The Darkest Place

by Daniel Judson

  He pulled into his driveway, parked his truck around back, out of sight from the street. He heard another wave of sirens coming from town. Probably emergency vehicles. He checked his watch. His vision was blurry in one eye, but he could see well enough to read the watch. It was nine forty-five. He listened till those sirens passed and had faded into the night before he tried to open his door. He felt pain in his left shoulder then. He’d been hurt before, in football, in the fight that ruined his knee. But this was a different kind of hurt altogether. It reached deep inside, deeper than anything he’d known before. But nothing was broken, everything moved like it should, and that was all that mattered to him. A bum knee was enough.

  Miller tried his driver’s door again. It wouldn’t open. He checked to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. He made his way across the seat to the passenger door. That opened easily enough. He climbed down and stepped back to look at his truck. The body was dented, the windshield cracked, there was dirt caught between the bumpers and the body. But the roof seemed to have taken the worst of it. The steel looked as if someone had danced all over it. There wasn’t a part of it that wasn’t dented.

  Miller headed toward his back door. Abby’s car wasn’t anywhere to be seen, not in his driveway nor on the street in front of his house. The note he had left for her was gone, so he figured she must have been here and left. Maybe it was better, though, that she wasn’t here, Miller thought. He didn’t want her to see him like this. He didn’t want to scare her off. Plus, his night wasn’t over yet. There was the chance that whoever had come after Miller might go after Clay next. He had to warn Clay, had to tell him what had happened.

  Miller walked toward his kitchen phone. It was mounted on the wall beside his refrigerator. He felt dizzy still, as if a part of him was back in the loose grip of his driver’s seat, being spun around like nothing. He found it suddenly difficult to walk a straight line. It amazed him just how difficult that was right now.

  He made it to the phone, barely, and dialed Clay’s number. His hands were shaking badly. It took three attempts before he got the number right.

  Five

  KANE AWOKE IN HIS CLOTHES, FACEDOWN ON THE EDGE OF HIS worn mattress, his only movement for a long time the uneven blinking of his eyes and the soft expanding of his stomach as he breathed.

  The sky beyond his one window was overcast, the light that made it into his small room dim, almost solemn. Early morning, he thought. For a while he thought of nothing beyond that, thought of no one, was nothing more than a stranger to his own life. But that didn’t last. Eventually he thought of Meg. It was inevitable. She was always the first thing on his mind when he awoke. He wondered as he lay there what she was doing right now, and when today she would get the chance—make the chance—to call him. He would give anything to be able to sit at her table and look at her as she stood naked in front of her work. Of course he didn’t have much of anything left to give. But he kept his mind away from that, kept it instead on his most recent memory of her—her smell on him, the smell of the two of them. That was, what, yesterday morning? It seemed like a lifetime now. But as he lay there he remembered the night before yesterday morning, a night spent tearing at each other for hours, drunk, followed by him lying beside her as she drifted off, sweat drying, lips numb from hard kissing. He kept that fresh in his mind, as though it was all in the world that he had.

  After a while his mind wandered from that, from Meg, wandered to the memory of his son, of the day he was killed. Such thoughts were never far away, waiting always in the shallows, lingering just below the surface. But it was too early for that, Kane told himself, much too early. He always wanted his son with him, the memory of him, all memories, no matter what the pain. But this morning, for some reason, things were different. He felt that deep down. But what was different?

  He was tired, beyond tired. He could barely move. He needed more sleep, that was for certain. Outside his window was a weak winter dawn. No reason for him to be up now. He lay there with his eyes closed, motionless except for his breathing, for the swelling and collapsing of his stomach beneath him. He wanted more sleep, chose to let it come if it wanted. Maybe he’d sleep deep enough to dream of Meg, dream of her eyes and her skin. He couldn’t remember any dreams from the night before, which was unusual. He always dreamed, for better or for worse, always awakened in the middle of one, sometimes for a while, anyway, still lost in it. But there was no such spell this morning. Kane thought again about his sense that something was different. Something wasn’t right. Something inside him, going off like a muted alarm, or a siren heard from a distance. Kane was focused on that thought, the thought of a siren crying in the distance, when he heard a noise come from down his narrow hallway.

  His eyes opened again, he listened for the noise to repeat, heard it almost right away. A cupboard door was opened, then closed. That was the sound he had heard just seconds before. He was certain of it. Then he heard someone run the tap in his kitchen, heard water falling into the metal sink. The tap had been opened up full. The next thing that reached his ears was the sound of his kettle being placed upon his stovetop. It was followed by the soft pop of a flame coming to life, then the steady hiss of the gas burner.

  Kane sat up. He felt like he was moving against a rushing current of water. There was an ache deep in his head. He moved to the edge of his mattress, paused there, had to because of a whooshing that sprang up like a sudden storm from the ache in his head. He closed his eyes, wincing against pain. When he opened them again, he saw on the floor not far from his bed an empty bottle. Then he saw a drinking glass, or what remained of one, anyway. It was in pieces, some of which had scattered across to the other end of the floor.

  Kane heard more noise coming from the kitchenette. He forced himself to stand, careful of the pieces of broken glass, and made his way to his bedroom doorway. With each step he took, the ache in his head blossomed, spreading down the back of his neck. He thought of roots reaching through a dark, cold ground. He reached out for the wall, used it to support himself, to guide him along. He needed it. The plaster felt cold beneath his palm. It was only then that he became aware of the floorboards beneath his bare feet. They, too, were cold. The ache in his head began to throb, like a wound does, an echo to his heartbeat. His throat was dry, painfully so, and there was a bad taste in his mouth, the worst he’d ever known—foul, like he had recently bitten into something that had long since begun to rot.

  Kane moved into the narrow hallway, wavering. Someone was definitely in his kitchenette. He could see a shadow moving, could hear whoever it was opening cupboard doors and then closing them. His first thought was that Meg had come to see him, had come to fuck him because she couldn’t live without him as much as he couldn’t live without her. She had been to his apartment only once before, back when they had first met. Upon leaving that late afternoon, she had told Kane that she would not be coming back, ever. Not enough light in his place, she had told him, too depressing for her. Too much of a poor man’s hovel, probably, is what she meant. So for her to actually show up now, to put his tea water on for him, to show him uncharacteristic mercy, as it were, would have been a gesture that would have meant a lot to Kane. He was just about to speak her name, his heart, despite the swirling in his head, lifting with hope, when the shadow coming from the kitchenette moved again and a solidly built man stepped suddenly out into the hallway.

  The man was heading for the bathroom door, directly across from the kitchenette. But he spotted Kane out of the corner of his eye and stopped abruptly. He turned and faced Kane fully, his shoulders all but filling the hallway. He seemed as surprised to see Kane as Kane was to see him.

  “You’re up,” he said. Then, after a quick moment, after taking a good look at Kane, he added with uncertainty, “Or maybe not.”

  Kane muttered, “What are you doing here, Doc?”

  Mercer stayed where he was. But he stood ready to move, ready to rush forward if necessary, if Kane began to fall. Kane was clear-minded en
ough to see that, clear-minded enough to know that it was more than obvious by the way he was standing with one hand on the hallway wall that he was struggling to keep from crashing down to the floor.

  “I thought I’d better come check up on you,” Mercer said. His voice was soft. He was fairly certain Kane wasn’t in the frame of mind to hear anything louder than that.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s a little after four.”

  “In the morning?”

  “No, Deke. It’s four in the afternoon. You missed all your classes. Every one of them.”

  “Jesus. You should’ve called me, Doc.”

  “I did. A half dozen times. You didn’t answer. I left messages on your machine, but you never called back.”

  “I was here,” Kane said. He could think of nothing more to say than that. He’d never before in his life slept through a ringing phone. Maybe something was wrong with it, he thought. Maybe he had shut the ringer off by mistake. But he couldn’t remember the last time he had touched it. He couldn’t remember much of anything prior to a few moments ago, to waking up facedown on his bed, in his clothes.

  “When you didn’t answer your phone,” Mercer said, “I thought maybe something had happened to you and decided to come by. Your door wasn’t locked, so I let myself in. I’ll tell you, if there’d been an empty pill bottle or something somewhere nearby, I would have called an ambulance. I mean, I couldn’t wake you for anything. But the only thing nearby was an empty bottle. I was about to run a cold shower and drag your ass under it. I figured that’d wake you up, sooner or later.” Mercer looked Kane up and down. He wondered how much longer Kane could stand there. He was holding on to the wall as if beneath his feet was a rolling sea. He could barely lift his head. Mercer watched this, feeling bad for the kid. But he had to think past that. This was life and death now, nothing less. Mercer took in a breath, let it out slowly, and then said the only thing he could say. It was a good enough place to start.

  “You look like hell, Deke.”

  “I feel like it.”

  “This is how he got Bill. You know that, right? This is exactly how Dolan got Bill Young.”

  Kane lifted his head and looked at Mercer but said nothing. After a moment he lowered his head again.

  “You remember what happened to him, don’t you, Deke? To Bill.”

  “Of course.”

  “You should know that Dolan came by at the start of every one of your classes today, to check up on you. He knows you blew them off.”

  Kane nodded, saying nothing.

  “Tell me the truth, Deke. Did you drink that whole bottle last night?”

  “I don’t know.” He barely had enough air to get the words out.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I can’t remember. I feel like I just had surgery, like I’ve just woken up from surgery or something. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Do you need help getting to the bathroom?”

  Kane shook his head. “I think I just need to stand still for a minute. I think maybe I got up too fast.”

  Mercer gave Kane a moment, watching him closely. Finally, he said, “Have you been having blackouts, Deke?”

  “No.”

  “Time you can’t account for?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the thing with blackouts. You wouldn’t know. Are you with your lady friend a lot?”

  “Whenever possible.”

  “Has she said anything about you getting up at night, walking around, saying or doing things you don’t remember?”

  “I think she’d say something if I was doing something like that. She’s not the type to let something like that go. She generally calls me on my shit.”

  Mercer nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a good quality in a lover,” he said. “Listen, that reminds me. When you didn’t answer your phone, I called that other number. Some guy answered. I told him I had misdialed and hung up. I figured you might need to know that.”

  Kane was still looking down at the floor. He thought of Meg at home with her husband, felt even more now like he was going to be sick. Luckily, though, the thought didn’t linger long. His mind could grasp very little, hold on to even less. He nodded once, then said, “Thanks for letting me know that.”

  “Look, Deke, I realize how much Bill meant to you, but you really don’t need to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Follow in his footsteps. Repeat his mistakes.”

  “I’m not.”

  “That’s what it looks like from where I’m standing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His writing career took a nosedive so he started teaching to make money. Then he started messing around with women he shouldn’t have been messing around with. He went out of his way to lose everything. I watched him do it. You watched him do it. Now I see you doing everything you can to keep up that fine tradition.”

  “This has nothing to do with him, Doc.”

  “I think it does. I think it has everything to do with him.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “You couldn’t imagine a life for yourself after your son was killed, so you played out a scenario of self-destruction that was familiar to you. You stopped writing and came back here to teach. You started drinking like a dead Irish poet, took up with this married woman. You did everything Young did. It’s like you needed to cause yourself harm for some reason and decided that the best way to do that was to do what he had done, to let what happened to him happen to you. A bad thing to block out the memory of an even worse thing.”

  Kane shook his head. “I didn’t decide anything, Doc. It just happened that way.”

  “The unconscious mind is a powerful thing. We make a lot of things happen without knowing it, then let ourselves off the hook by calling it fate or luck or God’s will.”

  “You think I wanted this to happen?”

  “You tell me.”

  “My son died, Doc. You’re telling me I wanted that to happen?”

  “No, of course not. But that was four years ago. I’m talking about what you’ve done with your life since then. The things you’ve chosen.”

  Kane said nothing. Mercer took a step toward him suddenly.

  “Did you cause your son’s death?” he said.

  Kane lifted his head. It took all he had. “No.”

  “Could you have prevented it?”

  Kane said nothing.

  “Could you have prevented it?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “He was scuba diving, right? That’s what happened, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were on vacation, all three of you? In Mexico?”

  “The Yucatán. Yeah. Will had read about these caves, how the Mayans had thought they were the entrance to the underworld. He wanted to see that. I wanted him to have what he wanted, see everything he wanted to see.”

  “Do you dive, Deke?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “And your son was certified?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said he taught other kids how to dive, he was that good at it. He was an expert.”

  Kane nodded.

  “So you weren’t negligent in letting him go. You had no reason to think anything would happen to him.”

  “No.”

  “So it was in no way your fault.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Doc.”

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “How does it work?”

  “He drowned, for Christ’s sake. Alone, in the dark. He got trapped and he drowned.”

  “And you can’t forget that.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll probably never forget that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you can barely live with it, right? You can barely live with the memory of it.”

  Kane
shook his head.

  “You’re going to have to learn to do that, Deke. You’re going to have to find a way to live with it. You’re going to have to find a way to live with the loss.”

  “And how exactly am I supposed to do that?”

  Mercer shrugged. “I don’t know. But drinking your body weight hasn’t really done the trick now, has it? Nor has letting your marriage of fifteen years just fall apart. Or watching your career go down the tubes, or fucking this married woman, or pissing our bosses off. None of that has worked yet, has it?”

  Kane said nothing.

  “So what’s left?”

  Kane looked away, staring at the plaster wall beside him. After a while, he muttered, “I don’t know.”

  Mercer took another step toward him then. “You’re going to have to figure it out soon, Deke. Because I think you’re about to run out of bottoms to hit.”

  “Am I fired, Doc? Tell me the truth.”

  “I haven’t heard anything officially. But, yeah, you’re probably done. Today was probably the nail in your coffin.” He glanced at the tiny kitchenette—two-burner gas stove, a few cabinets, a small sink, barely enough room for one person. “Hard to imagine, giving all this up, huh?”

  “You never struck me as the type to kick a guy when he’s down, Doc.”

  Mercer said nothing, just looked at Kane.

  “So what do I do now?” Kane said finally.

  “You’re out of booze. Do you think maybe you could go today without having a drink?”

  “Yeah.”