Into the Darkness

by Andrews, V. C.

  I rose and took a quick shower, mostly to wake myself up fully. Even though it had seemed to go by fast, it had not been a good night’s sleep, but I didn’t want my parents to wonder about it. I dressed and hurried down ahead of them to set the breakfast table. Mom followed. She and Dad had decided to have pancakes with bananas in them. We had wonderful Oregon maple syrup. In minutes, we were side by side working on breakfast. Usually, people didn’t go shopping at jewelry stores early in the morning, so we didn’t open until ten a.m. Our busiest hours were right before lunch and from midday to five. Most of the time, I remained behind with Dad, and Mom went home to make dinner, but there were many days when business slowed and he closed up himself.

  “What’s this interesting young man going to do with himself in Echo Lake this summer?” Dad asked when we were all around the table eating our pancakes.

  “I told you he said he had to stay close to home, watch over his mother. I imagine he has to do that especially when his father is so far away.”

  “How sad,” Mom said. “That doesn’t sound like much of a summer for him. You should introduce him to some of the other boys and girls in your class, invite some people over and introduce him.”

  “He didn’t seem all that interested in meeting anyone else,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I saw them glance at each other.

  “Well, give him time,” Dad said, finishing up. “You’ve got to warm up to a new home and a new town, get into it slowly, like a hot bath.”

  “How would you know that, Gregory, when you’ve barely slept a week outside of this town?” Mom asked.

  “I remember how hard it was that week, too. Wasn’t it our honeymoon?”

  “Oh, go on with you,” she said, shaking her head at him. She turned to me. “Now you can appreciate what it’s been like being with the same man day in and day out for twenty-two years.”

  “Has it been that long?” Dad asked her. She punched him gently on the shoulder, and he pretended to be in pain. Watching them made me wonder what it was like to wake up and face the day surrounded by gloom. From the way he had spoken, Brayden’s mornings were rarely anything but depressing. What would he do with himself here? Was he just too ashamed to show how much he really would like to be with others his age?

  I was doing just what I had told myself I would stop doing, wondering almost obsessively about him.

  My parents started out for the store ahead of me. My job was to stay behind and clean up the breakfast dishes and the kitchen. It was a little less than a mile to the village proper where our store was, and most days in the summer, we all walked. Dad said it was his only chance to get in any meaningful physical exercise. He and Mom went at a good pace, but they still looked as if they were walking mostly to be together as much as possible. Other girls were always telling me about my parents: “Actually still holding hands when they walk!” Most of the girls thought it was cute, but some, especially those like Megan Thomas, thought they were being ostentatious. That was her new word for the year, ostentatious. Everyone but her, it seemed, was too showy and pretentious. I knew she said the same things about me.

  I, too, liked the walk to the village in the summer. Unless we had a downpour, there was something delicious about the fresh morning air, the aroma of flowers and freshly cut grass. I loved the way the sparrows and robins flitted from tree to tree. There was something so comforting in the sounds of other families starting their days, dads and moms getting into their cars, grandparents opening up window curtains, little kids bursting out into the sunshine as if they had been kept prisoner by the night, chained to their beds by their sleep. Dogs began barking, and cats were seen slinking around corners hunting prey.

  When I described all of this in an essay for my English teacher at the time, Mr. Madeo, he said it reminded him of the play Our Town. “You’re Echo Lake’s Thornton Wilder,” he wrote next to my A plus. We had read that play in the tenth grade, and then our drama department put it on the following year. Mr. Madeo urged me to try out for the part of Emily Webb, but I just couldn’t get myself up on the stage.

  And yet I was often accused of using our streets as my private stage. I don’t think anyone else, or at least any other girl in the school, was criticized as much for the way she walked. They mocked my perfect posture and self-confidence. Of course Megan said I was being ostentatious. She didn’t understand that if someone was ostentatious, she had something about her which she could be.

  So I had good posture and I wore a habitual soft smile on my face—so what? Why was that so annoying not only to her but to some of the other girls?

  “It just looks like you’re so satisfied with yourself,” Barbara Morris whispered to me after I had snapped back at Megan one time at lunch. Megan usually picked on someone at school and did her indictment while she ate and preached to her little cadre of devoted followers. I called them the Gossip Assassins.

  “What’s wrong with being satisfied with yourself?” I asked Barbara. At least she didn’t join in with as much venom as the rest of them.

  “Nothing, except . . .”

  “Except what?”

  “You act like you don’t need anyone to give you a compliment. You’ve given them all to yourself already,” she replied.

  Her remark got me wondering if that was really the way everyone saw me. Could that be why, especially this past school year, most of the boys were standoffish? I caught them looking at me often, but as soon as I looked back at them, they always looked away, as if they had been caught doing something unethical, if not illegal. That is, all except Shayne Allan, who probably deserved the label of most conceited member of the student body far more than I deserved it.

  Yes, he was undeniably very handsome, with his dark brown hair, his soft blue-gray eyes, and his Tom Cruise good looks. He was one of the top athletes in the school, the baseball team’s best pitcher and often the high scorer on the basketball team. He dressed better than the other boys but not to the point of looking like a prude. His hair was always well styled and groomed. His father was CEO of the only major industrial enterprise within twenty miles of Echo Lake, Price Manufacturers, a company that sold wood products constructed from Oregon trees. Shayne drove a Porsche from the moment he got his driver’s license. The truth was, he looked put together by some Hollywood casting director. To top it off, he was in real contention for valedictorian.

  Shayne Allan, Mr. Perfect, also just happened to be the darling of the faculty because of how well he did in his classes, how mature he was in his behavior, and how good he was at making them feel good. When my friends sighed over him and asked me about him, I always said something like, “He’s not real; he’s a robot. Stick him with a pin, and you’ll break the pin.”

  Ellie Patton, the closest I had to a best friend, had so deep and complete a crush on him that I didn’t doubt she would jump into Echo Lake in January naked if he asked her to do it. Nothing infuriated her as much as my apparent indifference to him. Of course, she accused me of putting on an act.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t fantasize about him, Amber. I see the way you look at him sometimes, too.”

  “I’m just waiting to see if he’s going to leak any oil from one of his joints or short out, blow a fuse.”

  “Right,” Ellie said. And then, as difficult as it was for her to tell me, she revealed that most of the kids in our class, especially the girls, thought that Shayne and I would make the perfect couple, the absolute ultimate prom king and queen. After we were married, we would have to have the best-looking children in the world.

  A part of me couldn’t help but absorb and enjoy the compliment. Even my most envious detractors were forced to admit that they thought I was beautiful. Everyone thought it was only a matter of time until Shayne and I found each other. Until now, he was so enamored of himself that he wouldn’t pay much, if any, attention to a girl who didn’t reveal how much she would enjoy it. I was careful about giving him a second look and barely said a word to him. I
ignored him the few times he said something to me while passing me in the hallway.

  “Don’t worry about it. There’s no room in his heart for anyone else but himself,” I told Ellie. “It runs in his family. You know how stuck-up his younger sister, Wendi, is since her parents paid for her new nose. The Allan house must have more mirrors in it than the hall of mirrors in a carnival. Shayne won’t walk past a window without glancing at himself. It’s a severe case of narcissism.”

  “That’s exactly what most people say about you, Amber,” she shot back at me, and the topic popped like a bubble between us, leaving us in a cloud of silence.

  Despite the aloof look I wore on my face when I walked to and from the store, I was quite aware of how other people were looking at me, especially men. Even old men, like Mr. Ritter, who ran a small supermarket for so long that Dad jokingly claimed he had sold a half-pound of bacon once to President Woodrow Wilson, and seemed always to be at the doorway of his store when I passed by so he could nod, smile, and wave hello. He wore the sort of smile old men draw out of their youthful memories. When I described it to Mom, she smiled herself and said, “It’s all right. You make him feel like a young man again.”

  “By doing what?”

  “Just being there,” she said, brushing back my hair and looking at me the way she might look at the biggest diamond with the best clarity in our store ever.

  I had to admit that hearing about the way men appreciated me frightened me a little. I never forgot the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. The goddess Venus was so jealous of a mortal girl named Psyche that she asked her son Cupid to use his golden arrows while Psyche slept so that when she awoke, she would fall in love with the vile creature Venus had planted there. Cupid approached her, prepared to hit her with the arrow to make her fall in love with the creature, but he fell in love with her instead and wouldn’t do it. There was a lot more to the story, but the end always bothered me, because the conclusion was that Psyche was too beautiful to have a mortal man. She ended up with Cupid.

  Would I be too beautiful for any mortal man? Was it a sin even to think like that, to worry about it? It haunted me. Everyone has his or her little fears born out of something that happened early in his or her life. This was mine. I’d never tell anyone. I would just smother it as best I could. Here was another example of what Brayden Matthews meant about not revealing inner secrets, I thought. How did he know so much about me after so short a time with me?

  When I stepped out of the house this morning, I hesitated, to see if he would suddenly appear the way he had last night, but I didn’t see him, nor did I see any sign of life around his house. It still looked no different from how it had when no one was there. Nothing new had been added to dress it up any. There were no new curtains. No one had come to fix the chipped paint on the railings. The windows didn’t even look as if they had been washed. An old wheelbarrow was still overturned at the side of the house, and an old garden hose was curled like a pregnant snake beside it.

  Brayden did say that his mother slept most of the day, but then, what did he do while she slept? Did he sleep most of the day, too? Had he stayed up all night to keep her company? Was that his burden, the reason he wasn’t keen on meeting new people? I walked slowly past his front lawn, keeping an eye on the front door and windows, but I saw no movement, nothing. Disappointed, I continued to the village and to the jewelry store. It was a very busy day, one that kept me going straight to lunch. It was only then that my thoughts returned to Brayden. I wondered if he might stop by or even just step up to our front windows and look at the displays and try to catch my attention.

  But I didn’t see anything of him, and after lunch, business picked up again. It slowed down a little after four. Mom said we were all going to the diner for dinner. Dad had a craving for liver and onions, and that was the old Echo Lake diner’s specialty.

  “Why don’t you go home first, honey, shower and change, and then drive the car back? We have a lot to do before closing. Then we can drive home and do the same, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I know it doesn’t sound all that exciting,” she said quietly, “but we have to give him his treat. He earned it today.”

  Dad had had four major adjustments to do on bracelets and necklaces and had put together a beautiful blue sapphire ring in a twenty-four-karat gold setting for Dr. Immerman’s wife. He was our family doctor and just recently had bought property at the lake.

  “Unless you have something more interesting to do,” she added. “I mean, if you’d like, you could invite the new boy over to dinner, make him something.”

  “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know him well enough yet. I’m fine. I like the chicken pot pie at the diner,” I said, scooping up my purse and heading out for home.

  Ellie and Charlotte Watts pulled up to the corner in Charlotte’s red BMW convertible just as I reached it and was about to cross the street. Charlotte’s father was one of the most successful land developers in and around Echo Lake. She was a very plain-looking girl, about fifteen pounds too heavy for her five-feet-three-inch frame. She kept her popularity by holding parties at her parents’ large house just outside the village and treating everyone else to pizza or frozen yogurt. The Wattses owned property on the lake, too, but hadn’t developed it. I wondered now if that was the property Brayden and I had visited. I didn’t want to ask about it, however. I didn’t want them to know I had gone there with him.

  “I’m having a July Fourth party tomorrow night,” Charlotte announced. “Fireworks and everything. You’re invited,” she added with the tone of someone who had been forced to apologize. I was sure Ellie had put her up to it.

  “It’s not July Fourth this weekend. That’s next weekend, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, visibly annoyed. “This is the weekend my parents are going to Las Vegas. They’re leaving tomorrow, and they’re taking my brother Julius, so I’m declaring it July Fourth. The maid’s off Saturday, so it’s perfect. If you don’t want to come, don’t come.”

  “They’re letting you have the party?”

  She looked at Ellie and then turned back to me. “Hello. Figure it out, Prudence Perfect. If you do make the royal decision to come, wear something red, white, or blue or all three. Danny Silver is bringing the fireworks. Everyone’s arriving about seven-thirty. I’ll have lots of food—catered, of course.” She glanced at Ellie again. “By the way, Shayne will be there. He didn’t hesitate when I invited him. The invitation was barely out of my mouth.”

  “Are you coming or not?” Ellie demanded when I didn’t burst out with an enthusiastic yes.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Try?” Charlotte said. “We know how difficult it is for you to grant an audience to the rest of us mere mortals.”

  I was thinking so hard about it that I missed her sarcasm.

  “What?” Ellie asked, seeing the thoughtful expression on my face.

  “Something came to mind. I have a new neighbor. He’s going to be in our class this year if his family stays in Echo Lake. I should bring him along so he can meet the mere mortals.”

  “A new neighbor? He? Is he good-looking?” Charlotte asked quickly.

  “Very.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if his family stays’?” Ellie asked.

  “They’ve rented for the summer and are not sure yet about spending the rest of the year or more.”

  “I wish my parents would have given me that choice,” Ellie said.

  “Yeah, like any other place would have you,” Charlotte told her. She turned to me. “Well, if you bring him to the party and he sees just how much fun we have here, he’ll want to stay for sure. Are you bringing him?”

  “I’ll see. He’s a little shy,” I said.

  “A little shy? You know that much about him already? How come you didn’t mention him to me before?” Ellie asked, sounding indignant.

  “We just met yesterday. I don’t know much about him, but I had that impression.�
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  “Maybe you intimidated him,” Ellie said. “You can do that very easily.”

  “No,” I said, refusing to bite. “I think he’s just not that outgoing.”

  “We’ll break him out of his shyness, won’t we?” Charlotte asked Ellie.

  Ellie looked at me suspiciously. “If someone else hasn’t done so already or doesn’t have plans to do it herself. You met him yesterday? How long have he and his family been here?”

  “Only a few days.”

  “And you never said anything?”

  “I told you. I just met him yesterday.”

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “Do? Nothing. We went for a walk.”

  “A walk? Where?”

  “Just on the street,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell them about the lake.

  They looked at each other as if I had lost my mind.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve got to get home. We’re going to dinner tonight.”

  “We?” Ellie asked.

  “My parents and I. No, not my new neighbor—not yet, at least,” I added, almost under my breath. I guess it was obvious I wished it were so.

  They looked at each other again, and then they both laughed.

  “You mean there really is someone you actually deem to be worthy of a date with you?” Charlotte asked me.

  Instead of reacting to her sarcasm, I pretended to give it deep thought. “I’m not quite sure yet. I forgot to look to see if he has dirty fingernails. See ya,” I tossed at them, and hurried away. When I looked back, they were still parked, laughing.

  Brayden wasn’t outside his house, and as before, nothing looked touched or changed. The windows were dark, and when I paused, I heard no sounds, no music, no television, nothing going on inside. I had no time to linger. I did look over again, pausing after I had driven out to go get my parents. It was deeper twilight now, and still no lights were on inside his house.