The Comfort of Black

by Carter Wilson

  THE COMFORT OF BLACK

  Also by Carter Wilson

  The Boy in the Woods

  Final Crossing

  THE COMFORT OF BLACK

  A Novel

  CARTER WILSON

  Copyright © 2015 by Carter Wilson

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-60809-129-4

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing Longboat Key, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For Pam

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The book is dedicated to my wonderful agent, Pam Ahearn. Your feedback, tireless effort, and most of all your belief in my writing are all forever appreciated. And thanks to Pat Gussin, Bob Gussin, Frank Troncale and all the other staff at Oceanview for reading this book and wanting to take it on.

  I hugely appreciate all the feedback from the steadfast members of my critique group. Ed, Dirk, Sean and Linda, here’s to you.

  Ili and Sawyer, you can’t read this one either. But thanks for being amazing children and inspiring me on a daily basis. I love you endlessly. Now, stop picking up my books and looking for the bad words.

  Jessica, you are awesome in all sorts of ways. We are good together, and I simply couldn’t do any of this without you. Henry, thanks for making me smile and being just a good kid.

  Mom, I appreciate you reading the draft with a keen eye, as always. Sole, this one would freak you out as well, so I’ll just give you the CliffsNotes version sometime. But you give me tequila, and that’s a good thing.

  Dad, I think about you every day, and there are always bits of you reflected in my writing.

  Finally, thanks to all the readers who have been following me since my first novel. I hope this one lives up to your expectations. Knowing there are folks out there buying my books and enjoying the stories I create is pretty much writer-heaven. Let’s keep this relationship going for a long time.

  THE COMFORT OF BLACK

  PROLOGUE

  THANKSGIVING NIGHT

  REDEMPTION, KANSAS

  1995

  Hannah didn’t have a plan beyond setting her father on fire.

  She hid in her closet tonight as Billy rampaged, cloaked in the dark among shoes too small to wear, clothes reeking of cigarette smoke no matter how many times she washed them, and a memory box containing only dried, blackened roses from her first and only boyfriend, a romance that lasted not much longer than the flowers. Hannah had spent much time in this closet before, and time itself stretched into magical proportions in the cramped darkness. Seconds were minutes, minutes were hours. But it would finally be over. Billy was predictable. When his rage ended, it would leave him fatigued, like a cheetah after a kill. He would sleep, and when he did, it would be Hannah’s turn to act.

  Forever later, when the house finally fell silent around her, Hannah slowly counted to one hundred and opened the closet door. She left her room and crept through the house, the rough floorboards creaking beneath her bare feet. She found her mother in bed, an empty glass of gin on the night table, her nightly anesthetic. Hannah draped an arm around her and felt her mother shake with stifled sobs. Hannah told her it was time to do something. Time to stop living like this.

  “Go brush your teeth and get to sleep,” her mother said. She spoke into her pillow. “Things will be better in the morning.”

  Things were always promised to be better in the morning.

  Hannah stroked her mother’s hair.

  “Yes, they will,” Hannah said. It was the first time she ever believed it.

  Her father’s abuse stretched as far back as Hannah could remember. Now Hannah was fifteen, the assaults had become routine, and Hannah no longer called him Daddy. Justine still called him Daddy, but Hannah only called him Billy. To Hannah, she had no daddy.

  Hannah left her mother and walked softly into the room she shared with Justine and found her twelve-year-old sister asleep, her hair pasted in sweat to the side of her face, her favorite stuffed rabbit clutched against her chest like a newborn child in its mother’s arms. The rabbit was missing its left ear, the stuffing held in by a piece of duct tape pasted over the hole. Billy had torn the ear off one night as punishment for a chore left undone. Ripped it off the creature’s head right in front of a crying Justine, then fed the ear down the garbage disposal. Hannah leaned down and kissed Justine on the forehead and whispered in her ear. “Tonight, Justine. It’s gonna be over tonight.” Justine didn’t stir.

  Hannah then walked through the living room and stared briefly at her father, who, even in sleep, seemed tensed in rage, ready to spring at any moment like the toy snake inside the fake can of nuts. He had finally passed out in his favorite chair, the shitty green one that smelled of mold and cigarettes. Billy’s final Pall Mall of the night had burned to the filter as he slept, the ash scattered in gray motes around his dirty work boots. An empty whiskey glass rested on the arm of the chair, remnants of the drink visible on Billy’s t-shirt, streaks of dull caramel against grayed white.

  Hannah continued to the garage and found a can of gasoline. She picked it up and crept back into the house, leaving the door open behind her. She lifted Billy’s lighter off the kitchen table and held it tight in her fist. Back in the living room now, the smell of turkey was heavy and stale from the kitchen. She unscrewed the top of the gas can, the acrid fumes attacking her nostrils. But it smelled good. It smelled like a last-chance gas station on a long, desert road, one final opportunity to refuel before heading west toward something new, vast, and different.

  As she looked down on her father, Hannah’s rage swelled. This was the rage Hannah inherited from Billy, and as she got older she found herself fighting against it, convincing herself she was not like him, but still the anger flooded her more often than she could remember. She usually found a way to dam it up. But not tonight. Tonight she was thankful for it. It would allow her to do what needed to be done.

  As gently as she could, Hannah sloshed the contents of the bottle over Billy’s lower legs and along the base of his chair. Billy was a hard sleeper. Hannah was pretty certain the noise would not wake him, but the smell was strong. The fumes might arouse him, so she needed to move fast. She trembled as the gas can lost weight in her hands. But Billy didn’t move, and the only sound he offered was a steady, rhythmic snore, the song of the drunk. Hannah had poured a long trail of the gas leading toward the dining room table, next to where the uneaten turkey remained there, nobody having even bothered to put it in the refrigerator. She had poured the final drops inside the hole in the carcass.

  She stared at Billy and squeezed the lighter in her right hand, her palm sweaty against the hard plastic. She heard his yells from earlier in the evening echo in her memory. You ruined the fuckin’ turkey, you stupid bitch. Billy’s open palm had connected with his wife’s face, one more biting sting piled on top of hundreds—maybe thousands—before it. That was his preferred method of assault. Never a closed fist. Always open-palmed, as if somehow that made it a correction rather than a beating.

  The fire would spread quickly, and Hannah would have to run and get her mother and siste
r. Would they try to help him? Or would they jump into the car and drive, drive as far and as fast as they could go, crying at the horror of what they left behind but relieved by the freedom the flames had given them?

  Hannah fantasized the latter. In this fantasy, Hannah would be a hero, the girl who saved her family from a monster. Her mother would stop drinking and her sister would finally live in a world where the drunken shouts of cunt and whore weren’t nighttime rituals. In this same fantasy the police would say it was self-defense, because the cops in the small Kansas town knew Billy was an evil man and the world would be better without him. Things would be the kind of normal Hannah had always dreamed.

  A world without Billy.

  But Hannah had never experienced a dream coming true, not in the fifteen years she had been on this earth.

  She needed to act but found her body frozen. Standing, not moving, not even breathing, a void of motion that seemed to transcend time. The moment held a religious kind of quiet. In her mind, she saw the reverend in their little Baptist church reading from the Bible, and in this moment, this darkness, she could hear the man’s voice speaking with conviction, his gaze sweeping through the tiny congregation.

  Be still, and know I am God.

  Hannah blinked, breaking the spell, not wanting God to be a part of this moment. God hadn’t been there for her before, so He wasn’t allowed to be here now. Her hand began to shake as she stared down at her father and flicked the lighter. Once. Twice. On the third attempt, the flint sparked the gas, and the flame rose above her thumb. A drop of sweat beaded on her forehead and ran down her face, tickling the tip of her nose. She heard herself gasp in the silence of the tiny, broken house.

  Billy’s eyes shot open. They were wide at first, then narrowed as his gaze drilled into her. He smiled in the dark of the room, his teeth radiating against his unshaven face. Cheshire Cat. He sniffed the air and then spied the gasoline can on the floor near her feet.

  “Good for you, Hannie,” he said. “Maybe you just did learn a thing or two from me.”

  An invisible python wrapped itself around Hannah’s chest and squeezed.

  Billy coughed and cleared his throat. His voice was a soft growl. “You realize, even on fire, I’m gonna come over there and break every bone in that beautiful, soft face of yours. You know that, right? With my last ounce of life I will make you suffer, baby. But you do what you gotta do, Hannie. I always thought you were soft, but maybe I was wrong. This is your moment. So do it, little girl.” He straightened in the chair. “Do it.”

  The words repeated in her head. A mantra.

  Do it, Hannah. Do it. Do it.

  Billy rose from his chair as Hannah kept her arm held out in front of her. Billy’s face danced behind the flickering flame. His bright-blue wolf’s eyes gleamed with excitement. The smell of blood, of a meal soon to be had.

  She had stopped breathing. She could not move. The stillness of moments before was back and it consumed her. All she could do was look at him.

  Billy came toward her.

  PART I

  HANNAH

  CHAPTER ONE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  EARLY NOVEMBER

  PRESENT DAY

  Hannah and her husband hadn’t had sex in six weeks. Six weeks and three days, the longest span of abstinence in their entire relationship. Hannah knew, because she kept a calendar. Since the first time they had made love she made a little mark with a pen in her Day-Timer, black hashes adding up over the year, whiskers of sexual memories.

  The past two years had been filled with ever-increasing gaps. Dallin was thirty-three and Hannah thirty-four. There was no good reason for gaps at that age, she thought.

  He was working late. Or he was tired. Or the most common reason of all: he was stressed. That one, in particular, made no sense to her. What better cure for stress than sex? But she didn’t understand, he would say. It’s not like that. Do you know how much pressure I’m under? I can’t just perform on command.

  Bullshit, she thought. Two years ago I couldn’t walk across the bedroom in a pair of baggy sweatpants without you attacking me.

  But he had been distant recently, the kind of distant older couples might call comfortable. There was no comfort in it to Hannah. To her, it was simply confusing and sad. How long could a person blame every other part of life for the simple fact that, perhaps, they were actually falling out of love?

  The increase in gaps didn’t completely overlap with their decision to start a family, but there was a relationship between the two. She had questioned if he even wanted a child, and though he insisted he did, there was no denying they were doing less and less of what it took to actually make one.

  But tonight she could put a mark in her calendar.

  Dallin thrust up into her. She lay on her stomach on the king-size bed, the comforter pushed aside in a mound, half-hanging off the bed, spilling on the floor like a snow drift. Hannah turned her face to the side, one side hot from the blood pulsing through her cheeks, the other cool from the Turkish linen. Her eyes were closed. Dallin’s fingers clutched hers—almost painfully—as he pushed up into her from behind. His thrusting came erratically, almost desperately, until he slowed to a stop. Hannah started to open her eyes when he shifted his weight. She felt his tongue draw a line from the small of her back to the valley between her shoulder blades, and then she understood. He needed to consume her.

  When things were good, times like tonight, she never felt so desired by a man as she did by Dallin. When he was like this, he would prolong his pleasure by stopping himself and exploring her body with his tongue, toes to earlobes, as if he couldn’t get enough. Sometimes he bit her, other times his fingers would dig deep into her skin. Never too hard, but deep enough. Deep enough to let her know he craved her more than anything else could be craved.

  This was the Dallin of two years ago. All Hannah wanted was that version of him, all the time. She wanted to clench her entire body, keep him close, not let him disappear back into interminably long days of corporate importance. She no longer wanted to compete for her husband against his own success.

  Dallin put himself back into her and pushed deeper, creating a rhythm she knew to the exact beat. She felt drops of sweat from his face drip onto her back…one…two…as his pace quickened. He grunted as he moved quicker, his hips moving faster and pushing harder against her, almost violently, until she knew he was going to climax. She wanted to hear him say her name as he came inside her. She wanted it but she would never ask. She needed him to want to say it.

  Dallin’s body shuddered, tensed, and then eased. He came, but hadn’t said a word. She felt him roll off her and collapse onto the sheets, and she remained trapped under a thousand-pound silence.

  The idea of how good a drink would taste struck her. A Manhattan. Margarita. Even just a glass of pinot. It was so predictable, the urge for a vice at the slightest hint of unease. It was an urge of habit, and not just because alcohol was commonly a post-sex consumption. It was because alcohol itself was a habit, and her one drink a day had grown to three or more. But she hadn’t had a drop in a week, knowing she could soon be pregnant. The seven days without alcohol had been maddeningly difficult, forcing her to label her habit a problem, but that was all over now. She had a reason to be sober.

  Hannah finally opened her eyes and looked over at her husband. She reached out with her hand and brushed back his hair, which was just showing signs of early gray.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, Hannah.”

  Hannah.

  She remembered the first time she heard him say it. Her move from a life in Redemption, Kansas, to Seattle for college hadn’t been insignificant. She’d grown up in the arms of white, small-town, God-fearing America, never having traveled to more than the neighboring states for the first eighteen years of her life, never having flown on a plane, never knowing the world she had only read about. But how she had read. Anything and everything. From Jane Austen to OK Magazi
ne. Stephen King to Fitzgerald. Hannah dreamed of traveling the world, but the rare trip to a crowded mall in Kansas City overwhelmed her. What she couldn’t experience in life she tried to compensate for in academics, and so Hannah had nearly perfect SAT scores and an emptiness in her soul because she didn’t know how any of her knowledge mattered.

  Billy never understood Hannah’s attraction to books when she was a little girl. You want a story? Here’s a story. I work my ass off twelve hours a day so you, your sister, and your momma can sit around and read books and go shopping. The-fucking-end. How’s that for a story? It didn’t matter if any of it was true or not, but that was Billy. What he said was the truth to him, and with a man like Billy, little else matters.

  You’re just a rube, Hannie. That’s what all those folks in Seattle gonna say about you. Just a rube from Kansas, all she is. That’s what Billy would have said about Hannah’s decision to move, but Billy was no longer around, and Hannah never had to listen to him again. Billy had been out of her life since Hannah was fifteen, sent away to prison for beating her to near death. That night, Thanksgiving 1995, was the last time she had seen him. That was the night Hannah finally decided to do something about Billy. On that night Hannah touched the lighter to the gas, but Billy pounced before the flame reached him. On that night the fire did not start, and Billy beat her far beyond what he had ever done to her mother.

  Billy was gone, but Hannah’s fantasy of a perfect world never came. Three years later, Hannah’s mother killed herself, binging on gin until blood filled her eyes. Her mother had always blamed Hannah for Billy’s absence, blamed her for breaking up a violently dysfunctional family that was all she knew. And after Billy was sent away, there was nothing Hannah nor her younger sister could do to stop their mother’s downward spiral of self-destruction. Hannah never understood the addiction to abuse her mother inhabited, but some things just defied logic. Like Hannah’s own love of booze despite it having been her mother’s choice of suicide weapon.