The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

  “Come, come.” He waved them over. “I’ll teach you something. Do you know how to candle eggs?”

  Then he lit a candle and placed a punctured tin can over the flame. Each child—they naturally seemed to order themselves from oldest to youngest—placed an egg, still warm, over the top of the can’s hole. The flame shone through the shells, lit up the eggs like lanterns.

  “This is how we check if there are cracks in the shells,” said Havryil. “I sell the good ones and we keep any with flaws.”

  The boy with glasses placed his egg last. The brown shell became transparent: inside was thick albumen and a yolk that glowed like the sun.

  “Do you see any cracks?” said Havryil.

  The boy shook his head.

  “You’re right.” Havryil gave him a thumbs-up. “They are good.”

  When her mother became ill,

  Sydney returned to Victoria for the first time in years. Mr. George greeted her at the front door to a house on Rockland Drive with five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a garden of rhododendrons surrounded by stone walls.

  The flowers were like her mother: bright and impractical and resolutely cheerful. Sydney felt a swell of generosity, of gladness that her mother had found herself in the home she’d always wanted.

  Her brother was already there, visiting from Vancouver, where he played piano in three or four bands. “Hey, Syd.” He looked older than she’d ever imagined he would. “Nice truck. It’s so vintage.”

  Her mother had grown thin, and lost one of her breasts. “Sydney. My little girl.” She held her daughter’s hand too tightly. “You’re home.”

  Earl retired and moved

  with his wife to Courtenay, BC, to be closer to a hospital—Theresa’s emphysema was only getting worse. He left Sydney in charge of the paper and she ran it for twelve years. Then the mill closed.

  She kept the paper going as long as she could, driving out to Gold River and Campbell River to try to sell ads. But soon Tahsis was down to three hundred people and there was no fighting it. The Tahsis Talk died, and she was too ashamed to write Earl to tell him. Havryil made her toast with blackberry jam for dinner, held her under his arm, ran his hand through her gray hair.

  Someone put up a sign, just outside the town: Last one to leave, it read, turn out the light!

  He started having dizzy spells.

  Twice he collapsed in the garden, that old bruise in his chest flaring up. When he opened his eyes, he looked up at the green canopy and waited for his vision to focus. When his breathing steadied, when he could make out the tree branches and the pale apple blossoms, he stood slowly and brushed the dirt from his clothes.

  He was thankful she wasn’t home to see this. It would only worry her.

  Reading helped—

  not newspapers, because even the feel of the paper made her heart ache—but the books Havryil had read to improve his English. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Great Expectations.

  There was no consolation for how quiet the house was without him. But reading helped, and so did chores, and driving with no destination in mind.

  A man visited once.

  He wore glasses and carried a briefcase and drove a hatchback. “Hello, Mrs. Kohen.”

  “Sydney.” She shook his hand. “Do I know you?”

  He glanced toward the house, the garden. “Amazing,” he said. “It looks the same.” He claimed to have visited this place as a child.

  She shook her head. “There were no families near here.”

  “My brothers and I came a few times. Your husband gave us apples. We used to fill our pockets.”

  Her grief had gone quieter over the past few years, but this left her mute—they’d lived together for forty-four years, and still there were things she hadn’t known. Children had visited. He’d given them apples.

  “Can I interview you?” asked the man, who’d introduced himself as Larry. “I’m putting together a book for the Historical Society. A history of the town.”

  She understood now: the glasses, the hatchback, the briefcase. He must live in a city now, and be nostalgic for this place.

  “I’m trying to capture as much as I can,” he said. “Talking to as many people as I can.”

  “Oh, sure.” She nodded. “But you’d better come inside. My knees aren’t so good and standing around doesn’t help.”

  She made coffee and they sat at the table where she used to eat dinners with Havryil—she wondered if it all seemed shabby to this man. From the briefcase, he took out a notebook and a cell phone, which he used as a tape recorder.

  “What a gizmo,” she said, and he smiled. He said he wanted her story, in her own words.

  She used to say that during interviews too: Tell me in your own words. She used to feel frustrated when people wouldn’t just spit it out. But where to start? Her life story. It flickered in her mind like a candle flame, something she couldn’t hold and couldn’t measure.

  She sipped her coffee. “My own words.” She looked at the alphabet, each careful letter that Havryil had carved into the walls.

  Stay, he’d said,

  and she had, for forty-eight years. And still she remained in the house, chopping wood for fires, tending the garden. She’d mostly stopped speaking. Not because she couldn’t bear it—he’d shown her that loss can be borne—but because there was no one, now, to talk to.

  I Am Optimus Prime

  He knocked on the door, a thin guy with pitted skin. Not handsome, except you wouldn’t know it from the way he leaned against the doorjamb, confident my mom would let him in. I stood at her side, one finger hooked in her belt loop. I was nine but looked six—one of those fine-boned, fragile boys. “Hey, buddy,” he said, giving me a nod. He was probably about the age I am now, twenty-five or so. His pant legs were too short, and even though it was October and there was already snow on the ground, he wore battered sneakers without socks. I could see his bony ankles, red from the cold.

  He’d driven eleven hours to get here, he said, in a car with a broken heater. He could see his breath as he drove and had to put his socks on his hands to keep his fingers from going numb. He had the radio on—thank God that still worked—and heard a song that reminded him of my mom.

  He told her this in the kitchen while she served him a cup of hot chocolate, the kind I liked, the kind with tiny marshmallows. He put his wool socks back on his hands, and danced my mom around the kitchen with those clumsy mitts on.

  He played with me too, using the socks like puppets. He named his left hand Snake and his right Angel, and propelled these characters into a sort of good-cop/bad-cop routine, Snake trying to nip off my nose, Angel giving me woolly kisses on the cheek.

  Then he swiveled back to face my mom and said, “I’ve missed you, angel,” apparently forgetting that was the name of one of his socks.

  “Right,” she said. “Sure you have.” But she was pleased.

  He told her that he was sober, that he’d been working up north in the tar sands, that he’d driven down just to see her. And now I imagine that was the truth, or part of it. The other part was maybe that he’d been living with a woman up there and things had gone bad with her. Or maybe he’d screwed up at work. Or maybe he’d been staying with his aunt in Cold Lake and had grown tired of her rules. Or maybe, probably, he’d driven from Fort Mac to Calgary, partied for a month, and when he sobered up, realized he couldn’t afford to fix the car’s heater and couldn’t face that cold drive again.

  In any case, my mom decided to believe his story. So I still don’t know where he’d been or where he went after. I still don’t know much more than I knew then, which was only what I’d been told: that he was my dad.

  Maybe my mom had boyfriends before—I have vague memories of men in the house, men who were nice to me, one who even fixed up a bike and taught me to ride it—but I’d never understood they were boyfriends. They’d simply been around until they weren’t around anymore, and I didn’t miss them.

  But with my dad, it w
as different. I couldn’t stop staring at him. It was like looking in a mirror, or like someone had shown up wearing my face like a mask. Of course, it was distorted: his cheekbones were more pronounced; his hair was a sandy brown instead of blond; he had purple bags under his eyes that looked like bruises, and the kind of easy smile that wins friends. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him and neither could my mom.

  She wasn’t stupid enough to let him live with us, so he rented a room nearby. She wanted me to get used to having my dad around, and she wanted him to prove himself. To do that, he attended AA meetings every week. He walked east from our place along Bowness Road, to what used to be a storefront and is now one room, almost invisible between the Chinese diner and the CrossFit gym. There’s no sign on the front, only white blinds that are always kept closed. Inside it’s cold, especially in winter, so people keep their coats on. The walls are covered in posters that remind you of the 12 Steps and the Serenity Prayer, that three-line song you’re supposed to sing to yourself.

  This is not a place I need to imagine; I know it well. I go there myself now, three times a week.

  When my dad wasn’t at meetings, he worked at the Safeway down the street, stocking shelves. And when he wasn’t working, he and I played Guitar Hero, or he helped me with my homework so it would get done faster and we could play more Guitar Hero. My mom worked at a doctor’s office, doing paperwork and answering phones, and she was good at her job, efficient and appreciated. The doctor she worked for, Carolyn, always said she couldn’t live without my mother and so paid her decently and bought me books for Christmas. I had recently started grade four, where I was learning to read in French.

  What I mean is, there was a rhythm to our life. We were a family.

  In the same way I picked up new words at school—grenouille, haricot, vêtement—I collected information about my dad. He liked to watch sitcoms. He did thirty push-ups every morning. He sang all the time—pop or country, any little tune that got stuck in his head. His voice was thin and watery, like mine turned out to be, but still somehow charming.

  He taught me how to flip a plate, cradling it on my flat palm, tossing it in the air, then catching it right-side up. He invented stories for me before bed, stories about a boy who had the same name as me but who was much braver and who, each night, saved the entire world from total destruction! And when Halloween rolled around, he bought me a Transformers costume from Safeway—how did he know that’s what I wanted to be?—and offered to take me trick-or-treating. The past couple of years I’d gone with my friends Justin and Louie, but this year I wanted to go with my dad instead. He said his dad had always taken him out on Halloween and they went house to house until they had so much candy they could hardly carry it home.

  “What’s your favorite chocolate bar?” he asked.

  “Mars,” I said. “And Reese’s. And Skor.”

  “Right on.” He nodded. “Me too.”

  The costume was the wrong size. My dad had forgotten that it would be cold at the end of October and I would need to fit my bulky coat and snow pants underneath. Also, he’d been right about me wanting to be a Transformer, but he’d bought me the dark Megatron outfit, and I didn’t want to be a bad guy, no matter how powerful the Decepticons were. I wanted the red Optimus Prime costume. So my mom exchanged the suit for a larger size, in red, though it was still too short in the legs.

  I looked forward to Halloween with a sense of thrilled fear. Thrill because I’d never been on an outing alone with the guy who was apparently my dad, but more importantly, because I wanted candy. I wanted to carry a gigantic bag of it home. Then I wanted to look at it, sort it, anticipate it. And when I ate it, I wanted to eat it all at once—I wanted my hands and face to be sticky from sugar. I wanted, wanted, wanted.

  Fear because I didn’t really believe my dad would still be here when Halloween came. It was two weeks away, and two weeks was forever.

  In the meantime, he went to meetings the way some people go to church. He had to carry a book around like it was a Bible and he had to walk himself through the 12 Steps. He liked to joke that the first step was easy—all he had to do was admit he was a fuck-up—but he was stuck on number two. “Is there a power greater than myself?” he said, lifting soup cans like dumbbells, pretending to strain his arms. “Seriously, I’m just supposed to believe in God?”

  “God as you understand him,” said my mom.

  “Yeah, yeah.” He sniffed at her ear and licked the side of her face like he was a puppy. “Dog as I understand him.”

  Halloween finally came and my dad was still around. I put on my snowsuit, the costume, the plastic mask, and got my mom to paint the visible part of my face with red face paint. She took pictures and my dad pretended not to recognize me. “Who are you?” he said, spinning around. “Where’s Davy?”

  And then the two of us were outside, crunching over snow-covered sidewalks. I had an empty pillowcase and was ready to fill it to the top with candy, ready to walk all night if I had to. First we went next door, to the house that belonged to Tracy and Rob and their baby girl. They’d dressed their baby as a bumblebee.

  “What are you?” said Tracy, as the bumblebee drooled on her shoulder.

  “He is Optimus Prime,” said my dad. “Leader of the Autobots.” The way he said it made it feel true.

  “Aw, so cute!” said Tracy.

  “Cool,” said Rob, and tossed me a Snickers bar.

  We went to a few more houses, and passed other kids—a zombie and a duck, a kid with a bullet hole in his forehead, a group of shivering and giggling Spice Girls who looked too old to be trick-or-treating. My mask kept sliding down my face, making it impossible for me to see. I slipped on the ice a couple of times but my dad caught me before I fell.

  “How about I hang on to that for you?” he said.

  “But then no one’ll know who I am.”

  “I just don’t want you to break your face, buddy.”

  At the next house, a teenage girl answered the door. “What are you?” she asked, and I waited for my dad to say that thing about me being the leader of the Autobots, but he didn’t say it.

  “I’m a Transformer,” I said.

  “Oh. Yeah.” She gave me four packages of Twizzlers. “I need this stuff out of the house,” she said. “We bought way too much and I’ll just eat it all.”

  I gave my dad one of the Twizzler packs and he ate the whole thing in less than a minute. Then we crossed the bridge and walked along the street that backed onto the river.

  “There’s more distance between the houses here,” my dad explained. “But it’s worth it ’cause these people are loaded.”

  At the first place I got a full-sized Oh Henry! bar, and my dad gave me a nod. “See?” he whispered. Then we went to the next house, a tall modern-looking place where all the windows were dark.

  “There’s no one home,” I said.

  My dad rang the doorbell anyway—he was nothing if not hopeful—and we yelled, Trick or treat! in unison. We waited but no one came.

  And maybe it was that street, or bad luck, or coincidence, but the next three houses we tried, it was the same thing: no one opened the door.

  At the third house, a small bungalow set far back from the street, my dad rang the doorbell three times. Most of the houses here were big, new in-fills, but this place looked like it had sat on that flat stretch of snow for fifty years.

  My dad gave up on the bell and knocked hard enough to rattle the door’s little moon-shaped window.

  “What the hell?” He kicked snow onto the freshly shoveled driveway. “Losers.”

  “Maybe they’re at the mall. I think some kids go ’cause the stores give out candy.”

  “See, that’s just depressing. That’s something I wish you hadn’t told me.”

  I didn’t understand—the mall seemed fine to me. My toes and the tips of my ears were going numb, my pillowcase was nearly empty, and my dad’s face had taken on a dark expression. It’s hard to describe what that looked like
exactly, only how it made me feel: like my stomach was a sock turning itself inside out.

  “Maybe we should try the next place,” I said.

  “They’re probably in there.” He put his face against the bungalow’s window. “With the fucking lights turned off.”

  A distorted version of his face, hollowed and skeleton-like, was reflected back in the glass.

  “Dad?” I didn’t usually call him that—I called him Paul because that’s how he’d been introduced. “I’m getting cold.”

  He stood with his face pressed to the glass and I could tell he wasn’t breathing because the window wasn’t fogging up. “Hey!” he yelled. “I got my kid out here!”

  I expected lights to come on, someone to open the door. I expected to get in trouble. But nothing happened.

  “You know what?” he said. “Screw this.”

  He took my hand and we walked down the middle of the street, me trying to keep up, skidding alongside him in my boots. My mask slipped down again and I nearly fell.

  “Jesus Christ.” He ripped it off my face. “Give me that.”

  I thought we were going home but we passed right by our street and headed toward the strip mall, to the warm light of the grocery store where he worked. We slid across the icy parking lot and in through the chugging automatic doors.

  The heat inside made my numbed ears sting. One of the cashiers, a young woman with dark hair, waved to my dad and said, “Couldn’t stay away, huh?”

  He gave her a wink. “Not from you.”

  Then he led me to what my mom called the “junk aisle,” a wonderland she hardly ever let me visit. Rows of two-liter bottles of pop gleamed—cream soda, Orange Crush, Dr Pepper—and beyond that was the special section for Halloween candy. There were my favorites: Mars and Reese’s and Skor. And there were Kit Kat, Coffee Crisp, Crunchie. And Rolo, Wonderbar, Bounty, Crispy Crunch, Caramilk, Smarties, Glosettes, Tootsie Rolls, Rockets, Nibs, Nerds, Candy Corn, Zombie Bites, jelly beans, jawbreakers, Bazooka Joe, Hubba Bubba, Hershey’s Kisses, and gummies shaped like bears, gummies shaped like skulls, gummies shaped like severed toes. I was in heaven. I was saved.