The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

  “I can take you, I can take you,” Cody said—he was eighteen, younger than his friend—and he gave Brodie a kick on the shin and called him a dirty Indian.

  “What’d you say, white boy?” Brodie put Cody in a headlock and they tumbled to the pavement, scraping their knees, grappling and grunting, scratching each other until they bled.

  “Oh, my god!” Lielle giggled. “Don’t hurt each other!”

  We believed they were showing off for us, proving their strength. We were pretty sure Cody liked Lielle and Brodie liked me. When they finished fighting, Lielle asked Cody if we could bum cigarettes off him, and he tossed his pack over to us.

  Brodie rolled his own and never shared, but once he used his Zippo to light my cigarette. He leaned toward me, the flame cradled in big, callused hands.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” he said. “So what’s your name?”

  “Hannah.”

  “Hannah-banana,” Cody interrupted, smiling in that mocking way. “I like your yellow hair.”

  The first puffs always made me dizzy, but so did the way Cody and Brodie appraised me, smoke curling from their mouths. It occurred to me that maybe I was the pretty one, the one they might want.

  “How old are you, Hannah-banana?” asked Cody.

  “Can we go?” said Lielle.

  “Why?” he said. “Where do you have to be?”

  Then she turned and walked away, her cigarette dropping ash on the ground. I stayed where I was, leaning against the wall, and contemplated for an entire second the possibility that I might not follow her. Then I ran to catch up.

  It was midafternoon, the hottest part of the day. My tank top stuck to my skin and my shorts were so tight I worried they’d give me a yeast infection. The streets were empty—it was Wednesday and most people were at work, in some other universe of air-conditioned cubicles and elevators and water coolers. The asphalt baked in the sun and smelled of tar. Most of the lawns we passed were crisp and brown. Others were freakishly green: aerated and fertilized, sprinklers spraying them all day.

  “I’m thirsty,” I said. “Let’s go back to my house.”

  “I’m sick of your house.” Lielle kicked at the gravel along the edge of the road. “Let’s go to someone else’s house.”

  “Whose?”

  “Fuck if I care,” she said, using the vocabulary I’d taught her. “Anyone’s.”

  We had a month before high school started, a month before we’d be pulled apart: Lielle would attend a private school on the other side of the city and I would take the bus to public school. And after high school, Lielle would go back to Israel for two years to serve in the IDF. Her mother had been a junior officer in the Israeli army, and Lielle had shown me a photograph of her mom as a young woman in uniform, a beret pinned to her shoulder, a gun gripped in her hands. I tried to imagine myself, with my bony elbows and tangled hair, serving in the Canadian army. Or my mother—who always had laundry fluff clinging to her sweaters—holding a gun.

  “What if you die?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Lielle nodded. “A person can die.”

  Between us, there was an unarticulated promise to remain best friends—despite high school, despite the army, despite death. But promises can be forgotten. We needed something—an adventure, a tragedy—to wed us together.

  We walked down the street awake to possibilities. Most houses in my neighborhood were one or two stories, with beige or a sickly pink siding that was fashionable. Some people had swing sets on their arid lawns, or basketball nets bolted above the driveways.

  We passed houses with cars parked out front or where windows and blinds were open. We wanted places that seemed closed up, empty and dark. Once we looked for them, they appeared, blooming like bruises on the bright skin of the street.

  We found it, as perfect as though it had been promised us.

  The curtains were drawn closed, the windows shut, the driveway a bare slap of concrete. It was a single-level, with faded green siding and a red door. Marigolds grew out front—heavy on their stalks, bowing as though to welcome us.

  We walked by twice to be sure the place was empty. Without speaking, Lielle and I turned a corner and took the unpaved back alley. Behind the house was a wooden fence with a gate. Easy to unlatch.

  We were trespassing already, in this backyard covered with patchy grass, the ground dusty and pale from lack of watering. Lettuce was going to seed, its edges burned from the heat. Maybe the owners had gone on holidays—to a cabin, or to visit family in another city, or to somewhere exotic like Greece or Morocco. I mouthed the word Morocco under my breath, because I liked the way its syllables folded into one another.

  “What?” whispered Lielle.

  “Nothing.”

  A stone path cut through the yard to the back porch. We tried the door: locked. We paused on the little cement stoop. Lielle said, “Let’s try the windows.”

  She stood on her toes to reach the first-floor panes but they were locked. Then she tried the basement window. I was beside her, saying, “Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit,” even though I didn’t quite believe we’d go through with it.

  The basement window slid open.

  “Rip the screen.” I was suddenly, briefly courageous. “Use this.” I took my key from my pocket and thought of my house—with iced tea in the fridge, Oreos in the cupboard, and innumerable other reasons not to break the law.

  Lielle used the key to puncture a hole in the mosquito screen, then tore through it in a jagged line. She crouched in front of the window. “Do you hear an alarm?”

  “No.”

  “A dog?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” She nodded toward the gash in the screen. “You go.”

  “Why me?”

  “I found the way in. It’s your turn.”

  I wanted to burst into tears. I wanted to smack her face. I wanted, most of all, to go home. But I couldn’t do that now—not in this now, the present we’d so recently created for ourselves.

  “Okay.” I took a breath like I was about to dive into deep water, then slid through the window feet-first. My T-shirt rode up and the ledge scratched the skin on my ribs.

  “Come on.” Lielle was hopping from one foot to the other like she had to pee. “Hurry up.”

  “Will you relax?” I shimmied the rest of the way through the window, and the torn ends of the mosquito screen scraped the back of my neck and caught my hair. I landed on something soft that broke my fall, a box that seemed to contain clothes or blankets. I blinked, willing my eyes to adjust to the dark. “I’m in!” I called to Lielle, but there was no answer.

  My hands reached out and felt the cold cement floor. I stood up, brushed myself off, tried to stand on the box—of towels? winter jackets?—to see back out into the fresh air, the sunlight. The cardboard sank again under my weight and I couldn’t reach the window ledge. “I’m in!” I yelled louder.

  Nothing.

  I sank down in the dark and imagined that box contained a yellowing wedding dress, or a wig collection, or the pelts of animals that the owner of the house had killed and skinned. The basement was cold and quiet. I shivered. “Lielle?” I whispered.

  Then her head—shadowed and back-lit by daylight, ghostly in the underground dark—appeared through the window above me. “What are you doing?”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was waiting for you at the back door.” She said this slowly, like I was the one who spoke English as a second language. “Go upstairs and unlock it.”

  “I’m not going upstairs to unlock the door.”

  “That’s the way it’s done. Don’t you watch TV?”

  “I am not opening the fucking door for you. I can hardly see anything.”

  Her head disappeared and I was again abandoned. I was about to scream when her legs came through the window, then her hips. She shimmied through and fell on top of me, her elbow knocking me in the face.

  “Jesus, ow.”

  “Sorry.�
�

  She was, without realizing it, holding my hand. Our clammy skin stuck us together—we were married in our fear. We walked through the basement like that, tripping over boxes and old unplugged lamps and other objects covered in dust, stuff I couldn’t distinguish. We knocked things over and whispered, “What-was-that-oh-my-god-what-was-that?” We found a narrow staircase and climbed it on our hands and knees.

  When we opened the door at the top of the stairs, we were in the kitchen. The room was dim because the blinds were drawn, maybe to keep out the heat. Lielle let go of my hand, felt her way along the wall, and switched on a light. “Ta-da!” she said.

  We burst out laughing. I bent over and clutched at my crotch—thought I’d pee myself—and that made us laugh more. We were hysterical, terrified.

  When we caught our breath, I looked around the kitchen. The marigolds out front had led me to expect something homey, a kitchen that belonged to an elderly couple, maybe, like my neighbors, the Korens, who had pictures of their nieces and nephews on the fridge, meat in the freezer, cups and saucers for tea in a china cabinet.

  But this kitchen—this kitchen belonged to someone who lived alone. Sunlight dish detergent by the sink. Beige linoleum designed to look like tile. The radio tuned to Country 105, emitting a grainy background hum. A grimy coffee percolator on the counter and one spider plant (dead) on the windowsill. On the fridge was a magnet that read Welcome to paradise! with an off-kilter drawing of a palm tree. The magnet didn’t affix anything to the fridge. It sat alone on that white expanse.

  Lielle turned on the tap, then left the water running and trailed her hand along the counter. “This place is weird.” Her voice was full of excitement and a dangerous, creeping disappointment. “What do we do now?”

  I was still thirsty, so I opened the fridge. Inside there was a bottle of French’s mustard, half a loaf of bread, a container of store-bought lemon icing, and a liter of 2 percent milk. I grabbed that, even though I didn’t like milk. Usually it grossed me out: the creamy taste, the white it left at the corners of my mouth, that smell of rot and reproduction. At home, I always refused it. But there­­—in that strange, sad, thrilling house­­—I drank it straight from the carton.

  Even now I like ghost towns and abandoned houses, places that seem to be haunted, buildings with dark, locked rooms. While visiting friends and family, I find myself assessing their homes in terms of security. I look for open windows. I examine door hinges and latches and the flimsy locks on gates. I look for a way in. When I find it, I look for a way out.

  My partner joked that this habit came in handy when we were looking to buy our own place. “She’s an expert in home security,” Sasha said to our realtor, keeping a straight face.

  And our daughter, the child who came later, the child I kept—kept, as though anyone ever belongs to anyone else. We try to give her privacy. Though I once went through her pockets and opened her desk drawers. This was out of genuine concern, motherly instinct, but it sickened me. After, I tried to put everything back the way it was, the way she had it. As unchanged—undamaged—as possible.

  I have no idea how long Lielle and I were in that house with its empty fridge and dirty countertops. Probably less than ten minutes. We went out the back door, and left the milk on the counter, the light on, the tap running. My legs felt weak, but as soon as we were outside, I started to run.

  We ran until we got to my street, four blocks away, and that’s when I threw up. The milk tasted sour in my throat. It landed in a white puddle on the road, looking pure and untouched against the pavement. Lielle wiped my face with her sleeve and said, “You okay?”

  My being sick didn’t ruin our afternoon. We linked arms and stumbled the rest of the way home like a couple of giddy drunks.

  My mom looked up from the mail she was sorting and said, “What’s with you two?” then asked if Lielle wanted to stay for dinner.

  “Sure,” she answered as we pounded up the stairs to my room. “Thanks!”

  When we got to my room and shut the door, Lielle said, “Check it out.”

  From her pocket, she pulled out the palm-tree magnet. It was made of clay, probably bargained for and purchased on a touristy beach. I almost vomited again. I imagined the owner as a man, middle-aged. Softening around the middle, yellow stains under the arms of his buttoned shirts, his yearly vacation planned with care.

  “You stole his magnet?” I said.

  “Oh, god, Hannah-banana.” Lielle gave me a light slap across the face. “Welcome,” she said, “to paradise!”

  And that was enough to pull me back in. For Lielle’s sake, and for mine, I laughed along with her. And that’s what we called it, our code for breaking in: going to paradise.

  A few years later, Lielle served in the IDF. She liked basic training: sleeping in a tent, learning to shoot a gun. She emailed me a photo of her with two girls on either side, all of them in the same mud-green uniform. They were laughing and had their arms around each other. One of the girls had acne and aviator sunglasses and blew a kiss to the camera.

  The army is like summer camp, Lielle wrote, except with guns.

  She told me that the food was decent. That she now had muscles she hadn’t realized existed. That an acquaintance of hers, a boy she’d kissed on a beach in Eilat, was dead.

  Then I didn’t hear from her for months, until she wrote to say that she was in Intelligence, doing observation. She had her own shift and her own turf: day after day, she watched four hundred meters of the security wall on a closed-circuit monitor. My eyes get dry cause I forget to blink. The same Gaza streets, the same faces on a grainy screen. She said her job reminded her of “going to paradise.” (Remember that? I can’t believe we did that.) She told me she’d given nicknames to the people she saw every day—old women in headscarves, boys playing soccer—even though her supervisor had warned her not to become attached.

  She said she was having trouble sleeping now. She said she was getting so fat. She said she hoped to travel when her army stint was done. Maybe India, she said, or something.

  We mostly limited our crime spree to my neighborhood, with its bungalows separated by low hedges and easy-to-hop fences. It was trusting and well tended. People had small lawns and friendly neighbors. There was always an unlocked window or a key under a mat.

  We learned to assess, in seconds and without discussing it, which houses were good targets and which to avoid. We learned to pick locks using bobby pins and a small screwdriver. We learned that people forget to secure their back doors, or their garage doors, or their balconies. We learned that the body is malleable when it needs to be: it can fit through tight spaces, reach high ledges. We weren’t so unlike Kat, the girl who’d graffitied her name behind Little Caesars. We too wanted to leave a mark, to own something by wrecking it. That desire was satisfied every time we climbed through a window or jimmied open a door, every time we walked in and took a breath of someone’s private air.

  I taught Lielle the word shit-mix and we tasted every bottle of liquor that people kept in their homes. Amaretto, Limoncello, scotch, vodka, gin, crème de menthe. Once we found some weed and a pipe, but the high just made us more paranoid than usual. Lielle thought the owners of the house were hiding behind the couch, which didn’t seem far-fetched at all. Even empty houses feel occupied. And once, it did happen that a man emerged from the bathroom, a towel around his waist, in a house we’d assumed was empty. This was the only time we broke into a house in Lielle’s neighborhood. The place was practically a mansion, the floors covered with lush white carpet that muffled every step.

  “Hey,” said the guy, when he saw us jumping on his bed.

  For each spring I took on his mattress, I noticed something about him: bulky shoulders, tufts of hair around his nipples, moisture streaking down his freshly shaved face. A face distorted by rage, warped like I was looking at him from underwater.

  “Hi,” said Lielle, cheerful, as though we belonged there.

  My insides were liquid. He woul
d call the police; I would be arrested; my mom would have to pick me up from the station. But then Lielle grabbed my shirt and yelled, “Run!” and we leapt off the bed, made it out the door and down the stairs, outside, back toward the safety of the empty pool.

  “Fucking kids!” we heard the guy yell as we crashed down his staircase. “You stealing, fucking kids—”

  He was wrong. Stealing wasn’t the point, though Lielle did take something from every house we broke into. She never stole electronics or CDs or jewelry or money. She took something personal. A postcard. A miniature spoon from Disneyland. A green button torn off a coat. A family photo. A tiny vial of perfume. She kept these things in her bedroom, on her desk or hanging from her walls.

  I never stole anything. That was my one rule. I looked at the pictures that people kept in frames or in piles at the back of desk drawers. I ate their food, lay in their beds, tried on their clothes. I sat on their couches, watched their televisions, spooned yogurt from their containers. I went through their drawers and cupboards and closets, never looking for anything in particular, just looking. I found old tubes of lubricant, pornographic decks of cards, rusted nail clippers, disintegrating Kleenexes, old photographs of children who were perhaps now dead or abandoned or grown up—in any case, not children anymore. I read diaries and letters and overdue credit card bills. I peed in other people’s toilets, and washed my hands with the sweet-smelling soap they must have stolen from hotel rooms. I dried my hands on their towels, used their lotion, and studied the medicine in their cabinets.

  I learned through all this that inside another person’s house, you’re on borrowed time, loaned to you from another life. You have to be careful. You have to wear a watch. An hour feels like four minutes. Four minutes feels like a decade. You will begin to believe you live in that house. Its corners, its dust, its furniture, its dishcloths—they will begin to feel like your own.