The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

By the end of August, my neighborhood was put on alert. The police called every house and left a recorded message on people’s answering machines: There have been a series of break-ins in your area. If you notice anything suspicious, please call the Calgary Police Department’s nonemergency line. I listened to the message three times, then hit delete. But my mom heard the news from our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Koren.

  I’d never known their first names—hadn’t even considered that they had first names. They were a retired couple who used to babysit me after school when my mom was at work. Mr. Koren would usually be in the living room, caring for his plants. Mrs. Koren and I sat in the kitchen, which was smoky from her cigarettes and warm from the oven. She usually had a batch of biscuits baking, or a pot of homemade barbecue sauce on the stove.

  She always let me pick out a game from the Kids Room, which was on the main floor, wood-paneled, with a shelf of toys and a single bed in the corner. I loved that room, though Mrs. Koren never let me linger in there. She only sent me in to pick out a board game because she liked to play something while she made dinner. She taught me how to play cribbage, euchre, and gin rummy. We also played Snakes and Ladders, Yahtzee, and Monopoly. My favorite was Clue, because you could be any character you wanted; I always picked Colonel Mustard and Mrs. Koren liked to be Miss Scarlet.

  Mrs. Koren never let me win the way my mom did. She sat at the plastic kitchen table, ashing her cigarettes into an old canning-jar lid, and said things like, “You think you’re smart? You think you can beat this old lady?” She fed me plates of sugar cookies, candies from a dish, and sweet pickles directly from the jar.

  When I was too old for a babysitter, my mother occasionally sent me over to the Korens with a banana loaf and instructions to “make sure they’re still breathing.” She made me shovel their walk when it snowed. Sometimes Mrs. Koren would call through her screen door as I left for school in the mornings. “You should come by someday. We’ll play a game of rummy.”

  I meant to visit her, but never did. After a while, whenever I ran into her, the guilt made me fidget and pretend not to see her. Anyway, the Korens spent less and less time in town because they bought a trailer and used it almost year-round.

  But now, years after I’d spoken much to either of them, Mr. Koren was on our front stoop, saying, “Heard anything about those break-ins?”

  “Break-ins?” My mom had a distracted, overworked air about her. “What break-ins?”

  “The police called.” Mr. Koren’s hair was whiter than I remembered. “Seems it’s a problem around here.”

  Mr. Koren explained that he and his wife would be out of town for a few weeks and were worried about security while they were away. “Maybe you can keep an eye out.” He looked at me when he said it. “I know you’re home for the summer.”

  “Sure.” Was I blushing? Blinking too much? Too little? I tried to hold his gaze. “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Good.” Mr. Koren gave me a wink. “Keep your eyes peeled, kiddo.”

  After the conversation with Mr. Koren, we decided it was too risky—we’d have to stop going to paradise. So we went back to the bottom of the pool, though its green, shimmering walls felt like a cage now. And my house wasn’t much better. There we watched daytime TV, particularly talk shows where people exposed their strange, depressing, private lives. We dressed up in the clothes that hung in my mother’s closet, wearing her pleated skirts and shoulder-padded sweaters and pointy pumps, then put them back the way we’d found them. We played Would You Rather and Truth or Dare.

  “I dare you to take off your shirt and run up the street screaming, I’m left-handed! I’m left-handed!” said Lielle.

  “I don’t want to take off my shirt.”

  “Why? Because you don’t have a bra.”

  “Because I don’t want to.”

  Lielle tossed her body backward and sprawled on my bed. “Forget it.”

  I went back to reading a Cosmo that Lielle had brought over, learning how to “achieve” glossy hair and skin that has a “summer sparkle.” The magazine was mesmerizing even as it made me suicidal.

  “Your neighbors’ place is so close to your house.” Lielle looked through my open bedroom window. “You can see right into their living room.”

  “‘Super Foods, Super Sex,’” I read aloud. Cosmo was promising me the biggest, best orgasms of my life, if I incorporated flax and blueberries into my diet.

  “Do they ever watch you?” Lielle leaned on the windowsill, her body half outside the house. She was wearing the shorts I’d worn when we went to visit Cody and Brodie, along with a T-shirt she’d altered herself, cutting the neck and sleeves off with scissors. “They can probably see you getting dressed and stuff.”

  “They’re not like that. They’re old.”

  I flipped to an article called “Ten Surprising Ways to Make Him Want More,” which advised women to invite their boyfriends out for ice cream and then lick the cone suggestively.

  “Maybe we should invite Cody and Brodie for ice cream,” I said.

  “It seems like they’re never home.” Lielle stared at the neighbors’ brown-sided bungalow. “Do they go away a lot?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. A swamp or something.”

  “We should go there.”

  “To the swamp?”

  “No, shit-ass. To their house.”

  I’d spoken to Mr. Koren once before they left on their trip. He was in their backyard, opening the door and the windows to the trailer, taking the curtains off their rods and shaking them out. “You got to give it air,” he said.

  I was lying on a towel in the backyard suntanning. When Mr. Koren spoke, I looked up at him through my sunglasses, annoyed by the interruption.

  “We go down to the swamp every year,” he said. “It’s our favorite spot.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I had no idea what he was talking about. I was bad at geography, and hadn’t heard of the Everglades.

  “You ever seen a swamp? It has alligators, and flowers of every color, and insects the size of my head.” He spoke as though I were a four-year-old child. “They could eat you right up.”

  I could tell he meant this to be amusing. “Cool,” I said, or something like that.

  But it didn’t matter where they were, or what the name of the swamp was. The point, as Lielle said, was that they weren’t home.

  “I don’t think we should go over there,” I said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Hello,” she said. “The driveway’s empty.”

  “We’re not breaking into their place.”

  “So they live next door. What’s the difference?”

  What was the difference? Next door or down the road—they were all my neighbors. There was, of course, the sticky issue of the law—but if we’d already broken it a few times, what was once more? And what was the law anyway, if not rules that were decided without my input, rules I’d never agreed to follow?

  These were sorts of things I asked myself that summer. And once you start asking those sorts of questions, it’s hard to stop.

  Getting in was easy. We slid my library card between the door and the frame, and the Korens’ lock unlatched. As always, we went to the kitchen first, but were disappointed. The fridge and cupboards were full of what we called old-person food: canned meats, jars of pickles, digestive cookies, flat ginger ale, dried prunes. The liquor cabinet was disappointing too. I’d imagined that Mr. Koren might be a whiskey drinker, but all we found was a dented can of Molson in the fridge. Lielle popped the tab and we passed the beer back and forth. “She used to keep a lot of candy around,” I said, but we couldn’t find any.

  The kitchen table—plastic and meant for a patio—was covered with a handmade table-runner. The brown plaid couch in the living room had an indentation where Mr. Koren sat and watched TV. The lace doilies on the furniture were the same as I remembered, but the house had fewer plants. Mr. Koren used to grow a collection
of potted flowers and ferns and exotic things I didn’t recognize—so much life that the air felt warm and marshy. Now there were only some cacti and succulents, things that could survive in the owners’ absence.

  “It smells funny in here,” said Lielle. “Like mothballs.”

  That’s when I remembered the Kids Room. It was on the main floor, down the hall from the kitchen. When I opened the door, it was exactly as I remembered. The single bed and shelves of old-fashioned toys and games.

  “Cool,” said Lielle. “It’s like a movie set.”

  The board games were still piled neatly on a shelf: Yahtzee, Risk, Clue, the Game of Life. Boxes so old that the color had faded and the cardboard smelled stale. I took out the dominoes, which had uneven, hand-painted white dots. I poured them onto the floor and began standing them in line.

  Lielle sat on the single bed, which was covered with a blanket knitted from wool that was the same mint green as the inside of the pool. She wrapped herself in it and the bed groaned when she stretched out. In the kitchen, she’d found a pack of Mrs. Koren’s cigarettes and a book of matches. She lit one of these cigarettes, inhaled, and coughed violently. “These are kind of strong,” she said.

  I was lost in the rhythm of placing one domino after another. The house, the smell of that familiar tobacco—I’d returned to my childhood, to a time of quiet and focused play.

  “They used to babysit me.” I imagined Mrs. Koren calling to me at any moment from the kitchen, telling me to hurry up. “We used to play board games.”

  Lielle had gotten used to the strong tobacco and smoked leisurely now. She reclined on the bed.

  “I came over after school,” I said. “And some Saturday afternoons.”

  “Whose room is this?” Lielle turned on her side and the bed complained again. “I thought you said this place belonged to old people.”

  “It does. This is the Kids Room.”

  “What kids? You mean grandkids?”

  As a child, I’d never asked the question. This room had simply existed in the same way other things existed—my house, my parents—and it never occurred to me to wonder. You go to the Kids Room and pick us out a game, Mrs. Koren said, smoking the same brand of cigarette Lielle now held.

  I stood up, careful not to knock over the dominoes, which now reached across the floor. I stepped over them and opened the closet. It was full of children’s clothing: shirts, pants, tiny pairs of overalls. I picked up a pair of corduroys. They must have hung on that hanger for years because the metal had stained them with rust. The pants would have fit a child around four years old. From the look of them and the rest of the clothing—some was hand-stitched—the child must have been a boy. Where was he? When had he slept here? I’d never seen or heard of him, and there were no photographs on the walls.

  “The Kids Room,” I whispered to myself. Then, “The kid’s room.”

  Lielle was wrapped in the blanket, half asleep. “What?”

  “We shouldn’t be here,” I said.

  “Duh.”

  “I mean it.” Right then, I heard someone in the house. Or thought I did. Someone humming to themlselves. “Lielle, let’s go.”

  She yawned without bothering to cover her mouth. “Now?” She stood up, still wrapped in the blanket. She moved through the smoke, the cigarette in one hand, to the bedroom’s threshold.

  I nodded toward the blanket that covered her shoulders. “You’re taking that?”

  “I know it’s gross.” She looked down at the green wool. “But I’ll wash it.”

  “Lielle.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t belong to us.”

  She laughed. “Nothing belongs to us.”

  “We’re not here to steal from them.”

  “What are we here for, then? To go through their closets?”

  The child’s corduroys were still in my hand.

  “I’m not the one who goes through people’s drawers.” Lielle held the blanket tight around her shoulders. “I’m not the one who reads their mail.”

  “It’s different.”

  “Is it?”

  “Can we just go home?”

  “You mean to your house?” Lielle arched one dark eyebrow. “Why don’t you go hang out with Cody and Brodie? You like them.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Then she pressed the burning end of the cigarette into the blanket. “Yes, you do.”

  I smelled the singe of wool and imagined the blanket, the room, the entire house swallowed by fire. “No,” I said. “I don’t.” Then I stepped toward her, wanting to smack her, push her, tear the blanket from her shoulders. Instead, I kissed her—hard, fast, on the mouth.

  She pushed me away. “Fuck you.” Then she dropped the cigarette and the smoldering blanket slid off her shoulders.

  “Wait.” I reached for her hand—now I didn’t want to leave. Outside this room, we’d be back in the ordinary world, where time passed. We would grow up; we would separate; we would die. “Lielle, wait.”

  But she walked past. Her foot kicked over one of the dominoes, then the rest fell in their inevitable way.

  After the Korens’, I locked myself in my room. Anytime the phone rang, I held my breath. I hoped it was Lielle, even though I didn’t want to talk to her. I also thought it might be Mr. or Mrs. Koren, home suddenly and coincidentally. Or it might be the police.

  But nothing happened. I read the Cosmo Lielle had left behind.

  The next day I put on her shirt, her shorts, her watermelon lip gloss, and walked over to Little Caesars. I hoped, in some delirious way, that Lielle would be there. Instead I found Cody, in his ball cap, leaning against that wall scribbled with the name Kat. I wondered how old Kat was now, where she’d gone, if she still lived nearby.

  “It’s you,” said Cody, as though he’d been waiting for me, as though I’d been promised him. “Hey, Hannah-banana.”

  He passed me the burnt-down cigarette that had been hanging from his mouth, and I brought it to my lips. The filter was wet from his saliva. I inhaled, exhaled, and then—it happened fast—he was pressing me up against Kat’s wall, his breath hot on my skin. He’d tilted his cap back so that I saw his eyes—they were blue—and he kissed me. He crushed his erection into my stomach.

  “I should go home,” I said.

  “Where’s home?”

  I gave him the Korens’ address; I told him my parents were out; I said I’d meet him there later, after his shift was done.

  Then I walked away with the stub of his cigarette still in my hand. It had burned down to the filter, was smoldering still, singeing my fingers.

  Two days later, my mom and I came home from grocery shopping and found Lielle in our living room, watching TV.

  “How did you get in?” my mom asked. “Did we leave the door unlocked?”

  “The window,” said Lielle.

  My mom gave Lielle a blank, almost tranquil look—I wonder what she sensed that summer. Did the air in our place feel strange and foreign to her too? I wondered how long Lielle had been in our house and what she’d stolen from me.

  “I made some popcorn,” said Lielle. “Hope that’s okay.”

  She stood to help my mom with the bags of groceries. I heard them talking in the kitchen and it was easy to pretend I didn’t live there. To pretend I was a ghost.

  “So guess what?” Lielle found me in my room. “We filled the pool.”

  “Why? Summer’s over.”

  “My dad got a new girlfriend, so he wants to show off.” She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, do you want to go swimming?”

  “No, thanks.” I wanted her to hate me the way I hated Cody. That seemed easier. But she crouched beside me and reached into her pocket. She pulled out the Welcome to paradise! magnet.

  “I thought we could leave it on the porch or something,” she said. “With a note that says we’re sorry.”

  I took the magnet and felt its weight in my hand. It was ugly and cheap and badly made. I handed it back to her. “Kee
p it.”

  I wanted her to have it as a record, a souvenir, like the small collection I’d acquired: her Cosmo, her lip gloss, the cropped top she’d lent me. I’d thrown away the stub of Cody’s cigarette, but Lielle’s things were hidden at the back of my sock drawer. I’d begun to worry over the fact that my mother sometimes came into my room without knocking, to ask me to close my window, or to come down for dinner, or to help with the dishes. I’d never minded before, but now when she came in I would scream, “This is my room!” I was impatient with her, and it never occurred to me that she might be lonely. I worried she might enter my room while I was away and inspect my things, looking for—what? She probably had no idea, only intuited some loss, some difference in me, some secret life I kept from her. She’d started saying things like, I’m concerned.

  I was concerned too, but for different reasons. Why had I kissed Lielle? And would she forget it ever happened? Forgetting must be easy—that’s why the Korens preserved that room. And that’s why I kept Lielle’s watermelon lip gloss, as if lip gloss could keep time at bay, could protect us from whatever fate that kid had found.

  Lielle didn’t look at me, just turned the magnet over in her hands. “Don’t cry,” she said. And when I didn’t stop, “Come on, shit-face. Don’t.”

  I wanted to tell her what had happened with Cody, how it was nothing like Cosmo had promised. I wanted her to wipe my eyes with her sleeve and say, It’s okay, and then it would be. I wanted us to sit at the bottom of a pool that would never be filled. To go to paradise and never get caught. To live together in another country, in our own house, a house with gold walls and a tiger guarding the door.

  Todd

  When Eddie woke from alcohol-fueled dreams, the bird was on the edge of the mattress. Black feathers, black feet, black beak. Eddie figured he was dreaming. He closed his eyes—there was a heaviness behind them, an aftermath from the Jim Beam he drank last night—but when he opened them, the crow was still there. A bird in the house, but Eddie couldn’t remember the rest.

  It must have flown in the bedroom window—he left it open because he still slept best when he felt the cold air and heard the noise of the street.