The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

  The only light down there came from a small octagonal window. Dust got in my eyes, my nostrils. I was trying to love dust because Miss Robb said we were all made from it. I sneezed.

  “Bless you,” whispered Toby.

  He walked ahead of me, as if he knew his way, toward an old furnace that sat silent in the summer.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  Toby didn’t answer. He crouched beside a shoe box on the floor. When he opened the lid, a dark thing moved inside.

  I stepped away. “What is that?”

  “I found it down here,” said Toby.

  I moved closer and crouched to see. A bat. Black eyes, tufts of orange fur on its forehead. Wings folded like umbrellas.

  Toby lifted it from the box and placed it in my hands. It was small and soft, a mouse with wings. I could feel its terror—it shivered. Then it stretched out its wing, unfurled it like the sail of a boat. A transparent membrane, delicately veined—like a leaf, like lace.

  “I love it.” The words just came out. I held the bat closer to my face, smelled the dust on its fur. Then it opened its mouth, showing a row of tiny teeth, and screamed. A sound of agony.

  “It’s hurt.” I saw that its wing was torn, ripped like the knee of Toby’s pants. “What happened?”

  Toby shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “You found it down here?”

  “It’s for you.”

  “We should tell Miss Robb.”

  But then we’d have to explain why we’d left the Sunday school room, why we were in the basement. So we dealt with it on our own. Toby tried to feed the bat part of a Fig Newton that he’d found in his pocket. Then we stroked its head and sang one of the songs Miss Robb had taught us:

  Without Him I would be nothing

  Without Him I’d surely fail;

  Without Him I would be drifting

  Like a ship without a sail

  The bat breathed in fast gulps. I suggested the one thing I knew could heal. “We should give it a name.”

  Did I suggest it or did Toby? One of us thought of that long-ago man who lived wholeheartedly, who was welcomed into the Promised Land. Caleb.

  I remember how it felt to bestow a name upon that bat, the way Adam might have—to define the small mystery breathing in my hand. Naming was a declaration of love. The bat belonged to me, and I would save it.

  Toby and I squeezed our eyes shut and prayed. Please, we said. Please help.

  I outgrew that dress with its lace collar; I outgrew Miss Robb and her stories. What is love? When I was sixteen, it was a Europop song. Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more.

  I was beyond love, above it, because everyone and everything had disappointed me. Miss Robb married and had children and grew frumpy and old—she no longer had perfect bangs and pink nails. And my parents were idiots. Jerome told me that our families had spent so much time together because his parents felt sorry for us. That the Burkes had paid for all the bowling and skiing outings—the french fries and hot chocolate, the gas, the admission tickets.

  He told me this when we still hung out in their basement, which had a small trampoline and a pool table. He’d taught me how to dust blue chalk over my pool cue and into the crease of skin next to my thumb.

  “It wasn’t a big deal.” Jerome nudged my cue to help me line up my shot. “It was charity.”

  When I heard that word, charity, I felt sorry for my family too. And I despised us. Despised my father for losing every job he found and declaring that it wasn’t his fault—his boss was a moron or his coworker had something against him. Despised my mother for the way she fell for pyramid schemes and believed that selling face creams or vitamins or little decorative amulets would save us.

  And Jesus. Impossible to count the ways He had let me down. So I stopped talking to Him. Silence was easy; it happened all the time. My mom stopped talking to my dad for days on end; I had stopped talking to my best friend in Grade 2 because she’d stolen my barrette; Jerome stopped talking to me because he’d grown bored of hanging out with a kid. And now I stopped talking to Jesus. A day went by, then a week, then months. Nothing happened—no pestilence, no punishment. I only realized later, decades later, that God’s silence was a heartbreak to me. That my body felt like a sail with no wind filling it out.

  And Toby? He grew into those hand-me-down suits. Tall and broad-chested like his brother, he arrived at church without baggy sleeves or holes in the knees of his trousers. His hair was streaked with sun—he now spent his excess energy outside on basketball courts, playing for the school’s team. He also became an usher at church, taking over from Jerome, who passed on his keys. Now Toby arrived early each Sunday morning to turn on the lights, check the thermostat, place the hymnals. Toby shook our hands when we passed through the door. Toby passed the collection plate. Toby stood for the entire service, ready to assist anyone who needed help.

  At sixteen, Toby was the only one I didn’t hate, the only one who hadn’t disappointed me—because my expectations had been so low. But Toby had forsaken me. When he stood at the church door and I approached, his gaze grazed the top of my head and his smile emptied. As though he’d never written me love notes, never prayed with me in the basement of this church, never showed me his flaccid penis. As though he’d never chosen me.

  Usually I ignored him too, but once, I dared him to look at me. Dared him to deny me. “Hi, Toby,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Hello, Leanna.”

  Nausea rushed through me like a wave. “No one calls me that anymore.”

  Toby turned away from me, toward a young family who were arriving. “Hello! Welcome.” He reached to shake the adults’ hands, and the children clamored to be near him. But I—my body—blocked him from moving toward them, from lifting the children into the air, from spinning them until they were delirious and sick.

  “I’m Lea now.”

  “Okay.” He delivered a perfectly pleasant smile and the family passed by, their bodies moving around us like water. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “You’re welcome.” When I stared at him, his face went red like the time he’d punched Kipp Fitch. “Anything else I can do, Toby?”

  “I actually go by Tobiah now,” he said.

  “Really? Tobiah?”

  “Your parents are inside.” He moved to let me past. “If you’re waiting for them.”

  “I’m pregnant.” I hadn’t told anyone else yet because my body was still hiding the fact. Only the skin around my eyes had darkened; I wore a mask all the time now. “With child.”

  Toby looked at me then. We were both thinking about sex—he knew I’d had it and I knew he hadn’t—but it was more than that. He must have sensed the violence in me. I wanted to grab him by the throat and drag him to the basement. For ten anxious weeks, pregnancy had left me exhausted most of the time, enraged the rest, and I wanted to punch someone, to feel flesh give way under my fists. I wanted to hurt Toby. Tobiah. I wanted to make him remember me; I wanted to make him cry; I wanted us to hold hands and pray. Please help.

  Our prayers worked. Or is this just my memory of it? My brain telling me a story? The bat flew from my hands.

  And then? Did we walk up the staircase together?

  We must have returned to the classroom and continued building our ark. We must have glued our popsicle sticks together, carefully traced and cut our sails. Because Miss Robb came back with a plastic basin full of water. She was flushed from carrying it, and some had sloshed onto her blouse. She apologized for taking so long. “But it’s worth the wait,” she said, “because I have a surprise.” She raised her lovely eyebrows. “We’re going to sail our arks,” she said. “For real.”

  Then all the children took turns putting their arks on the water. Every single one of them sank, paper turning soggy. “Oh, dear,” said Miss Robb.

  Then it was our turn. Toby and I each held one side of our boat and lowered it to rest on the water’s delicate membrane.

  Our
ark—I remember this for certain—could float.

  With child. I said the words, and my insides started to roil—I felt seasick. I marched into the church, ignoring Pastor Guthrie’s nicotine-stained smile, ignoring Jerome’s noncommittal nod, ignoring Jesus pinned naked to his cross. I sat in the wooden pew beside my parents and ignored them too. I flipped to the first reading.

  Partway through the sermon, my lower back was singing with pain. I stood, walked to the back of the church, down the hallway that led to the Sunday school rooms. I could hear children laughing or screaming or crying. I needed to be alone. I opened the door that led to the dark basement, and sat on the steps.

  The basement was still lit by that one octagonal window—dust floated through the air. Then I fell. The memory is just an image, like from the Illustrated Bible: my body at the bottom of the stairs. Then Toby above me, helping me to my feet. Toby hugging me like he’d never forsaken me. Holding me and saying, “Leanna. Leanna, are you okay?”

  What is love? We were in one of those pews—Toby had the keys to the church and this was the only place we could find privacy. Toby’s heart pounded against my hand. Was it fear of me? Or rage? Or adoration? When we were on that pew, he couldn’t stop saying how much he loved me. We did not have sex but we kissed, and Toby pressed both his hands to my breasts. They had been sore during that brief pregnancy, tender as bruises. Now they were numb.

  Everything was forgotten. Forgiven. For Toby, my body was pure. I was Leanna.

  But I remembered. I remembered the waxy smell of the empty church. I remembered splinters from the wooden pew in my back. How many times had Jerome and I come here? Four? Five? Jerome pouring sips of sacramental wine into my mouth.

  I also remembered sitting in this pew after my fall, bleeding. Toilet paper stuffed into my underwear. I told my parents I didn’t feel well, that I needed to go home.

  Three or four days later, I was in the bathroom, the door locked, and could hear the TV downstairs—my parents were watching M*A*S*H. I sat in the empty tub and something slipped out of me, something smaller than a bat. The child was perfect: toes, fingers, eyebrows. Delicate eyelids made of skin so transparent that I could see the blue veins underneath.

  Caleb. I was sure he was a boy. I named him as soon as I held him to my chest.

  Here is what I believe: The bat was healed. Flew from my hands. Toby and I sat on the basement floor, and the bat circled above us, never hitting a wall or any of those piles of dusty boxes and books—bats use echolocation, I would learn later in school.

  Caleb circled and circled until he found that octagonal window, the only source of light, and flew free.

  For years, I remembered. Even when I got married, I couldn’t forget that I was taking Jerome’s name too. But then I had a stroke of luck: I got pregnant again. Again and again. My brain hardly worked for years and I forgot everything, even the names of my own children. It was a joke in our family, me calling one by the name of another.

  “I’m Sarah.” My daughter would roll her eyes. “That’s Rebekah.”

  “Take out the garbage,” I’d say, “whoever you are.”

  Toby would place a kiss on the back of my head. “My wife,” he’d say with a laugh, “the idiot.”

  I lived in fog, a beautiful fog like in paintings of winter, of ocean. Memories passed by like clouds on the other side of a window. Some were friendly, familiar: The bat’s stunning, sliced wing. Toby holding gummy scissors.

  When they were still small, my children liked to curl up around me in the hour before bedtime, their bodies warm and protective. I read them the story of baby Moses, the story of the Red Sea, the story of Joshua and Caleb.

  None of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun.

  My youngest daughter cried at this. She wanted to change the ending so that all the Israelites could enter the Promised Land. She wanted a more forgiving God. “Why?” she asked. “Why is God so mean?”

  I didn’t know the answer. There was no answer.

  Toby appeared in the doorway, knelt and took her tear-streaked face in his hands. “In His wisdom, God knew what was best for them.” His voice was perfectly calm, perfectly correct. “They were unfaithful, honey. So they were punished.”

  He kissed her hair and she clutched his shoulder. She trusted him more than anyone else in the world.

  “God isn’t mean,” he said. “God is love.”

  “I remember this one time.” Jerome swayed at the microphone, paused so long that I felt afraid of what he might say. “This one time, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I put my hands over both of their mouths. And they bit me.”

  The audience, our family and friends, laughed. Toby squeezed my sweaty hand under the white-linen table. And when Jerome looked at us, I remembered being sixteen, begging and negotiating with God, asking only for Jerome to look at me again, to talk to me. And when he didn’t. When he didn’t, I lost my faith.

  “They bit me,” said Jerome, “at the same time.”

  Then he turned back to our guests. He lifted his glass and liquid sloshed onto his suit jacket. “If that’s not love,” he said, “what is?”

  That wooden pew. The pain in my lower back. Standing during the sermon, walking to the back of the church, down the hallway that led to the Sunday school rooms. I opened the door that led to the dark basement, and sat on one of the steps. I would not vomit. I would not vomit now, here, in this church. I breathed in fast gulps.

  The door opened behind me. Light on the staircase, showing the dust. A shifting of molecules.

  “Leanna. You okay?”

  The door closed and it was dark again. Toby stood over me.

  “Hey, Toby.” I clutched my stomach. Took a breath. “Remember that bat?”

  “Of course.”

  Two words, and I knew that Toby was still the boy who’d tugged on my sleeve, who’d said please, who brought me here to show me a pure-hearted thing. So I stood up, nauseous, unsteady. He was a few steps higher than me and I reached for him. We were companions, always had been, and there was no one who would be more faithful to me. No one who would love me so wholeheardedly.

  I held out both hands to him, knowing we would build our own ark in this world. But he didn’t catch me. He moved calmly away, one step higher. And I lost my balance, fell down the stairs, fell so fast that my brain didn’t keep up. My brain didn’t keep up for years. It still reached for him, still felt relief, still believed in this story: that this was love, that it would save me.

  STEVE AND LAUREN:

  Three Love Stories

  The Hole

  They had been living in the house for three years when Lauren noticed it. While vacuuming the living room, she moved the coffee table to one side and saw a hole in the floor, big enough that she almost caught her foot in it. She turned off the vacuum—a Kenmore Gentle Sweep they’d received as a wedding gift—and got down on her hands and knees. She touched the frayed carpet and splintered floorboards. She peered down and saw blackness.

  It struck her as strange that there was a hole in the floor, because the house didn’t have a basement. One reason they’d purchased this property was that the foundation was built on solid rock. The city sat on a fault line and Steve said that houses built on rock would fare better in an earthquake. He had done research.

  She returned the coffee table to its place, careful to set each leg in its divot. She would mention the hole to Steve that evening.

  But when he came back from the Science Fair he’d judged all weekend—as a new teacher, he was expected to participate in many extracurricular activities—he told her he’d run into Amanda and Quinn, who’d just returned from a month in Honduras.

  “I’m surprised they could afford it,” Lauren said while she helped unload groceries from a cloth bag. She thought about Honduras and pictured colorful houses, beaches with bright water, and guerrilla soldiers in fatigues. “Was there a coup there recently? Wa
s that Honduras?”

  “I invited them over sometime. Thought we could barbecue.”

  Was she thinking of Nicaragua? Nicaragua. That was a nice word, full of pleasing sounds. She worked as a rep for a condo developer, which was more than a full-time job, but one day she planned to take a night class and learn Spanish or French, one of those elegant European languages. She had so many ambitions, resolutions unfulfilled. She’d once taken up sewing, and now bolts of fabric sat unused in a closet. And there was a whole list of books she meant to read: The Master and Margarita, Anna Karenina. She’d planned to be one of the few people to actually get through A Brief History of Time, but for years it had gathered dust on her bedside table.

  “Maybe you can make that cake thing,” said Steve. “The chocolate-orange one.”

  “Sounds good.” She poured them each a glass of wine. “We haven’t seen those two in forever.”

  Steve and Lauren didn’t vacuum often. Steve believed that a clean house was the sign of a wasted life, and Lauren, though naturally a tidy person, had come to agree. So the hole remained hidden. Busy at work, Lauren forgot about it until she next had one of those nights: the kind where she lay awake, listening to Steve’s breath, knowing she would be exhausted in the morning. She was thinking about nothing (a brand of eye shadow she wanted to try, a twinge in her neck that never went away), and then she remembered the hole.

  She climbed from the bed, walked quietly down the stairs, and went to the living room. She pushed the coffee table against the entertainment center, turned on a lamp—one they’d bought at an antique shop in Chemainus—and saw that the hole had grown. It was big enough to swallow her entire head. She crouched down. The hole seemed to be filled with nothing at all—no light, no shadow.

  She recalled that Steve sometimes mentioned dark matter (or was it dark energy?) and claimed that most of the universe was invisible to even the most advanced telescopes and satellites. When Steve told her these things, he used his teacher voice and Lauren became the bored student. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about dark matter (okay, maybe she didn’t care about dark matter or dark particles or whatever—maybe she felt that if something is undetectable, it isn’t worth talking about); it was the pedagogic note in her husband’s voice that made her feel trapped and helpless. It reminded her of being in grade three, seated in front of Ryan Ogle, who blew on her neck to annoy her, whose breath was warm and wet, both horrible and welcome to her.