The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

7

  Bruno confided in me that there wasn’t much money left, perhaps ten thousand dollars after some debts Dad had accrued, plus the two thousand Bruno had found upstairs. Twelve thousand sounded like a lot to the two of us, but we knew that it wasn’t much of a savings. Brooke would need it for her own life as much as Bruno and I wanted to paw at it ourselves. Brooke had to run the business and Hawthorn. I didn’t really want Hawthorn, and neither did Bruno. We saw our futures off-island.

  “What kind of debts? He was cheap.”

  Bruno shrugged. “He spent money like anyone else. There’s some company in New York he’d buy books or something from.” He shook his head. “Maybe that was the porn. Who knows? I found receipts for other stuff.”

  “But the business,” I said. “It was running okay?”

  The business was the store my dad had in the village, the one that Brooke ran. A small sundries store, it was a direct competitor for the larger Croder-Sharp-Callahan Store, which always turned a profit. Apparently, my dad’s store had been losing money. It ran itself, it paid Brooke’s meager salary, which allowed Hawthorn to keep up appearances, but it didn’t run into profit, even during the abundant summertime.

  “I guess you didn’t know some money was missing,” Bruno said.

  “Grogan told me something about money problems. But I didn’t think it was anything other than Dad having no financial sense.”

  Bruno snorted. “Well, it was his life. And his money. I guess given that he always did things his way, it’s fine, right?” He had challenge in his eyes, but I was not up for an argument over Dad’s corpse.

  “Maybe it’s time we sold off some of Hawthorn,” I suggested. “Not the house. I mean, maybe the woods, or over by the creek. There’s a lot of unused acreage. It’s worth something. We could keep five acres around the house and sell the rest.”

  “Brooke wouldn’t let it happen,” Bruno said.

  I glanced at him with some curiosity. “You need money, don’t you?”

  “I don’t give a damn about the money,” he said. “I just give a damn about what Brooke’s gonna need now. She’s stuck here.”

  “Well, when things are better, we’ll all sit down and figure this out,” I said. “If Brooke needs money to stay here, we’ll figure it out. She’s closing the store for a couple of weeks. I like the idea of helping her out a little. I just wish I weren’t the official fuck-up that I am.”

  “I’m officially the fuck-up,” Bruno said. “I’m the one who hated Dad. I’m the one who thinks bad about everything. I drink too much. Just right now. I think I need to stop drinking.”

  “No, no,” I said. “We both drink too much. Actually, I watched you. You had three beers last night. To some people, that’s barely drinking.”

  “To others, it’s alcoholism,” he said.

  “I wasn’t fond of Dad either,” I admitted. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why. He wasn’t mean to me. I insist: I am the family fuck-up.”

  “Nope,” Bruno said. “I’m the family fuck-up. Nemo, you don’t even want to know.”

  I shook my head, enjoying this. “You’re in the minor leagues. I’m the major league fuck-up. Who else got run out of town at eighteen? Who else can’t hold a job for a year at a time? Who else—”

  “You wrote a book.”

  It was true. I’d written a fantasy novel a few years previous. It was published. No one bought or read it. It had been my dream to be a writer, but by twenty-eight that dream had eroded.

  “Lots of fuck-ups write books,” I said. “Libraries are full of the evidence. You’re the athlete with the good grades and the charm who everyone loves. You can play the piano. I lose a girlfriend every time I say I like her. I lose a job when they discover how incompetent I am.”

  “Okay,” Bruno sighed. “I’ve got a trump card. I’m gay.”

  I sat there in silence. The word hadn’t quite registered. Bruno? Gay? My little brother? “Wow. Wow. Bruno. Wow. That’s news to me.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “To you. Dad knew. That’s why he didn’t love having me staying in the house. Dad was a homophobe. You know what? I think he hated me, too. Since I was born. He told me he thought I was doing it to get back at him for something. Don’t tell Paulette Doone. She’ll do an exorcism.” Then he added, “You shocked?”

  8

  “You knew he was gay?” I asked Brooke as soon as we had a minute alone. She was pulling clothes out of the dryer, while trying to keep the two dogs from getting into the laundry room.

  “Of course,” she said. “Here, help fold.”

  “Not good at this,” I said, as she passed me some warm towels.

  “Folding? Or getting used to having a gay brother?”

  “Folding. I don’t care that he’s gay.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “I knew it when he was twelve. He told me when he was sixteen.”

  “Told you?”

  “What, you were around for him to talk to?” she asked, and it stopped me cold. “He wanted to tell you, but apparently you didn’t want to stay on the phone with him long enough to talk about it. Bruno has a lot of anger about Dad, and I think some of it is directed at you. He assumed, from some comment you made to him once, that you’d be like Dad about it.”

  “I would not ever—damn it,” I said. “Damn it.” She was right. I vaguely remembered a long phone call, very late at night, when Bruno had been sad over something that had happened—I assume he had broken up with a girl in college—and he never quite got to the point. But it had been mostly me, not wanting him to get to the point. Not really even listening the one time Bruno had seemed to open up to me as an adult I had never been there for him at all, past the age of twelve. Even then, I was too preoccupied with my girlfriend and buddies and getting up to no good. Bruno must’ve felt a little lost not having someone to talk to about it. I felt terrible. GUILT rose up within me. I had been an awful older brother.

  “Oh,” Brooke said. She waited a beat before speaking again. “He has a boyfriend. Cary Conklin. Try not to be too shocked.”

  “This family will never cease to amaze me,” I said. “Good for him.”

  She dropped the sheets she’d bunched up in a pile on the floor. She squeezed my arm. “I’m glad you’re home, even under the circumstances. You should stay a little longer this time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. And meant it. “It always amazes me what I don’t know about stuff around here. Do you realize that none of us really knows each other?”

  “You mean, you don’t know us very well anymore,” she said.

  “Busted,” I said, nodding.

  “What drove you from this house?” she asked, as if it were the weightiest question in the universe.

  I didn’t even need to think about it. “I always felt something was rotten here,” I said. “And I never knew why. But maybe I was just so messed up then. It’s like it was a different life, not the one I have now.”

  “It’s because Mom left,” she said. “Dad always said that. He said you took off because you’d been abandoned more than any of us. He said you cried and cried the night she left and begged her to stay, and then you blamed him.”

  I tried to remember this, but none of it came. “I guess I buried it all.”

  “I did that, too,” she said. “Bruno seems to be the only one who doesn’t bury stuff. He just throws it all out there on the wall. Sometimes too much.”

  “I know so little about Bruno,” I said. “Is there anything about you I need to know?”

  She gave me a curious stare, as if she were about to surprise me with something. “Nothing you don’t already know,” she said. “I gave up on love this fall. That kind of love—the kind that’s about two souls binding together. And so on. It seems a little empty to even think about it after what happened, the whole idea of dating. It seems trivial. Anything I want to do seems trivial. After that.” That’s what she’d called our father’s murder. She swore she could not even remember sitting in the smokehouse with h
is body, or what it looked like, or how she felt. It had been that bad of a shock. All she could say was “after what happened,"

  "after that,” or simply, “after.” I wondered how many years needed to go by before all of us would somehow get better from this. “I refuse to go out on any more dates with local men until I know that they’re not just here because they have no place else to go.”

  “That’s what I feel like. I have no place else to go,” I said. “You always have Hawthorn. By the rights of the firstborn, the house is probably yours.” She said this seriously, as if she believed it.

  “Spoken like someone who doesn’t give a damn. Well, it’s yours. It has been since we were kids.”

  “I’m not sure I love it anymore,” she said. “Not like I did then. Sometimes it’s like a prison. It’s like a place with too many doors. And none of them lead outside. Even before. Sometimes it’s like a splinter inside me that won’t come out. Someone said something to me a while ago that’s been bugging me. Someone said that he thought we were too incestuous.”

  “You and Dad?”

  She shot me a look that was half-grimace and half-mocking. “God, no. All of us. He told me that I’d never find a mate because I was too caught up in this family. Which is ridiculous, isn’t it? We’re a half-assed family now. Mom’s gone, Dad’s dead. Bruno hated Dad. I think he doesn’t like me too much anymore. You both have lives elsewhere. How can we be incestuous?”

  “Who said it?”

  “Joe Grogan,” she said. “But do you think we are? This whole Raglan thing? How we keep too separate from everyone here? How Dad didn’t like our friends, and how we had those games we all played and kept other kids away? Was it unhealthy?”

  “We played with Harry when we were kids.”

  “I meant in general,” she said, somewhat testily.

  “What’s bothering you?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Joe said that just to hurt you.”

  “You know what?” she said. “I think all three of us aren’t meant to be happy. Maybe we were too close here. I always felt like I was betraying him to have a life outside Hawthorn. I felt like if I did, it would be like Mom leaving, or you or Bruno taking off. Can I ask you something? Something I don’t want to be judged on?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1

  Before I could answer, Brooke jumped in with, “Not ghosts as in dead people. I mean, the idea of someone haunting someone. The idea that inside a person, there can be another person.”

  “You mean, psychologically?”

  “Maybe. That might be it. It’s Dad I’m thinking of. He always told me that someone haunted him. He didn’t start talking about it ‘til last year, when we were fighting. He started drinking again, and we ... well, we got into it. Yelling at each other. I’m not proud of it, but it happened. And he told me that he thought he was losing his mind because he felt like someone was haunting him. Do you think there are such things as hauntings?”

  “No.”

  “I think I do,” she said. “I think I believe there’s one here. I think Dad was haunted. And I think I am, too.”

  2

  That night, as I lay in bed, I had the disturbing feeling that there was a woman in the room.

  Standing near my bed.

  Please don’t let it be Brooke naked, sleepwalking, her fingers running all over her body.

  I opened my eyes in the dark, expecting to see Brooke, but no one was there.

  Yet each time I closed my eyes, I had the distinct impression: a woman.

  Not a figure, and not a man. If I opened my eyes, she would be gone. Once I closed them again, she’d still be there, a phantom.

  And not only standing there, but angry.

  I had this sense, it was crawling around in my brain and body, as if I could detect her aura. Anger and madness. It pissed me off that it took me so long to fall asleep. I could picture nothing about her, but it was like a negative image behind my eyes when I closed them. It was all that ghost and haunting talk that Brooke had been going on about. It influenced me too much in the late night. It frightened me a little, as well, because it reminded me of the madness our father had told us that our mother possessed. I wondered if we each would go mad someday—some biological imperative, some little signal sent out from an obscured part of the brain. That we’d somehow begin to show signs of mental breakdown. I wondered if Brooke had already been experiencing this. I wondered if it was the reason we had ever played that awful game as children, where our minds seemed to work differently afterward.

  I felt my inner life was unquiet. Restless. Constant thought, constant debating over family and my father’s death and what I sensed versus what I didn’t—my brain didn’t seem to stop at night at all. I tossed and turned, and wrapped myself in the comforter and blankets, and then threw them off the bed and rolled up in the top sheet.

  I don’t know when sleep finally came, but soon after, I awoke to hear Brooke screaming.

  Three bloodcurdling shrieks, the like of which I’d never heard before. I stumbled out of bed and called to her.

  All the doors were closed, so I had to open the five doors that separated my room from Brooke’s—Bruno had come running as well.

  As I went, I could see the first morning sunlight out the windows.

  When we got to Brooke’s room, she was sound asleep in her bed.

  On her dresser, at her bedside table, even on the windowsill: small votive candles, all nursing small flames.

  Bruno and I stared at each other for a second. Bruno whispered, “That’s fucked.”

  I figured he meant having heard the scream, or even the burning candles, but he pointed to the big window over her bed, the shades up, the curtains drawn back.

  3

  It was as if just seconds before we’d gotten there, Brooke had taken her finger and rubbed words across the condensation on her bedroom window, then had breathed heavily on it so they’d show up.

  The words were written largely enough to be read from across the room:

  HERE COMES A CANDLE TO LIGHT YOU TO BED

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1

  All right, let me put it all down here: When we were little kids, we’d played that damned game as if it were real, and we broke the main rule about not playing it after dark.

  We played it when we weren’t supposed to, and I suspected that it screwed with our heads, only I wasn’t sure how to talk about it. It had an accompanying dose of shame with it, and a decent bit of fear. (And it was fun.) It turned bad when we couldn’t stop playing it. When we’d sneak away, and put on the blindfolds and start going into the Dark Game.

  Start going where it went.

  Brooke had been most affected by the Dark Game, and by the Brain Fart.

  She had been the one who had nearly died at the age of eight, afterward.

  Her heart had nearly stopped, at least that’s what it had seemed like to me. I practically got hysterical and kept telling our father that she needed to go to a hospital, but he told me it wasn’t that bad.

  “She’s had a fright,” he said. First he brought her temperature down with an ice bath. He made me his assistant, had me running all over the house for the thermometer, the ear drops, the nose drops, and the Vicks VapoRub to help her breathe better.

  Dad kept her in warm blankets for two weeks after that, and spoon-fed her, and wouldn’t let her so much as go to the bathroom by herself until he was sure she was better.

  After that, he took me by the hand down to the duck pond, and he told me that if I ever played the Dark Game again, he would make sure that I lived to regret it.

  I lied to him and told him I never would play it again.

  But my fingers were crossed, so it didn’t count. Or so I thought.

  As I grew up, I lived to regret pretty much everything.

  2

  “Locks,” Brooke said. “I w
ant new locks on every door.”

  I stood in the doorway, having just come back from a hike with the dogs down through the woods. It was two in the afternoon—the earliest I had seen Brooke get up in a few days. “How many?”

  “Seven,” she said. “For the outside doors. I want at least two for the inside.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Deadbolts. All of them,” she said.

  “Not for the inside,” I said.

  “Inside and out,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just haven’t felt safe. We can call a locksmith if you want.”

  “No, I can do it. Dad’s tools still around?”

  She nodded and went to show me where the tool kit was—under our father’s desk in his den on the first floor. The desk was piled high with folders and papers. “He was doing some genealogical research,” she said.

  I flipped through some of the papers, but have to admit that I began feeling very numb doing it. I felt as if I were picking over his bones.

  “It’s the Raglans going back to before William the Conqueror,” she said with some wistfulness in her voice. “He spent too much time on it. But sometimes it was the only thing he did at night.”

  I pulled the tool kit out—a large metal suitcase that my father had loved dearly. I crouched down and opened it.

  “Seven deadbolts,” Brooke repeated, as she stood over me. “Might as well be the same key for all of them. Can you do that?”

  I glanced up at her. “Sure. It’s just a key assembly.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “Why inside?”

  “I don’t feel safe,” she said. “I want the doors to the upstairs hall to lock. Both ends of the hall.”

  “That’s not practical. If there’s a fire and it’s locked and we can’t get the key...”