How to Find Your Way in the Dark

by Derek B. Miller

  “Young lady—”

  “I have a gun in the house. I will come back outside, and I will shoot you in the face, I swear to God as my witness. So, you answer me or you’d better be prepared to kill me because I can’t take it anymore.”

  The man put down the paper. He introduced himself. He was an assistant manager at G. Fox & Co. and worked in the women’s clothing section. He was a specialist in leather goods and gloves. He met a woman named Lila Horowitz who used to shop there. He had been training some of the salesgirls when Lila appeared, and he explained the merchandise and talked to her for a while. A month later, Lila came back and he approached her. It was innocent at first. It grew into more. The man explained that sometime around September or October of 1937 Lila disappeared. For a few months he had tried to accept this, but the more he thought about their relationship, the less sense it made. So, he started coming by this house in the winter. He knew Lila didn’t live here, but he’d met her sister-in-law Lucy before and he figured that Lila must visit from time to time. He couldn’t call or knock on the door without explaining himself, though, so he waited and watched and hoped, but Lila never returned.

  “She’d dead,” Mirabelle said. “My mother too. They died in the fire at the theater last year.” She told him the name of the cemetery, and said, “Now you know.”

  After that, the car never returned.

  Sheldon sat listening to the story. His whole world was coming unraveled again and this time he had no reserves. He couldn’t walk back home through the rain again. He couldn’t sleep on his own doorstep and burn the world down a second time. He couldn’t.

  “You’re a liar,” he whispered.

  “I’m a bitch, Sheldon. I am not a liar,” Mirabelle said.

  “My mother was not having an affair. She was not cheating on my father. Why would you say something like that? You really are a monster, Mirabelle. I thought it was all a show but—”

  “She was, Sheldon. I loved Uncle Joe too. He was wonderful, but he had dust on his boots and dirt under his fingernails, and he was a loner living in the woods who was shell-shocked from the war. He was one of the kindest and best people I’ve ever known, but your mom was—like—Vivien Leigh or Hedy Lamarr or something. She wanted to wear gowns and high heels, and dine at the top of skyscrapers. She wanted more. We all want more. I want more! You can’t expect women to be perfect servants of your needs. We’re people and we’re trying to weave our way through obstacles you can’t even see. You think being Jewish is tough? Being a Jewish woman is tougher.”

  Sheldon didn’t say anything.

  “It doesn’t mean she was bad or didn’t love you. It doesn’t mean she didn’t love your dad either. It just means she had an affair. More than that, we have no idea. You have to forgive her. Maybe even me,” Mirabelle said much more softly now.

  “Did Abe know?”

  Sheldon had started receiving letters from Abe in Canada in the spring of 1940. Abe talked about his training and his goals, his buddies and his ambitions. Never once did he mention Sheldon’s mother or an affair.

  “No. I never told him.”

  Sheldon drew some deep breaths before asking, “Who is this guy, this De Marco? He looks like a two-bit crook, and he’s up here every year with a new girl. You know that, right? You’re throwing away your family, your history, your pride, your dignity—”

  “Were you not listening? There are reasons I’m doing what I’m doing, Donny.”

  Sheldon was listening but he didn’t understand. He wanted things the way he wanted them. He was tired of compromising.

  Mirabelle lost her patience. “You’re fifteen years old, Sheldon! Have some respect!”

  “Aunt Lucy would be ashamed of you.”

  Mirabelle had had enough. She waved her arms around the room as though she were ordering the staff at the Waldorf around.

  “Prepare the room. Do your job, and if you even hint that you know me, I will ruin your life.”

  “I don’t know why I ever loved you,” Sheldon whispered.

  Mirabelle’s arms fell to her side. Those words, more than anything Sheldon had said so far, sank into Mirabelle’s heart. In many ways, Sheldon was all she had left too. Her father was no longer interested in her, and Abe was gone—bombing German U-boats from a base in Iceland. Sheldon may have been only a little kid, but knowing she had his undying affection had always given her a sense of self-worth and a grounding. She knew she could change her own future with her actions, but she had never really known that a person could call all of history into question with only a few words. It was a bitter lesson.

  Hurt, Mirabelle turned and walked out of the room without a sound. She closed the door gently behind her. Sheldon was left alone in the room with thousands of dollars’ worth of gems and jewelry.

  And he knew exactly what to do with them.

  Neversink

  SHELDON WALKED.

  With a king’s ransom of jewels wrapped in a cloth and tied to a mop that he carried over his shoulder like a hobo, Sheldon walked.

  Dressed in the unbreathable wool garb of a bellhop, he walked under the full weight of a New York summer sun past Grossinger’s Lake and through the pines of the heavy forest beyond—wild lilacs and aromatic white flowers that Sheldon didn’t recognize now in bloom—until he reached Never­sink Road, which ran gently downhill like an invitation to Hades.

  After the Krupinski truck had turned over in the rain, Sheldon had walked for six or eight hours. Though only twelve years old then, he had learned that time is shredded by events and that distance is not measured in miles but in thoughts and memories. This time, on a tree-lined path that reminded him of home, he walked with purpose. He was going to find a river he had been told was there.

  According to the fly-fishing brochure he’d taken from the Grossinger’s lobby on his way out, the Neversink River was only five or six miles away as the crow flies. The Neversink River, said the brochure, got its name from an Indian tribe who called it the Ne-wa-sink, which meant “continually flowing.” It didn’t say what language the tribe spoke, and it didn’t say which tribe.

  It might have been bullshit. There was a lot of bullshit in the brochures. All rivers continually flow. Wasn’t that what made them rivers?

  * * *

  The sweat on his face reminded him of real work and proper summers, of humping a rucksack through the woods with his father to bring their kills back to the house for storage. He didn’t like seeing animals in pain, and the trapping sometimes made him wince, but Sheldon’s father would dispatch the animals without fuss and as humanely as possible. He took no pleasure in it either. Together they’d lay the entrails at discreet stations in the forest where other animals would eat them and the bugs would thrive and the plants would grow. This way, everything was used and something was returned.

  On their walks, Joseph would usually let Sheldon lead. Sometimes they would enjoy the silence of the forest, but it was a silence that was more than the absence of talk because the forest was never silent. It was a time for listening. Everything is music, his mother once said to his father, and they agreed. Where there is life, there is song. Hearing it requires only the capacity for appreciation.

  Neversink Road started dropping more precipitously, and at one turn toward the north, the valley opened in front of him—a vista of tranquility and perfection. The hills were layered shades of green, and the trees were so densely packed that they seemed to form a single mass. So close to Grossinger’s and the town of Liberty, this was nevertheless a lifetime away. Nothing about the place suggested the presence—so close by—of opulence and evening gowns, rainbows dancing across the polished floors from lit chandeliers, and the laughter of a thousand guests before a night of horns and music.

  This place was home. It was a valley indistinguishable from the Berkshires or Hampshire or Worcester. Sheldon felt as if he were a boy in a Twain story, and the road he was on left Hartford and New York and the life of gangsters far behind.

  Th
e valley basin reached out to him like a clarion call. Soon he arrived at a tiny village called Neversink with a main street, a two-room schoolhouse, and a covered bridge. This was the New England of Whately. That it was on the New York side of the invisible border meant nothing to the trees or waters or the winds. It looked like it meant nothing to the way of life either.

  On the porch of the general store, a man sat on a bench smoking a pipe. The shade looked welcoming and Sheldon was very thirsty. The man nodded as Sheldon stepped into the cool of the shop and bought himself a cold Coke from a humming refrigerator.

  Outside, he took a pull on the bottle and the bubbles burned his throat with a nameless pleasure that was sweet and as cold as a quarry.

  The man with the pipe laughed approvingly. “That’s what they made it for. A boy like you on a day like this. You drink it all down.”

  “It’s good,” Sheldon agreed.

  “You must be hot in that getup.” The man’s tobacco was aromatic and hung in the air around him.

  Sheldon had forgotten how stupid he must look. He nodded sheepishly.

  “No trains here and you’re too clean for a hobo,” the man said. “Should I keep guessing?”

  Sheldon sat beside the man.

  “I’m a bellhop at the hotel,” Sheldon said, feeling like an escaped convict.

  “The fancy Jewish one?”

  Sheldon had never heard the words “fancy” and “Jewish” used together before, but he said yes.

  “Those places started popping up twenty-five years ago. All that time, you’re the first one to ever take a step in Neversink.”

  “This feels more like home to me than the hotel.” Sheldon told the man he was from the Berkshires. Whately was actually in Franklin County, but his dad had always called it the Berkshires and that was good enough for Sheldon.

  “Never been out that way myself. Heard they had some of the same problems we’re having now, though. They lost that fight just like we’re gonna.”

  Sheldon removed his coat. A breeze hit his sweat and he felt cooler.

  “Problems?” Sheldon asked.

  “That’s not why you’re here? Take a last look? If I was a boy, I’d want to see a doomed place.”

  Sheldon didn’t know what he was talking about.

  The street was empty and as dry as a fistful of ash. Everything glowed with the yellow haze of the sun that was sinking lower. Nothing was moving, not even the leaves. As plush and green as the valley was, the town could have been out West. If a cowboy had ridden through and tipped his hat, Sheldon wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Where you from again?” the man asked.

  “Whately.”

  “Never heard of it. What’s it near that I might’ve?”

  “Northampton’s pretty big. We’re a bit north.”

  “OK, yeah, OK, I can see it now. So, this story I’m gonna tell you would have happened in 1938. Your parents would have known about it. I’m surprised it didn’t come up. Well, anyway, they called it the Valley of the Dammed. This was east of you a bit. Bunch of little towns no bigger than Neversink.” He rattled them off on his fingers. “Dana. Prescott. Enfield. I forget the other one. Boston was growing, and it was getting thirsty, you see. And to get more water, they needed a new reservoir. So, in April of 1938 they disincorporated the villages, dug up seven thousand dead from the cemeteries for reinterment on higher ground, and workers from the city came in and destroyed those villages like demon hordes from the bowels of hell. The villagers were all run out, you see, and those hired ruffians smashed the houses and broke the windows and vandalized the churches and set fire to the woods; thirty square miles of forests burned for months. Thirty square miles. It’s too much to hold in the mind. You just have to repeat the words. You must have seen the smoke. You must have known about it.”

  Sheldon said he did remember the smoke and the dark sunsets. It was seven months after his mother had died, and everything seemed darker that year, the sunsets more vivid. He had thought it was his imagination.

  “No,” said the man. “That was the Valley of the Dammed filling the skies with its own ghosts. They spelled ‘damned’ with two ms, you see, and everyone got the joke but no one laughed. That’s our fate soon. They’re going to start filling in this whole valley for drinking water. We got the word. We’re marked here. I thought you came down to see. I know I woulda done.”

  He puffed on his pipe. The smoke only made the day hotter.

  They were silent, and Sheldon had sat on enough benches like this to know the conversation wasn’t over. He fiddled with the mop handle across his leg and idly wondered whether the shape of the gemstones against the cloth of the towel was obvious or not. The man wasn’t looking anywhere near the jewels, though. He was looking into the past across the border.

  “A town called Neversink is going to be 175 feet under the water, and a river that continually flows is going to come to a rest on top of it. How about that?”

  Sheldon said nothing. There was nothing to say. It seemed important to listen, though. Looking around, he saw no children. He wondered if maybe he was the youngest person to know about this. That would make him, in time, the last person to remember.

  “Sometimes,” the man said, “when I’m staring into the sun too long, I wonder if some bureaucrat saw our name on a map, took it as a provocation, and thought it would be hilarious to drown us. We live in strange times. These days, even the dead are on the move.”

  Sheldon left the man behind when they were done talking. Less than a mile up the road, the sweetness of the Coke still on his lips, he found the gentle river that would someday quench the thirst of a million souls in New York after Neversink was obliterated from the map.

  Without ceremony or doubt, Sheldon opened the towel at the end of his mop handle, grabbed the jewelry he’d stolen from Mirabelle’s suitcase that she’d been smuggling for De Marco; and he threw the pieces into the river one by one.

  When he was done, Sheldon walked into the water with his clothes on and submerged himself—if only for a moment—in the cool and silence of oblivion.

  The Guest

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Sheldon returned to his room. His clothes were stiff from his dip in the river. To clean them, he stepped directly into the shower, allowing the cool water and shampoo to rinse off the sweat and smell of his ten-mile walk. Cleaned and renewed, he dressed himself in a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt. Lenny was out. Sheldon sat on his own bed, crossed his legs, and picked up the house phone with one hand as he placed a copy of The Thin Man on his chest. He wasn’t so interested in the plot, but he liked reading Nick and Nora’s banter with each other. It was fun the way they were equals. Dashiell Hammett made it clear that they were Greek, but they were sharp-witted and fast in their dialogue and that made them sound Jewish to Sheldon. On the other hand, he’d never met anyone Greek.

  Asta was a weird name for a dog, though. He didn’t know anyone or anything else on earth named Asta.

  Miriam was working the front desk and answered. He said he was sick. Real sick. Green sick.

  “Oh, no, Sheldon! Did you eat something?” she asked, as he tried to find his place in the story. He forgot to add a bookmark or dog-ear the page, so he had to skim.

  “Oh, please, don’t mention food.” He moaned.

  “So, talking about things like spaghetti and meatballs or lasagna or clam chowder is probably a bad idea, huh?”

  Sheldon smiled and moaned again. “I didn’t realize you hated me so much.”

  “I don’t. I just wish you were a little older.”

  “Lenny’s older. I think he’s forty-seven or something.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. He’s married, though.”

  “Things are shaky,” said Sheldon.

  “So, you think I have a chance with him?”

  “With Lenny? I think if you asked him the time, he’d build you a clock.”

  “What about you?”

  “Time doesn’t move at all
when I’m with you, Miriam.”

  “See,” said Miriam, audibly moving the phone to her other ear and speaking in a lower voice. “Other boys don’t say things like that to me. You’re different from other people. You know that, right? Your brain doesn’t work the same way.”

  “My dad used to say it would get me into trouble.”

  “Trouble’s what I’m trying to get you into, but you keep resisting.”

  “You’re almost eighteen. I’m basically fifteen. What’s going to happen?”

  “You ever kiss a beautiful redhead before?”

  “No.”

  “That explains why you’re asking.”

  Sheldon knew she was only flirting with him, but he knew she liked him too, and there were certainly moments—moments when he was alone—that he thought of her too. Mirabelle was older than Miriam was, and so he’d been in a kind of love with an older woman before. This felt more . . . real. Possible, somehow.

  “Ben’s going to come looking for me,” Sheldon said. “Possibly with an axe. Can you cover for me? Say I told you earlier that I was sick? That I didn’t know the rules about telling him directly?”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’m . . . under the weather. In a way. There’s a lot going on these days, you know?”

  “Yeah. Summers.”

  “I guess.”

  * * *

  All the talk about food had made him hungry. Sheldon called up room service and asked for a plate of the dinner special and told them to charge it to his room. If he went down to the cafeteria, his cover story would be blown, and he liked that his room was dark and the sheets clean.

  He needed the rest. This morning he had suffered the shock of seeing and then fighting with Mirabelle. After that, she had destroyed the memory of his mother and the assumptions of his childhood, and then he had walked ten miles on one Coke, which wasn’t enough fuel.

  In his own way, he was sick and tired.

  Twenty minutes later, Sheldon was dozing when someone started banging on the door. It was a fast and furious thump and not at all the knock of housekeeping or room service. Sheldon’s heart pounded as he remembered that he’d stolen a pirate’s chest of jewelry and it probably wasn’t a mystery who stole it.