Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  The funeral director had shown us a private family room with fussy furniture missing from someone’s formal parlor but with a door that closes out the rest of the world, and a watercooler in the corner with little cone cups. Let’s go, Michele says.

  We stand.

  But then the woman is in front of me, blocking the way. She’s all I can see. The dress frumpy and too tight, the haircut ragged. Misery in a navy blue dress, shoes chosen for comfort. Crumpled tissues balled up in her hand. A thin band on her left hand cut into her finger.

  “You think you’re the only one who lost someone,” she says.

  The others. So many faces turn in our direction.

  “You’re not the only one,” she says. “He did this. He did.” Waving her hand toward—

  Bix, stately in a suit so that I could pretend some other man, a stranger, lay in this box. The suit is a liar. They have patched as much of his body as they could find, and the suit holds it together in a man shape.

  He did this. He did. It was like a dream I had had so many times. Had it really happened or did it only feel like it had happened because I dreamt it again and again, and in my waking hours, went over it and over it like a song I couldn’t quite sing the words to. I can hum it.

  He did this. He did.

  There was one carefully placed handprint marring the shine of the casket, just where the flag draped. I reached to wipe it off.

  Michele? Help me with this?

  Help me?

  Michele is gone. Only this woman. I will never be left alone.

  I will always be alone.

  I woke up panting, my fingers gripping the criss-crossed wires of the cell’s door. Saying something breathless to myself into the empty hall.

  He did this. He did.

  Sleepwalking.

  I SPENT THE rest of the night curled into myself on the slab, shivering, awake. When I used to sleep well, the night seemed brief, sometimes too short. Often I had gone through the day yawning into my hand.

  But now that I kept watch, the night was interminable. An hour stretched toward forever. I began to feel the turn of the earth under my feet. It took a long time to spin this ship around a full rotation. It took all night. If you were paying attention, eyes wide open, you were part of the crew on turnabout, tugging the ropes to swing the sails around, creaking timber, trying to catch any thin wind to keep moving toward the morning. It took all night.

  “Eden.”

  Warren Hoyt stood outside the cage wire in a pool of light that made him look like an angel. Angel. Why had she named her kid that? A kid whose dad called the cops on her? I didn’t believe in angels. I believed in skylights I had not noticed the night before. I stared at the pool of light at Hoyt’s feet and reached toward its warmth. The filmstrip flickered desperately.

  “Mike, come on. Get her out of there. Could you not spare a blanket or jacket or something?”

  I had a jacket, then, someone tucking me into it and rubbing my arms. My teeth knocked together.

  “Sheriff didn’t say—”

  “I’ll tell you what to tell that shithead—”

  Outside, it was another world. The sun was up, the air warm on its way to hot. It was still summer, still a grand blue sky overhead. Outside, it was day, a glorious day, cartoonish in its brightness.

  “—what right he had to put you in that dungeon,” Warren was mumbling as he put me in the passenger side of his Jeep. When he got behind the wheel, he looked at me for a long moment. “Eden, should I take you to the hospital? You’re worrying me.”

  I shook my head. The hospital meant careening over that bridge. I didn’t trust myself on that bridge. I didn’t trust myself not to grab the steering wheel and jerk it. Left-hand turn into traffic. Right-hand turn into oblivion.

  All I wanted was a minute of sleep. A second. Just one second. All I wanted was the puff of the comforter in the guest house, the sigh of the down as I submitted to it, an outline of my body, and the quilt off the window pulled over me, up to my chin. All I wanted.

  “Guest house,” I said. My mouth was dry.

  “What? Really?”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Guest house.”

  “Not sure that’s the right idea,” he said, but turned the Jeep away from the sun through the windshield. West. “You’ve got another day in town—Barrows isn’t letting anyone out of the county. Something about evidence, like he’s actually trying to . . . I could take you home, though.”

  Home? My vision opened up to include his hopeful face.

  “My home, I mean.” He cleared his throat. “You can have the guest room there as long as you need, grab a shower. I’ll find some clothes for you, something warmer. The nights here get really—well, you know that now. I’ll put the kettle on for tea, or hot chocolate. Or are you a coffee drinker?”

  “You don’t live over the bridge.”

  “No, I’m on the troll side—the Lower Peninsula—that’s what they say. My half acre butts up against the wilderness at the south edge of my park,” he said. “The park, I mean. It’s quiet.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes? To . . . which parts?”

  I noticed his hands on the wheel. They were good hands. I could put everything into them, just now. I didn’t need to pull on the wheel. I was not the driver. I was not in command.

  “All of it?”

  I nodded.

  “I just need to check in with Erica Ruth—is that OK? Just five minutes and then we’ll go home.”

  We drove. Small houses, tree-lined streets, then green. Trees, fields, more trees. The sign for the park and then Warren was speaking. “. . . just a minute or two, I promise. Are you still cold? I can leave the heat on.”

  We had stopped. The blowers blasted, all the warm air turned toward me.

  My hands were cold. I clenched my fists, open, closed, the injured one stiff and sore, warming them. I found myself looking at my own fingerprints. Was it possible? Had Bix been in the guest house? The Jeep grew warm, then hot. My vision widened to take in the empty driver’s seat, the keys in the ignition.

  For a moment I felt the wind on my face as I drove home, my real home, my knuckles sunburned on the steering wheel. Home. But what was home? Nothing, except my stuff might have been moved out and replaced with doll furniture, for the space. I couldn’t remember the real estate agent’s name. I reached for my phone to call him. Get out of the house. I will never sell the house. I need the house. I have nothing and now, not even memory, not even certainty.

  No phone.

  I needed the house. I needed . . . Michele.

  The wind was against my face, the door open, the Jeep still running. I stumbled into the gate house, the screen door slapping behind me.

  Erica Ruth turned and stared, taking in the mess of me wrapped in Warren’s green uniform jacket. It hung almost to my knees. “Why are you— What happened now?”

  “Could I use the phone? Long distance? I need to call my sister.”

  “Warren will be out in a minute.”

  “It won’t be more than a minute,” I said, crossing the room.

  Erica put the phone up on the counter between us, more to shield herself, it seemed, than to offer me what I wanted.

  I dialed. Michele. Pick up, pick up.

  Voice mail.

  I hung up and dialed again. No answer.

  A third time. The dial tone purred in my ears. It wasn’t like Michele not to pick up her cell phone. She was glued to it, except when the girls needed her, or when she was driving. Had something happened to one of the girls? And then I realized: something had happened to me. And further, she knew where I was. I’d told her when I’d called the day before from the hospital. If she wasn’t picking up, she was driving. She could be on her way.

  “What does your sister look like?” Erica Ruth said. “There was a woman here looking for you.”

  I swiped at my wet eyes with the back of my hand. “Already?” I said. Hope filled my chest. It would be O
K. Someone would come rushing in to bang on the doors after all. I wiped my nose and thought it over. “I didn’t call her until yesterday.”

  “Oh,” Erica Ruth said. She chewed her lip, looked out the window. “Maybe not, then. She was asking about the Wallace reservation. I just assumed she was with you.”

  I didn’t know how she’d arranged it so quickly but I was willing to believe. She was here already. She would whisk me away, just as she had the day of the funeral, when the woman with the navy dress—

  “Are you OK?” Erica Ruth said. “Should I get Warren?”

  I had seen her. The woman. The woman with the cheap haircut and the bad-fitting dress, but she hadn’t been wearing the dress this time, of course. A bright blue jacket, zipped tight, even in the heat of summer. I’d seen her.

  My eyes found Erica Ruth’s. Impossible. But hadn’t I? I could see the woman’s face, clear as day. Her dumb beaded shoes, not good for walking. Those shoes, on the stairs—passing me on the stairs at the motel, before Dev had carried my case up for me. The blue jacket lit up in my memory, like bright bulbs on a strand of Christmas lights, back, back to the bench outside the breakfast place. Then, the same blue coat, public beach, her head tilted toward the water, as though the waves spoke to her and she was listening. I had recognized the woman’s sadness that day but not the woman herself. Her. The woman from the funeral who had come to claim her share of my grief, who had turned Bix’s funeral into a spectacle which had pushed even more of my friends away from me. The woman who had accosted me even in my own dreams. She. Her. Here. But—why? Why had she followed me to this place? And how?

  “She was here?”

  “Well, someone . . . I had to explain to her that the guest house was closed because of the— But she gave the name Wallace, so I thought—”

  “She said her name was Wallace?”

  Erica Ruth swallowed hard at my tone.

  It made no sense. So little that had happened this week did, but this was too much. Too much a coincidence, too harsh a reality. There was the whole world, after all, an entire planet for this woman to exist upon, but she had come to the same town, the same patch of protected dark sky—

  For a moment my mind went blank, black. The chattering nervous voice in my head that was my own churning wheel of thought gave out, and all was calm. The water lapped at my bare feet, and the only sound was the breeze rustling at the sea grasses behind me. Bix, holding my hand as we walked the beach to the viewing area. At night, Bix, putting his arm around my shoulders and pointing out a constellation I might have otherwise missed. Bix, pulling me to the suite behind the kitchen and dancing me toward the bed.

  That’s the way it should have gone. But I had not been here. “She said her name was Wallace?”

  “No, she said the reservation was under that name, not that her name— What is it? Are you OK? I’ll get Warren.”

  “Erica Ruth,” I said. My voice was rotten, a creaking board.

  She stopped.

  “When I checked in,” I said. “You couldn’t find my name in your paperwork.”

  She was nodding but uncomfortable.

  “You found the reservation under Bix’s name, or you wouldn’t have given me the room. Benedict Wallace.”

  “I found his reservation.”

  “Under his name,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  The defenses had started to build internally. It was all a mistake. I hadn’t seen what I’d seen. She was not here. She couldn’t be. There was no reason for her to be here. So much of what I’d seen this week I’d started to doubt. Did I sleepwalk or not? Had Dev really cornered Martha about the father of her baby? Had I been here before? The filmstrip jumped and caught, my eye twitching to let it loose.

  “Only?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was there another name with the reservation? Besides Benedict Wallace?”

  Erica Ruth slowly turned to the computer and tapped around on the keyboard. I couldn’t tell if she was researching or stalling.

  “Eden,” she said. “Eden Wallace.”

  I took a deep breath. “OK,” I said. I wiped at my eyes again, in relief. “OK.” Breathe in, breathe out.

  “But . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m the one . . .” she said. “I typed that name. When you checked in, you gave me your name and I—I thought we’d got it wrong somehow.”

  I’d seen her. She was here. I couldn’t breathe in or out. “Do you remember the name you had? The one that was wrong?”

  Erica Ruth didn’t say anything for a long time. The earth turned under us. I knew what she would say. It was the only thing that made any sense out of this long senseless weekend. We said it together. “Colleen.”

  My heart thundered in my chest. I didn’t think I could find enough oxygen to confirm the worst, but I had to say it. “Rynski? Colleen Rynski?”

  Erica Ruth frowned. “That name sounds . . .”

  She dug out a clipboard from the counter and raked through the loose pages. Warren had gone to the clipboard the day Dev, Paris, and I had come to complain about the shared reservation. The clipboard was the final say? The clipboard was God.

  Erica Ruth found what she’d been looking for and peered at the page. I had gone somewhere else. I had gone back to the house in Chicago, the back deck, the night sky overhead. Before I was afraid of the night, of the dark, of the future and the past, and the present, of everything. I went back to the deck, under the glow of streetlights and billboards and streetlamps at every corner and in the alley and bright neon at every store window OPEN, glow and sparkle everywhere you looked. To the deck, where Bix sat brooding, beer in hand. He’d been gone the week before, some project he had going on, some outing for work, arriving home tired and short-tempered. That night he’d gotten home late again, didn’t want dinner. It was too cold for the deck, but he was out there, staring into a starless sky. What are you doing out here? I must have said. Something like that. And he’d said, after a little prodding, Thinking about the ways life didn’t turn out the way I meant it to.

  That had turned on the faucet of things you had to say to such sentiments. They hardly needed to be said at this point, did they? Reassurances. We both knew them.

  We both needed me to say them, though, or I would have had to ask what he meant, which way had things gone wrong? I didn’t know what I was afraid of, exactly, but I knew there were words he could say that would ruin everything. And so I played along. You’re working as hard as two people, I said, and he had laughed a little. We’d ended up in bed, like the old days, except that in the dark that night, he was different—forceful, almost brutish. In the dark, he turned into someone I didn’t know. And I had wondered then, maybe for the first time: Who had he been treating like this? Whose fuck was this?

  Click. “Eden?”

  I shook the image from my mind to find Warren in the door. Erica Ruth beckoned to him and handed the clipboard over, pointing at a spot on the page she’d been reading. He stared at it for a long moment, frowning. “Who’s Colleen Wallace?”

  I fell to my knees.

  The two of them rushed over and tried to urge me back on my feet. But my strength would not let me try. The top of me was heavy, my head, my heart. I lay forward over my knees on the dirty floor in Warren Hoyt’s too-big jacket and cried into the floorboards. For a moment, I saw myself from above, and I was Hillary, wailing into the floor of the guest house. I had lost him. I had lost him all over again.

  “I don’t understand,” Warren said.

  “I thought I just had the name wrong somehow,” Erica Ruth said. She meant to sound defensive but had started to cry, too. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Well, who is it?”

  I breathed into the cold floor. The silence drew out.

  “His girlfriend, I think,” Erica Ruth finally said quietly. “His, uh. Mistress?”

  “Whose?”

  “Her husband’s.”

  I sat ba
ck on my heels in time to see Hoyt’s expression morph into confusion. “He died, though,” he said.

  “After he made the reservations,” Erica Ruth said. “For him and . . .” She gestured toward the clipboard.

  “Oh,” Warren said, prim and astonished. They both looked at me. “Not for your anniversary then.”

  Erica Ruth grabbed the clipboard and shoved it under his nose again. He looked where she pointed. I could see it in my mind, though I hadn’t seen it written there. I had never even considered the two names used together. Colleen Wallace. Wallace. Not a mistake.

  Erica Ruth whispered something to Warren. I heard Rynski.

  “She was here?” I said.

  “I don’t—the morning after the—” She swallowed. Her face was blotchy red. “Body. I was here by myself until the sheriff came and everything was so confusing and I sent her away.”

  “You sent her to the Hide-a-Way,” I guessed.

  “It was the only place with rooms,” Erica Ruth whispered. “They hadn’t even sent you there yet.”

  “Wait,” Warren said, looking at me. “Eden’s husband’s, uh, girlfriend showed up here? To check in?”

  “No,” Erica Ruth said, looking uncertainly at me. “I don’t know.”

  I let the moment draw out, but there was no way around it. “Her mother,” I said.

  It made sense to me, but of course not to them.

  “The accident . . .” I started over. “Bix killed four people and himself. One of them was . . .” I had trouble with the name. I didn’t like to say it. When he died, the name meant nothing to me, and now they were two syllables I’d rather never hear again. “Colleen. He killed his girlfriend in the crash. She was in his car and he was drunk, and now she’s dead, too. They said on the news—they said ‘his wife.’ And that’s how I heard. That’s how I found out.” And then the slut’s mother had crashed his funeral and caused a scene and now she’d come all this way to hold up her hands to me and cry. You’re not the only one. And I wasn’t. Not by far. But I was the one still here, the one who could be scolded and shamed, the one shoved into the limelight. The mother wanted someone to pay, and though someone had and would, always—it was not enough. I knew how she felt. It would never be enough.