Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  He drummed his fingers on the glass tabletop and took off his shoes. He had drunk almost half the bottle of wine by himself. Karen was a half-hour late. Justin felt his hands moving toward his mouth, his teeth closing in around the half-moon edges of his fingernails. He grabbed his cell phone and paced the room.

  “Gary, it’s Justin. I think I’ve found our Southwestern location.”

  “Christ, Justin, you work fast.” Gary was in his car—Justin could hear the radio in the background, some voices in a cacophony of shouts. Gary liked to listen to radio shows where people with unshakable opinions disagreed violently about issues of great complexity. This kind of argument gave Justin a headache.

  “So, this place is good?”

  “It’s good. It’s a little strange—I’ll have to explain the concept to you later—but the price is right, and we can do so much with the space.”

  When they ended the call, Justin still felt restless.

  It wasn’t enough. Justin needed to do something with his body, he decided, something more than looking at a book or a screen. He took off his shoes and paced the carpet in his black socks. The socks itched his feet, so he took them off and walked barefoot, feeling the plush between his toes.

  He stood in the middle of the living room, wishing Karen were home. He needed somebody to reflect his success back to him. Until then, it wouldn’t feel real. As much as he tried, he wasn’t yet in the habit of believing in his own success.

  Justin had grown up poor, the third son in a family of six, in a small town in the Adirondacks. His mother had cleaned rooms for a local hotel and for some families in the area. She had found small ways to be proud. This quality of hers saddened Justin more than her thick-soled shoes, her pants with elastic waistbands, and the baloney sandwiches she made for herself in the mornings and ate during breaks on a bench by the gas station.

  She would bring him home toys that other children had left at the hotel: a G.I. Joe action figure missing one arm, a stuffed elephant, a whole set of Little Golden Books. But she had always worried about money. She shouted when he drank too much milk, or asked for second helpings of meat, or spent his quarters on gum and video games at the arcade.

  “Do you know how much I worked to buy this meat?” his mother would shout when he wouldn’t finish his dinner. She could point her wooden spoon at the hamburger and turn the ground cylinders of meat into money and the aches of her labour.

  Justin had not forgotten how it was to have less—the tightness in his throat and shoulders when he grew out of his t-shirts, or the blisters he developed when his feet grew too large for his shoes, or the rush of blood that came to his face when he had to spend money for a school project and knew he would have to ask his mother, and that it would shame her to say no. Justin had grown up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread and a vast array of casseroles, such as tuna noodle with cream of mushroom soup, often punctuated with whatever canned vegetable there had been a sale on at the grocery store. He’d worn his older brothers’ clothes and slept in a bed with his younger sister, Lilly, until they were both teenagers and their parents shoved another twin bed in the room so they could have their privacy. Even now, when he had no trouble purchasing the things he needed, Justin felt tightness in his chest when the toothpaste tube was suddenly empty.

  He understood as a child that the world, at any moment, might fall apart. He had always known this. He could not remember a moment when he believed that his parents could save him from the world and its chance disasters or misfortunes. It wasn’t any better for adults; if you fell behind in payments you might lose your home, you might go hungry, you might get sick and not be able to pay to fix it. These things were not impossible, and so Justin had planned for them. He kept the telephone number to DHS written in his school notebooks. He knew that it took twenty minutes to get to the closest neighbour and that they had a telephone, two cars, and were kind. If he absolutely needed to, he’d have somewhere to go.

  Justin had decided that he would not be caught by accident. He wouldn’t fall behind. He wouldn’t stop moving forward. And now, here he was, so far ahead that he couldn’t possibly go back to where he had come from. There wasn’t any reason to be afraid anymore.

  III

  Claire worked late on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. She supervised the “Getting to Know the Computer” classes that the library held for free for anyone over the age of fifty-five who wanted to learn how to navigate the Internet, or even just open the library website to search for a book. People still sometimes asked for the card catalogue and stared, confused, when she pointed at the computer. It never ceased to surprise her how so many people could have gone through life without knowing what a mouse was or how to use it.

  Claire spent most of her work days re-shelving books and magazines, checking in and checking out books, walking the floors of the library, and shooing away teenagers who used the meeting rooms and desks to eat their lunches of potato chips and soda. She was often surprised to hear her own voice out loud when she told the occasional library patron to take their feet from the desk or please throw away any drinks without lids.

  Her solitary job suited her, though sometimes she was surprised by the excitement she felt when somebody asked her a question. She had once pretended to lose her way when helping a particularly handsome young man find some murder mystery series. She had known exactly which one he wanted—it was a popular paperback, the cover worn, the pages dog-eared, the kind of book that always seemed exciting from the outside, but bored her to death when she actually sat down to read it—but she’d kept him in general fiction for five minutes, asking him about his school, his life, his interests, before she chose to remember that the mysteries were all in a separate section, at the back of the library.

  I’m not really like I seem right now, she wanted to tell him. She was not usually quite so desperate for human connection. Mostly, she was happy.

  Claire didn’t keep a journal (the idea of writing such a thing exhausted her), so she didn’t have a sense of the general trajectory of her happiness throughout her life. She did not remember many times of overwhelming unhappiness (though there had been some—Sam, of course). She believed that she fulfilled a useful position in the world, one that fit her. She was not a person of great ambition—it was enough to live in a familiar town, to do even a small amount of good. So many people did less. She had very little to complain about.

  Claire had worked for the Farmington library for eight years. She’d graduated from the state university with her master’s in Library Sciences after an accelerated five-year degree plan. It had never occurred to her to be anything but a librarian.

  It’s the only way I won’t be lonely, she’d often thought. A funny thing to think, she knew, but it was the truth. Just the idea being in the proximity of stacks and stacks of pages that had been read and thumbed-through, or even ignored by hundreds, if not thousands, of other people, gave her comfort. She liked thinking about how they had held each book: the people who compulsively read the cheap little paperbacks with coloured spines in the Romance section, those who thumbed through the Zane Grey collection, or the ones who checked out Salinger’s Glass family stories over and over again. She liked holding each book and imagining that she had a little bit of somebody else’s skin on hers, the traces of heat from their hands now in her hands. Her sense of spirituality began and ended in the library, with the memories of hands and eyes on so many pages over hundreds of years.

  It was a kind of immortality to have the words you’d thought of bound up in a book, kept in a building, speaking to people long after your death.When Claire was in high school, when her reading had become obsessive (according to her mother, who considered all enthusiasms excessive), she would underline sentences in books that revealed something that she had felt before but had not realized that other people felt, too. Like the desire to hurt something beautiful because it was beautiful, or the sudden
urge to jump from something very high because it was there and seemed to call out to be jumped from. Finding such things made her feel part of the larger world.

  She often had this feeling of expansiveness when she listened to Casey’s Top 40 as a teenager. She’d lie out on the front lawn on her old quilt, moving with the shade as the day progressed, the boom box batteries so close to dead that only the FM stations would work. Sam would tease her for listening to such a goofy show, for turning up the radio when Casey began his slick, rat-a-tat routine, but she liked hearing the call-in dedications, all of those voices from far away suddenly intimate and in her ears.

  The library made her feel like that: close to thousands of whispering voices.

  She loved her work, but Claire knew that she had stayed in Farmington to do that work because of Sam.

  After Sam’s death, her life had not resumed its former shape, as the counsellors and teachers and psychologists had said it would. As everybody had promised.

  This sadness will pass in time, they’d told her. You’ll never forget him, but the pain will lessen. They assured her that everybody thought, at first, that the pain would never pass, that nothing would ever be the same, but it would. You will snap back, they said. One day, they said, she would wake up in the morning and not think of Sam until after breakfast. Later, maybe she wouldn’t think of him until dinner, or even bedtime, while brushing her teeth. They told her this as though she should hope for such forgetfulness.

  But she was not the same person. Half of the person she had been was gone.

  She kept to herself. You keep too many secrets, her mother had said, and it was true, but not for the reasons her parents might have imagined—sex, a drinking habit, piercings that they wouldn’t approve of. It was nothing like that. She did not kiss a boy until her senior year, at prom, when the guy she went with, Denny, had pressed his face against hers in the parking lot and searched for her mouth in the dark. She had been cold and tired and flush-faced from being around so many people for so long. She had let him hold himself against her until she felt tension in him, until she felt him clutching, then she had pushed him away, saying that she was cold, that she was tired, that she wanted to go home. She got a reputation for being uptight, a cock tease. She didn’t mind.

  As a teenager, she didn’t feel comfortable in the world. She would sometimes feel struck with the awkwardness of her body, of other people’s bodies—of human bodies in general—and feel an overwhelming need to climb under her desk or blankets or the dinner table and pull her arms and legs tight against her chest and stomach and become as small and compact as possible. At school, while standing in the hallway between classes, she often heard a swell of different voices amplified in her head, making a racket like a room full of people ripping sheets.

  When she lost Sam, she lost her ability to be easy with people. She plodded, uncertain of how loudly to speak, how close to stand to other people, when to say hello and when not to say hello. She had forgotten how to be a regular person.

  And her parents changed, too. They kept their distance from her, even as they complained about her pulling away. Sometimes, after Sam’s death, when they all sat around the dinner table moving potatoes around with their forks, cutting the meat into little strips, Claire could feel her mother’s eyes on her, trying to look through her, not at her, not at anything her face might be saying or doing.

  She’s trying to find the Sam in me, Claire would think. She’s trying to push away the Claire and get the Sam out.

  After a while, she avoided her mother as much as possible. When her mother was upset, the entire house was agitated—the hot water scalded, the floors creaked, the refrigerator groaned and made painful whirring noises. Her mother was silent, brooding, not the type to shout or openly confront anyone. Instead, she shut down her face, her eyes, and closed her lips tight. Claire never knew when she would unwittingly upset her mother. It was impossible to tell what might set her off: a broken cup, a television commercial featuring a boy and his father, a diaper commercial with a baby holding its own fat feet. Or simply Claire standing in the doorway, brushing her teeth. As she grew older, she moved quietly away from them with no open rancour, no discussion of hurt feelings, but a general sense of having lost something she never quite had to begin with.

  Claire’s relationship with her father was as it had been since Sam’s death: he was a genial ghost, shouting hello from an easy chair where he watched public television and let the world spin around him. She came to visit on holidays and birthdays. She listened to her mother when she called, listened to her complain about the family next door that stole her mail and how the kids on the street rolled their skateboards back and forth all night, keeping her awake with the grind of the hard wheels against the concrete.

  Claire was happy to listen to her complaints—they didn’t require a complicated response, or for her to talk about her own life. They only required noises of agreement. When her parents asked how she was, she said fine and that was that. They didn’t seem to want more. Or maybe they didn’t believe that there was more. Claire did not blame them for an uncharitable assumption. From the outside, her life seemed to follow very steady, even lines.

  She wasn’t the girl who flirted anymore. She wasn’t the girl who had teased Archie about weed (and what had happened to Archie, anyway? She’d heard he’d gotten married, joined the military, and then he’d disappeared). She hadn’t been that person in so long she remembered only vaguely what it was like. She missed that Claire, the one with her bangs feathered up, her enormous hot-pink t-shirts tied at her hip. Claire didn’t go to bars. She didn’t join clubs. She didn’t have close friends—just a few men she had dated and said hello to in the grocery store and her co-workers. She had lived with two men in town. She saw them sometimes, from afar, and often waved, or even walked up to them to have a conversation that skipped lightly across the surface of their history. She was grateful that she had never seen one of them with another woman. Or a child.

  In Farmington, people knew her history. She couldn’t pretend that she was whole and normal. When they looked at her, particularly people her own age and her parents’ age, they knew something about her—they were remembering Sam when they looked at her. They could feel the absence and pitied her for it.

  Maybe even the ones who had never known Sam, who didn’t know anything about her, could tell. She imagined she carried the loss with her like a scent.

  She thought sometimes that things would have been better if she had left, but Farmington was the only place she knew well, and it gave her comfort to see the same rows of trees, the same gravestones leaning in the back of the Old Farmington graveyard, their dates and names worn almost flat.

  Leaving would mean leaving Sam, and she couldn’t do that, though she knew he was only a body in a box now (she couldn’t follow this line of thought past those words—Sam in the graveyard, Sam’s body reduced to bone and leather and hair) and he didn’t even know that she was still here, keeping a promise she had never given and that he never would have asked her to make.

  She felt, in a small way, that she had let Sam down. Though she didn’t believe in the afterlife, in spirits watching the people below from the bleachers of heaven, amused at their continual fuck-ups and self-created miseries, she often felt that he was watching her and disapproving of the smallness of her life.

  As soon as Claire finished her shift, she went directly home to eat dinner alone. When she looked in the mirror (which she didn’t do very often), she had a feeling of helplessness at the sight of her face changing—she wasn’t old, she wasn’t unattractive, but she was losing her youth, her years of being pretty without trying. She had wasted her twenties reading books in bed. She had wasted time with men that she did not love, and who did not love her, but served as a person to fill the empty place in her head for a while.

  She knew the problem: there wasn’t enough of her to love. Sam had occupied half o
f her mind, and with him gone there was too much empty space. Her thoughts rattled and her personality had become dislodged, unanchored. It had no shape, no definition. She knew that she could be funny, charming even, but that at the centre of her, there was something essential missing, something that other people had all on their own but that Sam had taken away from her.

  In late July, she dreamed about Sam for the first time in a very long time. It had been so long that when she woke, her heart was beating so quick and hard that she was afraid she might be having a panic attack. She woke cold, her window open, though she never slept with the window open. She had left her window open at night once as a child and had woken to a bird on her dresser, shrieking, not singing. After that, the idea of being surprised by nature kept her in stuffy, airless rooms.

  Sun flooded her carpet; the air on her face was clean. It would have been a beautiful way to wake up if she’d planned it. But she hadn’t, and so she was afraid. Maybe there was a robin in her closet, a spider in her underwear drawer, a man with a knife under the bed come to take her collection of Jeff Buckley albums and self-help books.

  She laughed at herself and threw the covers off. She would not be afraid of ridiculous things. She wasn’t worth stealing from. She had nothing anyone else could possibly want.

  Claire showed up at the library at eight every morning to lay out the morning papers, change the old magazines, and shelve the books that had been left in the drop box before opening at nine. She switched on each computer, one after the other, and they wheezed to life with one great breath. She walked the floors and picked up stray pieces of paper and receipts, pushed the stacks of books back against the bookshelf walls and flush to the left or right, each book pressed tight against the one before it.