Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  “I’m sorry my tea burned you,” Claire said.

  “Don’t be silly. You didn’t have anything to do with it being hot or burning me.” Delia set down her teacup after taking a tiny, experimental sip. She sniffled, rubbed her hand under her nose, and looked away.

  She was crying, Claire realized. Oh Christ, she thought. They’re getting a divorce. Mom has cancer. Dad has cancer. Almost immediately, at the thought of hospitals, of treatments, she remembered Sam’s funeral, which had taken place on an ungodly beautiful day in September, a day bright and colourful as a postcard from the corner store. She thought of Sam in the coffin, his skin white and pasty, the colour painted on garishly, inexpertly, making him look like a doll of a boy. She couldn’t do it again, not yet. She needed more time.

  “What’s wrong?” Claire asked.

  Her mother shook her head and covered her eyes with her fists. She rubbed the tears away, her mascara smearing into the crepey skin around her eyes.

  Claire had never seen her mother cry over nothing before. She’d cried when she broke her collarbone a few years earlier—she slid on a patch of ice in front of the house on Christmas Eve and crashed down with an audible snap. But she didn’t cry about anything less serious than a broken bone, at least not in front of people.

  Her mother plucked a tissue from her sleeve, where she kept them gathered like magician’s scarves, and wiped under her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry to get worked up like that.”

  “It’s okay,” Claire said. “What’s wrong?”

  Delia looked out the living room window. Claire followed her gaze. She looked out to the lawn, green as algae, the clear sky above it. Children roamed the sidewalks in packs or alone, texting or listening to their earbuds. She felt a sudden, painful desire to be the Claire of twenty years ago—too bored to even turn on the television, too hot and listless to get up and go outside or go up to her room and read. Then, everything was coming later, and she was only waiting for it. Waiting for Sam, for somebody she knew to pass, for somebody to see her and say hello and offer her something interesting to see and do.

  “Did you hear what they are going to do with the factory?” her mother asked suddenly. “How they’re going to put a store in there, some coffee shop?” She shook her head. “It’s a shame the town would let it happen.”

  Claire looked at her mother. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she might be upset about the factory. Claire had already drafted a letter of protest to send to the newspaper, to the Beans company headquarters, and personally to this Justin Hemmings, who was overseeing the design and staffing at this new location, but she didn’t expect much to come of it. She’d lived in Farmington her entire life, so she knew how things worked. The people in charge had already made their decisions.

  “I did hear.” Claire pressed her hands against her knees. She didn’t want to cry in front of her mother. “I’m going to send a letter to the paper,” she said.

  “Please don’t send a letter to the paper.” Delia said, shaking her head, pressing her lips together in a sour pucker. “We don’t need everyone to know our business.”

  Claire sighed. “How else can we protest,” she said, “if nobody knows we are upset?”

  Her mother busied herself with putting heaps of sugar into her tea. “Why don’t you talk to Miriam Hastings?” she said. “You know, up at the municipal building? I bet she would be willing to cause a stir if she knew how we felt. I bet she would have something to say about it.”

  Miriam Hastings, the Assistant Town Manager, was the right-hand woman of Town Manager Dick Stevens, a former police chief with a fierce, often angry face that made him seem perpetually aggravated. It was his eyebrows, Claire had decided. She wondered if he had gotten most of his promotions based solely on the authority in those eyebrows.

  Miriam Hastings was another story. She was the soft face of Farmington—the person you could appeal to if you wanted to have a Humane Society benefit at the town gazebo or a cancer research barbecue on the church lawn. Claire had written several letters to Miriam when the library went through a sharp funding cut in the early aughts. She’d asked for the town to contribute to keep the afternoon teen reading groups going. Miriam was the accessible side of the town, though she was known for being sharp, even a little harsh, with those she didn’t like or respect.

  “What does Miriam Hastings have to do with the factory?” Claire asked. She assumed private business didn’t need much from town officials.

  Her mother poured milk into her cup, turning the tea to a cloudy muck.

  “She lost a family member in that factory, too.” She looked up and met Claire’s eyes. “Miriam’s one of us.”

  One of us. Claire let that go. “What do you mean? Who did she lose?”

  As far as Claire could tell, Miriam and her family were golden, untouched by tragedy of even the smallest kind—a lost dog, one profligate child. Miriam was in her mid-sixties at least, but could pass for a woman in her early fifties. Her three children were attractive and academically successful. Her husband had been a dentist in the area before his retirement. Claire didn’t associate Miriam Hastings with death.

  “Her aunt was one of the women killed in the factory.”

  Claire knew about the fire. Claire remembered her teacher discussing it on Town Heritage day, when her entire fourth-grade class spent a day walking from green-streaked plaque to statue to monument, trekking all across Farmington until the school bus loaded them up, exhausted, and took them to Friendly’s for ice cream. They had visited the catamount statue in Old Farmington; the cat’s muscles bulged around its elbows and shoulders, its teeth pulled back in a snarl. Jenny, a particularly lovely and malicious blonde with perfectly symmetrical pig-tails, had told Claire that catamounts still prowled around Old Farmington and that she should be careful. Claire hadn’t believed it, but large, powerful cats had since occupied her nightmares. They’d visited the small stone monument by the old battleground celebrating the capture of an enemy weapons cache during the Revolutionary War. Claire had learned the word cache that day, a word that sounded exactly like what it was: a hidden place. And they had walked to the factories, already largely abandoned, already part of history.

  Back then, the factory hadn’t meant much to her. She and Sam had been in the same class.

  They listened as their teacher, Mrs. Salsburg, in her usual polyester slacks and gauzy shirt (sometimes so gauzy that Claire thought she could see a whisper of Mrs. Salsburg’s bra, a scandalous sight), told them about the proud history of textiles in Farmington. She explained that the waterwheel, which was still turning behind the factory, had once powered all of the machines. She then told them about the fire that had almost destroyed it in the fifties, how the owners had rebuilt it so that it looked almost exactly as it had before.

  The factory had made her uneasy, even then. Maybe it had something to do with the quality of light—by then, the sky had darkened and it had grown colder. She remembered taking Sam’s hand as they trudged behind Mrs. Salsburg to see the waterwheel. The water was loud and furious that day, the river swollen and rushing around the wheel, the slats violently catching the waves and flinging them up as it cut through the river. The water was muddy and churned milk chocolate-coloured foam at its edges. Mrs. Salsburg, sensing imminent rain, called them back to the sidewalk, where they walked back to their bus parked near the town plaza. They got to Friendly’s just in time to see the first raindrops, the first shivers of lightning illuminating the clouds from behind like lights behind the angel hair on a Christmas tree. Claire and Sam had walked home after school under the same umbrella, exhausted after all of the walking but nervous from the sudden influx of sugar—they rarely ever ate desserts at home and felt energized by the double-dip mint chocolate-chip ice cream cones they had both chosen. They kicked in the puddles and talked about the places in town they had liked the most. Sam had l
iked the catamount statue because it looked real, as if it could come to life and jump down and eat anyone who teased it. Claire had liked the plaza and the gazebo, where Old Sammy, their own Revolutionary War hero (he had gathered a unit of farmers to hold off the British—though the British had never arrived, a fact conveniently left off the plaques), had made a speech to the people of the town about standing up for their country, for their people, in the midst of fear and chaos and threats from The King. Claire knew that The King meant England, the whole thing, not just the King, but she liked to imagine a letter from the King himself, arriving in an enormous, gold-embossed envelope, personally threatening Farmington’s freedom.

  They had both agreed that the factory was the creepiest part of town—even creepier than the deer park, where deer with patchy fur, the pink of their skin showing where they’d rubbed it away, nibbled at the edges of the fence and slept among the weeds and tall grass.

  Claire’s mother had told her not to believe in ghosts. “Those are just stories to scare girls and boys,” she’d said, and Claire didn’t want to be just another girl or boy. Sam had agreed. “No ghosts,” he said. “Only Heaven or Hell, like in the Bible.” She and Sam had sometimes gone to Sunday school at St. Mary’s Church. Their parents encouraged them to go, though they didn’t seem particularly interested in what Claire and Sam had learned in class. Claire suspected they just wanted a morning to themselves to drink coffee and read the Sunday paper in peace. Still, the lesson about Hell had impressed them both, and for a while they tried very hard to please God, until the summer, when they forgot about fire and the gnashing of teeth and stayed out past dark and went to the river, though they weren’t supposed to, and sometimes stole packs of gum from the gas station.

  By the time Claire had left her mother’s house, she had agreed to meet with Miriam Hastings about the factory.

  “You have to go out on a limb,” her mother had said. Her tears had left a slight delicacy around her eyes, a pinkness that reminded Claire of the nervous eyes of white rabbits.

  “You should want to stand up for your brother,” she said.

  Claire could not argue with this. She should want to stand up for her brother. She agreed that she would try to arrange a meeting with Miriam. After drinking her tea, she said that she was exhausted, that she had to get home. Her mother agreed that it was getting late, that she should probably finish with her cleaning, though Claire could see no evidence that there was anything left to be cleaned—the entire house smelled of lemons and the chalky acid of Ajax.

  Her mother had never gotten around to teaching her how to crochet. Claire balled up her yarn and needles in a plastic bag and carried them back to her apartment. She felt that her mother was punishing her in a new and impossible-to-complain-about way.

  She reached her apartment just before seven thirty, as the light began to dim. It was almost cool that August night, and Claire knew that fall would be coming soon. September was her worst month. The therapist she’d seen for many years once noted that all of her major depressions had occurred in September. Of course, it was the anniversary of Sam’s death—it didn’t take a therapist to point that out. But his death, and her feelings around it, had seeped into everything else about September—leaves dying brightly, falling and catching the light, the blue skies, the cinnamon smell of the branches and dirt drying up, curling away to prepare for winter. When she looked out the window in September, she sometimes thought it would be different, that it wouldn’t be the same that year, but it always was the same, especially on the golden days.

  The night he’d died had been warm, beautiful and clear. As she’d run home, the memory of Sam’s gurgling, wet breathing still on her mind, she had picked a red leaf from her hair. It had tangled in her ponytail and tickled against her ear as she ran.

  That night she took out a bottle of red wine she’d bought from the corner store. She didn’t know much about wine, but she knew that she liked the dry, acid wines, the kind that made her tongue feel like it had been stung. She drank glass after glass in the low light of her kitchen. Her cat cried and whipped around her ankles, asking for food or attention. She watched the black square of her kitchen window, perfectly blank above the confusion of dirty cups and plates and saucers in her sink, and tried to think of what she could possibly say to convince Miriam Hastings, Assistant Town Manager, to discourage the addition of at least twenty-five new jobs in Farmington.

  When Justin returned home, he told Karen nothing about what he had experienced at the factory—at least nothing of what had happened to him. He told her that the visit had gone well, that they would take the building. She had not smiled at the news. She had not congratulated him.

  “So, we might be moving,” she said.

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to talk about it,” he said.

  She didn’t reply.

  “I’m feeling a bit sick from all of the driving,” he said. “I’m going to go up to bed early.” She didn’t argue with him.

  That night, after swallowing a sleeping pill with a glass of wine, Justin dreamed of the factory. His dreams were vivid and ugly, and he felt a sharp pain in his ribs, though he could not remember how the pain had gotten there or any other details.

  In the morning, he woke exhausted, his muscles spent and faintly tender.

  He called Gary to report that the factory was exactly what they were looking for.

  By the time he hung up, Justin was no longer troubled by the dream. He no longer had the stale smell in his nose, the ache in his muscles. He was triumphant. He would move the company forward. He would create something beautiful and lasting. His life would be there, in that peaceful town. And it would be a real life, not the makeshift, temporary thing he had with Karen in this rented apartment, in this small city he felt no allegiance to, in this place that had never felt like home, no matter how long he had lived there. He would love where he lived and where he worked. Not many people could say that.

  His father had worked at a bread factory, a flat, completely utilitarian building at the edge of a river. It had been built in the fifties, during the craze for things like Tupperware, manufactured homes, and televisions dinners. It was made of squares within squares within squares, the inside walls cream-coloured, the parking lot an expanse of concrete broken only with yellow lines. Sometimes, when Justin’s mother would pick his father up from work, Justin would wait for him in the parking lot, watching as workers emerged from the doors at five thirty, watching for his father to appear in the crowd of almost identical men—all dressed in blue work shirts with their names embroidered on the pockets, tan slacks, and black shoes. He knew his father because he dragged his left foot slightly—it was an almost imperceptible limp, but his father referenced it almost daily. His lame foot had kept him out of the Navy, had made him a laughingstock at school, had caused him to drop out in tenth grade, had made him unable to do manual labour, had stuck him in factories doing women’s work (though mostly men worked at the factory, a detail Justin never pointed out when his father was on one of his tirades), work that he feared was making him soft. Justin began to regard the foot as his father did—a terrible blight on his father’s life, the thing that had caused them to live in a rented house with leaking ceilings, two children per room, a nagging wife, all of it a result of that slightly weak, slightly dragging foot. Justin knew that he was part of that unwanted life, an appendage like the foot, only worse because he needed to be fed and cared for. He tried to make himself small and quiet to ease his father’s bitterness. He spoke in a whisper. He ate very little.

  Justin remembered, when he was as young as eight or nine, sitting up at night and planning his future. He decided that he would take up a paper route. Lots of kids did it in the summer. He imagined himself awake in the dark of early morning, slinging a pack full of papers across his back, wheeling his bike with the rusty chain from the garage, and setting out by himself in the strange, orange light of early morning,
a time when only farm trucks and semi-truck drivers were out. The idea of being awake that early, when almost everybody else was in bed and dreaming, was an obsession. It was a kind of power, being awake when everyone else was asleep. It was appealing, too, having a job of his own, money in his pocket that he had earned.

  Farmington made him think of Clark’s River, his hometown. Farmington was much more upscale, with that small, liberal arts college with its vast, perfectly landscaped yard and surrounding stone wall. But it had its history, too. Its east side looked like Clark’s River, with its rows of empty factories and old factory houses, now chopped up into multi-family apartment housing, the air conditioners sagging from the windows, play kitchens and grubby plastic tricycles poking out from the overgrown weeds on the lawn. He knew Farmington, and he knew what it needed—it needed an injection of success.

  Sometimes, while at a business meeting or at lunch with a colleague, Justin would look down at his lunch, at his water bubbling in its glass, at the buttons on his jacket, and wonder if people could tell that he didn’t really belong there, that he had grown up in a house with holes in the walls and been picked on at school for only taking a bath once a week. But now, nobody knew who he really was. He looked like everyone else. And he would breathe easier, begin to listen again to whatever his boss was saying with PowerPoint, to whatever his office friend was talking about over their fifteen-dollar salads.

  He often dreamed of Clark’s River. He dreamed that he woke in his old bed, his sister snoring. It was early, the thin, pink light of five in the morning, just like in his fantasies about the paper route. But he was an adult in his old bed again, holding his knees in the cold. He wanted to get up and look around. What would he find in the drawers in the kitchen, in the bathroom cupboards? Would his mother be awake in the kitchen, her hair still coiled and pinned up in tight rollers? Would his father be alive again, sipping milk and waiting for his Advil to kick in? Justin pushed the blankets aside and put his bare feet on the floor. It was cold, so cold that he felt, even within the dream, that he was awake, that he was aware, and that he wasn’t a child again. Then he heard it. At first he couldn’t tell what it was, a strange scrape and bump, like somebody dragging a body over concrete. Then, he remembered. It was his father coming to get him out of bed, to get him up and ready for school, to get him to go feed the dogs or scrape the ice from the windshield or help his mother with breakfast. As he heard the steps getting closer, Justin pulled his feet from the floor and pressed his knees to his chest again. Thump, slide, thump. He was an adult. And he was lost here, shivering in bed, his dead father coming to wake him.