Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  III

  The Farmington Banner arrived at Sunnydale at five every morning, and those who could still read the paper unassisted—who could shuffle to the activity room in their slippers, take their cup of pills from the woman in bright scrubs, her hair redolent with freesia, and sit in the activity room to read or watch the television or play chess, checkers, or if the weather was sweet and warm, sit out on the screened-in patio—read the Banner each morning from front to back, lingering on the obituaries, the Dear Abby columns, the articles about children and their 4-H animals, photographs of young women and men holding hands, smiling into the camera, their engagements official.

  Richard, almost ninety, who still took walks every morning after his juice, pills, and paper, opened the latest issue and stopped at the front page. He touched the page and ink came away on his fingers. The factory.

  Others shuffled in: Cyndi dragging her walker across the rough carpet, Arthur, who was rolled in by Miss Chester, a young, busty woman who gossiped and sometimes spoke loudly on her cell phone in the nurse’s station, and a few other stragglers. Richard looked up and waited until they passed and had settled into their seats, the televisions turned to their favourite station, which played only game shows, all day. He resisted the lure of game shows, but he found himself, sometimes, peering over his spy novel or newspaper, wondering if those nice people on screen would win a trip to Bali if they could only arrange the prices of various grocery store products in the right order. To avoid the noise, he went out to the porch, though the air was cold for August, and unfolded the paper again.

  So they were rebuilding the factory. A coffee shop. Revitalization. It all sounded very cheerful.

  Richard remembered the day of the fire. A fire at the textile factory, his mother said, her ear to the telephone’s mouthpiece. The voice on the other side was probably one of her friends, one of those women who knew everything there was to know in Farmington—who seemed to have chosen their houses based on the visibility of adjacent points of crisis: the fire department, the local dive bar, the police station, the high school.

  Joan, he thought.

  He had spoken to Joan the week before. She’d been at the grocery store, buying milk. They had exchanged pleasantries. He remembered she had been wearing a yellow skirt and a white button-up shirt; she was dressed like a girl on a date, though she was only buying orange juice. It seemed strange, then, that he couldn’t walk up to her and take her hand, as he had so many times before. She did not seem angry with him, and he could not manage anger at her. She had simply grown tired of him, her in her bright dresses, her secrets. There had been no theatrics, no arguments. Before Joan, he had never had cause to doubt himself; he had always been enough. But she had simply let him go without any protest. It had been his first serious wounding, though he had never admitted it.

  He drove to Factory Street, where he could see a billow of black smoke rising over the pines that lined the river. Fire trucks blocked the street, so he parked at the steel mill and walked to the factory, behind the trucks, cutting through a backyard to avoid the firemen who were waving away bystanders. A group of women huddled near the trucks, though a fireman told them to stand back, stand away. A few police officers skirted the perimeter, holding the women back.

  He couldn’t see Joan. Maybe she had left, seeing no purpose in standing around in the poisonous smoke. Maybe she had been sick at home that day, flipping through her movie magazines in the attic room he had visited so often, back when she wanted to see him. He imagined her in the room, her window open, her cheeks blazing from the constant heat.

  He lingered for a few minutes more, but there was no sight of her. He left the way he had come and drove home. His mother asked him if he had seen Joan and he said no, but he hadn’t seen much at all.

  Nothing to worry about, he had told her, patting her on the back. Joan could always take care of herself. He was sure that she would be fine.

  He attended the funeral in the awkward position of being the former boyfriend who some people, mostly her older, more distant relatives, still assumed to be a current boyfriend. Richard nodded and comforted those who came to him. People couldn’t place him—he must be feeling something, but they didn’t know quite what. So they kept their distance, and he kept his. Her closed casket was black as a banker’s shoe, and the bundle of white lilies on the lid drooped in the too-warm room. Later, after the funeral and weeks of mourning, upon seeing Joan’s mother in the street, taking her small, ladylike steps, he did not go up to her and say hello—he went the other way, often dodging through alleys, around the backs of buildings to avoid her. Sometimes he saw Patricia in the grocery store, wrestling with one of her thin, perpetually whiny children. He didn’t have to go out of his way to avoid her—she seemed to be in a fog of annoyance, too absorbed by her children and the problem of feeding them, clothing them, and getting them from the grocery store to the car to worry about him or anyone else.

  And so he drifted out of their lives. After five years, nobody asked him about Joan. After ten, it seemed strange to him that it had happened at all. He remembered Joan, but mostly in colourful pieces—her dresses, her lips, her fingernails. He remembered that she laughed more often than anyone he had ever known, but often at inappropriate times—during serious films, or when he was describing something he didn’t intend to be funny. And he remembered that he hadn’t been enough for her.

  Later, he married a woman with Joan’s affable personality, her figure, but none of her nebulous ambition. Leslie was satisfied with what he could give her—a large house in North Farmington, a housekeeper every Wednesday and Friday.

  When he travelled for insurance assessments, for conferences, he found women that reminded him of Joan in hotel and airport bars, sipping from their glasses, their faces open and wise. They had no interest in holding on to him. The first time he took one up to his room, a woman with high, wide cheekbones and lips pink as crayoned petals, he was terrified—what if she somehow discovered his home phone number? What if she became pregnant? What if she wouldn’t leave in the morning? What if she cried and said she loved him? He had to muster up the courage to touch her when she slipped out of her dress.

  He needn’t have worried. She left efficiently and completely, thanking him for the drinks, smiling with her bare lips, revealing a row of crooked teeth. And that’s how they all were. Like Joan, they weren’t really interested in him—he was only research, preparation for something that Richard wasn’t a part of.

  He sat out on the sun porch for a half-hour, until the cold seeped through his sweater.

  He sometimes imagined Joan’s ghost. He didn’t really believe in ghosts, but Joan had seemed a ghost even before she’d died—a creature he couldn’t quite catch or remember really touching.

  They should let her rest, he thought, rising to go back inside, maybe watch some of those quiz programs or play checkers with Buck. He doubted, though, that she was resting. She had never cared for resting.

  Miss Chester, or Jackie, as her friends and family called her, read the article over her rushed doughnut and orange juice. She ate from behind a pane of glass, where she could look out into the activity room without having to listen to the constant noise of the television, of wheels or teeth working, of the shuffle shuffle shuffle of slippers.

  The factory. Her first personal memory of death was tied to that factory. Even before her grandparents, before distant great-aunts or pets, Sam had died. He had been in her class, a popular boy who had always been kind, if dismissive. She had been overweight, not unpopular, but not popular either—merely a fixture, one of the mass of people who went together from class to class, not as friends but with a peculiar loyalty from spending eight hours a day for most of the year in the same rooms.

  He had died down there in the basement. He had fallen, maybe, broken bones, bled to death. It had seemed impossible to her at first. Sam dead? He was too healthy to be dead. She could remem
ber him running laps around the track as she sat in the bleachers, reading Seventeen and feeling invisible.

  When the knowledge set in, when she attended the funeral and saw the heaps of flowers, his parents in black, bent and pale, she became afraid for herself. Sam, a familiar part of the room, a voice she neither delighted in nor feared, was gone. But what was worse was how—it could have happened to anyone.

  I could fall down the front steps and die, she had realized. A car could hit me as I’m crossing the street, humming to myself, thinking of dinner. It isn’t up to me at all.

  She’d never quite gotten over that knowledge.

  IV

  Justin booked himself into the Farmington Hotel for a week. He had come to check on the construction of the building, that’s what he told the foreman, but he had also come to test himself: would he crumble this time? He had also scheduled a meeting with Miriam Hastings, the Assistant to the Town Manager. He had found her photograph on the town of Farmington’s website: tall, slim, a blonde bob. She had gone to the state college for a degree in Human Resources and had been a resident of Farmington for her entire life. Justin had written her small biography on an index card and highlighted things he could discuss—her human resources experience, her small town life, what it was like to be married to a doctor, her children. Asking people about their lives endeared them to you, he’d found. He had been a shy, awkward child, unsure how to be natural with people. Learning tricks like this had helped.

  Justin drove down streets named after presidents and trees (Lincoln, Garfield, Poplar, Cedar) and saw where the simply nice neighbourhoods became the good neighbourhoods, became the wealthy neighbourhoods

  —houses that sat on large plots of elaborately landscaped yards, with gates and trees and cobblestone driveways or three-car garages. He had his eye on a little white house on Maple Street, just blocks away from the factory, a starter house with an expansive backyard fenced in by a secure, but friendly, red picket fence. A place for children to play, he’d thought, though he had no children and knew that Karen didn’t want any right now.

  I don’t think I’m ready, she’d told him.

  This had ended the conversation, but Justin persisted in imagining his future child—a shapeless, sexless, uncertain thing, mostly a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, the idea of a room filled with toys, superhero-themed sheets, and glow-in-the-dark moons and stars affixed to the ceiling.

  Karen didn’t want to move to Farmington.

  Fine, she had said. You go. Spend a week there. See how much you like living in the middle of nowhere. I’m staying here.

  He had not argued with her. He knew her life was in Albany—her yoga classes, the women she had lunch with, the various people she spent her days with that he had never met, phantom people named Joey or Connie or Claudia whom he sometimes heard stories about. It made him jealous that these people, who didn’t seem real, could make her happier than he could.

  Justin didn’t understand himself: she was right, of course. Their lives were there. She liked Albany and saw no reason to leave. He was being unfair, forcing her because he had made an enormous choice for them. But what else could he do? It felt like fate. He moved forward. He tried not to think about Karen as he struggled to sleep in this unfamiliar room. He remembered the basement instead, what it had done to him.

  Being in the basement had reminded him of when he was a child and his parents, having saved up enough money for a rare treat, had taken him and his brothers and sisters to one of those enormous waterparks filled with big plastic slides, children in bright bathing suits with inflated balloons on their arms, and over-priced snacks and soda. He’d wanted so badly to ride the biggest slide, and his parents finally let him, but on his way down, he’d gotten twisted in the plastic tube and was spit out, his limbs akimbo, and smacked hard into the surface of the pool, the chlorinated water filling his mouth and lungs. He thought he might die, but he had somehow made it to the surface and saw his father there, laughing, and had pretended nothing was wrong. Of course, the basement was really nothing like that: at no point had he really been in danger. But that feeling remained, of being close to danger and having nobody to tell.

  Justin woke in his room, a honeymoon suite with white lace accents, scented bubble-bath bottles in a shell-shaped bowl in the bathroom, and a guestbook by the bed, signed by former couples who had stayed there. He read the honeymooners’ names as he put on his socks and shoes, lacing them tight. Heidi and Joseph. Caroline and Glenn. Alfred and Connie. He couldn’t put a face to any of them, couldn’t make up a story. He could only imagine them in this bed, under the covers on their wedding nights, pulling up the tight sheets from between the mattress and box spring to move more freely, throwing off the comforter, bulky as a winter sweater.

  Justin opened his files, checking for each necessary document: the contract, sales receipts, insurance paperwork. He placed each document in the correct file and laid each file neatly in his briefcase. As he entered the rental car, which smelled like hospital pine disinfectant, he imagined his files, the coloured tabs zipped tight in the mesh compartment of his briefcase, the row of capped pens all in working order. He felt himself calming as he made the sharp turn off of Main toward Factory Street.

  At the factory, a man about Justin’s age stood by a black truck. He leaned against the shiny black paint, arms crossed, and stared out at the forest across the road. Justin recognized him from high school—not him exactly, but his type, the person who could look out over a classroom full of new people and feel absolutely no anxiety. Even the man’s stance was at ease, his face untroubled as Justin drove up and parked. Justin imagined he was the kind of man who knew his place in the world exactly.

  The man’s name was Chris. He was the foreman. He shook Justin’s hand.

  Justin glancing over Chris’s shoulder to the factory’s door. He felt his palms and the back of his neck going cold and sticky.

  “Let’s go inside to take a look,” Justin said.

  Chris nodded. “We’ll have to talk about the basement,” he said.

  “What about the basement?”

  Chris cleared his throat. “Awful stench down there—maybe a mouse crawled in and died, maybe a bird, something like that. The guys can hardly stand to be down there for the stink. We’ll have to do something about it.”

  Justin nodded. “I noticed that too, the last time I was here.” He put his hands in his pockets. He had the urge to spit, to make Chris feel that they were alike—he was just a regular guy, not irrationally afraid of a basement or the smell of a dying animal.

  “Let’s go check it out,” Justin said.

  Chris nodded and walked toward the factory, its doors thrown open. Inside, the formerly murky main room was alight. Debris from broken machinery and office supplies had been gathered and placed in a heap by the entrance.

  The factory floor was still a jumble, filled with cords trailing from saws and drills. The workers ate their lunches on a rickety folding table.

  Chris and Justin went straight back to the small, sturdy basement door.

  “Your vision for the floor area is clear,” Chris said. “A cashier at the front, four sections, a wide-open space toward the back, the wide windows, all of that, but the basement is tricky. The space is there, and I imagine you and your company don’t want to waste it, but it makes for a lousy storage area. Dank, narrow, all that.” Chris motioned toward the door. “Let’s go down.”

  Just as Justin remembered, the air was thick with dust, but it lacked that particular electric, sickening, alive quality that had sent him out of the factory the last time.

  It smelled stale, rotten, and wet, yes, but not alive. He breathed in deeply, almost savouring the hints of mould, burnt hair, excrement. He could handle this.

  Chris grimaced, holding his hand over his nose. “See what I mean?”

  The basement was still full of machines draped in
tarps, tied down with ropes thick as a thumb, the knots so old and tight that Justin imagined they would have to cut through them to see what was underneath. But the shapes were clearly those of machines and nothing else. He breathed easier. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. He wasn’t afraid.

  “Well, it doesn’t smell good, that’s for sure. But that can be fixed, can’t it? Can’t you find the source?”

  Chris looked around. “It could be an animal, dead somewhere under these tarps. Or maybe just rot in the tarps themselves—mould can smell like something dead. I can’t be sure.”

  Justin nodded. He was in charge. The man was looking to him for guidance.

  “Empty the whole place out,” Justin said. “Get rid of it all.”

  Chris nodded, squinting at the sudden light blazing through the basement’s tiny windows as a cloud rolled away from the sun.

  Justin watched the dust-thick air as the sun illuminated each little particle.

  I am not afraid, Justin thought. There is nothing to be afraid of here. It’s just a room.

  V

  Miriam Hastings did not take bullshit. This was what people said about her, and she approved of this assessment. It was a vision of herself that she’d cultivated. I don’t take any bullshit, she said once during a meeting, and now people repeated it and believed it. It was that simple. Now that the town officials knew her better, knew that she wasn’t afraid to call the police chief a son of a bitch or tell someone to shut up during a town meeting, people even said it to her face, as a compliment.

  That was how she had risen so far in a town run by men. She didn’t let people speak down to her, speak over her, speak as though she wasn’t in the room. She wasn’t aggressive, she wasn’t an asshole, but she made her presence clear. She thought of it as projecting herself. When she sat down to a meeting, she imagined that her body was three times its actual size. She imagined her presence was solid and certain, absolutely inviolable, a fact of nature. Then, she could speak her mind.