Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  Claire kept her mind on the path, on making it to the factory without being seen. She had an old black purse slung over her shoulder, bulging with her new rags and the can of kerosene. The fluid sloshed as she moved.

  She tapped at the windows, all of which were locked, shut tight. The front door was also locked; no hanging metal lock this time but a padlock.

  At the bottom of her black purse were a few rocks as big as her fist. She had picked them up along the way, surprised to find so many rocks so particularly suited to her purpose.

  She started with the basement window, the one Sam had disappeared down—the one she had leaned over so many times in her dreams. She was surprised at how cleanly and easily the glass broke. It tinkled as it pelted something below. She took out one of the rags and soaked it in kerosene. Then she held the rag away from her face and lit it.

  She hadn’t had much experience with fire. When the rag lit and blew into her face, singeing her eyebrows, she almost instinctively threw it on the ground and stamped it out. But she remembered what she was there to do and, despite the slight burn on her thumb, the sickly smell of burning hair, she tossed the rag through the broken window. She nicked the side of her hand on the glass. A cut opened, deep and wide. It was bleeding, and it was probably deeper than she knew, but she couldn’t stop now. She’d bandage it later. Her thumb throbbed where the flames had merely brushed across her skin. She ignored that, too.

  At first, she saw only a small, uninspired light coming from the basement. She worried that the fire had fizzled out on its own, that maybe it had fallen against the damp brick wall and blazed out. She moved toward the window, careful to keep her face away from the jagged edges. A burst of hot air blew back her singed hair and the fire bloomed—it illuminated the space, and for a moment, before the smoke filled the room, before the flames grew too hot and close for her to watch anymore, she could see into the basement—it was filled with cardboard boxes, which had all caught fire and glowed like kindling in a fireplace. Her heart, which had been mercifully quiet, was now beating hard; her mind, previously possessed by a Zen-like stillness, now informed her of all the possible consequences of her actions. She was destroying a building. She could be arrested, probably would be.

  I probably will go to prison, she thought, wondering if she could plead insanity, and if she did, exactly what they would do to her. Would she have to spend time in an institution? The idea seemed almost like a relief. Maybe then she could tell somebody about Sam. She wrapped her hand in one of her leftover rags and threw the kerosene can through the basement window—the fire down there was raging now, sending up black billows of smoke.

  She felt as though somebody was watching her, somebody curious: these unseen eyes didn’t worry her. Maybe it was Sam, happy to see the job done. Maybe it was a witness who could easily identify her. Maybe she would be pursued and caught immediately. It was hard to care. All she felt was relief: she’d done what Sam had asked.

  “I love you,” she said aloud, “but you can go now.”

  Claire made her way home the same way she had come, through side streets, down scarcely lit alleyways, until she was back in her little apartment. She took off her smoky clothes and went to the bathroom to assess the damage. Her hand was cut deep and still bleeding. She could have used stitches, but she washed and mended the cut herself, held the edges together with a piece of medical tape. It would have to do.

  She went to her room and packed her last bag, her suitcase. The house was bare of her things, her history. She had skipped work that day, complaining of stomach cramps, and stayed home and packed everything of value. She quickly realized that most of what she owned she could stand to lose and brought three carfuls of clothes, books, trinkets, and jewellery she had never worn to the local goodwill. She threw away old letters from lovers she scarcely ever thought of. She even threw away her datebook. In the end, she was left with just three boxes filled with books, clothes, and some cookware.

  Claire stood over her suitcase. Her blankets and pillows were rolled up tight in her trunk, pressed against the spare tire and the rusty jack that she hoped she’d never need. Then she stuffed her smoky clothes into the trash barrel behind her neighbour’s house and got into her car, started the engine.

  I could drive all night, she thought, realizing she wasn’t tired, though she thought she should be. Maybe she’d see the sun rise. She hadn’t seen a sunrise since she was a child and her allergies would wake her early in the morning. Sam would often rise with her. They would wait for their parents to wake up and watch the sun come up as she sneezed and her eyes watered.

  But Sam was gone, and now Justin was gone to her, too, and Claire was by herself, finally. The town fell away from her like unpinned layers of gauze from a healed wound.

  IV

  When Miriam experienced a bout of insomnia, she went out for a walk. She always felt safe in her neighbourhood, which was lined with streetlights and hedges guarding enormous yards. She sat up in bed and pulled the mini blinds away from the window. The light hurt her eyes. She didn’t want to walk around in the brightness of those streetlights tonight. She’d take a drive.

  She rose and threw on the clothes she had left by the bed from the day before. Her husband didn’t stir—he was used to her nighttime wanderings. As far as she knew, he had never suffered from insomnia. He slept deeply and heavily—had since their wedding night, after he’d taken off her white dress in the dark and they had groped and struggled until he was finished. She thought of that night whenever she saw him sleeping. He was so peaceful, as though he had come a great distance to fall asleep in her bed.

  Miriam grabbed her car keys and gently shut the front door.

  Driving so late at night made her feel as though she was doing something vaguely illegal. She drove past the lit windows of downtown, noting how strange they looked, empty but bright. The sporting goods store had decorated its windows with mannequins posed like a family about to take their canoe out on the water, the mother and the father watching as they children stood in the canoe, their faces turned toward the adult mannequins. The scene made her nervous tonight, though she’d never noticed it before. Why would the parents have the children get in first?

  Miriam parked in the Tastee-Freez parking lot. She walked across the street to the deer park, which was lit with a dozen streetlights and was, thankfully, empty. Teenagers supposedly used it to have sex, sell drugs, or do other nefarious things after dark, though Miriam couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to be in the deer park at night for more than a few minutes. She sat on a bench, far from the fence where the deer were penned in a few acres of wildly grassy and wooded land. Local environmentalists had asked the town to do something about the park—the animals were clearly sick and suffering, their fur falling away in patches, skin erupted in sores, and animal control had to drag dead deer out almost every week—but nobody could decide on a course of action. For years, the town had planned to do something, to set the deer free and unfence the wild grass and shrubs and make a real park out of it, but their plans never quite got off the ground. Deer, they’d found, were difficult to transport—most would die from fear before they arrived at their destination. The park ranger from the Green Mountain National Forest suggested that the town allow him and his rangers to come in and shoot the deer and put them out of their misery. That wasn’t acceptable to the environmentalists. So the deer remained in their enormous pen, which sometimes emanated a smell like rotten potatoes.

  Miriam looked out into the mass of dark grass and shrubs—she heard a sound, something crackling and falling into the soft grass.

  It probably wasn’t safe there so far past midnight. She wondered then where the few homeless people in Farmington went at night, where the woman who talked to herself by the catamount statue went when she wasn’t having long conversations with inanimate objects. The closest shelter was an hour away, across the mountain range, in Brattleboro.

 
Miriam stood and walked along the sidewalk until Main Street met Factory Street. She continued, following the sidewalk, less smooth than the others, the streetlights a bit farther apart, though Beans had illuminated the space right in front of the factory.

  What am I doing here? she asked herself. Before reaching the lights, she crossed the street to the opposite side, where the lack of streetlights would make her invisible.

  She sat on the sidewalk, in the darkness, and looked to the dark face of the factory, at that thick, heavy door, at the new locks—no longer those heavy iron chains. She thought she saw something dart around the left side of the building, a shade flitting through the dark: a person or a large animal.

  Miriam jumped up to her feet. She heard breaking glass. She couldn’t see anything—the lights blinded her, made the shadows behind it that much darker.

  I should go, she thought. I should tell the police.

  More broken glass and then a soft thump. Something flickered then, on the right side of the building—a flashlight.

  Instead of stepping forward, instead of calling out as she knew she should, Miriam backed away from the street, away from the lights, until she was hugging the hedges that lined the sidewalk, trying to disappear into them. Her bowels felt weak and she thought, absurdly, of the stone catamount downtown and how kids had said it would come to life at night and stalk the streets for late-night stragglers.

  From the darkness at the side of the factory, a figure in black appeared amongst a tangle of weeds and trees. It was a woman—her hair streamed out behind her. She ran from the factory, passing through the streetlights just across from Miriam. Miriam tightened, afraid that the woman had seen her, but the figure was too intent on getting out of the light and away from the factory to notice anyone pressed against the hedge.

  The woman glanced over her shoulder as she crossed the street. Her face was suddenly illuminated, caught in the streetlights.

  It was the woman Miriam had spoken to a few days earlier, the one whose brother had died in the factory—Claire.

  Miriam remained in the darkness for a few moments after Claire passed. She had probably broken a window, spray painted something on the side of the building, done something relatively harmless but costly—something that Justin would want to know about and fix.

  Then, the first licks of fire uncurled from the broken basement window, creating a faint, orange light that Miriam immediately recognized.

  She thought it might be her mind running away from her, her tired eyes. She moved out of the darkness and into the streetlight, forgetting her desire for anonymity. The light was exactly what it seemed: fire coming from the belly of the factory.

  Heat poured from the lone broken window, smoke squeezing out from the tiny cracks in the foundation. Miriam approached the broken window. It spilled fire and she stepped back.

  Call somebody, she thought. Go to a nearby house, tell somebody.

  Miriam stared into the fire.

  It twisted in fluctuations of light and darkness. She thought of how she had never seen a painting that represented fire properly. It was always presented as a block of bright colour, maybe with a few variant hues to indicate movement. But fire was full of shadows, constantly twisting and reaching, dark streaks of amber knotting in strands. If you looked closely, the dark lines became bodies, people reaching up to get out, to escape the heat and the brightness.

  Miriam blinked and backed away. She kept to the shadows and walked away from the factory, careful not to reveal her face in the streetlights. She remained in shadow as she walked down Factory Street and across the deer park, back to her car. She saw nobody along the way; she imagined that she saw someone’s shadow in the window of the Tastee-Freeze, but it was only a cardboard cut-out of an ice cream cone, absurdly shaped like a curvaceous woman.

  Miriam drove home, stripped off her clothes, stuffed them down deep in the hamper, and went to bed naked. She was suddenly exhausted.

  When the call came—how much later she wasn’t sure—she had almost forgotten what she had seen earlier that night.

  V

  The first to wake were the ones who lived at the edge of town. The small houses and apartments were the first to feel the heat of the blaze. Crystal Ramirez, thirteen, smelled the fire first. She had been awake in her bed at one in the morning, having just gotten to the halfway point in Jane Eyre. Jane loved Mr. Rochester, but she couldn’t say anything about it. Mr. Rochester, who seemed to be cruel and full of himself, had dressed up as a gypsy (a ruse that Crystal had seen through, and was disappointed that Jane hadn’t) and tried to force Jane to reveal her love. He loved her, of course, but wanted her to suffer. It seemed strange to Crystal that he would want somebody he loved to suffer, but she understood already that men were sometimes like this. Women, too.

  She lay in bed, thinking of Jane and Mr. Rochester, how in times not so long ago, it was impossible to state exactly what one thought or who one loved. Nowadays, if you liked a guy, you could text him. It seemed almost too easy.

  She sat up in bed—she smelled fire. Whenever her mother smelled fire she sniffed at the electrical outlets, pulled the furniture away from the furnace vents, and generally made a big production of things, making everybody get up and help her search for the phantom smell. Crystal went to her window, which was already open, and looked through the mesh. It was too dark. She pushed up the screen to see clearly through the trees.

  In the dark, an orange glow illuminated the line of tall, sparse pine trees between her room and the row of factories beyond, those big empty boxes, the windows black or broken, the river cold and clear behind them.

  The trees were on fire. Or the things behind the trees. Crystal watched the light expand and contract, breathing just like an animal.

  In town, too, people woke, not quite knowing why but feeling suddenly hungry, ill, headaches like tiny hammers in their skulls. They rose from bed, put on their robes, and went to their kitchens where they sat drinking glasses of water or milk, feeling as though they had missed something, or were late for something, or were waiting for something. And then the fire trucks sounded their sirens as they raced through the empty streets, and the townspeople breathed a sigh of relief. Something was about to happen.

  The crowd began to gather soon after—people who lived within walking distance came in their slippers, some with their children trailing barefoot. The children felt their feet on the pavement and the grass between their toes, the blades damp and cool. Most of the children would remember this as a night of rare freedom, like the freedom of family picnics where their mothers and fathers drank wine from Styrofoam cups and let the children wander out past their vision and play games they couldn’t play in their parents’ sight. The fire, too, was like the Fourth of July, with all those colours in the sky, only better because nobody knew when it would end and the adults couldn’t control it. It might light up the trees around it, the buildings next to it, it might even run up the street until it reached the houses beyond. It was exciting, the children thought, to be near something that the adults couldn’t control. It was like being near a lion or the ocean.

  As the townspeople got closer to the fire, as close as they could come without being shouted at by the firemen and police officers, the children gripped their parents’ legs, clung to their thin nightclothes. The adults huddled together. The factory would be gone in an hour if the fire kept travelling as it was, and they wanted to watch until it was gone. They felt, still, that something important was happening, something they needed to see.

  The fire department soaked the pavement around the building and sprayed their hoses at the outer walls. They weren’t interested in saving the building anymore—it was too late. They just didn’t want it to spread to the other empty factories and houses.

  “It will burn itself out soon,” somebody said, and the crowd nodded or sighed.

  Some were old enough to remember the first fi
re, the day the women had rushed out, coughing, and the picture in the paper the day after that showed them kneeling or standing and weeping in the parking lot as flames burst through the windows. The headlines had said Tragedy at the New England Textiles Factory. This, though, was not a tragedy.

  Some remembered the death of the boy, the one who had fallen through the basement window. They had known him by sight or name, had perhaps gone to school with his mother or father, or had had him over for dinner. They remembered his sister, that sad double, and how she had cried at the funeral and had tried to climb into the coffin to be with him.

  VI

  Miriam got a call whenever there was a four-alarm fire. Usually, she spoke to the Fire Chief and then went back to bed, or back to business, or back to dinner. However, when she was told the location of the fire that night, she got dressed. At least she could be there for the end. She put on different clothes than the ones she’d stuffed in the hamper—a blouse and skirt. This was an official visit, after all, not just midnight wandering.

  When she got to the factory, it was clear that nothing could be saved. The fire could only be contained and kept from spreading. Luckily, the factory itself was somewhat isolated from other buildings, backed by the river, and the ground was damp from a recent rain.

  She found Justin easily, despite the crowd that had gathered to see the last moments of the factory. It was a strange crowd, buzzing, curious but not particularly sad. They felt like she did: bewildered but interested. Justin stood as close to the building as was allowed. His hands were shoved into his pockets. He watched the building burn, his face expressionless. Miriam made her way toward him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.