When he closed his eyes during break at work, or before going to sleep at night, in those moments when his thoughts moved quickly and he could not catch them, he sometimes found himself back in the basement of the factory where he’d found Claire asleep, her body curled, her arms around her knees.
That day he had been far more afraid than he let on. He thought that maybe her heart had stopped, that the factory itself had taken her because he refused to give in, to go away, to do what it wanted—it wanted him to fail, it wanted him to leave, it wanted to tear away the faux-wood panelling and the piles of napkins and the college-dorm posters in cheap, tin frames. It’s taken her, he’d thought at the time, because I’m stubborn and I won’t admit that I’m afraid.
But then she had awakened, woozy, but alive, and he had been so relieved and embarrassed by his irrational fears that he shouted at her for falling asleep. He remembered her slight flinch when he raised his voice.
He had been completely ignorant of what she was planning, even then, when they were together in the very place she’d go on to burn down the next day. It seemed impossible to him that a person could keep her intentions so well hidden. Wouldn’t she want to tell me why, at least? Wouldn’t she feel ashamed?
He hadn’t felt a signal in his stomach, a churning nervousness. He always believed in hunches; they were one of the seven secrets to success. But he’d had no hunches. Just a dumb, drugged happiness, the thought of which shamed him now. He wished that he had had some inkling—that he could at least say, I knew, somewhere, deep down, this would happen. But he couldn’t say that at all. His intuition had failed him.
When Beans decided not to rebuild on the factory grounds, the town bought the land. Miriam spearheaded the purchase.
“We’ll make it a public park,” she announced at a town meeting. “We’ll put a gazebo there. We’ll have musical events, Shakespeare in the Park, craft fairs, a Fourth of July picnic.” It felt good to make plans, to transform the black wreck of the factory into something new.
The Select Board approved the purchase and Beans sold the property back to the town at a deep discount. The charred remains of the factory were cleared away and new squares of lush lawn were laid on the black, churned dirt.
It was a beautiful spot, overlooking the river at its deepest point. A white fence kept the park from the shallows, kept toddlers from wandering down and drowning—a common worry among local parents, once the plans for the park had been revealed. They scheduled the construction of a white gazebo, four white benches, a cobblestone path from the gazebo to the benches, and a new swing set in a pit of clean pebbles, deep and with enough give for a child to fall without breaking a bone.
It was difficult to believe that a place so beautiful and clean and untouched could have been a mess of rubble just months before.
Miriam named it Memorial Park.
Justin survived his first winter in Farmington. He bought snow tires as soon as the first frost came and rubber grippers for the bottom of his shoes, so he could walk on the ice without falling. In Farmington, the sidewalks were often left unsalted. One morning, before purchasing the grippers, he had slipped and split his chin open, requiring five black stitches. At the hospital, he met a nurse, a woman so young he assumed she must be a candy striper (but do candy stripers still exist? he wondered). She was an RN, twenty-five years old. She told him that almost everyone in Farmington injured themselves on the ice at some point—broken arms, broken legs, chins and sometimes foreheads cut open. After that, he thought of his scar—a thin, almost unnoticeable line from his lower chin to where his lower lip began—as a badge, something that proved that he could take it, he could live there, that he belonged now and had the whole time.
By spring, he was dating a woman from town—they had met during a Select Board meeting, which Justin attended faithfully, even if they were only going to discuss salt for the roads or approve the purchase of a new dump truck. She was a kindergarten teacher. He noticed her when she stood to make a formal complaint about a proposed emergency siren that would be placed a hundred feet from the elementary school. Afterwards, he congratulated for her articulate and fair-minded position and asked her out to dinner. Three months later, she moved in with him and graded scribbled work sheets on his dining room table. He cooked, as he was better at it and enjoyed it, and she made the coffee in the morning. This was the life he had wanted, he sometimes reminded himself when he thought of what had happened with the factory. His current happiness was well worth anything that might have been lost.
In June, he received a postcard. On the front was a photograph of a castle in Scotland surrounded by green grass, hills, and more hills in the distance. The postmark, though, was from Colorado. There was no return address.
Go to the Catholic Cemetery on Chester Street. Row 4, number 10. Samuel Thomas Martin.
I’m sorry and I wish that I could have seen you happy.
I hope you have found your home.
Claire
VIII
It was difficult for the locals to remember that the factory was gone, even years after that final fire. The building, its immovable grey presence a fixture since childhood, of school trips, stories, and nightmares, was really gone, and in its place was a pretty park, a harmless place with an outdoor water fountain that nobody let their children drink from, a brightly painted merry-go-round, and plastic animals perched atop strong, steel coils.
The townspeople let their children play there, though. The stories they’d learned as children seemed distant—the dead women dragging themselves from the river, the murderers in the basement, the dead boy who’d whisper in your ear if you said his name at 11:30 at night on September 15th because he was lonely and was only allowed to speak at that exact moment. These old monsters couldn’t possibly roam this bright, clean, open place. There wasn’t any shadow for them to hide in, and the grass was green and fragrant and frequently clipped down to a reasonable length.
The children didn’t seem afraid as they ran across the pebbles, slipping on the unsteady surface, or as they climbed to the very top of the domed monkey bars and hung from their knees, allowing their cheeks to brighten and hair to muss as blood rushed to their heads.
There was still the river, of course, which rushed by, deep enough at its most swollen for a grown man to drown in. The park had a tall white fence around its perimeter, and so for the first time, the children were safe even from the river. Stay in the park, parents would say. Don’t go outside the fence. Don’t go near the water. A little girl your age was playing in the river after the rain and drowned—they never found her body.
The river became the monster.
There must be a place that’s forbidden. It’s a necessary black mark on the map, a place where the monsters, the ghosts, the killers of children, the writhing teenagers, and the devil worshippers go. Otherwise they’d be in the town, living in regular houses like everyone else, unrecognizable in their plastic rain boots, with their bags of salt, applying a thin layer to their perfectly normal driveways every winter. They’d be invisible.
Epilogue
Farmington
You had lived there for so long that it didn’t even seem like a particular place. It was as familiar as your own skin, as the furniture and knickknacks in your grandparents’ house, that lighter shaped like a pistol on their mantel, the tapestry depicting Saint Peter at the gates of heaven just above the green and orange couch. You had walked the entire length of the river from the edge of town, where the sidewalked streets ended, to the other, where the sidewalk turned into the shoulder of the highway. You had gone to every Fourth of July fireworks display since you were old enough to remember and had probably attended them even before, swaddled against your mother or father as the sounds exploded around you and rained brightness in the sky that you could not understand.
As far as you were concerned, you would never live there again once you’d escaped. You imagined y
ourself selling shoes at the Payless down by the factories, serving truck drivers their black coffee and cinnamon rolls at the café, even teaching at the high school, showing up at seven every morning to ease learning down the throats of the unwilling. You had gone to that high school, had kept your head down as you walked the halls, had felt your teachers skip over your stringy hair, your acne, your clothes, your desperate smell of deodorant. The idea of going back there as an adult made you shiver with fear. What if you became the person you had been just by showing up again?
Sure, there were nice things about it—Old Farmington had its grand houses, its mansion with the miniature dollhouse mansion in the backyard, its private college tucked up and away from the town and its general slump of decline, but those things weren’t really in Farmington—they stood at the periphery. Inside Farmington, the river cut the town in two; the train tracks, no longer used, were overgrown with weeds. Farmington was dying from the inside out. You knew this, and you didn’t want to die with it. What was it that someone had once said? You can’t feel guilty for escaping the sinking ship, even if the people you love won’t leave. Or even if they can’t leave. You had escaped that ship. It was in the long process of sinking.
And so you left, and you were happy. The place you went had culture, not just those once-a-month poetry readings in Farmington, where the entire crowd consisted of people over sixty, but real culture that everyone had a part in—art galleries, poetry groups, belly dancing, pottery. You began to drink socially, not just out of bright cans on the weekends or from the screw-top mouths of sweet wine bottles. You dropped certain words from your vocabulary, like wicked or upstreet. You learned the complicated knots of roads in your city, which café sold the best coffee, which had the best corned beef sandwiches, and which newsstand sold Italian Vogue behind the counter like some convenience stores in your town sold Hustler.
You went home for every major holiday: Christmas, Thanksgiving, sometimes the Fourth of July. Your mother would say that you looked pale and thin. You’d smile and nod and roll your eyes, the expected responses from the child who had left and made a life far away. They expected you to be slightly dismissive, unfamiliar with the important town gossip, absorbed with your phone and your important emails. And so you were as they tried to tell you about Kelly—you remember Kelly from upstreet?—and how her latest boyfriend had bloodied her nose. You’d made a sound with your mouth and thought about Kelly, that distant memory, and felt sorry for her. She hadn’t escaped like you had.
During your visit, you’d go to the corner store to buy cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving or real maple syrup for Christmas morning breakfast or hot-dog buns for a cookout and you’d see someone you went to school with—Brian or Derek or Joe, you couldn’t remember which—a boy you’d had a crush on who had not noticed that you’d existed beyond occasionally teasing you during gym class, who now worked at the deli counter, slicing ham and turkey with an enormous blade like an elementary-school paper cutter. You paid the cashier and smiled at Derek, Joe, or Brian, pleased that he didn’t remember you but that you remembered him.
After many years, though, you began to change. You watched yourself grow soft and lonely in your city, where you had so many friends and acquaintances, where you knew the best theatres, the best places to get drinks on a Saturday night. You began to see people you had known in your previous life, in that time when you had shuffled home from school, your backpack full of library books and drawings and music magazines with pictures and articles that were like dispatches from a life you could not yet access. You thought you saw Jenny Parker crossing the street on your way from work. She had been your best friend in middle school, but in high school she’d drifted away, had moved with a group of girls with boyfriends who walked through the halls in packs, giggling with high-pitched exclamations of disgust or delight. But there she was, on the city sidewalk, as perfect and untouchable as ever. You blinked until your vision cleared and you realized no, it wasn’t her, it was only a woman with a similar fall of ash-blonde hair, the same profile with an upturned nose.
And when you were in the park, eating your lunch, you would find yourself thinking of your childhood, that time when you had been so trapped and unhappy, walking the same squares of sidewalk, passing the same weeping willows in the Chestertons’ yard, waving to Mrs. Chesterton in April when she began her spring ritual of obsessively pulling weeds and trimming hedges and planting rows of bright tulips in the space between her lawn and the wall.
Now, as an adult, during your Christmas, summer, and fall visits, you experienced those walks again and discovered something—you enjoyed them now. Even the memory of that particular sadness and boredom had a sweetness.
The smell of the willows, their drooping leaves, and the river, a smell so familiar and inexplicable that it hit you like a dream come back the next day in full force. The river sent its cold air up from the water, the smell of minerals and salt, the slap of cold relief, particularly after a hot, late-spring day spent walking from school to home.
You began to dream about this walk, the expected turn as you exited out the back door of the school and took the unbroken sidewalk to the Chestertons’, to the river, up the hill to the park where the octagonal monkey bars glittered viciously in the sun, and you’d imagined as a child how the heat from the metal might make your hands burn and smoke if you grabbed it. Such a vivid imagination! your mother had said, not always as a compliment. Then you’d scale the hill, shifting the weight in your backpack, adjusting the straps, until you reached the summit, where you could see your whole street laid out before you—the houses and their various lawns, trimmed or overgrown, small and enormous, pocked with horseshoe stakes or old swing set pits in the yard.
You began to remember these walks as the only time when you could be quiet in your mind, the times when you had realized who you were, what you loved, where you wanted to put your attention. You remembered the day that you saw what seemed like a bucketful of rose petals travelling down that river, as though some angry lover had torn an expensive bouquet, petal by petal, and thrown it in the water. What a gesture.
And you began to remember the Christmases, sleeping in your old room, the attic floorboards expanding and retracting with the heat. Your mother turning in bed, your father walking from the bedroom to the kitchen, his bare feet slapping against the linoleum (that sound made you feel slightly embarrassed, as though you were seeing him naked or crying).
On spring mornings, when you woke early to the pale sun coming through the blinds, when your blood jumped at the opportunity to be bared, even slightly, to the air. Boys showed up to school in shorts, though they shivered and their hair stood out from their legs like a frightened cat’s fur.
I am becoming foolish in my old age, you thought. When you returned home for winter, you offered to fetch the maple syrup and the flour just for a chance to see Derek or Joe or Brian in the deli department, to see that familiar way that he pushed his hair back from his head, as he did in Math class. Whatever his name, you remembered that motion, his hands through his hair. But he wasn’t there.
Whenever you visited, you wandered the town, went to places you remembered—the record store on Main Street, next to the old bank that had been turned into an art gallery, or the diner next to the high school, where you had ordered milkshakes and hamburgers after school, giddy with your adult participation in commerce. As you walked among the people you might have once known but didn’t know anymore, you missed the days that you had spent away, how you had missed the town’s renovation, the artists who had been commissioned to paint the windows of the abandoned restaurants and the general store. You looked at the newspaper, at the births and deaths sections, at familiar last names, and thought you recognized the mouths and eyes of some of the infants, though you couldn’t be sure.
But when you visited, you also saw that it was impossible to re-enter—your cousin, a hairdresser in town, spoke of people you did not know, the
drama of their lives, and you felt names and professions and diseases and misfortunes and births and marriages and divorces streaming above your head. Too much time had passed.
But then you’d go from the house to your car on the day you were scheduled to go home. You would back out of the driveway, go down the street, take the highway out past the Old Town, those enormous Victorian houses that you’d imagined living in as a little girl—how lucky you thought it would be to walk up and down those grand staircases, to sleep in rooms at the top of the house, those sloping ceilings and round porthole windows that looked over the curving streets of Old Town, over the old graveyard and the catamount statue. As you drove past the row of factories and the new, sparkling park, built in a place where you remembered a factory from your childhood, an imposing slate thing that seemed at one point a fixture of the town. As you passed the park you realized that it wasn’t even the place you remembered anymore. You didn’t miss this place, but you missed the place you had experienced years ago, as a child. Maybe it was the same for everyone, even those who had stayed, always missing a place that no longer existed.
You passed the last few houses and entered the country, a place where towns blurred, disappearing and reappearing again on the other side with new names, new white churches standing in the middle of the town, where all of the roads pointed and crossed.
They are all the same, you thought. And everybody is from one and everybody misses one and everybody wants to get away.
Acknowledgements
A thousand thanks to ChiZine Publications,
including Samantha, Andrew, Megan, Brett,
and everyone else involved in making this book a reality.
Almost Dark Page 21