Into That Darkness

by Steven Price

  The wife was speaking quickly and then her voice grew louder and then she said, angrily: And what does she think? The girl was here and left?

  She doesn’t think anything. She’s just looking for the girl.

  Anna Mercia almost could not hear him.

  His wife said something then that Anna Mercia did not hear and the barber spoke again, quickly. That’s ridiculous Aggie. Why would she do such a thing.

  How do you know she’s not lying?

  I don’t think she’s lying.

  The wife’s voice came again muffled and unclear. Then there was a creaking of the bedsprings as something shifted and then she could hear both voices very clearly.

  —Cole. You know what I’m talking about.

  Come on, Aggie. Her picture’s on the floor there. It’s her. She’s trying to find her family.

  You mean the girl.

  Yes. The girl.

  I don’t trust her.

  You don’t need to trust her. How’s your leg. Let me take a look at it.

  You get her out of here. I mean it.

  It’s her house.

  I don’t care. Get her out of here.

  The barber was silent.

  The bed creaked again. You know what’s going on out there, his wife said. You saw that family in the Volkswagen. You want that to be us? Is that what you want?

  The barber said something more but Anna Mercia could not hear what it was and then she made her slow way back to the living room. She left the drapes undrawn. The sky outside was orange from the fires that still burned across the city and the room was bright as it had been on moon-filled nights before the earthquake and she lay with her broken arm folded carefully across her sternum and her face turned to the hall.

  She did not understand what they had been saying about her daughter. It did not seem to her that Kat could have come here yet. She knew she was weakening but her mind remained hard. That is good, she thought. Keep your thoughts very clear.

  She remembered how when Kat was a child her husband would hang a silver globe in their window in the days leading up to Christmas. Glinting as it turned in the slow light from the street below. She remembered this and how her daughter would lie in their bed staring up at it as the sound of carols drifted from the radio next door and the snow drifted in the darkness outside. The white flakes coalescing on the cold glass. Her little eyes opening, closing, and David laughing through the wall with his friends. A sweet scent of cloves as they smoked and smoked and her daughter asleep in the cot with her.

  The silver globe in their window, spinning and spinning.

  And too that last visit from her father. Pulling out of her garage in the car, late for work. As her father came hefting a garbage can in his big arms and setting it in the dirt at the curb. How she had thought he was coming to say farewell. The bag had come apart and scattered eggshells and coffee grounds into the low weeds and he stood a moment with his hand atop his white hair before stooping there. The lagoon below shining harshly in the early sunlight and the tide beyond draining out. Her radio had come on playing an aria of some old Italian opera and moved by this she saw a grace and sadness in her father she had not seen before. She slowed the car and her old father straightened holding in his hands the dripping trash, father and daughter regarding each other without expression through the car window and neither speaking. The father staring past his own watery reflection to find his daughter’s face.

  She opened her eyes.

  All at once she was remembering the voice on her daughter’s cellphone and she knew with certainty that it was the barber she had spoken to. She was shaking.

  She did not know how long she lay there. After a time she kicked back the wool blanket and pressed her shoes to the armrest of the couch and her heart was thundering inside her.

  She got up from the couch and made her way back down the hall, trailing her good hand along the charred wallpaper. She knocked softly on the bedroom door where she had slept all those years and then she turned the knob woozily with one shoulder to the wall to steady herself. When she opened the door the barber had already got up from sleep and was standing just inside holding a lit candle and she gave a start.

  What is it? he said. The shadows strange in his bandages.

  Anna Mercia could hear the barber’s wife snoring softly in the gloom. She said, I need to talk to you.

  The barber glanced back at his wife then stepped out into the hall and shut the door to the bedroom. They stood a moment in the candlelight, the wax melting slowly over his thumbs.

  She’s sleeping, he said. What’s wrong with you. Are you sick?

  I need to talk to you.

  In here.

  He opened the door to the bathroom across the hall and they slipped through. He set the candle onto the edge of the sink and then leaned back on the bathtub.

  Sit down, he said. I thought you might come. What is it.

  Anna Mercia watched him a moment then sat on the crooked toilet. The bathroom walls were black from the fire and the ceiling dangled in strips over them. The floor littered with pieces of masonry and small bottles and jars. She could feel the slick of sweat on her arms.

  I know she was here, she said.

  Who?

  You know who.

  He was looking at her and the light deepened and stretched in his face. The skin around his good eye looked swollen. Who are you talking about? he asked.

  Katherine. My daughter.

  The barber frowned suddenly and in the flickering candlelight his bandaged head looked grotesque and deeply ugly. Your daughter hasn’t been here, he said. I already told you that. Jesus. He looked at her very hard. What do you want? he asked.

  I want my daughter.

  You’re confused.

  I’m not, she whispered.

  Yes.

  I called her cell earlier. You answered it.

  He looked at her for a long moment.

  How’d you get her cell?

  He shrugged angrily.

  How’d you get her cell? she asked again.

  He was looking at her with a dark expression. I found it, he said. Here. In the house. But she hasn’t been here, nobody has. You know there’s nothing going on here.

  You’re lying to me, she whispered. Why’re you lying to me? But then she leaned over and held her face in her hand and then her shoulders were shaking. She felt like she could not breathe and she gasped and she shook.

  They sat in silence for a while, the candle burning down. At last the barber shifted his feet and the glass crunched under him.

  That’s enough, he said quietly. There was something in his voice. She did not hear it at first and then she did hear it and she looked up.

  In the hazy orange light he was standing where before he had been leaning on the lip of the bathtub and she realized how much bigger he was than her. He said to her, Why’d you come to me really? What do you want?

  She did not like how he was looking at her.

  He said, You never thought your daughter was here. Did you.

  She said nothing.

  Come here, he said.

  He unbuckled his belt and opened his pants. His penis was standing out.

  Suck it, he said.

  She blinked at him, uncomprehending.

  He leaned across to her and gripped her chin hard. He said, Suck my fucking cock.

  She glanced over to the door. Across the hall his wife would be sleeping. Don’t do this, she said. Please.

  Get on your fucking knees, he said.

  He pushed her down. The bathroom floor was black with char and there were chunks of rubble and shards of glass from the mirror gouging her knees. She could feel herself starting to cry but she made no sound. His penis was warm and sticky and tasted of sweat when he forced it into her.

  He was gripping her hair hard and he made small grunting noises as he went. Her good hand was thick and cold in the dirt and slapping there and suddenly there was something sharp under her palm. A slice of glass
from the mirror. She was coughing and spitting. He was thrusting deeply and his coarse hair was scratching her nose and chin and all at once she took up the shard and pressed it under his scrotum. His fists were still on her head but he stopped abruptly. She could feel a line of blood opening in the folds of his skin.

  She was crying and spitting.

  What did you do to her? she cried. Her lips and chin were wet. She held the blade hard against him. What did you do to her?

  He looked at her, frightened. Nothing, he said. I swear. I never saw her, she didn’t even come here. I swear it.

  She could feel his sticky penis withdrawing across her wrist where her hand was pressing with the blade of glass.

  Please, he said.

  She thought very coldly and very clearly of her daughter coming home and meeting this man and she stopped crying and she made herself look at him. Then she pushed the shard in with as much force as she could manage and twisted it sharply and it snapped off in her fist.

  He screamed.

  He screamed and still screaming fell thrashing against the side of the bathtub. There was something warm and slick running down her arm and the front of her sweater and she got to her feet and stood with her back against the wall and watched him. In the candlelight she could see the barber curling up under the edge of the bathtub in his shirttails and with his trousers tangled at his shins and he was gurgling in a strange, brutal, guttural agony.

  Then she stumbled out. As she passed the bedroom she could hear the barber’s wife calling for her husband but she did not slow and she stumbled for the front door breathing hard. She kicked the door wide and took the steps two at a time half-running onto the lawn. She could feel the shard of glass cutting into her hand and she threw it into the grass. Something was rising in her throat but she swallowed it back down.

  Then she slowed. Stopped. Stood in the street under the pale burning sky and turned back and looked at her house dark in that undarkness. She thought: Kat could still return. Kat could go there still. She did not fear the barber any longer but she understood that she could not let the barber’s wife find her daughter. She knew this suddenly and with a burning clarity.

  She went back in. She went in and up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom and in the darkness she turned the handle and the door swung softly open. The room stank.

  The barber’s wife was feverish.

  Cole? she called weakly. Is that you? What’s going on?

  Don’t turn on a light, Anna Mercia said.

  The wife was fumbling in the sheets and then the flashlight flared on and cut a slow beam across the ceiling and down the wall and lit up Anna Mercia where she stood.

  Oh god, the wife began to cry. Oh god what have you done to him.

  She was drenched in the barber’s blood. She stood in that doorway studying the barber’s wife and then she felt suddenly sick. She could not do it. She knew this woman would not live out the week. She was trembling with the thought of what she had come back to do and she could not do it.

  Where is he? the barber’s wife was crying. What did you do to him?

  Anna Mercia said nothing. The heavy woman could not stir from the bed. Anna Mercia went to the closet and sifted through the clothes on the floor there and stripped off the grey sweater and pulled on a shirt and made her way back out of the room, ignoring the wife’s cries.

  In the living room she stood for a long time staring out at the orange sky and she did not understand why she did not leave at once. She went to her phone and picked up the handset and listened but there was no dial tone. She put it back. Under a bundle of coats she found a pair of her hiking boots and laced them on awkwardly, holding the long laces in her teeth. Then went back down the hallway and into the burned bathroom and saw that the candle had smouldered down but was not yet out. The barber lay unmoving in his blood. The candle leaned unmoving in its wax. She looked at him and she did not blow out the candle and after a time she left.

  The hour was late. She walked in the middle of the street along the dividing line. She had not walked twenty minutes before she slowed, and sat heavily, gulping air. Don’t you stop here, she thought to herself. Don’t you stop, Anna Mercia. Don’t you stop.

  But she just curled up onto her side and started to shake.

  She closed her eyes. Then she felt the ground shiver under her, and she opened her eyes in fear, and saw headlights approaching very slowly. The asphalt was cool under her cheek where she lay and after a time she lowered her head and closed her eyes.

  They wanted so much, our mothers. I think about it sometimes. I don’t know how they did it. They wanted their lives back but still felt responsible for ours.

  I miss having her to talk to, there’s so much I’d ask. She was a secretary in a private school and I think of the paperwork and the staples, the dry air and the paycheque and the feel of a day’s work behind her and how much she must have wanted it. I don’t think my father liked it. But men get as much without judgment. Or so it seems when you’re not a man, and you watch them pass freely from the breakfast table to their cars in the morning. It looks so easy. Of course it’s not, it’s not easy for anyone. But it’s harder for a woman, the costs are physical. Men don’t feel the pain of possibilities in the same way, the permanence of choice. At the end of her life, bed-bound by illness, my mother said to me, Don’t let anyone tell you you can have everything. You can’t. A woman has to choose.

  I don’t think she ever got over my father. I could see it as a girl even if I couldn’t explain it. She met him at a swimming race in the Okanagan in 1964. He was the only black man there. He beat everyone in the race easily, everyone except my mother. She was famous for a while for winning that race. She had a newspaper clipping somewhere with her lifting a trophy, smiling. My father was standing beside her and you could just see his arm and shoulder cropped on the right.

  I think sometimes about what my mother said. All my life I guess I was living under that. You don’t choose your parents, you don’t choose what they go through. I guess as a girl I understood I was meant to pick, that I couldn’t have both as she’d tried for, couldn’t have both a family and a career. That idea guided me for so long, the awful strictness of it. When I learned I was pregnant with Kat I cried for days. I hate to think about it now. I didn’t choose to change. You can make all the decisions in the world, it doesn’t mean your body will listen to any of them. Kat, Katherine. My beautiful Katherine. She was a hard labour. Mason came out easy as anything, like he just couldn’t wait to get to know the world. Not Kat.

  I don’t know if anyone gets to have everything. But I don’t know that you have to choose either. I was almost thirty before I realized that was my mother’s life and not mine. I think about Kat and Mason and I worry what I must be pushing on them without knowing it. I know it’s something. It’s always something.

  THE INTERRUPTED MAN

  What is it, son? the old man asked. Did you hear it again?

  Mason nodded.

  From downstairs?

  Yes.

  The old man grunted and came into the study with the candle stub in his fist. It’s nothing, he said. I hear things too. There’s nothing down there.

  Mason watched the old man set the tray on the edge of an upturned chair. He was coming back to himself now and he could feel his thoughts righting themselves and he did not fear the old man as he had.

  He had followed him to this place. An old house gabled and shuttered. A tall door below had opened into gloom, into a narrow dim staircase leading up to the landing, the banister creaking and rickety under his sore hands as the old man ascended before him. All this he remembered now as if it were not real. Above the wainscotting were photographs of worlds long vanished, and where he sat with his back to the wall he could just make out the ghostly half-eroded faces in their frames.

  It’s just the shock of what we’ve been through, the old man was saying. It does things.

  But Mason knew it was not the shock. He lifted his head.


  The old man was very pale, and very tall, and the folds of skin under his eyes were deep and grooved in the candlelight. He kneeled and with a small brush swept aside the crumbled plaster on the desk and shook out the battered books and set out the tins of food he had found. His big hands were trembling badly. Sometimes he would clear his throat and the sound reminded the boy of ships in the harbour in the dark water. He remembered his grandfather’s small suitcase on the bed and the feeling in him of farewell. He thought then of his mother and then he thought: Kat will never believe me and will never believe this but she will believe Mom. I will find her but first I will find Mom and I will not be afraid no matter what.

  It’s getting dark, the old man said then. He leaned back in the gloom picking at his hands and eyeing Mason aslant. We’ll have to hide that candle. I don’t want people in the street to see it.

  What about people in the house. Should they be able to see it?

  The old man said nothing.

  What.

  The old man gave him a long look. You know what, he said.

  Then he picked up a can of chili and opened it very slowly and bent the lid back and passed it across. Mason took it but did not eat.

  There was no glass in the big window frame and the evening was blowing coldly in. A low grey ocean of light beyond the stoven roofs and laddered telephone poles flared first a deep blue then burned translucent and faded as if sucked down over the rim of the world. The day was failing. He thought of his mother out there in that city and then he tried very hard not to think.

  The candle stub had been set melted into a broken-legged stool and pooled now white and eerie in the hollows of his burnished hands where he sat and he watched the old man rise with a lantern shutter and cover the flame with its orange shade, the glare softening and smouldering on in the high, coved ceiling.

  I grew up here, the old man said. In this house. Did I tell you that?

  No.

  He opened and closed his fist in the bad light. A long harrowed scar rode in the white flesh. He said, Well I did. I can remember being your age and standing where you are now and watching my grandfather in the yard in the fall. You could smell the warm pies in the oven from right across the fields when the cook left the windows open. All this was pasture then.