Darkness My Old Friend

by Lisa Unger

  Words were so awkward in his mouth. He didn’t know how to use them to express his inner life. It was as if they didn’t fit, a language that seemed to work for everyone else but him. He couldn’t bring himself to climb the stairs, wasn’t sure what he would say if he did go up to her. He’d made so many apologies, so many promises. What was left to say?

  He found himself thinking suddenly of the workbench. For Christmas a few years back, after they’d discovered that his cholesterol and blood pressure were through the roof, Maggie bought and had installed in the garage an elaborate workspace, with every possible tool he’d need for the woodworking he used to enjoy. He’d never once touched it; it just sat, collecting dust.

  He wandered down the hallway now and went out into the garage. He pressed the button by the door to open up the space to the outside, and he flipped on the light. The garage door clattered open, letting in a rush of cool evening air. The wind outside was wild, sending leaves skittering across the drive.

  He walked over to the bench… tiny drawers filled with every possible nail and screw, a hammer and a set of screwdrivers hanging, still gleaming. Beside the bench a circular saw, a cabinet with a selection of blades, a power drill with every bit. Everything he needed was there to build anything he cared to build. He just didn’t know what he wanted to construct. But for the first time, he didn’t feel guilty looking at it; it didn’t stare back accusingly, neglected.

  As he lifted his hand to touch the work area, the garage flooded with a blinding halogen light, the rumble of an engine. He shaded his eyes against the glare and walked outside. A giant maroon SUV had pulled up beside Ricky’s car. The door opened, and out climbed Chuck Ferrigno. He looked a little heavier, a little more haggard than the last time Jones had seen him, not quite a year ago.

  “I know,” said Chuck when he caught sight of Jones. “I look like shit.”

  Jones had always really liked Chuck, was glad that the post he’d resigned as head detective at Hollows PD had been given to the other man. Chuck deserved it. He might be the last of the real cops, someone who didn’t come to the job because of a crime show he’d seen on television.

  “The job takes its toll,” said Jones. He gave Chuck a hearty slap on the shoulder as they shook hands.

  “You look good, Jones. Rested. Retirement agrees with you.”

  I’m in therapy. My wife hates me. And I have no fucking idea what to do with whatever amount of time I have left. Oh, and I’m obsessed with death. Wake up every night with the sweats just thinking about it.

  “Can’t complain,” Jones said. “Life is good.”

  “My wife wants me to retire,” Chuck said. He issued a snort of disdain. “I told her she needs to pull down six figures like Maggie and I’ll think about it.”

  Chuck rubbed his forehead, and Jones noticed that he’d lost the little hair he used to have on top. Chuck’s crown gleamed in the light over the garage. He still kept that ring of hair around his ears, though, like a friar. Jones thought he should shave it, grow a goatee, make it work for him. But real men didn’t talk about hair.

  “What brings you out?” asked Jones.

  “Ah,” said Chuck. He glanced up at the sky, then around the yard, as though looking for something he’d lost. “I need to talk. Have some time?”

  Buddy, I’ve got nothing but time.

  “Sure. Come on in. I’ll put on some coffee.”

  Jones was embarrassed to acknowledge a giddy rush of excitement as he led Chuck inside.

  He couldn’t breathe, but it was okay-a relief even. He almost could believe it, how close was the edge of darkness. One minute he’d been standing on the bank, the great rushing river a roar in his head. Then he saw her, a floating reed of a girl, motionless but for the current sweeping her along. There was no thought. He was only action. He was only the blast of the frigid water all around him. Then there was a blissful silence, a peaceful, all-consuming quiet. He almost let it take him. But then he saw her floating ahead of him. Her hair was a halo. Her arms were outstretched like wings.

  Come on, girl. I’ll take you home.

  Her thin body was in his hands. He could feel her ribs against his palms as he lifted her, kicking them both toward the milky distant light of the surface. How were they so deep? How did they get so far down?

  Don’t give up.

  Then something powerful lifted her from his grasp, and she rose, pulled like a puppet on strings. He watched her go, and as she got farther from him, he felt his will waning. The pull of the cold water was so strong. And now that he had no one to save, his desire to reach the surface was fading. His legs felt heavy, his arms too tired to stroke. So he simply stopped moving, pushing, struggling. It was just that easy.

  “Jones.”

  Maggie. I’m sorry.

  Then he was in his own home, lying on the couch. The television filled the dark room with its flickering light. Maggie sat beside him, looking small and pale in her white nightgown.

  “You were howling.” Her voice wobbled in the sentence; her eyes were wide.

  “Was I?” He sat up, wiped some drool from the side of his face. Being embarrassed in front of his wife was a new feeling. He didn’t like it, how awkward they were with each other. When had it happened? How long had it taken him to notice?

  “I thought it was an animal-in pain,” she said. “In terrible pain.”

  That’s not too far from the truth, actually.

  “What were you dreaming about?” she asked.

  He shook his head. Already the dream was slipping away from his consciousness. “I don’t remember,” he lied.

  He hadn’t told Maggie about Eloise Montgomery’s visit or her premonition. But obviously she’d unsettled him more than he would have been willing to admit.

  Maggie curled her legs under her. He’d decided to sleep on the couch tonight and give her the bed rather than continue to wake up to notice her absence, to lie awake and wonder why she didn’t want to sleep beside him.

  She was looking at him in a way that he realized had become familiar, as though her husband were a confounding puzzle she was unsure she wanted to solve.

  “What did Chuck want?” she asked. “I saw him pull into the driveway.”

  Jones sat up and turned on the lamp beside the couch, grabbed the remote control, and turned off the television. The stack of files Chuck had left sat on the end table. It seemed like a week ago that he’d been there; it had been only a few hours.

  “Do you remember Marla Holt?” Jones asked.

  Maggie cocked her head, stared up at the ceiling. “The name is vaguely familiar.”

  “You were still in graduate school at the time.”

  Maggie had left for New York City right after high school, earning her undergraduate degree at New York University and then going on to Columbia for her master’s in family and adolescent psychology. When her father was dying from lung cancer, she’d returned to The Hollows to help her mother. During that time Jones and Maggie connected for the first time since Hollows High and fell in love. She came home, they got married, and she opened a private practice. They’d been in The Hollows ever since.

  “Maybe my mother mentioned it,” she said. There was very little that Maggie’s mother, Elizabeth, failed to mention. The former principal of Hollows High, Elizabeth was, in her retirement, an information hub. She would have known everything there was to know about the Marla Holt case and everything else that went on in The Hollows. “But I don’t remember the details.”

  “Marla was a woman in her late thirties with a fourteen-year-old son and a small daughter when she went missing in 1987,” he said. “Her husband, Mack Holt, said she ran off with another guy. We suspected foul play, but we could never prove anything. Eventually the Holt disappearance went into the unsolved file.”

  “It was your case?” She was leaning toward him now. He remembered this-how she’d always loved talking about his work and how he’d loved talking to her about his cases. Her ideas, her psychological
insights, her knowledge of human nature made her an invaluable resource. He relied on her so much, for everything. He wouldn’t have been half as good at his job without her.

  “One of my first after making detective,” he said. He got up and bent back to stretch out his spine. He heard a sharp succession of pops, but there was little relief from the ache that had settled there.

  “What happened to the children?”

  “Funny you should ask. I’m not sure about the girl, but the boy is in his thirties now. And he’s still looking for answers.”

  “He wants to reopen the case?” she asked.

  “He’s hired the dynamic duo,” he said. “Ray Muldune, retired detective, and Eloise Montgomery, psychic sidekick.”

  Maggie released a long, slow breath, rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Those names were bound to bring up a lot of bad memories.

  “She came here today, too. Coincidentally,” Jones said. He just dropped it in, so that it would sound casual. “Or maybe not so coincidentally. Maybe it’s part of whatever scam they’re running. Who knows?”

  She looked up at him, surprise creasing her brow. “Eloise Montgomery came here? What did she want?”

  He released a disdainful snort. “She had a vision about me pulling a body out of water. She thought I needed to know about it.”

  He rolled his eyes to further emphasize his skepticism, but he could tell she didn’t buy it. She pinned him down with an inquisitive look. He sank into the couch beneath the weight of it. The clock on the DVD player read 12:03.

  “How did you feel about that?” she asked.

  She didn’t fool him, either. She didn’t want to deal with how it made her feel, so she was asking him about his feelings.

  “Annoyed more than anything,” he said. “Who does she think she is?”

  Maggie wrapped her arms around herself. A lifetime ago Maggie’s mother had visited Eloise Montgomery. And the things she’d learned from Eloise had far-reaching impact, the true nature of which was discovered only last year. Jones slid in closer to his wife, dropped an arm around her shoulder, and she molded herself against him.

  “So… what?” she said. “Chuck had questions about the Marla Holt case?”

  Jones shrugged. “He asked if he could bring the files by, wondered if I’d take a look and see what I remembered. Who knows, maybe from a distance something might pop.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “If that’s okay.”

  She gazed up at him with something like relief. He felt her body relax under his arm. “Are they paying you?”

  “Just barely,” he said. “Holt is making noise-calling the chief, writing letters to the mayor. Muldune has been asking for the files. Chuck held them off by telling them he’d put someone on it unofficially. But with budget cuts they had to let two guys go this year; they don’t have the manpower.”

  “So they want you as a consultant.”

  He liked the sound of that, couldn’t help but smile. “On the cheap and down low,” he said.

  “I think it’s a good gig. Maybe you need something like this.”

  “As long as it doesn’t interfere with my other thriving business-guy around the neighborhood with nothing to do but get your mail.”

  She lifted a hand to touch his face. He caught it and pressed it to his chest. She gave him a tentative smile, then looked away.

  “That reminds me,” she said. “You got a call today from a woman by the name of Paula Carr from The Oaks. She got your name from the Pedersens.”

  The Oaks was a wealthy neighborhood about ten minutes north of the downtown area where Jones and Maggie lived. It was his first call off their street, and it reminded him again of Eloise’s visit and her other warning that he was getting a reputation. What had she said? People are going to start coming to you for more, from farther away. It might lead you to places you don’t expect.

  He shared this with Maggie, and she accepted it with a nod but didn’t say anything right away. In the quiet, Jones noticed the ticking of that goddamn clock again. He really hated that thing.

  “So that could mean Chuck, too,” she said. She sounded thoughtful, far off.

  He pushed out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, if we’re putting weight behind the ramblings of a mentally ill woman.”

  He felt her snake her arms around his middle and hold on tight. He returned her embrace, leaned down to kiss her soft, open mouth.

  “We’re not, are we?” he asked. He looked into those deep, sweet eyes.

  She leaned up and kissed him again. Was it a little urgent? It sent a jolt through him. They still had it, that heat. It had never once waned in all their years together, even in the hard times, even when they were sleeping in separate rooms. He always wanted her. Always.

  “No. Of course not.” She stood and offered him her hand. “Come to bed.”

  chapter eight

  Michael Holt pulled into the driveway of his childhood home and cut the engine. The windows were dark, the lawn overgrown. One of the lower-level shutters hung by a single nail, listing to the side. He sat in the warm interior of the car and considered driving back into town and getting a hotel room. The Super 8 off the highway had rooms for sixty-nine dollars a night, including cable television and a pancake breakfast. The billboard had boasted superlatives like CLEAN! and SAFE!-which might not be enough for some but were more than enough for Michael, especially given his current residence.

  He thought about his dwindling bank account, though, and the fact that the house-run-down and badly in need of modernization-could sit on the market in a struggling economy for months, even years.

  Well, said the agent he’d hired to list the house. The word had sounded more like a sigh coming from her pretty, glossed lips. We’ll see what we can do. Some people are looking for teardowns and handyman specials. She’d been all smiles in the office. On the property, when he was showing her the house, she’d gone stiff, her smile turning down into a kind of grimace, a look of falsely bright endurance. She’d made polite little noises of dismay. “Um,” she’d said in the upstairs bath. “Oh,” she’d murmured in the attic. “Wow,” she’d said in his father’s room. In the kitchen she’d lost her composure. “Oh, my God. How did he live like this?”

  “I don’t know,” Michael had said. “We weren’t… close.”

  “Michael,” she said finally in the foyer. He’d watched her back toward the door, a beautifully manicured hand to her forehead. “You’re going to have to clear out some of this clutter. I really can’t show it until you do.”

  Clutter. It was an interesting choice of words. Clutter seemed so innocent-maybe a pile of papers on the desk, or a closet filled with too many old clothes, maybe a mess in the garage. Clutter was almost funny, something that needed to be cheerfully tidied up. It didn’t begin to describe his father’s house. It was a towering menace of filth. There were the overflowing boxes in the hallways, stacks of newspapers and magazines in the bathroom; Michael’s old room was filled with computer parts and old telephones, an unexplainable graveyard of nonfunctioning electronic devices. There was a closet where they’d kept the cat’s litter box. The cat was long dead, but the smell of his urine and feces remained. Opening that closet door was to invite an olfactory assault that could bring a man to his knees.

  There were shelves and shelves of books in every room, and a cartoon plume of dust flew up whenever one was removed from its place. It was the kitchen, though, that was the dark heart of the house, the smell of decay so oppressive, the buzzing of flies so unnerving that he’d not even set foot over the threshold. And that was just the first floor.

  Movement on the property next door caught Michael’s eye. He saw Mrs. Miller on her porch, her arms folded across her middle. It was dark, but he could tell she was looking in his direction, wondering why he was sitting there in his car. She was probably wondering, too, about the sign that the agency had placed in the yard today. He’d thought it would bring him some relief to see it there. But instead
he felt a familiar dark hollow within him, this terrible emptiness he had carried around ever since his mother had left. It started just below his navel and spread through him like a stain-red wine on linen.

  ***

  “Where’s Mom?” It was a hundred years ago that he’d first asked that question, the question he’d been asking in one way or another every day since.

  His father, Mack, had stood in the kitchen, scrambling eggs in a scratched-up yellow pan on the stove. His father had seemed to freeze, to hold his breath, when Michael entered the room and pulled up his usual chair at the table. Michael remembered everything about that room that morning. How the sun came in from the window over the sink, and through it he could see the tire swing he hadn’t touched in years. How the chair leg always caught on the vinyl tile that was coming up, how there was a cigarette burn in the red-and-white checked tablecloth. He could smell the eggs, cooked too long. His mother wouldn’t like the coffee his father had made; it smelled weak. They’d probably bicker about it. If you don’t like the coffee I make, make it yourself.

  “What do you mean, ‘Where’s Mom?’ ”

  There was something strange about his father’s tone, something taut and foreign; his shoulders seemed to quake just slightly. Mack still hadn’t turned to look at him; Michael stared at the back of his father’s head, the dark brown hair run through with gray, the eternal plaid shirt, the chinos and brown leather shoes. What are you wearing, Mack? His mother’s eternal question that wasn’t a question but a taunt.

  That morning Michael had a terrible headache, a real killer. He’d struggled for the details of the night before but found he couldn’t remember. He was supposed to spend the night at a friend’s house, but once there he’d wanted to come home. He remembered riding his bike through the quiet streets. He remembered leaving the bike in the drive and coming up the front steps, putting his hand on the knob. But that was the last moment he could recall. As vivid as his memory of that morning was, the night before was still, years later, a total blank.