Darkness My Old Friend

by Lisa Unger

  “It’s okay, Ray,” she said. “You’ve done a lot of good in your life. You’ve helped a lot of people.”

  He gave a slow, uncertain nod. She looked at the hard ridge of his forehead, the broken line of his nose. When he leaned in to kiss her, she didn’t push him away. She let his soft mouth touch hers, tentative and slow at first, then deeper. He had this way of holding her that she’d always loved. He wrapped his arms around her back, enveloping her completely. She put hers around his neck and took him all in-the wide expanse of his chest, the stubble on his jaw, the fading scent of the cigar he’d deny having smoked.

  “Ah, Eloise,” he whispered. “It’s been so long.”

  Once upon a time, making love was about flesh and beauty. It was about his muscles and his thick head of hair. It was about the heat between her legs. Her desire for Ray had been guilty and breathless. They’d rip at each other’s clothes. He used to enter her in a desperate rush, and she’d cry out in her pleasure. Tonight it was something else. Something slow and quiet, something they’d earned rather than something they’d stolen. She reached for the light, but he stopped her.

  “I want to look at you.”

  And he was right. She wanted to be seen, even though her beauty had faded and life had worn her down. And she wanted to see him, how the hairs on his chest had gone gray and the lines on his face had deepened into valleys. And it was all so imperfect-they were so imperfect-that she knew it was real. It wasn’t gauzy or indistinct like her visions; she wasn’t dreaming as she sometimes did about her life before. And after they were done, lay curled up in each other, Eloise found that for the first time in years she was hungry.

  chapter nineteen

  There was a warm scent to the room, something earthy and sweet. And there was a golden quality to the light. The sofa was plush, with big, soft pillows that Willow could hold upon her lap and hug with both her arms. And when she walked through the door, these things-as well as Dr. Cooper’s warm smile and how she always offered something warm to drink-caused the tension to leave her shoulders. She felt like she could breathe more easily in here than anywhere else in her world.

  Willow told that to her mother. Even though her mother had said she was glad, her voice got that tightness. Willow knew she’d hurt Bethany’s feelings somehow by saying that. Willow couldn’t imagine why that would hurt her mother’s feelings. It had nothing to do with her. And Bethany wondered why Willow never wanted to talk.

  Willow sank into the couch and fought off the urge to curl up and go to sleep. Here she had the sense that everything that was wrong with her would wait outside the door, unable to enter until she had rested. She could just be for an hour; she could just be honest.

  “I hear you’ve had a rough couple of days,” said the doctor.

  Dr. Cooper had already made her some hot chocolate and settled into the chair across from Willow. She had a way of talking, a softness to her tone. Like she knew all about it but didn’t judge. Which was new, because Willow felt like she was always being judged-by her friends, by her teachers, even by her mother. Judged and coming up short. She didn’t feel like that here. Not that Dr. Cooper ever let her off the hook for bad behavior. She bored in, wanting to know why and what Willow was thinking and how she might do better next time. It was exhausting sometimes to look so closely at the things she’d done. Willow was often angry and frustrated, sometimes embarrassed. Sometimes here she cried. But she never felt judged.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  She relayed the events of the last couple of days. And Dr. Cooper listened in that careful way she had, nodding, making low, affirming noises. She didn’t interrupt, as Willow’s mother did with pointless questions that confused Willow (“Why did you think that was okay?”) and exclamations that shamed her (“Oh, my God, Willow!”). And so Willow found herself opening up. If she cried, Dr. Cooper didn’t fawn over her, just handed her a box of tissues, told her it was okay to let her emotions out.

  “So what was going on with you inside, Willow? It seems to me like you’ve been doing a lot of running away-cutting school, leaving the library to go out to the graveyard with your friends. What are you running from? Or to?”

  Willow shrugged. She hadn’t really seen it that way before. “I was trying to get some space, I guess.”

  “What does that mean to you?”

  “Like, you know, when your backpack is too heavy or your pants are too tight. That feeling you have when you put the bag down or unbutton your jeans, that relief. Like that. I just wanted that feeling.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  There was a crystal prism hanging in the window. The afternoon light shining through cast rainbow flecks on the far wall. Willow wanted to walk over and spin it, make the rainbows dance like fairies.

  “You said something similar when we talked about the events in New York,” observed Dr. Cooper. “You said you just wanted to step out of your skin, you wanted to be someone else.”

  Dr. Cooper was the first person to whom Willow had ever told the whole truth about what happened in New York. She was the only person Willow had ever told about that dark, angry, dead feeling she had inside sometimes. How she’d just wanted to get away from herself.

  “It’s not quite the same,” the doctor went on. “But it has a similar essence.”

  “No,” said Willow. “It wasn’t as bad as that.”

  In New York it was about the lie that grew and grew. It took on a life of its own, getting more complicated, harder to manage. At first it made her feel good, powerful-the story about the concert and the boy she met there. Then it started to make her feel sick. But she still needed to do it, almost couldn’t stop herself, even when she wanted to. The lie just kept getting bigger, until it became a monster that ate her whole life. When she ran away in New York, she hadn’t planned to come back.

  “It’s just that school, this town, everybody’s expectations,” Willow said when the doctor stayed silent. “I just wanted not to have eyes on me for a little while.”

  They’d wanted to meet him, asked about him every day. This boy, her imaginary boyfriend. She’d made up a whole story about him: He went to Regis; his mother had died when he was little (so sad); his dad was a workaholic (they all knew about that). He took his little cousin to the Britney Spears concert (so sweet). His name was Rainer, after the poet (so cool). She bought herself gifts from him-a pretty ring, a teddy bear. She set up a fake e-mail account, sent herself notes from him that she could show her friends. Once they even had a fight.

  But then it all got to be too much. She thought about staging a breakup-something dramatic. Another girl. Or maybe she’d discovered that he was into drugs. I could not handle that, she’d say. And everyone would heartily agree. And then she could just go back to being Willow. Except she couldn’t. She didn’t want to. Who was she without the fiction of Rainer? She couldn’t remember. And she was smart enough to understand how pathetic this was. She’d made him up; he didn’t exist. And she was lost without him.

  She might have talked to her mother about it, if things were normal. If her father-if Richard-hadn’t moved out. But her mom was a wreck. Every night when she thought Willow was sleeping, Bethany cried. I fucked up our whole world, Willow heard Bethany say to someone on the phone. What did that mean? Willow didn’t know.

  Then one day that dark feeling settled in and she started thinking things she’d never thought before. She thought her mother might be better-off without her. If it hadn’t been for the fight Bethany and Richard had over the concert, they’d probably still be married. And if her friends ever found out that Rainer wasn’t real, they wouldn’t be her friends anymore. They’d hate her.

  The night when she told her mother she was spending the night with Zoë and she told Zoë she was seeing Rainer, she didn’t even know what she was going to do. She just wanted to go away, like she told the doctor. She wanted to get out of her own skin, to be someone, any
one else.

  And she was. After she walked out of the lobby of her building and turned off her block, for the first time in her life no one knew where she was or what she was doing. She wasn’t with her parents, in school, with her friends, or with a baby-sitter. She was totally and completely free. She could get on a train or a bus. She could go anywhere she wanted. But it wasn’t exciting the way she thought it would be. Within ten city blocks, it was lonely and terrifying.

  The city that was so familiar to her suddenly seemed loud and intimidating. Strange men leered, and car horns blared. The hundred dollars she had in her pocket suddenly seemed like nothing. The buildings were taller and harder, and she felt so small. She walked from the leafy airiness of the Upper West Side all the way down Broadway-through the chaos of midtown, the hip quiet of the Village. Eventually she found herself in the bustle of Chinatown, with icy cases of dead fish and duck carcasses turning on spits in windows, tables of Buddhas and crystal lotus flowers glinting. In SoHo the hundred dollars in her wallet wouldn’t even buy her a pair of sunglasses.

  She probably wasn’t even five miles from her home, but she might as well have been a thousand miles. If she didn’t go back, she realized, no one would find her in that city. That was the thing about New York-you were never alone and you always were. You were lost in plain sight.

  But scared and sad as she was, she couldn’t go home. She couldn’t call her mom or her friends and tell them all how she’d lied. It wasn’t the biggest thing in the world; it wasn’t the worst thing she could have done. It was just that it revealed so much about her, how pathetic and sad she was, how lonely, how not okay inside. That dark anger in her started to grow and spread, until it wasn’t only a part of her, it was all of her. And she thought it would just be easier to be gone.

  After hours of wandering, she wound up in Washington Square Park. It was late, and the park was closed; you could walk through but not hang out. She stopped at the playground where Bethany used to take her and laced her fingers through the black bars of the locked gate. She didn’t remember swinging on the swings or playing on the seesaw, bouncing on the little spring horse. But there were pictures of her there. And she wished that she were that small again. Which was strange, because usually the only thing she ever wished for was to be grown up, on her own, in charge of her life. Here she was with all of that and now she just wanted to be little again, playing with her mom on the playground.

  “Willow.”

  At first she thought it was a hallucination, that she had finally and truly lost it. Her mom was standing there, eyes red from crying. And the next thing Willow knew, she was in her mother’s arms, crying, too.

  “How did you find me here?” she asked. She clung to her mom’s red wool coat, unwilling to let go. Her mom didn’t answer right away, just kept crying. She walked Willow over to a bench, and they sat. Bethany took Willow’s face in her hands. Willow could see how scared and sad her mother was.

  “When you were small,” Bethany said, wiping her eyes, “I always told you if we somehow got separated in the park, you should come to this gate and wait for me and stop the first policeman you saw. I’ve been looking for you all night. I went everywhere we go together. This was the last place I thought of. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

  Dr. Cooper had wanted to know if Willow remembered her mother’s instructions, if on some subconscious level that memory had led her to the playground gate. Willow wasn’t sure she knew the answer.

  “What were you doing, Willow?” her mother had asked. “What were you going to do?”

  “I just wanted to be gone from this place,” she’d said. Really it was a wail, all her sadness and anger coming out of her in a roar.

  “What place?” Bethany asked. “What are you saying, baby?”

  After that, things just went haywire. Willow was ostracized at school. There was a battalion of shrinks, one worse than the last. Everyone thought Willow was suicidal. And then finally the announcement that they were leaving New York City, moving to a place called The Hollows. Her mother was right about their whole world being fucked up. It was just that it had been Willow’s fault, not Bethany’s.

  “If it weren’t for the things I’d done, we wouldn’t even be here,” Willow complained now to Dr. Cooper.

  “And what’s so bad about this place?”

  “It’s not New York City. The kids are all cretins. Suburban losers.”

  The doctor smiled. “No, it’s not New York City. I grew up here, you know. I remember that it seems like kind of a snore. I didn’t really fit in with the ‘cretins,’ either.”

  This piqued Willow’s interest. It was hard to imagine Dr. Cooper as a kid who didn’t fit in. “So what did you do?”

  “I expressed myself in the ways that I could. I studied hard and made good grades. When I grew up, I moved to New York City. I lived there for a long time.”

  “And then you came back here? Why?”

  “I fell in love with my husband. His job was here; my mother still lives here. We wanted a family, and I wanted that family to be safe. So we settled in The Hollows. Your mother wanted to come here so that you would be safe. So that she could protect you better.”

  Willow released a little snort. “So that she could control me better. So that she had to drive me everywhere.”

  The doctor shrugged. “Parents and children often disagree on the difference between protection and control.”

  Willow sank back into the couch and thought of Jolie and Cole, how free they were to do what they wanted to do, and what Willow knew about freedom now. The world was impossibly complicated. How did anyone ever figure anything out? How did you ever know what was the right thing? How could you ever tell what would make you happy?

  “I hate it here,” Willow said. “The Hollows sucks.”

  Usually this statement caused Bethany to lose it. But the doctor just offered her patient smile. “Wherever you go, there you are,” she said.

  Willow thought about this a second. “I don’t get it.”

  “You might be in New York City. You might be in The Hollows. You might be on the moon. But you’ll always be Willow. When you can be happy there, you’ll be happy anywhere.”

  Dr. Cooper was smiling as if she were enjoying herself. And Willow found herself smiling, too, even though she wasn’t sure she agreed. After all, New York City was cool. And The Hollows was not. What did that have to do with her?

  She finished telling Dr. Cooper about Jolie and Cole, about the graveyard and how they never found what she’d been looking for out there, how Jolie thought she was lying, and how she was grounded forever now.

  “You know, I don’t agree with your actions. But I think it’s progress that even though you felt the urge to lie, you stopped yourself,” Dr. Cooper said when Willow was done. “I think you can be proud of that.”

  Dr. Cooper knew, too, that the lying had started long before the lie about Rainer. For years Willow had been telling little lies to her friends and her parents about meaningless things. How a cute boy on the subway had winked at her or how she was having recurring nightmares. Once she made up a story about having almost been mugged, how she ran from three thugs on the train when they tried to take her backpack. She didn’t even know why she did it. She liked the thrill of it, the making up of events, coming up with details to make it more real. She liked the reactions she got. It wasn’t so different from what her mother did, was it? Okay, Willow, sure, her mother had said to that. The difference is, I’m not passing my fiction off as truth. If you want to tell stories, write them down.

  Dr. Cooper had said in one of their early sessions, “It’s almost like you’re creating a fictional Willow. Willow who boys like. Willow who escapes from muggers. A character. But I think the real Willow is pretty cool-smart, creative, adorable. Maybe you should try to get to know her.”

  “Yeah,” Willow had said. “I guess.”

  But isn’t that what they always told you? Be yourself? Do your best? How co
uld that be true for everyone? Not everyone was nice and kind, talented, pretty, intelligent. Sometimes your best was not good enough to achieve what you wanted. What happened then? Were you just stuck with yourself, your life just whatever sad product of your “best” effort?

  They talked then about her plans to do better in school, to stay focused and not run off.

  “When you feel like running, call me,” said Dr. Cooper. “We can talk it through.”

  Willow agreed. “But what do I do about Jolie? She’s my only friend, and even if she doesn’t hate me now because she thinks I lied, I’m not allowed to hang out with her anymore.”

  The truth was, she wasn’t that upset about it. Everything had an unhinged quality when she was around Jolie, as if they could just go right off the rails.

  “Be honest with her. Tell her you’re being punished and that you promised to be more focused on your schoolwork. If she’s a real friend, she’ll understand that.”

  Willow almost laughed out loud. Jolie would definitely not understand that. It all sounded so easy in here, in this safe, warm space. It seemed like everything could be talked out and worked out. There were no variables in this room, no wild cards. No heady emotions, no swell of anxiety, no pressure to be something she wasn’t. But it wasn’t like that out there in the real world. Out there the moment could sweep Willow into its current. And all her good intentions and heartfelt promises would be washed away like broken branches in a rushing river.

  chapter twenty

  Jones didn’t like it when Maggie was mad at him, but it wasn’t going to keep him from going about his day. This was one of the things he hated about The Hollows, one of the things he’d always hated. Someone was always watching, itching to pick up the phone and start chattering. Because of Maggie’s conversation with Henry, she knew that he hadn’t gone to his scheduled appointment with Dr. Dahl. Their argument this morning was still ringing in his ears.