Darkness My Old Friend

by Lisa Unger

“Do you think your father killed her? Is that why you’re back? Now that he’s dead, you want to answer that question?”

  Holt covered his eyes and shook his head. He didn’t reply, and Jones regretted asking. The words were harsh. Even if Holt was toying with the idea himself, he wasn’t necessarily willing to say it out loud. Jones had a feeling that the conversation was going to come to an abrupt end. Not being a cop, he’d have no right to press. When Michael Holt looked up again, all Jones saw was a desperately sad young man.

  “I’m not feeling well, Mr. Cooper. If there’s nothing else, you can see yourself out.”

  Holt got up then and left the room. A minute later Jones heard more banging from the kitchen. He saw himself out.

  Once in the car, he called Chuck.

  “It’s my advice that you get someone out there to start digging. I’ll call Bill Grove and get you permission, no problem.”

  He heard Chuck shuffling papers on the other side. “Really? What do you think is out there?”

  “No idea.” That was a lie. He had an idea.

  Chuck was eating something now, chewing unapologetically into the phone. “What are you thinking, Jones?”

  Between whatever Michael Holt was hiding (and he was hiding something), Ray Muldune’s obsessive nature (they went way back), and Eloise Montgomery’s visions, this thing was not going away. Jones told Chuck as much. What Jones didn’t say was that he didn’t want it to go away. He wanted to know what had happened to Marla Holt. He wanted to know what was back in the Hollows Wood.

  As a young, ambitious cop, he’d been eager to clear the board, to move on from cases that couldn’t be solved. He didn’t always follow his instincts. It wasn’t that he let things slide. It was just that he relied more heavily on what he saw than on what he felt. And what he saw back then when he looked at the Holt case was a beautiful and unhappy woman who’d had an affair and run off on her family. Even though there might have been a few details that nagged, he’d relied on the facts and maybe a little on his preconceived ideas about women, about people.

  The years had taken plenty from him. But he’d learned a few things, too. He’d learned patience, for one thing. Not much, Maggie would argue. But he had more than he used to, certainly. He’d learned that people had many facets, each of them true. And just because you saw one face clearly most of the time, that didn’t mean there wasn’t another one right behind it. But more than anything, he’d learned that when he felt that nagging discomfort (he had it now that he was looking back on the Marla Holt case), there was something to it. He wasn’t arrogant enough anymore to imagine that he knew what it was.

  “We didn’t talk about renovating, Michael. We just wanted to clean up the place.” Tammy, the real estate agent, sounded exasperated.

  “Right. But wouldn’t putting in new cabinets help us sell the place better?”

  Tammy issued a sigh on the other end of the phone. Michael could just see the parting of those perfectly glossed lips, the wringing of her manicured hands. She was one of those women, tight-bodied, waxed, painted, hair-colored. He wasn’t sure he’d seen any part of her in the raw. Everything from eyebrows to toenails was in check.

  “Michael, you’re not getting it,” she said. There was a new harshness in her voice. “The kitchen cabinets are not the problem. The house is a teardown. Someone will demolish it and build a new structure on the land. Putting in cabinets is a waste of your time and money. Did you call those cleaning crews I told you about? Get some estimates? We need to remove that junk.”

  He didn’t tell her he’d already taken a sledgehammer to the kitchen. It always looked so easy on those home-repair shows. But the real world didn’t yield so easily; it splintered in some places, held on tight in others. It came off in great chunks or refused to budge.

  “Let’s just get back to basics, Michael.” She had this really annoying habit of using his name all the time. As if he were a hyperactive child and she was always struggling to keep his attention. “Call a crew. Start having the junk hauled away. You can’t do this work by yourself. And forget about those cabinets.”

  He didn’t say anything. For whatever reason, her advice reminded him of Eloise Montgomery. “Just let this go,” she’d said. “She’s gone. She has been for many years. It never does any of us any good to live in the past.”

  “Are you hearing me, Michael?” asked Tammy.

  He wanted to answer her, but he couldn’t find his voice. This happened to him when there were too many competing thoughts, or sounds, or demands on his attention. Something in him just froze. He stood in the semidemolished kitchen, phone in one hand, sledgehammer in the other, and he just couldn’t manage to get any words out.

  “Michael?”

  Then, “Oh, for crying out loud.” And Tammy hung up. He stuck the phone back in his pocket.

  He felt it then, that terrible tide of rage. It came up from within him, filling his ears with the sound of rushing blood. He hefted the sledgehammer and used all his strength to put it through the drywall, releasing a mighty roar. A plume of white-gray dust rose into the already cloudy air. Next the counter. It splintered but didn’t collapse. Then the floor. He felt the impact rocket through his arms and into his back. The pain sobered him. Concrete. The floor must be concrete beneath the linoleum. He sank to the floor, let the dust settle on his hair, his body. He wished it could bury him, like snow. He felt a little better, the terrible rush of anger passing, receding, then gone.

  But what kind of advice was that from Eloise Montgomery? Most people could recognize that a child would want to know what had happened to his mother, even if that child was nearly forty and his mother had been gone for more than twenty-five years. This is not something that a person moves on from. It defines him.

  His sister seemed to have more peace with it, periods in her life where she was busy with school, career, later her husband and children. But she was so young when Mom had disappeared. Cara admitted that she hardly remembered their mother at all. She did suffer bouts of depression related to their mother’s disappearance, went through a phase where she’d hired a private detective. When that endeavor turned up nothing, she started to see a shrink. But it had been a long time since they’d talked about Mom; Michael sensed that Cara had given up, moved on in a way he could not. In some sense, Cara thought of their aunt Sally as her mother, with whom Cara had gone to live in the year after their mother vanished. Michael stayed with his father. He wanted to be there, waiting, when his mother came home.

  Cara had been upset that he’d hired Ray Muldune and Eloise Montgomery. She hadn’t come back to say good-bye to their father or to help Michael settle the estate.

  “A psychic? Really, Mike? Really?” She said it in that flat way that people do now. Really. A way that manages to imply disbelief and disdain, an air of superiority.

  “I wanted this to be the closing of a door,” she’d said to him. “Why do you have to keep prying it open?”

  “The door will never close until I know what happened to her. And I feel like this is my last chance. He’s gone. Whatever he was guarding, hiding here, is mine now.”

  He heard her breathing. When she was little, Michael had liked to watch Cara sleep. She was so peaceful, so solidly asleep, as though nothing could wake her. The sound of her breath used to make him happy, relax him.

  “Take it all, okay?” she said. “Whatever money he had left, the house, whatever you find. It’s all yours.” She didn’t say it with heat. “But when you’ve found what you’re looking for-or if you don’t-promise me you’ll stop focusing on Mom and use whatever money is left to start focusing on yourself. Promise me.”

  “I promise.” But the line between them crackled with uncertainty.

  “I’m a mother now, you know,” she said. “I understand how hard it is, how unceasing are the demands, how mundane and just frustrating it can be day after day. There’s no break from being a mother, no weekends or holidays. You’re on call twenty-four/seven. When you’re not
with them, you’re thinking about them.”

  He’d never heard her say anything like that. He always thought of her as the perfect mom-carpooling, baking cookies, making Halloween costumes.

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “I’m just saying that I never wanted anything else, you know. Not like my friends. I never had big dreams. I just wanted to have a house, a family-you know, to be a mom. So it’s good for me. I love it. But if I didn’t? If I had wanted something else and got this instead, and if I didn’t love my husband? Maybe I could just walk away and not come back.”

  “She didn’t,” he said.

  “I’m just saying. And then you wouldn’t-couldn’t-come back. Even if you hated yourself, regretted it, missed your children. How could you face that shame, face the pain you’d caused, answer those questions? Mommy, why did you leave us?” Her voice broke on that, and she started to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say.

  He listened to her take a couple of deep, shuddering sobs. He wanted to hold her, comfort her. But even if they were together, he wouldn’t be able to do that. He couldn’t handle physical closeness like that, not with her. Not when she looked so much like their mother. In fact, though they talked every month at least, he hadn’t seen his sister in three years.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I love you. Take care of yourself, okay?”

  She’d hung up before he could say anything else, and they hadn’t talked since. She’d sent flowers to Mack’s grave. The card read, We hope you have found peace. Did she really hope that? he wondered. Or was that something people just said? These niceties that people uttered-blanketing a well of anger and resentment or masking apathy-they were so confusing.

  Now he looked around at the mess he’d made. The kitchen was bad before. He’d cleaned out all the decaying organic matter, and the smell was better. At least to him-when he was wearing a mask. But in taking down the rotting old cabinets, he’d managed to turn the space into a demolition site. And the fact was, Michael realized, he had no idea whatsoever how to install new cabinets or floors. He wasn’t even sure that’s why he’d done it. Did he decide to renovate and then begin demolition? Or did he decide to renovate after he’d already picked up the hammer and started destroying? He honestly couldn’t remember. He’d never really even painted a wall. Tammy was right. He needed to call in that cleaning crew.

  But the thought of that-strangers stomping through this place, taking everything that was left of her and putting it in a Dumpster-filled him with dread. Holding on, even to these wrecked remains, was so much easier than letting go. Maybe he was his father’s son after all.

  He heard another knock at the front door and moved quickly from the kitchen. He was afraid that Tammy had gotten into her car and come to see what he’d done. Or that Jones Cooper had returned with more questions that Michael couldn’t and didn’t want to answer. He’d found Cooper’s visit unsettling, mainly because he recalled so little about that night, had so many questions himself. And he remembered Jones Cooper, with his hard, analytical stare. Jones Cooper saw things, no matter what you said. He saw things in you that you didn’t know were there.

  “Michael, are you home?”

  It was Ray Muldune, carrying the brown paper bag that Michael knew contained his mother’s running shoes. Ray stayed in the foyer, had his hand over his mouth.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” Ray said.

  The older man had an odd look on his face. Michael really liked Ray. Ray said what he meant, even if it was rude, insensitive, or ugly.

  “Did it work?” Michael asked.

  Ray gave a noncommittal lift of his shoulders, a quick bob of the head. “She saw something. I don’t know what it means.”

  “Tell me.”

  Michael had never wanted to be away from her. Even when he was too old to want to be with her all the time, he did. At sleepovers he’d often slip out and ride his bike home, causing much commotion in the morning at his friend’s house when he was discovered missing. He didn’t like to sleep away from his mother. She needed him. She’d said so. More than Cara, more than his father, she needed Michael. Or maybe she hadn’t said so; he couldn’t remember when she had. But somehow he just knew. That’s why he didn’t understand, could never understand, how she would have left him behind.

  That night she’d wanted him to go. He remembered that. “You’re too old for this, honey. Most kids love sleepovers-scary movies, pizza, candy till you drop. You don’t want to sit home in your room while all your friends are having fun.”

  Were they really his friends, though? He and Brian used to be friends in grade school. They used to play in the woods behind Michael’s house, explore the abandoned structures, climb into the forbidden mine heads, and walk the dark tunnels. But now that they were in middle school, things were different. Michael still wanted to do those things. But Brian wanted to play baseball, talk to girls. They didn’t really hang out anymore, even though their mothers were still friends. In the hallway the other day, Michael had heard someone call him a freak. When he turned around to see who it was, he saw Brian standing in a group of jocks. Brian wasn’t looking at him, but the other guys were laughing.

  These sleepovers were really just about baby-sitting: I’ll take Brian this Saturday; you’ll have Michael next week. But he went, because she wanted him to go. He knew that his father wouldn’t be home until late. Cara would have Mom all to herself. Sometimes he wished he were small like Cara, could still fit into his mother’s lap, that she still brushed his hair and buttoned up his coat. Why can’t I go on a sleepover? Cara had wailed as he left on his bike. The irony of it.

  There was pizza, candy, and a scary movie. But Michael and Brian barely exchanged a word that whole night, skulking around each other, both sullenly enduring what had been demanded of them. And when everyone was sleeping, Michael crept out the front door, climbed onto his bike that tilted in the driveway, and drove home. That ride, the high white moon, the strips of gliding clouds, the smell of skunk and cut grass, the chill of the air. That was all he remembered, really. He didn’t remember letting himself in, or creeping up to his bedroom, or going to sleep. But that’s what he must have done, because he woke up in his bed the next morning.

  It wasn’t until this afternoon, talking to Jones Cooper, that he remembered the raised voices, the fighting he’d heard. He did remember that now; it had been coming back since he’d talked to Mrs. Miller. But that was it. Maybe it was clearing up the clutter that was jogging his memory. He’d heard about that, how cleaning out your house could cleanse your mind and your spirit, change your life. The clutter represented trapped energy, a repressed past. Not that this was his house. But in a way it was, because he’d never made another home for himself, not really-just a string of dorms, rooming houses, and studio apartments. In a way he’d never really left this place.

  Ray told him about Eloise’s vision, about men chasing a woman through the woods-two men, voices raised, calling behind her. Hearing Ray talk about it, Michael felt his stomach start to wrench and cramp.

  “Eloise wants me always to be careful to say that these visions might not be related to your case,” said Ray. “But she saw these things while wearing your mother’s shoes.”

  They were standing outside on the front step. Ray didn’t like to come into the house. Michael didn’t blame him.

  “So what does it mean?” Michael asked. “What happens now?”

  Ray had a way of looking at Michael that sometimes made him uncomfortable. It was a calm and searching gaze, a careful examination of what stood before him. He always looked slightly mystified, as though he couldn’t quite believe his eyes.

  “Sometimes her visions deepen, meaning that she’ll see greater detail over the next couple of days. And if she does, then we might have more to go on; she might see faces, or the voices might become clearer, or maybe she’ll hear a name. But right now it sounds to me that the area she described is ab
out a mile into the woods behind your house. There’s a clearing with an abandoned building. The locals call it the Chapel. Do you know it?”

  He knew it. Of course he did. Inside, he heard a kind of white noise. A lightness welled up from his stomach, and he started to feel so hot. Beads of sweat trailed down his back. He sat on the step and put his head in his hands, willing himself not to throw up.

  “Michael. Are you all right?”

  No, man, no. I am really not all right. My father is dead. My mother has been missing for so long, and I cannot stop looking for her no matter what I do. And I’m starting to remember things, ugly things about the night she left. Christ.

  “I’m fine,” he said instead. “Just overheated, I guess, or breathing in some bad air. I’m trying to renovate the kitchen.”

  Ray was quiet, sat down beside Michael. Michael told him about Jones Cooper’s visit, about how he remembered raised voices in the house that night.

  Mikey , be a good boy for Mom, okay? I love you more than anything. Those were the last words he remembered hearing from his mother. He’d replayed them, the quick kiss that followed, the feeling of her hand patting him on the back as he left. She always said that: I love you more than anything. Her tone was light, harking back to when he was small, and she’d say, I love you more than all the stars in the sky and all the fish in the sea and all the flowers in all the fields. And he’d say, I love you more than all the ladybugs and dragonflies and butterflies. She’d say, I love you more than all those things, times ten. I love you more than anything. He’d heard her say it to Cara, too. Which hurt in a way he knew even then that it shouldn’t. He turned back once as he got on his bike. But she wasn’t standing in the door waving as she usually did; she was tending to Cara’s misery. If she had known that it was their last moment together, he would have felt it. But it was a parting like any other casual parting, quick and perfunctory and see you in a bit, honey. There was no charge to it. It was this moment, more than any other, that made him think that something had happened to her, something not of her choosing.