Darkness My Old Friend

by Lisa Unger

  When the police knocked on her door all those years ago, she’d told them that she’d seen a black sedan, that Marla Holt had gotten into it and ridden away. She had seen that, many times. The vehicle would come to a stop outside the house, and Marla would run outside and climb in, always dressed up pretty. Once she’d had a small valise. Claudia had seen that, just not the night Marla went missing.

  Among all her secrets, her little bits of stored knowledge, this had been her most precious. Watching from her window as the lights went on inside the Holt house, lights she hadn’t seen burning in years, she knew that someone had discovered the truth. And she felt angry, bitter, as though something had been stolen from her.

  She shut the blinds and went to bed.

  chapter thirty-eight

  THE HOLLOWS SUCKS. Willow wrote this in her notebook as Mr. Vance handed back their essays about A Separate Peace. She barely glanced at it as he put it on her desk. An A, of course.

  “Nice work, Miss Graves.” She looked up at him, and he smiled at her, the way he used to. And she smiled back. He leaned in to whisper, tapping on her notebook, “It’s not that bad.”

  They spent the rest of the class talking about the essay question. Willow stayed silent until the end, when Mr. Vance glanced in her direction.

  “Willow wrote an extraordinary essay,” he said. “Would you care to share your thoughts about the book? You’re uncharacteristically silent today.”

  Everybody was looking at her in the way they had been for the last couple of days. Everyone, it seemed, knew about her running away, falling into the Black River, being fished out by the police. They thought that she’d been chased by Michael Holt. (In fact it was only Jolie who claimed to have seen him. That’s why she was screaming. But Willow wasn’t sure it was true.) They’d really been chasing Jolie, trying to get her to come in from the rain.

  In some rumors Michael Holt had confessed to Willow about murdering his mother. (She’d never even seen him. By the time her mother and Mr. Ivy got her back to the car, he’d been taken away already.) They all knew now that she’d been the one to see him digging in the Hollows Wood. They’d stopped sneering and laughing at her, for some reason. Everyone wanted to talk to her, to hear about that night in the woods. And Willow was happy to tell the tale for them. Finally she had something to say that was harrowing and extraordinary, and not a lie at all.

  “I think Gene did knock Fin from the tree on purpose,” said Willow. “He bounced the branch.”

  “But they were friends, best friends,” said Mr. Vance.

  “True. But sometimes we hurt the people we love, and we do it because something inside us is hurting,” she said. “It doesn’t even have to do with the other person. Sometimes there’s just this ugly, unhappy place inside us. And everything bad-anger, jealousy, sadness-it all lives there.”

  Mr. Vance was looking at her so intently that she almost stopped talking. Everyone was looking at her.

  “Go on,” Mr. Vance said.

  “And sometimes you go there-you live in that place. And when you’re there, you might do and say terrible things. Because things that are good and happy and bright seem ugly and cause you pain. You want to smash those things. You want other people to hurt, too. So you hurt them, even if you love them.”

  “Very insightful, Willow,” said Mr. Vance.

  She shrugged. “It’s just a book.” When she glanced up at him, he was smiling, but he still looked sad. She was sad, too. He was one of the people she had hurt, and they couldn’t be friends, not like they used to, anymore.

  “Story is life, Miss Graves,” he said. She’d heard him say that a million times. She finally understood what he meant.

  Out in the hallway after class, Cole was waiting for her. He took her backpack and walked her to her locker.

  “How was class?” he asked.

  She held up her essay.

  “Brainiac,” he said. He leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Want a ride home?”

  “I have to ask my mom,” she said. She gave him a roll of her eyes.

  “So call her,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

  “How was it today?” she asked him.

  He shrugged, looked down at his feet. “Fine.” He wasn’t much of a talker.

  It was his first day back at school since the night in the woods. His father had been arrested for embezzlement or something like that. And Cole had been reunited with his mother. They were both staying with his stepmother and his half siblings-which Willow thought must be the weirdest possible situation. She tried to imagine her and her mom living with Brenda the stripper. It would not be okay. But Cole seemed happy with it. His mom needed a place; he wanted to stay in The Hollows and be close to Claire and Cameron-and to Willow. So, for now, it worked. When his mom got a good job, they’d get their own place.

  “Cole asked if he could give me a ride home,” she said when she reached her mom. The hall was thinning out, people heading to the buses. They started moving toward the door, in case she said no.

  “Willow.”

  “We’ll come straight there,” she said.

  Willow had been sure she was going to be grounded for life after the woods. But instead she and Bethany had stayed up all that night talking. They talked about things they’d never really discussed-the night Willow first ran away in New York City, the lies she’d told that alienated all her friends, how lost she felt, and how much blame she had felt after Bethany’s divorce from Richard. She’d just wanted to disappear, not die, not end her life. She wanted to dissolve, be invisible. It was hard to explain, but her mother seemed to listen and understand.

  When Willow had chased Jolie in the rain, trying to get her to come back to the car, she’d slipped and fallen into the water. And after the shock of the cold, panic set in. And as the water took her away from Cole and Jolie, who chased her through the trees and finally fell behind, she screamed for her mother.

  In her frightened mind, she believed that her mother could always hear her when she called and would always come for her. That her mother was just like the mom in that story she loved. And she’d realized she believed that because it had always been true; her mom was always there. Even if she did invite Mr. Ivy to dinner. But she also believed that she had to stay close by for her mother to hear her. And Willow had strayed very far. Her mother couldn’t hear her calling for help.

  And then her foot got stuck and she was pulled under. She didn’t remember much after that, except opening her eyes on the bank, seeing Jolie and Cole looking at her in horror like they thought she was dead.

  She told her mother all this. And her mother, amazingly, didn’t cry. And because she didn’t, because she seemed strong, Willow told her about that dark, angry place she had inside sometimes. The place that helped her understand Gene in A Separate Peace. She’d been in that place when she was so mean to her mom at dinner with Mr. Ivy. She had never told anyone about that.

  They went to see Dr. Cooper together the next day and talked to her about what had happened, how they could move forward together in a better way, what they could do to earn each other’s trust. Grounding for eternity was not on the list of things to do.

  She was actually breaking one of her promises right now, by calling in to question a rule her mother had made. No riding in cars with boys.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll take the bus.”

  “He can meet you here,” she said. “We’ll bake cookies.”

  She was about to make some smart comment about how they weren’t three years old and cookie baking had lost its charm. But she didn’t. She still loved to bake cookies.

  “I have to take the bus,” she said to Cole. She stuffed the phone into her bag. “She said you could come over.”

  She felt that anxiety well up, that fear that he would think she was a giant dork and that he’d rather be with Jolie, who could go anywhere and do anything she wanted to do.

  “Cool,” he said. “See you there.”

  He re
ad something on her face, gave her that quick, shy smile he had. “I’ll be there this time. Promise.”

  And then he was gone. Mom thought he was too old for her. Next year he’d be a senior and she’d be a sophomore. Mom thought he had too many problems. He’s got a lot on his plate for a kid. His dad’s in jail. His mom is out of work. I don’t want his baggage to become yours. What did that even mean? And then, of course, there was the big talk about sex. And how Willow wasn’t ready, and how it was a special thing that she was too young to understand, and how she shouldn’t make the choice to share herself that way yet. And that she had to promise to talk to Bethany if she was thinking about it, and not to do anything until she did. How disgusting was it to talk to your mother about things like that? Anyway, Willow so wasn’t there. She didn’t even want to think about that.

  “Are you going to have sex with Mr. Ivy?” Willow had asked. She drew out his name into a playful taunt.

  “Willow!” Bethany had said. Bull’s-eye. Willow was off the hook. A high red blush lit up her mother’s face. “Please! That is so not your business.”

  “Are you going to see him again?” she asked. Because that’s what she really wanted to know.

  “At the moment we’re just friends.”

  “But you like him like him, right? You don’t just friend like him.”

  Honesty, that was the other promise. No secrets and half-truths. No lies. Her mother looked away. “Yes, I like him like him. But there’s no guarantee he feels the same way. Our first date did not exactly go seamlessly.”

  “He likes you,” Willow said. “I can tell.”

  “Whatever,” Bethany said. “Whatever it winds up being, it’s going to be very slow. So you don’t have anything to worry about. It’s not going to affect your life at all.”

  Willow got on the bus and sat in the back. She put her earbuds in and listened to Lady Gaga as the bus wound its way home. They passed the silver-gray pond surrounded by trees losing their leaves. And the sky above was blue with high white clouds, and the light was already going golden. The days were growing short. As the bus pulled to a stop in front of her drive, a flock of birds startled and fluttered noisily away. When she stepped outside and the bus pulled away, she was left with that silence she’d grown to appreciate and the smell of pine, somewhere the scent of burning wood. Maybe Mr. Vance was right. The Hollows wasn’t that bad.

  chapter thirty-nine

  Jones was behind on the leaves. The lawn was almost covered with them. Maggie wanted him to get a leaf blower, but he liked the exercise of raking. Going to the gym and logging miles on a machine seemed like a waste of time. Everyone was pounding away on some piece of equipment, staring at a television screen, with headphones in ears. That couldn’t be healthy, could it? At least when he was raking, he was outside, taking in the air, accomplishing something. But it seemed like he’d been raking for hours. And he hadn’t even scratched the surface.

  To his dismay and annoyance, the mourning doves had made a nest in the upper corner of the porch roof. He’d heard them cooing when he came out to get the paper and looked up to see them nestled together in a small pile of twigs and scraps of newspaper on a little ledge that Jones hadn’t even noticed before.

  “Oh, leave them,” said Maggie. “They’re so cute, and it’s going to be cold this winter. Maybe we should hang a bird feeder.”

  “No,” he said. “No way. They have to go.”

  “Don’t be such an old crank.”

  “They carry lice, you know.”

  “Oh, Jones.”

  Now the doves sat on the rail, cuddling together, looking sweet. They knew they had Maggie on their side, didn’t they? If he got rid of their nest while they were out doing their mourning-dove things, he’d be in trouble. He leaned his rake against the tree, dropped his gloves on the ground, and walked inside through the garage so that he wouldn’t have to walk past those smug little birds. He’d find a nice way to relocate them, just move the nest somewhere. Maybe when Maggie was over at her mother’s later.

  Inside, on the old table in the kitchen sat a copy of the Hollows Gazette. There was an article in there about the discovery of Marla Holt’s remains. He’d been mentioned in the article as the retired cop-turned-private investigator. He didn’t know where the reporter had gotten her information. The phone started ringing a couple of hours after the paper hit the driveways. There was no mention in the article of the circumstances under which Jones had retired. And it seemed that no one remembered or cared.

  Maggie had been taking messages. A woman wanted to find her sister who had been missing since 1985. A man wanted his wife followed-you know, just to be sure she was faithful. There were a couple of others-someone wanted a background check on his daughter’s boyfriend. One lady’s dog had run away, and could he help? PI work was not glamorous.

  “I told you you’d be surprised,” Maggie had said after he’d read through the stack.

  “I’m not taking jobs like that,” he’d said.

  “Jobs like what?”

  “You know, following cheating spouses, checking up on boyfriends, tailing people collecting Workers’ Comp. That’s lower than I’m willing to go.”

  Maggie put her hand on his face, delivered a kiss to his forehead. “Just do what moves you.”

  Holding the newspaper in his hand, he thought about that sentence. What moved him? He wasn’t sure he knew. Rather, he wasn’t sure he could put it into words. He figured he’d know it when he found it.

  ***

  A couple of hours later, he was in Dr. Dahl’s office running down the week’s events.

  “So I guess we know what phase two is,” said the doctor. “Is private-investigative work where you want to put your energies?”

  Jones picked up on something from the doctor. Was it disappointment?

  “Is there something wrong with that?” he asked.

  “No,” said Dr. Dahl. “Of course not. I just wondered if there was anything else you wanted to look at. You haven’t made any firm decisions. We’d talked about woodworking.”

  Somehow Jones just couldn’t see himself making bookshelves for a living. It’s not like he had some drive to be a designer or any real passion for it. He had some native ability, enjoyed working with his hands. But it wasn’t something that fascinated him, not in the same way that police work had. He told the doctor as much.

  “Well, good,” he said. He smoothed out his perfectly creased charcoal slacks, fixed Jones with a warm smile. “Passion is important. I just wonder if it’s not the darkness of it all that calls you, Jones.”

  Jones didn’t know what to say to that. Something about it smarted, made him feel the rise of that anger.

  “It’s gritty work,” the doctor said. “There’s danger. You said yourself you could have died.”

  “But I didn’t,” he said. “I saved that girl. If I hadn’t freed her foot, she would have drowned. That means something to me.”

  “Of course it does,” said the doctor. “Of course.”

  Since the night of his near drowning, the nightmares had ceased. He hadn’t been waking up sweating, yelling, gasping for air in a full week. Maggie had moved back into the bedroom and stayed the whole night. He wouldn’t say that he’d conquered his fear of death; it was a specter that lingered. It snuck up on him when he least expected, and he’d be struck wondering, what would it be? A slip in the shower? A car accident? Murder? Maybe he would be murdered by someone like that psycho Kevin Carr. But then it would pass. It was a specter that lingered for everyone, wasn’t it?

  Maybe the night terrors would come back. But maybe they wouldn’t, now that he knew what he was supposed to be doing with his life. He was meant to be helping people-and not just checking their mail and watering their plants. He knew that as surely as he knew anything. And the fact that he knew with such clarity made him think that maybe, after all, there was something larger than himself. Maybe.

  “When last you were here, we talked about your father,”
said Dr. Dahl. He was apparently looking to pick at some scabs. Maybe Jones seemed too happy today. The doctor was afraid he’d be out of a job. “Have you done any thinking about that?”

  “Some,” Jones said. “I’ve thought about it some.”

  He had thought about it some. But he wasn’t ready to talk to the doctor or anyone about it, not even Mags.

  “Would you care to share your thoughts?”

  Jones looked at the clock. “I think our time is up, Doc,” he said. It was up-a little over, in fact.

  “Ah, yes,” said Dr. Dahl. “Next week, then.”

  “Definitely.”

  At the reception desk, he paid his bill. As he waited for his receipt, Jones watched some other guy about his age walk into Dr. Dahl’s office. He wondered what that guy’s problem was. He looked depressed.

  Jones had promised his wife that he’d keep seeing Dr. Dahl, and he would. He knew it helped him, kept him thinking about and working on the things that he might otherwise avoid. Maggie needed that, deserved that, and so did he. And more than that, Maggie was hot for him right now. She was digging the whole PI thing. She was proud of him for staying in therapy. She was sleeping in their bedroom. She wasn’t mad at him, had stopped giving him the look. She was a smart woman, and he’d do what she wanted. If he knew what was good for him.

  Out in the car, he reached over to the file he’d left on the passenger seat. He’d written the name on the protruding tag: Jefferson Cooper.

  It had taken him only a couple of hours to find his father. All these years, and all he had to do was pick up a phone. He dug through some of Abigail’s old papers and found his father’s Social Security number. Jones gave Jack a call at noon, and by three that afternoon he had an address, credit and employment history. He hadn’t decided what he was going to do with that. He hadn’t allowed himself to have a memory of his father-ever. Maggie had suggested once that he try to think of three good memories he had of the time he, his father, and his mother were all together. Every time he did this, he felt that headache come on, had the urge to run for the nearest burger joint, anesthetize himself with fat and simple carbs. He’d be taking his time with this. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do.