Drawn Into Darkness

by Nancy Springer

  Peace on earth and goodwill for me that year had been my parents pretending my baby daughter had never happened, encouraging me to go on with my life while upholding the same pretense. Which I had tried to do. Having no idea my little girl was right here in Fulcrum with me.

  Fifteen years later—a bit more than a year ago—I’d found out accidentally, from the bureaucrat who’d taken my application to renew my teaching certificate. “Small world,” he had remarked to me across his desk in the Department of Education building in Columbus. “I know Don Phillips. He and I went to law school together. How are he and Pearl doing?” Faced with my blank look, he’d added, “According to the transcripts your college faxed to me, Phillips paid your bills. We’re talking about the same Don Phillips, right? District attorney, lives in Fulcrum?”

  I don’t remember what I said, but I’m good at being vaguely agreeable.

  “Is he your uncle or something, paying your tuition?”

  I had no idea. News to me.

  But I’d always wondered why my parents had sent me to college, uncomplaining about the expense, when they were the type to scold about “money up a puppy’s rectum”—honestly, those are the exact words they used—if I broke an orange juice glass while washing the dishes.

  Driving back to Fulcrum from Columbus, with my hands clenched tighter and tighter on the steering wheel, I had headed straight for my parents’ brown shingled house.

  I suppose I ought to call it a Cape Cod, but it lacked the implied coziness and charm. It was just small, that’s all. Rife with restriction, like the people who lived in it.

  Walking into the entry, where plastic covered a rag rug that covered the carpet that covered the floor, I saw Dad in the living room, watching Jeopardy!; he waved but did not look at me. I headed in the opposite direction and found Mom in the kitchen, a sterile white place with no nonsense or fridge magnets, just as the other rooms held no whimsy or dust catchers, just as Mom wore no personality or jewelry except her wedding ring, ever.

  Standing at the kitchen sink, Mom was cutting up whole raw chickens, undoubtedly purchased in bulk at a bargain price. Immobilizing a plump chicken leg over the index finger of her left hand, Mom wielded her favorite old wooden-handled butcher knife, neatly severing the drumstick from the thigh as she sliced unerringly through the joint. I shuddered. Big sharp knives always gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t know why.

  “’Lo, Mom.” I heard the tension in my own voice.

  But nodding back at me, Mom seemed relaxed enough, her gray hair smoothed back under a crocheted prayer bonnet instead of a starched linen one. My mom was fifty-five, but she looked seventy. Being born old seems to run in my family.

  Of course she asked me whether I would like some freshly baked “hermits,” applesauce-and-honey pastry cut into bars, and I declined because always and forever I was dieting. Quite truthfully I told her that I wished I could still gobble her warm-from-the-oven baked goodies the way I used to. Sitting at the kitchen table, I made small talk for a few minutes, then said, “Mom, I need to get in touch with the adoption agency from, you know, back when I was a teenager. . . .”

  Mom dropped her knife into the sink with a clatter and swiveled to look at me as if I’d morphed into a warthog. Foreseeing such a reaction, I’d rehearsed an explanation.

  “The doctor says I should, because of the lupus,” I told her levelly. It’s easy to lie to your parents when they’ve trained you to hide your true feelings, to live a lie. “The baby may have inherited a predisposition for autoimmune disorders from me. So the adoptive parents need to be notified. Which agency was it?”

  Mom told me, “You’ll do no such thing.”

  “You don’t want me to do what’s right?” I don’t think I’d ever argued with her so coolly. I was able to do it because at that moment, having spent hours thinking about what she and my father had done, I hated her.

  And maybe she sensed something deep underneath the calm words. She left her work to sit at the table facing me, wiping her hands with a dish towel, faltering, “If your affliction . . . If God sees fit to punish . . . God’s will . . .”

  “I just want to inform the agency,” I lied. “But if you won’t tell me the name of the agency, then I’ll have to try to find the child and notify her myself. It’s not so hard anymore, you know, on the Internet. I—”

  Mom interrupted. “There was no agency.”

  “No agency? But you always said ‘the adoption agency’ this, ‘the adoption agency—’”

  “It was a private adoption. You can’t notify any agency or trace it on your whatchacallit, computer. So just put any such nonsense out of your mind, Candor Verity.” Her use of my full name signaled the finality of this pronouncement.

  Candor? Verity? She and Dad had named me Truth, Truth, yet they had been lying to me for years.

  “You are not to speak of it again.” Broomstick straight and rigid, Mom stood up and marched to the sink, where she picked up her knife to dismember another chicken.

  I wanted to grab the big butcher knife away from her and stab her right in the—but the thought, the impulse, frightened me even more than the sight of the knife did. I got up and left the house.

  Over the next few days I had found out what I needed to know from public records and news archives on the Internet. Don and Pearl Phillips had a single child, a daughter, Juliet Dawn Phillips. Her birth date: Christmas Day 1995. And yes, she was adopted. A gubernatorial hopeful who touted right-to-life and family values, Donald Phillips had made public reference several times to the blessed adoption process that had given him and his wife their beloved daughter. He hadn’t gone into detail about the private adoption, which, from what I had just learned about where my college tuition money had come from, had probably skirted the edges of legality. While he hadn’t exactly bought a baby, my parents had certainly made lemonade in the shade.

  So that was what I learned last year . . . but even now, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the Greater Fulcrum Shopping Mall, I still clenched my teeth just thinking how my parents had shamed me for getting pregnant, snatched me away from the only home I had ever known, arranged for the disposal of my baby, and then “let” me attend U of Ohio right here at Fulcrum, still under the parental thumb.

  “Hypocrites,” I whispered through my teeth as I accelerated past a Hallmark store and a jewelry store, anger lengthening my stiff, painful strides. “Lying hypocrites.” I hoped Juliet was planning to go to a real college and have a career—

  It looked like Juliet and her friends were heading for the food court.

  Yes. Swerving like a flock of starlings, they swarmed the taco stand. I sat down on one end of a mall bench, forgetting my anger, once again intent on just watching. Juliet stood hugging herself, rubbing her bare arms with her hands. The child was underdressed for the weather; what were her adoptive parents thinking, to let her out of the house in that skimpy top, with her sleek little belly bare? Didn’t they care whether she caught pneumonia or, even worse, boys?

  Didn’t they realize she might make the same mistake—

  No, my dreaming mind took over. It hadn’t been a mistake and it couldn’t happen to Juliet because there was not, would never be, and never had been another boy like Blake.

  • • •

  I am sixteen and living a fairy tale. I have been a good, good girl for years and now it is all happening, I am Cinderella and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty all awakening as one, and Blake is my miracle prince. Every day in school he gazes into my eyes and gives me the most special flower, a white rose folded out of notebook paper, with a red candy nestled deep inside. Hiding in a stall of the girls’ room, I suck on the cherry candy as I unfold the rose to read Blake’s secret message to me. His angular printing sprawls all over the paper; each line seems to dive off the edge of a cliff. “My sweet, sweet Candy,” he writes, “I am going to open you and suck your sugar.” I have no specific idea what this means, but it warms my whole body with the most wo
nderful feeling. “I am going to taste you with my mouth and my tongue. Meet me in the back stairwell at beginning of lunch period. I am starving for you, my love.”

  A girl I barely know stops me in the hallway. “Listen, stupid, stay away from Blake Roman,” she tells me, hard-eyed. “Where do you think he learned those slick moves of his?”

  What I perceive as her jealousy sets me aglow with joyful defiance. Missing lunch, I meet Blake in the back stairwell, because I am like a heroine in one of the romance novels I read on the sly; I have been swept away. I am caught in a kind of carnal rapture. In the shadows under the last flight of stairs, Blake starts to pull my top up. “But someone might see us,” I whisper.

  “Yes,” he agrees, “and that makes me hungry like a wolf. I need you. Do you love me?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then you will do this for me.” Expertly he lifts my bra to bare my small breasts. He is so sure of every move, so masterful that I know he is more than my prince; he is my love angel, born knowing how to do these things just for me. I obey him as I have always obeyed those with authority: God, the preacher, the teacher, my parents . . . no, I try not to think of my parents. I sense clearly enough that what I am doing is so deeply forbidden that I cannot even imagine what would be my punishment. But my parents’ authority has been superseded by a more compelling one, Blake’s, because nothing, nothing in my life or my dreams, has ever felt so wide-eyed spine-curling shocking electrically good as what he does to me.

  “I’ll be waiting for you right here after school,” Blake whispers as he twitches my bra back where it belongs, “and we’ll go somewhere and I’ll unfold you like a white flower, my Candy, my love.”

  • • •

  Sitting there in the mall, I realized I’d better stop playing that particular memory or it would show in my face. I refocused on Juliet. She and her friends had settled at one of the sticky plastic tables in the food court, and right beside it was another table, empty. Back-to-back with Juliet’s chair stood an empty chair. I stared at it.

  No. I had promised myself I would keep my distance. I knew in my heart that my being here constituted questionable mental hygiene, that there was something unhealthy about the way I was acting. Imagine if anyone were to find me scouring the Internet—the Fulcrum Area High School home page, the Phillips family Web site, Facebook, MySpace—imagine if anyone were to find the downloaded pictures of Juliet that I kept in a scrapbook hidden under my mattress. Imagine if anyone had seen me trying to get my first sight of her, watching summer band practice with binoculars from my car. Anybody would think I was sick, pitiful, even a bit psycho—and now I wanted to sit close to her to eavesdrop on what she was saying? No. Maybe someday, somehow, I would hear the sound of her voice, but not today.

  Maybe someday, somehow, we would talk face-to-face. Often, trying to fall asleep at night, I fantasized about a revelation, a reunion, how she would embrace me and I would whisper “Daughter” and she would reply “Mother” and we both would cry. But that was a wish-fulfillment fantasy, nothing more. In my real life it was enough—it was going to have to be enough—to attend Youth Symphony concerts and see her playing all the flute solos, to drive past her high school (I couldn’t drive past her house; it was in a gated community), to watch her talking with her friends as she ate her burrito.

  I hadn’t gone places with friends when I was her age. I’d been a shy nobody, unfashionably dressed in the modest tops and skirts, some of them home sewn, that my mother had provided. Worse than being the only girl in my school who wore kneesocks instead of panty hose, I was too well behaved. I was hopelessly uncool.

  Blake hadn’t had friends either. He’d worn slim black jeans instead of saggy pants, black boots instead of Converse sneakers. Other boys had stayed away from him and that seemed to be the way he liked it. Rebel. Loner. A misfit, like me.

  But it looked to me as if Juliet was normal. Popular, even. She and all her friends were laughing about something. I wondered what was so funny. Were they being mean, laughing at someone, or was it the good kind of laughter, warm laughter? I wondered what Juliet was like, really. Did she go “awww” over puppies and kittens and lop-eared bunnies? Did she give her adoptive mom and dad a hard time? Did she dream about horses? Was she smart, a good student? Did she cuddle babies? What kind of music did she listen to?

  She stuck something into one of her nostrils, some sort of gimmick—maybe from the party store?—that flashed like a tiny sapphire blue strobe. The kids laughed so hard a blond girl nearly choked on her soda.

  I smiled, feeling an odd, aching pride. My daughter, clowning around? I’d never been like that.

  She removed the blue flasher from her nose and placed it into one of her ears, then stood up to stick it into her navel. She posed like a fashion model. Perhaps some ribald things were said. Juliet grinned at one of the boys, put the tip of her thumb to her teeth, and gestured subtly with her fingers. The boy slumped in his seat amid howling and hooting. Whatever the exchange of insults had been, apparently Juliet had won.

  I tried not to beam too obviously. My daughter.

  Juliet looked at her wristwatch, removed the sapphire strobe from her navel, exchanged a couple of good-bye hugs with her girlfriends, and walked away while the others stayed where they were. Juliet had to go somewhere, evidently. I wondered where. Some sort of lesson? Flute? Gymnastics? Voice? Had she inherited my love of singing harmony?

  At a distance, I followed her out of the main mall entrance to the front lot where everybody parked; the back lot got used only at Christmastime. Standing on the mall apron, in the shadow of one of the pink concrete pillars holding up the portico, I watched as Juliet walked into the sunshine. Sashayed, rather. Or skylarked. Always that balletic lift in her step. Sunlit, her long, dark hair shimmered almost golden as she strode toward the red and white checkerboard MINI Cooper her parents had given her.

  There didn’t happen to be anyone else going or coming at the time. Not that anyone would have noticed me anyway, just another housewife waiting for her husband to bring the car around.

  Wait, there was one other person out here. As Juliet strode across the parking lot, a middle-aged man limped toward her, leaning heavily on a thick wooden cane. Disabled. From his other hand, the one not gripping the cane, hung several heavily pendulous plastic shopping bags.

  He spoke to Juliet, and I saw her smile and nod. She followed him to a neutral-colored van. Watching, I felt my chest swell warm, warm as she opened the side door for him. Yes, my daughter was a nice girl, yes, my daughter had a good heart, helping a handicapped man. She took the heavy plastic bags from him, turned, and leaned far into the van to place them where he wanted them.

  And the man stood up straight, swung his cane like a club, and struck her with it, hard, on the back of the head. She fell into the van. He threw the cane in on top of her, shoved her dangling feet inside, and closed the sliding door with a slam. Then he walked briskly around the front of the van, climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and drove away.