As Night Falls

by Jenny Milchman

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Cut off from the rest of the world, without her phone or even her computer, Ivy felt as if she were stuck on one of the backcountry trips her father planned, where she was forbidden to bring any devices.

  Not stuck. That wasn’t the right word. Ivy actually enjoyed those trips. She used to anyway. Back in the days before Darcy and all the others except Melissa blurred into one shiny, skinny streak, practically interchangeable right down to the fact that they all looked down on Ivy.

  She and Harlan were sitting on the floor now. Thank God. This felt a lot safer. Ivy had managed to locate a deck of cards in the bottom of some box that had never gotten unpacked. She had tried to teach Harlan Spades, but that hadn’t worked out so well, and the sight of him getting frustrated had caused instant backtracking on Ivy’s part.

  “Go fish,” she mumbled, unable to masquerade her boredom. What time was it? When was this night going to end? How was it going to end? She shivered.

  “You could put on a sweater,” Harlan suggested.

  Ivy got up and went over to her dresser.

  Harlan looked happy, thrilled almost—as if he had figured something out and it hadn’t been half so hard as he’d imagined—when she came back, zipping up a hoodie.

  “How come you let Nick boss you around?” Ivy asked. She pushed her fanned-out cards onto the purple band of her rainbow rug.

  Harlan lifted his head. His brows wriggled like caterpillars. “Nick’s a lot smarter than me,” he said at last.

  “Huh,” Ivy replied. “You know, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t?”

  Ivy shook her head, though she wasn’t one hundred percent positive about that. In some ways, Harlan seemed more simpleminded and literal than the kids she babysat, although he showed flashes of knowing things deep down. And hadn’t Nick been a little babyish himself, tantruming when Ivy refused to do what he wanted in the basement? He’d acted a lot cooler and smarter since coming upstairs, except when he saw the snow, but still; Ivy momentarily dismissed both captors with disgust. Children, she thought. So maybe Harlan could be manipulated, like a sugared-up preschooler. Without him even realizing what she was doing.

  She’d have to get him to talk.

  As if reading her thoughts—but he couldn’t do that, could he?—Harlan said, “You look like someone I know.”

  “Yeah?” Ivy asked eagerly. “Who?”

  He turned his head away momentarily. It was the size of a pot you put a houseplant in. A really big houseplant.

  “Want to see something?” he asked.

  Now he sounded almost shy, like this boy Ivy had known forever, since kindergarten anyway, but who only spoke to her once a year.

  “How was your summer?” the boy always asked.

  Darcy teased Ivy about it, saying how the boy’s mother probably coached him at home. She would act out the whole scene, playing the mom in a whiny, nagging voice: “Why don’t you just talk to the girl?” and then doing the boy: “Oh, yeah, right, what should I say?” Finally Darcy would sing out: “Just ask her how her summer was!”

  Harlan began to shift his body around, messing up the cards Ivy had spread out. He took off one of his shoes, and Ivy frowned. The shoe came apart, and Harlan removed something, holding it out to her.

  Ivy reached forward with a hand that felt too loose to grasp anything, as if all the bones inside it had dissolved. “What is this?” she asked, trying not to let her distaste show.

  “That’s my sister’s teddy bear,” he said. “Well, part of him. I never had a teddy bear. My daddy said I was too big to need one. But my sister didn’t mind sharing.”

  Ivy looked down, the caramel-colored clump resolving into a tuft of fur. She bit her lip. “Is it your sister?” she asked. “Who I look like?”

  Harlan matched her lip-biting gesture, revealing front teeth the size of stones. “You know things, too. Just like your mama.”

  “What?”

  He took the piece of fur out of Ivy’s hand, and reached up without rising so much as an inch off the floor. He tucked the clump under the sheet on her bed.

  “Why was it—why was he in your shoe?” Ivy asked.

  Harlan settled both hands in his cavernous lap. “He comes out after lights out and goes back in before morning count.”

  “Lights out? Like at camp?”

  Harlan wagged his head. “I never went to camp.”

  And they wouldn’t really do morning count at camp anyway, would they? The truth was beginning to come to Ivy now, pieces jigsawing into place. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t put them together before. She really was dumb, just like Darcy said.

  “Hey, look.” Harlan pointed to his cards. “I have another match.”

  Ivy took the pair and placed it on the slim stack he had acquired.

  “You met Nick in prison,” she said, a figuring-things-out note in her voice. “That’s why you’re wearing those clothes.” A short laugh escaped her; it didn’t sound anything like normal laughter. “How the hell did you get to our house?” Cursing. Also not like her. “No wonder you have to walk to another country.”

  Harlan’s face changed, grew smoldery and shut.

  He doesn’t want to talk about it, Ivy realized. Doesn’t even like to think about it. Why? Because he can’t stand the idea of being captured. She felt a flash of power, like a plug sparking.

  Maybe if she made Harlan mad, some kind of change would take place. Like shaking a stuck appliance until something popped loose.

  “You think the police won’t find you there?” Ivy asked. “They have the news in Canada too, you know.” She sounded like Darcy when she talked to that shy boy, or any of the losers—Darcy’s name for them, not hers—at school.

  But unlike Darcy, Ivy instantly regretted her course of action.

  Harlan rose off the floor, looming over her like a building. “The police aren’t looking for us.”

  “No,” Ivy said. “I’m sure they’re not.”

  “I better ask Nick.” Glowering, he lowered his hand.

  Ivy cowered on the floor. Once she stood up, she wouldn’t have any excuse for how insignificant she felt beside him.

  Harlan thrust his arm at her impatiently.

  Ivy stared upward until her neck began to ache.

  They were at a standstill, except not a real standstill, because both of them knew how easily he could just pick her up, make Ivy do whatever he wanted.

  Light swept across the windows from outside. Ivy twisted to see, and Harlan turned, too. Two far-off blue-white scoops, bright as spotlights. Or headlights.

  Just about to make the turn onto their road, a car.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Making this call under Nick’s direction entailed at least one or two ethical violations, but Sandy couldn’t think about that right now. As if there were guidelines governing situations like this. Protecting your patient’s confidentiality when a madman broke into your house.

  The phone rang once in her ear, and Madeline picked up.

  “Dr. Tremont! You’re all right!”

  Sandy looked up from the phone. Nick’s gaze sat on her, heavy as rocks.

  “Yes, Madeline,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “It’s a good thing you called back,” the girl said cheerily.

  Madeline had turned twenty last year, but Sandy persisted in thinking of her as a young girl. It was part of the countertransference she talked about in supervision. Something in Madeline pulled for a caretaking response from Sandy.

  “Is it?” Sandy said. “Why?” Trying to be neutral, to conduct therapy when the man who had taken her family prisoner was sitting on the opposite side of the kitchen, was proving to be something of a challenge. Take that, Dr. Phil.

  “Well, I was worried,” Madeline said. “You always call right back.”

  Sandy opened her mouth to respond, then hesitated.

  Nick took a few deliberate steps across the room, planting his boots in front of Sandy, so clo
se that she could see him breathe.

  “I know,” Sandy said, subduing her voice. “And I’m sorry that tonight I—”

  Nick coughed, a warning rumble.

  “I was about to come out to your house and check on you!” Madeline interrupted in that same high-pitched, oddly jolly tone.

  Nick reached for the phone, but Sandy clutched it, shaking her head and shooting him an I told you so look. She tried to broadcast her thoughts. Don’t you hear the state she’s in? If I can’t talk her down, then we’re getting a visitor.

  Nick lowered his hand.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on tonight?” Sandy suggested, all the while thinking madly. Did Madeline know where she lived? It was possible. The house Ben built had been small-town news, and the hospital had a rumor network more efficient than a class of gossipy sixth graders. Good God, Sandy thought. Imagine if Madeline had walked into this. How much trauma could one young life hold before it burst like a balloon?

  Madeline had been talking. Sandy swerved to catch up.

  “And then she”—a retching sound, a cry—“she didn’t want me to tuck her in tonight!”

  Dottie. They were talking about Madeline’s little girl.

  Madeline was crying full-force now. “She said—oh, Dr. Tremont, she said she could do it herself!”

  Something inside Sandy went quiet and still. Nick’s hovering presence faded until Sandy was focused solely on her client, as if they were sitting in a private office somewhere, discussing Madeline’s palpable pain.

  “Okay,” Sandy said softly. “Yes. I understand.”

  “You do?” Madeline cried. “Because I sure don’t!”

  “I know, Madeline, but you’re a young mother,” Sandy said softly. “Remember? We’ve talked about this. How parenting is a series of stages, and you have about a second to get used to the one that you’re in before the next is upon you.”

  “This isn’t a stage,” Madeline burst out. “My child hates me! She doesn’t love me anymore, she doesn’t even want me to—oh God, I don’t think I can stand this—”

  “Madeline,” Sandy interjected. “You can stop this before it spirals out of control, remember? Count inside your head. Practice your breathing.”

  Over the speaker, the sound of shaky breaths, in and out.

  “What did you do when Dottie asked to put herself to sleep?” Sandy asked, knowing the words would cause a resurgence of pain, but hoping that by hearing them spoken out loud, the event would become a little more normalized.

  “What could I do?” Madeline demanded. “I let her.”

  Sandy smiled. Despite everything, she felt a glimmer of pride for her client. “That’s wonderful.”

  “Yeah, right,” Madeline said. “It’s just great that my baby is rejecting me.”

  “Dottie isn’t rejecting you,” Sandy said. “She’s becoming a toddler. Taking stabs at independence. I know it feels bad to you, but as far as Dottie is concerned, she loves you even more now. Because you’re showing her that you can let her do what she needs to.”

  Sandy hoped her words would buoy the young woman. For all her youth and wounded-bird quality, Madeline was smart, and intuitive, and resourceful. She’d found her way to a spot on the organic farm, created a life for herself and her daughter out of nothing.

  “Dr. Tremont?” An anxious rise in her voice.

  “Yes, Madeline. I’m here.”

  “I miss my mother.” A sob traveled across the line. “I miss her so much.”

  The focused place Sandy had come to receded like a wave, sucked back into an endless ocean. Madeline’s mother, whom therapy had revealed to be a skinty, disapproving woman, unable to give her daughter a sliver of praise for anything. Sandy took the phone from her ear. Nick’s gaze seized hers, but he was the last person she could stand to look at right now. She turned around unsteadily, as if the even surface of the floor had begun to roll beneath her.

  “Dr. Tremont?” Madeline said again.

  Her voice seemed to come from far away. Time sloshed by in a fluid, unmarked rush.

  Nick reached for the receiver, and Sandy reared back as if burned.

  “It’s terrible that your mother was killed,” she said at last, all but panting. “But there are other ways to lose your mother—” The sentence sheared off, and Sandy had to start again. “Sometimes your mother can be right there and you still don’t have her. So try to be glad that you were so close to yours before she died.”

  Silence over the phone.

  Sandy bent over, spent. The line between judicious self-disclosure and too much information shared by a therapist was perhaps the vaguest and hardest to identify in the whole profession. Self-revelation could serve a therapeutic function. It could normalize, illuminate, connect. But Sandy knew that what she’d just said hadn’t come out of a willingness to utilize an aspect of her own life to help a patient. Sandy had blurted those words out, hot and unexamined. Where had they been dredged up from?

  Madeline’s breathing was quieter now, though, and steady.

  After a long moment, she said, “You’re right, Dr. Tremont. I am lucky about that.”

  Sandy pulled herself back to the present. It felt like it took physical effort to do so, as if she had hauled herself up over the edge of a cliff.

  “I think you’ll be all right tonight, Madeline,” she said. “And Dottie will, too.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Madeline said. “I feel much better now—”

  Nick took the phone and set it back in its cradle.

  As his hand grazed hers, something let loose inside Sandy. Her knees gave a jog, and the final brick crumbled to dust in her mind. Sandy brought her hands up to her temples, pressing hard, but she couldn’t halt the stampeding herd of memories.

  Nick looked at her, an aha in his pale gray eyes. “So. Now we stop pretending?”

  “No,” Sandy said, still squeezing. “No, no, no…”

  “Shut up!” Nick hissed.

  There was a distant crunch of gravel, then the growl of an approaching car.

  DECEMBER 16, 1977

  The Happy Learners Nursery School was housed in a low red building on an isolated road leading out of Cold Kettle. Barbara had balked at first, not wanting her little boy to be so far from home at only four years of age, even though the school was really just a few miles from the center of town as the crow flies. But there weren’t many options for children before they started kindergarten. When Barbara had looked into the one other place, run by a good friend of Glenda Williams, the woman had eyed Nicholas oddly and accepted Barbara’s application with a studied coolness. Barbara wouldn’t have allowed Nicholas to spend his days in such a place for all the gold in California. If her son was going to enter school, then he would have to be treated with the same loving warmth Barbara provided.

  Nicholas went to Happy Learners three mornings a week, so Barbara had found it a little odd when the director invited her to drop by on a Thursday, one of the days Nicholas didn’t attend. Not only her; Gordon had also been asked. Barbara arranged for Nicholas to stay with Glenda upon the director’s suggestion that the little boy not come, another thing Barbara thought strange.

  “Tell me again why I’m here,” Gordon said, shifting uncomfortably on the rigid chair in the hall outside the director’s office. It wasn’t one of the children’s seats, but Gordon still looked out of place in it—in this whole situation, in fact, like an adult playing at dolls. School, along with the rest of Nicholas’ life, was Barbara’s terrain. “Why did they want to see us both?”

  “I’m not sure,” Barbara replied. She twisted around in the seat she occupied, almost facing the wall so that she didn’t have to look at the hall. Then something occurred to her. “Maybe they want to talk about skipping Nicholas ahead into kindergarten. That’s why they asked us not to bring him along. So he wouldn’t get, you know, a swelled head.”

  Gordon was distracted, studying the hallway.

  Barbara continued to avert her eyes
from the spot where he kept a watchful eye.

  The door to the director’s office swung open, and Ms. Castleman stuck her head out.

  The Ms. had impressed Barbara upon introduction—she felt a blend of interest and admiration for the women’s libbers who were infiltrating Cold Kettle—though the director’s political leanings were less important than the education her son was being given, of course. But Nicholas actually had a touch of the hippie himself, with those long locks of curls Barbara cut so sparingly. He fit right in here.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Burgess? Won’t you come in?” Ms. Castleman poked her head out a little farther, peering into the hall. “And bring your little girl, of course.”

  Gordon stood up and walked in the indicated direction, stooping down and offering one hand as he scooped up a toy with the other.

  Barbara left him to the task, entering the office first.

  —

  “There are some playthings over there,” Ms. Castleman said, pointing to a corner.

  Barbara faced the director’s desk resolutely, waiting to begin.

  After a few moments spent fussing and settling, Gordon came and took a seat beside her.

  “Thank you for coming in,” Ms. Castleman said to him. “We don’t usually ask to see both parents, usually just the mother is fine. Your extra time is appreciated.”

  “That’s all right,” Barbara replied for both of them. “When it comes to Nicholas, we want to be here for whatever is needed.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Ms. Castleman said. There was something careful in her words.

  Barbara decided to spare the director any delay in deciding how to proceed.

  “Ms. Castleman…” The title felt awkward, unseemly on her tongue. “I have an idea about why you wanted to see us.”

  Ms. Castleman sat forward. “You do?”

  Barbara nodded eagerly.

  Gordon had been checking behind him; now he turned and faced front again.