Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  "Oh, yeah," he said. "That was a bad one. The evil poison that turns children blind when they see the sun."

  "And the goblinfire," he said. "Look." He showed me a page in the sketchbook of a boy who might've been me, but with pointed elf ears, and a blackness of night all around him. In the middle of the blackness was a smudge of fiery yellow and orange.

  We looked through some more of the sketches, pointing out what we remembered. The little ogre-girl who gobbled up people who said no to her; the boy whose skin was made out of bubblegum and blew up in a big pink bubble when he wanted to fly.

  The most unusual one had me, Bruno, and Brooke all standing in a row with our mouths open in screams, and the tops of our heads were exploding.

  Underneath this, Bruno had written in purple crayon: BRAIN FARTS!!!

  And then there was the picture that was of us playing the Dark Game.

  I barely glanced at it.

  In a circle, holding hands.

  Three children.

  Bruno, Brooke, Nemo.

  Blindfolds over their eyes.

  "I wasn't much of an artist," Bruno said, and quickly closed his sketchbook.

  I awoke the next morning, with Bruno standing over my bed.

  He had on what looked like long underwear. Something about the way he looked, his hair all scruffy in his face, and something of an excited expression on his face, reminded me of him as a kid. "Get up! Nemo, you gotta see this!"

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1

  After I'd rolled onto the floor, sleepily trying to find my bathrobe, Bruno dragged me from room to room until we came to my father's bedroom. It was exactly as I remembered it: the king-sized bed with my grandmother's quilt thrown over it and one goose down pillow at the head.

  A small black-and-white television on a metal stand by the window.

  A lamp by the bed, with a small round table beneath it, on which my father kept the TV guide and his nail clippers. Above the bed, a photo of him and my mother on their wedding day.

  "Look at this, look," Bruno said. He opened the doors to the wardrobe, the very one we had all squeezed into as children. It had wide doors, and when he drew them back, they revealed my father's clothes, hanging. Bruno parted these. There was no back to the wardrobe. It was open and went to the wall. The wallpaper had been scraped back around a hole about four feet tall.

  "What the hell?"

  "Yeah and it gets better," Bruno said. He crouched down, stepping into the wardrobe, and withdrew a stack of papers and magazines. "Haven't completely gone through these, but want to see what Dad was up to in here all by his lonesome?"

  He passed me the magazine on the top.

  Slaves of Lust was the title. On the cover, a not-so-beautiful model with large, sloppy breasts covered from head to foot in rubber, only her face showing through a zipper. Others in the pile included: Master and Harem, Love Torture, and Punish the Naughty Lady.

  "He was an S&M porn hound," Bruno said.

  2

  I didn't expect my father not to have a private sex life that involved his hand (this somehow kept him purer for all of us, who had hoped he'd remain true to our mother, a fantasy in its own way for kids whose mothers have run off), but when Bruno dumped the magazines on the bed, they were plainly the kinds of pornography I'd never seen before. I mean, I'd watched porn in college when someone had videotapes, and I'd flipped through the odd Penthouse and the other assorted girlie magazines.

  But they'd seemed tame in comparison to what my dad had been stashing away.

  The kind that made me flinch a little and not think well of people who were pornographers. (Porn is a funny thing. When you see the mainstream pornography, what Granny used to call "marriage manuals," it all seems full of happy, willing participants. There's an element to human beauty and fantasy in it. But when you see this kind, it looks as ugly as anything that is human can look. Call me puritan. But watching people being whipped or tied up wasn't my idea of eroticism. Not to say it's not someone else's. To each his or her own. Obviously, it was my dad's idea of a turn on. Call me a prude, but the last thing I wanted to find was my dad's porn stash.) "You think it was 'cause Granddad used to beat him?" Bruno asked.

  "What?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. If a guy is into this, doesn't that just mean he had a lot of punishment as a kid and it became eroticized? I've known a few guys who liked this kind of stuff, and they all seemed to have this whole discipline thing going on. Granddad had that bullwhip or whatever that he kept above the door. It must've had some effect on Dad."

  "You're talking about Dad. Christ. Gives me the willies."

  "Yeah. I guess it's freaky. Who knew?"

  "Let's just throw it out," I said.

  "It's not the porn that I care about," Bruno said. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hole, groaning a bit where he scraped his back. He back-crawled out, and brought with him a stack of letters. "Lots of this stuff. I put some in my room, too. Look," he said. "All this stuff. And two thousand cash." He pointed to the dresser. I went over to it, and touched the top of what turned out to be three stacks of hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in plastic bags, and bound with rubber bands.

  "His bank account?"

  "Mad money," Bruno said. "And these, too."

  He came over to me, and passed me the letters he'd found. At first, I thought they were letters from my mother to him. Love letters from when they were young.

  I picked one of them up. Turned it over.

  3

  Dear Mia,

  Please come back to us.

  The children miss you more than you can imagine, and I am going crazy without you.

  I didn't know loneliness until you left. Please fulfill my greatest wish, that you love me again, that you love your children again.

  Nemo is nearly fourteen and is going to be a man soon. But he needs his mother. He doesn't always make correct judgments, and I'm just not good at understanding why he's different than I was as a boy. But you were so good with him.

  Brooke is as beautiful as you, and as bright. You must see her. And Bruno still cries for you at night, even though he hardy remembers what you look like.

  Please come home, Mia. Please.

  I love you and I wish that night had never happened between us.

  I love you and always keep a light on at Hawthorn for you.

  If you ever think for a moment that I have lost all love for you, or that I hate you, know in your heart that you are mistaken.

  You are the only one for me. You are the love of my life. You are my only light. I beg of you, on my knees, and to God, and to everything holy and sacred in the world: Come home and be a mother to your children, and if you feel even an ounce of kindness and pity for me, come home. Come home and take care of them, be their mother, hold them close. I am so sorry for what happened between us.

  Love always, Gordie

  4

  The letters were dusty and written on various kinds of paper—parchment, typing paper, notepad paper, as well as elegant stationery. The envelopes, from which my father had torn the letters before stacking them all together, had a single address on them: a house in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My mother's name: Mia Raglan.

  It gave me a lonely feeling to read through them, between the porn, like a parade of the sacred and the profane.

  I went and sat on his bed, and then lay back and put my head on the pillow.

  I read letter after letter.

  5

  We ended up tossing the porn in the garbage without telling Brooke, since she was a bit judgmental about anything to do with pictures of naked women.

  But the letters I passed to Brooke.

  We also gave her the money that was found, although Bruno really wanted to keep some of it (he had debts, he said, and I told him I had bigger debts, but it still should be for Brooke since there were bills to pay at home).

  On the sofa in the living room, while Bruno played something on the piano that sounded vaguely lik
e a classical lullaby, Brooke flipped through the letters the way she might look over legal documents—with a kind of spirited disinterest. "He wrote these all the time."

  "He didn't send them," I said. "I don't know why."

  "He may have. They might've been returned. He said that some came back undeliverable."

  "Look at the dates," I said.

  She glanced at the top right-hand comers of some of the letters. "Every week," she said, nodding. "That makes sense. He always went to the post office on Monday morning. Sometimes there was nothing to mail, and he still went. I saw him writing to her once. He told me he did it because he had to keep the faith."

  "He really loved her."

  "I suppose he did," she said. "I was never sure of it. I'd guess he was angry with her. For leaving. I always wondered if they really loved each other at any time. He told me she had mental breakdowns more than once. Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't just a caretaker for her. But I guess he still wanted her to come home. All these letters. Sent back. She must've hated all of us."

  I didn't jump on her comment, which seemed cold. It had been a rough time for all of us.

  Bruno, playing the piano, stopped. He said, "He never sent them. Check the envelopes again."

  Brooke held up one of the envelopes. "Oh. We missed it." She passed it to me. "Bruno's right. No postmark. He must've just written these and held on to them."

  "Poor guy," I said.

  Bruno turned around on the piano bench. "He used to hit her," he said, that Brunoesque anger rising in his voice as if he could go from "calm" to "storm" in seconds flat.

  "He did not," I said.

  "Sure he did. I saw him. She came and got me. I was maybe three. I just remember he hit her. He was yelling at her, and he hit her, and I was there, and she picked me up and took me up to her room. She snuggled up to me in the bed, crying. He tore her dress, and he made her cry, and he hit her. It's a vivid memory. That's the first time I remember not liking him at all."

  "You might be remembering wrong," Brooke said. "You always remember things a little twisted and negative."

  "Not damn likely," Bruno said.

  "From the age of three?" Brooke let out a mocking laugh. "Even if he hit her—and I still don't believe it—maybe it was just once. And a bad time."

  "You believe that?" Bruno asked. "You think it's okay for a guy to hit his wife under any circumstances, Brooke? You think he took us out to that smokehouse and used the belt on us, and he didn't use it on her at some point?"

  "We were kids," she said, her own piss-and-vinegar rising. "He was spanking us. It's not the same."

  "I watched him spank Nemo one time," Bruno said. "I stood in the corner of that freezing cold place, and I saw blood on Nemo's rear end. He wasn't just spanking us."

  "Shut up," Brooke said, "just shut up. He's dead now. Let it go. Jesus, you'd think he never did anything for you. You'd think because he spanked us a couple of times—"

  "It wasn't just spanking," Bruno said, disgust rising in his voice. "Spanking a kid is different. What I saw him do to Nemo was whip him."

  As he said the words, I tried to remember a time when I felt as if my father had whipped me, but I could not. It was a great blank spot for me. I remembered hating the place of punishment and Dad's anger, but I could not for the life of me ever remember feeling that he'd gone overboard.

  Bruno turned back around and began banging something out on that upright piano that sounded like nothing but noise at first.

  Brooke shot me a glance that seemed to be full of curiosity. Then we recognized the tune—it was "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring."

  We had all heard it as little children, from our mother's music box.

  6

  The cloud that hung low, the mystery and depression and trauma we'd all sustained from this shocking murder of our father, remained, but as the days rolled out I began to realize that we were all that was left of us. We still could remake ourselves, grow back together a bit and somehow get along.

  My heart felt a bit heavy with the knowledge that somewhere out there, my father's killer was wandering free.

  I didn't trust the universe enough to think they'd get him anytime soon.

  7

  Bruno confided in me that there wasn't much money left, perhaps ten thousand dollars after some debts Dad had accrued, plus the two thousand Bruno had found upstairs. Twelve thousand sounded like a lot to the two of us, but we knew that it wasn't much of a savings. Brooke would need it for her own life as much as Bruno and I wanted to paw at it ourselves. Brooke had to run the business and Hawthorn. I didn't really want Hawthorn, and neither did Bruno. We saw our futures off-island.

  "What kind of debts? He was cheap."

  Bruno shrugged. "He spent money like anyone else. There's some company in New York he'd buy books or something from." He shook his head. "Maybe that was the porn. Who knows? I found receipts for other stuff."

  "But the business," I said. "It was running okay?"

  The business was the store my dad had in the village, the one that Brooke ran. A small sundries store, it was a direct competitor for the larger Croder-Sharp-Callahan Store, which always turned a profit. Apparently, my dad's store had been losing money. It ran itself, it paid Brooke's meager salary, which allowed Hawthorn to keep up appearances, but it didn't run into profit, even during the abundant summertime.

  "I guess you didn't know some money was missing," Bruno said.

  "Grogan told me something about money problems. But I didn't think it was anything other than Dad having no financial sense."

  Bruno snorted. "Well, it was his life. And his money. I guess given that he always did things his way, it's fine, right?" He had challenge in his eyes, but I was not up for an argument over Dad's corpse.

  "Maybe it's time we sold off some of Hawthorn," I suggested. "Not the house. I mean, maybe the woods, or over by the creek. There's a lot of unused acreage. It's worth something. We could keep five acres around the house and sell the rest."

  "Brooke wouldn't let it happen," Bruno said.

  I glanced at him with some curiosity. "You need money, don't you?"

  "I don't give a damn about the money," he said. "I just give a damn about what Brooke's gonna need now. She's stuck here."

  "Well, when things are better, we'll all sit down and figure this out," I said. "If Brooke needs money to stay here, we'll figure it out. She's closing the store for a couple of weeks. I like the idea of helping her out a little. I just wish I weren't the official fuck-up that I am."

  "I'm officially the fuck-up," Bruno said. "I'm the one who hated Dad. I'm the one who thinks bad about everything. I drink too much. Just right now. I think I need to stop drinking."

  "No, no," I said. "We both drink too much. Actually, I watched you. You had three beers last night. To some people, that's barely drinking."

  "To others, it's alcoholism," he said.

  "I wasn't fond of Dad either," I admitted. "I can't for the life of me figure out why. He wasn't mean to me. I insist: I am the family fuck-up."

  "Nope," Bruno said. "I'm the family fuck-up. Nemo, you don't even want to know."

  I shook my head, enjoying this. "You're in the minor leagues. I'm the major league fuck-up. Who else got run out of town at eighteen? Who else can't hold a job for a year at a time? Who else—"

  "You wrote a book."

  It was true. I'd written a fantasy novel a few years previous. It was published. No one bought or read it. It had been my dream to be a writer, but by twenty-eight that dream had eroded.

  "Lots of fuck-ups write books," I said. "Libraries are full of the evidence. You're the athlete with the good grades and the charm who everyone loves. You can play the piano. I lose a girlfriend every time I say I like her. I lose a job when they discover how incompetent I am."

  "Okay," Bruno sighed. "I've got a trump card. I'm gay."

  I sat there in silence. The word hadn't quite registered. Bruno? Gay? My little brother? "Wow. Wow. Bruno. Wow. That's news
to me."

  "Yeah," he said. "To you. Dad knew. That's why he didn't love having me staying in the house. Dad was a homophobe. You know what? I think he hated me, too. Since I was born. He told me he thought I was doing it to get back at him for something. Don't tell Paulette Doone. She'll do an exorcism." Then he added, "You shocked?"

  8

  "You knew he was gay?" I asked Brooke as soon as we had a minute alone. She was pulling clothes out of the dryer, while trying to keep the two dogs from getting into the laundry room.

  "Of course," she said. "Here, help fold."

  "Not good at this," I said, as she passed me some warm towels.

  "Folding? Or getting used to having a gay brother?"

  "Folding. I don't care that he's gay."

  "Yes, you do," she said. "I knew it when he was twelve. He told me when he was sixteen."

  "Told you?"

  "What, you were around for him to talk to?" she asked, and it stopped me cold. "He wanted to tell you, but apparently you didn't want to stay on the phone with him long enough to talk about it. Bruno has a lot of anger about Dad, and I think some of it is directed at you. He assumed, from some comment you made to him once, that you'd be like Dad about it."

  "I would not ever—damn it," I said. "Damn it." She was right. I vaguely remembered a long phone call, very late at night, when Bruno had been sad over something that had happened—I assume he had broken up with a girl in college—and he never quite got to the point. But it had been mostly me, not wanting him to get to the point. Not really even listening the one time Bruno had seemed to open up to me as an adult, I had never been there for him at all, past the age of twelve. Even then, I was too preoccupied with my girlfriend and buddies and getting up to no good. Bruno must've felt a little lost not having someone to talk to about it. I felt terrible. GUILT rose up within me. I had been an awful older brother.