Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  ‘Hello, buddy!’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Hey.’ He sighed and wandered off.

  ‘Someone’s having a little tantrum this morning.’ Sasha hugged me with one arm, made a mwah noise next to my ear. ‘It’ll wear off. There’s a party down the street and he wants to go, but a boy needs to hang out with his mother.’

  I was the ‘mother’ and Sasha was the ‘mom’. I didn’t like it but I didn’t have the right, or the power, to change it, and Sasha had been good about leaving Jamie’s surname as Harbour, as I’d requested. Sasha had raised Jamie since he was an infant. She and her husband had unquestioningly accepted my baby so that he didn’t fall into the hands of strangers in foster care, strangers who might adopt him and insist I never saw him again. Accepting that I was Jamie’s mother, but that he would call me ‘Blair’, was just one of a million heartaches I’d had to face following the moment I pulled the trigger of a gun and took a man’s life. You don’t tell your mother you love them, or confide your secrets in her, or go to her for help. That stuff belongs to the mom. I followed Sasha into the high-ceilinged home, looking for my son, my chest tight with the anticipation of holding him.

  ‘Jamie, we can drop in to the party if you want,’ I said, finding him slumped on a leather couch. ‘Let’s go get ice cream and then pay a visit on the way back.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘All the good food will be gone by then, probably.’

  ‘That’s your last “whatever”.’ Sasha pointed the finger of doom at the boy. ‘You get one per day and you’ve just used it, Bucko. Now get up and hug Blair, then get your stuff. And if I find a Nintendo Switch in your pocket when you come back out here I’m going to put it in the lock-up.’

  The ‘lock-up’ was Sasha’s underwear drawer, a place for overused electronics and confiscated forbidden magazines. I received an awkward hug from Jamie and then stood, face burning, while Sasha saw to her Iron Man cookies in the huge kitchen.

  ‘Oh my god,’ she said suddenly, while adjusting the temperature on the high-tech oven. ‘You’ll never believe this. I’ve been clearing out some old stuff from the basement. I found some photos of us.’ She pointed with an oven mitt to a stack on the counter. ‘Such a blast from the past.’

  I went to the stack of photos and looked through them. Pool party shots. Some extravagant drunken gathering or another. Brentwood society ladies liked expensive white wine and deep, devastating conversations poolside while the children played, and we’d find any excuse to do it. Someone’s promotion. A kid’s graduation. A marriage, a divorce. We’d had a party for a dog’s birthday once. I spotted myself at Sasha’s side in the cabana in her yard, laughing, drinking sparkling water with lemon, my baby bump hardly showing. I tried to guess how many days passed between the taking of the photograph and the night I murdered a man. Maybe two months. I put the photos down.

  ‘Look at my hair.’ She leaned over. ‘Crazy, right?’

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I was robbed two nights ago.’ I glanced at the hallway to make sure Jamie was out of earshot. ‘They got my car and all my cash. Every cent. I snuck onto a bus to get here.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Sasha jerked away, as though from an offensive odour. ‘How is that even possible?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘Blair,’ she sighed. ‘Honestly. This is not the kind of behaviour that fills me with confidence about you getting more one-on-one time with Jamie.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t hear me correctly,’ I said carefully. ‘I was robbed. It’s not my behaviour we’re talking about.’

  ‘You’re the one who insists on living in the badlands,’ Sasha said, waving in the general direction of the south-east. ‘I’ve told you before, someone up here would let you live in their guest house, where it’s safe. I could make some calls.’

  ‘Accommodation is great but I’ve got to eat. No one within miles of here would hire me.’

  ‘They’d hire you in the house, Blair.’ Sasha rolled her eyes. ‘It would have to be someone I knew, but I could swing it.’

  ‘That sounds hellish for me,’ I said. ‘And you. What are you going to say? “This is my murderous ex-con friend, mother of my child. Will you have her as live-in help? It might be dangerous, but imagine how fun it will it be, staring at her and whispering about her while she brings us drinks.”’

  ‘So what do you need?’ She looked me over. ‘Cash and to borrow the car to take Jamie to the pier, I suppose.’

  ‘I can pay you back in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’ll have to tell Henry something. Perhaps I won’t mention the robbery. We need to make a time to discuss the custody arrangement and I don’t know how something like this will sound to him,’ she said, going to her handbag, on a chair by the windows. She started extracting notes from her pocketbook. ‘He’s hardly ever here at the moment anyway. Work has got him run ragged.’

  A sparkle of terror hit my brain. The ‘talk’ Sasha was going to have with Henry, about my having shared custody of Jamie, had been mentioned but not executed three times already. I wondered if this was going to blow it all out of the water. I wasn’t asking for fifty-fifty. I just wanted days, not hours, with my son. I’d met all my parole conditions. I was being visited and interviewed once a month by Child Protective Services agents, two prim and stiff-backed women who sat together on my couch and looked down their noses at my scuffed second-hand coffee table and the worn industrial carpet in my apartment. I was doing everything I could.

  I pushed down the ache in my chest as the boy re-emerged from his bedroom, a smile full of effort and strain on his face. Sasha gave him the Nintendo pat-down and kissed him goodbye.

  ‘Let’s go!’ I chirped, like a cartoon adventurer about to set off on a treacherous mountain climb. I squeezed his shoulder on the way to the door, maybe too hard.

  The Santa Monica Pier Ferris wheel carriages swung gently as the machinery clunked between stops. Jamie bumped into me at one of the intervals, shifted by the movement of the carriage, and then slid across the seat away from me, awkward. It always took him a long time to warm up.

  ‘So, what’s so great about this Benny kid and his party?’ I asked.

  ‘Someone said they were going to have a magician,’ Jamie said. ‘Or an acrobat. I don’t know. Me and the guys have been trying to learn how to do backflips and I thought he might teach us.’

  ‘I like how you say “me and the guys” like you’re a bunch of twenty-year-olds.’

  ‘We’re kind of half twenty-year-olds,’ he mused.

  ‘I knew a chick in prison who could do backflips,’ I said. ‘She could do a handstand on one hand too.’

  ‘Why was she in prison if she was so cool?’

  ‘Drugs. Theft,’ I said. ‘In fact, I saw her yesterday morning, out of the blue.’ I shoved away the sudden wave of anxiety that rose at the thought of Sneak and her child. ‘Hey, guess what?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I love you with all my heart and soul.’

  ‘Oh, god.’ He clapped a hand over his eyes. ‘You’ve said that, like, a million times before, you know that?’

  The sun was sparkling in Jamie’s hair. I wanted to stroke it so badly that I had to turn away.

  ‘What was your jail friend visiting for?’ he asked. ‘Was she just saying hello? Do you ever, like, hang out with all the people you knew in there?’

  ‘No. Actually, we’re not allowed to hang out.’

  ‘Well, that’s pretty stupid.’

  ‘It’s the law,’ I said. ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Were there any other murderers in jail or was it just you?’

  I flinched at the question.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘There were plenty.’

  ‘I didn’t know girls could be murderers before Mom told me about you.’

  ‘They can.’

  ‘Were they scary? The ones in prison?’

  ‘Some
of them were,’ I said. ‘Most of them were just like me. I’m not scary.’ I waited for a response. There was none. ‘Am I?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Nah,’ he replied eventually. I took a chance and patted the back of his head.

  ‘So, get this,’ he said suddenly. ‘We’ve got a new neighbour at our house.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘At the back. I met her last night.’

  ‘You like her?’

  ‘She seems pretty cool,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But she smokes a lot. Smoking’s bad for you. Gives you cancer. That’s what happened to Mr Beauvoir. He got cancer. Maybe everybody who moves in to that house will smoke and get cancer and die.’

  I watched my child, wondering how he could turn something as exciting as the arrival of a friendly new neighbour into something so dark. I supposed it seemed to Jamie as though there was murder and unexpected death all around him, stories of it happening in a past he was not a part of, events that permeated his present reality. No matter what I did, I would not be able to protect Jamie from what I had done while he was curled, unborn, inside my body. I fiddled with my phone, and a desire to indulge my addiction rose and fell. I thought about Dayly’s blood on the wall of her apartment, the upturned chair. I saw the desperate young woman behind the gun in the Pump’n’Jump, the way her arm shook with a terror that radiated from deep within. Sneak’s child, out there somewhere, dead or alive.

  Our carriage was almost at the bottom of the wheel. ‘Can we get ice cream now?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Anything you want,’ I told him.

  It was about three weeks after I gave birth to Jamie in the prison infirmary. The hazy, dense mental fugue I’d fallen into, complete with alien overlords and space battles for Earth, had complete control of my waking minutes. I was lying on my bed looking at nothing when she came by.

  ‘Bitch,’ she said, putting an elbow on the bed beside me, leaning in. ‘I gotta ask you. How long you planning to lie there pretending you’re dead?’

  I blinked myself back into reality, looked at her.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I said.

  ‘No way. You know why?’ She turned and pointed. ‘Because that’s my bunk over there. The one in the corner. I sleep on my left side, which means every morning and every night for the past month I’ve gone to sleep and woken up looking at your bugged-out, drooling face. I’m tired of it. It’s bothering me. It’s offending me now. If slapping the shit out of you is going to bring you back to earth, I’ll do it.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said.

  She leaned in closer. ‘Here’s what you need to understand,’ she said. ‘We’re all sad in here. We’re all angry. You think you’re the only one who’s ever had to give up a baby in this place? There was a crazy woman in here last summer who had to sleep with a doll. Not just sleep with it but carry it around everywhere, pretending to go off and breastfeed it, talking to it and changing its diapers. You think you’re the only one who’s ever had to stare down the barrel of a decade or more in this shithole? You’re trippin’. We’re all in this together, and you lying there cracking up is going to start making other people wonder if they shouldn’t be doing the same. We all get through it or none of us get through it, you understand? Weren’t you a doctor? Didn’t I hear that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I muttered.

  ‘So you’re supposed to be all about helping everyone else,’ she said. ‘Snap to it, bitch.’

  I thought about Sneak’s words as I led my son into the police station.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Jamie asked as we entered the dull brick building. ‘Is this where you went to jail?’

  I hushed him. It was, in fact, the police station I had been escorted to on the night of the murder. But it was the only station I knew, and I had to act while I had use of Sasha’s car.

  ‘We’re just making a quick report.’

  The boy looked around excitedly at the framed pictures of police, collections of badges and the polished brass trophies from police sporting events in a big cabinet before the brick wall. The smell of the place was the same as the night I had been brought here. Leather, gun oil, trouble, pride.

  The thin male officer behind the front desk was clicking idly at a computer. ‘Yep,’ he said by way of address.

  ‘Hi.’ I put my sweaty hands on the counter. ‘I’m here to report a stolen car.’

  The officer sighed and began leafing through sheets of paper on a shelf below the counter. He set a form in front of me.

  ‘Fill that out.’

  I filled out the form. The officer took it, signed it, and slipped it behind the desk, somewhere I couldn’t see, probably onto an enormous pile.

  ‘I’m also . . . uh.’ I stared at my hands on the counter, thinking, deciding. ‘Yeah. I’m here to see if a missing person report has been filed.’

  ‘You’re here to file a missing person report?’ He frowned.

  ‘No.’ I swallowed. ‘I’m here to see if one has been filed. I . . . I’m trying to find out . . . If one hasn’t been filed, you see, I may want to file one. Or have someone come here and file one. If that’s okay. The girl . . . I’m hoping her roommate might have, uh . . .’

  The officer stared at me. His badge said McAuley.

  ‘Could you please just see if a missing person report has been filed for Dayly Lawlor?’ I said. Sweat was rolling down my ribs. I flapped my shirt away from my skin. ‘L-a-w-l-o-r. I don’t know if it’s “Daily” like every day, or otherwise.’

  McAuley looked over my shoulder at Jamie and then back at me. There was a deadness in his eyes that didn’t lift as he turned to the computer and started typing. He ran a finger down a list of names that was laminated and taped to the desk, then picked up a phone and dialled. The officer said ‘Front desk’, and then replaced the receiver.

  I stood, hoping whoever was being called to the front desk had nothing to do with me. That McAuley would return to the computer, check for Dayly, confirm that she wasn’t my problem and let me go. But a man in plain clothes appeared through a door beside the counter and looked right at me.

  He glanced at Jamie then beckoned me sharply with one hand. ‘You can leave the boy where he is.’

  Hallways, corners, sudden vast offices full of cubicles, eyes, posters, racks of uniform hats. I was tracing steps that I had taken ten years earlier, each one taking me further and further away from my child. I was inside. An interview room door was shutting behind us. An air-sucking sound.

  I realised I hadn’t looked at the man before me. Like the well-trained inmate that I had once been, I’d focused only on his shoes. Brown leather boots, worn, scuffed, under jeans. I caught a glimpse of a neat blond buzz cut and a questioning look. Heavy, stubbled jaw. I turned away.

  ‘Sit.’ He gestured to a chair. There was no table in the room to hide behind. I sat, clasped my hands, and he sank into the other chair.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he began.

  ‘What? Nothing.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘Nothing.’ I straightened. ‘I was just here to check on a report.’

  ‘You’re nervous.’

  ‘Police stations make everybody nervous.’

  ‘Your name,’ he said. It wasn’t a request, it was a statement.

  ‘Blair Harbour.’

  The man took out his phone and started typing. I was in too deep. Trying to regulate my breathing, avoid drowning. I struggled in the silence.

  ‘And yours?’ I asked, just to break it.

  ‘Detective Al Tasik.’

  A detective. I gripped my chair. ‘What division are you in?’ I asked.

  More silence. He was in control, an elbow on the arm of his chair, chewing a nail as he surfed the internet or looked at his texts or whatever the hell he was doing. The calm of a person in a doctor’s waiting room. Casual.

  ‘You’re lying,’ he said finally.

  ‘What?’ I said again, laughed stupidly. ‘No, I—’

  ‘You’re Blair Harbour. Killer. C
onvict. Parolee.’ He showed me the phone screen, a second-long flash of my own face. ‘But you sit down in front of me just now and the first thing you say is you’re nervous because everybody gets nervous in police stations. That’s a lie by omission. When were you going to tell me you’re a convicted criminal?’

  ‘Look.’ I took a deep breath, swiped a stray hair out of my face before it stuck to the sweat beading at my temples. ‘I’m just here to see if my friend – if a person who I think may be missing – has been reported as such. That’s all.’

  ‘Dayly Lawlor is your friend?’

  My heart was hammering. I wondered if he could see my jugular pulsing. ‘No. I don’t know her.’

  ‘You just said she was your friend. Are you avoiding saying she’s your friend because she’s a criminal, too? You have particularly strict parole conditions, Ms Harbour. I’m sure you’ve been made aware of those. They specifically state that interactions with anyone who has been convicted of a—’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I needed to take back control of the conversation. Interrupt him. He didn’t like it. His jaw twitched.

  ‘When was the last time you saw Ms Lawlor?’

  The Pump’n’Jump. The gun in her hand. The blood on her fingers.

  ‘I’ve never seen her,’ I said. ‘I’m telling you Dayly Lawlor is not a friend. I’ve never met her. She’s related to someone I know.’

  ‘Someone you know? Who?’

  ‘Just a person.’

  ‘Tell me their name.’

  ‘I don’t have to do that.’

  ‘So you’re just here checking on the missing person report of someone you don’t know and have never met.’ He nodded slowly, smirked at an empty corner of the room as though he was so used to sharing a smirk with his partner that he did it even when they weren’t there. ‘Ms Harbour, I’m going to ask you now, are you currently under the influence of any drugs?’

  My mind leaped ahead, sizzled and snapped through a series of horrific visions. A drug test. A formal interview while we waited for results. A call to my parole officer. A call to Sasha and Henry from McAuley at the front desk, telling them to come get Jamie, that I was going to be detained for an undetermined amount of time due to a sudden unfolding of circumstances on which he could not elaborate. The thought pressed again that the only person who was going to get me out of this room was myself. The way I had got myself out from under the gaze of the robber’s gun two days earlier, the way I had talked and schemed and lied my way out of rapes, assaults and shankings in prison a million times across the decade I had been inside.