Dark Places

“You’ll be out of here soon, Ben. Can you believe it? You’ll be out of prison.” This was by no means a sure thing—a strip of blood on a dead girl’s sheets is good, but a confession’s better. Still, I was hopeful. Still.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” he said. “It may be time. I think twenty-four years may be enough. It may be enough for … standing by. Letting it happen.”

“I think so.”

Lyle and I had put together pieces of that night from what Diondra had told me: They were at the house, ready to run away, and something happened that unraveled Diondra, she killed Michelle. Ben didn’t stop her. My guess is, Michelle somehow learned of the pregnancy, the secret baby. I would ask Ben one day, ask for the details. But I knew he’d give me nothing now.

The two Days sat looking at each other, thinking things and swallowing them. Ben scratched a pimple on his arm, the Y of the Polly tattoo peeking out from his sleeve.

“So: Crystal. What can you tell me about Crystal, Libby? What happened that night? I’ve heard different versions. Is she, is she wrong. Bad?”

So now it was Ben wondering what happened in a lonely, cold house outside of town. I fingered the two tear- shaped scars on my cheekbone, imprints from the iron’s steam ducts.

“She’s smart enough to duck the police all this time,” I said. “Diondra will never say where she is.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t know, Ben, she was protecting her mother. Diondra said she told Crystal everything, and I think she meant it. Everything: I killed Michelle and no one can know. What does it do to a girl who knows her mother is a murderer? She gets obsessed, she tries to make sense of it, she clips photos of her dead relatives, she reads her dead aunt’s diary until she can quote from it, she knows every angle, she spends her life ready to defend her mom. And then I show up, and it’s Crystal who blows it. And what does she do? She tries to fix it. I kind of understand. I give her a pass. She won’t go to prison because of me.”

I’d been vague with the police about Crystal—they wanted to speak with her about the fire, but they didn’t know she’d tried to kill me. I wasn’t going to snitch on another member of my family, I just wasn’t, even if this one happened to be guilty. I tried to tell myself she wasn’t that disturbed. It could have been momentary madness, born out of love. But then, her mom had had a case of that, and it left my sister dead.

I hope to never see Crystal again, but if I do I’m glad I have a gun, let’s put it that way.

“You really give her a pass?”

“I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely,” I added.

“You talking about Mom?” Ben said.

“I was talking about me.”

“You could have been talking about all of us.”

Ben pressed his hand against the glass, and my brother and I matched palms.

Ben DayNOW

Standing out in the prison yard the other day, he smelled smoke. Smoke was floating on a current of air about eight feet above his head, and he pictured the field fires of autumn, back when he was a kid, flames marching across the soil in flickering lines, burning away what’s not useful. He’d hated being a farm kid, but now that’s all he thought about. Outside. At night, when the other men were making their sticky sounds, he’d close his eyes and see acres of sorghum, rattling at his knees with those shiny brown beads, like a girl’s jewelry. He’d see the Flint Hills of Kansas, with their eerie, flattened tops, like each mound was waiting for its own coyote to howl from it. Or he’d close his eyes and picture his foot, slopped deep in mud, the feel of the earth sucking him in, holding on to him.

Once or twice a week, Ben had a giddy moment where he almost laughed. He was in prison. For life. For murdering his family. Could that be right? By now he thought of Ben, fifteen-year-old Ben, almost as his son, an entirely different being, and sometimes he wanted to throttle the kid, the kid who just didn’t have it in him— he’d picture shaking Ben until his face blurred.

But sometimes he was proud.

Yes, he’d been a whimpering little worthless coward that night, a boy who just let things happen. Scared. But after the murders, something fell in place maybe. He would be quiet to save Diondra, his woman, and the baby. His second family. He couldn’t bring himself to bust out of that room and save Debby and his mom. He couldn’t bring himself to stop Diondra and save Michelle. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything but shut up and take it. Stay still and take it. That he could do.

He’d be that kind of man.

He’d become famous because he was that kind of man. First he was the bad-ass Devil-daddy, everyone twitching to get away from him, even the guards spooked, and then he was the kindly, misunderstood prisoner. Women came all the time, and he tried not to say too much, let them imagine what he was thinking. They usually imagined he was thinking good thoughts. Sometimes he was. And sometimes he was thinking what would’ve happened if that night went different: He and Diondra and a squealing baby somewhere in western Kansas, Diondra crying mean tears in some tiny, food-grimed cell of a motel room they rented by the week. He’d have killed her. At some point, he might have. Or maybe he’d have grabbed the baby and run, and he and Crystal would be happy somewhere, her a college graduate, him running the farm, the coffee maker always on, like home.

Now maybe it was his turn to be out and Diondra’s turn to be in, and he’d get out and find Crystal wherever she was, she was a sheltered kid, she couldn’t disappear for long, he’d find her and take care of her. It’d be nice to take care of her, to actually do something besides shutting up and taking it.

But even as he was thinking this, he knew he’d have to aim smaller. That’s what he learned from his life so far: always aim smaller. He was born to be lonely, that’s what he knew for certain. When he was a kid, when he was a teenager, and definitely now. Sometimes he felt like he’d been gone his whole life—in exile, away from the place he was supposed to be, and that, soldier-like, he was pining to be returned. Homesick for a place he’d never been.