Dark Places

Patty just stared.

“In a way that people might get the wrong idea about … sexually?”

Patty almost choked. “Ben hates the girls!” She was surprised at the relief she felt. “He has as little to do with them as possible.”

Diane lit another cigarette, gave a taut nod of her head. “Well, OK, good. But there’s something more. A friend of mine told me a rumor that there’s been a complaint about Ben over at the school, that a few little girls, Michelle’s age or so, had talked about kissing him and maybe him touching them or something. Maybe worse. The stuff I heard was worse.”

“Ben? You realize that’s completely crazy.” Patty stood up, couldn’t figure out what to do with her arms or legs. She turned to the right and then the left too quickly, like a distracted dog, and sat back down. A strap in her chair broke.

“I do know it’s crazy. Or some misunderstanding.”

That was the worst word Diane could have said. As soon as she said it, Patty knew she’d been dreading just exactly that. That wedge of possibility—misunderstanding—that could turn this into something. A pat on the head might be a caress of the back might be a kiss on the lips might be the roof caving in.

“Misunderstanding? Ben wouldn’t misunderstand a kiss. Or touching. Not with a little girl. He’s not a pervert. He’s an odd kid, but he’s not sick. He’s not crazy.” Patty had spent her life swearing Ben wasn’t odd, was just an average kid. But now she’d settle for odd. The realization came suddenly, a wild jolt, like having your hair blown in your face while driving.

“Will you tell them he wouldn’t do that?” Patty asked, and the tears came all at once, suddenly her cheeks were soaked.

“I can tell everyone in Kinnakee, everyone in the state of Kansas that he wouldn’t do that, and it might not be the end of it. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just heard yesterday afternoon, but it seems to be getting … bigger. I almost came out here. Then I spent the rest of the night convincing myself that it wasn’t anything. Then I woke up this morning and realized it was.”

Patty knew that feeling, a dream hangover, like when she jumped up from a panicky sleep at 2 in the morning and tried to talk herself into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn’t so.

“So you came over here with groceries and a sticker book and all along you had this story about Ben you were going to tell me.”

“Like I said …” Diane shrugged sympathetically, splayed her fingers except for the ones holding the cigarette.

“Well, what happens now? Do you know the girls’ names? Is someone going to phone me or talk to me, or talk to Ben? I need to find Ben.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. We had a fight. About his hair. He took off on his bike.”

“So what was the story with his hair?”

“I don’t know, Diane! What in God’s name does it matter now?”

But of course Patty knew it did matter. Everything now would be filtered and sifted for meaning.

“Well, I don’t think this is an emergency,” Diane said quietly. “I don’t think we need to get him home right now unless you want him home right now.”

“I want him home right now.”

“OK, well let’s start calling people then. You can give me a list of his friends and I’ll start phoning.”

“I don’t even know his friends anymore,” Patty said. “He was talking to someone this morning, but he wouldn’t say who.”

“Let’s hit redial.”

Her sister grunted, stamped out her cigarette with a boot, pulled Patty out of her chair, led her inside. Diane snapped at the girls to stay in their room when the bedroom door cracked, and made her way to the phone, purposefully hit the redial button with one braut-sized finger. Sing-song numeric tones blared out of the receiver— beepBeepBEEPbeepbeepbupBEEP—and before it even rang, Diane hung up.

“My number.”

“Oh, yeah. I called after breakfast to see when you’d be over.”

The two sisters sat at the table, and Diane poured more mugs of coffee. The snow glared into the kitchen like a strobelight.

“We need to get Ben home,” Patty said.

Libby DayNOW

Moony as a grade-school girl, I drove home thinking about Ben. Since I was seven, I pictured him in the same haunted-house flashes: Ben, black- haired, smooth-faced, with his hands clasped around an axe, charging down the hall at Debby, a humming noise coming from his tight lips. Ben’s face speckled in blood, howling, the shotgun going up to his shoulder.

Id forgotten there was once just Ben, shy and serious, those weird unsettling blasts of humor. Just Ben my brother, who couldn’t have done what they said. What I said.