Dark Places

“Let it go, Libby.”

“What’d you do with the baby?”

I felt queasy, fevered. If the baby had lived, it’d be (he’d be, she’d be), what, twenty-four years old. The baby wasn’t a baby anymore. I tried to picture an adult, but my brain kept bouncing back an image of a blanket-swaddled infant. But hell, I could barely picture me as an adult. My next birthday I’ll be thirty-two, my mom’s age when she was killed. She’d seemed so grown up. More grown up than I’d ever be.

So if it was alive, the baby was twenty-four. I had one of my awful visions. A might-have-been vision. Us, if everyone had lived, at home in Kinnakee. There’s Michelle in the living room, still fiddling with her oversized glasses, bossing around a bundle of kids who roll their eyes at her but do what they’re told. Debby, chubby and chattery with a big, blond farmer-husband and a special room in her own farmhouse for crafts, packed with sewing ribbons and quilting patches and glue guns. My mom, ripe-fifties and sunbaggy, her hair mostly white, still bickering pleasantly with Diane. And into the room comes Ben’s kid, a daughter, a redhead, a girl in her twenties, thin and assured, bangly bracelets on delicate wrists, a college graduate who doesn’t take any of us seriously. A Day girl.

I choked on my own spit, started coughing, my windpipe shut down. The visitor two booths down from me leaned out to look and then, deciding I wasn’t going to die, went back to her son.

“What happened that night, Ben? I need to know. I just need to know.”

“Libby, you can’t win this game. I tell you I’m innocent, that means you’re guilty, you ruined my life. I tell you I’m guilty … I don’t think that makes you feel much better, does it?”

He was right. It was one reason I’d stayed immobile for so many years. I threw something else out: “And what about Trey Teepano?”

“Trey Teepano.”

“I know he was a bookie, and that he was into Devil shit, and that he was a friend of yours, and he was with you that night. With Diondra. That all seems pretty fucked up.”

“Where’d you get all that?” Ben looked me in the eye, then raised his gaze up, gave a long stare at my red roots that were to my ears now.

“Dad told me. He said he owed Trey Teepano money and—”

“Dad? He’s Dad now?”

“Runner said—”

“Runner said fuck-all. You need to grow up, Libby. You need to pick a side. You can spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what happened, trying to reason. Or you can just trust yourself. Pick a side. Be on mine. It’s better.”

Ben DayJANUARY 2, 1985

10:23 P.M.

They drove out past the edge of town, the road going from cement to dirt, Ben rattling around in the backseat, hands pressed up against the top of the truck, trying to stay in place. He was stoned, real stoned, and his teeth and head rattled. You got a screw loose? He had two or three loose. He wanted to sleep. Eat first, then sleep. He watched the lights of Kinnakee fade away and then it was miles of glowing blue snow, a patch of grass here, a jagged scar of fence there, but mostly snow like the surface of the moon. Like he really was in outer space, on another planet, and he wasn’t going home, ever.

They turned down some road, trees sucking them in, tunnel-like on all sides and he realized he had no idea where they were. He just hoped whatever was about to happen was over soon. He wanted a hamburger. His mom made crazy hamburgers, called them kitchen-sinkers, fattened up cheap ground meat with onions and macaroni and whatever else crap was about to go bad. One time he swore he found part of a banana, glopped over with ketchup—his mom thought ketchup made everything OK. It didn’t, her cooking sucked, but he’d eat one of those hamburgers right now. He was thinking I’m so hungry I could eat a cow. And then, as if his food-prayer worked, he refocused his eyes from a gritty stain on the backseat to the outside and there were ten or twenty Herefords standing in the snow for no reason. There was a barn nearby but no sign of a house, and the cows were too dumb to walk back into the barn, so they stood like a bunch of fat assholes, blowing steam from their nostrils. Herefords were the ugliest cows around, giant, rusty, with white crinkled faces and pink-rimmed eyes. Jersey cows were sort of sweet looking, they had those big deer faces, but Herefords looked prehistoric, belligerent, mean. The things had furry thick waddles and curvy-sharp horns and when Trey pulled to a stop, Ben felt a flurry of nerves. Something bad was going to happen.

“We’re here,” Trey said as they sat in the car, the heater turned off, the cold creeping in. “All out.” Trey reached over Diondra into the glove compartment—here grazing Diondra’s baby belly, them both giving weird smiles again—grabbed a cassette and popped it in the deck. The frenetic, zigzag music started scribbling on Ben’s brain.

“Come on, Ben,” Trey said, crunching down on the snow. He pulled up the driver’s seat to let Ben out, and Ben stumbled to the ground, missing the step, Trey grabbing hold of him. “Time for you to get some understanding, feel some power. You’re a dad soon, dude.” Trey shook him by both shoulders. “A dad!” His voice sounded friendly enough but he didn’t smile. He just stared with his lips tight and his eyes red-rimmed, almost bloody. Deciding. He had a deciding look. Then Trey let go, cuffed his jean jacket, and went around to the back of the truck. Ben tried to see across the hood, catch Diondra’s eyes, flash her a whatthefuck look, but she was leaning down into the cab, pulling another baggie out from under her seat, groaning with one hand on her belly, like it was really hard to bend down half a foot. She came back up, hand crooked on her back now and began digging around in the baggie. It was filled with foil gum wrappers and she pulled three out.

“Give it,” Trey said, stuck two in his pocket and unwrapped the third. “You and Ben can share.”

“I don’t want to share,” Diondra whined. “I feel like shit, I need a whole one.”

Trey gave a frustrated sigh, then shot one packet out at her, muttering Jesus Christ.

“What is that stuff?” Ben finally asked. He could feel that warm trickle on his head, knew he was bleeding again. His headache was worse too, throbbing behind his left eye, down his neck and into his shoulder, like an infection moving through his system. He rubbed at his neck, it felt like someone had tied a garden hose in knots and planted it under his skin.