Darkness My Old Friend

She got your name from the Pedersens.”

The Oaks was a wealthy neighborhood about ten minutes north of the downtown area where Jones and Maggie lived. It was his first call off their street, and it reminded him again of Eloise’s visit and her other warning that he was getting a reputation. What had she said? People are going to start coming to you for more, from farther away. It might lead you to places you don’t expect.

He shared this with Maggie, and she accepted it with a nod but didn’t say anything right away. In the quiet, Jones noticed the ticking of that goddamn clock again. He really hated that thing.

“So that could mean Chuck, too,” she said. She sounded thoughtful, far off.

He pushed out a nervous laugh. “Yeah, if we’re putting weight behind the ramblings of a mentally ill woman.”

He felt her snake her arms around his middle and hold on tight. He returned her embrace, leaned down to kiss her soft, open mouth.

“We’re not, are we?” he asked. He looked into those deep, sweet eyes.

She leaned up and kissed him again. Was it a little urgent? It sent a jolt through him. They still had it, that heat. It had never once waned in all their years together, even in the hard times, even when they were sleeping in separate rooms. He always wanted her. Always.

“No. Of course not.” She stood and offered him her hand. “Come to bed.”

chapter eight

Michael Holt pulled into the driveway of his childhood home and cut the engine. The windows were dark, the lawn overgrown. One of the lower-level shutters hung by a single nail, listing to the side. He sat in the warm interior of the car and considered driving back into town and getting a hotel room. The Super 8 off the highway had rooms for sixty-nine dollars a night, including cable television and a pancake breakfast. The billboard had boasted superlatives like CLEAN! and SAFE!-which might not be enough for some but were more than enough for Michael, especially given his current residence.

He thought about his dwindling bank account, though, and the fact that the house-run-down and badly in need of modernization-could sit on the market in a struggling economy for months, even years.

Well, said the agent he’d hired to list the house. The word had sounded more like a sigh coming from her pretty, glossed lips. We’ll see what we can do. Some people are looking for teardowns and handyman specials. She’d been all smiles in the office. On the property, when he was showing her the house, she’d gone stiff, her smile turning down into a kind of grimace, a look of falsely bright endurance. She’d made polite little noises of dismay. “Um,” she’d said in the upstairs bath. “Oh,” she’d murmured in the attic. “Wow,” she’d said in his father’s room. In the kitchen she’d lost her composure. “Oh, my God. How did he live like this?”

“I don’t know,” Michael had said. “We weren’t… close.”

“Michael,” she said finally in the foyer. He’d watched her back toward the door, a beautifully manicured hand to her forehead. “You’re going to have to clear out some of this clutter. I really can’t show it until you do.”

Clutter. It was an interesting choice of words. Clutter seemed so innocent-maybe a pile of papers on the desk, or a closet filled with too many old clothes, maybe a mess in the garage. Clutter was almost funny, something that needed to be cheerfully tidied up. It didn’t begin to describe his father’s house. It was a towering menace of filth. There were the overflowing boxes in the hallways, stacks of newspapers and magazines in the bathroom; Michael’s old room was filled with computer parts and old telephones, an unexplainable graveyard of nonfunctioning electronic devices. There was a closet where they’d kept the cat’s litter box. The cat was long dead, but the smell of his urine and feces remained. Opening that closet door was to invite an olfactory assault that could bring a man to his knees.

There were shelves and shelves of books in every room, and a cartoon plume of dust flew up whenever one was removed from its place. It was the kitchen, though, that was the dark heart of the house, the smell of decay so oppressive, the buzzing of flies so unnerving that he’d not even set foot over the threshold. And that was just the first floor.

Movement on the property next door caught Michael’s eye. He saw Mrs. Miller on her porch, her arms folded across her middle. It was dark, but he could tell she was looking in his direction, wondering why he was sitting there in his car. She was probably wondering, too, about the sign that the agency had placed in the yard today. He’d thought it would bring him some relief to see it there. But instead he felt a familiar dark hollow within him, this terrible emptiness he had carried around ever since his mother had left. It started just below his navel and spread through him like a stain-red wine on linen.

***

“Where’s Mom?” It was a hundred years ago that he’d first asked that question, the question he’d been asking in one way or another every day since.

His father, Mack, had stood in the kitchen, scrambling eggs in a scratched-up yellow pan on the stove. His father had seemed to freeze, to hold his breath, when Michael entered the room and pulled up his usual chair at the table. Michael remembered everything about that room that morning. How the sun came in from the window over the sink, and through it he could see the tire swing he hadn’t touched in years. How the chair leg always caught on the vinyl tile that was coming up, how there was a cigarette burn in the red-and-white checked tablecloth. He could smell the eggs, cooked too long. His mother wouldn’t like the coffee his father had made; it smelled weak. They’d probably bicker about it. If you don’t like the coffee I make, make it yourself.

“What do you mean, ‘Where’s Mom?’ ”

There was something strange about his father’s tone, something taut and foreign; his shoulders seemed to quake just slightly. Mack still hadn’t turned to look at him; Michael stared at the back of his father’s head, the dark brown hair run through with gray, the eternal plaid shirt, the chinos and brown leather shoes. What are you wearing, Mack? His mother’s eternal question that wasn’t a question but a taunt.

That morning Michael had a terrible headache, a real killer. He’d struggled for the details of the night before but found he couldn’t remember. He was supposed to spend the night at a friend’s house, but once there he’d wanted to come home. He remembered riding his bike through the quiet streets. He remembered leaving the bike in the drive and coming up the front steps, putting his hand on the knob. But that was the last moment he could recall. As vivid as his memory of that morning was, the night before was still, years later, a total blank.

“Where is she?” he’d asked again.

“She’s gone, son. You know that.”

His father had turned then, and the man looked as though he’d aged ten years since Michael saw him the day before.

“Gone where?”

I hate you. I hate this place. I hate this life. The words came back, the echo of her desperate shrieking still bouncing off the ceiling and the walls. That’s when it started opening in him, that abyss of despair.

A hard knock on the window of his truck snapped him back to the present. Mrs. Miller. He rolled down the window, though he didn’t want to.

“Michael,” she said. “What are you doing just sitting there like that?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Just zoning out. Long day.”

“You didn’t tell me you were selling.” Her breath smelled of something stale. It was hard to see in the darkness, but he knew her hair to be dyed a preposterous shade of orange, her face a cracked mask of deep lines.

He’d always hated Mrs. Miller. It seemed as if she’d been the mean old lady next store forever, the keeper of lost balls, the frowner, the finger wagger, the parent caller. Would she ever die? Or would she just rattle about