Darkness My Old Friend

she was pregnant, relegating her to office work for the company. You need your rest. She still drew a salary from the company, which was direct-deposited into an account for which she didn’t have a checkbook or an ATM card. He gave her an allowance for the house and the kids.

It was only after Janie died last year that she forced herself to look at what she’d allowed to happen. How she’d gone from an educated, accomplished woman, making six figures before she went to work for Kevin, to a housewife who didn’t even have access to the family bank account, whose phone calls to her mother were being tracked by her husband. She was a woman whose whole body flooded with dread when she heard the garage door open at night. She lived in fear of his words, his punishments. And the funny thing was that he rarely raised his voice, almost never put his hands on her. Almost never.

She’d stood up to him once. She had. It was when he told her that he didn’t want her to talk to her mother more than once a week. She’d paid him lip service, to avoid a fight in front of the children. But then she’d just ignored his directive. In fact, she’d talked to her mother more often. The night he’d got the bill, he’d come home after the children were sleeping. He’d come in quietly and put the bill on the kitchen counter. He’d reminded her how in college she’d had problems with depression. She’d been in therapy, taken medication. She’d confided in him early in their relationship that she’d felt so much pressure she’d been briefly suicidal.

“That type of mental illness doesn’t just go away, Paula. It can come back. You could be a danger to yourself. Even to the children.”

What was he saying? That he’d use her history to try to take her children away from her? Or was it even worse than that? Was he threatening to hurt her? To hurt Claire and Cameron? It was such a mind-bending moment that she was speechless with fear and confusion. He slept in his home office that night and left the next morning for work without a word. Why didn’t she leave that day? She couldn’t answer that question-fear, denial, inertia. It was some insidious combination of all those things.

She asked her mother to call her every day instead. Her mother complied and didn’t ask why.

Wasn’t there some belief about how if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out? But if you put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will allow itself to slowly cook to death? But she wasn’t dead yet. She was going to get them all out of the pot somehow.

Before Cole showed up, she’d had it all figured out. Once a year Kevin went away to meet with the other partners at a golf resort in Florida. He’d be gone for four days and come back either elated or in a deep funk depending on how things had gone, what the projections for the year were, whether or not they were going to get bonuses. Her plan was to take the kids and go to her parents’ as soon as Kevin left. She was going to tell them everything, the whole truth about the man she’d married. Then she was going to take the children and go far away. She was going to start over and pray he never found them. She couldn’t just go to her mom and dad and stay with them. It wouldn’t work; he’d come after her. There’d be an ugly battle for the children in the very best case. But more than that, she wasn’t sure what he was capable of, what he might do to her, the kids, even her parents. She just didn’t know anymore.

That trip was three weeks away. Unless she could find Cole’s mother and get him out of the house, she didn’t know what she was going to do. She couldn’t leave Cole alone with Kevin to bear the fallout of their leaving. But she couldn’t take him, either. He wasn’t her son, first of all. And he worshipped Kevin like a god.

That was why she’d contacted Jones Cooper. Maybe he could find Cole’s mother and Paula could call her, implore her to come back for Cole. If anyone else knew what Kevin was, it must be her.

It was all Paula could do not to throw herself onto Jones Cooper’s lap and confess everything to him and ask for his help. He seemed so strong and safe, so good. But she couldn’t do that. People talk; she couldn’t have word getting out, possibly getting back to Kevin. In a small town like The Hollows, there are no secrets once you’ve opened your mouth. Gossip was viral, infectious. It couldn’t help but spread.

The clock was ticking, she knew that. She knew that the company was about to go under. She knew that her husband’s moods were growing darker. She’d guessed at his password and logged in to his home computer and had been shocked by the things she’d found there. Kevin was not the man she thought he was. Maybe he never had been. He’d been visiting ugly, hard-core porn sites, guns-and-ammo sites. He’d been visiting sites about postpartum psychosis. She learned that they were drowning in debt. And then Paula found an e-mail correspondence between him and another woman. He was having an affair. The messages were filled with lies about Paula, that she didn’t take care of the kids, that she was having an affair, that she was mentally unstable, an alcoholic. It made her wonder about everything he’d told her about Cole’s mother, the other women he’d been with before her.

Then last week she took his car to be washed. While she was waiting in line, she started picking up the trash he just left on the floor of the car. She didn’t want the people who washed it to think that she was a slob who ate nothing but fast food and then dumped the wrappers and empty cups, leaving them littered about the interior. She felt something under the passenger seat and pulled out a black canvas bag. She unzipped it and saw a plastic case inside. Somehow she knew what it was before she opened it. Sitting there, she opened the lid and saw the gun. She felt as if someone had sucked all the air out of the car.

She slammed the case shut and jumped when the attendant knocked on the window. She smiled at him, told him she wanted the Super Wash, and asked him how long it would take. She exited the vehicle with the bag in her hand. Still smiling, she walked inside and paid the clerk. She went over to the window and watched the car get lathered and rinsed, sprayed with wax, and buffed. She wished there were a car wash for her life, something she could enter on a conveyor belt, something that would wash away everything that was dirty and ugly about her life. Where did he get this gun? Why was it in the car? Should she put it back? Should she get rid of it? What would he do if he knew she’d found it and disposed of it? It was a trap, a lose-lose scenario. She put the gun back where she’d found it and drove home. Why hadn’t she left that Monday when he went to work? She didn’t know the answer to that, either.

What she found so odd about the situation she was in was that on the surface they must seem so normal. She was chitchatting with people at school when she dropped off Cammy and picked him up. She made her daily posts on Facebook, sharing pictures of the family and their various activities. Cammy on his scooter, Claire making a big mess with her mashed sweet potatoes. Fakebook, a place where people could project the image that they wanted, show only the things they wanted everyone to see, hiding every dark and sad thing in their hearts and in their lives. Or maybe it was just her.

The neighbors must see the handsome Kevin going off to work every morning and coming home in the evenings, bringing in groceries or takeout, grabbing the mail from the box. Saturday night was their date night. They got dressed up and went out to the nicest restaurants, parties in the neighborhood, even into the city. But sometimes on those nights, Kevin wouldn’t say a word, checking his BlackBerry while she yammered away like an idiot over dinner. Or he’d dote on her at parties, then rail at her all the way home about how she ate too much or laughed too loud or how her dress was too tight, and was she ever going to lose that baby weight?

It was scary how much people didn’t know about one another. For example, no one knew or even suspected that Paula and her children had become a burden, an inconvenience to Kevin and the fantasy he was creating in his mind about his new girlfriend. And that Paula had better find a way to get herself and her children far, far from him and quickly. Otherwise… well, she just didn’t know what her husband was capable of doing. She just didn’t know.

On the monitor, Paula heard Claire start to fuss. She looked at the clock and saw that an hour had passed. It was time already to nurse the baby, pack her up, and go get Cammy. How did the hours, the days, pass so quickly? It seemed like some kind of trick. She always had such big plans for nap time. But she so often just found herself blanking out, collapsing into the silence.

When she turned to go upstairs, she saw him standing there. How long had he been standing there like that?

“Kevin,” she said. She forced a smile. “You scared me.”

“Where are the kids?”

Her hands were shaking suddenly, so she stuffed them into her pockets. It was funny how your body picked up signals that your mind wanted to ignore. She hated herself for feeling as afraid as she did right now.

“Cole’s out with friends.” She hated the sound of her own voice, so falsely light; the smile she kept plastered on her face actually ached. “Claire’s upstairs, just waking from her nap. And Cammy’s still at school.”

Kevin glanced at the clock. “It’s almost four.”