Darkness My Old Friend

“Michael, you’re not getting it,” she said. There was a new harshness in her voice. “The kitchen cabinets are not the problem. The house is a teardown. Someone will demolish it and build a new structure on the land. Putting in cabinets is a waste of your time and money. Did you call those cleaning crews I told you about? Get some estimates? We need to remove that junk.”

He didn’t tell her he’d already taken a sledgehammer to the kitchen. It always looked so easy on those home- repair shows. But the real world didn’t yield so easily; it splintered in some places, held on tight in others. It came off in great chunks or refused to budge.

“Let’s just get back to basics, Michael.” She had this really annoying habit of using his name all the time. As if he were a hyperactive child and she was always struggling to keep his attention. “Call a crew. Start having the junk hauled away. You can’t do this work by yourself. And forget about those cabinets.”

He didn’t say anything. For whatever reason, her advice reminded him of Eloise Montgomery. “Just let this go,” she’d said. “She’s gone. She has been for many years. It never does any of us any good to live in the past.”

“Are you hearing me, Michael?” asked Tammy.

He wanted to answer her, but he couldn’t find his voice. This happened to him when there were too many competing thoughts, or sounds, or demands on his attention. Something in him just froze. He stood in the semidemolished kitchen, phone in one hand, sledgehammer in the other, and he just couldn’t manage to get any words out.

“Michael?”

Then, “Oh, for crying out loud.” And Tammy hung up. He stuck the phone back in his pocket.

He felt it then, that terrible tide of rage. It came up from within him, filling his ears with the sound of rushing blood. He hefted the sledgehammer and used all his strength to put it through the drywall, releasing a mighty roar. A plume of white-gray dust rose into the already cloudy air. Next the counter. It splintered but didn’t collapse. Then the floor. He felt the impact rocket through his arms and into his back. The pain sobered him. Concrete. The floor must be concrete beneath the linoleum. He sank to the floor, let the dust settle on his hair, his body. He wished it could bury him, like snow. He felt a little better, the terrible rush of anger passing, receding, then gone.

But what kind of advice was that from Eloise Montgomery? Most people could recognize that a child would want to know what had happened to his mother, even if that child was nearly forty and his mother had been gone for more than twenty-five years. This is not something that a person moves on from. It defines him.

His sister seemed to have more peace with it, periods in her life where she was busy with school, career, later her husband and children. But she was so young when Mom had disappeared. Cara admitted that she hardly remembered their mother at all. She did suffer bouts of depression related to their mother’s disappearance, went through a phase where she’d hired a private detective. When that endeavor turned up nothing, she started to see a shrink. But it had been a long time since they’d talked about Mom; Michael sensed that Cara had given up, moved on in a way he could not. In some sense, Cara thought of their aunt Sally as her mother, with whom Cara had gone to live in the year after their mother vanished. Michael stayed with his father. He wanted to be there, waiting, when his mother came home.

Cara had been upset that he’d hired Ray Muldune and Eloise Montgomery. She hadn’t come back to say good-bye to their father or to help Michael settle the estate.

“A psychic? Really, Mike? Really?” She said it in that flat way that people do now. Really. A way that manages to imply disbelief and disdain, an air of superiority.

“I wanted this to be the closing of a door,” she’d said to him. “Why do you have to keep prying it open?”

“The door will never close until I know what happened to her. And I feel like this is my last chance. He’s gone. Whatever he was guarding, hiding here, is mine now.”

He heard her breathing. When she was little, Michael had liked to watch Cara sleep. She was so peaceful, so solidly asleep, as though nothing could wake her. The sound of her breath used to make him happy, relax him.

“Take it all, okay?” she said. “Whatever money he had left, the house, whatever you find. It’s all yours.” She didn’t say it with heat. “But when you’ve found what you’re looking for-or if you don’t-promise me you’ll stop focusing on Mom and use whatever money is left to start focusing on yourself. Promise me.”

“I promise.” But the line between them crackled with uncertainty.

“I’m a mother now, you know,” she said. “I understand how hard it is, how unceasing are the demands, how mundane and just frustrating it can be day after day. There’s no break from being a mother, no weekends or holidays. You’re on call twenty-four/seven. When you’re not with them, you’re thinking about them.”

He’d never heard her say anything like that. He always thought of her as the perfect mom-carpooling, baking cookies, making Halloween costumes.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“I’m just saying that I never wanted anything else, you know. Not like my friends. I never had big dreams. I just wanted to have a house, a family-you know, to be a mom. So it’s good for me. I love it. But if I didn’t? If I had wanted something else and got this instead, and if I didn’t love my husband? Maybe I could just walk away and not come back.”

“She didn’t,” he said.

“I’m just saying. And then you wouldn’t-couldn’t-come back. Even if you hated yourself, regretted it, missed your children. How could you face that shame, face the pain you’d caused, answer those questions? Mommy, why did you leave us?” Her voice broke on that, and she started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say.

He listened to her take a couple of deep, shuddering sobs. He wanted to hold her, comfort her. But even if they were together, he wouldn’t be able to do that. He couldn’t handle physical closeness like that, not with her. Not when she looked so much like their mother. In fact, though they talked every month at least, he hadn’t seen his sister in three years.

“I have to go,” she said. “I love you. Take care of yourself, okay?”

She’d hung up before he could say anything else, and they hadn’t talked since. She’d sent flowers to Mack’s grave. The card read, We hope you have found peace. Did she really hope that? he wondered. Or was that something people just said? These niceties that people uttered-blanketing a well of anger and resentment or masking apathy-they were so confusing.

Now he looked around at the mess he’d made. The kitchen was bad before. He’d cleaned out all the decaying organic matter, and the smell was better. At least to him-when he was wearing a mask. But in taking down the rotting old cabinets, he’d managed to turn the space into a demolition site. And the fact was, Michael realized, he had no idea whatsoever how to install new cabinets or floors. He wasn’t even sure that’s why he’d done it. Did he decide to renovate and then begin demolition? Or did he decide to renovate after he’d already picked up the hammer and started destroying? He honestly couldn’t remember. He’d never really even painted a wall. Tammy was right. He needed to call in that cleaning crew.

But the thought of that-strangers stomping through this place, taking everything that was left of her and putting it in a Dumpster-filled him with dread. Holding on, even to these wrecked remains, was so much easier than letting go. Maybe he was his father’s son after all.

He heard another knock at the front door and moved quickly from the kitchen. He was afraid that Tammy had gotten into her car and come to see what he’d done. Or that Jones Cooper had returned with more questions that Michael couldn’t and didn’t want to answer. He’d found Cooper’s visit unsettling, mainly because he recalled so little about that night, had so many questions himself. And he remembered Jones Cooper, with his hard, analytical stare. Jones Cooper saw things, no matter what you said. He saw things in you that you didn’t know were there.

“Michael, are you home?”

It was Ray Muldune, carrying the brown paper bag that Michael knew contained his mother’s running shoes. Ray stayed in the foyer, had his hand over his mouth.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” Ray said.

The older man had an odd look on his face. Michael really liked Ray. Ray said what he meant, even if it was rude, insensitive, or ugly.

“Did it work?” Michael asked.