Darkness My Old Friend

lashes, that nice soft mouth.

“For not coming to your house the other day,” he said. “I wanted to, but…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He just blew out a long breath, looked down at his nails.

“But what?”

For a second she thought she was dreaming. Sitting here alone with him, the rain beating down outside-it felt like something she could make up.

“I lied to you,” he said. “About my mom.”

Willow knew that. She remembered that she thought he was lying.

“She’s not in Iraq?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know where she is. My dad said she’s living with some guy and doesn’t want me around for a while. She wants me to finish school here, stay with my dad’s family.”

“I’m sorry.” She was sorry. She knew what it had felt like when Richard went off to live with that stripper, even though he and her mom were divorced. She knew what it had felt like when her mom was having a good time with Mr. Ivy. It felt like a betrayal. It hurt, made you unsure of your place in your family, in the world. She reached a hand over the seat, and Cole took it. She felt the heat move into her body.

“But now my stepmom and my half brother and half sister? They left, too. I guess Paula ran off on my dad. He said she hurt him, took the kids.” He leaned away from her, against the driver’s-side door.

“But?”

“But she’s so nice, such a good mom,” he said. “I just can’t see her hurting anyone.”

She couldn’t quite see his face, obscured as he was now by the seat. She climbed over the center console and came to sit beside him in the place Jolie had occupied.

“You think he lied?”

He shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t know. And if he lied about that, did he lie about my mom, too?”

“Can’t you call her?”

“Her phone got disconnected. She got fired from her job. She hasn’t answered any of my e-mails.”

Willow found herself thinking of her own mother, how she really had to get home. But then she saw that he was crying. A single tear trailed down his face. He wiped it quickly away. She reached out for him, and he moved easily into her embrace.

“It’s okay,” she said, even though she had no reason to believe that was true. Everything about him felt good- his arms around her, his face on her neck, his hair against her fingers. “Where’s your dad now?”

He pulled away from her suddenly, turned around to peer out into the darkness. “Did you hear that?”

Willow’s heart started pounding as she listened past the beating rain. Then she heard it, too, faint and far away, the sound of someone screaming. Maybe. They both exited the car at the same time, into the buckets of falling rain. Willow came to stand beside Cole. They looked in the direction of the woods but didn’t hear anything more. There was only darkness and rain, as far as Willow could see. Maybe it was their imagination. Maybe they hadn’t heard anything at all. But Willow knew she wouldn’t leave her friend out there alone.

“Let’s go get her,” said Willow.

“Okay.”

The thin beam of Cole’s flashlight was the only light they had.

Michael heard yelling. A woman’s angry voice ringing out over the rain, and he moved toward it. He’d been wandering in a kind of fog for so long, he didn’t know how long-dwelling in the mines, dozing there. There were some PowerBars and a few bottles of water in the knapsack he had with him, and he’d lived on those. He was happy where it was dark and quiet, where there were no eyes looking and no mouths talking. The darkness didn’t judge him or want anything from him. It didn’t care what he did or didn’t do; it didn’t care what he had done.

He heard more shouting; it sounded like the calling of birds. From the same direction, the rushing of the river seemed impossibly loud. He kept moving toward the voices. How long ago had it been since he had broken through the mine entrance and gone down, down, down into the world beneath? A day, two days-a week? Time had no meaning in there, just as he remembered when he used to go with his father. They’d descend in the day, and return in the night. It seemed as if they’d gotten into a spaceship and landed on a distant moon.

On his website, Michael called himself a caver and spelunker. He claimed that he gave tours and was a consultant. But, honestly, he wasn’t any of those things, didn’t do any of that. He was willing, of course. But no one had ever contacted him via the site he’d built. He didn’t have any formal training, other than following Mack on his research journeys. Michael was just a drifter, a loser. He could never get a hold on anything, could never build a life in the world up above-or down below.

Since college, Michael had been drifting from one meaningless job to the next. First he worked as an admin at a website development company, which is where he learned how to develop and maintain sites. He was competent enough, but he just couldn’t get the social stuff. He couldn’t talk to people. He sometimes just blanked out in meetings, went catatonic in his boss’s office. And, then, one day he found he just couldn’t go back.

He attempted other kinds of work. He was a custodian in an office building for a while, then a grocery store stocker. The longest job he’d held was as a night watchman. He didn’t have to see or talk to anyone, other than fielding the occasional call or visit from his supervisor, who’d seemed just as reluctant to have a conversation as Michael was. He could simply wander long, dim, empty hallways and feel something akin to peace. He had time to work on his website, the place where he was all the things he couldn’t be in real life. And the night was suitable cover, wasn’t it?

As he had entered the mines, with Ray chasing after him, he didn’t have any plans to return. But after so many days wrestling demons, he had to come up for air. Now, in the woods, he was lost-in every sense of the word. He could still hear something, more faintly, and he followed. He had to tell someone what he had done. It was time for confession now, and punishment.

The dark had spoken to him. It whispered that it was safe to remember, that it was time. And then he was back, on his bike riding through the old neighborhood. He was a wraith, quiet and fast. And the night was silvery and slick. On reaching home, he dropped his bicycle on the driveway, and left it where it twisted.

Inside, he could feel that the energy was different and strange. He heard music. He heard his mother’s voice. He felt powerfully that he didn’t belong there in that moment and that he shouldn’t have come home. But he was drawn toward the unfamiliar sounds… a man’s tender voice, a strange cadence to his mother’s words, a song he’d never heard before. And when he moved toward the light of his mother’s drawing room, he saw her in the embrace of a man, not his father.

Inside him something shifted, went black and ugly. Why? He didn’t know. But he went to that blank space he had within him-where there was just the rushing of blood in his ears and the sound of his own breathing. The man, a faceless stranger, left in a hurry. And Michael was left alone with his mother.

“Michael,” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that? He was just a friend.”

“You sent me away,” he said. He knew his tone was bitter, vicious. “So that you could be with him.”

He saw the shame on her face. But there was also anger.

“Michael,” she said. “I am your mother. You don’t speak to me that way.”

Then there were the lights of his father’s car in the driveway. And inside Michael, a familiar slow, simmering rage was starting to brew. He knew it well-he’d felt it before tantrums as a child, before fights at school, during screaming battles with his father. But he’d never felt it for his mother, never directed it at her. She’d always been the one to talk him through those rages. Breathe, sweetie. Breathe.

She was backing away from him when his father walked in.

“What’s going on?” Mack said. He laid his briefcase and coat on the couch. He looked weary.

“She had a man here,” said Michael. “She was in his arms. She’s a whore just like you always said.”

And Mack had said that so many times. Michael heard his father yell it during arguments and whisper it at the dinner table. And Michael had railed against him, always defended her and protected her. But Mack was right.

The stinging slap his mother landed on his face sent a shock through Michael. It was white lightning, electrifying him. Then she was running up the stairs, with Mack bounding after her. Michael heard her