Darkness My Old Friend

up!”

Bethany gave her daughter a warning look, and Willow drew back, looking stricken. Then she put her head in her hands. “Mom, please.”

“This is Bethany Graves. Can I come and pick up that phone from you? Sorry for any inconvenience. My daughter lost it.”

“Sure, of course,” said the voice. He sounded as though he found the encounter amusing, which was just a shade irritating. “Or I could come to you?”

“Well, we could meet you somewhere.” Nice voice or not, the New Yorker in her thought better of giving some strange man her address, letting him come to their remote house surrounded by ten acres of trees. Peaceful, isolated. Perfect for a writer. Yeah, and no one can hear you screaming, Philip had commented when he came for dinner last weekend. The sentence had stayed with her.

“How about the Hollows Brew in an hour?” he said.

“Perfect. Thanks so much.” She ended the call.

Then, to Willow, “What is wrong with you, kiddo?”

The look on Willow’s face made her stomach flutter. It was always like that with them, even when Willow was an infant-what one of them felt, the other felt, too. When Willow was small-yesterday, a hundred years ago-as soon as Bethany opened her eyes in the morning, or at night, she would hear Willow start to stir. If Bethany had been nervous, anxious, upset, Willow was cranky. It was still true. There was no way Willow could feel sad or stressed or afraid without Bethany’s feeling the tug of it on her insides.

“Who was that?” asked Willow. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes wide. “The man from the woods?”

“You saw a man in the woods?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you. I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

Bethany felt a flash flood of annoyance banked by guilt. Willow was probably right. Bethany might not have believed her.

“Try me,” Bethany said.

Willow started talking fast about her teacher, how hurt and embarrassed she was in his office, fleeing from the school, what she saw in the woods. She paced, waved her hands in the air. Bethany just watched in awe, listened to the way she wove the story, told the details-the damp leaves, the sky through the trees. Her daughter was a natural-born storyteller. And this-at her age, anyway-had not proved to be a good thing. When Willow was finished, she collapsed back down in her chair in a dramatic flop, as if exhausted by the events and their retelling.

“Now he knows who we are,” Willow said. “What if he was burying a body or something?”

Bethany pulled up a chair beside her daughter, wiped the strawberry blond hair back from her face, squeezed her frail little shoulder. She’d been looking into those dark brown eyes for a million years. The girl around them had grown and changed, but those eyes seemed as eternal as the moon.

“Willow. Really,” Bethany said. “Where did you ever get such a wild imagination?”

Willow looked at her sharply, incredulous, and then they both started to laugh. They laughed until they were weeping with it, both of them clutching their middles. And Bethany thought how much she loved her wild, defiant child, how she’d failed at almost everything, lost so much, but that none of it mattered because of the one thing about her life that was right.

chapter four

“So how have you been feeling, Jones?”

Useless, aimless, broken, Doc. Really just miserable. Was that true? No, not totally. But Jones felt as if Dr. Dahl would be happier if that’s what he said.

“Good,” said Jones. “You know. Keeping busy.”

“Keeping busy with what?” Dr. Dahl had this earnest way about him. He always accompanied his questions with a hopeful, inquiring lift of his jet-black brows.

Jones offered a shrug, took a sip from the coffee he’d carried in with him. He’d brought one for the doctor, too. But the other man had declined. I’m off coffee, he’d said. Thanks. This refusal somehow seemed petty and superior to Jones; it made him like the doctor a little less. And Jones didn’t like Dr. Dahl very much to begin with.

“The house, mostly,” said Jones. “An old house like ours requires quite a bit of maintenance.” He paused, but the doctor didn’t say anything. Jones felt compelled to go on. “My neighbors have been relying on me a lot lately- watching their homes while they’re away, checking mail, helping some of the older people with jobs around the yard. You know.” Why did it sound so lame?

Dr. Dahl looked pensive. Jones thought the doctor was a little too pretty, with girlish lashes and smooth skin. Too well maintained. His nails shone a bit, as though he’d had a manicure. Why it should bother Jones that the guy took care of himself, he didn’t know. But it did.

“It’s been a year since you stopped working,” said Dr. Dahl. The doctor’s tone implied a question, but Jones knew he wasn’t asking. The doctor was making a point.

“About that long, yes.” Jones felt his shoulders tighten with the urge to defend himself. But he didn’t say anything else. The doctor seemed to wait for Jones to go on. When he didn’t: “So. You’re a relatively young man. Have you given much thought to what might come next? If you might embark on another career?”

Jones looked around the room, his eyes resting on a tribal mask that hung on the wall. It was the only thing in the space that was not generic, that told him anything about the doctor. In the landscape of gold and cream surfaces, within walls featuring the most banal art images-a sailboat at sunset, a still life of flowers, another of fruit-that mask was the single object that Jones could tell wasn’t picked from some catalog. Sometimes during his sessions he found himself staring into its hollow eyes, fixating on its snarling mouth.

“I haven’t thought about it much,” Jones said. The truth was, he didn’t want to think about it. He couldn’t think about it. He was a cop; that’s what he’d always been. He simply couldn’t imagine doing anything else. What was he going to do? Go to work in some office, stand around a watercooler and sit in a cubicle? What was he even qualified to do? He didn’t say any of this to the doctor.

“What were your interests before you were a police officer?” asked Dr. Dahl.

“Before I was a cop, I was a kid. I went straight from college to the academy. I was on patrol before I was twenty-three.”

“So you didn’t have any interests?”

“Sports.” He was conscious of the fact that he had folded his arms across his chest, was so tense that his shoulders were starting to ache. He tried to relax, let his arms rest at his sides. “I played lacrosse.”

There had been other interests; he’d always liked working with his hands, building things with wood. He’d done well in his shop classes, might have gone on to a vocational school if he hadn’t developed an interest in the police department, heard that you did better on the job with a degree. Of course, his decision was informed by his crippling guilt, his sick relationship with his mother, his abandonment issues. All things he’d hashed over in this office until his head ached.

He’d been seeing the doctor for the better part of a year-partially (mostly) because his wife insisted, partially because he was struggling with the events that had caused him to retire early from the only work he’d ever wanted to do, partially because he knew that there were things going on inside him that weren’t quite healthy. But what good was it doing him, really? Did he really feel any better than he had a year ago? He didn’t know.

“Anything else?” said the doctor. Jones wondered how long Dr. Dahl had been waiting for him to go on.

“I used to like woodworking. I was pretty good at it.”

The doctor sat up with interest, almost looked relieved. For the first time, it occurred to Jones that he might be a difficult patient.

The man can’t help you, Jones, if you don’t like him, trust him, and open up to him, Maggie had said to him as recently as yesterday.