The Darkest Evening of the Year Read online

  The scene still lived in his memory as no scene from a dream had ever before endured.

  Amy said, ”And then?”

  “Oh. Yeah. Suddenly I’m not an observer of the dream, I’m a part of it, I’m the baby, gazing up at my grandmother. She smiles down at me and her eyes are amazing, so full of love, so much more vivid than anything else in the most vivid dream I’ve ever had. And she winks. The last thing I saw was Grandma’s wink. Then I woke up. And that’s the incredible thing. The bed is like you see it now. Perfectly made. I’m lying on top of the covers, and the bed is neat enough to pass a military inspection.”

  He expected amazement. She stared at him.

  “All right, see, when you hauled me out of here last night to go save a dog from a crazy-drunk-violent guy, I left the bed a mess. And when I crashed for a nap this afternoon, it was still a mess.”

  “So?”

  “Spread hanging over the footboard, sheets tangled, a pillow on the floor. But I wake up, and the bed’s been made under me, as if my grandmother in the dream turned around and straightened up this one after getting my mother and baby-me settled.”

  “‘Baby-me’?”

  “Come on, Amy. You understand what I’m saying.”

  “Do you ever sleepwalk?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Maybe you made the bed in your sleep.”

  “I didn’t. I couldn’t. That’s impossible.”

  “Yeah. It makes much more sense that your dead grandmother came out of a dream and made it for you.”

  Eye to eye with her, he chewed for a moment on his lower lip, and then he said, “Why are you being like this?”

  “I’m not being like anything. I’m just being practical, prudent, levelheaded, smart, sober, and rational.”

  He took a deep breath. He blew it out. “What if, okay, what if I believe Antoine the blind dog can drive?”

  “The dog isn’t blind.”

  Brian put his hands on her shoulders again. “It’s not just the bed, Amy. It’s the uncanny vividness of the dream, so bright and so detailed, like real life, and being shown the night I was born. It’s the way those drawings flowed through me, just poured out of the pencil. And the hallucinations—that sound, those shadows—except they were not hallucinations. Amy, something is happening here.”

  She put one hand to his face, feeling his beard stubble. “Have you eaten anything today?”

  “No. I drank a Red Bull. I’m not hungry.”

  “Sweetie, why don’t I make you something to eat?”

  “I’m not hallucinating from hunger, Amy. If you could have seen Grandma’s eyes, that wink.”

  “I’ll make pasta. You have a jar of that terrific pesto sauce?”

  Brian leaned closer to her and narrowed his eyes. He could tell that she wanted to look away from him and that she didn’t dare.

  “Something’s happened to you, too,” he said. “You do have a story of your own. I thought so earlier. What’s happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  “Just a thing,” she said uneasily.

  “What thing?”

  “It’s just the way Nickie is.”

  “What way is she?”

  “Watchful. Wise. Mysterious. I don’t know. Actually, it’s not even new. Sometimes you get a dog and you think, This is an old soul.”

  “Come on. What else, Amy?”

  “Nothing. Really. Just a bedroom-slipper thing.”

  She was fingering the cameo locket at her throat. When she saw him take note of it, she lowered her hand.

  “Bedroom-slipper thing? Tell me.”

  “I can’t. Not now. It’s nothing. It couldn’t be anything.”

  “Now I am agitated,” he said.

  Looking toward the hall, she said, “Where are the kids?”

  As she started to turn away from him, he grabbed her by the arm. “Wait. Waking up on top of a freshly made bed isn’t the big thing. I haven’t told you the big thing.”

  “What—did Grandma do your laundry, too?”

  He felt as though his heart were coming loose in his chest and sliding lower by the moment.

  “This is going to be hard. I’m sick to my stomach trying to think how to tell you. It’s a wonderful thing and a terrible thing.”

  A change in her eyes, the steadiness and clarity of her stare, suggested that she knew he needed her as never before and that she was ready.

  He kissed her forehead, and with his lips still against her brow, he said, “I love you.”

  Head bowed, not looking up, as if the words were as solemn as a prayer, she said, “I love you, too.”

  They had gotten this far months ago, but no further. He had assumed that the next step, which seemed excruciatingly overdue, would be consummation, the physical commitment.

  No one before her had ever held him in expectation with such exquisite charm.

  Now he realized that consummation had never been the next step, could not have been, should not have been. The next step must be revelation.

  “Come with me,” he said, and led her to his study.

  All three dogs were waiting there, lying quietly together, as though they knew—or as though one of them knew—that the supreme test of Brian and Amy’s relationship would occur in this room.

  His apartment study had two wheeled office chairs for those occasions when one of his employees came from downstairs to work here with him. He rolled both behind his desk.

  He directed Amy into one chair, and he sat facing her in the other. They were knee to knee.

  In their front-row seats, Fred, Ethel, and Nickie watched with grave interest.

  When Brian held out his hands, palms up, Amy at once put her hands in his, giving him the courage to speak. “There’s something I should’ve told you, Amy. Long ago. But I thought, the way things were, maybe I’d never need to tell you.”

  When he hesitated, she did not press him. Her hands had not gone damp in his, or cold. Her gaze remained steady.

  “When I was younger, much younger, I was an idiot about a lot of things. One of them was sex. I thought it was easy, women were a kind of sport. God, that sounds awful. But it’s the way so many of us came out of college in those days. Life had nothing to teach me. That’s what I thought.”

  “But it never stops teaching,” she said.

  “No. It’s one long lesson. So…there were a number of women, too many. I left all the precautions to them, because they seemed to think it was a sport, too. I knew they wouldn’t risk pregnancy. They didn’t want consequences. They just wanted to get it off. But one of them was…different. Vanessa. We weren’t together long, but she didn’t take precautions. I fathered a child.”

  His mouth had gone dry. His throat felt swollen, a trap to keep in all his words.

  “I think about my daughter every day. I lie awake at night wondering—is she all right, is she ever given a chance to be happy, is she at least safe? With Vanessa…she can’t be safe. I tried to find her. I couldn’t. I’ve failed as a father, as a man, at the fundamental things.”

  Amy said, “No failure is forever.”

  “It feels like forever. I’ve only seen her once, briefly, when she was an infant. How can I love a child so much when I’ve only seen her once?”

  “The important thing is, you can. You’ve got that capacity in you.”

  “She’s a Down’s syndrome girl,” he said. “I thought she looked like an angel, beautiful. I doubt she even knows I exist. I’ve wanted to see her so bad, for ten years I’ve wanted to see her, but I never expected to see her again. And now…everything is changing.”

  Amy squeezed his hands and said, “Not everything. There’s still you and me.”

  PART TWO

  “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

  But I have promises to keep”

  —ROBERT FROST

  Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

  Chapter

  33

  The bedspre
ad is tight and tucked, the pillows plumped. No dust dulls any surface.

  Piggy is required to keep her room clean, and periodically her mother conducts an inspection with stern standards and with sterner punishments.

  Harrow suspects that the child would keep a spotless room even if she were not required to do so. The threat of chastisement is not what guarantees her cleanliness.

  She exhibits a desire for order, for quiet continuity, and a longing for fixity in all affairs. This is evident in the way she marshals the images in her collages and in the classic patterns of decoration that, with thread and needles, she applies to the dresses of the dolls.

  “Piggy, you can’t eat just the sandwich,” says Moongirl. “You don’t know what a balanced diet means, but I do. Have some potato salad.”

  “I will,” Piggy replies, but she still makes no move toward the plastic container.

  In Moongirl’s company, the child seldom raises her head, and she rarely makes eye contact. She knows that her mother wants humility from her, and self-abasement.

  As with the yearning for order, humility is not something Piggy learned to please her mother. This quality is as natural to her as feathers to a bird.

  Self-abasement, on the other hand, she resists. She has a quiet dignity that should not have survived ten years like those she has endured.

  She accepts the scorn, the insults, the meanness that her mother visits upon her, every affront and vexation, as though it is what she deserves, but she refuses to disgrace herself. She can be dishonored by another but never abased.

  Harrow suspects that the girl’s innate dignity, free of pride, is what has kept her alive. Her mother recognizes this quality in her and wants, more than anything, to destroy it before she destroys the child.

  To please Moongirl, this breaking must precede the burning; the spirit must be fatally wounded before the flesh is fed to fire.

  Now Piggy opens a lunchbox bag of potato chips, and her mother says, “That’s why you’re fat.”

  The child neither hesitates nor stuffs the chips into her mouth defiantly. She proceeds calmly with her meal, head down.

  With greater diligence, Moongirl rips out the needlework from the doll’s dress.

  Piggy is permitted to have these toys only so they can be taken from her as punishment. So it is with all she has.

  Each time Moongirl sees that the child has grown fond of one doll above the others, she acts. She seems to have determined that the one on which she now works is such a favorite.

  Sometimes, the child cries quietly. She never sobs. Her lower lip trembles, the tears roll down her face, and that is all.

  Harrow is certain that often, if not always, the tears are false, summoned with an effort. Piggy knows that tears are wanted, that her mother is a creature who feeds on tears.

  This is metaphorically true, but it is also a fact. He has never seen Moongirl kiss her daughter, but twice he has seen her lick tears from the corners of the child’s eyes.

  If Piggy did not occasionally give her mother a reward of tears, she might be dead by now. The tears have suggested to Moongirl that in time her daughter can be broken; and it is this breaking that she desires more than all else, for which she has been patient.

  The pent-up violence in Moongirl is like the megadeath condensed in the perfect sphere of plutonium in a nuclear weapon. When a blast is finally triggered, the explosion will be awesome.

  Having cut most of the needlework out of the doll’s dress, she now rends the dress itself, not with the scissors but with her bare hands, grinding her teeth with satisfaction as she rips each seam.

  Perhaps she has begun to suspect that her daughter’s dignity can never be taken from her. This would explain why she might commit to burning Piggy tomorrow night.

  Although Harrow is an imaginative man, his imagination fails him when he tries to envision the horrors that this woman will visit on her daughter before setting her afire. After ten years of unslaked thirst for infanticide and then parricide, Moongirl will surely make a memorable spectacle of Piggy’s final hours.

  At the desk, the child opens the bag of cookies, again passing on the potato salad. She has an instinct for her mother’s traps.

  Moongirl now holds a naked doll. Its limbs are articulated so that it can be manipulated into almost any position. But when she bends an elbow joint backward, she snaps off one of the forearms.

  “Fat little cookie-sucking mouth,” she says.

  Harrow finds ruthlessness erotic.

  “Piggy at the trough.”

  Power is the only thing that he admires, the only thing that matters, and violence—emotional, psychological, physical, verbal violence—is the purest expression of power. Absolute violence is absolute power.

  Watching Moongirl now, he wants in the worst way to take her down into their windowless room, into their perfect darkness, where they can do what they are, be what they do, down in the grasping greedy dark, down in the urgent animal dark.

  Chapter

  34

  In the sky’s distillery, the afternoon light was a weak brandy.

  Standing at a study window, Brian said, “She seemed like a free spirit—bold, edgy, but fun. After we’d been together awhile, I began to realize something was wrong with her.”

  Amy had sampled Vanessa’s e-mails. The ten-year collection was large. She got the flavor from a few, and didn’t care to read more.

  “I wanted to end it, but she had this magnetism.” In disgust, he repeated, “Magnetism. Truth. She was hot, totally hot, and I knew she was unstable, but I was weak. That’s the sick truth.”

  He had begun this account facing Amy, but even ten years after these events, shame led him to prefer to confess to the window.

  She wanted to move behind him, put a hand on his waist, and let him know this changed nothing between them. But perhaps he needed his self-disgust to be able to purge himself of these secrets; she sensed that her affection might weaken his resolve, that he was aware of this, that she must trust him to know when he could face her again.

  Fred and Ethel snoozed back to back, bookends without a book. Nickie remained awake, more interested than she pretended to be.

  “I never imagined she wanted a child,” Brian said. “Of the women I knew back then, she was the least likely to pine for motherhood.”

  If Amy should not touch him just now, she could stand at another window, sharing the pre-twilight view to which he unburdened himself.

  “When she got pregnant, it was an ugly scene. But not how you might expect. She said she wanted my baby, needed it, she said, but she never wanted to see me again.”

  “Don’t you have common-law rights or something?”

  “I tried to discuss that with her, but all she wanted to talk about was how I took the crown as the world’s biggest loser.”

  “If that’s what she thought of you, why did she want your baby?”

  “It was weird. She was vicious. Such contempt, loathing. She ripped my taste in clothes, music, books, my financial prospects, everything—some true, some not. I had to get away from her.”

  The westering sun fired the intricacies of a fretwork of clouds. The majesty of the light and sky was a striking contrast to the base story that he had to tell.

  “I expected her to call. She didn’t. Told myself good riddance, it wasn’t any of my business now. But some things she’d said about me had the sting of truth. I didn’t like what I saw in mirrors anymore. I kept thinking of the baby she was carrying, my baby.”

  Whatever faults he had in those days, he’d grown into a good man. Later, he might want to hear that from her, but not now.

  “I needed a month to realize, if I didn’t have that baby in my life, then my life would never be right. It would be distorted, more distorted every year. So I called Vanessa. She’d changed her phone number. I went to her apartment. Moved. No forwarding address.”

  Amy remembered he had once seen the baby. “But you found her.”

  “Three
months I tried mutual acquaintances. She wasn’t seeing them anymore. Pulled up all her roots. Eventually I got some money for a private detective. Even he had some trouble tracking her down.”

  Spilling across the clouds from the tipped snifter of the sun, the light was a richer shade of brandy than before, and the blue sky itself began to take some of the stain.

  “She had a huge, expensive apartment overlooking Newport Harbor. A wealthy land developer named Parker Hisscus was paying the rent.”

  “That’s a big name around here.”

  “She was six months pregnant when I visited her. Gave me five minutes, so I could see the style he kept her in. Then she had the maid show me out. Next morning, a friend of Hisscus came to see me.”

  “He was that obvious?”

  “I don’t mean muscle. The guy was unsavory but polite. Wanted me to know Hisscus would marry the lady after the birth of their baby.”

  “If it was their baby, why wait?”

  “I wondered. And then this guy offers me a commission—a custom home to design for another friend of Hisscus.”

  “If it were his baby, he wouldn’t try to buy it that way.”

  “I turned down the commission. Went to an attorney. Then another attorney. Same story from both. If Vanessa and Hisscus say he’s the dad, I have no grounds to push for a DNA test.”

  Threads of self-disgust and quiet anger had been sewn through Brian’s voice thus far, but now Amy heard something like sorrow, too.

  “I kept trying to find a way, and then one night she came to my place with the baby not two weeks old, born premature. She said…”

  For a moment, he could not repeat Vanessa’s words to him.

  Then: “She said, ‘Here’s what you pumped into me. This stupid little freak. Your stupid little freak has screwed up everything.’”

  “So it was over with her and Hisscus.”

  “I never understood what was going on there anyway. But it was over, it wasn’t his baby, and she was out. She wanted money, whatever I could pay for the baby. I showed her my checkbook, savings-account balance. So there I was, made a baby and put it in a situation where it’s up for sale, I’m no better than she was.”

  “Not true,” Amy said at once. “You wanted the girl.”