What You See in the Dark Read online

  Things change. Everything’s gotta change, Arlene thought, rubbing her arms, and she stepped back into the house.

  But how some things stayed. That feeling, standing in the hallway. She could remember it even now.

  It was early yet and Arlene was tempted to turn the TV set back on. She was in no mood, though, for another unhappy teleplay, and instead she prepared for bed, turning off the lights in the house one by one and taking one last look out at the parking lot. With some guilt and some defeat, she turned off the motel’s road sign, a little angry that Dan wasn’t around to man the office in the evening hours like he had agreed. But no one was coming. She lay in bed and tried to get her mind to stop racing, to stop thinking of the motel’s demise, and in her frustration she put her hand out to the empty side of the bed.

  Sleep came in a strange wave of images: Cal at the counter turning the pages of the newspaper; Vernon drinking from his coffee cup; the young waitresses wiggling their bottoms for the farmers. Sleep brought the Actress, too, enough to wake Arlene a bit to near alertness, wondering what had become of her, Cal never having seen anything in the newspaper headlines announcing a film shoot. She floated back into sleep, her mind flitting from image to image and refusing the clean slate of dreams, a sound thumping and thumping until Arlene opened her eyes, groggy, and realized the sound was real. She sat up, alert, and listened carefully as the faint thump came again, from Dan’s room, and she recoiled for a moment at the possibility that Dan would dare bring that girl into the house when the motel rooms sat empty and secretive.

  She listened for voices but heard nothing except Dan’s footsteps and drawers being opened and shut. Her nightstand clock glowed a surprising five minutes past eleven.

  “Dan?” she called from her open room. A light shone from underneath the door to his room. “Danny?”

  The noise in his room stopped for a moment, and Arlene stood at the threshold of her bedroom, waiting to hear an answer, wondering why Dan was taking so long to respond when he had clearly heard her voice.

  “Dan?”

  He opened the door and stuck his head out, the same brown hair as Frederick’s, the same hard line of a nose. The same long jut of clavicle and the coarse ring of hair around the nipple. She caught a glimpse of his white underwear. She remembered Frederick’s coarse laughter when she had told him about her brother, about having no idea where her brother had gone during his first night home.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Sorry, Mama,” he said nervously, his body half-hidden behind the door. “Go on back to sleep.”

  “If you have a girl in there …” Arlene teetered between stepping forward and stepping back. She braced herself for the embarrassment of confronting a naked girl sitting on the edge of Dan’s bed. She steeled herself as she had when Frederick shushed her, Dan’s little-boy footsteps in the hallway, tiny and fearful.

  Through the sliver of open door, her view partially blocked by Dan’s body, she saw the edge of the bed. It was bare.

  “What’s going on?” she asked again.

  “Mama … ,” he protested, but the absence of the girl allowed her to approach the door insistently. It was her house. Then she saw the suitcase.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going, Dan?” She put her hand on his door and he pushed back. She was surprised at her strength, but knowing she couldn’t hold her ground, she slid her hand on the jamb, fingers in full view, daring Dan to close the door and bruise her.

  “Mama!” he yelled. “Leave me alone!”

  “You better not be running off!” she yelled back. “The two of you are too young to be doing that!”

  She pushed harder against the door—hard enough to surprise him, a peek of his face coming through the sliver of doorframe—and she gasped at the similarity of his face to Frederick’s. But then she spotted the cuts.

  “What’s that on your cheek?” she demanded. “Dan, answer me!” She put her hand on the jamb, fingers laid out as fragile as eggs. She felt him stop pushing on the door, a silent truce.

  “Mama,” Dan said quietly, “give me a minute to put on some clothes. Okay?” His voice was jittery, now that she heard him speak a complete sentence. “Okay?”

  “All right,” she agreed, but she kept her fingers on the jamb. She heard the rough slip of Dan getting into a pair of dungarees, the slide of a drawer as he searched for a shirt. Then he slowly opened the door.

  Dan’s suitcase sat open on the bed, a story she didn’t yet know. Next to it was the black bank deposit bag from their front office. He stood with his hand on the doorknob.

  “What’s that on your cheek?” she asked, but now she didn’t want to know the answer. A black eye or a crust of blood under the nostril or a swollen lip would have made it easy to imagine too many beers at the Bluebird, the inability of men to keep their mouths shut against bravado. Dan’s cheek was something more dreadful in its simplicity: four little half-moons, caked in purple. A small hand doing that to his face.

  “Something happened, Mama …”

  “Oh, dear God … ,” she said, and took her eyes away from the scratches on his cheek and saw the mess, the spilled contents of his bureau and, on top of it, his white shirt with dark stains, the deep, ugly sheen. She couldn’t help but touch it, her fingers electric against the damp, and she flinched. “Oh, dear God …”

  He was a blur of motion, hurrying over to the suitcase, gathering the black bank bag and shoving it inside, snapping the thing shut. She followed him out helplessly, incredulously, as he made his way to the kitchen, pulling the cabinets open and yanking down bread, boxed crackers, a jar of peanut butter, a tin of canned meat. In a flash, he spied the keys to her sedan hanging by a hook near the door and grabbed them before she could stop him.

  “Dan … what on earth happened?”

  “Listen, Mama,” he said, stuffing the keys into his pocket. He became calm once again, the tone in his voice suggesting he was not going to repeat himself. “You listen to me, now. I’m not telling you where I’m going. And I’m not going to tell you what I did.” His voice quivered and broke. “You know what I did.”

  She thought of her brother, after all that time in a prison up-state, and the way he took a cigarette in his mouth and blew out the smoke.

  “What did you do, Dan?”

  “Listen to me! The police are going to come around here soon enough. So I’m not telling you anything. You don’t know anything, so they can’t call you a liar.” He patted his pocket, as if to assure himself the keys were there, then reached under the sink for a paper bag and gathered the food.

  “Dan, you can’t do this …”

  “Mama … ,” he said sternly. “I took the cash from the office and I’m sorry about that. But you get rid of that truck. Okay? Take it up into the mountains and burn it or push it into the river. Just get rid of it.”

  “I won’t do any such thing,” she said, with a firm voice, a glimmer of defiance, the same tone she had used when speaking to Frederick those years ago in this very kitchen, when he threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop pestering him about his late hours. Frederick had looked at her with a stare as thin and deadly as a razor.

  “You do what you want,” Dan said. He gathered the food and the suitcase and butted his way to the front door, unstoppable, and she wanted to reach out to him, remembering how her mother had reached out to her brother to embrace him when he came back.

  To her surprise, Dan put his things down and hugged her. He held her hard and she allowed him to. She closed her eyes against the half-moons on his cheek, their ugly certainties, and willed everything to stop, to stay as it was.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “I am.” He gathered the suitcase and the paper bag of food and bounded out to the parking lot. She ran out to the porch, almost following him down in her bare feet. She watched his dark form fumble with the keys, heard the click of the door as he unlocked the sedan. The night was still, no cars on the highway, no sound at all, the entire c
ity asleep, and her car roared to life, startling her. The inevitability startled her, the coming change. The motor gunned and the lights, weak willed and scant, dimmed as Dan put the car into reverse and wheeled right out of the parking lot. Just like that. Just like Frederick, whom she had not witnessed leaving, only finding an envelope on the kitchen table announcing his departure. The envelope held the deeds to the motel and the house and a bit of cash, but otherwise no indication about where he had gone. But the dark silhouette in the sedan tonight was not Frederick—it was Dan, making a hurried right turn onto the highway, heading south, the red taillights disappearing, the rumble of the engine receding, and Arlene on the front porch alone and looking at the dark.

  Dan’s black Ford pickup stared at her, parked lengthwise, its one visible headlight a wary eye. It sat there like a still but breathing animal. The truck spooked her, a dark hulk in the empty space of their parking lot, and Arlene had to step away from the door, a foolish fear of the truck somehow turning on and idling there. It reminded her of falling asleep in front of the television set and waking up to static that unnerved her, filled her with a shaky dread as she rose from the armchair and moved toward the set, deeper toward the source of her irrational fear, just to turn the thing off.

  Sooner or later an officer would indeed come and park his patrol car in front of her house, stepping out with questions. The truck sat out there with the inevitable answers. She wondered what was in it, why Dan wanted her to dispose of it. She pictured herself driving it east of Bakersfield, on any of the roads that headed out on big, easy asphalt, then meandered into swerving, near-single-lane passages that hardly anybody traveled. Not this time of year, with fog and sometimes even snow in those hills if a cold front came in hard. Those were summer roads, roads for fishing spots along the creek, bass and trout making their way down the Sierra, picked off all along the way until only the lowly catfish survived. The hills blazed with dry grass but by winter went green again and even muddy, the tree trunks rich with moss. Hardly anybody went up there, just the locals who knew the roads. No guardrails to stop a vehicle from plummeting down into the ravines that grew deeper and deeper as the hills gradually turned into mountain.

  She could see herself doing it.

  She could see herself driving the truck up there, the hairpin turns of those roads. Far up there. Ten miles, maybe, of that kind of driving, then pulling over and turning off the engine. And then what? A box of matches and a jug of gasoline? Would the truck explode? She could see it, the truck blooming in flame, consumed. Would anybody hear it, the echo of the blast, somebody looking east and seeing an odd orange glow over there in the mountains way before dawn? The orange tip of her brother’s cigarette glowed when he puffed, its blaze a signal that he didn’t want to talk anymore, just listen. Would the truck burn itself out, or would the flames leap over to the grass, the damp winter containing it? What then, with a ten-mile walk back to town? How long would that take, especially in this cold, her hands huddled around her elbows, her feet against the asphalt in thin shoes? The little girl in her childhood picture book walked all that way. But how impossible! Five miles, then? Three? Just far enough away from the eastern edge of Bakersfield, at the beginning of the hill slopes, far enough away to slip the truck into neutral and steer it over the side of a ravine, out of sight of the road.

  For what? It was nothing she had done. She had no lies to conceal. She knew where Dan was headed. Only south. And that was logical. Over to Los Angeles to hide in that enormous city. Over to San Diego. To Tijuana and everything she’d heard about its teeming, ugly life.

  She didn’t even know what he’d done, really.

  The truck stared back at her, and she stood on the porch for a long moment, the way she had stood in the early morning hallway of her house when her brother had returned. She had been waiting for answers back then. Right in front of her, the truck held them. She went back into the house to wrap herself tight in a housecoat, and she slipped on a pair of Keds. She walked down the porch stairs, the truck beckoning like a faithful star. Her eyes fixed on the cab, its interior too dark for her to see inside. What was she expecting, the body of the dead girl? Arlene chided herself for being so afraid, never having been so, after all these years near the highway, so far away from town, having grown up in the countryside. Darkness was just not being able to see. Nothing came out of it. She had stared at darkness throughout her childhood summers as she’d gone to sleep, the strange noises outside nothing but small animals foraging for food. Yet here she was, approaching the truck with so much timidity that she felt foolish.

  She opened the truck door, the dome light dim, and ran her eyes over the interior. What had she expected? A torn and bloodied bench seat? Red handprints on the steering wheel? Nothing seemed unusual, nothing that demanded the truck be destroyed as Dan had adamantly suggested. Maybe, Arlene thought, it was simply that the police would be searching for the vehicle, that someone had spotted it making a getaway from whatever horrible scene still waited to be discovered. She needed the truck now, Dan having taken her car.

  But then she spotted something. The dome light was too dim for her to see clearly, so Arlene leaned in. Along the curve of the steering wheel, along the ridges made for the fingers to grip, she could see a vague discoloration, a darkness. Her stomach gripped in panic, the fear coming again, and she stepped back as if shocked by an electric wire.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Arlene muttered, anger overtaking her fear, wishing Dan had driven away in the truck instead of her sedan. Now what was she to do? She looked at the steering wheel more closely, her eyes following the curve and spotting the rest of the marks, streaky, as if he’d already tried to wipe them away. Fearless now, Arlene put her finger on the wheel, expecting to feel something slick or dried, but nothing was discernible, just the cold, smooth surface chilled by the December night, and the keys still in the ignition.

  “Stupid, stupid … ,” she muttered again. She eased onto the bench seat, the door still open so the weak dome light could give a measure of guidance. She spit on the steering wheel and, with the inside hem of her housecoat, began to wipe away. She spit into her hand and ran it along another spot, working the hem along the steering wheel as if she were fastidiously wiping down the café counters, the task of cleaning always something she could put muscle into. Arlene turned the hem of the housecoat and inspected it, the fabric now tinted with a deep color. She wriggled out of it, impervious to the chill of the vinyl seat, and spit a few more times on the steering wheel, on the dashboard, swiping her housecoat along the surface with a confused vigor. Why was she doing this? What, exactly, was she trying to hide? It wasn’t her story to manipulate, not her words that she needed to consider carefully when the police came looking. She stopped wiping for a moment, considering. She looked at the inside hem of her coat, the newly dark smears on the cloth, but then turned the hem down, the coat back to how it looked every day, and decided then and there that Dan was on his own.

  You know where he went that night, right? Frederick had asked her when she told him years later about her brother, about wondering where he’d gone that first night after getting home. They’d been lying in bed, very young, when being in bed was still thrilling and exhausting, and Arlene had her hand on Frederick’s chest. She could feel in her palm the deep, guttural cackle he let out when he asked the question, a pulse so disconcerting she had to take her hand away.

  He was out getting pussy, Frederick had said, laughing, both of them in the dark, and she was grateful now, sitting in the truck, that she had not seen the look on his face when he had said that. If your brother was in prison for three years, believe me, that was the first thing he went out to get. Her brother, who had shown up at her wedding at City Hall all cleaned up, a poorly fitting suit picked out from the secondhand shop on Union Avenue, but cleaned up nonetheless. Sober, clean shaven, his hair combed, freshly cut in the kitchen the day before. Hardworking, too, stacking fruit crates on the farms up north by Exeter and Portervil
le, picking strawberries and almonds, driving trucks. All the love shown to him by their mother, only to find that he’d left all the hard work and gone off to Los Angeles, never to return.

  That was one unlucky woman, Frederick had said. Whoever she was.

  Dan, she thought, her own son, was ripped through with that same ugliness, the same disregard, as her own brother, whatever was contained in the pulse rooted in her palm, holding her hand against Frederick’s chest as if she could keep his ugliness at bay.

  The parking lot sat silent, greeting her revelation. The night sat silent. Nothing moved. Not even a cold breeze to disturb the trees. Nothing from the highway. Not the truck still settling with metallic pings. Not even her own breathing. The windows of the house beckoned to her, but not warmly, not the yellow picture windows of her childhood storybook. They stared back at her with a cold, white gleam, and inside, Arlene knew, were years of empty rooms.

  From the road came the sound of a distant motor. A truck: she could tell by its downshifting gears, the way the engine sounded as it approached and slowed. Arlene looked in the rearview mirror, but then came the distinct sound of brakes that needed a tending to, and the soft arc of headlights sweeping left as if preparing to make a turn into the parking lot. Hadn’t she turned off the lights to the motel’s road sign? She quickly closed the door to the truck to shut off the dome light, one eye on the rearview mirror.