What You See in the Dark Page 14

  Sure enough, a diesel truck turned a slow roll into the parking lot. Its headlights swept over the cab and glistened on the chrome and glass, refracting, and Arlene edged herself against the door. She held her breath as if doing so would send the truck away, but it eased over to the edge of the parking lot, near one of the motel wings. The truck sat chugging for a moment, and Arlene listened, not able to hear anything over the noise of the truck’s idling engine, and unable to see much in the rearview mirror. Maybe the driver was studying the darkened motel office or looking at the still-lit windows of the house, judging whether it was worth it to disturb anyone at this time of night.

  The engine idled interminably and then suddenly stopped. The parking lot was plunged back into silence—she could even make out the diesel truck’s engine ticking away as it cooled. It was too late, she realized, to step out of the truck, even if the driver might make nothing of it. But later, when the police came and maybe questioned him, it would seem suspicious, her getting out of a truck, housecoat over a nightgown. She craned her neck to get a better look in the rearview mirror but could see nothing in the darkness, and then the door to the diesel truck opened.

  The sounds carried. The weight of his body as he jumped down to the ground. A gob of spit as he hacked to clear his throat. His boots stepping across the gravel. Another door opening and then the rough whisper of his voice saying something in the dark—were there two of them? She listened for an exchange, but it was only the driver’s voice. He was talking to himself as she heard him step onto the wooden porch in front of the motel office, then rap on the door. Arlene heard him knock again before he let out a whistle and an admonishment that she couldn’t make out: that was when she made out the soft footfalls alarmingly near the truck and realized the driver had let out a dog. She could spot its dark form in the side-view mirror, lifting its leg to whiz on the truck’s rear tire. She stayed absolutely still, even as the dog sniffed its way along the side of the truck, as if it sensed her inside. The dog paused for a moment, its attention held stone-tight at her window, and it let out a short, anticipatory growl.

  “Buddy!” she heard the truck driver call out in a hoarse whisper, then a quick, sharp whistle of a command. The dog obeyed, but she could see the dark form of its head still fixed on her as it trotted back toward its owner. One more time, the driver let out a short whistle of admonishment, as if the dog had stopped to rethink its retreat, and then the parking lot went silent again.

  In the mirror, for the briefest moment, she saw a tip of light, as if a firefly had flown into view. She wanted to rub her eyes to see if she’d imagined it, but it came again and this time she caught its orange color, the tip of light she remembered from her childhood, watching her brother. He was smoking. She shifted a bit and turned to take a sidelong glance out the back window. The tip of his cigarette bloomed a few more times. He was too far away for her to see his silhouette in the darkness, to know whether he was facing the road or staring up at the cold light of the house, deciding once and for all whether he would make the effort to knock up there.

  Two glows later, the orange tip darted to the side and went out as the driver flicked the butt to the gravel. She heard him whistle softly again, but the dog seemed near its owner, the whistle calm and reassuring. The driver’s boots shifted across the gravel, heading back to the diesel truck, but then he paused yet again, this time urinating—a heavy, long stream hitting the ground before the boots resumed walking. Arlene could see the light in the truck’s cab turn on again as the driver opened the door, his voice saying something to encourage the dog to get inside, and then he lifted himself back into the cab.

  Arlene sighed, relieved, and ducked back a little, anticipating that the headlights of the truck would sweep over her again. She crouched down, waiting, but as the moments slipped by, the truck didn’t move. She kept anticipating the engine turning over and the truck getting back on the highway to search for another motel. But nothing. “Sweet Jesus,” she muttered when she realized the driver was bedding down for the night, the silence growing deeper and deeper. She braved another sidelong glance through the rear window, still fearful that the driver might suddenly turn on the engine, the headlights catching her like a fox in the road. The truck remained still. Nothing passed on the highway.

  The tension in her body hardened further in the December cold. Arlene could feel it in her fingers. She wouldn’t last much longer, dressed as she was in her nightgown. She draped the housecoat over herself and sat up a little straighter, craning for a better look at the truck. In the other direction, the front door of her house seemed impossibly far away. She racked her brain trying to recall if she’d locked the kitchen door on her way to bed earlier that evening—maybe sneaking around to the side of the house wouldn’t rouse the driver or the dog. But now everything she did, Arlene knew, would carry a sound, just like the driver’s boots, the dog’s prowl of her premises, the driver relieving himself on the ground. The dome light of her truck would turn on, but maybe the driver wouldn’t see it, now that he was bedded down for the night. She would have to slip out of the truck quietly and click its door shut, then scurry up the steps to the house.

  He could be exhausted and already asleep. He could’ve drunk a beer or two on the road just before he made the turn-off, the alcohol making him drowsy. But how many nights had she herself been awakened by movement in the parking lot, one of the drivers who’d checked in going right back out to the Bakersfield bars?

  Her feet numbed at the toes. She could not wait much longer.

  Arlene took a deep breath. She grabbed the door handle, absolute ice to the touch, and held it for a long moment. Maybe it would be best to put the coat on first. She slipped it back on, arranging herself, and was surprised at how much noise she made by doing so. She shot a last look back at the diesel truck, but nothing, so she took the door handle once again and this time pulled.

  The dome light blazed like an accusation, and she scrambled as quietly as she could out of the cab. The truck door groaned. Her feet thudded onto the gravel. Alarmed by the noise she was making, she shut the door as softly as she could, the dome light extinguishing, but she couldn’t hook the latch. She pushed the door a little, finally hearing it click shut, but she could see, even in the dark, how the door wasn’t flush with the frame. From the diesel truck came the faint but perceptible growl of the driver’s dog, alert to her movement. Arlene crouched down, listening for the growl again. She imagined the dog sitting up in the seat, paws resting on the door, studying her malevolently through the window of the cab. Her body ached from crouching, the slumped posture, the cold. Just that pathway to the house, just those steps, just the screen door, just the twist of the knob. The dog remained silent, as did the road, so Arlene bolted, trying her best to half run, half tiptoe to the house, the cold gleam of the windows taunting her with their proximity, but by the time she hit the steps, she was so overcome by the fear of being caught, by the anticipation of the driver calling out Hey! into the night, that she disregarded the creak of the screen door and how it always slapped against the frame, and rushed in, shutting the door behind her hard enough for the window to shudder.

  Yet even after she made it inside, she kept looking out, with the same foolish impulse that forced her to run back into the house on some mornings to check the electric coffeepot, its unplugged cord coiled safely away. The trucker had remained asleep, the dog not barking, and she turned out the living room light, one window going dark, signifying motion to anyone who might be looking. But no one was looking. She knew this now. It was well past midnight and anyone still awake would be only half so, nodded off in front of the buzz and static of a television set, the local stations not able to fill insomnia’s empty hours. There was no need to be nervous, but she remained so as she walked into the kitchen, filling a teakettle with water and setting it to boil so she could ward off the chill of having been outside, wondering if her silhouette appeared in the windows, a ghostly form to an onlooker from the road. The
ugly feeling was unshakable, that sense of being watched. Arlene reached over and turned out the kitchen light, one more light extinguished in the house, leaving her alone with only the blue flame of the stove, startlingly bright. So bright, she was surprised how easily she could manage a teacup from the cabinet, a spoon from the drawer. At the first sign of a coming whistle from the kettle, Arlene removed it from the stove, carefully pouring hot water by the glow of the blue flame, something to keep her eye on as she sat in the kitchen.

  What’s a mother to do? Arlene thought. She saw her mother in the Bakersfield courthouse, her dedicated mornings of dressing up in her best outfit to sit through proceedings she could not possibly have understood completely, then coming home in the afternoon to air out the dress and make it ready for the next day. What’s a good mother to do? Willful and stubborn, sitting in silence while she heard exactly what her own son had been accused of. What’s a good mother? Arlene considered the chasm she had to cross to be like her mother, to be confronted with the irrefutable, yet still acknowledge her own flesh and blood. A son no matter what. Here is a knife. Here is a gun. Here is a bloody set of clothes. Here are your son’s hands. Deep down, she knew she could never be like her mother, long dead now. Upstairs, she remembered, was Dan’s bloody shirt on the dresser, but now she did not feel the sense of panic. There would be more to dig out of by trying to hide the shirt than by allowing its discovery. She would show the police officers, lead them right to it, her arms crossed over the flaps of her housecoat, and they would never think to inspect her garment and trace it back to an earlier moment of desperation.

  Arlene sat at the table, warming her numb fingers against the teacup. There were hard days coming. Tomorrow, would she go to work? Would she be able to simply carry on with the business of the day, serving coffee, swiping change off the tables and dipping the coins into the pocket of her apron, making it clear through her silence that she would not be entertaining anyone’s nosy questions? How fast would the talk start swirling? With the patrol officers coming into the café at 6 a.m. on the dot for scrambled eggs and hash browns? Wouldn’t her face grow more severe by the hour? Wouldn’t her hair, pulled back in a bun, look even more like a gesture of resignation to her coming old age? Let your hair down, one of the young waitresses had told her, about six months after Frederick had left her, when it was clear to everyone that the male regulars had gotten wind of her situation. She had felt ashamed about it: feeling abandoned on the one hand, desired on the other. Not good enough for her own husband, yet not damaged at all in the eyes of the lonelier bachelor farmers.

  But this was different. How much time would pass before people began to ask her questions directly? How thick would the silence be when she walked over to a table of customers and everyone politely gave their orders? Would it be better or worse if Dan were caught, arrested, and dragged back to Bakersfield? How would it look if he disappeared, Arlene still walking around free? The young waitresses would cross paths with one another in the back kitchen. The whole town would be talking about her. What kind of mother raises a son like that?

  Sitting in the dark of her kitchen, Arlene wasn’t sure if the clarity was real, but she understood her mother now. With her hands on the teacup, she felt for the warmth, its measure, its certainty, the way she had felt the laugh rumble from Frederick’s chest, a discovery. She searched her own mind now in the same way, her own heart. What it took to sit in a courtroom when the entire world was against your son. What it took to sit there and know the silent judgment being cast upon you, the way you had to raise your head and walk in and out of the courtroom with conviction. Nothing you could do would bring back the victim everyone was grieving over. Nothing could be done in terms of real justice. Mercy wasn’t anywhere in the law. Neither was forgiveness. Or clemency. If it was, someone would have called out and said there were two mothers in the courtroom—why should they both suffer?

  Could Arlene do that at least? Walk in and out of the café and face the day with her chin held high? Mrs. Watson. That woman. Her son. Long years awaited, whether or not she rose from the kitchen table, went back to bed, or remained sitting until dawn. Ahead were long years of being Mrs. Watson, with no one remembering Frederick, no one remembering she had a first name, even though it was on the red badge she pinned to her uniform every day. A waitress, but no one’s ex-wife. No one’s daughter, her family long gone. But everyone remembering she was the mother of that young man who had done that terrible thing.

  She resolved to stay at the kitchen table until dawn. She resolved to stay until the police officer came with his inevitable questions. She resolved to point to the room at the back of the house and tell him what was in there. She resolved to tell him about what Dan had wanted her to do with the truck, how she had refused to do so because she was a mother. Arlene looked outside at the dark shape of the diesel truck and felt for the man inside. She had forced him to remain in the cold, huddled uncomfortably with his dog to pass the night, all because she hadn’t had the wherewithal to act like a woman first and not a mother, a person who cared about someone else’s well-being, not just her son’s.

  Arlene thought about walking back out there and rapping on the door of the truck, showing the driver to one of the rooms and telling him with great apology that the fee would be waived. She decided against it, only because she was going to be facing life very soon—questions, suspicions, accusations—and these would be the last quiet hours she was going to have.

  She thought back to that morning years before, when she had stood in the hallway of their old farmhouse, her brother maybe or maybe not in that back bedroom, and she had listened for some kind of noise to tell her that he was in there. Instead, her own mother rose and disturbed the quiet of the house. Arlene, honey, her mother had said. What are you doing up so early, my love? And then her mother began making an enormous breakfast in the kitchen.

  The hours passed in the dark, Arlene transfixed by herself, by the silent truck in the parking lot, by the huge well of her coming life. The tea went cold. The blue flame burned. When the sky started to change over in the east, she finally rose from the table. She turned on the light. She took out eggs and sausages from the refrigerator, pancake mix from the cabinet. She set coffee to boil. She worked with resolve, remembering how her brother had walked into the kitchen to the smell of their mother’s cooking, his hair matted, and he made a playful grab for her and brought her to his lap as a cup of coffee was presented to him. The pans sizzled hot on the stove. Thank you, love, Frederick used to tell her, after their big Sunday dinners. Arlene made hearty portions and set everything on a breakfast tray—the coffee in a carafe, the eggs and sausages and toast and pancakes covered with a larger, upside-down plate to keep everything warm as she made her way outside and over to the truck.

  The sky readied itself for day in the east. Arlene cleared the steps carefully, making her way to the diesel truck. The December morning clipped her with a sharp chill, her breath in the air. The dog sensed her even before she had taken a few steps, but she kept her resolve. She would move forward. There was only forward.

  From the road came the familiar sound of tires, of a car slowing down. As she looked to the road, the police car rolled into view, and she stopped. The dog barked madly and she heard the driver call out, “Buddy!” in a tired voice, then again when the dog raised its paws to the window. The police car slowed down and she could see in the coming clarity that there were two officers inside. They parked the car and she felt her hands go numb. “Buddy!” the driver yelled, and she could hear him rising up in the cab. She wanted to keep going, but the distance was too great, too long, the simple path into the storybook forest too dark, too dark. She felt her hands give up and drop the tray as the officers opened the doors to the patrol car, the food spilling all over the gravel, the plates shattering, the coffee carafe tumbling. Arlene looked at the truck driver’s breakfast and then at the two officers approaching and she collapsed to her knees, weeping. She wept hard. She held her fac
e in her hands and the morning was cold and she wanted to go back inside to the safety of her little house with the warm yellow windows.

  “Mrs. Watson?” said one of the officers, approaching her. He came in to the café every day, just past the lunch hour, and ordered a grilled cheese, home fries, and a cola. “Mrs. Watson?” he called one more time, his boots on the gravel. He came closer, closer. Then he put his hands on her shoulders and bent down to her. “Arlene?”

  Nine

  When she entered that room, she thought the difficult moment would be the instant she loosened the robe and let it fall from her shoulders, all eyes on her, and already the need to start acting, to move with a nonchalance about her own body, taking off the robe without it appearing sensual. But when you remove a robe, you remove a robe. There’s no hiding nakedness. The moment she took off the robe, she could feel all the eyes in the room averted, and no one witnessing how she handed the robe like a coat to the wardrobe mistress. The eyes averted, but sooner or later they looked at her. She wasn’t naked: she wore bikini briefs, and her breasts were mostly covered with a flesh-colored moleskin fitted and glued painstakingly by the costume designer, intended to make her look naked with the proper camera angle, no worry about straps being inadvertently caught on film, or even the pinch of flesh caused by fabric bunching up with the tiniest wrong move. She wasn’t naked, but all eyes settled on her because she was the one being filmed, with a proximity of cameras and lighting that she had underestimated.

  Their brief scouting trip, back in October, had failed to bring them even the road shots showing the Actress driving her car: they had to shoot those later on a soundstage and add the voice-overs in the editing. Production began after the October trip, straight weeks of tight, rushed work all through the fall. Some of the sequences that involved no actors—like long shots of the Phoenix skyline, or a rear projection of a police car driving along a stretch of desert highway—were completed by an unsupervised second unit, the Director specifying exactly what needed to show up on film. But not this scene: the desire for order was keener, the Director sitting the Actress down and showing her how the sequence was going to be staged and filmed, a barrage of particular shots, each of them choreographed with a precision the Actress found almost daunting in its exactitude. The Director mapped out each shot on board after board, and she could see for herself how he was planning to get around the problem of her nakedness: the trust that the camera would shoot only the particular part of the body he was asking for and nothing else. Her torso, her thighs, her shoulders, the curve of her bare back.