When All Light Fails

by Randall Silvis

  Jayme fought a rush of dizziness, didn’t want to think about what this development forebode for Emma. “I don’t know anything about that disease.”

  “The symptoms are like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s, but it can come on fast, as it did in your sister’s case. According to the file, she had her first symptoms about seven weeks ago, but she didn’t see a doctor until ten days ago, when she started hallucinating.”

  “It’s neurological?”

  He nodded. “A degenerative brain disorder. But don’t worry, it’s not hereditary. Unfortunately, there’s no real treatment for it. Most people suffer for a year or so after the initial symptoms. Your sister is one of the lucky ones. Her coma was induced for her own safety. She won’t come out of it.”

  Jayme stared helplessly at him for a few moments, nauseated and weak. “When will she…?”

  “It could happen anytime. I give her a week at the most.”

  Her left knee buckled, but she pulled straight and locked it in place.

  DeMarco touched her shoulder; she turned and drew away from the desk.

  “I’m sorry,” the young man said. “I’ve been trying to call her mother.”

  “Keep trying, please.” Then she walked with DeMarco back to the elevator. Stood waiting for the door to open. Walked in and went to the corner and leaned against the wall.

  DeMarco stepped in and hit the Lobby button, went to her as the doors closed with a hiss and slipped both arms around her. She leaned into him, her face pressed into the side of his neck, hands clutching at his waist, fingers pinching and squeezing his flesh, and sobbed for a woman she did not know, sobbed for a mother and her soon-to-be motherless child.

  Twenty-Two

  If the cat devours the mouse, does the mouse become the cat?

  It was supposed to be spring but DeMarco stood with both hands atop the damp roof of the rental car in the hospital’s parking lot, his body against the closed door, and inhaled two long breaths of November. He didn’t like the taste of it. Jayme sat in the passenger seat with her hands on her lap, staring through the windshield. The sky was gunmetal gray, the sun occluded behind an irregular wall of dirty clouds.

  After a minute or so Jayme turned to look out the driver’s side window but could see only DeMarco’s waist and chest, the gray fleece pullover he had chosen for the day. She leaned across the console and knocked on the glass.

  He opened the door and climbed in frowning. Closed the door and said, “I don’t like this at all.”

  She nodded, her eyes still wet. “Tell me again how she looked last night,” she said.

  He cocked his head.

  “Emma. When you saw her through the trailer window.”

  He called the image back, watched it forming. “Like a little girl,” he told her. “Kind of skinny, I guess. She was wearing jeans and socks and some kind of sweatshirt. Pink socks, I think. Yeah, they were pink.”

  “What color was her sweatshirt?”

  “Yellow. But like a washed-out yellow, you know?”

  “Sort of butter yellow?”

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “What color was her hair?”

  “Baby,” he told her, and laid a hand atop hers. “You’re just hurting yourself now.”

  “I want to see her too. Same as you did.”

  “You saw the photos on Facebook.”

  “It’s not the same. I want to see her the way you did. Describe her hair for me.”

  “She has brown hair. A little darker than medium brown. And cut fairly short, I think. Though she was lying down, so… She had a little earring, it would be her left ear I saw. A little blue stud. It sparkled from the light overhead.”

  “And what was she doing? You said her eyes were open?”

  He nodded. “Staring at the ceiling, thinking, dreaming, it’s impossible to say. But there was a book open on her chest. And she had her hands crossed over her belly.”

  “What was the book?”

  “Baby, I don’t know. It was just a quick glance.”

  “She was probably lying there thinking about her mom,” Jayme said. “Missing her and worrying about her.”

  “Probably.” He didn’t want this to go too far, didn’t want her to start sobbing again. He knew what it was like to feel every child’s pain. Knew how it drained the body and withered the soul. Especially when you do not understand that you are every child, that every child is you, and that all pain is your pain, all love your love, every moment a moment in the life that is life.

  “I don’t like what we’re doing here,” he told her. “This sneaking around. We’re treating a little girl like she’s a criminal of some kind.”

  Jayme nodded in agreement. Then handed his own words back to him. “But isn’t it the nature of an investigation to be discreet?”

  “So we quit,” he suggested. “I’ll call him up and tell him we’re out.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we go to work for her. For Emma. Pro bono.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Same thing. Find out who her father is. But do it in the open, with her cooperation.”

  “We’ll have to get the grandmother’s agreement first.”

  “Of course.”

  “And then the judge’s too. Are we going to do that in the open, with his cooperation?”

  “Why wouldn’t he agree? It’s what he wants, or so he claimed. He won’t like that we switched sides on him, but he’ll be getting the same deal for no money.”

  “I don’t know,” Jayme said.

  “I’ve never been comfortable with this anonymity he claims to need. She sent the letter to him. She knows who he is. Her mother knows who he is. Her grandmother probably knows who he is. For all we know, the whole town of Scottville might know who he is.”

  “He’s worried about his reputation back home. Even if he’s not her father, word could get out that he took part in the whole…you know.”

  “Why are you defending him?” DeMarco asked. “I got the feeling you didn’t much care for him.”

  “I’m playing the devil’s advocate is all. Same as you always do with me. Truth is, I love your plan.”

  DeMarco grunted. Then asked, “In that case, may I express myself freely?”

  “Always, babe.”

  “Then fuck his reputation. This is a little girl’s life we’re talking about here.”

  She smiled. Turned her hand in his and squeezed his fingers. “This is why I love you,” she said.

  Twenty-Three

  The past lays the egg, the present cracks it open, and the future comes climbing out

  After his son’s death, DeMarco went to war against the world. He had the legal authority to do so. A Pennsylvania State Trooper uniform, a badge, a 9mm handgun. And, he told himself, he had the moral authority to do so. In truth he had no such authority, and his war against the world was really a war against God. DeMarco’s nine-month-old son had died while sitting in his car seat, watching his mommy up front or the back of his daddy’s head or maybe just watching full of wonder as the lights of night twinkled through the windows. Until a red pickup truck ran the traffic light and T-boned DeMarco’s car. The drunk at the wheel of that truck served some time but not enough, and DeMarco’s wife, Laraine, blamed him for the loss and stopped talking to him and eventually left him and started picking up strangers in bars as a way to either punish DeMarco or to expiate a bit of her own anguish. So yes, DeMarco had been angry. He had been furious. And for a dozen years his fury and guilt could find no relief.

  For all of those years and more he had been mired in the sewage of the world, his daily life a series of confrontations with lawbreakers of every ilk and of interviews with their frightened, grieving, despairing victims. Every time he investigated a crime, he waded neck-deep into the muck again. He had never wanted
to be there but was compelled by a powerful need to be useful, to justify his existence, and he knew no other way to do it. He would rather sit in the woods and listen to the breeze through the leaves but that wouldn’t pay the bills nor would it satisfy his deeper need to understand the true nature of reality.

  A part of him, even as a boy, had wanted to just start walking. To drop everything, every concern, every burden, every obligation, and to just walk and keep walking, no destination in mind. Only with the intention of never setting foot on pavement, never again walking a sidewalk or a city street. Never sleeping inside a building with walls thicker than 68-denier polyester. He wondered if it were possible. How many years did he have left? Maybe thirty, if he were lucky. How many states could he cover? How many continents? He knew a lot of people who were afraid to be out of doors, afraid of solitude and silence and darkness and nature, people who hid from those conditions, ran from them, trembled at the mere thought of being trapped inside one of them. But not him. He preferred them, singly or, better yet, all at once. God, how he would cherish that freedom!

  And now here he was again, wrestling with the demon, his own mirror image. Fight or flight. There was no question, really. No doubt of which option he would choose. Maybe he just needed to believe that there was an option. It always came down to that, didn’t it? An option was hope, a way out. His own big two-hearted river. How long had Nick Adams stayed in the woods? He couldn’t remember. A couple of days at least. But DeMarco didn’t have a couple of days. A couple of minutes would have to do. And he had already used them up by staring out the gnat-speckled windshield.

  He made the call right there in the hospital parking lot, with Jayme at his side, the phone on speaker. The judge’s hello sounded as if he had a mouthful of food, so DeMarco got straight to the point and was secretly hoping the judge would choke on his breakfast. “We’re terminating our agreement with you, Judge. We don’t like the sneaking around part of it. So we’re just going to go ahead on our own dime and get the sample from the girl and pass the results on to her and her grandmother. We trust that you will cooperate.”

  He heard the judge swallow, then clear his throat. “You are reneging on our agreement?”

  “We’ve reconsidered your terms and we don’t like them. As I said, this is at our own expense. We’re all square as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Not a good move, Sergeant. Backing out on a handshake. Very unprofessional.”

  “C’est la vie, Judge. Can we assume that you will donate a sample of your own DNA? And see that your friends do the same?”

  After a few moments of silence, the judge said, “On one condition. You provide me with the DNA breakdown of the girl so that we can have our own tests run.”

  “Sure. Why not?” DeMarco said.

  “And I owe you nothing?”

  “Nada y nada.”

  “What was that about a grandmother? Where’s the mother in this?”

  “Dying,” DeMarco said. “In hospice.”

  And the next thing he heard, five seconds later, was a click.

  Jayme said, “I think you ruined his breakfast.”

  “I hope he likes his eggs scrambled,” DeMarco answered. “Because we just scrambled them for him.”

  Twenty-Four

  Of roots and rings and buds and things

  DeMarco at the grave of Daksh Khatri. This was in the previous November, back when the trees had retreated into a dormancy, a drowsy abscission—back when every breath DeMarco took still hurt, when Jayme was still reluctant to grant him leave of the house alone, as if only her vehement and adamantine love could keep him safe, sequester him from another error in judgment, another impetuous act. But he needed to see this place in the ground where the body that had once housed a deranged man had been laid without benefit of prayer or any semblance of ritual. Khatri’s own parents had refused his body, said he had shamed the family through both avenues of time forward and back. And so he had been laid to rest courtesy of Mahoning County, Ohio, where he had first wreaked his havoc.

  The feds were still watching the plot for the appearance of any lingering confederates, any demented groupies or wannabes. But all they would see this morning was Khatri’s lone male survivor, DeMarco, shivering inside his too-thin jacket, the dead leaves blowing about his legs like brittle, papery demons sucked dry of all power, impuissant and doomed to crumble.

  It was strange what DeMarco felt for Khatri now, strangest of all to himself, though any who saw him standing there above the still-mounded earth might wonder why he had come and what he was thinking. To gloat, no doubt. To exult in his enemy’s death, his own triumphant recovery. But that wasn’t what DeMarco was thinking or feeling. Instead, no bitterness, no self-satisfaction, but something like a kinship. Something like amusement that needed to be shared, and which only the dead could understand.

  So now you know, brother. Now you know it all, same as I did. Now you see the trick of it all. The many, many ways we get it wrong.

  And DeMarco wanted to thank Khatri for that knowledge before it was all lost to him again, before DeMarco forgot every crumb of the everything he had known. That was why he had come to the grave that morning. Why he shivered and smiled and mumbled aloud, knowing he would be heard. “Thank you, Daksh,” he said. “Man, you had me going. Good luck on your journey, brother. And thank you for helping me with mine.”

  And then the days and weeks passed and his body grew stronger while his memories retreated. But the memory of his visit to Khatri’s grave remained, as he knew it would, and it preserved for him, as he had hoped it might, his memory of why he had made that November visit—because memory is both a gift and a curse, just as life itself is, depending upon one’s perspective at the time, depending on the condition one’s condition is in.

  Remembering this now, months later, midmorning Saturday in early spring, as he silently drove from the hospital and back toward the Barries’ green-and-white trailer in its pocket of woods, with Jayme watching out the side window and pondering who knew what, pondering mankind’s cruelty and lust and basest urges and desires probably, he thought he understood again the necessity for forgetting, the imperative to don the mask and become the character and to forget that the play is just a play. Understanding was itself but a glimmer, a flitting firefly of light. But without Khatri he would never have come to know that. His gratitude, for the moment at least, was too huge to keep quiet.

  “Thank you, brother,” he whispered again.

  “Hmm?” Jayme said, and looked his way. “What did you say, babe?”

  He took a quick glance. Saw her pretty, troubled face lit by a slanting golden light, a ray of sun breaking through the clouds. That tiny sprinkling of pale freckles that always made him smile, made his heart feel hollow yet full. “Did I say something?” he asked.

  “I thought you did.”

  He tried to bring it back, but found nothing there. Only Jayme, only now, only the Michigan woods and the stark, naked beauty of the still-leafless trees. Only the emptiness of another pending death, a woman he did not know except through a purloined glance at her daughter. “I have no idea,” he said.

  Twenty-Five

  Oh the constellations of misery and sorrow she wore

  It was the girl who answered Jayme’s knock, the girl still in pajamas though the morning was waning, a navy-blue T-shirt and leggings covered with white and purple stars of all sizes, the collar and cuffs of the shirt and leggings a faded pink, all of the colors faded from a hundred or more washings, the cuffs of the leggings barely reaching her naked ankles, her feet in faded blue crew socks with white cat prints across her toes. Emma Barrie looked out through the aluminum storm door with its full panel of dirty glass and saw Jayme’s puzzling smile, the mouth turning upward in forced happiness but the eyes frowning, the big man standing behind her with his own sad face, and she felt a chill go through her as if straight through the glass, a
gray chill slicing into her like the enemy of light itself, so that her own face scrunched up and her belly tightened and she shivered and began to cry.

  “Oh, baby,” Jayme said, and reached for the handle and found the door unlocked, pulled the door open and moved onto the first metal step. She would have continued except that Emma backed away and then turned and ran toward the rear of the trailer. So Jayme stepped down onto the grass again and let the door close. She turned to DeMarco. “I think she knows. I think she knew just by looking at me.”

  DeMarco swung an arm around her but said nothing. They waited. And soon a smallish woman in her sixties came trundling from the back, quick footsteps thudding onto the floor, and appeared behind the glass, her eyes still sleepy but suspicious, thin graying hair brittle and mussed. She tightened the belt of a dirty white fleece robe and yanked the door open eight or so inches and spoke through the opening. “What’s going on here?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jayme answered. “The hospital has been trying to reach you. Have you heard from them yet?”

  “I put the phone off when I’m sleeping. What’s the matter? Is it Jennie?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” Jayme said. “She’s been transferred to hospice care.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” the woman said in a long, sighing breath. “Son of a bitch.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jayme said.

  The woman continued to look at her, saying nothing. Then she asked, angry, “Did you tell Emma that? Is that what set her off? You have no right telling her something like that without me knowing about it.”

  “I didn’t even speak to her,” Jayme said. “She just looked at me and started crying.”

  Again the woman was silent for a moment. Then she turned her gaze to DeMarco. “She does that sometimes. Like she knows stuff we don’t. She’s probably got the same thing my Jennie’s got. Poor little thing.”

  DeMarco could think of no appropriate reply.