Dark Rooms

by Lili Anolik

  Not that he’s told me any of this himself. All my gleaning’s been from Renee, the chatty type, fortunately. Damon still barely talks to me. Looks at me even less. I sure look at him, though. Every night through the windows of his grandmother’s house. I don’t know what it is I’m hoping to see—him torturing small animals, building a shrine to Nica in his closet, pouring his heart out into a diary I can later steal, find a full confession in. Whatever it is, I don’t see it. His routine is the same, never changes. He and his grandmother eat dinner, move into the den after cleaning the kitchen. He does strength-training exercises as the two of them watch TV. At ten thirty, he kisses her on the cheek, goes upstairs, brushes his teeth, and it’s lights out. His grandmother seems to be the only person he spends time with besides Max and Renee. At first I think this is odd, but then I realize it couldn’t make more sense. All his friends are in college now, even U Bridgeport-bound Frankie. Apart from discovering that he prefers steak to chicken, courtroom dramas to police procedurals, Colgate to Crest, though, I’ve learned nothing.

  There have, however, been two notable developments in the last week and a half: I’m feeling a faint tenderness in my breasts and a slight tightness at my waist, which, according to the website LaborOfLove.com, means the baby’s entering its fetal period. The tail’s disappeared, and the toes and upper lip are starting to form. Twelve more days and the external genitalia will be starting to form, too, bringing the first trimester to its official close.

  As I turn onto Damon’s street, I glance at the seat beside me and spot the stun gun—internal rechargeable battery, lifetime warranty, guaranteed to bring down a three-hundred-pound attacker in under two seconds, and, best of all, designed to look like a tube of lipstick, a bargain at $34.99 plus shipping from Amazon—peeking out of my bag. I’d ordered it so I’d feel safe when I was alone with Damon. A smart move. The purchase of a competent, responsible, savvy person. Yet as I stare at the gun’s ridiculous dainty canister, a shade of pink usually only seen on boxes of feminine hygiene products, I’m struck by a depressing thought: I’m not up to the task I’ve set myself. Not even close. To solve a mystery, you have to have powers of penetration, be able to get to the heart of things, and I’m the perpetual outsider who understands nothing. I’ll never find out what happened to Nica, who’s to blame. Instead I’ll blow through the handful of days I have left following the same ass-backward pattern I’ve followed my entire life: me, the older sister, chasing after Nica, the younger, without ever quite catching up. I’ll continue to stalk a guy who’ll turn out to have nothing to do with anything; work a pair of jobs, equally crappy; eat bad, sleep worse. And this whole dropping-out-of-Williams-and-moving-back-home gambit will morph into some sort of grotesque last hurrah before I become a single mother with no college education and zero career prospects, living in the house I grew up in with my screw-loose dad.

  I pull up to the curb in front of Damon’s grandmother’s house. I’m so used to sneaking into this neighborhood, trying to play its angles, melt into its shadows, I find it strange to be here on invitation and in the open. I feel exposed. Blatant, somehow. Like I’m asking to get caught, thrown out. Taking a deep breath, I tell myself to relax, calm down, remind myself that I’m not doing anything wrong.

  I’m about to exit the car. Before I can open my door, though, Damon shoots out his. He’s stiff-legged but still speedy in jeans and a navy sweatshirt, heavy clothes for such a warm night. He swings his body in the car, so fast I barely have time to toss my bag in the back. Without looking at me, he says, “Let’s go.”

  I’ve lived in Hartford my whole life, but the route Damon’s taking me on is all side streets and back roads, and I lose my bearings quickly. The effect, though, of relinquishing control, passively following his orders, is oddly soothing, almost hypnotic. The vibrations from the engine spread up my calves and thighs, into the bones of my lower back, as the concrete ribbon unfurls before me.

  I turn on the radio. The song playing was a big hit last summer. The lyrics are about doomed love, about loss and suffering and anguish. The girl singer’s voice, though, is so light and sweet and caressing that the words are transformed, become light and sweet and caressing too. Nica had been crazy about the song, listening to it over and over. I remember the two of us going to the outlet mall in Clinton for back-to-school clothes. The ride was over an hour with traffic, and Nica, who’d just gotten her license but still preferred to be driven, didn’t talk to me practically at all. Spent the entire trip hunting for the song on the radio, roaming from station to station, finding it, then, before the final chord had even been struck, lunging forward, beginning the hunt again. “It’s like torture,” she’d said, twirling the dial manically, “because you know it’s playing somewhere, but if you don’t get to it in time, you’ll miss it.”

  Usually when a shard of memory like this one presents itself to me, I just swallow it down. Let it cut my tongue, the roof of my mouth, my throat, inflicting the pain solely on myself. I’m about to do that now. But then, I do something different. Turning to Damon, I say, “This song.”

  “Yeah?” he says, impatient.

  “My sister loved it. My sister, Nica.” The pleasure it gives me to say her name in front of him is powerful, all the more so for being unexpected. It’s like a pressure I wasn’t aware of had been building inside me, building and building, and the release valve just got turned. I want to say the name to him again, get some more of that good feeling. I don’t get the chance to, though, because at that moment he orders me to pull over.

  “Where are we?” I say, killing the engine.

  “Clay/Arsenal.”

  Looking around, I realize I was wrong about Blue Hills being the shittiest neighborhood in Hartford. The street we’re on—I don’t know the name because the sign’s missing—is deserted. On it are a gas station, a corner store, a vacant lot, and several mutilated billboards. The sidewalk is trash-strewn. Half the traffic lights have been knocked out. And above our heads a pair of laced-together sneakers dangles like a bunch of grapes from a telephone wire.

  “I’ll be back in five,” Damon says. “Lock all the doors.” As he reaches for the handle, I hit the Lock button on my fob. He tugs on the handle uselessly a couple times. “Lock them after I get out, I meant.”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I say.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  When I don’t move, he exhales heavily, releases the handle. “Luis Ramos was FTA yesterday.” Off my blank look: “FTA, Failure to Appear.”

  “Which one’s Luis?”

  “Buy-and-bust. Second offense. The judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest this morning.”

  “And you’re supposed to, what, recover him? How do you know where he is?”

  “See that.” Damon points to the corner store, Save-A-Lot Xpress. “It belongs to his mom. She’s the one who came to Max. Put up her mortgage as collateral. If Luis skips bail, she loses too. Could wind up losing her house.”

  “I thought he already skipped?”

  “Yeah, but Max said if I bring him in quick and without too much trouble, he’ll issue a Resumption of Liability, help secure a new court date.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Damon shrugs. “Liked the mom, I guess. Feels bad for her. Plus, she’s helping him out, making his job easier. She called the office earlier today. Told him Luis would be in the store after it closed at midnight. Said she’d leave the back door unlocked. Speaking of unlocked doors.” He reaches for the handle again.

  I ignore him. “So you’re just going to walk through the unlocked door? Then what?”

  “Then I’m going to ask Luis nicely to turn himself in.”

  “And if he says no?”

  “Then I’ll ask him not nicely.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Damon sighs, lifts his sweatshirt. Tucked in the waistband of his jeans is an object that’s small and compact and so black it’s almost blue: a gun.

  “Se
e,” he says, “you can relax. Everything’s under control.”

  I don’t respond. Don’t stop staring, either. The gun transfixes me, the cold, hard, steel fact of it. And as I stare, I notice the muscles in Damon’s abdomen, their rectangular shape, the way they’re neatly cubed and stacked; it makes his body seem machinelike, too, an extension of his weapon. A thin seam of black hair snakes between the muscles, disappears into the elastic of his boxers.

  “Can I?” I say, my hand hovering an inch or so from the butt.

  I’m surprised when he nods.

  I take out the gun and weigh it in my palm, bounce it gently up and down. “A .22?” I say, in as casual a tone as I can muster.

  “A .45.”

  The feeling of relief I experience at hearing this is cut short by a thought: It doesn’t mean he didn’t shoot Nica, just that he didn’t shoot her with this gun. I clench up again.

  “Am I allowed to go now?” Damon says, snatching back the gun, returning it to his waistband. “Do I have permission?”

  I unlock his door. As I listen to him struggle with his brace, I think about how scary this situation is, and how if Nica were here, she wouldn’t be scared, or, if she were scared, she wouldn’t let it stop her. Pushing past my reluctance, I open my door.

  “What are you doing?” he says, when he sees me walking around to the front of the car.

  “I won’t come inside the store with you. I’ll just wait outside. That way, if something goes wrong, I’ll be the first to know. I can call your uncle or 911.”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong.”

  “I’ll just wait then. Look, if you make me get back in the car, I’m driving away in it. You’ll have to find another ride home.”

  For ten seconds or so we stand there, tight, facing each other. Then his eyelid twitches and he turns around, starts walking toward Save-A-Lot Xpress.

  After hitting the Lock button on my fob for a second time, I follow.

  The alley behind the store is empty except for a Dumpster, a couple of cardboard boxes with the words DEL MONTE QUALITY stamped on the side. The pavement is damp and smells like urine. The wall is a scorched-looking brick, in it a door. Damon stands in front of this door, looking at me, his eyes huge and inky black. His hand lightly touches the gun in his waistband. My hand does the same with the stun gun in my bag. He nods at me. I nod back, glad that I don’t have to speak.

  Damon reaches for the knob. It won’t turn, though. He grips it tighter, shaking the whole door as he twists and pulls.

  “Locked,” I say, trying to keep the relief out of my voice.

  He lets his head fall forward, rest against the sooty brick. “Shit. She screwed us.”

  “Is there another back door?”

  Glaring at me, “Do you see another back door?”

  “No, but maybe—” I feel the cell in my pocket vibrate. I pull it out, glance at the caller ID. Dad. Wondering where the hell I am at one in the morning, no doubt. “I should take this,” I say.

  “Fine. I’m going to check the windows.”

  I nod. Wanting privacy, I hold off until he rounds the corner, then quickly run through the excuse I prepared earlier: I was hanging out with Maddie in her room, it got late, we fell asleep. An old standby of Nica’s. Bringing the phone to my face, I press the Answer button. The call’s already gone to voice mail, though. I start to hit Return, then pause. It occurs to me that Dad might not be calling to find out where I am at all, has no idea I’m not at the house. He might be calling to let me know why he’s not at the house. Could be he’s stuck at work doing inventory or is having car troubles (he’s had that station wagon for ten years now and it was secondhand to begin with) and is worried that I’m worried—if, on the off chance, I’m even awake to worry. In fact, this strikes me as the likelier scenario. I’ll bet he was expecting to leave a message. And if he wasn’t, well, he’ll just have to wait until I get home to be lied to.

  I close the phone and slip it into my pocket, a weight lifted from my shoulders now that I no longer have to talk to him. I’m about to join Damon when I hear a noise. I turn and look. The knob. Too shocked to run, too shocked to even move, I just stand there and watch as it rotates slowly counterclockwise, listen as its tongue slips out of the groove with a soft metallic click. Suddenly the door swings open, light pouring out so that my eyes are dazed and I can’t see who or what is in front of me.

  And then my eyes adjust.

  He’s propped against the doorframe, arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle. His jeans hang low on his hipbones, and he’s wearing a shirt that’s completely unbuttoned, exposing a flat stomach, a boyishly smooth chest. His face, though, is not boyish at all. It’s dark and craggy and pitted with scars and forty at least. When he sees me staring, his lips peel back in a smile. One of his teeth is gold.

  “Was you the little mouse scratching at my door?” he says.

  I feel his eyes moving over me, and all at once I’m conscious of my arms and legs, practically bare in a short skirt and T-shirt. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

  He laughs softly. “What’s the matter, mouse? Cat got your tongue?”

  Again I open my mouth and nothing comes out. I shrug my helplessness at him.

  More of that soft laughter. “My name is Luis,” he says.

  Without thinking, I hold out my hand to him, like we’ve been formally introduced, like he’s a friend’s parent I’m meeting for the first time, a college interviewer. He closes his hand around mine and tugs, tipping me off balance, so I have no choice but to step toward him. We look at each other. A heat starts to gather between our skins, and I can feel the rough calluses on the pads of his fingers. I try to take back my hand, but he doesn’t let me, tightens his grip instead, tightens and tightens until I wince. He smiles at me when I do, and I return the smile even though I’m in pain now, and terrified, mesmerized by the menace of him and that gold tooth.

  Finally, he releases me. “You got a name, mouse?”

  A beat passes. My hand’s throbbing, and my heart’s going so fast it’s making me dizzy.

  “That’s okay,” he says, “you don’t have to tell me. Pleased to make your acquaintance, whoever you are.” He brings his hand up to my face, rests it lightly on my cheek. He’s not holding on to me now, is only barely touching me, and I want to run, but I can’t. Want to reach for the stun gun in my bag, but I can’t do that, either. Can’t even call out. The bulk and heat and pressure of him, the beating of my heart, the glint of that tooth make me stand there limply. The smell on his fingers is strong and complicated: the sweet, rotten scent of marijuana on top; underneath, the fainter scents of fried food and ketchup and something like sweat yet not sweat, tarter than sweat, and ranker.

  Tears well up in my eyes as he drags his hand across my mouth, wrenching my lips apart. I grit my teeth. I need to breathe through my nose so that his fingers can’t get into my mouth. But the hot reek of him is thickening the air, clogging it, and taking it in through anything as narrow as nostrils becomes impossible; I don’t even try. Seconds pass. My lungs start to burn. And I realize that I’m not going to be able to go without oxygen much longer, that I’m going to have to open up, let him inside me. The only sound I can hear is the pounding of the blood in my ears.

  And then I can hear other sounds, too: Damon’s voice shouting from inside the store, and footsteps, draggy but fast-moving. Moments later, he flies through the door, tackles Luis. I almost go down with them but manage to grab hold of the edge of the Dumpster and stay upright. As I gulp air, they roll around on the pavement. Damon comes out on top, straddling Luis and pinning him. When he cocks back his arm, I close my eyes. My ears aren’t closed, though, so what I’m not watching, I’m listening to: a fist doing its work. After a while, the quality of the blows changes. At first it’s like something hard and with bones in it is being struck. Then it’s like something soft and heavy and wetly fleshy is being struck.

  And after that, nothing.

  Re
luctantly, I open my eyes. The first thing I see is Luis’s face. It’s pulp, basically, and gore, his nose a smear of spongy tissue spread across his cheek, his mouth so caved in and bloody the gold tooth’s no longer visible. Maybe he swallowed it. He is breathing, though, a fine mist tinting the air red whenever he exhales.

  I start to scream, scream and scream, and then Damon’s arms are around me. They’re pulling me to him roughly, my cheek slamming against his chest. I hear his heart; it’s beating inside his rib cage so loud and so hard it seems to throb right through his body and into mine.

  “It was the front door,” he says. “It was the front door that she left unlocked.”

  Damon and I are sitting on the curb in front of Save-A-Lot Xpress when a black-and-white pulls up. Two officers get out. Damon flashes something at them—his bail bond investigator badge, I think, I assume—tells them Luis is handcuffed to a drainpipe inside. Says he’ll be right back.

  “What about his mom’s house?” I say, as he walks me to my car. “Won’t she lose it now?”

  The night air is close, but I’m shivering. Before I understand what’s happening, Damon’s unlocked the car with my fob, taken Nica’s jacket out of the backseat and wrapped it around my shoulders. The smell hits my stomach before my nose: Nica’s smell, her perfume—the stinging citrus, the cloying vanilla—cigarette smoke on top. Does Damon recognize it? I wonder. If not the smell then the jacket? I look over at him but his head is bent, so I can’t see his expression.