Love In Darkness

by E. M. Tippetts

  “Just…”

  “I totally hear that. Good job. Someone had to do it. So why are you here? I mean, is this your last meal before Mr. Officer Boss Guy locks you up?”

  “I didn’t arrest him,” says Officer Li. “John being John counts as sufficient provocation for violence.”

  “So why are you here?” She keeps her gaze fixed on me.

  “Because I wanted a burrito,” I say. “And this guy’s talking to me like we’re friends or something now.”

  “Okay, what is up with that?” Kailie rounds on Officer Li. “Because it’s creepy, all right? Put the mirror shades back on and go back to being a total self-righteous jerk already.”

  “Only for you.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I wasn’t joking. For you, I will always be a self-righteous jerk. Let the punishment fit the crime. Your crime is that whole talking thing you do. Really, you’ve gotta stop.”

  “Shut it. Okay, Alex, help.”

  “What?”

  “Kirsten and my dad just got in this huge fight and he was completely awful to her. So that’s her part time job at the Inn gone.”

  “What’s she going to do?”

  “She’s going to try to start her own company doing services for the disabled and is going to write to the Wilkstone Foundation.” She rests her elbows on the table and her forehead against the heels of her hands.

  I nudge my basket with its half eaten burrito towards her and she dives right in, her teeth crunching through the tortilla shell. “Mmm, shredded beef,” she says with her mouth full. “Good stuff.”

  “Kailie,” says Officer Li, “is there anything I can do? Your sister have a place to live and all that?”

  “She said she applied for rent forbearance from the Wilkstone Foundation a while ago. But it’s not like they’re gonna give her free rent and help her start a business, right? Eventually, yeah, she’ll need a place to live.”

  “No,” I say. “As long as she’s working to better her situation, she’s probably fine there.”

  ”Yeah, about that.” Kailie looks me over. “When you suggested she apply to the Foundation, you said she could get ‘more’ help with her rent. Which means you knew she was getting help already. How would you know that? You got some connection to the Wilkstones no one knows about?”

  Officer Li is watching my expression, and he looks perplexed. “You don’t, do you?”

  I shrug, unsure what to say.

  “Wait a minute…” says Officer Li.

  “What?” I shrug again, but know that’s one time too many. It doesn’t seem natural. They can tell I’m hiding something.

  All the color drains from his face. “Gimme your driver’s license.”

  “I don’t have a valid-”

  “I’m not checking to see if you’re legal to drive. Hand it over.”

  “No, come on.”

  Kailie looks at me, her head cocked to one side. “No way.”

  Officer Li swears, startling both me and Kailie. “Tell me this is a joke, Katsumoto. Your last name is…”

  “His mother’s last name,” says Kailie.

  Their gazes lock. “When you asked him if he was connected to the Wilkstones,” he says, “he flinched.”

  “Guys.”

  Kailie slaps her palm down on the table with an ear-ringing smack and turns to me. “You actually are a Wilkstone. Yes or no?”

  I look down at the gravel under our chairs, then give in and dig my business cards, that spell out my full name and give the address of the Foundation, out of my back pocket. I hand one to Officer Li and flip the other one at Kailie’s chest, which she manages to catch by clapping her hands together.

  Officer Li swears again and leans against the table. The guy looks physically ill.

  “What?” I say. “I can’t help-”

  “How many times have I arrested you?” the cop says. “I’ve treated you like total crap, Alex, and I was screwing over-”

  “Are you the only one left?” Kailie asks.

  “Only direct descendant.”

  “Who else knows about this?” She looks at the back of the business card, which is blank, and then stuffs it in her bra because she’s Kailie and a pocket would make too much sense.

  “Just Madison. She figured it out when she saw my initials at the bottom of a letter from the Foundation.”

  “Alexander Wilkstone Katsumoto,” says Officer Li.

  “Keep it down, all right? I don’t want people to know this.”

  “So what kind of pull do you have with the Foundation?” Kailie asks.

  “None… I mean… not really. I need to meet with them about some stuff-”

  “Who’s them?” Officer Li asks.

  “Other relatives. Great aunt, second cousins, that kind of thing. None of them live around here.”

  “What do you need to meet about?” says Kailie.

  “Just… stuff.”

  “Firing me for one thing,” says Officer Li. “Seriously, I-”

  “Shut up,” says Kailie. “We’re talking here. This isn’t about you.”

  “What she said,” I agree. I’m agreeing with Kailie. Kailie and I are ganging up on Officer Li, to stop him apologizing for all the times he was a jerk. The world really has gone surreal.

  “It’s just a shock,” he says.

  “How,” I ask, “could you add stuff to my criminal record without seeing my middle name?”

  “By not looking. I don’t know.”

  “Alex, wait a minute,” says Kailie. “You don’t have any other family other than your mother and some second cousins?”

  I nod.

  “Wow…” She turns to Officer Li, and at his blank look explains, “If Alex’s condition gets bad, who’s going to make decisions for him?”

  “Oh.”

  I shrug. “The state.”

  “Heck no, Alex. You’ve got enough people around who care about you.” Kailie rubs her mouth with one of my napkins.

  “What people? You see any of my old high school friends here?”

  “You’ve got friends,” says Officer Li. “You’ve got your church.”

  “Looking after a lunatic goes beyond the usual kind of charity,” I say.

  Kailie licks a flake of fried burrito off her finger.

  Officer Li rubs his eyes. “Yeah. I know I shouldn’t turn this back to me, but this is my nightmare with Mikey. Having him in a situation like this.”

  “Have another kid,” says Kailie.

  “Yeah, done. It’s due in seven months, but what if it’s got the same condition?”

  “Congrats,” I say. “Siblings can be the best kind of therapy for a kid like Mikey.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, congrats,” says Kailie. “And yeah, too much about you. Moving on.”

  “No, I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I say. It’s nice to have people to talk to, but I’m tired now. “Can I beg a ride home off one of you?”

  “Yeah, I’ll take you,” says Kailie. “You get back to work,” she tells Officer Li.

  “I’m too busy digesting this crap you made me eat.”

  “Yeah, other people made you do it. That excuse never worked for us.” Kailie gestures at herself and me.

  Officer Li laughs and we say goodbye with a wave.

  Hours later, Hiroko wakes me from a sound sleep by shouting, “Alex!” up the stairs.

  “Yeah?” I call back, my voice deep and groggy.

  “Did you disarm the alarm?”

  It takes me a moment to think about that, but yes, I must have when I got home. I should have re-armed it, but I might have forgotten. Crap. “Is Mom missing?”

  “Yes.”

  The clock by my bed reveals that it’s 4:30 a.m.

  I roll out of bed and pull on some shoes. “Okay, I’ll call the police.”

  “I’m going to check Wilkstone Road.”

  I hear her run up the stairs, past my door, and out to the garage. A moment later the
garage door opens with a rumble.

  Without thinking, I call Officer Li’s cell phone. It’s only when he answers, groggy, that I realize how rude this is. “I’m sorry. I shoulda just called the non-emergency number or… I’m sorry.”

  “What’s up, Alex? Your mom missing again?”

  “Yeah. Go back to sleep.”

  “Just give me a minute and I’ll go check Wilkstone.”

  “You don’t have to-”

  “Gimme a break. I’m not gonna just leave your mother to wander around in the middle of the night. I’ll call you back once I have something to report.”

  “Thanks. I’m gonna… I guess I’ll check the bluffs and the beach.”

  “Yeah good idea. Okay, talk to you soon.”

  “Thanks.”

  “De nada.”

  I pull on my jacket and grab a flashlight, then pause and wait. Something is very, very wrong. I wait and listen.

  Silence.

  And then it hits me. That’s the problem. I never hear silence anymore. Or is it a problem? Is this my medication working, or is this the voices playing tricks on me? I push those concerns aside as I head out the back door.

  As always there’s a wind coming in off the sea, and today it feels like a million weak little hands pushing against me, trying to turn me around. I head down the five steppes of our landscaped yard until I reach the bottom with its little bench and wrought iron table and chairs, where I brought Madison for a candlelit dinner on prom night. Today my gaze sweeps past this and along the jagged edge of the cliff beyond. “Mom?”

  There comes a faint noise that could be someone crying in the distance, or could be one of the many phantoms in my mind.

  I look up and down the bluffs. They’re rocky and jagged and I wouldn’t be able to see if someone were over the next little crag. Having said that, there’s a narrow little path down to the rocky beach below that I want to descend, though I’m not sure whether that’s logical. If she’s at the bottom of the cliffs, odds are she is not in good shape. If she’s still at the top, I could find her before she falls.

  But I feel like I should go down the path, so I do, grasping the metal rail that was affixed by whomever first owned this property. The path is so narrow that when Madison and I would go down it, we had to move single file. I always went first so I could catch her if she slipped, and I remember how nervous she’d been the first time we’d descended it. “This banister is safe?”

  “It gets slippery sometimes, so just go slow.” The metal is rusty on the underside but smooth on top from all the hands that have gripped it on their way down.

  Now, as I grasp it, it doesn’t budge. It’s well cemented in place, which means if my mom came down this way, she’d have had this to hold onto. “Mom!” I call out. This time there’s a slight echo off the rocks that gets swallowed by the vast expanse of sea. The tide’s out, but on its way in, and along this part of the bluffs, it can sometimes come in far enough to cover the beach. That gives me a sense of urgency.

  “Mom!”

  My feet slip, but I keep hold of the banister and right myself, then continue to clamber down as fast as possible.

  “Mom!”

  “Help.” The word is soft and I barely hear it, and it’s in Japanese.

  “I’m coming. Stay where you are.” I all but hurl myself down the rest of the way, my hand on the banister the only thing between me and death by a fall onto the rocks below. “Where are you, Mom?”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Where’s Brian? I think he might have drowned.”

  “Dad didn’t drown. Keep talking.”

  “You weren’t here. You don’t know.” Her voice is gaining strength.

  I reach the bottom of the path and cut to the right, towards the sound. “It’ll be okay, Mom. Where are you?”

  Sniffles and sobs, barely audible above the slosh of the surf. The beach narrows to the width of a footpath, then opens out into a small alcove where my mother cowers in nothing but her nightgown, her hands and feet cut up and bloody, her skin alabaster pale and covered with goosebumps. I yank my shirt off and wrap it around her frail frame and when she grasps it with her hands, she streaks it with blood.

  There’s no cellphone reception down here so I squat down and say, “I need to carry you out.”

  “No.”

  “Mom, it’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t know who you are.”

  “It’s Alex, Mom. It’s okay.”

  “Who’s Alex?”

  “It’s me.”

  And then the voices all burst into laughter, the sound reverberating off the cliffs.

  “Get away from me!” my mother shrieks.

  Onlyit might not be my mother. What if the voices have her?

  I maneuver so I can put my hands on her shoulders. This is our way of connecting, my way of grounding her in the moment so that she knows it’s just me and she’s safe.

  She claws my wrists until I let go. That has never happened before. That move’s worked since I was a little kid. “Mom.” She has to be in there somewhere.

  “Get away.”

  “She’s gone,” says a voice. “Gone, gone, gone.”

  “You’re too late.”

  “You screwed up.”

  “This is your fault.”

  I already know that.

  The tide is still on its way in, and I want to get my mother out of here, which means I have no choice but to carry her against her will. My heart convulses. It’ll be no trouble to overpower her, and that’s the problem. I don’t want to overpower my mother, to haul her like a sack of potatoes and treat her like she’s just a deadweight. That’s what everyone else has always done to her, but I was always different. We have a connection that no one’s ever been able to break. I want to talk to her and reason with her and let her know that she’s safe. I want her to look at me and know who I am, because she always has.

  I didn’t think anything could feel worse than losing Madison. This feels worse. “Mom.”

  She lunges at me and tries to claw my eyes. Her nails are long enough to draw blood when one rakes across my cheek. I duck away and then step forward while still doubled over so that I can take her over my shoulders in a fireman carry.

  “Put me down!” she screams, only her voice is distorted. It isn’t her talking. Whatever’s taken her over, hammers me with her fists and kicks with her feet. The blows hurt some, but I’ve had worse. The fact that my mother might think I’m trying to hurt her cuts deep as a knife.

  “It’s me,” I say. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m going to get you to safety.”

  I debate whether to go up the path again with my mom thrashing like this, or on down the beach to where it widens out and I can get a cell phone signal. I just don’t know. Trying to carry her up the path is dangerous. I turn and head down the beach, picking my way over the rocks.

  “You’re too late.”

  “Tide’s coming in.”

  More laughter which is loud enough to hurt my ears. The ocean inches ever closer, licking at the rocks and sloshing against my feet.

  Exquisite pain blooms in my arm and the voices all burst into cackles.

  My mother’s bitten me, hard, and she won’t let up.

  “Stop. Ouch.” It hurts badly enough that my eyes sting with tears. “Stop it! Mom!” I shake her frail frame until she lets go and goes limp.

  “You’ve killed her.”

  “Nice job.”

  “Idiot.”

  Warm blood streams down my arm and drips off my elbow. The tide’s now in far enough that each wave comes up to my ankles, leaving the bare skin stinging from salt and frigid with cold as each wave rolls out.

  I stumble, but keep on walking. “Mom, you’re going to be okay.”

  “Dead. Gone.”

  “You shook her too hard. You killed her.”

  “You broke her neck.”

  My mother’s body stirs, but I know now that it
isn’t her. It’s whatever’s taken over her body. The ocean beside me grows darker and darker, until the water is black like a gaping void, hurling itself at me again and again. The rocks under my feet shift and roll.

  It’s all I can do to stagger on. I know it’s two miles to the parking area, where most of us access the beach. There’s cellphone service there. I have no idea how far I’ve come by now.

  Fingernails dig deep into my back and this time I don’t thrash. I let her pierce my skin and draw more blood. The stream of blood down my arm is drying to a crust and the wound stings as the wind rubs its rough hands over it.

  “Alex?” calls a voice in the distance. I don’t know if it’s real or not.

  Nor do I care. “Here! Help!”

  “You find her?”

  It’s Officer Li. He must’ve reached the beach and started along it towards the base of our property.

  My mother’s shriek is his answer. It’s loud enough to make my ears ring.

  “You’re all right, Grace,” the cop hollers. “You relax. No need to fight.”

  I can hear that he’s ahead of me, but I can’t really see him. My breathing becomes tight and labored and the world starts to go black.

  “You’re too late.”

  “They’re going to see what you’ve done to her.”

  “You’re going to jail.”

  “You’d be better off dead.”

  “Whoa, Alex, hey.” I feel strong, gentle hands on my forearms, but I can’t see who it is. The world has grayed out. “Here. It’s me, Justin.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  “You aren’t hurting her. Grace, relax. You’re with friends.”

  My mother thrashes and sense that Officer Li has to duck to one side. “Okay, lean down,” he tells me. He helps my mother down and she begins to punch and scratch me, which I barely feel. Officer Li can handle it. He won’t hurt my mother.

  “Alex. Hey. I need backup.”

  His radio comes to life with a crackle, reality shatters, and the shards fall away.

  I try to wake up but find myself trapped in a memory from more than two years ago.

  Madison lays next to me on my bed, dozing while I read. I can’t concentrate on my book with her right there. It’s as if I’m just a run of the mill human, and she’s got so many extra touches that she’s another sort of being entirely, from her adorable, rounded ears to the delicate pink softness of her lips to the graceful lines of her neck, the swell of her breasts, the narrowing above her hips, and the curvaceous lines of her long legs.