Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  PRAISE FOR ECHO LAKE

  “Think the secret lovechild of Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey.”

  —Dino Parenti, in Pantheon Magazine

  “. . . there are novels that possess an atmosphere so strong, so inescapable

  that it turns the narrative into an unbelievably engrossing reading experience. More than atmospheric, these rare novels deserve to be called something far more powerful: mesmerizing. Letitia Trent’s Echo Lake belongs to this select group, and it doesn’t stop there.”

  —Gabino Iglesias, in Heavy Feather Review

  “Trent’s years as a poet serve her well in this heavily atmospheric novel, which deftly conjures up both evil and the small town’s complicit reluctance to face its past.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “In Echo Lake, Letitia Trent, with deceptively simple, beautiful language, creates a small American town slowly self destructing under the weight of its secrets. Trent illuminates the mystery of family and community, the pain of loss, all the while spinning a tale of murder and suspense. It’s at turns a lovely and bone chilling read.”

  —Paula Bomer, author of Inside Madeleine

  “In Echo Lake, Trent’s small town characters guard their secrets, and warn their children away from the mist-covered lake. Dark, ominous, and lyrical, Echo Lake is a beautiful exploration of loss, and the menace of deceptive surfaces.”

  —Karen Brown, author of The Longings of Wayward Girls

  “Trent’s debut novel combines a ripping good scare with prose as rich as

  dark verse. Her characters wear the imprint of the past like livid bruises,

  the bravest among them untangling their distorted histories to discover truths about the nature of community, family and self.”

  —Sophie Littlefield, author of House of Glass

  FIRST EDITION

  Almost Dark © 2016 by Letitia Trent

  Cover layout design © 2016 by Erik Mohr

  Interior design © 2016 by Aaron Drown Design

  All Rights Reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by

  Publishers Group Canada

  76 Stafford Street, Unit 300

  Toronto, Ontario, M6J 2S1

  Toll Free: 800-747-8147

  e-mail: info@pgcbooks.ca

  Distributed in the U.S. by

  Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc.

  10150 York Road, Suite 300

  Hunt Valley, MD 21030

  Phone: (443) 318-8500

  e-mail: books@diamondbookdistributors.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Trent, Letitia, author

  Almost dark / Letitia Trent.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77148-336-0 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77148-337-7 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS3620.R46A65 2016 813'.6 C2015-907532-7

  C2015-907533-5

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  info@chizinepub.com

  Edited by Andrew Wilmot

  Proofread by Megan Kearns and Sandra Kasturi

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  For my family in Vermont

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  —William Faulkner

  I

  I

  September 15th, 1993

  Claire and Sam went out to the factory that Friday night because they’d heard from Archie that high school kids went there to party on the weekends. According to Sam, Archie was a trusted source of illicit information: his father was a motorcycle mechanic, a job that Archie had somehow made seem exotic, and he let Archie drink beer and smoke in the house. Archie had only shrugged when Claire expressed shock that anyone’s parents would let them smoke or drink.

  “I guess we just do things differently,” he’d said.

  Sam insisted that Archie knew what was cool, and Claire knew enough to believe her brother. Archie knew that you called concerts shows instead of citaoncerts. You called everything an album, even if it was a tape or a CD. He wore a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt—he’d gone to a concert, a show, in Albany, and Trent Reznor had spit on him. He told the story almost every time anyone mentioned going to a show or even listening to a new CD, and wore the shirt almost as often, though it had a small hole in one shoulder and was faded to a muddy grey instead of its original black. But the fading made it even better, and Archie somehow knew that, too. His hair was long and straight and he smoked cigarettes behind the school with another group of boys who bunched in a tight circle, mumbling short, cutting exchanges, sloping their shoulders inward and sliding quick, darting glances at anyone who passed. He smoked pot, too. He’d shown Claire and Sam a baggy full of something that looked like dried garden weeds and told them to inhale. Claire had stuck her nose in the bag and sneezed—it smelled like nothing she recognized.

  “I stole it from my dad,” he said, brushing his shaggy hair out of his eyes.

  “If anyone finds out you have that,” Claire said, “you could get kicked out.” But she was too excited to be worried for him. She wanted her real life, her adult life, to begin and she had a feeling that Archie might be her way in.

  Sam just laughed. “Nice,” he said.

  Their attention seemed to please Archie. He smiled and put the baggie in his back pocket.

  “Can we have some?” Claire asked.

  Archie laughed and punched her lightly on the shoulder. “You’re too young, kid. Maybe in a couple of years.”

  Claire could feel that he liked to look at her. This was new. Usually, boys didn’t notice her. She didn’t quite know what to do with this new development, but she sensed it might benefit her. She wanted to be an adult. She’d recently thrown away her Barbies and bought her first real tube of lipstick, a reddish-brown color like Angela Chase wore on My So-Called Life.

  “Oh, come on, Archie,” she said. She met his eyes and held them for longer than usual. He looked away first.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking, kid,” He said. He sighed and put his hands in his pockets, world-weary, weighed down with so much forbidden knowledge. “It’s really strong stuff,” he told her, “almost like hash. Hash can really mess you up.”

  Claire knew hash only as a particularly disgusting meal of corned beef and potatoes, which her grandparents liked to eat with slices of buttered white bread. Her parents were not cool like Archie’s dad—they went to the Methodist church every Sunday and her mom wouldn’t let her watch Blossom because she’d heard on Dateline that the show had had a whole special about somebody losing their virginity. Claire had to get all of the good television—MTV, Blossom, Life Goes On, and Tales From the Crypt—at her friends’ houses, where their parents were too busy working or arguing or doing whatever adults did all day to pay attention to what their kids were watching.

  Sam told her later what hash was, after Archie had gone to shop class and nobody was around to make fun of her for not knowing.

  “Hash is like pot,” he explained, “only stronger. It makes you super high or something. It makes time slow down.”

  Time slowing down. The idea seemed te
rrifying to Claire. Why would anyone want time to be slower than it already was? Time was so slow that it seemed that ninth grade was taking months and months and months to finish.

  Sam was Claire’s twin. He was taller, better looking, smarter, and though they were the exact same age, he somehow seemed older. He looked like their mother, who had been called Snow White in high school (Claire had seen it scrawled in her old yearbook, under her impossibly pretty picture—her mother’s eyes and lipstick and black hair against her clear, pale skin). Claire looked like her mother, too, but a smaller, mousier, less striking version.

  It was as though Sam had sucked up all of the best genes in the womb and had left her with mediocrity.

  The factory had almost burned down once, long before Claire and Sam had been born—long before they had even been imagined. Now, it was just a building that had always been there. All the children of Farmington had to visit it in Elementary school—there was something special about the slate shingles, which had come from a nearby quarry, and its historical location. The children of Farmington were always having to look at some pieces of rock that supposedly had something to do with the state—marble slabs at the Capital building and quartzite rocks, halved and thick with crystals, at the mineral museum. Claire had seen every important rock in the state by the time she was out of elementary school. That’s what came from living in a place where there was nothing much but rocks and maple syrup and snow.

  Years ago, the factory had shut down for good. Somebody had gotten sick, sued for damages, and the place had been closed. Claire couldn’t remember much about it. It had happened when she was a child. All she remembered were the news reports. That day, her parents had watched the local news intently. The news was finally going to mention Farmington. This never happened, except when Farmington was going to get a snowstorm that might knock down power lines and cause elderly people to freeze to death in their homes, and even then it was only a cloud-covered place on the weatherman’s map, or a snow-choked road where a reporter stood in a blizzard, reporting about how dangerous it was to be outside. She had looked up from her crayons and soda and saw a place she knew on television—the Channel Six news trucks were right in front of the factory. Her mother had shooed her away from the television then, told her to get started on her homework, just as the real news was starting, and she never learned what had happened.

  That Friday night, Claire begged Sam to take her to the factory. Their parents had gone to bed early, exhausted with stomach flu, which they’d had for the last week—and which Claire and Sam had mercifully avoided.

  “You kids,” their mother said, sounding almost angry. “You kids have the best immune systems. Never sick, and when you do get sick, you’re always sick together.”

  And so they found themselves basically alone by nine p.m. on a Friday night.

  “C’mon,” Claire said. “It can’t hurt to go. They’ll never even know we were gone.”

  “I guess it can’t hurt,” Sam said, distracted. He’d been playing The Legend of Zelda while Claire watched. He could play video games for hours at a time, something that increasingly bothered her: it was one of the first interests they didn’t share. She could see, already, that this would happen more and more as they got older. She didn’t know if he had noticed this drift, if he cared. It was normal, after all, to separate from your siblings, from your family.

  Sam held Claire’s hand as they walked, navigating her around a piece of split sidewalk, the crack big enough to lodge a foot in. She would have tripped, maybe sprained or broken an ankle, if he hadn’t guided her. Sam had good eyesight, or at least was better at seeing what was right in front of him. He was good at sports, too—a starter on the basketball team and one of the school’s tennis stars. There was almost nothing that he wasn’t good at. He wanted to be an attorney when he grew up, like the people on L.A. Law. Claire wanted to be a librarian because she liked to be around books. She remembered how the children’s room librarians would sometimes pull big, colourful picture books from the shelves and read them out loud, slowly, lingering over the pictures.

  “I used to love that,” she’d told Sam, “how you could go to the library and sit down on those pillows and bean bag chairs and they would just read you a book out loud and you could just sit and imagine being somewhere else completely. It would be nice to do that for other kids, you know?”

  Sam had not laughed when she told him her future hopes, though she knew he was probably a little bit disappointed—there had never been, and there never would be, a television show about librarians. Even L.A. librarians.

  Claire was good at reading, at taking tests, at everything in school except for math, and even then she did reasonably well when tested. These gifts served her well in school, but she didn’t know what they could do for her beyond that. Most people had talents in something real—fixing lawnmowers, drawing, writing, budgeting—not in test taking. She didn’t do sports, not even field hockey, which everybody in town seemed to love. Even adults without children came to the high school hockey games. It had seeped mysteriously into the fabric of the town, so much so that her parents were surprised when she’d told them that she didn’t want to play.

  Claire hated falling on the ground and getting her hands and knees dirty, having to stand up with mud between her fingers, on her legs. She hated having to pretend to care if her ball went into the goal at the very end of the field. It was also hard for her to care when she thought of what would happen in the end: if they won, everybody went out for pizza; if they lost, everybody went out for pizza. She couldn’t figure out why it mattered which event brought about the pizza at the end.

  But worse, she dreaded the inevitable disappointment that her presence on a team seemed to inspire. Nobody said it out loud, but she could feel the general sigh and resignation from the other kids when she was assigned to their team during PE. And, because she was frightened of failing, whenever somebody passed her the ball she froze or swiped stiffly at it, knowing as soon as her stick met the ball that it would go in a direction that was of no help to anyone, or worse yet, the direction of somebody on the opposite team—someone who didn’t care about the mud on her knees or squelching between her fingers, who wanted nothing more than to get the ball in the goal.

  Instead of sports, Claire was a member of Quiz Bowl. She wasn’t stupid—she knew it wasn’t cool. But it was fun, and she didn’t have the fear of letting her team down. She was good at remembering things heard in passing on television, or names and dates her eyes might have skimmed in a textbook or magazine. Her brain seemed to absorb everything equally—celebrity gossip and novel passages and quotes from films. She was the star of the team.

  Being Sam’s sister made it easier for her to be on the Quiz Bowl team instead of the hockey team. Even though she was shy and didn’t know the right people, she knew that Sam would be there to bring the world to her. With Sam, she could do almost anything she wanted without being picked on or isolated. She was luckier than some of the other kids on the Quiz Bowl team, the ones who wore their pants too high, or had big plastic glasses and funny teeth or parents who spoke too loudly or clapped too long when they received the attendance award at the year-end assembly. They didn’t have any buffer between themselves and the world at school, where real-life rules didn’t yet apply. Someday, Kenny Walker, who had braces, thin, freckled arms, and had his books knocked out of his hands practically every time he stepped away from his locker, would probably live in the biggest house in Farmington because he could do complicated long division in his head and could put together things without looking at the diagrams. Or, more likely, he would leave Farmington altogether. But right now, he was miserable.

  Sam protected her from their lonely lives. He protected her from having to live in imaginary worlds like Sheila, the Quiz Bowl science whiz, who obsessed over Doctor Who and could talk about almost nothing else. Claire liked to be around those kids during Quiz Bowl, where she could l
augh at jokes about Pi, or about how the kids from Chesterville didn’t know that Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens. Afterward, though, she was happy to be with Sam again. He would make sure that she didn’t drift off like Sheila, into a world that nobody else wanted to enter.

  Claire squeezed Sam’s hand and then dropped it as they made their way to the factory, to the newer, smoother strips of sidewalk. It was mid-September but still warm. Her mother called it an Indian summer; it was a strange, humid warmth with an edge of cold, just like early spring.

  Her hands were both damp and cool. She wiped them on her jeans.

  They walked past rows and rows of houses with the same design, same driveways and garages, same dingy paint. Most seemed empty, the windows dark and the porch lights off. But there were cars in some of the driveways. It was late, past eleven. She imagined the people inside, sleeping in their beds. Probably mostly older couples, judging by the absolute darkness in every window and the lack of toys or swing sets in their yards.

  They went from streetlight to streetlight, walking more quickly when they passed through a stretch of darkness.

  They reached the factory. Claire took Sam’s hand. It was dark, far from the streetlights, set back away from the road. It was the last building in a row of former factories, some now converted into office buildings, others similarly abandoned. Beyond the factory, the roadside grew tangled and wild, the sidewalk ended, and only a few isolated houses remained tucked up away from the road, at the ends of long driveways.

  “Come on,” Sam said, dropping Claire’s hand. He picked up his pace, his white tennis shoes flicking back and forth as he jogged away. The factory’s grey slate walls were as familiar to Claire as any building in town—the high school, with its orange brick; the YMCA, with the scummy pool out back and the aqua-green tiling on the bathroom floors; or the post office, with the blue pens chained to the counter so they couldn’t be stolen. She hesitated as Sam ran ahead. The windows were black and reflected nothing. There were no lights behind them, no rustles or voices or signs of movement.