Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  It should have been me, Claire wanted to say, but there was no point. It didn’t matter who it should have been. Her father drove slowly and carefully. She got the sense that he was trying to protect her by pretending that everything was normal.

  Her father said that Sam would be better, not to worry, not to worry at all.

  “He just had a fall, is all.”

  Her father paused, probably noting the accidental rhyme. He had always been quick to notice puns, to delight in accidental repetitions and malapropisms. Claire watched him, already grieving the change that would come over him soon. No more waking early to circle the typos in the local paper, to look at the funny papers. He’d be a different kind of person soon. They all would. She mourned him even as he spoke.

  “The doctors can work miracles these days,” he said. “But Sam won’t need a miracle.”

  He switched on the radio, a clatter of violins and swells of brass.

  Claire pressed her hot face against the passenger side window, cool and greasy against her skin. She wanted the night to be over as soon as possible. She wanted it to be over so that the next day could come, and then the next one, so that weeks and then months would be between this day and the others.

  But she wanted time to stop, too, that grinding forward motion. As long as they didn’t reach the hospital, Sam was still alive. If they just kept driving and never arrived, they would never know, and so Sam would still be here.

  When they reached the hospital parking lot, Claire knew. As they pulled into a space near the entrance and parked, Claire saw her mother open the thick glass doors and run from the lobby, crying, screaming Sam’s name. She’d been waiting for them. Claire went down on her hands and knees and threw up, right there in the compact car parking spot. She observed the blotches of oil on the ground and a stray Hershey’s bar wrapper, dirty and plastered against the curb. She vomited so violently that it made her cry and cough and she could hardly breathe. Nobody went to her to pull back her hair or help her up. It was better that way. It was good for her to practise being alone.

  “He’s gone,” she heard her mother crying into her father’s sweater. “He was gone before they could do anything. He was gone by the time we got here,” she said.

  Though Claire was on her hands and knees, trying to get the vomit from her lips so that she could join her parents, could at least stand with them and cry and let them hold her as if she were a child, she could hear something in her mother’s voice—a little silver blade of blame. She could feel it touch her. She could feel it pressing against the inside of her skull like a migraine.

  Samuel Thomas Martin died on September 15th, 1993, from major blood loss, injury to the lungs and other internal organs, and severe head trauma. At the time, it had seemed important to Claire to know the details of what had happened. Knowing the names of his injuries meant they could be written down on paper or spoken, and Claire could keep them with her and they would not escape her. If she had possession of the correct words, she had control over them. When somebody asked what had happened (though few people did—the paper had covered it, and nobody knew what more to say or how to handle whatever sadness might be stirred but the question), she said it just like that—he died from blood loss and lung damage and severe head trauma.

  When he fell through the window, he had fallen directly on a long, sharp piece of a broken loom, left down in the basement after the textile factory went out of business. It had pierced his ribs, his right lung, and had cracked his breastbone. It had not punctured his heart, but his head had crashed against the metal base of the machine and his skull had been fractured. Even as he had gasped and wheezed for Claire to find help, blood was filling his skull, his lungs, draining him as it blued and purpled his lips and under his eyes. Claire had not seen this, but she imagined it. She imagined it every night.

  “I know there are very few things that could bring you comfort now,” the doctor had said, his blue eyes bright and interested, “but your son wouldn’t have made it, even if we had gotten there immediately. There was just too much damage.”

  “I am sorry for your loss,” he added as an afterthought. He couldn’t help it. He wasn’t intentionally cruel. It simply didn’t matter to him.

  Claire left as the doctor informed her father of all of the ways that Sam’s intact organs could benefit people still alive. She stood in the glass hallway between the waiting room and the outer doors. She tried to slow her breathing; she felt that she had been breathing heavily, panting, since she had run home, and that she’d never really caught her breath. Later, she regretted leaving her father alone in that room. At the time her mother was somewhere else in the hospital—Claire didn’t think it strange in the moment that she wasn’t there. Nothing was stranger than Sam not being there, and nothing seemed to be in its right place. But she wished her father hadn’t been forced to sign papers alone, to offer Sam’s eyes and kidneys, all of his young parts, and to agree that Sam no longer needed them.

  She didn’t care about people who were still alive.

  They had taken away his body and she didn’t know where it had gone.

  The room Sam had been wheeled into was empty now. She had not seen him, though her father and mother had, before they took him away. She couldn’t bear to see him that way, though later, she regretted that decision. It had happened so quickly, as though they were afraid to let his dead body stay and infect everyone else with its stillness.

  She never told her parents—it would make her seem too selfish—but it was the quiet in her head that she mourned the most, at least that first day. Later, she would miss Sam himself, as he was now separate from her (as much as she couldn’t understand him being separate from her), but that day, she missed the Sam in her head.

  In the first few weeks, Claire often closed her eyes and tried to conjure up his face in the dark. It didn’t work, not like she wanted; his face appeared hazy, unformed. She had to consult photographs to remember exactly which side of his hair rose in a cowlick, which eye was smaller than the other.

  That’s what other people did who had family members who had died. They would make a scrapbook of photos and try to remember. It seemed a failure of character that Sam was leaving her mind, that she had to try to recall him. If she had loved him enough, she wouldn’t forget essential things, like his favourite ice cream flavour or rock band.

  This must be what it’s like to be a regular person, she thought as she listened to the silence in the next room. The silence in her head was like the whirring of air inside a seashell.

  II

  July, Present Day

  Justin discovered the factory by chance on his way back from a conference in Keene, New Hampshire, where he’d spoken with a store manager about rampant theft at the Beans stores in the area; he had given a PowerPoint presentation about preventing theft instead of prosecuting it. Justin had a PowerPoint for almost everything he might possibly have to say to his employees. He had once lamented the rise of PowerPoint presentations as a replacement for actual discussions, but now he welcomed the distance they provided. If an idea, command, or even warning was delivered through a computer program with a nice blue border and a few pictures to accompany it, then it was less frightening, less personal. He disliked the disciplinary aspects of his job—firing people gave him stomach cramps, made him feel like a complete and utter asshole. He couldn’t really blame twenty-something high-school dropouts being paid eight dollars an hour for stealing. The world probably did owe them something. But he couldn’t allow them to steal from him.

  Scenic Route 9 went through Farmington, a sweet, small, old town, dotted with those green-tinted plaques and monuments erected at the scenes of even the most unimportant events of the Revolutionary War, such as the spot where General such-and-such rested his horse, or where some rag-tag local militia had hoarded their muskets. This town was particularly beautiful, though—it had a classic white church at the centre,
original brick buildings and streets paved in cobblestone, and old, broken-down factory buildings down by the river, where a waterwheel had once powered them.

  Most were vacant, though some were still in fine condition—they could be remodelled, Justin thought as he passed, made into little mini-malls filled with high-end specialty stores, establishments that weren’t seen as tacky or trashy or a blight on the landscape.

  He was always thinking of ways to use empty spaces. This was something Gary, his supervisor, admired about him.

  “You’re always thinking, aren’t you?” Gary had once asked. He pointed at Justin, right in front of the five other New England and Upstate New York district managers during a staff meeting. This embarrassed Justin. He didn’t like to be singled out.

  “Everyone is always thinking,” Justin had replied. “Only some people don’t say everything they’re thinking the moment they think it.”

  Everyone in the room had laughed mildly, in that way people laugh at jokes that are not funny. Justin had successfully deflected the compliment. As the meeting ended, Gary asked him to take a small stipend to scout out a new Beans location for their New England expansion.

  “You really care about the company,” he’d said. “We see that, and we want to reward it.”

  Corporate had discussed creating a branch in southern Vermont—most of the population was centred in the North, but the Southern parts of the state bordered many highly populated areas in Massachusetts and New York, so they got a great deal of tourist traffic. Justin had taken his time on the way back, scouting out locations, but there had been nothing promising until now. The factories in Farmington were set along the one major scenic highway out of Farmington and to Albany, a highway advertised as one of the most beautiful routes in the entirety of New England. But there were few establishments along the way except a few gift shops selling maple syrup and t-shirts. So much potential here, Justin thought. It almost made him angry, how undeveloped the place was. Didn’t people know that empty spaces were made to be filled?

  Justin continued past the place where the town’s sidewalks ended and the sparsely populated countryside began. It consisted of houses that had once been beautiful but now sat nestled amongst overgrown shrubs and untended front yards.

  As he reached the town’s limit, where the scenic highway grew wild and then, across the New York state border, become two-laned again, he slowed and made a U-turn.

  He had a hunch.

  He drove back to Farmington and parked on the gravel lot of the very last factory, a two-storey building shingled in dull but reflective slate, its grey blending with the choppy, high river behind it.

  The door was locked shut with a padlock that hung from a heavy chain. The chain, suddenly, brought him back home, to his childhood. He’d had a dog when he was six or seven—Zeus, a mix between husky and something else, a beautiful mutt—that his mother chained to a tree near his doghouse because he ran away whenever he was set free. The chain was thick, heavy, and Justin had pitied the dog, having to carry it around on his neck all of the time. He couldn’t remember what had happened to the dog. He hoped it had gotten free, but that was unlikely. It had probably died, like most of their pets, and he had probably buried it in the backyard himself, since his father’s back hurt too much to shovel.

  He lifted the hanging length of chain and let it fall and clang against the heavy door.

  Justin walked the perimeter of the building, his shined shoes collecting a layer of dust from the gravel. The place looked renovated—some of the shingles were newer, less chipped and ragged, and the windows were sturdy and well insulated—not broken, like the glass in the windows of most abandoned buildings.

  Justin saw no signs indicating who owned the place. He scrawled the name of the road in the notebook he always kept in his back pocket, in case he felt an idea coming. He believed in listening to hunches. He had read about hunches in The Seven Secrets of Success. He had written the seven secrets carefully in each of his college notebooks, and later made a poster to put in his office at Beans, right above his desk so he would never forget them.

  It was difficult for Justin to find any information about the factory. He called several real estate companies in Farmington. They said they didn’t know who owned it, or that it had belonged to an out-of-towner, that it was passed along through inheritance, that the owner had abandoned it. Justin doubted all their stories. They were told with an air of impromptu invention, a careless flinging of contradictory facts.

  “It’s been abandoned, like, forever,” one receptionist said.

  “But who abandoned it? Do you happen to have any information about that?” he asked. Justin believed he had a knack for dealing with country people, these secretaries and managers and realtors who fooled out-of-towners into renting summer homes by their shallow, algae-infested lakes, or buying overpriced rustic lawn furniture. But he understood them, too—not like the other management at Beans, most of whom had been to business school and saw their present positions as merely a rung in the inevitable ladder up and up until a comfortable retirement. Justin had grown up in a small town. When he called somebody who pronounced the word idea as idear, or referred to anything as being upstreet, he knew that he was speaking to his people. He could imagine himself on the other side of the telephone, a game of solitaire on the computer, cold coffee in a cup, twenty-five-dollar shoes pinching his feet. If things had gone badly, that’s where he would be right now.

  The woman made a humming sound like a garbage disposal. “I’m not sure about that, sir. It’s been abandoned for about five, six years now. The company is gone. Not sure if they were renting or leasing or what. Not sure,” she repeated.

  Justin heard the sound of her typing in the background, click clack.

  “Looks like the factory isn’t in our database, sir. You’ll have to call Johnson Realty.”

  Justin called Johnson Realty, who were equally evasive, though their receptionist was at least honest about his lack of forthrightness.

  “I’m not sure if I can talk about that,” he said. Justin heard the boy shifting gum around in his mouth. “I don’t think it’s officially on the market. Let me talk to my supervisor.”

  The phone clattered down and then distant, muffled voices rose and fell; the receptionist hadn’t even put him on hold.

  “Sir? Hi. I’m back. We do handle that property, sir.” The voice assumed the helpful tones of professionalism, and Justin was heartened. Justin was an adherent to the Broken Window Theory, which he’d read about in some bestselling book he’d received for his birthday. It claimed that when things looked like a mess they ended up becoming a mess, because everyone realized that disorder reigned and nobody was really in charge of anything. Order was a way to pretend that the world was not continually in danger of collapse, and when people believed this, they were less likely to destroy things. Professionalism added to this helpful illusion. It was a row of imaginary intact windows.

  Justin’s job was preserving order. People were relieved when they walked into a store and saw carefully piled and folded clothes, bins full of fragrant coffee beans, shelves that were dusted and painted and bore no signs of wear. It was better than therapy, he sometimes thought, to put one’s own house, one’s spaces, in order. Justin had never gone to therapy, but he couldn’t imagine that talking to somebody about things in the past that could not be changed could possibly be more satisfying than taking something in your hands and changing it yourself.

  “Excellent,” Justin said. “Can you transfer me to the agent handling this property?”

  With no warning, Justin was turned over to another voice—this one gruff, male, older, with a bit of a smoker’s rasp.

  “Gilbert,” the voice said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m curious about a certain property.”

  By the end of the telephone call, Justin was pleased enough to open a new bottle of w
ine and drink the first glass by himself. Karen, his fiancée, was at a late-night spinning class. In Justin’s opinion, going from work to a class where you had to sweat and grunt in a room full of people to annoying, repetitive music seemed like yet another hellish experience that contemporary people willingly subjected themselves to, much like bikini waxing and colon cleansing. But it made Karen happy.

  Justin drank his glass of wine slowly, imagining Karen on the bicycle, her hair soaked with sweat. Neither one of them were very good at relaxation. She preferred sweating, moving, and talking to sitting down. During movies, they both ate steadily, moving their hands from popcorn bucket to mouth. Justin was terrible at holiday gatherings, where he was expected to sit down and have a conversation in front of a football game or parade or a cheese and cracker tray. He fidgeted and was easily distracted by the view from the window, no matter how meagre. He found it hard to follow conversations that drifted from pointless observation to mild interjection to second pointless observation.

  But he could relax now. He had accomplished something. He felt his jaw unclench, the small muscles around his mouth—muscles that he hadn’t realized were tightened—release.

  The factory was available. It was not only available, but it was available at a discount, a deep discount, because the owner wanted to be rid of it—but only to the right buyer. They wanted a reputable company to take it over. The other companies that had approached them hadn’t fit the bill. The location, too, made it a hard sell, according to the realtor.

  But Justin disagreed. In the ten years he had been with Beans, he’d studied people. He subscribed to Business Weekly and read their portraits of the everyday consumer. He imagined that he knew something about the way that people made decisions. Many of the people who lived in a dying factory town like Farmington, where the only jobs were for retail workers, waitresses, mechanics, high school teachers, and bank tellers, were the kind of people who needed small luxuries, like coffee. The other people who lived there were largely wealthy retirees and college professors who worked at the nearby liberal arts school. They, too, would be attracted to Beans.