Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  Graves nodded and switched off his flashlight. “It’s a good space, no doubt.” He put his hands in his pockets.

  “So why hasn’t anybody else bought it?”

  Graves hesitated for a moment as he fumbled while putting the flashlight back in one of the many hidden pockets of his jacket.

  “Oh, I suppose it’s because all the factories are moving out of here anyways.” He jerked his head to the right. Justin could see, through the dirty window, the bulk of another empty factory building, its roof bowed and rotting, windows broken and jagged, the edges of glass glinting in the afternoon light. Justin looked around the factory—none of the windows had been broken, or if they had, they’d been repaired. And no graffiti inside, no signs of squatters with dirty sleeping bags, beer cans, rotten fast food wrappers.

  “That’s true,” Justin said, “but this building is different than the others—it’s beautiful, for one thing. How old is it?”

  Graves looked up at the ceiling. “Must be seventy years or so. But it’s been upgraded, changed, since then. The slate shingles used to be a theme around here.”

  “It’s a wonder the state or town hasn’t bought this,” Justin said. “Put a little museum in here or something.”

  Graves snorted. “We don’t need another museum around here,” he said. “What in the world would we put in it? Old looms? More of that Revolutionary War junk we have all over town already?”

  Justin didn’t argue. He wanted the building. Though it was a few blocks from downtown, it was on the only major road going from Farmington to Albany: There was guaranteed daily traffic, people going to and from work, people driving the scenic route. It was merely a ten-minute walk from the centre of town. He believed that he understood why the place had remained empty: nobody could see the potential like he could . People in town could only see it as a factory. Still yet, being inside in the factory made him shaky—his fingers were cold, his stomach roiling. He wanted it anyway. Like how he sometimes wanted to drink whiskey, though he always woke up with a headache the next morning and could smell it in his sweat and feel it in his mouth all the next day.

  He took in the room. He stood in the middle and closed his eyes. He arranged the space in his mind. He saw the coffee-shop area by the windows at the back, the wooden chairs, the salt and pepper shakers at the centre of each table. He could see the windows, clean, their shades snapped up. They looked out on the river, swollen and roaring, the sound subtly calming. The room was large, airy. He imagined a bookshelf against the back wall, filled with used books, the spines artfully tattered. He opened his eyes.

  “We want this space,” Justin said. “This is exactly what we had in mind.”

  Graves nodded. He did not appear to be excited or even convinced. He folded his hands together.

  Justin spoke into the silence. “Of course, we will discuss the details later—Gary will come to meet with you, as will Phillip and David. They have the real authority to make the sale, though I can assure you that my word will convince them.” Mr. Graves nodded, but Justin could not feel him give.

  “Is there anything else that we need to discuss, Mr. Graves? I’d like to move forward as soon as possible.” He paused. He heard his own voice in his head, the prissy formality of his sentences.

  “Maybe you should see more of it before you decide,” Graves said.

  “What more is there to look at?”

  “You should see the basement,” Graves said.

  “Sure,” Justin said. “If you think it’s a concern.”

  Graves turned to him. “I’m not sure if it’s a concern or not. That depends,” he said. “Just some people have a real reaction to the basement—it’s usually a deal breaker, to tell you the truth. I don’t want you to be surprised. I want you to know what you’re getting.”

  “Sure, sure,” Justin said. He followed Graves as he moved across the room, his flashlight back on.

  “Not much light down here, so be careful on your way down,” Graves called over his shoulder. Justin assented with a tight, silent nod. Basements were airless and contained a kind of dark that was murky even under a harsh, bare bulb. They had small slat windows high up, not large enough to let in much light or climb out of. If you were trapped, there was no second door, no windows to crawl from. No way out. He knew this. He went down anyway.

  “We’ll probably renovate the basement,” Justin said. Speaking fixed his attention on his voice, keeping it steady and solid. “If it’s just a cosmetic problem.”

  Graves didn’t respond. He led Justin to a small door with an elaborate metal lock. He took out a crowded keychain and jiggled a long, skinny key into the door. Justin heard the little click of inner gears working and releasing.

  Later, Justin would try to recall exactly what had caused him to throw up by the passenger-side door of his car just minutes after he and Graves emerged from the basement.

  There wasn’t anything obviously wrong with the basement. It was crowded with equipment covered by tarps—lumpy, sometimes-sharp shapes rising against the smooth, featureless draping. A surprising amount of light filtered in through the tiny windows. As they walked down the dark stairs, he’d felt the sickness creeping up his throat, his stomach rioting, sweat beading in rashes across his skin. Jesus Christ, he thought. I’m thirty-two. I’m too old to feel like this.

  It was something about the smell, he decided later. It smelled like burning paper, like a chemical, but also something mineral, earthy, like mounds of garden dirt. The smell was sharp and filled the room like smoke. He had a sudden, mad thought that he could use his hands and shape something solid in the air—that he could reach up and cup the air and take it back to Albany with him in a jar. The smell was also familiar. Wet dog. His mother’s hairspray. His own clothes when he hadn’t washed them for days.

  “It’s a little musty down here,” was all he said, his voice already rasping. He brought his hand up to his throat.

  Graves nodded. “The air isn’t good,” he said. Justin could tell that he, too, was suffering. He cleared his throat as he led Justin past the ghostly forms of the machines under their jackets.

  “I see what you mean,” Justin said, “about this part of building needing work.” He imagined that if he kept speaking, the feeling would pass.

  Graves held up his hand and waved to Justin. “Come over here,” he said. “Stand right here.”

  Justin nodded, though the deeper he went into the room, the sicker, more suffocated he felt.

  He stood next to Graves and breathed in the silence for a few moments—not more than half a minute. And then it hit him. It wasn’t a feeling, or a thought, but a sensation—a physical wave that rose up through his feet and out the top of his head like reversed lightning. He lost his vision then, his hearing—everything was muffled, fuzzy, and he could hear only a thin, piercing whine coming from somewhere inside his head, a sound like a song played back on the wrong speed setting. His thoughts spun and whistled.

  Before he knew what his body was doing, he felt himself climbing, clawing really, up the basement steps, gasping for breath. He thumped his chest to loosen whatever had choked him and ran across the factory floor, through the tracks in the dust he and Graves had made, and out to his car, where he kept an emergency inhaler in the glove box.

  As he released the medicine into his mouth, Graves was beside him, asking him if he was all right, if he needed to be taken to the hospital.

  Justin shook his head as his throat opened. His lungs filled and he gasped.

  “Just asthma,” he said. “I haven’t had an attack in over a year.” He looked down at his hands, which shook from the sudden rush of medicine.

  “It must have been the dust,” he said. “The bad air in there.”

  Graves nodded but said nothing as Justin sat in the passenger seat, the door open, elbows on his knees and his head between his hands.

  “Do
you still want it?” Graves asked quietly.

  Later, Justin understood that Graves had tried to warn him. He’d even shown him.

  “We most certainly do,” Justin said, leaning back and placing the inhaler in the glove box again, amongst old maps and registration papers and a tube of Karen’s lipstick. “Like I said, we have people that can take care of things like this.”

  “Do you,” Graves said. It was not a question, but a weary acknowledgement of Justin’s illusions.

  Justin nodded, though he wondered exactly who could possibly fix what was wrong with the basement. An exorcist, maybe. But he pushed those thoughts aside.

  “So, if you’d like to move forward,” Justin said, “I’ll put you through to Gary, my supervisor, and we can start drawing up paperwork.”

  He dialled Gary’s number, and as he did, the feeling that had been bubbling up in his stomach and throat all afternoon overwhelmed him. His fingers slipped and pushed the wrong numbers. He lips felt numb, his mouth salty.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He leaned over and vomited between his shoes until his body was limp and empty of whatever sickness had temporarily possessed it.

  Claire went to visit her mother in late August, after a late-night phone call in which Delia had hinted at nightmares, at wanting some comfort during the long days when Claire’s father was gone doing whatever it was retired men did all day. Claire had not seen her mother since the Fourth of July, when she’d come over at her parents’ bidding to eat her mother’s angel food cake and watch fireworks on television, something that Claire always found strangely depressing—watching fireworks on television was like listening to an orchestra through broken headphones, like putting a pale, hotel-room landscape watercolour in a window to block the real view. But her parents had seemed to enjoy her company that night, and their strange animation had made her, in turn, less uncomfortable. Her mother had milled around her, fussing with Claire’s drink and plates, whisking away knick-knacks. Delia had complained about the government, the noise from the neighbours, how quickly people drove down the road in front of the living room window.

  Her father had rocked back and forth in his easy chair, the squeaking escalating as he complained about the state senator he’d seen on television arguing that Vermont should secede from the Union.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “What are they going to do now, the crazies we got up there? Make pot the state flower?”

  Claire had laughed as her mother tsked and put her hand on Claire’s shoulder.

  “I don’t like your father watching C-Span all the time,” she said. “It’s nerve wracking. All that silence and then talk talk talk and silence. They let the camera roll after everything is done and you just have to look at empty chairs and people shaking hands and leaving. It’s terrible.”

  Her father sniffed. “I think it’s peaceful.”

  Claire had come because she felt a different tone in her mother’s voice—something eager-to-please, an attempt to keep Claire on the telephone, to make her happy. Claire was used to her mother’s quick, efficient summaries, her brisk goodbyes. But her latest phone call hadn’t followed this pattern. She had kept Claire on the phone for almost an hour talking about nothing.

  Of course Delia was lonely, Claire already knew that. She always had been. It was part of her personality, like her quick temper, her manipulation, her surprising sentimentality about holidays. But Claire had never imagined that her mother wanted her company or that her company was even preferable to loneliness.

  Claire brought a bag of yarn and a crochet needle along with her. Years before, she’d asked her mother to teach her to crochet, and Delia had agreed but never followed through. Claire imagined that this was yet another example of a long list of things her mother had half-heartedly promised and then forgotten, but during the phone call, her mother mentioned crocheting again.

  “Why don’t you buy some beautiful dark purple yarn, honey?” she said. “We’ll make something with it.”

  Claire was thrilled at being called honey. Her mother wasn’t unkind, but she used terms of endearment sparingly. She was of old, Protestant Yankee stock (a fact that she was proud of—she liked to point at all the ancestors in the old graveyard who had her last name) and believed that overusing endearments cheapened them, made them meaningless.

  So Claire had come with a bag of yarn and five different crochet needles—she didn’t know the size she needed, or the first thing about crocheting. When she knocked on the door, she heard her mother call from somewhere deep in the house. All of the windows were open and Claire faintly heard Patsy Cline singing from Delia’s clock radio, which was by her bedside, where it had been since Claire was a teenager.

  I’ve got your picture, she’s got you.

  Claire opened the door. The house was as she had left it—not just since the last time she visited but since leaving for college. It hadn’t changed substantially in almost fifteen years, aside from new clocks and newer versions of the same couch and chair. Claire looked down at her shoes as she removed them. After Sam’s death, her parents had stripped the house bare and redecorated the cozy, lived-in, doily-dotted surfaces which had been covered with mismatched, hand-me-down furniture and family photographs in gaudy frames. Her mother had once liked soft, flowery things—the carpet had been a pale pink, the couch red-checked like a tablecloth, soft throw pillows everywhere. A year after Sam died, the entire house had changed.

  “It’s my allergies,” Delia had explained. “I’m getting too old to spend half my day vacuuming and dusting.” This wasn’t true, though. Delia didn’t have allergies. Sam and Claire had.

  They had also changed the couch to a brown, hulking, leather loveseat that stuck to Claire’s legs in the summer and was cold and crinkly against her skin in the winter. The family photos were set in simple black and silver frames and half had been taken down—all of the candid portraits were gone, leaving only the posed ones, Claire and Sam standing behind their parents, their smiles tight and unnatural.

  At the time, Claire had been offended by the changes, hurt that her parents had changed things without consulting her. The thought often formed in her head, though she knew it was silly: if Sam came back, he’d be angry that everything was different. She imagined him coming home from school, throwing his backpack down on that cold, leather couch, and regarding the clean, metal and glass surfaces around him with horror. He had enjoyed their mother’s ugly doilies, her penchant for pink and purple, with the kind of ironic fondness that young men developed toward their parents. Claire had lacked such irony—she’d sneered at her mother’s acrylic yarn, her seasonal decorations, her elastic-waisted pants. Sam could afford to be amused from a distance. There was no chance that he might someday become her. Later, Claire thought that this was just another piece of evidence that Sam was a kinder, better person than her.

  “Mom, where are you?” Claire called into the empty living room. She heard water beating against the enormous metal sink, deep and gleaming like the sink in an industrial kitchen. When the sink’s stopper was pulled, the whoosh of water down the drain made Claire think of something ugly and misshapen crouched in the heart of a sewer—something that sucked water and meat from bones and snatched children who ventured out at night without their parents or a flashlight.

  Claire entered the kitchen, blinking in a sudden, hot room full of light. Her mother had all the windows open, all the shades up. Claire lifted her hand up to her brow and made a visor. She was able to make out her mother’s back, her body bent over the sink.

  “I’m just finishing up the dishes,” Delia called over her shoulder. She scrubbed a frying pan with a Brillo Pad, the soap foaming and spilling over her knuckles. From behind, she looked nearly half her age. From the front, though, time had not been so kind. Though her hair was scarcely streaked with grey, she had deep, long lines carved from the edges of her mouth to her chin, from eyebrows t
o hairline.

  “Let me help you,” Claire said, taking a blinding-white dishcloth (her mother soaked them in bleach weekly).

  She ran the cloth over the pan and watched her mother work efficiently, savagely, on a pot crusted with macaroni and cheese.

  “I brought the yarn.”

  “What?” Delia didn’t look up from her work.

  “The yarn,” Claire said. “You said you wanted to teach me to crochet.”

  Delia pressed her lips together and scrubbed harder. Her knuckles knocked against the pan as she scrubbed.

  “Of course,” she said. “After the dishes.”

  Claire nodded and took the wet pan from her mother’s hands. She wiped each dish and pot and pan completely dry. When they finished, Claire hoped, as she often had as a teenager, as a college student returning temporarily to a place she no longer understood or belonged, that her mother had noticed how obedient she was, how well she had completed the small task given to her. But she only asked Claire to go in the living room and wait while she made some tea.

  Claire sat in the living room as Delia moved around in the kitchen, clicking cups, running the sink. Claire could hear the soft, foamy sound of boiling water being poured into cups of her mother’s always faintly stale and tasteless tea. Her mother drank her tea with heaping teaspoons of sugar and a quarter cup of milk, so she probably never noticed the difference. Claire drank hers straight, as she did her coffee and her liquor on the rare occasions when she went out to drink or bought a glass of something clear and fiery to help sleep or calm her nerves.

  Delia entered the room, staring down at the tea in her hands, the cup’s delicate handles tight around her swollen knuckles. She hissed as water splashed on her hand. Claire rose to her feet and eased the cup from her.

  “Thank you,” Claire said, blowing on the hot water as steam billowed from it. She smiled. She wanted to put her mother at ease—even here in her own living room, Delia’s eyes were darting, distracted, as she sucked on the skin between her thumb and forefinger, where she’d been splashed.