Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  “It sounds like you’ve thought this through,” she said, finally, unsure if this was what he wanted to hear.

  “I’d like your support,” he said. “I think of Farmington as my town, already, and I want to do what is best for it.”

  Miriam nodded. There was little else she could do. Why wouldn’t she support him? Because her aunt had died a half a century ago in that building? Because the idea of stepping into it for a coffee sounded about as appealing as swimming in the river behind it mid-winter? Often, in her time as the Assistant Town Manager, she’d had to agree to things she did not truly want to do. But they had never before been so personal, and so strange, as agreeing to support a coffeeshop in the place where her aunt had burned to death. But what other choice did she have?

  “I’ll see you at the opening,” she said.

  Joan had died fifty years ago. She was gone and nothing could be done about it.

  He smiled. “Thank you for the opportunity to be part of your town,” he said.

  After Justin left, Miriam shut her door.

  “It’ll get better,” she said aloud. She imagined her aunt Joan in the room, sitting where Justin had been with her legs crossed, her hair sculpted into something elaborate and icy.

  “I’m doing this because I have to,” Miriam said. Her aunt wasn’t there. Her aunt was in the Catholic cemetery, her grave long untended.

  Perhaps Justin was right. Perhaps it was time to make the factory right again.

  VI

  Claire woke to the smell of mint. Not a subtle smell, like something drifting in from an open window, but a smell like a sprig of fresh mint. She remembered that sensation, that burning.

  She sat up in bed, laughing.

  “Sam, get out of here!” she shouted into the empty room.

  She closed her mouth and covered it with her hand. She was in her apartment, not her teenage bedroom. Sam wasn’t breathing on her face, trying to wake her up. He hadn’t done that in over fifteen years because he was dead.

  She sat up in bed, the cold air leaking in from her open window. During the day it was as hot as August, and she had to strip down to a t-shirt. At night she pulled on her sweaters and warmed her feet with the small space heater in her room. September didn’t know where it belonged.

  Claire threw off her covers and went to the kitchen. She was completely awake now at five-thirty in the morning, hours before she needed to be. She busied herself with making coffee, scooping heaping tablespoons into the fluted white cup, pouring the water, scouring yesterday’s coffee cup and mugs and saucers. Rarely plates—she hardly used plates since Marcus left. She ate yogurt out of plastic cups and sandwiches off of folded paper towels.

  Claire went to the kitchen window and threw it open. The dust from the mini blinds blew into the cold, clean light, making tiny twists and curlicues in the air.

  She took a cup of coffee and a handful of chocolate chip cookies to the living room. The window there looked out at the rows of houses across the street, all two-storeyed and well-manicured. Decorative gates surrounded some homes, while others had Tibetan prayer flags in the windows or papier-mâché masks hanging from the trees. College students lived in this area—mostly older students who shared houses, made small gardens, kept compost heaps. A deep, even sidewalk ran along both sides of the road. Farmington was a walking town, and usually Claire could see college students walking, joggers, women pushing enormous strollers. There was nobody out now, though, not this early. Claire sipped her coffee, which was thick, black, and made her back teeth hurt.

  Today, she was meeting with Miriam Hastings. It had taken her two weeks to make the appointment, and then another two to find a time that both she and Miriam could meet. She had a half hour of Miriam’s time—a precious amount, she knew, but far too little to explain exactly what the matter was. She had told Miriam that she had some concern about the factory and the new company, but she had not specified her concerns. She imagined that Miriam thought she was just one of the many people in town who objected to the corporate ownership of a historical town building. Claire had seen the picketers in front of the town offices earlier in the week.

  Claire was happy to let Miriam believe that this was her concern. She felt stupid going to Miriam, like a frightened child going to her mother after a nightmare. She didn’t have a real reason, nothing she could explain clearly or succinctly, just a sickness in the pit of her stomach when she imagined teenagers sipping coffee feet away from where Sam had died. And her dreams had compelled her, of course, which she couldn’t tell Miriam about.

  At six, Claire rose from her couch and dressed. Her neighbours, an elderly couple who still held hands when they went on walks, led their three small dogs down the wide sidewalk on gold leashes. They cooed and spoke to the dogs like children. Claire could hear them from inside her apartment, even when she went to her bedroom to dress, or into the ill-lit bathroom to apply her makeup. She practised her speech in the mirror. She would sound merely concerned. She would sound sane.

  Miriam was afraid. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to meet this woman who worked at the library. However, when she was appointed Assistant Town Manager she had agreed to meet with any and all concerned members of the town. She had said this on television during a local broadcast of a Select Board meeting. She had made herself the friendly, available face of the town, the person that any normal citizen could petition and expect a fair hearing.

  So she brushed the crumbs from her doughnut off her jacket and prepared herself to meet this Claire.

  Why are you so nervous? Miriam looked at her face in the pocket mirror, smudged her eye shadow out of the crease of her eyelid and wiped the lipstick from the edges of her mouth, where the colour bled into the surrounding wrinkles.

  Her secretary knocked on the door.

  “Your next appointment is here.”

  Miriam nodded. “Show her in.”

  Claire recognized Miriam from the newspaper and from the town picnics that the library employees attended every July, along with the parking staff, the planning department, and the historical society. She had shaken hands with Miriam twice, was twice graced with her easy smile, but she was sure that Miriam would not remember her. She had priorities far higher than remembering some librarian. Claire was used to being the kind of person that nobody made it a habit to know.

  Miriam wore a neat, grey suit, but she did not look severe. She seemed warm, smiling generously, her eyes friendly.

  Claire felt the heaviness of her long skirt, the awkward way the seams of her blouse lay across her skin. She wondered what she would look like in twenty years. She imagined she’d share more in common with the women who wore elastic-band pants and boxy button-up shirts while shuffling around downtown in their garden shoes than she would with Miriam Hastings.

  “Wonderful to meet you,” Miriam said. She stuck out her hand. “You work at the library, right?”

  Claire nodded. “For almost ten years now.”

  Miriam dropped Claire’s hand and gestured toward the doorway. “I recognize your name from the timesheets,” she said as she clicked ahead of Claire in her heels.

  Miriam’s office was warmer than Claire expected. The walls were painted yellow and covered in photographs of handsome, active children alongside plaques and certificates with Miriam’s name in calligraphic script, honouring her for her work raising money for the Boys and Girls Club and her contribution to the Humane Society Walk-Run, and her award from the Chamber of Commerce for most civic-minded local politician of the year. Not a particularly hard award to win, Claire imagined, but it was something.

  “What would you like to chat about?” Miriam folded her hands on her desk, which was littered with paper and a half-eaten doughnut, and leaned forward. “I hear you have some objections to the new business opening in the old textiles factory.”

  “Well,” Claire licked her lips. “Understan
d, I’m not opposed to it for the reasons you might think.”

  Miriam nodded, encouraging.

  Claire’s well-planned speech disappeared from her mind completely. “I just think,” she said, “that the town should have had more notice. The people of the town, I mean. Through the newspaper, through a special town meeting. We should have known. We should get to decide. It’s not like any other building. You know that.”

  Miriam nodded and smiled.

  “Many people have this confusion about the plan,” she said. “The town isn’t taking over the building—it is actually a privately owned factory—”

  “No, I know,” Claire interrupted. She shifted in her seat. “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I know it is privately owned.”

  Miriam nodded. She gave the impression of having endless, bountiful patience. It pained Claire to try such patience.

  “I know it doesn’t belong to the town,” Claire said, “but I think because of what happened, you know, because of all of the accidents, that we should all get some say in what happens to the place. I mean, all of us that have been affected by it. Those of us who’ve suffered because our loved ones died in there.”

  Miriam’s mouth opened slightly. Her carefully drawn eyebrows shot up. She thinks I’m talking about her, Claire thought.

  Claire shook her head. “I mean, my brother, Samuel,” she said. “You might not have known this, but my brother was the teenager who died in the factory fifteen years ago.”

  She looked down at her knees again. She’d said his name. She hated to say his name—particularly to people that had not known him.

  Miriam flashed fear—she pulled her lips away from the edges of her teeth in a slight snarl and her eyes went big. She tried to correct this quickly, before Claire noticed. She had to be careful: this was the kind of situation that could quickly elevate into a scene. She also had the desire to reach out and hold Claire’s hand, to tell her that she understood, that she had the same fears, the same desire to leave the factory chained up and abandoned. But she put on her Assistant Town Manager face. She said what she had to say.

  “I understand your concern,” she said. “And I’m so sorry for your loss. I, too, lost a family member in the factory. It was years and years ago, and nothing as painful as what you have experienced, but I can understand why you might be upset about the town allowing the factory to be used as a place of business again. But those accidents happened in factory settings—places where fires, industrial accidents, all sorts of risks are possible any day. We just happen to have more than our fair share of tragedy.”

  Claire nodded. “I understand that.”

  “And, really, the town has nothing to do with it,” Miriam went on. “It is a private building. Unless you want to try to declare it a historical site or a memorial, which is unlikely to happen, there is very little we can do. I’m sorry.”

  Claire couldn’t think of anything else to say. She had known all of this before. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted from Miriam Hastings.

  “I hope that you, and other concerned members of the town, will try to see this as something to help make those memories, that history that has been so painful to so many of us, finally the past.”

  Claire looked away, trying to control her face. Miriam could immediately see that she had said the wrong thing.

  “I don’t want the memory to go away,” Claire said. “Losing those memories means losing my brother.”

  Miriam shook her head and held up her hands.

  “I assure you, that’s not what I meant.” She sighed. “I meant that the town as a whole would be better, happier, if the factory could be a generative, useful place again. Not just a building full of ghosts.”

  Claire nodded. “I know you didn’t mean anything by it,” she said. She cleared her throat and rose. “Thank you for your time.”

  Miriam stood as Claire made her way to the door. She had lost Claire, had made her feel ashamed and vulnerable. But what else could she have said? She stood, helpless, and watched Claire leave.

  Claire paused in the doorway. “I dream about him now,” she said. “I do want the dreams to go away. As much as I loved him, as much as I don’t want to forget him, I can’t have him here all of the time, always reminding me. Maybe I want the ghosts to go away, too, but putting some goddam coffee shop in the factory isn’t going to get rid of them.”

  Miriam simply stood at her desk, nodding. Later, she wished she’d said something about her own doubts. But she couldn’t. She was in charge. She had to keep her power.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she repeated, her desk a barrier between her and Claire’s grief.

  Claire nodded and shut the door behind her.

  Miriam sat down again at her desk and tried her best to let the meeting go. There was, after all, nothing she could really do: she wasn’t the local therapist, she was the Assistant Town Manager. She looked at her agenda for the day. She finished her doughnut. She continued making the town run smoothly.

  VII

  The breakup had happened smoothly, almost easily, though not without the necessary skirmishes and proxy wars—Karen’s complaints about uncapped toothpaste and Justin’s grumbling about opened nail polish bottles that were really about things too difficult to articulate. They had all been rather gentle, half-hearted attempts at causing trouble, as though both knew they were playing parts, that this was a necessary pre-show before the main event. It seemed somehow wrong to merely agree to part, divide things, to shake hands and wish each other well. So they made some fuss, made a few mutual friends uncomfortable, and staged a dramatic breakup scene at a restaurant. Karen had wept into her cloth napkin. Justin had drunk three large glasses of red wine and felt a sickening mixture of elation and deep regret. Look what I’ve done to her, he thought, her candlelit hair blurring into the wallpaper behind her.

  That night, they lay in bed crying, apologizing to each other for not being quite the people they should have been. The next morning, they had calmly decided that Justin would leave by the end of the week. He would sleep on the pull-out bed in the living room. She would immediately begin to look for a job in advertising, something to do with art. She spoke enthusiastically about this.

  Justin had known that it was coming for weeks, maybe months. She didn’t want to align her life with his, not now that he had made a choice without her. And he couldn’t make her. Her being there in a little house in Farmington, angry, wishing always that she was elsewhere, would kill his happiness. He remembered that life of waiting, being miserable and trapped in a small house where he did not belong with people who understood nothing about what he wanted. That had been his childhood. He didn’t want Karen to know how that felt.

  Karen had been baffled by his decision to move to Farmington.

  “You don’t have to go,” she said. “But you want to go, to leave everything we have here. To leave me. And I don’t know why.”

  Justin didn’t know either. When he saw Farmington in his mind he saw it from a distance, as he had when he first drove over the mountain—that little bundle of houses, the distinctively New England church steeple rising from the centre of town, the Farmington Monument like a grey sword against the blue sky, forests of dark pine trees. He had wanted, even then, to enter the town, to live in that sweet picture that he’d seen from a distance. It was like a postcard. It was the kind of place that one might call idyllic, though Justin knew that these paradise places only existed for visitors: that town in the postcard didn’t really exist.

  Still yet, he had loved it from the moment he stepped out of his car, when he walked across the gravel at the New England Textiles factory. He loved it more than he loved Karen. That, of course, had been the problem all along.

  Justin pulled into the factory’s parking lot, which was now almost empty. He was meeting with Chris again. There had been a minor hitch earlier in the month when
they’d had to change crews. Justin wasn’t quite sure why. Something about squeamishness, allergies to chemicals, it was all unclear. Chris had assured Justin that those problems had been resolved, and that the new crew had been completely satisfied with the job.

  “They were local guys,” Chris had said by way of explanation. “The place spooked them is all.”

  Since Justin had visited last, the weather had started to change. The air sounded brittle as it went through the trees, their leaves still mostly green (though darkening, getting heavier and greener before they turned). He crossed his arms over his chest. He had not worn a jacket. He thought it might be a sign of weakness to wear that puffy, unseasonable thing just because of a little cold. He had also left most of his winter clothes in Albany, with Karen, who had cheerfully assumed control of the apartment and all of the expenses.

  I’ll pack the sweaters for you and you can pick them up when you come back to town again, she had said, smiling as though he had given her a gift and not a chore.

  She had seemed happy then, a woman lit up having suddenly solved a nagging problem.

  He was setting her free. It made him sad to think of himself as a particularly heavy burden, but he guessed he was.

  Chris emerged from the doorway. “Good to see you again.” He shook Justin’s hand. “We’ve made quite a bit of progress.”

  “Has the basement improved?”

  Chris grinned and nodded. “You’ll love it. Nothing spooky about it”

  Justin didn’t love it, but it wasn’t the place he remembered. It smelled of bleach and lemon. The walls were still their muddy brick, but that was to be expected—they couldn’t wash away that dirty texture or the colour of old blood. New fluorescent lights shone from their little white cups along the ceiling. The room could no longer be called damp or dark. It was almost bright. It was almost cheerful.