“I’m impressed,” Justin said. He stepped back, toward the doorway. The smell of lemon, the heat, all that light, was making him sick. But he didn’t want to seem ungrateful.
He touched the railing with his hand, put one foot on the last step. He breathed shallowly, wiped the fine sheen of sweat from his forehead.
“So we’re on track for the late October opening?”
The foreman grinned. “Absolutely.”
Justin had rented a small home near the factory. It was tucked back near the woods, away from other houses. He moved into the empty house with his books, his clothes, a few scattered plates and cups, and a television. He left everything else to Karen. He wanted to show her that he did not have hard feelings, that he cared for her and wanted what was best. It was surprisingly easy to do this. Months before, he couldn’t have imagined himself leaving so quietly and without despair, just a heavy sadness, a realization that they had put so much time into each other for nothing.
Justin didn’t consider himself to be a religious person, but he felt things. When he stood in front of the mailbox, he often knew exactly what letters he would find inside; when he stepped into a room, he usually knew who would like him, who wouldn’t, and who he wanted to like him and would have to pursue.
He had his goal, his vocation—he would make the factory right again. And already he was succeeding: the basement had been bleached clean, the trash cleared away. It wasn’t the same place he had entered just a month before.
He spoke to the men who were putting up the last-minute trimmings and blocking out the counters, the floor space, and the dining area. Soon they’d be painting—creamy walls with deep red and brown accents, indicating coziness and comfort, or so the colour consultant had promised. He had already put advertisements for positions in the paper: bright and friendly employees wanted, a positive and energetic job environment, potential for advancement.
Justin walked around outside the building, as he often did when he visited the factory. He crouched by the riverbank, watching the water rise and fall over the rocks below. The water was clear, cold, and clean—cleaner than any pond or pool or lake he’d swum in in his adult life. It reminded him of his childhood, as many things in Farmington did.
Justin had swum in rivers as a child, in cold, shallow streams that came down from the mountains. His mother would park by the side of the highway, in a worn-out space where fishermen and swimmers had parked for decades. She sat on a rock and read romance novels as he and his sister splashed in the water and rearranged the rocks to create shallow little pools to paddle in.
I don’t know how you kids do it, she’d said, waving them away when they came close enough to splash the fake tan from her legs. It’s freezing. I’m surprised you don’t catch pneumonia.
It was freezing. Justin recalled that he’d work himself down gradually, inch by inch—first his feet and ankles, then his knees, his thighs, up to his belly button, and then his chest. The arms were somehow the worst.
His sister just hopped in all at once. It’s better this way, she’d said. You get used to it all at once.
Justin watched the strange way the water whirled, riding the bumps and crevasses beneath it like a blanket over a body. Across the narrow river behind the factory (the length of two cars, easy to cross when it was low and placid), a thick block of evergreens edged the opposite bank. In all of the time he’d been out there he had seen only one person on the opposite side—a girl, weaving through the trees in a white dress like something from a painting or a 19th-century poem. She was not more than twelve, dressed in a gauzy nightgown that flew out behind her as she ran between the slim tree trunks, right along the edge of the bank.
The river smelled like salt, like dirt, and sometimes like blood, when the wind rose and carried its deeper smells up the bank. It curved and carved through the ground and didn’t care what it swept away.
When Justin couldn’t sleep at night, he went down to the river in his striped pyjamas, holding his flashlight and a sleeping bag in a bundle in his arms. He’d sit at the edge and listen. The river was different at night—you could hear things that were hidden during the day, like the small splashes of an animal entering the water or something rushing past the evergreen branches on the opposite bank, the pine needles swishing against its fur. He’d close his eyes and listen: when he couldn’t see the water flowing, it sounded strange and unlike anything he had ever heard before, like the continual crumpling of soft paper or small hands clapping in a constantly changing rhythm. He could fall asleep to the sound.
I belong here, he thought. Not just in this town, with these people, but right here, at this river, in this particular place in this particular moment.
After her meeting with Miriam, Claire discovered that she was angry. It wasn’t an emotion she indulged in often, so at first she mistook it for sadness, then for the onset of a cold (a shakiness, a scratchiness in her throat). But no, it was anger. Not so much with Miriam, who had a job to do after all—she had to do what was best for the town and couldn’t very well refuse to support a new business. Claire knew this. She was not unreasonable.
Claire was angry with herself.
You never stopped being afraid, she thought. She had let the factory make her so afraid that she couldn’t walk past it, could only drive past—behind all that steel and plush and glass in her car—when it was absolutely necessary. The factory was the centre of the feeling that spread to everything in Farmington. Everything reminded her of Sam, of the event that had taken him.
I can’t be free of it while I’m still here, she thought. Marcus was right.
But she also couldn’t leave, because Sam was still here.
When Claire spoke to her old friends, the people she had known as a child, she knew that Sam was there with them, too. They were thinking of him, how handsome he had been, intelligent, bound for somewhere wonderful. It would have fine for her to stay in Farmington and work in the library and run Internet classes for the elderly if Sam were still alive. It would have been a good balance, with Sam out there somewhere in the world, coming back at Christmas and Easter with stories of where he had been and what he had done.
But without Sam, she was a tragic figure, a person of almost a criminal lack of ambition. She should have done something big enough for the both of them.
But Sam wasn’t really gone, was he? He still seemed to be here, in whatever form he had now. He could even wake her up—the mint, the pressure of his elbows on her shoulders, the slight sandpapery texture of his chin against her cheek. The year he’d died he had started to grow facial hair in that patchy, tentative way of teenage boys, their cheeks mangy and thin like old carpet.
Claire stood in her bathroom, the bright bulb carving shadows into her face, furrows and hollows where there hadn’t been any before. She was naked from the waist up. She touched the thin skin around her mouth.
“Sam,” she said out loud, staring into her own eyes. “Sam. Why won’t you leave?”
What would they have in common anymore, anyway? He would be fifteen forever, in love with Pearl Jam, skateboarding, building model bridges, and drawing the complicated mechanisms of bicycles and engines in his notebook.
Nobody answered her. She hadn’t expected that anyone would.
Claire picked fuzzy, pink lint from her sweater and pulled it over her arms. She put on her A-line black skirt, her opaque stockings, and her shoes that clicked, then twirled her hair in a bun and pinned it back. She then gathered her purse and keys and started walking to work, thinking, why won’t you let me leave?
Before Sam had started coming back to her with such insistence, she had believed herself a person who had lived an examined life. She was never going to be famous or exceptional, and she had made peace with that. But I haven’t examined everything, she thought.
Claire had not been near the factory in years. There hadn’t been much reason since the factor
y had closed down, since that whole road had gone to seed and all of the grand old houses had been sectioned off into apartments, turned into places where people parked rusty cars in the yard, hung Beware of Dog signs on their fences, and strung clotheslines across weedy backyards.
At the end of the day, she shelved the last library books, tossed a ripe apple from the horror section shelf, pulled a long, handwritten letter from a copy of Women in Love and tucked it in her purse to read later, pushed the books tight to the edge of the stacks and held them fast with the book stop, and all the while thought, I’ll visit tonight.
It was getting darker earlier. The change always seemed to happen too quickly. Claire drove with the windows up. The sun had already reached the very edge of the horizon, edged the clouds orange, sent a harsh light into her eyes.
She drove slowly down Factory Street. It looked the same as she remembered—rows of factories before the river, that grey, busy ribbon behind the squat blocks of buildings. Then the slate factory, a storey higher than the others around it.
She parked in the empty driveway. The doors were locked with a heavy deadbolt, just like they had been the day that she and Sam had come, only now the deadbolt was clean, new, and the windows were clear. Claire walked to window closest to the door and pressed her forehead against the glass, shading her eyes from the glare with her hands. Inside, the sun cast beams of light in fading stripes across the floor. It was bare, panelled in a light oak. Claire squinted and strained to see past where the light illuminated, to the back of the building—maybe there was still a door to the basement. She wasn’t ready to crouch down and look through the tiny basement windows. She didn’t even like to stand near them—she imagined a hand reaching from the window, grasping her ankle, pulling her down through the slit.
“Excuse me.”
Claire started and stepped quickly away from the window.
The man standing opposite her was in his early thirties. He wore a business suit, black shoes, a blue button-up shirt with no tie. His hair was pale and short, his skin sensitive, pinkish, like a baby’s, as though his skin was missing a layer.
He said, “I’m sorry to have scared you—”
“No, I’m sorry. This is probably illegal or something. Trespassing on company property.” Claire motioned to the Beans sign that had been stuck in a churned mound of dirt.
The man shook his head. “Oh no, it’s not illegal to look.” He glanced past her, at the building, backlit by the sunset. He smiled at the building as a man might smile at his own child putting together her first puzzle.
A month ago, she would have excused herself and hurried away to the safety of her apartment. Her hands shook. She stood with her back to one of the tiny basements windows. She badly wanted to escape, but she did not move. She wouldn’t give in to fear. She would face this, finally.
“Do you work here?” Claire asked.
The man nodded and held out his hand. “I’m Justin Hemmings. District Manager for this new branch of Beans.”
Claire took his hand. It was warm. “I’ve heard about you,” she said. “I’ve seen quotes from you in the paper.”
Justin nodded. “Your town has been very kind to me so far. Are you a local?” he asked.
Claire nodded. “I am as local as they come. I grew up just a few blocks away from here.”
“So you’ve heard the stories.”
Claire swallowed and clasped her hands in front of her skirt. Her arms made a heart-shape over her body.
“About this place?”
Justin nodded.
Claire watched him as he stared at the factory’s black windows. It looked blank now, devoid of history.
“Those stories upset me,” he said. If he’d been a boy, his voice would have cracked.
“This place is beautiful,” he said. “It’s hard for me to believe that other people don’t see it, too. Just look at it.”
She looked. They were losing light. In the dark, the factory looked as though it had been shingled in slices of heavy, low-hanging clouds.
“But it has a history,” he said. “It’s hard to simply see a building when you know the history.”
“What do you know about it?” she asked him.
“I know that accidents happened here. I know that people died.” He looked to his feet and cleared his throat. “But I want to make the kind of place that people don’t associate with those things anymore, you know? As a local, don’t you wish that this could just be a place of business again?”
Claire swallowed and nodded. If she didn’t look at him, she could remain quiet.
I need to tell him who I am, she thought, but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate.
“I was just here to see how the construction is going,” she said. “Sorry to have disturbed you.” She turned away from him. This was enough, she thought. Enough for one day. When the place opened, she’d come inside. She’d order a coffee and make herself sit down and read the paper. Slowly, she’d cure herself.
“Wait,” he said. “Would you like to come inside? I can show you around.”
You can’t go in there, don’t go in—a voice pleaded. She was not entirely sure if it was her own. Her stomach made a sound she hoped only she could hear. She felt the skin of her palms go sticky.
Don’t be afraid.
“Sure,” she said. She held her voice together by force, moving her mouth emphatically around the sounds. “That would be wonderful.”
The key to the factory was on his personal keychain, among house keys and a small, silver key to a post office box in Farmington. Claire had one just like it, for the post office box where all of her magazines and junk mail went. She visited it weekly, sifting through the magazines, advertisements, and pleas for money from various organizations. It was comforting to see a similar key on his keychain. Nothing terrible could happen in the everyday world, where little keys opened post office boxes and men in khaki pants almost broke into tears over retail property.
She followed him up the concrete steps to the entrance. A light switched on automatically.
“We’ll have to put guardrails in next week,” he said, pointing to the steep drop at the sides of the steps. “Safety regulations.” She stayed close to his back, lightly grazing the fabric of his jacket when she reached the top step and the flat expanse of the porch.
He’s right here, she thought. Nothing can happen with somebody else right here.
Inside, she could see nothing, but smelled fresh lumber and lemons. He flipped the light switch. Rows of fluorescent lights flickered and steadied, filling the factory with the bright, greenish light.
The factory looked completely new from the inside—there were no signs of the old textile machines, the conveyor belts, or anything else that would mark it as what it had been before.
“The coffee shop is in the back, right?” Claire pointed to the very back of the room, where stools surrounded a high semi-circle bar and small tables were staggered along the floor, shiny metal outlets on the floor beneath them.
He nodded. “It’s going to be great—I see there isn’t really a coffee shop in Farmington, not a place where people can come and sit and linger. Diners, sure, but nothing besides that college coffee shop in North Farmington. None of the locals go there and it’s so far from everything but the college.”
He walked slowly across the floor, pointing out the empty display shelves. “Here we’ll have our collection of signature chocolates, here will be our ground coffees, here the t-shirts and handbags.”
Claire nodded, trying to hang on to his words, though her skin crawled and she felt suddenly itchy. She breathed deeply, listening to the sound of the air coming in and out of her mouth. She balled up her fists and refused to scratch.
Look, she thought. I am here and I am all right. Sam, I’m okay. I don’t need you anymore.
“So, does the factory have a basem
ent?”
Justin turned to her. He had been explaining the eco-friendly lighting system, how a small windmill on the roof of the building would light the three fluorescent bulbs at the coffee bar.
“Why?”
Claire forced herself to shrug. “I think I heard about one, back when this was a factory. Just stories. If you believe this place is haunted, then the haunting would be in the basement, for sure.”
Justin nodded. He was very quiet for a moment.
“You believe in ghosts?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It would be fun to see though, wouldn’t it?”
He looked away from her, fidgeting. “Fun,” he repeated. “It doesn’t sound fun to me.”
“It’s not important,” she said. She had frightened him. “We don’t have to look.”
He shook his head. “Oh no, I’m just trying to remember exactly what we decided to do with it,” he said. “I’m not sure if it’s ready yet.”
He’s lying, she thought. He looked up at the ceiling after he spoke, the first time that night he hadn’t met her eyes. She wondered why he would lie. Maybe he had ghosts of his own down there.
“I think it’s just a storage area.” He nodded. “Yes, we’re just keeping boxes down there. Not good for much else. I can take you down there if you want.”
All at once, as though the memory had opened up around her, Claire felt the warm air from the basement on her face, heard Sam’s raspy breathing echoing far back in her ear, slipping around like water after a swim.
“I’ve got to get going,” she said. “Maybe another time.”
He shook his head. “No problem. I’ll walk you out.”
Outside, it had become almost night. Stars materialized in the eastern half of the sky. They hung over the river, their reflections blurred and fragmented on the water.
Justin paused by Claire’s car.
“I rarely ever do this,” he said. “But what the hell. Would you mind going out to dinner with me sometime?”
Almost Dark Page 15
