Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  Claire didn’t immediately answer, and she felt him growing flustered.

  “You grew up here,” he said. “I’d like to get to know some people from the area. I live right around here, just up the road.” He pointed into the darkness, beyond the streetlight next to the factory. He lived past where the town sidewalks stopped. Where the town proper ended. It wasn’t safe, or so she remembered hearing over and over as a child: Don’t go past the sidewalks.

  “Of course I would,” she said. “It must be hard to come to a new place like this, to know nobody.”

  Really, it seemed a dream to her. How lucky it would be to live in a place where nobody knew you, where nothing reminded you of anything but itself, where every street, and building, and face was new and might take you anywhere.

  He said that he would pick her up. She hoped that he would leave first so she could stay and look at the moon on the water, could summon up the bravery to crouch down at one of those small basement windows and peer inside and see nothing, but he insisted on telling her goodbye until she was forced to get into her car and drive away in the dark.

  Claire thought of Justin as she undressed. She undid the buttons on her shirt, unable to remember the last time she had unbuttoned her shirt with any urgency. For that matter, she couldn’t remember the last time that somebody else had unbuttoned her shirt for her.

  She liked Justin, what she knew of him, which wasn’t much. She liked his face, his calm, his apparent love of Farmington. Claire stood in the dark, her blouse half-undone, her white bra a flash of brightness in the opposite window. Like the last flash of Sam’s teeth when he smiled before he pushed himself down into the basement.

  Justin took her to the only restaurant in town with cloth napkins. This was how The Chelsea was known in town—that place with the cloth napkins. A good place to bring a girl, his neighbour had told him.

  When he went to pick Claire up, she had made him wait in her living room for fifteen minutes.

  She sat in the bathroom, calming herself. Then she paced her bedroom for a few panicked minutes, afraid that she had left something embarrassing in the living room, like a vibrator in the desk drawer or an issue of People magazine on the lampstand.

  I’m as nervous as a teenager, she thought. She picked her clumped eyelashes apart with the hooked file attached to her nail clipper until each lash was free and she was calm enough to go down.

  He held open the car door for her, then the heavy glass restaurant door. He even pulled out her seat at the table. She blushed and shrugged as he pushed the chair to meet her body. She had never had a man do this for her. She felt like a spectacle.

  She noticed her high school history teacher at a nearby table, eating clams. He smiled at her; he probably wouldn’t know or remember her had Sam not died the year after she’d been in his class. She could feel familiar eyes on her, people she had known since she was young, by face if not by name.

  Justin laced his hands together and set them on the table. He watched as Claire fiddled with her napkin and placed it across her lap.

  “You know, I’ve never asked somebody out so soon after meeting them,” he said.

  “But I thought I was just showing you around town?” Claire smiled and looked down at the napkin smoothed across her bare knees.

  “Well, then I’ve never asked somebody to show me around town so soon.”

  “That makes two of us,” she said. “I don’t show many people around town.”

  “Can we order some wine?” she asked.

  Justin gave her a quick eyebrow raise.

  He thinks I’m a drunk, she thought. He thinks I can’t talk to him unless I drink.

  “Of course,” he said, and leaned back, gesturing to the waiter. He didn’t snap his fingers, didn’t speak aloud; he only nodded his head and the waiter came.

  Claire appreciated this skill. She had been a waitress for a short time, at a greasy spoon between Farmington and Maize, and she remembered being whistled at, shouted at, even clapped at once by a particularly impatient older woman, her teeth in a small glass cup next to her orange juice.

  The waiter poured wine into large, bulbous glasses. Claire thought she might know him from high school.

  “Can I get you anything else?” He looked at Claire. If he remembered her, his face didn’t contain any trace of that memory.

  I shouldn’t think myself so famous, she thought. Not everyone is looking. Not everyone knows me.

  “I find it hard to imagine that you don’t get asked out often.” Justin spoke down at the laminated menu, then darted his eyes to her.

  Claire blushed. “I’m not that easy to get to know,” she said. She wondered exactly what she was doing here with this man. Here, at least, was something new, though she wondered what she’d say when he found out, as he inevitably would, about Sam. She decided to set that aside for now.

  Claire ordered a salad. When she reached for her glass of wine, she watched her hand carefully to make sure that it didn’t shake.

  “I’m nervous,” she said aloud. She tried to swirl the wine in her glass and spilled a red stream down the side of her hand. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve been out on a date.”

  Justin ordered something heavy, a slab of meat with a side of baked potato—the kind of meal that always made Claire feel as though she had eaten a brick afterward.

  “I haven’t really been on a date in a long time either,” he said. “I just ended a three-year relationship. I guess you can’t really call that dating.”

  Oh Jesus, she thought, but only smiled.

  “Well, I guess we’re both out of practice,” she said.

  He began to speak, in response to a question she’d asked about where he had grown up. She was surprised at how much he could talk, once prompted. He told her about his family, how he had lived in poverty at the edge of a small, muddy town in Upstate New York.

  “That’s what I remember most,” he said. “All that mud. After the snow melted, after the rains in the autumn and in the spring. I remember losing a pair of shoes in that mud on my way to the school bus.”

  Claire told him that she had grown up in Farmington, that she and her brother had gone to school at Farmington Elementary, Farmington Middle School, and Farmington High. That she had spent her teenage years standing around in front of the Farmington strip mall with its two-screen movie theatre, wearing bright, tacky lip gloss, hoping that some boy from the high school would see her and ask her to go riding around town with him or even pay for a movie ticket. She didn’t tell him that when she was fourteen, usually her brother was there too, and that she was just as happy when he took her to a movie as she would have been with some strange boy.

  “Does your brother still live in town?”

  Justin poured her a new glass each time hers ran out.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s still here.” That was true, at least.

  Justin nodded. He didn’t ask anything further and she didn’t say anything more.

  Claire imagined Sam crouched in the far left corner of the restaurant, behind the enormous ficus. She imagined him throwing her a glare and scuttling away, through the front door, out into the darkness of Farmington.

  I am right here, in this restaurant, she assured herself. I’m not anywhere else. And Sam isn’t here. He’s in the graveyard, only bones and clothes. And as soon as she thought of it, she felt him again, his hands on her shoulders. She closed her eyes, shook her head, opened them again, and listened carefully to Justin, avoiding anything darting in the corner of her eye. Soon, she was able to focus on Justin’s words.

  After they had finished their dinner and their wine, after the tea candle in its little crystal cup had burned down to just liquid, she asked him to tell her more about himself. She saw him blurry through the dim lights. The waiter came and went, almost silently.

  He told her about his ex
-girlfriend Karen. He spoke fondly of her, which Claire liked.

  “We didn’t share the same idea of what life should be about,” he said.

  “What do you think life should be about?” she asked.

  Claire watched as he thought. He couldn’t hide anything; everything he thought passed across his face like a hand through water.

  “It should be about doing something of value for as many people as possible,” he said. He nodded. “Yes. That’s it. You could do that in lots of professions—working at a liquor store, as an accountant, anything that involves helping people get what they want or need.”

  She laughed. “Even as a librarian? I mean, I understand how a liquor store does something of value, but surely not a librarian!” She was joking, but he didn’t seem to know it.

  “Yes!” he said. “Librarians do a great service!”

  Claire laughed. She saw her old history teacher looking at them, smiling under his grey beard. She looked down at the plate at the food she hadn’t eaten. She didn’t want people from her past looking at her.

  Justin told her that he loved Farmington and had since the first time he saw it. “I wanted to live here, he said, to be a part of it. I’ve never felt like that before. I wanted to help. I wanted to give it something. This company is all I have. So that’s what I’m here to give.”

  “All those factories, empty, flooded and rain damaged, the floors broken.” He shook his head. “I had to do something.”

  “So you want to improve us,” she said. “Are we so backward?”

  Justin’s face had grown red and hectic. He raised a hand, knocking over the salt shaker.

  “No, I don’t mean that. This is a beautiful town; it has so much—”

  Claire laughed and clicked her teeth against her wine glass. She couldn’t remember how much she had drunk. She couldn’t quite remember if they had ordered another bottle. “I was kidding,” she said. “I was only kidding.”

  “It’s important that I don’t think that way—that I’m here to fix you.” He held up his fingers, air-quoting the word fix.

  Claire giggled and sipped her wine. “Here to renovate us, then,” she said.

  “It’s a question worth asking,” he said, sitting back in his chair. He sighed and grew serious, setting down his glass. He fixed his eyes on Claire.

  She wondered in that moment how she could have even considered not accompanying him to dinner. When he looked at her, the wine glass, the nondescript watercolour on the wall above her head, he was really seeing her. Here, finally, was somebody that wasn’t seeing Sam when he looked at her. He didn’t know—he couldn’t. That was the trick: to be with somebody who didn’t and would never know.

  “I don’t want to make your town better,” he said. “I want to help it to be what it once was. I want to bring it back to that, you know?”

  Claire nodded. She didn’t know quite what he meant—what exactly had Farmington been? A small manufacturing town, scenic but unremarkable. It could never be a manufacturing town again. But he spoke with such conviction that the content of what he said didn’t much matter. For a moment, she, too, believed that a handful of service jobs might make Farmington a better place.

  Claire wanted to reach out and touch his hand, but she kept her hands back and waited.

  Claire noticed the waiters and waitresses fidgeting around the edges of the restaurant, stacking the menus, arranging chairs so that they were flush against the tables. It must be almost closing time. They were the last customers left.

  “I have to go to work in the morning,” Claire said.

  Justin nodded. “Let me get the cheque and I’ll take you home.”

  She almost invited him inside. She got so far as to open the door, planning to ask him in for a nightcap or a cup of coffee, depending on where he wanted to go or when he had to wake up. But when she opened her mouth, she felt it fill with cold air, like a billow of air from the freezer. Her living room was cold, so cold that she let go of the door and let it shut behind her. Sam was here, waiting for her. She turned to Justin.

  “I must have left the air conditioner on,” she said. She cupped her hands around her elbows and hugged her arms against her chest. The cold made her teeth ache, she had breathed it so fully.

  “Well, I better let you go to sleep,” he said. He didn’t mention the cold. Perhaps he didn’t feel it. She was no longer completely sure if what she felt and experienced was real only to her.

  “Thank you for dinner,” she said.

  “Would you do it again, then?”

  “Yes.”

  Claire walked through the icy kitchen to her bedroom. She threw open the window.

  “Sam,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

  He didn’t speak to her or touch her. The room was warm and damp with night air. She shut the window and crawled into bed.

  She dreamed she was in the library. Justin was seated at one of the long wooden tables, an enormous book open before him—a book as large as the unabridged dictionary kept on its own podium on the third floor. In the dream, he was waiting for her to finish work, which consisted of opening each book to make sure that the words were in the right order. When she opened a new book, the words were images, the sentences playing out like film clips. She knew immediately which words had been somehow misplaced. It was her job to rearrange them. She felt a pang at the unfairness of it all, that she should be responsible for what somebody else had done.

  “It’s going to take me a long time to finish,” she told Justin.

  He didn’t look up. “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ve only just started this story.”

  Justin watched the crew snap and hammer together the shipment of decorative edging, of company-approved rustic-looking wooden tables, stands, and shelves. The coffee shop was almost complete. All they had to do was stock the shelves and set up the coffee machines, which would hum and drip all day. And then people would fill the space with their voices and their bodies, women with their purses scraping up against the counter, men with change and keys clicking in their pockets as they waited in line. Children would pull tea bags and chocolates from the counters, and their mothers or fathers would tsk and put them back. Justin loved these inevitabilities of everyday life. He loved seeing things move in familiar patterns.

  He had insisted on taking managerial control of the store for a few months. The idea of somebody else running it had frightened him. He didn’t trust anyone else. He didn’t trust the factory with a different manager, either. It might not want anybody else in charge. He felt that he had been tested, and he had come out stronger. It had threatened him, had tried to drive him away, but he had not given in. He believed that meant something.

  He knew that this was a curious idea, maybe a little crazy, so he didn’t repeat it, not even to Claire.

  Once, while flipping through television channels, Justin had seen a late night interview with an Australian surfer, a young woman. He’d entered the interview in the middle, as she was discussing paddling to shore after she had fallen from her surfboard, how she wasn’t quite sure what had happened to her until she woke up in the hospital.

  “And when did you know?” The interviewer leaned forward, her stiff hair reflecting the stage lights, forming something like a halo around her head. Her makeup was garish, lips bright and bluish-red, eye shadow glittering in the harsh light.

  The camera panned back to the girl and down her chest, to her legs, revealing that one leg was a stump that stopped just above the knee.

  “I knew in the hospital, when I reached down to scratch my leg and there was no leg there. A shark, they told me. I don’t remember anything about it.”

  The girl spoke simply. She almost laughed when she said it, as though the surprise had been humorous, a practical joke from God.

  “And you still surf?” The anchorwoman asked, her eyes big and brimming with con
cern. She leaned forward.

  “Of course,” the girl said. “Why would I stop? I love it too much.”

  The factory hadn’t taken Justin’s leg or any part of his body, but it had made him afraid, and it had tried to drive him away, but still he wanted to be there.

  It will be done soon, he thought, and when it’s done, I can begin life again. He didn’t know what he imagined beginning life meant, but he hoped it might have something to do with Claire. It was too soon to say that to her, of course, but he wished it all the same.

  He liked the way she listened—she was quiet until she had something to say. There was something sharp around her, like a crackling of static in a cat’s fur, but it didn’t repel him; she was difficult, like the factory, but not impossible. That night, after their first date, her apartment had exhaled a cold, dry air, like the air in a walk-in freezer.

  Still, he wanted to see her again. It wasn’t an impossible cold.

  IV

  I

  The fire was not the first thing that had happened in the place where the factory would later stand, that flat piece of land, verdant but not marshy despite its vicinity to the river. Perfect for building.

  First it had only been a field abutting the river, its grasses soft and tall. Children who lived near it—who played in the woods, caught snakes, and swam unattended in the river—were afraid to go there. Though the field was inviting, its expanse dotted with wildflowers, covered in whole patches of violets, bluets, or yellow dandelions, the children stayed away. They told stories, said that the grass was so green because there were people buried under it. They claimed a witch had cursed the place—she made it look beautiful so that it would lure people to come and do things they weren’t supposed to. Some children had heard their parents talk about young men and women laying down together out in the field, about how in the dark couples necked and petted.

  But mostly it was instinct—something about the grass smelled too sweet, like the candy bricks and windows of the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel. Snakes probably coiled in the grass, covered and waiting. The children were suspicious of things that came too easy. They were good New Englanders, like their parents, and understood that any pleasure you got for free was liable to be what killed you.