Their parents encouraged this fear. They warned the children away. Some spun elaborate stories of deaths, of ghosts rising from the river with dripping bedclothes, of creatures that would come and steal your voice, your soul, your heart. The children believed their parents, for the most part, because parents were the holders of all things worth knowing. Some parents used the field by the river as a threat: If you aren’t good, the river witch will get you and bury you in her garden. The Witch’s Garden was the field’s name for years.
When the town grew in size, Victoria’s Textiles moved in and built their factory by the river, right in the middle of the Witch’s Garden. It took weeks to assemble the slate and wood, weeks more to acquire the nails and glass. Local men were hired to construct the building, men who hoped for jobs at this new factory, which would allow them to purchase houses in town, shoes for their children, sugar and cream for pies.
Two young men died in the first month of construction. Two large pieces of slate had slipped from a pulley and killed the men below. The surviving workers went home and told their wives about the men. They didn’t want to frighten them, and they didn’t mean to burden them, but they could not help it—the stories came from them like sickness and they could not stop it. They told their wives of the blood. One man’s head split so they could see the white inside, another had a gash in his shoulder that spurted blood like water from a pump. The man with the shoulder injury was the worse off—the first man had died immediately and they had put a sheet over him, hiding his ruined head, what was left of his surprised face. The second one had died slowly, his blood seeping into the ground that would soon be levelled and patted down to create the factory floor. He had bled for a full twenty minutes before reaching the doctor, and by then he was sweating, speaking gibberish, his eyes rolling to the back of his head. He died that night, his skin hot and red, his lips cracked from shouting.
Following the deaths, construction of the factory was halted for two weeks—long enough for the funerals to pass—before work resumed again with a new crew. There were no more accidents during the construction, at least not serious ones—one man lost the tip of his finger on a saw blade, another twisted his ankle, and another broke a rib, though he didn’t know it until he woke up the morning after, his side aching, his lungs and throat raw.
It happens like that, sometimes, how you don’t know you’ve been hurt until it’s over, until the injury is so far in the past that you can’t pinpoint exactly how it had happened or how you could have prevented it.
II
Sam wouldn’t let her sleep. It was the only explanation.
Claire lay in bed after work, her eyes closed, the room silent and cool around her. Her blankets smelled of soap and the cat had curled up next to her, purring against her shoulder. But she couldn’t sleep.
She wanted to tell somebody what was happening, though she knew she couldn’t prove it. They would think she was crazy, that she was just having a bout of insomnia or night terrors and that all she needed was a vacation, a psychiatrist, some temporary anti-anxiety medication at least. Who could she tell, anyway? Justin? Then she’d have to explain that her brother was dead, why he was dead, and why she’d been at the factory that night. Her mother? Delia refused to talk about Sam, for the most part. It would only upset her. Claire wondered how she could live in the same town for over thirty years and still be so alone.
“I haven’t slept in three full nights.” She spoke to the mirror and laughed. It seemed that she couldn’t possibly still be standing, applying makeup to the green and blue under her eyes to hide their colour, to make the vessels under her skin and their secret movement less evident to anyone who happened to look at her. She carefully slid the mascara wand up from the base to the ends of her lashes, trying hard not to smudge the wand across her skin. If she did that, then she’d have to get out the greasy bottle of makeup remover and rub and rub away the colour. She had already done this twice; her left cheek was raw from scrubbing.
She had a date with Justin. It was funny to think of the word date at her age. Her other relationships had moved quickly from a few dates to seeing each other, to living together, and finally to no longer together. It was because she’d always vaguely known the men she dated—they were co-workers, men she’d known in high school. She had rarely experienced this giddiness at the fourth date, the fifth date, or, now, the sixth date. He still walked her to her door. They kissed in the wan, bug-speckled glow of her porch light. She had not yet invited him inside. He had not yet asked.
She liked being near him. He was unselfconscious, earnest about everything. When a couple at the restaurant with a small, crying child went outside to calm it, he turned to Claire and said, I’d like a baby someday. To Claire, this was a faintly embarrassing revelation, like showing a stranger X-rays of one’s own enlarged heart, but he didn’t say it with any expectation of response. He wasn’t afraid to say what he wanted.
Claire also didn’t understand what he saw in the town. How could he like the two-screen theatre with its scratchy, muffled sound and seats so thin you could feel the metal bones of the chair beneath? How did he view the high school, with its crumbling main entrance and the teenagers that slouched and smoked by it after school, their eyes dull and insolent as they stared at the slow traffic? How did he see the new strip mall just outside of town, its concrete whitish-grey and gleaming, the windows proclaiming sales that had been going on for the entire summer?
Claire was both depressed and comforted by these details. Nothing in Farmington would really ever be different. Only the names of stores would change, some trees would be cut down and cleared while others grew in abandoned lots, turning them wild again.
She didn’t believe that Farmington could really change. This was the key difference between them—Justin believed that he could exert some force on the town, that he could help improve it. Claire had no such illusions. The town chipped away at her, shaping and bending her as the years passed. But she could exert no force on the town. It was itself, and it was not malleable like her, not made of flesh.
She didn’t realize that she felt this way until she listened to Justin and his plans and wondered why it had never occurred to her that the town was capable of, or even needed, changing.
Justin spoke about choosing where he was going, steering his company in a specific direction, handling certain rough waters. She liked this language. It made her think of him behind the domed glass of a yacht, navigating it safely through black, choppy seas.
Claire applied her brightest lipstick and powdered her skin. She didn’t want him to know how tired she was, how she had fallen asleep on a stack of books in the back of the library when she’d gone to repair the torn bindings of an old collection of Dickens novels. She had awakened to the feeling of her own spit cooling around her chin on the back room tabletop. That had been the longest period of rest she’d had in almost two days.
Maybe Sam couldn’t get to her in the library. Or maybe he let her have that nap as a tease.
She had reached her limit the night before, as she sat up in bed, crying, listening to the fan clicking above her, the small sounds of her crisp white sheets rustling with her body. So many sounds that she had never noticed before. They were deafening when she wanted to sleep but couldn’t.
A few nights before, he’d delivered a hard slap to her cheek. She’d awoken with a stinging jaw, her face blotchy, cheekbone mottled and sore to the touch.
The next night, he pinched her upper arm. She was bruised the following day, two purple quarters on her upper arm separated by a strip of white skin. She had been afraid to fall asleep before, but now she simply couldn’t.
She searched the Internet for possible explanations. Parasomnia, for example. She read an article about a woman who woke up with her mouth smeared in blood, gore in her fingernails, her nightgown streaked. Every night, the woman walked to the refrigerator and tore into any meat she could find,
pulling apart strings of muscle and stuffing it raw into her mouth. She never woke during this experience, and always only ate raw meat, nothing else. The woman had cured her disease with an intensive combination of therapy and prescription sleeping pills. The woman still twitched and kicked in sleep, but at least she wasn’t filling her stomach with raw flesh every night.
She’d also found posts on message boards about poltergeists: people who woke to find their drawers and cabinets emptied, their chairs arranged in strange configurations. They attached grainy cell phone pictures of clothing strewn across the floor, refrigerators emptied onto the tile. It wasn’t quite like that, either. What was happening to her was personal.
Then the night came when Claire couldn’t fool herself anymore. She felt another slap to her face as she was drifting off to sleep. A pinch to her thigh when she closed her eyes. When she turned over, she felt the blade of a fingernail travel up her back.
Sam had teased her like this when they were children, pinching and slapping, lightly punching her when their parents weren’t looking. She had not thought often about this part of Sam since his death, this part that was not always so kind.
“Why won’t you let me sleep? Are you angry? Did I do something wrong?” Nobody answered.
For years, if you’d asked her what she wanted most, she would have said for Sam to come back. Now, all she could think of was how to make him leave.
Justin met her at her door, as he always did. He reached out for her hand and led her to his car.
“Where are we going this time?” she asked.
She’d let him surprise her on their dates, as it seemed to delight him. He took her to restaurants she had gone to as a child, brought her to make-out spots she’d been to as a teenager. Each place was new to him, and so it seemed new to her when she was with him. He even took her to Willow Park, at the top of Farmington’s tallest hill, and laid out a blanket. He had made sandwiches—thin, meagre things wrapped in plastic, oozing mayonnaise and mustard. He also brought a pillow and a bottle of wine. She laughed as he searched the picnic basket for the absent corkscrew and then showed him how to push the cork down into the wine with a butter knife.
“You’ll find out,” he told her. He opened the passenger-side door and she stepped inside, smoothing her skirt under her thighs.
Don’t fall asleep, she told herself. She pinched the thin, bluish skin of her wrist. The pain sharpened her thoughts for just a second, one bright flash, before they dimmed again.
“It’s nothing too exciting,” he said. “Just somewhere we can be alone.” He turned to her and smiled.
“That sounds lovely,” she said, even as her stomach sank. Her lips and fingers tingled as though the blood had suddenly abandoned her extremities, heading somewhere more urgently needed.
She knew where they were going, though she tried to pretend as though she didn’t. The car turned into the factory’s parking lot, the new rocks crackling like popcorn under the tires.
Justin stared at the factory, now illuminated with the new glow of a streetlight.
“You said it would be fun to see if there are ghosts,” he said. “I figured what better time than at night to see if anything spooky happens?”
Claire nodded. “Ah,” she said. “You remembered.”
He nodded. “I’ve made us a dinner, too,” he said.
Claire imagined sandwiches wrapped in many layers of plastic wrap, maybe even juice cartons with little straws poking from the top. She hoped he had brought a bottle of wine. She would need it.
It was evidence of how much he loved the factory that he did not see Claire’s jaw tighten as she nodded and opened the car door. He didn’t notice how she hesitated as she opened the back door and lifted out the picnic basket.
She faced the factory. She remembered this view, in just this level of light, at just about this time of night.
They went inside.
“Just set that down,” he said, “and we’ll take a tour.”
The factory had been completely stocked since she’d been there last. It smelled like coffee beans, chocolate, and fresh paint. The wood-panelled walls were covered in pop culture posters—Jimi Hendrix, Animal House, Marilyn Monroe staring blankly into a mirror. They seemed randomly, almost sloppily placed, but she knew now that this wasn’t the case. Justin had explained to her that everything in the store was carefully planned at corporate, from the colours of the chairs and tables to the candy placed at checkout and the selection of and placement of posters.
“It’s lovely,” she said. She spotted a bookshelf full of used books in the back, vintage checkerboards and chessboards, and a tin Chinese checkers container on the squat table between two burnt-orange couches.
“It’s amazing how quickly it came together.”
Justin nodded. “I’m proud of it. It’s the air, you know? Somehow the air here is right.”
Claire nodded, though the air felt too warm to her, full of small objects that threatened to become lodged in her throat.
“Can we have some wine?” She cleared her throat and coughed into her balled fist.
“Sounds good.” Justin squeezed her hand and let it fall. He rummaged through the picnic basket.
“I remembered the corkscrew this time,” he said. “I wanted this to be special.”
Claire could not eat—her stomach rioted—so she sipped her wine. She yawned and looked at the cheese, apples slices, and almonds Justin had brought, each in its own little bowl. She listened to him talk about his childhood, though she couldn’t remember how they had gotten on the subject. He sipped steadily from a Styrofoam cup full of wine. He was nervous.
“I’m a survivor,” he said, and Claire looked at him. She had drifted away for a moment, imagining her bed back home, how much she wished that she could sleep.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
He laughed. “Well, not like a survivor of an accident or a survivor of a plague.”
He refilled his glass and took a handful of almonds. He filled her glass, too. She drank without tasting.
“I mean that I got away from that life, you know? I don’t live there, and I don’t have to. I don’t work at the grocery store. I don’t lay asphalt for the county. Not that those are bad things, but they were the only things, you know? My mother has been a maid for forty years, and she’ll probably be one until she dies.
“She changes sheets and cleans toilets. I’m the only person in my family who doesn’t do work like that. I escaped.”
Justin turned off the lights at the back of the room, over the coffee table and checkout desk, so they were in lower, kinder light. Still, she saw the beginnings of soft wrinkles around his eyes. She wished that she were awake enough to say the kind of thing he might want to hear. He had told her something personal, something he probably didn’t tell everyone, and she wanted to let him know that she understood this. But his words percolated slowly through her head—she wasn’t sure if she’d caught everything he’d said. She touched his hand instead.
She blinked slowly, her eyes burning. She felt her hands tingle, her blood grow sluggish, her whole body wearing down. As Justin continued to speak, she heard Sam’s voice in her head, telling her to run, to get help, not to come down. Is Sam here? She asked herself, and had to remind herself that she was an adult, that she was with Justin right now.
The basement door was at the back of the room, open just a crack. Claire had noticed it when Justin first turned on the lights. Now that they were dim, she could still see it, a slice of darker shadow.
Sam.
“I need to visit the ladies room,” she said. Justin lay back, his forearm thrown over his eyes, probably feeling the effects of too much wine.
He’ll sit up and lead me back there, she thought. He’ll stand up and turn the lights on and I’ll have to go to the right room. I won’t get to go to the basement and see
Sam.
She shook her head. I won’t see Sam, whatever happens. He’s not here.
Justin didn’t rise or even lift his arm. “It’s in the back,” he said, “right behind those chairs and the table, near the bookshelf. There’s a light switch right by the door. Just feel for it.”
She didn’t turn on the lights. She walked to the basement door and looked back—Justin was still on the blanket. She pushed against the door. It opened without a whine or squeak of its hinges. She put her hand out and grabbed a wooden handrail—it was slick to the touch. Her feet found the top step, and then the next. They were close and narrow. She went down.
Although she had never been in the basement before, it felt like a place she knew. A part of her had been down here before. She had shouted down to Sam and her voice had reached him in the basement. She must have left some of herself here.
She clutched the railing tight—she could feel sleepiness coming over her in waves. The wine, too, made her drowsy, loose-limbed. She placed her feet carefully on each stair, pressing twice against the stone to make sure that she was actually touching the ground. She saw herself sliding on the stone, breaking her ankle. Then she’d be stuck down there until Justin returned. Or maybe she would smash her head on the ground. Her blood would mix with Sam’s and she would be there with him, forever, and it would be over.
Stop it. She pinched her wrist again until she couldn’t stand the pain, until her fingers ached from the pressure. She rubbed together her fingers—wet. She had pinched so hard she was bleeding
She reached the basement floor. It gave slightly under her feet, as though it had been covered with linoleum. A weak stream of light came from the basement window—light from the moon. That was the window, the one the light streamed through. She could hear the river. Claire moved toward it. She didn’t know, beyond coming down here, what she should do.
Almost Dark Page 17
