Girl in the Dark

by Marion Pauw

  “I understand it upsets you that I keep harping on it. But can’t you at least explain to me why you never told me about Ray? And why you no longer want to have anything to do with him? After all, he still is your son . . .”

  My mother whipped around to face me. “I don’t owe you an explanation, Iris. You have no idea what I went through with Ray. No idea.”

  “Then give me an idea. Because believe me, I’ll keep bugging you until you give me an answer.”

  My mother sighed demonstratively.

  “What did you go through, then? What was Ray like as a child?”

  My mother put her hands on her hips. “Ray was a runaway train that couldn’t be stopped, not even with the best will in the world. I just couldn’t manage him. He was impossible. He was always breaking things, pooped all over the house, even when he was eight, and could spend hours on end banging his head against the wall.” She rattled off the facts as if she’d learned them by heart.

  “That must have been awful for you, Mother.” I really meant it.

  She went on in a quieter voice. “I could never predict what would set him off. He’d come out with this ear-splitting scream and keep it up for so long that it drove me up the wall. It was like living with some wild animal. Although he could also be very sweet. He’d sit and play with his Legos for hours, and he loved to draw. Beautiful drawings of birds or spaceships, extremely detailed. But then if I told him it was time to put the crayons away, he’d have a tantrum.”

  I looked at Aaron, who was still staring at the aquarium with empty, faraway eyes. I could picture him tumbling through space, way out beyond the Milky Way, among the millions of distant suns and their orbiting moons.

  “And then all the problems with the other kids. The daily fights. Because teasing Ray always produced great results. You can’t imagine how aggressive he could be. You don’t even want to know how many times I had to humble myself and say I was sorry. ‘You’ve got to be stricter with him,’ I’d hear from Grandpa. ‘Discipline him, give him a good spanking if he refuses to listen.’ And from the neighbors: ‘Single mother, no idea how to cope.’ I kept punishing him, I yelled, begged, wept, bribed, ignored, smacked him, beat him, hit him hard, too hard, even . . . It was a nightmare.”

  There was something uncomfortably familiar about my mother’s story. I, too, was often made to feel I was a failure at child rearing, in spite of all the well-intentioned advice.

  “When it all got too much for me, I sent him to the Mason Home, a boarding institution for difficult children. That was”—my mother swallowed painfully—“after he killed a dog.”

  Hearing it from my mother felt different than hearing it from Detective De Winter. I could sense the horror, the shame and frustration lurking beneath my mother’s words. How would I feel if Aaron did such a thing?

  “The neighbors’ dog,” my mother went on. “It was scary. That he was capable of killing was bad enough. But even more worrying was the fact that he didn’t seem at all aware that he’d done something wrong. It was then that I realized Ray was a threat to society. And that I no longer could be responsible for him.” She gave me a tremulous smile. “There, now I’ve told you.”

  My mother and I rarely touched. But on an impulse I threw my arms around her and we hugged for a while. It was an awkward moment, but we somehow managed to get through it.

  “What you doing?” asked Aaron from his perch on the sofa.

  My mother and I quickly let go, as if we’d been caught in some perverted act.

  “We’re having dinner soon, my darling,” said my mother, walking over to him and running a hand through his hair. It always astonished me how easy it was for her to show affection to Aaron, as opposed to the obvious difficulty she had being affectionate with me. “How are the fishes doing?”

  “Venus is acting funny,” said Aaron.

  Venus was a Brazilian basslet: fuchsia in front and bright yellow in back. She and Peanut, her mate, spent most of their time in the grotto, a plastic contraption encrusted with coral and anemones. In spite of her bright coloring, Venus was a small fish that was easy to overlook.

  Now she was floating at the surface, her mouth wide open. The same pose in which I had found King Kong. She was still alive, but the question was for how much longer.

  “God, those wretched fish,” said my mother. “What do we do now?”

  “Add antibiotics to the water?”

  My mother shook her head and walked over to the sideboard. “I’ll just make a note to call Utrecht tomorrow, or I’ll forget. If my head weren’t attached to my body, I’d forget to take it along one of these days. It’s taking me such effort to focus lately.”

  “Well, Ray would love to take care of them again.”

  “Can’t you just see it? This enormous tank in a cell?” My mother put her pen down, a garish gold fountain pen.

  “It’s possible he’ll get out in the near future.”

  “Are you still insisting on going on with that ridiculous nonsense?”

  “I am.”

  “You know it’s pointless.”

  “Most of the cases I deal with are pointless, Mother.”

  We heard a ping from the kitchen. The not-quite-moussaka casserole was done.

  CHAPTER 37

  RAY

  “Is it okay if I come sit next to you?” Jeannie was looking at me. She was trying to be friendly, because the corners of her mouth went up and her eyes were slightly crinkled.

  Everyone stared at us. Jeannie ought to leave me alone. Didn’t she get it, that I didn’t want to talk to her? I didn’t want to talk to anyone anymore, except Iris Kastelein who said she was my sister, and maybe Mo, who I trusted because you have to trust someone. But Mo was sitting next to Jamal.

  Maybe my mother was another one I wouldn’t mind talking to. It had been a very long time since I’d seen her. The last time she’d come to see me was when I was in prison. She’d said, “Don’t kid yourself, Ray. You’re better off in here. At least now I don’t need to worry about you anymore.”

  Since I didn’t say anything, Jeannie seemed to take it for granted that she could sit down next to me. I made myself a bread and liverwurst sandwich. At mealtimes I still ended up eating whatever wound up at my end of the table, even though the only thing I considered palatable was the chocolate spread.

  “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

  I nodded with a mouth full of bread.

  “I know it isn’t any consolation, but I was really upset to have to send you to solitary. You got so violent that I didn’t have a choice.”

  I looked out the window, hoping she’d take the hint and stop talking. There was a small robin sitting on the wall. You didn’t see those very often in here. You didn’t see any birds very often, as a matter of fact, not even in the yard. Birds didn’t want to be here, apparently.

  I thought about my own backyard, which was always teeming with sparrows, chickadees, and robins. Then I thought about my fish. I really, really wanted my fish back.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  In my head I saw Venus, Saturn, King Kong, and François swimming up to the glass. Every time their heads hit the transparent wall, I’d hear a soft bonk.

  “Ray?”

  The bonking grew louder and louder and the fish kept reeling through my head. They wanted to get out. Out.

  I couldn’t help yelling. Or was I howling? All I knew was that there was a horrible sound coming from my throat.

  “Calm down,” I heard Jeannie say from somewhere far away. She put her hand on my arm, but I slapped it away. I didn’t want to be touched, especially not by her.

  The buzzer went off—the buzzer that sounded whenever there was a fight on, or if Ricky started throwing things at the television. A couple of seconds later the doors swung open and two guards rushed inside.

  They twisted my hands behind my back, making me bend over. Big drops started plopping down on the table. They were coming from my eyes. I was crying. That was it.
That’s what you do when you’re sad. That realization, strangely enough, made me feel calmer. I was no longer bawling, just sniffing.

  “Get up.” One of the guards yanked at my arms. It hurt. A lot. I was forced to do what he said.

  “Wait.” Mo came up to us and started waving something in front of my face. It was a white napkin. “Do you want to blow your nose, Ray?”

  I nodded.

  “Let him go a second, let him dry his face.”

  The guards did what Mo told them.

  I took the hanky, dabbed at my eyes, and then blew my nose. I felt light-headed, but I’d stopped crying.

  “I think he’s already calmed down,” Mo told the guards. “You can leave him here. I don’t think there’s any point taking him to the solitary unit. But thanks for your help.”

  “Mo,” said Jeannie in a voice I couldn’t interpret. “What are you doing?”

  “Tell you later.”

  The guards left the floor and nobody spoke. Then Rembrandt said, “Let’s give Mo a big hand.” And everyone began to clap.

  It felt a bit as if they were also clapping for me.

  Mo let me stay in my cell the rest of the day, to recover. The door wasn’t locked; I could leave if I wanted to. I studied the photos of my fish for a while and tacked them up on the wall next to the others. I’d first sorted them alphabetically by name, and then by color.

  Thinking of different ways to sort the photos of my fish took so much time that I decided to skip dinner. Mo offered to have them bring me food in my cell, but I wasn’t hungry.

  “Tomorrow you’re going back to having regular meals again, though,” said Mo, and then he left me alone.

  Over an hour later there was a knock on the door. It was André.

  “Good evening, Ray.”

  I quickly took the photos down off the wall. You never knew what André was going to do.

  “I just wanted you to know I’ve taken over Mo’s shift.”

  “Okay.” I waited for him to leave. But he stepped into my cell and shut the door. I clenched my hands around the edge of my bed to stop them from thrashing around.

  André sat down next to me.

  I shifted away from him a little, still clutching the bedframe, the way I’d clung to my mother’s hand when she’d brought me to the Mason Home when I was nine. Look, Ray, a Ping-Pong table. You’re going to have a great time in here.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” I echoed.

  “Everything okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Have you recovered from your stay in solitary?”

  I nodded again.

  “Strange, isn’t it, that they found drugs in your suite?” The social worker scratched his chin. “Do you have any idea how they got here?”

  I shook my head no.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Great.” He got to his feet, opened the door, but then seemed to change his mind. “And nobody’s ever talked about it to you?”

  I shook my head, but at the same time realized it wasn’t true. Someone had talked to me about it. Rembrandt.

  André shut the door again. “You don’t seem very sure about it. Think again.”

  I let go of the bedframe; my hands immediately shot out wildly. “Leave me alone!” I said.

  The buzzer went off, the signal that the cell doors would be locked for the night.

  André’s eyes blinked behind his glasses. “I’m keeping an eye on you, Boelens. Don’t try anything funny, you hear?” Then he left the cell.

  Unlike every other night, this time lockdown felt like a reprieve.

  CHAPTER 38

  IRIS

  Oskar Kool’s name did not come up in the record. Yet he must have known Rosita very well, and the man did have a motive, even if it came years and years after the fact.

  Ray’s description of him was pretty accurate. Despite being in his late sixties, Kool wore his hair long in the back, short in the front. His skin had the parchment cast of someone who’s smoked roll-ups all his life. When I found him, he was outside chopping wood.

  “So? Have you heard the news?”

  The old man didn’t react. He didn’t say yes or no, but just stared back at me dourly, clutching his ax.

  “I understand you’ve come into a nice inheritance. Haven’t you?”

  “What you want from me? If you’re looking for a handout, I can tell you right now that you’ve come to the wrong place.” He swung the ax high in the air and split a log with a mighty crash, spraying wood chips all over the front of my coat. I took a step back.

  “I’ve come to talk to you about Rosita and Anna. I am Ray Boelens’s attorney.”

  “Ray Boelens.”

  “You know him, don’t you?”

  “A nice boy.”

  I felt my face brighten. “A nice boy?” I repeated. I’d been hoping all this time to hear someone say something positive about Ray, the way a rejected lover sits waiting by the phone even though she ought to know better. And here it was—the phone was ringing at last.

  “That’s right. Until he went and hacked them to death.”

  “Right.” Wrong number. Foiled again.

  Kool lived in a small farmhouse, though “dump” might be a more accurate description. There were holes in the thatched roof and the woodwork was begging for a coat of paint. The farmyard was littered with machinery that looked as if it hadn’t been touched since the sixties.

  He put another log on the chopping block and brought the ax down. It struck me how shiny and clean this piece of equipment was compared to everything else, including Kool’s dirty overalls. The log split into two.

  “You’re one of the first to say anything positive about him.”

  Again he didn’t respond.

  “Funny, though. I mean—you just called Ray Boelens a ‘nice boy,’ ” I tried again.

  “He shouldn’t have done what he done. That goes without saying. But she did make him nuts. Just like her mom. Both of them knew exactly how to suck a man dry.”

  I didn’t know what to say. But Kool’s tongue had suddenly come loose. “Don’t get me wrong—they was good women, both of ’em. But you had to know how to handle ’em, like a stray dog. You never knew what you were going to get. Are they going to love you, are they going to leave you, bite you or lick your hand? It’s looking to be a cold winter,” he went on without pausing. “They can say all they like the earth’s getting warmer, but my bones are telling me something else.”

  “Do you have a fireplace?”

  “Wood stove.”

  “Cozy.”

  “It helps with the heating costs. I couldn’t care less about the coziness,” said the new millionaire.

  “Have you lived alone since Rosita’s mother passed?”

  “Yeah. Not all the time. But grief ain’t sexy, now, is it? Well, at first, maybe. Especially after Rosita and Anna died. Women want to take care of you and take away your pain. They want to bake you apple pies and pour you a drink. They want to talk to you for hours at a time. So you keep rehashing the same old story, and you get to know exactly at what point they’ll start sobbing. But after a month or so, they decide you should get over it. Time for the weeping and whining to stop. They wanna start having some fun. Fun? Who’s in the mood for fun?” He spat for emphasis. A brownish gob of spit landed less than a foot from my suede boots.

  “So why do you think Ray killed Rosita and Anna?”

  Oskar Kool put down his ax on the chopping block. “I already told you. She drove him crazy. She was a looker and she could wind that boy around her little finger. She knew how to wangle a new couch out of him and then a new TV. ‘Prezzie from my next-door neighbor,’ she’d tell me, beaming. ‘You don’t get something for nothing,’ I told her. ‘You’re making the guy horny as a tomcat.’ That made her laugh. She claimed Ray gave her those things because he didn’t have anything better to do with h
is money. ‘I give him a pat on the head once in a while,” she said. ‘He’ll just have to be satisfied with that.’ ” Kool shook his head. “Just like her old lady. Always take, take, take. But return the favor? Don’t hold your breath.”

  “It doesn’t sound very romantic.”

  “There’s no such thing as romance. You’ll find out yourself someday.”

  “Did you know your late wife had an uncle, Richard Angeli?”

  “I met him once. At our wedding. Elisa didn’t have much to do with him. Except they did exchange Christmas cards.”

  “And Rosita? Did she know him?”

  “She was at our wedding, so she must have seen him there. But the family wasn’t particularly close. To tell you the truth, my wife didn’t have much to do with Rosita, either. Though maybe it would have been different if she’d been around to know the little kid. I bet she’d have loved to show off a little granddaughter.”

  “Did your wife know Richard was rich?”

  “She did tell me once her uncle had plenty of money. But that’s all,” he said, nonchalant. Too nonchalant? I wondered.

  “He certainly had plenty of money.”

  Oskar Kool picked up his ax again. He had a tattoo of three dots between his thumb and forefinger. “He sure did.”

  “The money should come in handy for fixing up the farm.”

  “I guess so.” He put another log on the chopping block. It was clear that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over. Wood chips started flying in all directions; I could see the sweat breaking out on the old man’s forehead. He acted as if I was no longer there. I realized that if I wanted to get him to keep talking, I’d have to find another subject.

  “Did Rosita have any enemies that you know of?”

  “Hmm.” He scratched his chin. I noticed those three dots on his hand again. “I don’t think folks were particularly crazy about her. But enemies, that’s a big word.”

  “What about friends? Did she have any friends?”

  “I guess. But—not really. Take the day she moved into her new house on Queen Wilhelmina Street. Do you think anyone came to help her? No, old Oskar was the one to come to the rescue. Whenever something in the house needed fixing, she’d know where to find me, too.”