A Map of the Dark

by Karen Ellis

  She closes her eyes as the old loneliness for her father washes over her, but worse, and allows in the white noise of mindlessness until she’s no longer aware of the roar of the highway. In her half-wakeful drifting state, an image of Ruby approaches her, reaching out her hand. The lock on Elsa’s defenses gives way, unlatching like it always does in these cases—opening her wide to the girl in trouble.

  12

  Her hand on your back, in the milk-chocolate darkness, is a creamy swirl of heaven. It’s as if her light touch has been perfectly calibrated to send tingles to your scalp. Shivers cascade through your nerves and you sigh without sighing and relax like falling into sleep again and again. You force your eyes to stay open, force yourself to stay awake because you don’t want this to end. Her fingers brush down toward the bottom of your pajama top.

  “Good night, Elsa,” your mother whispers, respectful of your incremental drift toward sleep.

  “Five more minutes.”

  “It’s already been ten”—sounding gentle, the way she can when she wants to. No one is sweeter than your mother when she’s in a good mood. Her voice luscious and just-right. And you love her.

  “Please.”

  Her fingers climb back up the trellis of your ribs and fan over your shoulder blades. Your back so small under the wide span of her tender hand. And you believe she loves you too.

  But then, the next day, you believe she can’t love you.

  Three skips of the jump rope, alone in your bedroom, three skips in your stocking feet on the thick carpet when you’re sure she won’t hear you. Downstairs, with the noisy vacuum running, it’s impossible to hear anything. But then suddenly she’s in your room, her face a distortion, eyes ablaze, screaming, “Stop!”

  “But Mommy—” The rope now snaking at your feet.

  Her hand is so fast and tight on your wrist that your bones hurt. She jerks you into the closet and slams the door and the key turns on the outside and she leaves, her footsteps leaving, and then the quiet is complete. You slump among your shoes and hit yourself for your stupidity. Why did you do it? Last night’s bedtime ritual made you feel safe, but you ought to know better by now.

  The light that filters into the closet through the cracks in the door gradually fades until the dark becomes a kind of liquid drowning. You can’t see anything. There is nothing to hear, not even the vacuum, not a single footstep coming to you. The smell in here is peculiar, sour, and it fills your nose. Running your small hands up and down your arms and legs, you begin to wonder if you’re even real.

  Your insides start to shake, and you’re unbearably thirsty, and you need to cry, but you’re afraid of making any sound until your father gets home. You wait, and wait, but he doesn’t come. Where is Tara? Doesn’t anyone wonder where you went?

  Finally, after a thousand years, you begin to evaporate. You aren’t real. Your hands roam the floor, counting shoes—seven in all, one of a pair is missing—and then you feel the wire hanger just lying there. You pick it up and trace the funny shape, like bent elbows with a hook. When you reach the sharp end, you can’t resist pressing it into the pad of your fingertip, just to see how it feels. The puncture of metal, the breaking of skin, comes with a rush of sensation that assures you that you are real after all.

  You bend the hook and use the sharp tip to etch what you believe is an E in the top of your thigh. Your skin burns, not unpleasantly. You press harder. You think you feel blood rising out of your skin, but you’re not sure, so you dab the wound with the tip of your finger. Taste it. Yes, you have made yourself bleed, and if that isn’t proof of life, what is?

  You miss dinner. Your stomach growls and the thirst grows and grows. The last thing you remember is a dry clawing inside your throat.

  In the morning, you wake up in your bed, a whiff of your father’s sweet vanilla scent in your nostrils replacing the closet smell of isolation. The thought that he kissed you good night when you were sleeping reprises a memory of safety, and the closet, you think, was a dream, just a dream. But then you feel the tug of a bandage on your thigh and you sit up in bed, fast, covers puddling at your knees. And there it is: evidence of your self-inflicted wound.

  E for Elsa. Who is real. And alive. Even in the closet, alone.

  Carefully, you pry loose the edge of the bandage and peel it back.

  And it’s true, you were locked in the closet. But you were wrong; it isn’t an E. In the darkness, all you managed was a deep, ragged trench, an angry scribble.

  13

  The city’s density gathers force as they near Manhattan, Lex at the wheel.

  Elsa’s mind drifts back to the crusty old problem of her mother’s violence and the indigestibility of her father’s failure to protect her. In some ways she’s still waiting for him in that closet, has been waiting all her life, but now that he’s dying, how will he save her? And why, why, why hasn’t she ever asked him why he didn’t rescue her back then, when he might have used his parental authority, his love for her, to yank her away from an unpredictable mother? Still, despite the slow-drip betrayal of those years—the way he essentially stood back and watched what was happening to his own child—she has learned to resist bitterness when it sizzles up. She just doesn’t have the emotional energy to resent (too deeply) her admittedly imperfect father, and she knows he loves her, and after her mother’s death he was all she had left. It’s been a real comfort, all these years, just the idea that he’s out there, that he knows her, knows she exists in the realest ways, knows everything about her, despite the tentative promise (the tempered scar-like relief) that the worst memories will die with him. The anguish that has yoked her for decades, which he wants her to let go of. It occurs to her for the first time that he probably understands she will never forget the past but hopes she’ll learn to let it drift out of the forefront of her consciousness so that she can live more fully. Can she?

  Elsa turns to look at Lex, his nice profile blocking the view of New Jersey across the river. Traffic on the FDR moves swiftly. To their right, the towers of New York stagger higher and higher. Skyscrapers reaching into the sky and seeming to touch it but really not even close.

  He parks the car two blocks from her Brooklyn building and they walk together to Smith Street in a blooming twilight. It’s late enough that boutiques have started closing and restaurants are filling up. Elsa’s stomach lurches with hunger. She won’t return to Whitelaw Street tonight, she decides in that moment; she’ll stay in the here and now, no looking back. She’ll go home and eat something, fried eggs and a beer, in front of her laptop while she checks for updates on the Amber Alert and the APB; waits for the lab results; digs deeper into Ishmael Locke’s background; tries to find out what Ruby did with her father’s fake gun and how or if it connects with her disappearance; wonders whether she’s missing the lead she should be following while she chases Locke; waits for Mel to get home from her night class; and, not least important, calls to see if Roy is awake yet.

  “The subway’s that way,” she tells Lex, pointing left. “Let’s keep in touch tonight. I’ll be ready at a moment’s notice if anything comes up.”

  He nods, says, “Me too,” and sighs. “You know what I could use right now? I could use a drink.”

  “I hear you.” She thinks of the beer waiting for her at home, lonely, inviting.

  “What’s that place over there?” He looks across the street at the sleek façade of a vintage-inspired bar she has never been to despite having lived around the corner for four years. She rarely goes out for drinks with friends because she doesn’t really have any, and her colleagues in CARD generally rush home with heavy hearts after another day hunting for missing children, unequipped for levity or banter or jokes.

  “It’s the Clover Club,” she tells him.

  “Looks nice.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  He surprises her by taking her arm, gently but with enough confidence to be forceful, and guiding her into the street between the red blink of receding taill
ights and the glare of an oncoming car. They run to the curb.

  Exhilaration mixed with annoyance, she asks, “Are you trying to get us killed?”

  “Let me buy you a beer,” he says, “to make up for before. An apology.” He leads her toward the door, a flourish of gold lettering on finger-smudged glass.

  “Lex, thanks, but—” She stops talking when she realizes that he isn’t listening. He holds up a finger, begging her patience, his thumb dancing across the face of his phone. “My brother, David, works nearby. I told him I’d see him tonight if I was back in time and there was any chance.”

  “You mean there are two of you?”

  “You’ll join us.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass. I should go home and see if I can get some work done before my niece gets back from her class.”

  “Yup,” he tells her, reading his brother’s reply, “just coming out of the courthouse now, says he can be here in fifteen.”

  “What, is he a lawyer?”

  “Very good, Detective.”

  “Special Agent. Okay.” Feeling guilty for the severity of her reaction to the flowers. Wanting to give him an inch. “Just one beer.”

  Low lighting douses the carved mahogany walls and ceiling with a sense of reminiscence for a time that probably wasn’t as prettily lived when it was happening. Thing is, the faux atmosphere really is enticing—like a generous, frilly scoop of ice cream. There’s no point wasting a place like this on just a beer. But because the drinks menu is long and complicated, and Elsa’s tired, she keeps it simple and orders the bar’s namesake concoction of gin, vermouth, lemon, and raspberry. Lex tells a few jokes and she manages to dredge up some thin laughter, but after a while thoughts of Ruby still being gone and Ishmael Locke out there with answers to her questions vine tightly around her. Her skin prickles. She has to go.

  Standing, she says, “Thanks for the drink.”

  “You haven’t finished.”

  She picks up her glass and downs it, the final quarter inch of gin racing into her brain.

  Just then, his brother appears at their table, a man of medium height with thick disordered hair, the knot of his necktie pulled down to allow for the release of his top button. He strongly resembles Lex, but he’s older and has about him the look of a hard day that Elsa instantly relates to. She sits back down.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says to Lex, and turns to Elsa. His smile is wide and without his brother’s gap. “Whatever he’s told you about me, it isn’t true.”

  “Elsa Myers.”

  “David Cole—good to meet you.” His hand is warm and soft. She impulsively pulls hers away, because she knows herself; she has defective radar when it comes to men. So far, not a single one has failed to bolt after the darkness and booze have worn off, and, in daylight, the cryptography of her skin screams trouble.

  “She’s FBI,” Lex explains. “We’re working together on a case.”

  “Oh?” David borrows an unused chair from a neighbor’s table and pulls it up to join them.

  She says, “We just spent the day driving up and down the East Coast.”

  David offers an understanding nod, a shadow of concern moving through his eyes. He flags the waitress and orders an old-fashioned. Elsa already feels floaty from one drink. She begins to anticipate another.

  “Nice place,” David says, obviously looking for some way to direct the conversation away from work. She wonders what kind of lawyer he is. “Definitely a step up from where we usually meet.”

  “Which is?” she asks.

  “Any old Blarney Stone.”

  The brothers have the same happy laugh.

  “This place is toned,” Lex says.

  David corrects him. “Tony.”

  “Fancy place for a man with fancy brains. For David, only the best.”

  “Hey,” David protests, “I like the place, but it wasn’t exactly my suggestion.”

  “Fancy brains,” Elsa can’t help repeating, “as opposed to…?”

  “Mine, brains of a gamer. Moldy-basement brains. And you?”

  “Uh-oh.” Elsa trades an amused glance with David, enjoying this.

  Lex assesses her, his eyes booze-glossy. “Brains like a corn maze.”

  “How’s that?” she asks.

  “Complicated, can’t see over the top, easy to get lost in, but will definitely find a way out. And corn—under the husk, it’s very sweet. Hard to get to but worth the effort. See what I mean?”

  Elsa cocks her head, sips from the melted ice cube at the bottom of her glass, not seeing it at all.

  “It’s a compliment,” Lex explains.

  Patting his brother’s shoulder, David says, “I think we all know who’s got the fancy brains here. Especially after a drink.”

  The brothers share another laugh. Despite a significant age difference, they are obviously close. Elsa thinks of Tara, and then of her father, and then of Ruby, and the coil of anxiety returns.

  Their smiling young waitress approaches. “Another round?”

  Without a glance at the current state of their drinks, David nods and opens a tab on his credit card.

  Elsa reflexively digs into her bag to check her phone.

  “Why don’t you just put it on the table?” David suggests.

  She doesn’t like leaving her phone out when she’s with people; it’s rude, plus she worries she’ll forget it. But he’s right, and so she sets it down beside her drink, explaining, “You never know, and my father’s in the hospital, so…”

  “Hospital?” David asks.

  “She doesn’t like to discuss it.” Lex, kindly, protecting her.

  “Cancer,” she blurts out. When she’s intoxicated, her defenses peel away like dead skin.

  David lets out a long breath. “I’m sorry. What kind?” Asking the next logical question, just as his brother had earlier in the car.

  Lex intervenes. “David, enough.”

  “Lung,” Elsa says, wearied of her own reticence. “They caught it too late. He never even smoked.”

  David says, gently, “Mind if I ask why you don’t take personal leave? You have the right to, by law.”

  “That’s a good question,” she says in a tone more measured than she feels, because it is in fact an excellent question, another question his brother already asked, a question she’s repeatedly failed to answer for herself, “but I’ve decided for now to keep working. I thought I should hold on to as much leave time as possible to use at the end.”

  “This isn’t the end? You’re sure?”

  “There’s no way to tell.” Her voice squeaks regrettably high on the last word. “The doctor gave him two or three months, but what does that really mean?”

  “Good point.”

  If she were willing to admit the truth, she’d tell the Cole brothers that she thinks she’d go crazy if she had to sit there watching Roy die. Her sister is at the hospital. Isn’t that enough?

  “I remember when our mother was dying,” David says. “It was fourteen years ago already. Not an easy time.”

  Lex’s eyes seem to dull, rejecting the sharp edge of memory. He would have been a teenager then.

  “How old was she?” Elsa asks.

  “Only forty-nine.” A note of wistfulness in David’s voice. “Pancreatic cancer.”

  “It was like a freight train,” Lex adds. “Wham. That fast.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Elsa looks from brother to brother, their expressions hazed with recollection.

  David says, “I don’t think either of us really believed we’d lose her until she was gone. It was—”

  “—surreal,” Lex says. “Mama was the best. She loved us no matter what, even when we were little shits.”

  “Well, I wasn’t a little shit.” David looks at Lex and smiles wistfully. “You, on the other hand—”

  “Ha! I was the worst. But Mama, she loved me best, you’ve got to admit it, David. Even if she wasn’t my actual mom.”

  That catches Elsa’s attention. “
What?”

  “Sure, Mama loved you,” David says. “Who doesn’t love a surprise gift?”

  “Maybe she would have loved me even more if I was a box of candy.”

  “It’s true—she loved chocolate. Every night, two squares for her, one each for us.”

  “Even, she called this calculation,” Lex says. “Bad at math, that woman.”

  “She wasn’t your actual mother?” Elsa asks.

  “We have the same father,” David clarifies, “but my biological mother raised us both after my dad’s second wife left him high and dry in Moscow.”

  “Good old Dad,” Lex says. “The door was barely closed, she was gone like half a minute, and he put me on a plane to the United States of America to live with a woman and a brother I’d never met. Nice guy.”

  Elsa asks, “What was your mother’s name?”

  David answers, “Yelena Chkalov. She immigrated here when I was a baby and changed it to Cole.”

  “Well”—she lifts her cocktail—“here’s to Yelena. Brave woman.”

  They clink glasses over the table.

  “She was a great lady,” David says, tipping his head with affection. “She had a good sense of humor. Lex basically shows up on our doorstep when he’s eight years old and all she says is, ‘I have only three rules. You always do your homework; you set the table, which is your new job; and every night, I require a kiss on the cheek.’”

  Lex recalls the moment: “She’s wearing a muumuu with flowers, her feet are bare, she’s got on lipstick, and to me she looks like a wrinkled old lady, even though she’s only forty-three. ‘Where you been?’ she says to me. ‘Set the table.’ I swear, the second I saw that woman, I knew I was home.”