The Familiar Dark

by Amy Engel

  “I know my grandpa died when my mama was young. What happened to my grandma?”

  Louise looked away. “No one knows. She just stopped coming into town. Your grandpa claimed she’d run off at some point, but rumor was he’d finally gone too far and beat her to death. Thrown her body in the woods somewhere.”

  I swear, I sometimes thought there were more bodies tossed in the woods around Barren Springs than had ever been buried in the town cemetery. “And the cops didn’t do anything?”

  “What was there to do? There wasn’t any proof he’d killed her. And it was different back then. People left family matters to families. Your mama’d always been a sharp-eyed little girl. But after your grandma disappeared, she was hard as nails. Looked like she’d rip you to shreds if you so much as touched her. And then, a few years later, your granddad died of that stomach cancer. Your mama was about Junie’s age and totally alone in the world. People around town tried to help her, show her some kindness, but she was like a feral animal. All teeth and claws and biting anyone dumb enough to reach out a hand. I know social services got called at some point, but your mama was wily. She knew the holler like the back of her hand, knew people she could hunker down with, places to hide, favors to ask. Somehow, she made her way.”

  It wasn’t hard for me to imagine my mama surviving alone. She’d been doing it since I’d known her. One of those rare creatures who didn’t seem to need much of anything, not love or money or a purpose, to keep on breathing.

  Louise shifted in her seat so she could look straight at me. “When something like that happens to a person, it either shapes them or it breaks them. And God love her, your mama didn’t break, I can say that much for her. Most people would have. But your mama saw the way her world worked and she adapted. But she let it shape her into something ugly, let it turn something inside her. Or maybe she was born like her daddy and was always gonna end up this way, I don’t know. I still remember the day I saw her in town, her belly all swollen with Cal, and my heart dropped, worrying about what kind of mama she’d turn out to be. And then, years later, you walked into the diner looking for a job, so much like her but not completely gone over yet. Because you had Cal, had someone to keep you afloat. But it wasn’t until Junie was born that a light went on in you. Bright as anything.” Louise reached over and took my hand, smoothed it between her own. “I didn’t tell you this story to make you feel sorry for your mama or to make excuses for her. I told you because I can see how she’s pulling at you, making you think her way might be the right way. But it isn’t true. Junie may be gone, but you don’t have to slide backward, Eve. There’s other, better choices.”

  I let her hold my hand for another minute, kiss me on the cheek as she got out of the car. I promised her I’d think about what she said and that I’d do a better job eating. I said what she needed to hear because I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was too late; I was already at home in the dark.

  * * *

  • • •

  When I got back to my apartment building, I turned off my engine and waited, listened to the sound of the night: trees rustling in the wind, a man’s far-off hollering for a dog or a child, the tinny sound of someone’s radio drifting out through their open apartment window. But I didn’t hear any reporters, saw no news vans or clicking heels racing over to check who was inside my car. They must have given up and gone to look somewhere else. Maybe they were camped outside the Logans’ house, a more picturesque scene, to be sure.

  I wasn’t sure I had the energy to get out of my car, walk across the parking lot, and climb the flight of stairs to my apartment. Open the door and face the empty rooms that still smelled like my daughter. But falling asleep in my car and being awoken by cameras in my face would have been even worse. Not because I really cared about being captured with drool on my cheek and sleep in my eyes, but because I’d never hear the end of it from Cal. Land, either. There was a protocol to grieving on a national stage and I’d already fucked it up once. I wouldn’t be allowed to do it again.

  My footsteps made hollow slapping sounds on the concrete steps as I climbed, my steady progress screeching to a halt when I stepped out onto the landing and saw a man sitting in front of my apartment door, knees drawn up and forehead resting on his folded arms. He raised his head when he heard me, stared at me through bleary, beer-heavy eyes.

  I crossed my arms across my chest. “What are you doing here?” I’d always taken Junie to Izzy’s house, or picked Izzy up at her own. Izzy’s parents had never been here. I wasn’t aware Zach Logan even knew where I lived.

  He’d been crying, the dim light catching silvery trails on his cheeks. “That thing you said today . . .”

  I sighed. Louise had been right. Apparently my scene at the press conference was all anyone could talk about. “I shouldn’t have said it. Not out loud. I’m sorry I ruined the press conference.” I knew how to apologize even when I didn’t mean it, knew how to make the right words come out of my mouth in hopes they might diffuse whatever punishment was coming my way. With my mother, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But other people didn’t have her gift for sniffing out insincerity. It was like serving cake without the frosting. I’d left out the most important part, but people ate it anyway.

  Zach pushed himself upright, less drunk than I’d originally thought, his movements still fluid and precise. “No,” he said. “I’m glad you said it. I’m glad you feel it. I’m sick of being sad all the time. Sick of pretending to be strong. I think anger might be a relief.”

  I shoved past him, slammed my key into the lock on my apartment door. “It’s not a relief. None of this is a relief.”

  When his hand fell on my shoulder, I froze, didn’t turn around. “What are you doing?” I whispered. “Go home.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” Zach said, voice quiet. “My house doesn’t feel the same anymore.”

  I pushed my door open, shrugged out from underneath his warm hand. I took a deep breath, made my face a blank before I turned to look at him. Close enough that I could smell the beer on his breath and the mint he’d chewed to cover it up, could see the golden starbursts in his brown eyes and the dark stubble forming along his jawline. “Stop it,” I said, voice stern, while inside my gut twisted and my heart jumped. “You’re acting crazy.”

  Zach laughed, a hollow bark. “I feel crazy.” He took a step forward, into my open doorway so I couldn’t close him out. “I keep thinking about them. What they went through. How scared they must have been.” His voice broke and he swallowed hard. “How I should have been able to save them.” He held both hands out, toward me or God or the girls, I had no idea. “What kind of father can’t protect his own daughters?”

  Something close to terror exploded inside of me, a clawing panic that left my voice weak and reedy when I spoke. “Junie wasn’t your daughter.”

  Zach looked at me, eyes steady, not even a little bit drunk now. “We both know she was.”

  I stumbled backward, body still upright but the rest of me spinning, sliding into the past even as my brain frantically tried to stay moored in the present. “She was mine,” I rasped. “Only mine.” I realized too late that by stepping back, I’d left Zach room to move inside the apartment, shutting the door behind him. Trapping me. I wasn’t scared of Zach himself, but whatever words he said next were going to rip into me like bullets, leave jagged, bloody wounds. And I was already weak, had barely anything left to offer up as a shield.

  “It wasn’t immaculate conception, Eve,” he said. “I was there. She was mine, too.” He walked toward me but stopped when I backed away. “You don’t know how many times I picked up the phone those first few years, wanting to call. I used to sit right out there in your parking lot at night and debate whether I should knock on your door. But I never did, because you’d asked me not to.” He shook his head slightly. “You have no idea how fucking happy I was when Izzy came home from school al
l those years ago talking about her friend Junie. Asking if she could have her over to play. I couldn’t say yes fast enough. The first time Junie came around, I spent the whole day staring at her. I’d seen the two of you from a distance, but I never knew she had freckles or what her laugh sounded like. I was worried Jenny would figure it out from the way I watched her.”

  “Does she know?” I managed. “Jenny?”

  “No.” Zach shook his head. “Not a clue.” He looked toward Junie’s alcove, gestured with his hand. “Can I?”

  I didn’t respond. Couldn’t. I wanted this to all be a bad dream, something I could shake away in the morning light. In my mind, Junie didn’t have a father, had simply emerged from me, part of my body and no one else’s. I watched, silent, as Zach stepped into Junie’s room. He sucked in a quick breath, threw me a pained smile over his shoulder. “Smells like her,” he said. A scream built in my head, pounding against my skull as he touched her quilt, ran his hand over her bedside table, picked up one of her textbooks and balanced it in his hand. “I was always good at science. And she was, too. We talked about it sometimes when she was at our house. Izzy never quite grasped it, but Junie did.” He set down the book. “Maybe she got that from me.”

  I turned and walked into the kitchen, my breathing shallow and too fast, vision spinning. Banana cream pie climbing back into my throat. I didn’t turn around, even when Zach’s footsteps stopped behind me, his body close enough that I could feel his exhales stir the tiny hairs at the nape of my neck.

  “You told them you hadn’t seen me since that night,” he said quietly.

  “What?” I sounded like I was sprinting, lungs tight as I tried to outpace something determined to sink its claws into me.

  “At the funeral home that first night. With Land. You said you hadn’t seen Junie’s father since the night she was conceived.” He ran one finger down the back of my neck, and my entire body pulsed. “You lied.”

  I spun around, startling him enough that this time he was the one to take a step backward. But still too close to me. “I didn’t lie.”

  “Yes, you did. Because I’ve been right here, Eve, all this time. All these years.”

  “No. Zachary Logan has been here all this time. With his button-down shirts and his boat dealership and his pretty wife and daughter.” I stabbed into his chest with my finger, snatched my hand away the second I made contact. “I don’t know that guy. I don’t recognize him. He’s nothing to me.” I reached behind me and grabbed the counter with both hands, steadying myself. “I didn’t lie,” I repeated.

  “Okay,” Zach said, with a little smile. “Omitted, then.” He closed the distance between us, his body almost pressed up against mine. “You recognize me now?” he asked, voice soft.

  I looked at him, really looked at him, in a way I hadn’t in years. Letting my eyes linger instead of skipping over him like a busted needle on a record player, getting only the vaguest impression before moving on. And tonight he was as close to my memory as he’d ever been, with his dark hair tousled and messy, his faded blue T-shirt, his smell of sweat and aftershave. He looked real to me for the first time in years.

  “Do you?” he asked again.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  When he kissed me, it was like tumbling off a cliff. Falling headfirst into the past. Time unspooling in reverse so that we both were impossibly young again, Junie a speck on some future horizon we hadn’t even imagined yet. And we tore at each other as if we could somehow start over, re-create what had already happened and make it turn out differently this time around, undo what had already been done.

  But in the end, with my lips swollen from his mouth, his back marked by my nails, nothing had changed. It was too late. We were still strangers. And our daughter was still dead.

  FOURTEEN

  I might have lied to Land about never having seen Junie’s father again, but the rest of the story was true. It was a fuck-and-run. A one-night stand. No-strings-attached sex. It was all those things, but more than that, too. Even before the reality of Junie was born, that night was always more than its on-paper definition.

  Sunday nights at the diner were slow. Dinner service stopped at five, and only drinks and desserts were available until the doors closed at eight. It was the only night Thomas ever got a break, and he always drove away at five o’clock on the dot, leaving a single waitress to man the diner. It was a shit shift, no tips because there were never more than a couple of customers, at most. Because I was the newest waitress, hired at the start of summer, I was the one working that sticky mid-July night when Zach Logan walked through the door.

  I’d never seen him before, glanced through the plate glass window and realized I’d never seen his dark blue SUV, either. He wasn’t from around here, which made him instantly interesting. And his looks didn’t hurt, either. Slow half smile when he saw me, hair ruffled from the wind, slight farmer’s tan on his neck where his T-shirt pulled away from his skin. “You open?” he asked, swinging onto a counter stool before I answered.

  “We close in five minutes,” I told him. I’d never been shy, but I moved through life with a certain watchfulness, wary of unexpected movements, faces. But something about him drew me closer. I was almost amused, observing myself from a distance. So this was attraction. I’d slept with a half dozen guys already, had endured untold numbers of sloppy make-out sessions behind the school or in the woods near my mama’s trailer. Always waiting for that buzzing in my belly, that heat in my cheeks that happened to other people. And here it was. Came sauntering right through the diner door when I’d least expected it.

  I served him a piece of key lime pie and a cup of lukewarm coffee, locked the front doors and put out the Closed sign while he ate. Accepted his invitation to sit next to him, tried not to notice the way the tiny hairs on my arm stood up every time his hand brushed against my skin while we talked.

  He told me he was about to start his senior year in college, that he was from Illinois, passing through Barren Springs. On his way to somewhere better, I’d assumed. Chicago, he confirmed, where he had a summer internship. I don’t remember what I said in return. Some sterilized version of my own truth. I know I lied about my age, thinking that seventeen seemed too young to his twenty-one, might make him skittish and not likely to act on the spark I saw in his eyes. Not dumb enough to believe I’d ever see him again, but still wanting this moment, this night. This boy who didn’t belong here, a piece of something that was foreign and different and just for me. A boy who didn’t know my mama or my history. A boy who hadn’t already written my entire story the second he laid eyes on me.

  When I got up to turn off the lights, I let him follow me. Welcomed his hand sneaking under my skirt as the diner plunged into semidarkness. Closed my eyes and pretended I had a different life when he kissed me, the taste of whipped cream on his tongue. With him I was simply a girl who liked a boy. I wasn’t Cal Taggert’s less-attractive sister. I didn’t have a fading bruise on my cheek from my mama’s backhand. I wasn’t destined to spend the rest of my life working in this diner, always poor and always hungry for something more, even if I lacked the drive to reach for it. For those few hours, I let go of myself, and I was someone new.

  When he drove away, sometime after midnight, I had no expectation of ever seeing him again. I didn’t pine for him, or daydream about what might have been. I’d never been that girl, and one night with Zach hadn’t changed that. The real world beyond Barren Springs had swallowed him up, taillights fading into the dark, and I’d stayed behind. And that’s the way it was always going to be. I didn’t waste time wishing for a different ending, even after I held the positive pregnancy test in my hand.

  But, of course, I did see him again. Six months later. I’d gotten a weekend job helping serve food at Jenny Sable’s wedding. Marrying some guy she met at college, apparently. Dropped out and decided to become a Mrs. instead of finishing her degree. Rumor was she had
a bun in the oven already, but I didn’t pay much attention to the details. Just knew the reception was quite an event for Barren Springs. A buffet and passed hors d’oeuvres. Catered from the Blue Lantern, the only halfway-decent restaurant in a fifty-mile radius, and even then most everything came frozen and reheated in a microwave. A blustery, late-January day and 125 guests crammed into the old Elks Lodge on the edge of town. They’d tried to make it nice, hanging fairy lights and stuffing fake flowers into every dark corner, but the whole place still smelled like wet carpet and old cigarette smoke, the fake wood paneling slightly tacky to the touch. “Putting lipstick on a pig,” Louise said with a shake of her head when we arrived, both decked out in the matching cheap black dresses Jenny’s mom insisted we wear. Mine barely fit over my basketball stomach, and Jenny’s mom’s mouth pinched in disapproval when she saw me.

  I was out in the kitchen, loading lukewarm potato skins onto a platter, when the bride and groom arrived, caught only the tail end of the cheering as I made my way out into the reception hall. The first glimpse I got of Zach was when I offered my tray to a group of men, and he turned to face me, pale pink rose in his tuxedo lapel, shiny gold ring on his finger. I expected him to play dumb, pretend he’d never seen me before. When his face went slack at the sight of me, I wasn’t surprised. But I stumbled backward when he reached a hand out toward me, red patches blooming high on his cheekbones when his gaze fell to my stomach. Potato skins slid off my tray, smearing under my heels as I backed away.

  I tried to avoid him after that. Kept to the edge of the room, lurking in the shadowiest corners like a ghost. I watched his head swivel, searching, even as he listened to toasts in his honor, took his first spin on the dance floor with his new wife. He wasn’t pretending he hadn’t seen me, wasn’t trying to avoid me. Even as I wished desperately that he would.