The Familiar Dark

by Amy Engel

  I turned in my chair, already knowing who I would see and dreading it. Zach stood in the doorway, his plaid shirt half unbuttoned, white T-shirt peeking out. He wore jeans and his feet were bare, hair still damp from the shower. My stomach slid downward at the sight of him, remembering the feel of his skin against mine. His eyes shifted from his wife to me, lingered until I wanted to cross the room and slap him, force him to turn his head in a different direction. I shifted away instead, turned my gaze back to my own coffee cup.

  “Hey there,” Zach said, his voice moving closer. “What did I miss down here?”

  Jenny was bustling away at the counter, pouring coffee and adding a splash of milk, the well-practiced movements of a wife who no longer has to think about what her husband might like. His wants as ingrained as her own. “Nothing,” she said. “Eve wanted to see how I’m doing.” She turned, held out the mug to Zach.

  I slid my chair back, and it screeched against the floor. “I should get out of your hair. Thanks for the coffee.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Zach said.

  “No, finish your coffee, I’m fine.” I cut across the kitchen toward the front hall, and Zach drifted along in my wake. “What are you doing?” I whispered to him, jerking my arm away when he put a hand on my elbow.

  “You didn’t come here to see Jenny,” he said, voice pitched as low as mine.

  I laughed, short and sharp, turned to face him. “Yeah, I did, actually.”

  His hand found my collarbone, smoothed hair back over my shoulder, fingers skimming my bruises. His brow furrowed. “What happened here?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  His fingers lingered, raising goose bumps on my skin. “I think about you. All the time.”

  I slapped at his hand. “Are you insane? We’ve gone more than a decade without saying ten words to each other, and suddenly I’m all you think about? How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Not stupid at all,” Zach said, face serious. “And it’s not sudden.” That’s what made it almost impossible to stay mad at him, to even be mad at him. His earnestness, his absolute belief in whatever it was he was telling you. You might know it was bullshit, but Zach never did. Which in some ways made him even worse than Jimmy Ray. At least with Jimmy Ray what you saw was always what you got.

  I wrenched open the front door, shot Zach a look over my shoulder. “Stop it,” I said, as loud as I dared. “It was sex. And it was good. But it didn’t mean anything. Get back in that kitchen and have coffee with your wife. I am not what you want. Trust me.” Even now, sparing his feelings. The way women are taught to behave. Making it about what was good for him instead of what was bad for me.

  “What do you want?” Zach asked, like he actually thought the answer might be him. It almost made me pity him for being such a child. He still didn’t understand that what this might have been once upon a time made no difference anymore. One-night stand lust, potential true love, lifelong friendship. All the possibilities ceased to matter the moment Junie died.

  “I want to wake up tomorrow and have a daughter again. Or I want to wake up the day I met you and call in sick to the diner. Rewrite history.” I shrugged. “I want this pain to go away. Can you make that happen?”

  Zach shook his head, his eyes ancient. “No.”

  I stepped out onto the porch. “Then grow up, because you don’t have anything I need.”

  TWENTY

  I’d visited my mama’s trailer more since Junie’s death than I had in the entire time she’d been alive. It scared me how familiar it all felt, how I slipped back into it like I’d never managed to claw my way out. It fed into my horrified suspicion that this was where I was always destined to end up. That my time as my daughter’s mother had been only a momentary blip, a brief respite from my true nature. That what I really was, and always had been, was my mother’s daughter.

  The rusted black pickup was still parked in my mama’s yard, but this time I got the dubious pleasure of meeting the man who drove it. Or at least I assumed the guy passed out on my mama’s ripped faux-leather sofa was the owner. One homemade-tattoo-covered arm thrown over his face, a sliver of hairy beer belly winking at me where his T-shirt failed to meet the waistband of his dirty jeans. He was so exactly my mama’s type she might as well have picked him out of a catalog.

  He barely stirred when I let myself in, tattered screen door slamming behind me. “Mama?” I called. “You in here?” Too keyed up to be careful, forgetting all the protocols in place to keep things on an even keel. Don’t scream, don’t demand, don’t surprise. My mama was like a rabid dog that way, one mistake in the approach and you were as good as dead.

  “Jesus Christ, quiet the fuck down,” my mama hissed from the direction of the kitchen. She came around from behind the fridge, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Got half a mind to kick your ass,” she said. “Barging in here like you own the place.”

  The thing that had been nagging at me, plucking my mind like a violin string over and over until it about drove me crazy, had come rushing in as I’d left the Logans’ house this morning. The first time I’d let it go in what felt like forever, and suddenly there it was, my mind laying it out in front of me like a hog on a platter, ripe for the taking. I pointed at her, took two steps in her direction. “How did you know what Junie’s walk was like?” I demanded.

  My mama’s brow wrinkled up. “What in the hell are you talking about?” She swirled her cigarette hand beside her head. “Has grief made you loony, or what?”

  The man on the couch lowered his arm, squinted at me through bleary eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Shut up,” I said without looking at him, kept my eyes glued on my mama. “In my house the other day, in my kitchen. You said you knew about Zach and me because he and Junie have the same walk.”

  My mama stubbed her cigarette out on the countertop, flicked it into the sink. “Yeah, so?”

  “How’d you know? How do you know Junie’s walk well enough to recognize it in Zach? And don’t give me some bullshit about seeing her from a distance. You’ve never been that close to her, not for long enough to matter.” I wanted those words to be the truth, needed them to be, but I already suspected they weren’t, long before my mama opened her mouth and confirmed it.

  “You got some nerve, coming into my home, accusing me.” She paused, took a swig from her beer. “What exactly is it you’re accusing me of, anyway? Knowing how your daughter walked?” Her voice turned high and full of fake panic. “Quick, someone call the cops. I should be arrested. I’m a goddamn menace to society.”

  That’s how you always knew my mama felt cornered, backed against the wall by her own lies. She came out swinging, wild and mean, and she didn’t care who she took down in her wake.

  I sank down into one of the wobbly chairs clustered around the scarred kitchen table, leaned forward until my forehead almost touched my knees. “You knew her,” I said, more to myself than to my mama. “You knew Junie.” It was my worst nightmare come true. Everything I’d tried to protect her from, insulate her against, walking right up and making itself at home.

  “I was her grandma.”

  I shot upward so fast tiny stars sparked in my vision. “I was her mother. And I told you no. I told you to stay the fuck away from her!” I slammed one hand down onto the table, wondered how bad a price I might have to pay for the startled jump it caused my mama. “Isn’t that what you always said when we were growing up, to anyone who tried to interfere, stick their noses in our business trying to help Cal and me? That you were our mama and you made the rules?”

  She stared at me, even and calm now. “I did say that.”

  “I always knew you were poison. And I’d made my peace with that, with the part of me that comes from you. But you weren’t supposed to touch her, none of your filth or your meanness or your awful decisions were
ever going to get close to Junie.” I paused, a horrible thought bubbling to the surface. “Are you the one who introduced Izzy to Matt? Is that how she met him?”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about,” my mama said, brow furrowed. “I never even met Izzy.”

  I believed her only because she wouldn’t bother lying, not about something she’d consider as unimportant as bringing Matt into Izzy’s orbit. I palmed tears off my cheek with the flat of my hand. I glanced around the trailer with blurry eyes, half-finished beer cans littering the counters, a scrum of suspicious white powder smeared at the other end of the table, the thick, hot smell of rotting garbage, the blare of idiotic voices from the television in the corner. Something like horror swelled in my chest. “Did Junie come here? Did you bring her here?”

  “You ashamed of growing up poor?” my mama asked. “Is that what this is about?”

  “I’m still poor!” I screamed. “Junie was poor every day of her life. It’s never been about that. It’s about you.”

  “If I was so terrible, if growing up here was so bad, you knew where the door was.” She jutted her chin toward the front of the trailer. “Never saw you use it, though. Always seemed happy enough to keep on eating my food, sleeping under my roof.”

  I rolled my eyes, wishing Cal were here to catch my glance. “Oh, here we go.” I braced myself for the big windup, the unappreciated, picked-on mother whose kids were ungrateful brats. It was a version of the story my mama never got tired of telling. A self-serving fairy tale studded with lies.

  “What do you want me to say then?” she asked. “You want me to apologize for seeing my own grandchild? My own flesh and blood?”

  “No,” I said. “Your apologies don’t mean shit. We both know that. You’ve never been sorry for anything in your entire life. Except maybe giving birth to Cal and me.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said, her mouth twisting into a cruel little bow. “I never was sorry about Cal.”

  It was nothing she hadn’t said to me before, but it still had the power to hurt. Not a full body blow the way it had been when I was a kid, but a quick, sharp kick to the heart. “Don’t worry, Mama,” I said. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

  She turned away from me, tossed her empty beer bottle into the trash. “I ain’t in the mood for this.” She sighed. “I wanted to meet Junie, that’s all. I meant for it to be a onetime thing. But then I got to know her.” She paused, shoulder falling in a helpless shrug, the gesture you make before you admit something shameful. “I loved her,” she said finally.

  Nothing she could have said would have shocked me more. It was like hearing your dog start a conversation or watching the sun fall out of the sky. Something so impossible that even seeing it with your own eyes didn’t make it real. “You loved her,” I said, voice flat.

  “I did,” my mama confirmed. She sounded as surprised as anyone by the fact.

  I’d known my girl was special, always had. But to unclench the tight fist of my mother? Not even Cal had ever done that. Special didn’t even cover it. My God, I’d had no idea. I shifted in my chair, wanting to be gone, but wanting the whole story, too. This was probably my only chance. My mama wasn’t one for dragging things out, peeling back the layers. Once she shut the door on this subject, it would be shut for good. “You what? Walked up to her on the street and introduced yourself? ‘Hey, Junie, I’m the grandma your mom warned you about. Let’s be friends’?”

  “You know, I used to think I missed your real personality. The one you put on ice when Junie was born. At least that Evie had some spunk.” My mama shook her head. “But it turns out I don’t. Your smart-ass routine gets old quick.”

  I laughed, a hoarse bark. “I learned from the best. Now stop avoiding the question.”

  My mama leaned back against the counter, crossed her arms. “How do you think I met her? Use your brain. It ain’t hard to figure out.”

  It took me longer than it should have, cycling through the possibilities and skipping over the most obvious one because I didn’t want to believe it. “Cal?” I said finally. Voiced like a question but one I already knew the answer to. It was like taking a punch to the gut, the knowledge that Cal had violated the one trust I’d relied on him to always keep. He’d promised me. And promised Junie. Cradled her newborn body in his arms and vowed she’d always be safe, which meant keeping her far away from Mama. And he’d betrayed us both.

  “Yep. I told him I deserved to meet her at least. My only grandchild.” She smirked at me. “And he agreed. Didn’t even put up an argument.”

  Of course he didn’t. Because as much as Cal loved me, as much as he hated Mama, he was loyal to her, too. He still showed up at her trailer once a month with food or an envelope of cash. He visited her on Christmas Day and Mother’s Day and Easter. Not like me, who before Junie died hadn’t seen Mama, except from a distance, in more than five years. She had some sick hold over Cal, even now. The ability to bend him to her will when he ought to have known better. Part of me could hardly blame him for it. For all my big talk, I hadn’t managed to sever that final connection, either. “If you had anything to do with what happened to Junie, if it comes back to you in even the tiniest way, Mama . . .” I let my words trail off.

  “You think if I knew anything about what happened I’d be sitting here drinking beer and shooting the shit with you?” She lit up a new cigarette with a neon-pink lighter. “I don’t waste time making threats, Eve.” Accusatory squint through a scrim of smoke. “I don’t talk. I act. Whoever hurt her would already be dead in a ditch.”

  I pushed my chair back hard, and it went over halfway, crashing into the wall behind me. “We’re done,” I told her. “Not for now or for today. For always. Pretend you don’t know me.” Even as I spoke, I had the sinking feeling my words were coming too late. Junie’s death had set events in motion that couldn’t be stopped. I crossed to the front door, paused before stepping out. “Pretend you never had a daughter. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.”

  I wanted it to hurt her, but I knew with unflinching certainty that it hadn’t. As soon as I was gone, she’d open another beer, screw the guy on the sofa, and throw a frozen dinner in the microwave. End her evening with heroin between the toes. And the daughter she’d just lost, the daughter she hadn’t wanted to begin with, would never even cross her mind.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I couldn’t face Cal yet, look him in the eye and hear his stumbling, shamefaced apology. The combination of words that would never be big enough to cover the depth of his betrayal. The worst part was, I already knew I’d forgive him. He was all I had left. My only tether to the world. And as much as I didn’t want to, I understood why he’d done it. Understood how sometimes he was powerless to resist our mother. The piece of him that remained a little boy, desperate to prove his worth. But still . . . Junie. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around him bringing Junie into the mix. He must have thought he could control Mama, control the way she inserted herself into Junie’s life. But I knew better. There was no controlling Mama; there was only containment, and even that was fraught with danger as she constantly evaded your well-established perimeters. She was like a weed: You’d stomp her out in one spot, but when you turned around, she’d already be growing again.

  I still hadn’t recovered my taste for alcohol. In truth, I probably had never had one, even when I was younger. But back then, a few too many beers had made the rest of my life easier to swallow, too. But when I passed by Jimmy Ray’s strip joint, the sun beginning to fall into the horizon, I pulled into the lot. I told myself I wasn’t going inside to see Jimmy Ray, that I didn’t care one way or the other whether he was there, but the self-destructive song in my blood sang a different tune.

  This early in the evening, the place was virtually empty. Only one stripper out on the stage and a single occupied table, two guys who eyed me as I made my way to the bar. I was surprise
d to see Sam working behind the counter, and it took me a second to remember that Matt was dead. Blown to smithereens right in front of my eyes.

  “Hey, Eve,” Sam said, shy smile easing out from under his beard. “What can I get you?”

  “How about a vodka on the rocks.”

  Sam nodded, but kept his eyes on me a second too long. “How’re you doing?” he asked as he spun a glass upright on the bar, scooped ice inside.

  “Been better,” I said. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to drink. And forget everything for a little while. I needed relief, and I’d take it from the bottom of a bottle if that’s where I could find it.

  “Jimmy Ray’s not here,” Sam said as he slid my drink across the bar. “He’s kept himself scarce lately. Rumor has it, you about busted his nose clean off his face.”

  I drained half the vodka in one go, choking a little as I set the glass back down. My eyes burned, and heat spread inside my chest like tentacles. “Yep, that was me.”

  Sam laughed. “I would’ve loved to witness it.” He leaned closer, lowered his voice. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  I gave him what passed for a smile, finished my drink, and motioned for another. I could tell Sam wanted to say something about my newfound taste for alcohol. But this wasn’t the kind of place, and we weren’t the kind of people, for a go slow, take it easy speech. You walked in these doors to get wrecked, not to have an umbrella-adorned cocktail with your friends. I went a little slower with the second drink, but not by much. Turned around in my chair to stop Sam from trying to keep a conversation going. Of course, then I was forced to stare at the lone stripper, a woman about my own age with a greasy tangle of bottle-red hair and wide, stretch-marked hips. The tassels on her pasties swung in half-hearted arcs as she gyrated.