The Waking Dark

by Robin Wasserman

  But now the Preacher had gotten rid of the liquor, and it wasn’t Daniel’s father who’d been left behind. It was madness.

  If it could happen to his father, surely it could happen to Daniel. Darkness could fall on anyone – Cass was proof of that, too. The whole town was proof of that.

  Daniel had waited until night came. He couldn’t persuade the Preacher back to rationality; he couldn’t take Milo out of town; he couldn’t let things continue, and leave Milo prey to the Preacher’s delusions, and his guns. He waited until night, not because he was hoping a better solution would present itself, but because it would be easier in the dark.

  There was a bottle of Vicodin in the bottom drawer of his nightstand, left over from when his father had had his wisdom teeth removed many years before. Saved for a rainy day. Daniel counted out four of the pills, ground them into powder, and poured them into a cup of tea. His father preferred that now to whiskey, and accepted Daniel’s peace offering as if it were his due. He drank up.

  It took a long time to lug the Preacher’s limp body out to the shed. But once Daniel had made it, and caught his breath, and wiped off his sweat, it was easy enough to gather an armful of rope and bungee cord and truss up his father with the knots he’d recently helped Milo learn for a Cub Scout badge. He didn’t let himself think about what he’d done, or what he was doing. He stretched a piece of duct tape across his father’s mouth, so that in the morning, he couldn’t wake Milo with his screams.

  Topping the list of things he wouldn’t let himself think about: Milo, and what would happen if he found out. What he would think of Daniel then.

  What his father would do when Daniel set him free. If Daniel set him free.

  They were just knots, Daniel told himself, concentrating on the ropes. They would hold for as long as they needed to, and then he would figure something out. Reef knot. Sheet knot. Double sheet bend. Clove hitch. He was good at knots.

  His father was still breathing.

  That was good.

  Jule had intended to throw rocks at his window, if she could figure out which one it was. Or maybe just throw caution to the wind and ring the doorbell, even if it meant waking his crazy father. But when she arrived at the Ghent house, Daniel was standing in his bedroom window, watching the night. Jule, one hand still clasped around the knife she had shoved in the wide pocket of her fleece, raised her other hand and waved. Moments later, he came to the door.

  “You going to let me in, or what?” Jule said when he’d stood there dumbly for several seconds.

  “It’s five o’clock.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the morning.”

  “Were you in the middle of something?”

  She didn’t know how much longer she could keep from crying. She wondered if she looked upset; she wondered if she looked high, and if she still was. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” she said, breaking.

  He took her bag and brought her inside. He didn’t ask questions.

  “Your father?” she said.

  Daniel hesitated. “Upstairs. Out cold.”

  Could he smell it on her? Jule wondered. Could he see it in her darting eyes and widened pupils? The knife fit perfectly in the pocket of her fleece, like it belonged there. She wondered what Scott would think when he woke up to find it missing, along with his niece.

  No one stole from Scott Prevette.

  The room Daniel brought her into had no posters of punk bands or swimsuit models and no pools of dirty socks or fraying T-shirts spreading on the floor. But there were enough clues – the neat stack of sci-fi paperbacks on the card-table desk, the framed photo of a very young Milo opening Christmas presents, the map of the world tacked over his bed with ANYWHERE BUT HERE scrawled in thick black letters across the entire American Midwest – to indicate ownership. Jule shook her head and started backing out. “I don’t know what you thought, but —”

  “Oh, this isn’t a booty call?” Daniel pressed his hand to his chest. “How will my poor, broken heart ever survive?”

  Under other circumstances, Jule might have observed that lack of sleep had made him feisty, and he should consider staying up all night more often. But she could say nothing; the night had been too hard, and too long. She was done.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  She nodded furiously, lips clamped together until she could control what spilled out of them. Her face heated up with alarming speed, and her clothes were suddenly entirely too heavy and too tight. It was like one of those hot flashes that middle-aged women on TV were always complaining about, and it made her want to fling open the window and heave lungfuls of the night air – to climb out, if necessary, just to be out of this room and out from under Daniel’s stare. She was done with being watched.

  “Jule, you’re shaking,” Daniel said, approaching her, and she slipped her hand into her pocket and touched the knife. He stopped short of touching her. “What is it? What happened?”

  “I…” She held her breath, cutting off a sob before it could slip out. That had been too soon. She took a deep, measured breath. She could hold off the tears, no problem. But the trembling was out of her control.

  It was humiliating. But Daniel pretended it wasn’t happening, which helped. “You can have my bed,” he told her, in a voice that nearly approximated friendly, unconcerned chatter. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’ll stay in Milo’s room. Sheets are… well, clean enough, I guess, and if you want to borrow a T-shirt or something, they’re in the bottom drawer.”

  She shook her head, already undoing her boots and climbing into the bed fully clothed, pulling the covers up around her. The hot flash faded nearly as quickly as it had arrived, and now she was almost cold, but pleasurably so. The sheets were scratchy, but warm, and smelled like him.

  “Or I guess you could just sleep in that,” he said. “Bathroom’s right next door, and Milo’s is the second door down. If you need me, I mean. Not that you’ll – well, you know what I mean.”

  “You don’t have to go yet,” she said quietly. Holding it together. “I mean, don’t go. Yet. Okay?”

  “Uh…”

  “You can hang out for a while,” she said. Then quickly added, “On the floor.”

  He smiled, and she found herself joining him.

  “Of course,” he said. “On the floor.”

  He flicked out the light and sat down beside the bed.

  “You got your brother back,” she said. Talking was easier in the dark.

  “Yeah. Giuliana pulled a vanishing act. After all that. Can you believe it?”

  She suddenly realized why the woman in bed with Scott had looked so familiar. “Kid’s probably better off.”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced.

  “It’s not the same thing,” she said.

  “As what?”

  “As your mother. She’s dead.”

  “Thanks for the reminder.”

  “So of course you think you’d be better off if she were still around, and sure, maybe you even would be.”

  “Not maybe,” he said.

  The Preacher hadn’t always been the Preacher, she thought. Before there were disability checks and insurance settlements and oceans of whiskey, there’d just been Mr. Ghent, who she used to see dropping Daniel off at kindergarten, walking all the way there with him hand in hand. She remembered because she’d paid attention to things like that back then, trying to figure out exactly what it was that made her different from the other kids, and why they could all see it when, as much as she studied herself in the mirror, she was lost. Most days, that year and every other, she’d had to walk herself to school. By third grade, so did Daniel. She wasn’t sure which of them was luckier: the one who didn’t know what was missing or the one who did. “I’ll give you that,” she said. “Not maybe… But Milo doesn’t need that woman. He’s got you.”

  “Why are you here, Jule?” he said. “What happened?”

  In the dark, she could almost answer. She almost felt powerful a
gain. Screw Scott – if he found out she’d told someone the truth of what happened, what could he do? What would she let him do? Answer: nothing. She wasn’t afraid of him.

  But she was afraid of Daniel, of what he would think. It was too dark to see his face, but she would hear it in his voice.

  “Nothing happened,” she said.

  “Sure, that’s obvious.”

  “Nothing happened that you need to know about.”

  “I’m not trying to get in your business. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Like you care.” It came out harsher than she’d intended.

  “I should get out of here,” he said. “I’ll stop bothering you and leave you alone.”

  “Would you get out of my head and stop assuming you know what I’m thinking?” She hoped he couldn’t tell she was thinking how desperately she didn’t want to be alone. “Did I say I wanted you to go?”

  “So… you want me to stay?”

  “Well, want is a strong word.”

  For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of their breathing. I could reach out my hand and he would take it, she thought. Take it and hold it and just be, if that’s what I needed him to do. That’s how close he was; that’s the kind of guy he was. But she wasn’t that kind of girl. She couldn’t ask. And he was the kind of guy who would wait to be asked.

  “So what’s the deal with you keeping Cass Porter in your shed?” she asked instead. “That’s a bit kinkier than I would have expected.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Everyone knows about that. Not to mention there was that day you came over and stole my underwear.”

  She could almost hear the whoosh of blood to his face.

  “I thought it was hers. I would never have – I mean, I’m not – I was —”

  She put him out of his misery. “It’s fine. I get it. People do crazy things when they’re keeping girls locked up in their shed.”

  “I wasn’t…”

  “Joke,” she said. “Jesus.”

  “You know about what they’re going to do to her tomorrow?”

  “I’ve heard rumors.”

  “If you’re going to say that kind of thing would never happen here, don’t bother. People are different now. Something’s… different.”

  “Kinkier than you look and dumber. No one’s different, Daniel. Maybe they’re being more obvious about it now, because they’re tired of playing let’s-pretend. But that kind of thing is always happening here. I thought you knew that.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t believe that.”

  “You’ll believe it when they light her on fire.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m getting her out of there. Before they can do anything.”

  “Oh, really? How?”

  He was silent.

  “So you’ve got a rescuing complex. That’s your deal?”

  “It’s not a deal. It’s one person who needs me.”

  Either he was being polite, not mentioning the fact that he was currently in the process of rescuing Jule, or he didn’t think of her that way, the kind of girl that needed a rescue.

  Not that it mattered, since she resolutely did not care what he thought of her.

  Not at all.

  They were quiet for a long time.

  “You asleep down there?” she finally asked.

  “No.”

  “You know, when this is all over, and they open the borders, I’m getting out of here.”

  “Oleander?”

  “Oleander. Kansas. Hell, I don’t know, maybe the whole country. I hear Bali’s lovely this time of year.”

  “They say Rio’s nice,” he said.

  “There’s always Antarctica. I could sacrifice temperature for distance.”

  “And isolation. No one to annoy us but the penguins.”

  “Oh, it’s ‘us’ now, is it?”

  “Like I’m letting you go to Hawaii and leave me here.”

  “Hawaii’s in this country, Einstein. Off the table.” She closed her eyes. “There’s all these hotels in El Salvador. They built them in the eighties, all these giant resorts right on the beach, white sands and blue sea, the whole deal. To bring in the tourists, right? Except they’re in the middle of a drug war, and getting decapitated really spoils a vacation, so the tourists never come, and the hotels just get abandoned, all of them. Sitting right there on the edge of the world, empty paradise. Just waiting for someone desperate enough to move in.”

  “How do you know so much about random stuff in South America?”

  “Central.”

  “What?”

  “You said South. El Salvador’s in Central America.”

  “That’s kind of my point. How would you know?”

  She opened her eyes, looked at him, wondered whether to tell the truth.

  “Oh,” he said. “Right.”

  Like it was so stupidly obvious, like of course the Prevette girl would know all there was to know about Latin America, and anywhere else drug kingpins went to play.

  “Not ‘oh,’” she said. “Not what you’re thinking.”

  “I didn’t mean —”

  “Mr. Sorenson told me.”

  Daniel’s eyes widened. “The Nazi?”

  Jule sighed. “He’s not a Nazi.” Kyle Sorenson lived in a decaying house on the edge of town, a house that in thirty years he’d almost never left. He was an Oleander legend, a story kids used to spook themselves on stormy nights, and one of the most persistent rumors swirling about him, the one that most delighted boys between the ages of seven and twelve, concerned his alleged Nazi past. War crimes, Heil Hitlers, and a desperate midnight escape to the American Midwest, where he could live out his days amid Christians and cornfields, longing for the moment when the Reich would rise again. Other rumors had him as a retired and potentially cannibalistic serial killer, with bodies frozen in the basement to remind him of his youth, or – this one was more popular with girls – a political prisoner, smuggled out of Siberia and into Kansas, so traumatized by years of isolation and torture that he could no longer bear human companionship. “He’s just a lonely old man.”

  “And you actually know him?”

  “He and my uncle… they had kind of an arrangement for a while.” That had been when Scott became convinced the government was tapping his phones, and a cranky hermit with a shortwave radio collection came in handy. That had also been when Jule was still young enough – still cute enough and mute enough – that Scott towed her along with him when it suited him, and over the course of that year he’d towed her to Sorenson’s once or twice a week. Sometimes he’d left her there, alone with the strange old man, who’d had no idea how to entertain an eight-year-old, and so told her stories. Exotic tales of exotic lands, places he’d touched only through his radios but could describe like he’d been there. He made her feel like she’d been there – for those brief afternoons, he made her feel like she’d already escaped.

  “He knew a lot about other places,” Jule told Daniel. “It was like… I don’t know, like he wanted to get out as much as I did, but for some reason, he couldn’t.”

  The Salvadoran hotels, those beached white elephants soaking in the sun, had always been her favorite story. She’d wanted to hear about them again and again, the sparkling waves, the endless tracts of sand, the lavish rooms, all of them abandoned. It would be so easy to be alone there, untouched and unseen. It would, she’d told herself, almost lulled to sleep by the slow rhythm of Kyle Sorenson’s low voice, be easy to be happy.

  It had been her secret dream that one day Scott would tire of towing her back and forth and would just leave her with Mr. Sorenson for good. That she would live with him in the big old house, perhaps wiping the spotted windows and washing the musty sheets, cleaning without complaint as she never did at home. She’d do whatever she needed to do to make herself indispensable. One day, she dreamed in these daylight fantasies, she would slip and call him Grandfather, and she would blush until he patted her
shoulder and assured her it was all right. They would finally flee this place, together, and make a home in one of those faraway hotels on a deserted beach. They would be family, the only family either of them needed.

  And then Scott went to prison, and she never went back.

  But she never forgot about El Salvador, about her fairy tale. She’d never confided it to anyone else.

  “They’re probably not there anymore,” she said, and didn’t know why the thought made her so unbearably sad. “They probably never were.”