Gathering Dark

by Candice Fox

  ‘Look at this.’ I presented it to Jamie.

  ‘Ohhhhh.’ His hands rose to his face and made fists of excitement over his mouth. ‘Oh wow. Wow. Wow! It’s a rat. You have a pet rat?’

  ‘It’s a gopher. A Botta’s pocket gopher, in fact. I looked it up.’

  ‘Who’s Botta?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘The guy who invented gophers.’

  ‘Maybe it was the guy who invented pockets.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Can I hold it?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  I tumbled the warm little body into my son’s cupped hands. The gopher snuffled at its new fleshy surroundings, tiny pink paws gripping Jamie’s index finger. The gopher seemed to realise it was free to roam after being stuck in a box all day, and started walking up Jamie’s wrist, then forearm, towards his shoulder. He giggled and brought it back, only to have it do it again.

  ‘Jeez, he sure likes you.’ I folded my arms and watched, my heart big and heavy. ‘Look at him go. He wants to kiss you.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘I don’t think he has one . . .’ I thought about it. ‘At least, not one that I’ve heard.’

  ‘Can I name him?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  The boy thought for a moment, looked at the bag of Captain America cookies he had dumped on the counter.

  ‘Hugh Jackman.’

  ‘You want me to call the gopher “Hugh Jackman”?’ I laughed hard. ‘Why?’

  ‘He plays Wolverine.’

  ‘So why not call it Wolverine?’

  ‘Because Hugh Jackman is way better.’

  ‘Not Hugh? Not HJ? Not Jackie?’

  ‘Hugh Jackman.’

  ‘All right.’ I shrugged. ‘You got it. Is he your favourite Avenger or something?’

  ‘Oh god.’ Jamie slapped a palm over his eyes. ‘Wolverine is an X-Man, not an Avenger. Jeez, Mom.’

  My breath seized in my chest. Jamie didn’t seem to realise his mistake. He stroked the gopher on the top of its head.

  ‘Well, this is the most awesome thing that has ever happened in my whole life,’ the boy said.

  ‘That’s a hell of a claim. I’m glad I could be a part of it.’

  Sasha beeped her car horn from the front of the house and I went to the door to wave at her. ‘All right, buddy, put Hugh Jackman back. Make sure you close the lid tight.’

  I dug in the chocolate box for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, his favourite. As Jamie headed for the doorway he took it from me, turned, and wrapped his arms around my waist.

  ‘See you, Blair,’ he said as he bounded out into the night.

  ‘See you, baby,’ I said. I pressed the door closed and burst into tears.

  I dreamed about Dayly. We were standing with the counter of the Pump’n’Jump between us, crowded closer than we had been in reality. The jumble of chips, candy, fried goods and magazines that stocked the store had somehow festered and grown like jungle vines all around us, almost blocking the windows. There was only a hole the size of a dinner plate in the window over the cash register through which I could see the parking lot. I knew someone was out there, looking at us from the darkness. Someone bad.

  ‘He’s coming,’ I told Dayly. ‘Hide.’

  The raw panic ripped up through the centre of my chest into my throat as I was torn from dream to wakefulness by my phone. I grabbed it and answered in the still blackness of midnight.

  ‘Get. Your ass. Over here. Right. Now,’ Sasha growled.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘Jamie has a rat in his room.’ The fury coming down the line was like nothing I’d ever heard from her before. She seemed to be forcing the words out through clenched jaws. ‘A rat! A fucking rat!’

  ‘What . . .’ I sat up, gripping my head. ‘What the hell does that have to do with me?’

  ‘He says he got it from you!’

  A coldness flooded over me. I tore off the sheet and stumbled out of bed. In the kitchen, the ice cream container on the counter felt sickeningly light as I snatched it up.

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  ‘You gave our kid a pet rat?’ Sasha wailed. ‘Without asking me?’

  ‘No,’ I said, reminding myself to later celebrate her reference to ‘our’ kid. ‘No, I did not. He’s taken . . . uh. I don’t know. Something’s happened. There’s been some mista—’

  ‘I have Francine Readley over here,’ Sasha snarled. ‘Do you understand? Governor Readley’s wife. Everyone is here. Everyone who is fucking anyone from the neighbourhood is here and my son has a rat in his—’

  ‘I’m coming,’ I said. I grabbed the keys to the Gangstermobile. Sneak was collapsed on the floor between the coffee table and the couch, a pillow under her head and pills all over the table, snoring loudly. The stitches I’d put in her earlobe looked like tiny spiders in the dark. In the background of the call I could hear Jamie’s frantic voice, but not the words. ‘Listen, don’t do anything,’ I told Sasha. ‘The rat isn’t a rat. It’s a gopher and it’s not mine. It’s a very important animal, okay? It belongs to—’

  ‘You better haul ass, Blair,’ Sasha said. ‘I’m putting a rat trap in the room and blocking the door. You get here and it’s dead, that’s on you.’

  Dialling, dialling, dialling. Too late for anyone to answer an unknown number. I crushed the caiman-leather steering wheel cover with one hand and dialled frantically with the other, the breath caught in my chest, refusing to go in or out. Night walkers on Jefferson eyed the car from the shadows outside closed clothing stores and cafes. I passed a homeless camp under a bridge, watched the shapes moving inside tents draped with clothes and towels. My thumb danced over the phone screen. Finally, an answer.

  ‘Wassup?’

  ‘Who’s this?’ I asked. There was a lot of noise in the background of the call. People laughing, the pop and tinkle of a bottle shattering on a road. The thumping of bass.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘This is Miranda,’ she said. Her voice high and crisp, a little slurred.

  ‘This is Blair.’

  ‘Bear?’ She laughed.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m outside the Pig Pen,’ she said, sniffed hard. When she spoke next, her mouth was away from the phone. ‘Get me a vodka! Ice! Ice! I said ice!’

  ‘Sounds like a fun night.’

  ‘Not so far, we’re stuck in the damn line.’

  ‘I hope you get in soon.’

  ‘What the hell do you want? I don’t even know who this is.’

  ‘I’m no one,’ I said. ‘I just wanted someone to talk to. Someone to listen to.’ I knew the Pig Pen in Culver City, had passed it on my bus ride to work a hundred times. The interior was painted all pink, pink neon signs out the front, pink shag carpet stapled to the front of the bar, worn and dirty from a thousand thighs and knees passing it by. A young people’s place. Chalkboards out the front advertised cocktails in colourful plastic cowboy boots. My eyes left the dark road ahead and I imagined Miranda standing in the queue with other girls in shiny miniskirts, pink lights making their platinum hair look like cotton candy. I felt the thump of the bass in my chest, smelled beer on the road, vomit in the bases of potted palms. The ringing of Sasha’s voice in my ears was replaced by security guards waving people back.

  ‘This ain’t a suicide hotline, Bear,’ Miranda said, and hung up as I climbed the winding hills into Brentwood. The night walkers disappeared, the only eyes peering from the shadows now the scopes of security cameras and motion sensors.

  Sasha’s house was full of people. Women in form-fitting dresses and towering heels. I saw the faces of a couple of the women I’d known from the time before my great fall, pool-party buddies and ladies I’d jogged the streets with, lamenting the closing of our favourite boutique coffee-roasting house and the price of a good car detailer. A troupe of women bent in the window of the sitting room to watch me walk up the drive in my slippers and Walmart sweatpants, covering
their mouths, holding their wine glasses to their breasts. Oh, what I had become. I didn’t have to knock on the front door. Sasha wrenched it open.

  ‘You have got a lot to answer for,’ she seethed. I put my hands up in surrender.

  ‘Go back to your party,’ I said. ‘I’ll get the gopher.’

  ‘No.’ Sasha followed me to Jamie’s room. ‘Bette Davis Eyes’ was playing on the Sonos system and people were singing along in the yard. My slippers slapped on the marble tiles. ‘I want you to tell me how the hell this happened.’

  Jamie was sitting on his bed, wearing only Super Mario boxer shorts. I’d never seen my child look so beaten, so exhausted with shame. I gathered him in my arms as Sasha closed the door behind us.

  ‘What did you do, you silly little thing?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know it was stupid,’ he sobbed.

  Despite everything, a laugh escaped my lips. ‘What happened, buddy?’

  ‘I put Hugh Jackman away in a shoebox before I went out the back . . .’ He was racked with sobs. ‘And when I came back he was gone. I just wanted a pet.’

  ‘We’ve discussed this.’ Sasha stood in the corner with her arms folded. ‘You can have a dog when you’re sixteen, depending on your grades. You don’t go stealing rats from people’s houses! Rats are not pets!’

  ‘I’ll find it.’ I stood and took Sasha by the shoulders and shifted her towards the door, trying my best not to shove her, though every fibre of my being told me to. ‘Get out, Sasha. Go back to your party.’

  The rat trap wasn’t set. It was closed and unbaited, placed under the dresser, probably a baseless demonstration of Sasha’s anger serving only to terrify the boy. I picked it up and put it on the shelf, lay down on the carpet and looked under every piece of furniture. Jamie sat on the floor next to me while I searched, his head in his hands. I opened his wardrobe and began checking every shoe, wincing as I slid my hand into the toes. In the right shoe of a pair of Nike Air Max 1 Ultras, my fingertips hit warm fur.

  ‘I’ve got good news,’ I said. Jamie lifted his head. I shook the shoe until Hugh Jackman rolled into my palm, a flailing ball of brown with pink paws gripping for purchase. Jamie crawled into my arms and I kissed his head.

  ‘I’m so stupid!’ he cried.

  ‘You are not stupid,’ I told him. I held his cheek and looked at his eyes. ‘You just did a stupid thing. Everybody does that sometimes. Including me. Hell, I’m the queen of doing stupid things. You can’t compete with me on thoughtless acts, Jimbo, so don’t even try.’

  He hugged me. I rocked him a little until his sobs subsided.

  Sasha was standing outside the door when I left Jamie’s bedroom. There were women at the end of the hall staring at us. Erin Gaille, my old tennis partner. Willow O’Leary, a former fellow wine and cheese club member. The famous Francine Readley. I waved. They turned away, huddled together like startled birds. I slipped Hugh Jackman into the pocket of my hoodie and pulled the zipper shut on him.

  ‘I’m going to have to get Jamie a tetanus shot tomorrow morning,’ Sasha said.

  ‘Was he bitten?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Her eyes widened. ‘This is not something you take chances with, Blair.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I get it. Really, I do. I was freaked out by the gopher when I first held it. It’s very rat-like. And the feeling of it crawling on you takes a minute to get used to. But it’s kind of cute if you give it a chance. And think about it, Sasha. If it doesn’t bite you in the first thirty seconds, what the hell is it waiting for?’

  ‘You’re nuts,’ she sighed. ‘You’re just . . . ugh.’

  ‘I get why you—’

  ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘See, this is what you don’t get. Parenting – real parenting – is all about this shit. It’s about saying, “Hey, bringing a wild, flea- and parasite-riddled piece of vermin trash into my house sounds like a fun idea, but I’m not going to do it because my kid might get rabies and die.”’

  ‘Have you looked at the recorded human deaths attributed to gophers?’ I asked. ‘I bet you have.’

  ‘What the hell was his plan?’

  ‘He didn’t have a plan,’ I said. ‘He’s a child. He wanted a pet, saw one and brought it home.’

  ‘And what the hell was your plan?’ She gestured to my pocket. ‘What is a rat doing in your house?’

  ‘I’m babysitting it. It isn’t mine. It belongs to a friend.’

  ‘The friend I saw you getting out of that hideous car with?’ she asked. ‘The one who was covered in blood?’

  ‘Where’s Henry? Maybe I can explain it to him.’

  ‘He’s away.’ Sasha glanced at the women at the end of the hall, tugged at the front of her dress. ‘On business. Just forget it. You can explain in the morning. I’m done with this.’ She waved her hands around me like a magician summoning a rabbit out of a hat, indicating me, my life, my friends, my gopher, the dense cloud of problems I presented on the horizon of her neat, perfect world. ‘Just go.’

  The troupe of women at the sitting room windows was bigger when I left. Expensively sculpted bodies against the gold interior lights. I stopped halfway down the driveway and looked back at them, waiting for them to flee into the house in embarrassment, but they didn’t. They just stared. I flipped them the bird, and all their mouths fell open at once. I smiled as I walked to my car.

  JESSICA

  Sanchez tried to think of nice things that were yellow. Sunflowers. Lemon gelato. Beaches. But the stink of Wallert’s urine rose and rose from the stains she scrubbed at, a heady, feral smell, and all she could think of was his shrivelled, limp penis in his chubby hand, the way the stream twisted as it poured out and pattered on the carpet like the footsteps of a small animal. His arc had been wide, so she shifted on her knees to a new spot, working the carpet cleaner into a pale-yellow foam, pushing the soaked cream fibres this way and that. The T-shirt she had tied around her nose and mouth was damp with sweat. She settled back on her haunches and finally faced the fact that there was only one mental project that would take her away from this moment, from the little yellow stars crowding the cream universe beneath her. She let go, and thought about Blair Harbour.

  She’d been wrong about the cheese sandwich. It was looking as though she’d been wrong about the view through Harbour’s window into the Orlov house. Like Diggy had said, it was possible these were meaningless variables in an otherwise solid case. But Jessica could feel the heat in the darkness. A strange, rising fever that wanted to envelop her. Jessica dried her hands and slid her phone out of her back pocket. She searched for Kristi Zea, Orlov’s girlfriend, the only witness to the murder. There was no social media profile, no links to any information on Zea that didn’t originate from news sites covering Orlov’s murder. That was strange. Zea had been a prolific social media user before the killing, with multiple accounts on different platforms. Jessica guessed the young woman had changed her name, tried to move on to a new life.

  She stood and went to the smashed back window, decided to give the piss stains a rest for a while and see to the broken glass. It wasn’t a good idea to leave it lying here with the Harbour boy jumping the back fence and strolling over any time he wanted. She looked back at the meagre supplies she had bought for the clean-up job. She hadn’t factored in the glass, too revolted by the urine on the carpet. She wondered if there was a broom and trash bags in the garage. She went there, unthinking, and opened the internal door.

  It was the lights that did it. Fluorescents blinking to life, white eyes waking, reflecting on the polished concrete surface of the big, bare space. She remembered different things every time the flashbacks hit her. A sign above the door to the Linscott Place garage, soldered into pine and lovingly polished – ‘Garage-mahal’. A joke gift from a family member, probably. The old battered red couch. Beer fridge. Rug. Framed photographs on the walls, hot rods and football teams, a lime-green Chevrolet parked in a field. The rippling shock of panicked pain that seemed to pass
from her head to her toes as she turned and saw the man crouched over the old woman, bending to take another bite.

  Jessica realised she was on her knees in the middle of the garage of the Bluestone Lane house when the doorbell rang. Her hands were gripping at her own throat, where air refused to pass. She staggered towards the front door, wiped at invisible creeping, itching feelings crawling up her arms and neck. Taking the gun from the counter was a thoughtless action. She didn’t expect any friendly visitors here.

  She wrenched open the door and lifted the gun.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ Jessica sighed, shook her head. The anger was instant, washing over the terror that had gripped her in the garage. She had the gun pointed at the woman on the doorstep, out from her hip, cocked. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  Blair Harbour paused, looked at the gun, then glanced into the street, where a group of women in jogging lycra were standing on the corner, talking. The Harbour woman was older than Jessica remembered. Prison time was etched on her face. Ten years without proper food, sleep or exposure to sunlight. Her chocolatey hair was pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck and her shoes were worn sneakers, the T-shirt and shorts combo something she could probably slap a cap on and call a uniform at whatever shitty job she’d managed to acquire since her release.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Blair said. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘You must be lost. Your son’s house is over the back. I have nothing to say to you. I’ll give you thirty seconds head start, and then I’m calling the cops.’ She flicked the gun sideways. ‘Go now.’

  ‘Look, I just want to talk to you.’

  ‘Beat it. This is your first and only warning.’

  ‘It’s not about my case.’

  Harbour held her hands up. Her eyes were big, full of emotion. Jessica remembered her at the defence table. How those soulful eyes had wandered through the jury, assessing faces as they looked at the crime scene photographs. The big blue eyes of a curious deer, like her son had.

  ‘It’s not about my son, either,’ Harbour said when Jessica didn’t answer. ‘He seems to like you living here.’