What's Done in Darkness

by Laura McHugh

  There were no framed pictures, no family photographs. For the last several years that I lived at home, my family hadn’t owned a camera. My mother insisted that photographs were vain and unnecessary. To my knowledge, not a single picture of my whole family—my three brothers, my sister, Sylvie, our parents, and me—existed. I had a photo of Sylvie holding a chicken at the Darlings’ farm when we were helping to gather eggs. Tom Darling had taken it with his grandmother’s Polaroid, and I kept the picture in a small album in my nightstand, not daring to expose it to light, lest it fade.

  I climbed into bed with my laptop and, in the safety of my room, allowed myself to think about Farrow and the things he had said. I avoided the news as much as possible, because it tended to make me feel anxious and overwhelmed, so I hadn’t heard anything about the missing girl he had mentioned. I googled “Abby Donnelly Missouri,” trying different spellings of the first and last names, and when nothing relevant came up, I typed “Abby missing.” The top hits were for Abby Hernandez, who had been held captive for nine months before being released and leading police to her captor. The further I scrolled, the more missing Abbys came up. Too many. But no Abby Donnelly.

  I put the laptop away and took the photo album from my nightstand drawer. The picture of Sylvie was on the first page. My sister’s long hair streamed loosely over her shoulder, dark gold like molasses, hazel eyes squinting in the light, sunburn pinking her cheeks and nose. Her mouth wide with laughter. I tried to remember the sound of her laugh and couldn’t be sure that I had it right.

  I flipped through the rest of the pages, all of them blank, until I found the envelope I’d stashed near the back, postmarked Wisteria, Arkansas, the address penned in my mother’s handwriting. I unfolded the single sheet of notebook paper inside.

  Dear Sarabeth,

  Your sister Sylvia is engaged to be married, and it is her wish to invite you to the wedding, to have her family join together in celebrating this blessed occasion.

  I’d read the letter over and over in the days since I’d received it, and each time my heart withered at the thought of Sylvie getting married at sixteen. I’d thought I would bring her to live with me someday, that I could rescue her, like I had been rescued. Give her a chance to live her own life. Now I was too late.

  I’d wished so many times that I could call her, talk to her, but our parents had gotten rid of the phone after I left. Too many reporters calling. I wrote to them, but news from home was rare and filtered through Mama, like the letter about the engagement. We are overjoyed by the path God has chosen for your sister. Of course Mama was overjoyed, but what about Sylvie?

  I blamed myself. Maybe if I had stayed and gotten married, they wouldn’t be forcing this on her so soon. No way I could sit in the audience at my sister’s wedding without screaming objections and trying to drag her out of the church. I hadn’t written back yet, hadn’t decided what I was going to do.

  I returned the letter to its hiding place, put the album back in the drawer, and switched off the lamp. No nightmares, I whispered to myself. No nightmares, no nightmares, no nightmares. I kept a night-light burning, just bright enough to reveal the outlines of my dresser, chair, and bookcase, so that I’d immediately know where I was if I woke up in the night. I wasn’t afraid of the dark after what had happened. It wasn’t the dark itself that threatened but the things hidden beneath its shroud, and some of those things moved just as easily in daylight.

  CHAPTER 2

  SARABETH, THEN

  AGE 14

  “I made this for you.” Mama stepped into the bedroom I shared with Sylvie and handed me a booklet covered with flowered shelf paper. I opened it, noting the care she’d taken with the booklet’s construction, how she’d folded the sticky paper into sharp points at each corner and pasted a piece of sturdy white paper inside the front cover. My name was printed there in ballpoint pen. Sarabeth Shepherd.

  The first page was filled with Mama’s slanted handwriting. When I was younger, I’d watch her write out our weekly chore chart and imagine that her slanted words were in a hurry, hunched forward and walking purposefully, perhaps into a strong wind. In the booklet, each line was perfectly spaced, as though she’d placed a ruler beneath her pen as she wrote.

  Guide for Godly Girls

  Daddy is the head of our household, and we will be obedient and mindful of his headship at all times.

  We will dress modestly and appropriately. Clothing must provide proper coverage and not cling to the flesh.

  We will wear our hair long and abstain from cutting it. 1 Corinthians 11:15: “But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.”

  We will learn and practice the womanly arts of the home, including cooking, sewing, cleaning, and childcare.

  We will avoid unwholesome and unhealthy influences and activities in all forms.

  I flipped through, wondering if the entire book was filled with rules, more than I’d be able to remember, let alone obey, but most of the pages were blank.

  “You can use it to take notes in Bible study, write down prayers,” she said. “You know, like a journal. I made one for Sylvie, too.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I knew she had put a lot of effort into trying to make it pretty, though I wasn’t sure why. Daddy was always preaching about the beauty of keeping things plain and simple, probably because we couldn’t afford anything fancy or store-bought since he’d quit his job as a traveling salesman. I’d been using a spiral-bound notebook for Sunday school, my Bible study notes consisting mainly of doodles, expanding geometric patterns like Eli and I used to make with the Spirograph before Mama donated it, along with most of the other toys, to the Salvation Army. I wouldn’t dare put my prayers down on paper, because I didn’t doubt that my mother would open up the little book and read them. Dear God, please let us move back to town.

  “I know you miss your friends from school,” she said, squeezing my arm. “There have been lots of changes. But you’ll understand one day, this is all for the best.” Her skin was flushed with the excitement of her conviction, belief humming through her like an electric current. I felt the energy through the sleeve of my dress where her fingers gripped my flesh.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She nodded and released me, satisfied with my response. When she left, I placed the booklet next to my Bible on the otherwise-empty shelf. Mama had cleared out my Little House books after deciding that Laura Ingalls, despite her long hair and dresses, was impertinent, and then came back to confiscate the Chronicles of Narnia, which she had recently realized were fantasy books, despite my insistence that C. S. Lewis was a Christian author.

  Three months after moving to the farm, the slant-ceilinged room still felt barren, uninviting. Two twin beds for me and Sylvie, each neatly made with plain white sheets and yellow polyester blankets. A shared dresser that had come with the house, the musty drawers holding our socks and underwear and the long dresses Mama had sewn for us, plus one that I’d sewn myself, the pleats of the skirt gathered incorrectly, the hem wildly uneven. The plank floor was covered with a homemade rag rug. In our old house, in town, my bedroom had baby-blue shag carpeting and puffy valances that looked like clouds, and my bookshelf had been packed tight with library books and board games.

  We had been a fairly normal family. Mama was the religious one, a preacher’s daughter. She stayed home with us while Daddy worked. We went to church and Sunday school and Bible study and Bible camp, but so did most everyone else we knew. I was in seventh grade at Wisteria Middle School when Daddy got into a terrible accident on the way home from his route, his sedan pleated up like an accordion between two semis, trapping him but miraculously leaving just enough room for him to survive. He blacked out and woke to flames, which he thought were the fires of Hell, and by the time the firemen cut him out of the car and whisked him into
an ambulance, he’d had an epiphany.

  He was a sinner, he said—he had actually lined us up on the couch, even the younger kids, and confessed, to our great discomfort and confusion, to lustful thoughts about a truck-stop waitress in Fayetteville—but God had saved him for some reason. It became clear to him, upon deep prayer and reflection, that he had been given a second chance at life for the sake of his family. He would rededicate himself to the Lord and do everything he could to protect us from the evils of the world and ensure that our souls were saved, so the next time flames rose up and he was plucked from this earthly life, it would be by God’s hand, and not the Devil’s pitchfork.

  It seemed a bit extreme, and it made me wonder if Daddy had done more than fantasize about the waitress, if it was Mama rather than God who had forced his epiphany.

  He sold our house in town and bought a small farm, where we could live simply and raise modest crops to survive. We joined Holy Rock, the church Retta’s family belonged to, and Mama started homeschooling us. She replaced all my pants and Sylvie’s with long skirts and dresses. The boys got to keep their sneakers, but when they wore out, they’d be replaced with ugly brown work boots.

  In the beginning, it almost felt like an adventure, playing at being pioneers, like the Ingalls family in my Little House books. The novelty wore off quickly, like cheap varnish. I missed my school friends, the roller rink, sleepovers. I even missed things that had annoyed me before, like grocery shopping. I remembered sitting in the car one day after school while Mama ran into the Price Chopper for milk and cereal, hunched down in the seat so no one would see me at the cheaper of Wisteria’s two grocery stores. I’d flipped between radio stations, wishing she’d hurry up, thinking that I couldn’t possibly be more bored. Now I would have given anything to go to the store and run into someone I knew, to buy a box of Froot Loops and listen to the radio, to be surrounded by familiar comforts and feel like I was part of the outside world. At times the hunger for my old life flared into a desperate animal need to escape, and one night I had snuck out to see if I could walk to town, but it was so dark and we were so far from anything that I finally gave up and turned around.

  “Hey.” Eli leaned into the room, holding on to the doorframe. Mama had buzzed his hair too short the night before and it looked funny, his exposed scalp paler than his face, but that sort of thing didn’t bother him. “Daddy said to go over to the Darlings and help with the walnuts.”

  We’d bought our land from Mr. and Mrs. Darling, whose son had owned it before he died. Their much larger farm bordered ours, and they were teaching us all the things we didn’t know about homesteading, which was pretty much everything. They had loaned us equipment, helped with repairs, brought us food under the guise of Mrs. Darling getting overly ambitious with her canning. Daddy didn’t like to accept charity or feel indebted to anyone, so he’d made a standing offer to help out whenever they needed an extra set of hands.

  Mr. and Mrs. Darling would invite us over for a few simple chores and then find excuses for Eli and me to hang around. I had the feeling they did it for Tom, their grandson. He was two years younger than Eli and a year older than me, and he’d moved in with his grandparents after his father’s arms were severed in a hay baler. Tom told us that his dad had survived the accident but later drowned himself in the pond because he didn’t want to live without arms, unable to drive a tractor or manage livestock or do any of the things a farmer needs to do. Mr. Darling had said his son died from complications after the accident, not that he’d killed himself. I didn’t know which version of the story was true.

  Eli and I walked up the Darlings’ gravel drive. Their farmhouse was nicer and prettier than ours, with a wide front porch and bay windows, the barn red with white trim and a weathervane on top, like something out of a picture book. Zinnias and sweet peas filled the flower beds on either side of the steps. Mrs. Darling liked to pick them and put bouquets in old pickle jars and perfume bottles all around the house, even in the bathroom. The more you cut them, she had told me, the more they bloom.

  Tom was sitting on the steps waiting when we walked up. He swiped his wheat-colored hair away from his forehead and stood up to greet us, his gangly frame unfolding like the jointed paper skeleton we used to hang on our front door back when we still celebrated Halloween.

  “Hey,” he said, grinning, his head swiveling back and forth from me to Eli. “Grampa said we can take the Gator.”

  Tom had told us he knew how to operate every bit of machinery on the farm, including the combine and loader, but since the baler accident, the Gator was the only thing Mr. Darling would let him use. It resembled a golf cart, and while riding around the farm with Tom wasn’t exactly like cruising the Wisteria strip with friends, it was as close as Eli and I would get.

  We parked in a grove of walnut trees that bordered the pond. Knee-high weeds and sticker bushes grew unchecked all the way to the water’s edge. “Watch out,” Tom said. “It’s hard to see the nuts in the grass. They’ll roll your ankle if you step on ’em wrong.”

  I found one with my foot and picked it up, the rotted husk falling away from the shell, its odor pungent but not unpleasant.

  “You guys didn’t bring gloves?” Tom asked.

  We shook our heads.

  “Here,” he said, handing me the pair he’d brought for himself. “Walnuts’ll stain your hands worse than shoe polish.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Won’t bother me none. Usually we get ’em in the fall, when the husks are still green. Grampa cracks ’em and Gramma puts ’em in her Christmas fudge. But we didn’t get around to it last year.”

  I wondered if that was because of the pond, if Mr. and Mrs. Darling couldn’t bear to go near the place where their son had drowned, assuming Tom’s version of the story was true. It would be hard to have that reminder of death so close to home.

  Tom kept his back to the pond as we worked, collecting the walnuts in a five-gallon bucket. He talked nonstop, like he’d been saving up things to say for a long time and didn’t have anyone else to tell them to—and maybe he didn’t. We’d figured out that we knew some of the same kids from town, but if he had friends other than Eli and me, he never mentioned them.

  Tom stopped talking long enough to rub sweat off his face, leaving a dark smear across his forehead like a bruise, his nails stained black. “You guys wanna get some sodas?”

  Eli hesitated, but I was already stripping off my gloves. “Sure,” I said. “Thank you.” Sodas were another relic of our past, though I wasn’t certain if they’d been banished out of a general sense of austerity or if sugar and caffeine had crowded onto the list of sins.

  We took the Gator back to the house and went in through the kitchen door. The boys scrubbed their hands and then Tom got Cokes out of the fridge. There were bouquets of flowers on the table, the windowsill, and the sideboard, where a green spider had strung a dainty web between a sweet pea blossom and the handle of a teacup.

  “Gramma,” Tom called into the sitting room. “The Shepherd kids are here.”

  There was creaking and shuffling as Mrs. Darling got up from her armchair and hobbled in. She wore a housedress with an embroidered apron over the top. “Sorry it took me a minute to say a proper hello,” she said, rubbing her swollen knuckles. “Must’ve nodded off watching my stories.” She glanced at the sweating red can in Eli’s hand, and I instinctively moved to hide mine in the folds of my skirt, worried that she would snatch it away, that our mother had told her we weren’t allowed.

  “Tommy, are there any cookies left to put out for our guests?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, his ears reddening.

  She shook her head apologetically. “My arthritis has been acting up,” she said. “Haven’t been able to keep up with the baking. I swear we go through a loaf of bread and a dozen cookies a day.”

  Eli nudged his elbow
into my arm. “Sarabeth is a great baker,” he said. “If you’re needing some help.” I jabbed back at him. Since we no longer had the luxury of going to the store for a loaf of Wonder Bread, our mother had enlisted me to help with the baking, a dull and endless chore that meant hours in a sweltering kitchen under her constant scrutiny.

  “Is that so?” Mrs. Darling asked.

  Eli pressed his cold Coke against my back. I turned my head just enough to glare at him inconspicuously. He widened his eyes, dug the Coke into my kidney. Smiled. Put the can to his lips and took a long, blissful sip.

  I got the message. There were more Cokes in the fridge, a whole row. I had seen them. Chocolate milk, too. And little cups of Swiss Miss butterscotch pudding like the ones Mama used to pack in our lunches in grade school. From the living room came the familiar strains of The Young and the Restless theme. Our grandma had watched it religiously. You could almost imagine, in the Darlings’ kitchen, that life went on as before, that we were normal kids who could do normal things. I turned back to Mrs. Darling.

  “I do love to bake,” I said in my sweetest, most virtuous voice. “I’d be happy to help out, if you’d like.”

  Our father would not say no. He had deemed the Darlings Good Christian People, even if they did have a television, and he’d do almost anything to repay their compassion and generosity. I’d bake for them every day if it meant spending time in their kitchen instead of ours, drinking soda and listening to the TV, surrounded by reminders of the outside world, and, best of all, no one standing over me, lecturing me on all my failures, practical, spiritual, and otherwise.