Into That Darkness (11 page)
She went back in. She went in and up the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom and in the darkness she turned the handle and the door swung softly open. The room stank.
The barber's wife was feverish.
Cole? she called weakly. Is that you? What's going on?
Don't turn on a light, Anna Mercia said.
The wife was fumbling in the sheets and then the flashlight flared on and cut a slow beam across the ceiling and down the wall and lit up Anna Mercia where she stood.
Oh god, the wife began to cry. Oh god what have you done to him.
She was drenched in the barber's blood. She stood in that doorway studying the barber's wife and then she felt suddenly sick. She could not do it. She knew this woman would not live out the week. She was trembling with the thought of what she had come back to do and she could not do it.
Where is he? the barber's wife was crying. What did you do to him?
Anna Mercia said nothing. The heavy woman could not stir from the bed. Anna Mercia went to the closet and sifted through the clothes on the floor there and stripped off the grey sweater and pulled on a shirt and made her way back out of the room, ignoring the wife's cries.
In the living room she stood for a long time staring out at the orange sky and she did not understand why she did not leave at once. She went to her phone and picked up the handset and listened but there was no dial tone. She put it back. Under a bundle of coats she found a pair of her hiking boots and laced them on awkwardly, holding the long laces in her teeth. Then went back down the hallway and into the burned bathroom and saw that the candle had smouldered down but was not yet out. The barber lay unmoving in his blood. The candle leaned unmoving in its wax. She looked at him and she did not blow out the candle and after a time she left.
The hour was late. She walked in the middle of the street along the dividing line. She had not walked twenty minutes before she slowed, and sat heavily, gulping air.
Don't you stop here
, she thought to herself.
Don't you stop, Anna Mercia. Don't you stop.
But she just curled up onto her side and started to shake.
She closed her eyes. Then she felt the ground shiver under her, and she opened her eyes in fear, and saw headlights approaching very slowly. The asphalt was cool under her cheek where she lay and after a time she lowered her head and closed her eyes.
They wanted so much, our mothers. I think about it sometimes. I don't
know how they did it. They wanted their lives back but still felt responsible
for ours.
I miss having her to talk to, there's so much I'd ask. She was a secretary
in a private school and I think of the paperwork and the staples, the
dry air and the paycheque and the feel of a day's work behind her and
how much she must have wanted it. I don't think my father liked it.
But men get as much without judgment. Or so it seems when you're not
a man, and you watch them pass freely from the breakfast table to their
cars in the morning. It looks so easy. Of course it's not, it's not easy for
anyone. But it's harder for a woman, the costs are physical. Men don't
feel the pain of possibilities in the same way, the permanence of choice.
At the end of her life, bed-bound by illness, my mother said to me, Don't
let anyone tell you you can have everything. You can't. A woman has to
choose.
I don't think she ever got over my father. I could see it as a girl even
if I couldn't explain it. She met him at a swimming race in the Okanagan
in
1964
. He was the only black man there. He beat everyone in the
race easily, everyone except my mother. She was famous for a while for
winning that race. She had a newspaper clipping somewhere with her
lifting a trophy, smiling. My father was standing beside her and you
could just see his arm and shoulder cropped on the right.
I think sometimes about what my mother said. All my life I guess I
was living under that. You don't choose your parents, you don't choose
what they go through. I guess as a girl I understood I was meant to pick,
that I couldn't have both as she'd tried for, couldn't have both a family
and a career. That idea guided me for so long, the awful strictness of it.
When I learned I was pregnant with Kat I cried for days. I hate to think
about it now. I didn't choose to change. You can make all the decisions in
the world, it doesn't mean your body will listen to any of them. Kat,
Katherine. My beautiful Katherine. She was a hard labour. Mason came
out easy as anything, like he just couldn't wait to get to know the world.
Not Kat.
I don't know if anyone gets to have everything. But I don't know that
you have to choose either. I was almost thirty before I realized that was
my mother's life and not mine. I think about Kat and Mason and I worry
what I must be pushing on them without knowing it. I know it's something.
It's always something.
What is it, son? the old man asked. Did you hear it again?
Mason nodded.
From downstairs?
Yes.
The old man grunted and came into the study with the candle stub in his fist. It's nothing, he said. I hear things too. There's nothing down there.
Mason watched the old man set the tray on the edge of an upturned chair. He was coming back to himself now and he could feel his thoughts righting themselves and he did not fear the old man as he had.
He had followed him to this place. An old house gabled and shuttered. A tall door below had opened into gloom, into a narrow dim staircase leading up to the landing, the banister creaking and rickety under his sore hands as the old man ascended before him. All this he remembered now as if it were not real. Above the wainscotting were photographs of worlds long vanished, and where he sat with his back to the wall he could just make out the ghostly half-eroded faces in their frames.
It's just the shock of what we've been through, the old man was saying. It does things.
But Mason knew it was not the shock. He lifted his head.
The old man was very pale, and very tall, and the folds of skin under his eyes were deep and grooved in the candlelight. He kneeled and with a small brush swept aside the crumbled plaster on the desk and shook out the battered books and set out the tins of food he had found. His big hands were trembling badly. Sometimes he would clear his throat and the sound reminded the boy of ships in the harbour in the dark water. He remembered his grandfather's small suitcase on the bed and the feeling in him of farewell. He thought then of his mother and then he thought:
Kat
will never believe me and will never believe this but she will believe
Mom. I will find her but first I will find Mom and I will not be afraid no
matter what.
It's getting dark, the old man said then. He leaned back in the gloom picking at his hands and eyeing Mason aslant. We'll have to hide that candle. I don't want people in the street to see it.
What about people in the house. Should they be able to see it?
The old man said nothing.
What.
The old man gave him a long look. You know what, he said.
Then he picked up a can of chili and opened it very slowly and bent the lid back and passed it across. Mason took it but did not eat.
There was no glass in the big window frame and the evening was blowing coldly in. A low grey ocean of light beyond the stoven roofs and laddered telephone poles flared first a deep blue then burned translucent and faded as if sucked down over the rim of the world. The day was failing. He thought of his mother out there in that city and then he tried very hard not to think.
The candle stub had been set melted into a broken-legged stool and pooled now white and eerie in the hollows of his burnished hands where he sat and he watched the old man rise with a lantern shutter and cover the flame with its orange shade, the glare softening and smouldering on in the high, coved ceiling.
I grew up here, the old man said. In this house. Did I tell you that?
No.
He opened and closed his fist in the bad light. A long harrowed scar rode in the white flesh. He said, Well I did. I can remember being your age and standing where you are now and watching my grandfather in the yard in the fall. You could smell the warm pies in the oven from right across the fields when the cook left the windows open. All this was pasture then.
I don't like it here, Mason said.
My grandfather kept a cow and you could hear her bell when she came near the house. The old man looked up suddenly. This is as safe a place as any, son. I promise you.
Mason was watching the darkness spilling in through the broken hall.
Aren't you hungry at all? the old man asked.
No.
Because you look like you could eat a horse. Are you sure?
Mason turned back to the window. A dog was barking somewhere in the twilight.
You can be happy in your life at a certain point and not be able to imagine ever being happier, the old man went on in his low voice. And then you get old and everything is different and it's a different kind of happiness.
Mason thought he was speaking now to someone that he could not see and he shivered. You should check again, he said stubbornly. You should go downstairs and check again.
The old man nodded but he did not move. This was my grandfather's house, he said. I know it as well as I know anything. There's nothing here but ghosts and memories. I don't mean real ghosts.
No.
My grandfather was a judge, he said. He was a wealthy man. I didn't wonder about it as a boy but after his death I did. This isn't a big house. At the time I supposed he'd donated his money to some charity or other. But that wasn't it. Do you want to know something very strange?
Mason rubbed at his crumpled sleeves, his fingernails outlined in dirt.
What, he said.
Fifteen years after his death I received a letter. It was from a woman in Italy, a very old woman, who wanted to meet with me. In her youth she had been an actress on the stage. It seems my grandfather had sent monthly cheques to her for almost thirty years. Nearly his entire fortune went to her. Can you imagine?
Mason said nothing.
In the letter she included a little ivory hairbrush, as if for a doll, and a faded blue ribbon. I have no idea what these objects meant to her. I don't know what she was to him. I don't know whether he met her after my grandmother died, or before. Love is a strange thing, son. It's judged harshly during its lifetime and then kindly afterwards. Mason watched the old man frown as if to think over this last statement and then raise his dark eyes. I returned her letters unopened, after the first one. I never met with the woman. I suppose she must be dead now. And now do you know I wish almost more than anything that I had met with her. It is almost my only regret.
Maybe she wanted money.
Maybe. But I don't think it was money she was after. Money doesn't mean as much when you get old.
Mason turned and peered out at the hall.
What is it, son?
You didn't hear that?
The old man shook his head.
But then it came again, unmistakable. A clattering from somewhere deep inside the house. The scrape of boots across a wood floor, kicking aside masonry.
That
, he hissed.
The old man held up a hand and the sound fell away in a shirr of drapes from the room beyond. His dark eyes were doubtful. It sounded like the furnace, he said.
It wasn't the furnace.
Well. This old house makes some strange noises.
The wall where Mason sat was canted to one side and there was a buckle running along the hardwood floor and he thought,
It is not safe not here and I know that. I do not know what he wants but
I will not forget no matter what. I will stay only as long as I need to and
no longer. I will stay only until the morning and no longer.
In the morning I'll go to look for your mother, the old man said.
Mason looked up, startled.
You don't have to come if you don't want to, son.
But as the old man said this he would not meet his eye and Mason all at once understood.
He does not believe it
, he thought.
He does not believe he will find her. But it does not matter what he
believes.
He did not want to speak but then he looked up and then he spoke. You don't think we'll find her, he said. He could hear the hurt in his voice and it sounded like anger but it was not anger. She's not dead, he said.
The old man's eyes were leached and sad. Okay, he said.
Okay what. Don't say okay. You don't mean it.
No. I guess I don't.
Do you know where she is now?
No, son. I don't.
That's right. You don't.
The old man regarded him strangely.
Don't look at me like that, Mason said.
He had been speaking loudly and it was the most he had spoken since the tremor and he felt exhausted by the effort.
The old man turned his head towards the doorway.
Jesus Christ, he said.
He got to his feet.
Mason looked across in alarm.
A figure stood there. Lean and whip thin and wrapped in a white bedsheet unwinding like smoke in the dark hall. It wore heavy boots and stood in the doorway staring down at them and its eyes were as yellow as a dog's. In one fist it held a rifle.
Jesus Christ, the old man said again.
And then it was like some muscled thing was uncoiling inside the stranger and slowly raising itself swaying before them and then the stranger spoke.
You scared me, he said. His voice was very soft. I thought I was alone in here. You two are like ghosts. You are as quiet as ghosts.