Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

“Why are you here, Mr. Cooper?”

“I told you.”

“But that was only one reason.” He’d give her points for intuition.

“Honestly? I’m wondering what your racket is.”

She didn’t say anything, just held his eyes with that neutral gaze she had. What would it take to really piss her off? Jones wondered. Maggie was always accusing him of trying to get a rise out of people. It wasn’t true, generally speaking. He just couldn’t stand the fake stuff. Anger was real. Sometimes he liked to see a person get her feathers ruffled, just to see who she really was.

“Yesterday you came to me out of nowhere with dire predictions about my pending doom, among other things. You told me, too, that I was getting a reputation, that people were going to start coming to me for more things. Later that day the Hollows PD asks me to consult on a cold case to which it turns out you and Ray Muldune are connected. I guess I’m not a big fan of coincidence.”

She smiled at him, and it was genuinely warm. It lit up her face. He realized that she might have been pretty once, petite and dark-eyed, maybe even pixieish. She might have laughed and been happy in another life. But something had drained all the color from her, cored her out.

“I didn’t expect to like you, Mr. Cooper,” said Eloise.

In spite of himself, he smiled back. He didn’t expect to like her, either. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. He did find her interesting, though, a curiosity. The pieces of her didn’t fit together. He didn’t say any of those things.

She came to sit across from him again. “There’s no racket. I just say what I see. People can take it or leave it. I get that it’s not easy to accept things you can’t understand. It took me a full decade to accept what was happening to me.”

She gestured around her run-down kitchen, with the old appliances and peeling wallpaper. “As you can see, I’m not exactly living high on the hog.”

“Money’s not everything.”

Eloise sighed then, rubbed her head with a slim thumb and forefinger.

“I think it’s time for you to go. You want me to prove to you that I am what I say I am. Or you want to prove to yourself that I’m a fraud so that you don’t have to fret about my predictions. But neither one of those things is going to happen today. I’ll tell Ray you’ll be calling on him. He probably has more to contribute to the conversation than I do.”

She rose and walked down the hallway toward the door. After a second, Jones followed. He looked at the photos on the wall, two girls growing up in picture frames-babies in the bath, dance recitals, on horseback, prom. One blond, one dark. One favoring Eloise, one not. There were shots of a much younger Eloise. Jones found himself staring. The woman in the photographs-smiling, vibrant, bright-eyed-bore so little resemblance to the woman before him that out of context he would never have recognized her. There was a candid shot from her wedding; she wore a slim lace gown. Her smile was wide; her eyes were wet. She gripped her happy husband’s arm with one hand, a bouquet of roses in the other. Whatever had happened between that frame and the present moment had sucked the life from her. It wasn’t just age. The woman patiently waiting for him at the door was a specter, a ghost by comparison. Jones found himself pushing back an eddy of sadness.

He joined her at the door. She wouldn’t look at him, just stared outside.

“If you remember anything about Marla Holt…” he said. He let the sentence trail as he stepped onto the porch and took in the ill-kempt yard. He thought about offering to rake her leaves. They were going to kill the grass. And she was obviously not in any condition to be doing lawn work.

“I have a feeling we’ll be staying in touch, Mr. Cooper.”

“Call me Jones,” he said.

“Good-bye, Jones.”

He was about to turn back and say something about the leaves, but she had already quietly closed the door.

The baby was sleeping, and it was exactly one hour and thirty minutes before she had to leave to pick up Cammy from aftercare. Paula Carr made herself a cup of tea in the microwave, waiting in front of it so that she could turn it off before the buzzer sounded. Then she brought her cup with her to the couch, stepping over the toy truck she’d been meaning to move all day, and sat, releasing a deep breath.

This was the only time she had to think, to breathe and figure out what she was going to do. The rest of the day raced by in a blur of caregiving-breakfast, nursing, dropping off, grocery shopping, nursing, peekaboo, cleaning, nursing, starting dinner, picking up Cameron, snack, bath time, stories, on and on. It was absolutely manic from 6:00 A.M. until 7:30 P.M. She was firm on that bedtime for the little ones. Otherwise she wasn’t even a person. Without that time she wondered when she’d ever be just Paula-not Claire and Cameron’s mom, Kevin’s wife, Cole’s stepmother.

Kevin didn’t even know that she left Cameron in school for aftercare sometimes. She paid for it out of the account he didn’t know she had, either. As she looked out the window to her backyard, she felt a twinge of guilt about it, followed by a swell of anxiety. What if he finds out? The leaves were falling from the trees, and the sky was a flat gray.

For some reason, when they’d married, she hadn’t closed her savings account right away. At the time there was only a little money in there, just under a thousand dollars. She kept meaning to take care of it, but then she just forgot. Did she forget ? Or did some small part of her think it was a good idea to have a place, however small, that he didn’t know about?

It was perhaps eighteen months into their marriage when she started contributing money to it, money her mother gave her for Christmas and birthdays, money she was able to skim off the household budget. Then, a few months ago, her aunt Janie had died. Janie knew. More than anyone else, Janie knew that something was not right with Paula.

“Are you all right, honey?” she’d ask at the end of their weekly conversations. “Is everything okay?”

“Of course, Janie. Don’t be silly,” Paula would answer. Because she really wanted things to be okay. And more than that, she really wanted everyone else to think things were okay. And not just okay, perfect. Perfect marriage. Perfect children. Perfect Paula. She couldn’t bear it otherwise. She couldn’t stand the thought of people feeling sorry for her, thinking she’d failed. Because, on some level, weren’t people a little happier when things were not okay with other people? Didn’t it make them feel a little superior, a little better about themselves?

Surprisingly, Kevin had allowed her to take Claire and Cammy to Janie’s funeral. She’d figured he would insist on going, or demand that she go alone and come back right away. But he’d seemed to be eager for her to go, to take the kids, stay the weekend if she wanted. It wasn’t until later that she’d understood why. He’d waved, smiling in the driveway, and she’d watched him get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. The baby started to cry.

“Why is she always crying?” Cammy wanted to know. He glanced over at his little sister with interest.

“She’s just a baby,” Paula said. “She doesn’t have any words yet. She’ll fall asleep soon.”

“Why isn’t Dad coming?” He had that tone. It was pre-meltdown. Wobbly, petulant. Cammy always wanted his dad, even though Kevin was absent, vacant most of the time with the kids, especially the baby. She wondered why that was, that the parent who gave the least was wanted the most.

“He’s busy this weekend,” she said, forcing an easy brightness into her voice. “But Pop-Pop will be there to play with you.”