Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

“And I just keep thinking that I’m losing it. I’m not good at this anymore. And if I’m not good at this, then what? I was a bad husband, a mediocre father.” He turned to Eloise. “I’m not even an especially good friend. Look at you. You’re drained dry, and here I am asking for more.”

She put her hand to the back of his neck.

“We gave everything to this, didn’t we?” he said. “Everything.”

“Yes,” she said. “We did.”

She didn’t say that she had already lost everything when she came to this. That it had been thrust upon her. She hadn’t chosen it, as he had. The fact that she’d frightened Amanda off, that Amanda kept Eloise’s grandchildren far away from her-that was collateral damage. That was Amanda’s choice; Eloise was powerless against it. She’d have shut it off if she could have. She’d have rejected her sight, the work, all of it, for the love of her family, if only the choice had been offered. She didn’t say any of that.

“It’s okay, Ray,” she said. “You’ve done a lot of good in your life. You’ve helped a lot of people.”

He gave a slow, uncertain nod. She looked at the hard ridge of his forehead, the broken line of his nose. When he leaned in to kiss her, she didn’t push him away. She let his soft mouth touch hers, tentative and slow at first, then deeper. He had this way of holding her that she’d always loved. He wrapped his arms around her back, enveloping her completely. She put hers around his neck and took him all in-the wide expanse of his chest, the stubble on his jaw, the fading scent of the cigar he’d deny having smoked.

“Ah, Eloise,” he whispered. “It’s been so long.”

Once upon a time, making love was about flesh and beauty. It was about his muscles and his thick head of hair. It was about the heat between her legs. Her desire for Ray had been guilty and breathless. They’d rip at each other’s clothes. He used to enter her in a desperate rush, and she’d cry out in her pleasure. Tonight it was something else. Something slow and quiet, something they’d earned rather than something they’d stolen. She reached for the light, but he stopped her.

“I want to look at you.”

And he was right. She wanted to be seen, even though her beauty had faded and life had worn her down. And she wanted to see him, how the hairs on his chest had gone gray and the lines on his face had deepened into valleys. And it was all so imperfect- they were so imperfect-that she knew it was real. It wasn’t gauzy or indistinct like her visions; she wasn’t dreaming as she sometimes did about her life before. And after they were done, lay curled up in each other, Eloise found that for the first time in years she was hungry.

There was a warm scent to the room, something earthy and sweet. And there was a golden quality to the light. The sofa was plush, with big, soft pillows that Willow could hold upon her lap and hug with both her arms. And when she walked through the door, these things-as well as Dr. Cooper’s warm smile and how she always offered something warm to drink-caused the tension to leave her shoulders. She felt like she could breathe more easily in here than anywhere else in her world.

Willow told that to her mother. Even though her mother had said she was glad, her voice got that tightness. Willow knew she’d hurt Bethany’s feelings somehow by saying that. Willow couldn’t imagine why that would hurt her mother’s feelings. It had nothing to do with her. And Bethany wondered why Willow never wanted to talk.

Willow sank into the couch and fought off the urge to curl up and go to sleep. Here she had the sense that everything that was wrong with her would wait outside the door, unable to enter until she had rested. She could just be for an hour; she could just be honest.

“I hear you’ve had a rough couple of days,” said the doctor.

Dr. Cooper had already made her some hot chocolate and settled into the chair across from Willow. She had a way of talking, a softness to her tone. Like she knew all about it but didn’t judge. Which was new, because Willow felt like she was always being judged-by her friends, by her teachers, even by her mother. Judged and coming up short. She didn’t feel like that here. Not that Dr. Cooper ever let her off the hook for bad behavior. She bored in, wanting to know why and what Willow was thinking and how she might do better next time. It was exhausting sometimes to look so closely at the things she’d done. Willow was often angry and frustrated, sometimes embarrassed. Sometimes here she cried. But she never felt judged.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

“Want to talk about it?”

She relayed the events of the last couple of days. And Dr. Cooper listened in that careful way she had, nodding, making low, affirming noises. She didn’t interrupt, as Willow’s mother did with pointless questions that confused Willow (“Why did you think that was okay?”) and exclamations that shamed her (“Oh, my God, Willow!”). And so Willow found herself opening up. If she cried, Dr. Cooper didn’t fawn over her, just handed her a box of tissues, told her it was okay to let her emotions out.

“So what was going on with you inside, Willow? It seems to me like you’ve been doing a lot of running away-cutting school, leaving the library to go out to the graveyard with your friends. What are you running from? Or to?”

Willow shrugged. She hadn’t really seen it that way before. “I was trying to get some space, I guess.”

“What does that mean to you?”

“Like, you know, when your backpack is too heavy or your pants are too tight. That feeling you have when you put the bag down or unbutton your jeans, that relief. Like that. I just wanted that feeling.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

There was a crystal prism hanging in the window. The afternoon light shining through cast rainbow flecks on the far wall. Willow wanted to walk over and spin it, make the rainbows dance like fairies.

“You said something similar when we talked about the events in New York,” observed Dr. Cooper. “You said you just wanted to step out of your skin, you wanted to be someone else.”

Dr. Cooper was the first person to whom Willow had ever told the whole truth about what happened in New York. She was the only person Willow had ever told about that dark, angry, dead feeling she had inside sometimes. How she’d just wanted to get away from herself.

“It’s not quite the same,” the doctor went on. “But it has a similar essence.”

“No,” said Willow. “It wasn’t as bad as that.”

In New York it was about the lie that grew and grew. It took on a life of its own, getting more complicated, harder to manage. At first it made her feel good, powerful-the story about the concert and the boy she met there. Then it started to make her feel sick. But she still needed to do it, almost couldn’t stop herself, even when she wanted to. The lie just kept getting bigger, until it became a monster that ate her whole life. When she ran away in New York, she hadn’t planned to come back.

“It’s just that school, this town, everybody’s expectations,” Willow said when the doctor stayed silent. “I just wanted not to have eyes on me for a little while.”

They’d wanted to meet him, asked about him every day. This boy, her imaginary boyfriend. She’d made up a whole story about him: He went to Regis; his mother had died when he was little (so sad); his dad was a workaholic (they all knew about that). He took his little cousin to the Britney Spears concert (so sweet). His name was Rainer, after the poet (so cool). She bought herself gifts from him-a pretty ring, a teddy bear. She set up a fake e-mail account, sent herself notes from him that she could show her friends. Once they even had a fight.