Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

But then it all got to be too much. She thought about staging a breakup-something dramatic. Another girl. Or maybe she’d discovered that he was into drugs. I could not handle that , she’d say. And everyone would heartily agree. And then she could just go back to being Willow. Except she couldn’t. She didn’t want to. Who was she without the fiction of Rainer? She couldn’t remember. And she was smart enough to understand how pathetic this was. She’d made him up; he didn’t exist. And she was lost without him.

She might have talked to her mother about it, if things were normal. If her father-if Richard -hadn’t moved out. But her mom was a wreck. Every night when she thought Willow was sleeping, Bethany cried. I fucked up our whole world , Willow heard Bethany say to someone on the phone. What did that mean? Willow didn’t know.

Then one day that dark feeling settled in and she started thinking things she’d never thought before. She thought her mother might be better-off without her. If it hadn’t been for the fight Bethany and Richard had over the concert, they’d probably still be married. And if her friends ever found out that Rainer wasn’t real, they wouldn’t be her friends anymore. They’d hate her.

The night when she told her mother she was spending the night with Zoë and she told Zoë she was seeing Rainer, she didn’t even know what she was going to do. She just wanted to go away, like she told the doctor. She wanted to get out of her own skin, to be someone, anyone else.

And she was. After she walked out of the lobby of her building and turned off her block, for the first time in her life no one knew where she was or what she was doing. She wasn’t with her parents, in school, with her friends, or with a baby-sitter. She was totally and completely free. She could get on a train or a bus. She could go anywhere she wanted. But it wasn’t exciting the way she thought it would be. Within ten city blocks, it was lonely and terrifying.

The city that was so familiar to her suddenly seemed loud and intimidating. Strange men leered, and car horns blared. The hundred dollars she had in her pocket suddenly seemed like nothing. The buildings were taller and harder, and she felt so small. She walked from the leafy airiness of the Upper West Side all the way down Broadway-through the chaos of midtown, the hip quiet of the Village. Eventually she found herself in the bustle of Chinatown, with icy cases of dead fish and duck carcasses turning on spits in windows, tables of Buddhas and crystal lotus flowers glinting. In SoHo the hundred dollars in her wallet wouldn’t even buy her a pair of sunglasses.

She probably wasn’t even five miles from her home, but she might as well have been a thousand miles. If she didn’t go back, she realized, no one would find her in that city. That was the thing about New York-you were never alone and you always were. You were lost in plain sight.

But scared and sad as she was, she couldn’t go home. She couldn’t call her mom or her friends and tell them all how she’d lied. It wasn’t the biggest thing in the world; it wasn’t the worst thing she could have done. It was just that it revealed so much about her, how pathetic and sad she was, how lonely, how not okay inside. That dark anger in her started to grow and spread, until it wasn’t only a part of her, it was all of her. And she thought it would just be easier to be gone.

After hours of wandering, she wound up in Washington Square Park. It was late, and the park was closed; you could walk through but not hang out. She stopped at the playground where Bethany used to take her and laced her fingers through the black bars of the locked gate. She didn’t remember swinging on the swings or playing on the seesaw, bouncing on the little spring horse. But there were pictures of her there. And she wished that she were that small again. Which was strange, because usually the only thing she ever wished for was to be grown up, on her own, in charge of her life. Here she was with all of that and now she just wanted to be little again, playing with her mom on the playground.

“Willow.”

At first she thought it was a hallucination, that she had finally and truly lost it. Her mom was standing there, eyes red from crying. And the next thing Willow knew, she was in her mother’s arms, crying, too.

“How did you find me here?” she asked. She clung to her mom’s red wool coat, unwilling to let go. Her mom didn’t answer right away, just kept crying. She walked Willow over to a bench, and they sat. Bethany took Willow’s face in her hands. Willow could see how scared and sad her mother was.

“When you were small,” Bethany said, wiping her eyes, “I always told you if we somehow got separated in the park, you should come to this gate and wait for me and stop the first policeman you saw. I’ve been looking for you all night. I went everywhere we go together. This was the last place I thought of. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

Dr. Cooper had wanted to know if Willow remembered her mother’s instructions, if on some subconscious level that memory had led her to the playground gate. Willow wasn’t sure she knew the answer.

“What were you doing , Willow?” her mother had asked. “What were you going to do?”

“I just wanted to be gone from this place,” she’d said. Really it was a wail, all her sadness and anger coming out of her in a roar.

“What place?” Bethany asked. “What are you saying, baby?”

After that, things just went haywire. Willow was ostracized at school. There was a battalion of shrinks, one worse than the last. Everyone thought Willow was suicidal. And then finally the announcement that they were leaving New York City, moving to a place called The Hollows. Her mother was right about their whole world being fucked up. It was just that it had been Willow’s fault, not Bethany’s.

“If it weren’t for the things I’d done, we wouldn’t even be here,” Willow complained now to Dr. Cooper.

“And what’s so bad about this place?”

“It’s not New York City. The kids are all cretins. Suburban losers.”

The doctor smiled. “No, it’s not New York City. I grew up here, you know. I remember that it seems like kind of a snore. I didn’t really fit in with the ‘cretins,’ either.”

This piqued Willow’s interest. It was hard to imagine Dr. Cooper as a kid who didn’t fit in. “So what did you do?”

“I expressed myself in the ways that I could. I studied hard and made good grades. When I grew up, I moved to New York City. I lived there for a long time.”

“And then you came back here ? Why?”

“I fell in love with my husband. His job was here; my mother still lives here. We wanted a family, and I wanted that family to be safe. So we settled in The Hollows. Your mother wanted to come here so that you would be safe. So that she could protect you better.”

Willow released a little snort. “So that she could control me better. So that she had to drive me everywhere.”

The doctor shrugged. “Parents and children often disagree on the difference between protection and control.”

Willow sank back into the couch and thought of Jolie and Cole, how free they were to do what they wanted to do, and what Willow knew about freedom now. The world was impossibly complicated. How did anyone ever figure anything out? How did you ever know what was the right thing? How could you ever tell what would make you happy?

“I hate it here,” Willow said. “The Hollows sucks.”

Usually this statement caused Bethany to lose it. But the doctor just offered her patient smile. “Wherever you go, there you are,” she said.

Willow thought about this a second. “I don’t get it.”