Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

As a young, ambitious cop, he’d been eager to clear the board, to move on from cases that couldn’t be solved. He didn’t always follow his instincts. It wasn’t that he let things slide. It was just that he relied more heavily on what he saw than on what he felt. And what he saw back then when he looked at the Holt case was a beautiful and unhappy woman who’d had an affair and run off on her family. Even though there might have been a few details that nagged, he’d relied on the facts and maybe a little on his preconceived ideas about women, about people.

The years had taken plenty from him. But he’d learned a few things, too. He’d learned patience, for one thing. Not much, Maggie would argue. But he had more than he used to, certainly. He’d learned that people had many facets, each of them true. And just because you saw one face clearly most of the time, that didn’t mean there wasn’t another one right behind it. But more than anything, he’d learned that when he felt that nagging discomfort (he had it now that he was looking back on the Marla Holt case), there was something to it. He wasn’t arrogant enough anymore to imagine that he knew what it was.

“We didn’t talk about renovating, Michael. We just wanted to clean up the place.” Tammy, the real estate agent, sounded exasperated.

“Right. But wouldn’t putting in new cabinets help us sell the place better?”

Tammy issued a sigh on the other end of the phone. Michael could just see the parting of those perfectly glossed lips, the wringing of her manicured hands. She was one of those women, tight-bodied, waxed, painted, hair-colored. He wasn’t sure he’d seen any part of her in the raw. Everything from eyebrows to toenails was in check.

“Michael, you’re not getting it,” she said. There was a new harshness in her voice. “The kitchen cabinets are not the problem. The house is a teardown. Someone will demolish it and build a new structure on the land. Putting in cabinets is a waste of your time and money. Did you call those cleaning crews I told you about? Get some estimates? We need to remove that junk. ”

He didn’t tell her he’d already taken a sledgehammer to the kitchen. It always looked so easy on those home-repair shows. But the real world didn’t yield so easily; it splintered in some places, held on tight in others. It came off in great chunks or refused to budge.

“Let’s just get back to basics, Michael.” She had this really annoying habit of using his name all the time. As if he were a hyperactive child and she was always struggling to keep his attention. “Call a crew. Start having the junk hauled away. You can’t do this work by yourself. And forget about those cabinets.”

He didn’t say anything. For whatever reason, her advice reminded him of Eloise Montgomery. “Just let this go,” she’d said. “She’s gone. She has been for many years. It never does any of us any good to live in the past.”

“Are you hearing me, Michael?” asked Tammy.

He wanted to answer her, but he couldn’t find his voice. This happened to him when there were too many competing thoughts, or sounds, or demands on his attention. Something in him just froze. He stood in the semidemolished kitchen, phone in one hand, sledgehammer in the other, and he just couldn’t manage to get any words out.

“Michael?”

Then, “Oh, for crying out loud.” And Tammy hung up. He stuck the phone back in his pocket.

He felt it then, that terrible tide of rage. It came up from within him, filling his ears with the sound of rushing blood. He hefted the sledgehammer and used all his strength to put it through the drywall, releasing a mighty roar. A plume of white-gray dust rose into the already cloudy air. Next the counter. It splintered but didn’t collapse. Then the floor. He felt the impact rocket through his arms and into his back. The pain sobered him. Concrete. The floor must be concrete beneath the linoleum. He sank to the floor, let the dust settle on his hair, his body. He wished it could bury him, like snow. He felt a little better, the terrible rush of anger passing, receding, then gone.

But what kind of advice was that from Eloise Montgomery? Most people could recognize that a child would want to know what had happened to his mother, even if that child was nearly forty and his mother had been gone for more than twenty-five years. This is not something that a person moves on from. It defines him.

His sister seemed to have more peace with it, periods in her life where she was busy with school, career, later her husband and children. But she was so young when Mom had disappeared. Cara admitted that she hardly remembered their mother at all. She did suffer bouts of depression related to their mother’s disappearance, went through a phase where she’d hired a private detective. When that endeavor turned up nothing, she started to see a shrink. But it had been a long time since they’d talked about Mom; Michael sensed that Cara had given up, moved on in a way he could not. In some sense, Cara thought of their aunt Sally as her mother, with whom Cara had gone to live in the year after their mother vanished. Michael stayed with his father. He wanted to be there, waiting, when his mother came home.

Cara had been upset that he’d hired Ray Muldune and Eloise Montgomery. She hadn’t come back to say good-bye to their father or to help Michael settle the estate.

“A psychic ? Really, Mike? Really?” She said it in that flat way that people do now. Really . A way that manages to imply disbelief and disdain, an air of superiority.

“I wanted this to be the closing of a door,” she’d said to him. “Why do you have to keep prying it open?”

“The door will never close until I know what happened to her. And I feel like this is my last chance. He’s gone. Whatever he was guarding, hiding here, is mine now.”

He heard her breathing. When she was little, Michael had liked to watch Cara sleep. She was so peaceful, so solidly asleep, as though nothing could wake her. The sound of her breath used to make him happy, relax him.

“Take it all, okay?” she said. “Whatever money he had left, the house, whatever you find. It’s all yours.” She didn’t say it with heat. “But when you’ve found what you’re looking for-or if you don’t-promise me you’ll stop focusing on Mom and use whatever money is left to start focusing on yourself. Promise me.”

“I promise.” But the line between them crackled with uncertainty.

“I’m a mother now, you know,” she said. “I understand how hard it is, how unceasing are the demands, how mundane and just frustrating it can be day after day. There’s no break from being a mother, no weekends or holidays. You’re on call twenty-four/seven. When you’re not with them, you’re thinking about them.”

He’d never heard her say anything like that. He always thought of her as the perfect mom-carpooling, baking cookies, making Halloween costumes.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“I’m just saying that I never wanted anything else, you know. Not like my friends. I never had big dreams. I just wanted to have a house, a family-you know, to be a mom. So it’s good for me. I love it. But if I didn’t? If I had wanted something else and got this instead, and if I didn’t love my husband? Maybe I could just walk away and not come back.”

“She didn’t,” he said.

“I’m just saying. And then you wouldn’t- couldn’t -come back. Even if you hated yourself, regretted it, missed your children. How could you face that shame, face the pain you’d caused, answer those questions? Mommy, why did you leave us? ” Her voice broke on that, and she started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say.