Lisa Unger - Darkness My Old Friend

“Michael. Are you all right?”

No, man, no. I am really not all right. My father is dead. My mother has been missing for so long, and I cannot stop looking for her no matter what I do. And I’m starting to remember things, ugly things about the night she left. Christ .

“I’m fine,” he said instead. “Just overheated, I guess, or breathing in some bad air. I’m trying to renovate the kitchen.”

Ray was quiet, sat down beside Michael. Michael told him about Jones Cooper’s visit, about how he remembered raised voices in the house that night.

Mikey , be a good boy for Mom, okay? I love you more than anything . Those were the last words he remembered hearing from his mother. He’d replayed them, the quick kiss that followed, the feeling of her hand patting him on the back as he left. She always said that: I love you more than anything . Her tone was light, harking back to when he was small, and she’d say, I love you more than all the stars in the sky and all the fish in the sea and all the flowers in all the fields . And he’d say, I love you more than all the ladybugs and dragonflies and butterflies . She’d say, I love you more than all those things, times ten. I love you more than anything . He’d heard her say it to Cara, too. Which hurt in a way he knew even then that it shouldn’t. He turned back once as he got on his bike. But she wasn’t standing in the door waving as she usually did; she was tending to Cara’s misery. If she had known that it was their last moment together, he would have felt it. But it was a parting like any other casual parting, quick and perfunctory and see you in a bit, honey. There was no charge to it. It was this moment, more than any other, that made him think that something had happened to her, something not of her choosing.

“It was your parents’ voices you heard?” asked Ray.

“I think so.” He hadn’t considered that there might have been someone else in the house. He still had his head down. The world was wobbly; it could tilt on its side and dump him into space.

Michael knew he should say something about Jones Cooper’s seeing him out there, digging in the very spot where Eloise had had her vision. But he didn’t. For the first time, he allowed himself to consider that he wasn’t back there digging for that lost mine. After all, it was a shot in the dark. He had no idea where that mine was. No one did. The story was folk legend; he’d never found anything about it in all his research. It was just a story his father had told him.

Michael’s father was fascinated by the idea that men thought they could blow great veins in the earth and take what they found there. And they left these massive scars, these deep valleys in the ground. If you looked carefully, if you observed them, Mack believed, you could learn about the planet and about the people who were its current inhabitants. We will seek to take whatever we want, not for one second worrying about the damage we do , his father told him. And the earth, this patient mother, slowly heals herself of the wounds we inflict. But one day, she will tire of us, her incorrigible children. There’s going to be a cosmic time-out. The earth will reclaim herself .

“Are you sure you’re okay, son?” Ray asked again.

Michael made himself lift his head and look at Ray. “I’m just not feeling well. Everything is starting to get to me.”

Ray put a hand on his arm. He glanced over at the neighbor’s yard.

“Your neighbor, Claudia? She won’t talk to me. I’ve tried twice.”

“She’s a bitch,” Michael said. Ray’s face registered surprise, and Michael realized he’d said it with more heat than he’d intended. “She always has been.”

Ray laughed a little. “I picked up on that. The mean old lady next door.”

“I’ll try to talk to her,” Michael said. “One more time.”

A red van drove slowly down the street. It pulled in to a driveway, then turned around and headed back more quickly. Someone lost, finding his way. Michael couldn’t see the driver as the vehicle passed them by.

“Mike, look,” said Ray. “I’m at a bit of a dead end here. I don’t have anyone else left to talk to. None of the database searches, the classified ads we’ve run, or the people I’ve interviewed from back then have led us to anything new. Unless Eloise gets any closer, I don’t know what’s left for me.”

Michael felt a wash of fear. He didn’t want to be alone with this. Ray was the only person who didn’t think he was crazy for wanting to find his mother. “Are you quitting?” Michael asked.

“No. I’m just being honest with you about where I’m at.”

“I was thinking of putting up a website, you know, with pictures of her from back then, details about the case. I could get it up on the search engines. Maybe I’ll even make a Facebook page.”

“And you’d do this because…?”

“Because everyone’s online these days, maybe even her if she’s still alive,” he said. He felt a welling of excitement now. This was a good idea. “Maybe one day she searches herself on the Internet and she sees everything we’ve done to find her, and she’ll know we want her to come back to us, that we’re not angry, we just want to understand.”

Ray wasn’t good at hiding his feelings. Michael pretended not to see the unmasked pity in the other man’s eyes.

“That’s a good idea,” Ray said even so. “You never know what can break a case. It’s the little things that do it sometimes. All it would take is for her or someone she knows to sit down at a computer and enter her name.”

“Right,” Michael said. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“So we’ll wait on Eloise a day or so and revisit. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. Then, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to have the money to pay you until I sell this house.”

“I know,” Ray said. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out.”

There were two mourning doves cooing on the telephone wire above the street. And the day, coming on noon, seemed unseasonably warm to Michael, even though he noticed that Ray was wearing a dark wool jacket and a knit cap. The leaves on the trees around them were turning from gold to brown. His mother had always hated autumn. Everything dies , she said. But it comes back in the spring , he’d remind her. She’d nod, as though she weren’t convinced. Of course it does, darling .

Jolie wasn’t in school the next day. But that wasn’t unusual. Sometimes it seemed she was out more than she was in. Jolie skated by on C’s, though Willow thought that maybe she could do better. Jolie didn’t care. If Willow got a C, her mother would flip out. She’d be happy with nothing less than a B. And you shouldn’t be happy with anything less, either, young lady . Willow thought this was pretty funny, because her mother was so much the “rebel,” the “artist,” and had always taught her to ask questions and not bow to authority. But when it came to grades, she was as conservative as Laura Bush. Your education is your ticket to anywhere. Do well in school, learn as much as you can, and the world belongs to you . Was that true? she wondered. Had all those homeless people in the parks and subways of Manhattan just not paid attention in class? Wasn’t there more to success in life than algebra and biology?

Willow slogged her way through the day. She didn’t see Cole, either, though she kept looking for him in the hallways. Maybe Cole and Jolie had cut together, she thought. They probably had. They’d probably hooked up after her mother humiliated her and dragged her home and grounded her forever. She really hated her life so much.