Lisa Unger: Darkness My Old Friend

“But-”

“No. I told you if I ever tried to reach you on that phone and you didn’t answer that I’d take it away.”

Willow slumped in her seat and blew air out the corner of her mouth, lifting some wisps of hair from her eyes. “I lost it. My phone. I dropped it somewhere.”

Bethany looked at her daughter, who in turn was looking at the ripped knees of her fishnet tights. Bethany could see that Willow’s knees were skinned, that her shirt was ripped. Worry shouldered anger aside.

“What happened?” Bethany asked. “Tell me.”

Willow rolled her eyes. “I came home through the woods.”

“Christ, Willow!”

“I got scared and started to run,” she said. Willow looked teary and so young suddenly, just like when she was a toddler, in those moments right after a fall and before the real crying started. “I fell and dropped my phone. I was too afraid to go back for it.”

“Oh, Willow.” Bethany didn’t know whether to believe her or not. That was the really sad thing. She just didn’t have an instinct anymore about when her daughter was lying. Lord, what she wouldn’t give for a glass of wine. She glanced at the clock; it was a few minutes after three. She heard that if you were looking at the clock waiting for the hour to chime five so that you could have a drink, you might have a problem with alcohol. Bethany wasn’t sure she believed that. Seemed like there was always someone waiting to tell you that you had a problem with something.

“Really?” she said. “You lost it.” Bethany picked up the phone and dialed Willow’s number.

“Don’t!”

Bethany watched her daughter and held the phone out from her ear against the blasting music that played instead of a ringtone. She didn’t hear the phone ringing in her daughter’s backpack or on her person, as she’d suspected she would. She practically dropped the phone when a male voice answered. Some unnamed fear pulsed through her.

“Who is this?” she said.

“Who is this ?” the voice on the line asked. There was something nice about his tone, something soothing. “I found this phone in the woods.”

Willow was pale, staring at her with eyes the size of dinner plates.

“Don’t tell him who you are,” she said. She was standing now, pulling on Bethany’s arm. “Mom, hang up!”

Bethany gave her daughter a warning look, and Willow drew back, looking stricken. Then she put her head in her hands. “Mom, please.”

“This is Bethany Graves. Can I come and pick up that phone from you? Sorry for any inconvenience. My daughter lost it.”

“Sure, of course,” said the voice. He sounded as though he found the encounter amusing, which was just a shade irritating. “Or I could come to you?”

“Well, we could meet you somewhere.” Nice voice or not, the New Yorker in her thought better of giving some strange man her address, letting him come to their remote house surrounded by ten acres of trees. Peaceful, isolated. Perfect for a writer. Yeah, and no one can hear you screaming , Philip had commented when he came for dinner last weekend. The sentence had stayed with her.

“How about the Hollows Brew in an hour?” he said.

“Perfect. Thanks so much.” She ended the call.

Then, to Willow, “What is wrong with you, kiddo?”

The look on Willow’s face made her stomach flutter. It was always like that with them, even when Willow was an infant-what one of them felt, the other felt, too. When Willow was small-yesterday, a hundred years ago-as soon as Bethany opened her eyes in the morning, or at night, she would hear Willow start to stir. If Bethany had been nervous, anxious, upset, Willow was cranky. It was still true. There was no way Willow could feel sad or stressed or afraid without Bethany’s feeling the tug of it on her insides.

“Who was that?” asked Willow. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes wide. “The man from the woods?”

“You saw a man in the woods?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you. I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

Bethany felt a flash flood of annoyance banked by guilt. Willow was probably right. Bethany might not have believed her.

“Try me,” Bethany said.

Willow started talking fast about her teacher, how hurt and embarrassed she was in his office, fleeing from the school, what she saw in the woods. She paced, waved her hands in the air. Bethany just watched in awe, listened to the way she wove the story, told the details-the damp leaves, the sky through the trees. Her daughter was a natural-born storyteller. And this-at her age, anyway-had not proved to be a good thing. When Willow was finished, she collapsed back down in her chair in a dramatic flop, as if exhausted by the events and their retelling.

“Now he knows who we are,” Willow said. “What if he was burying a body or something?”

Bethany pulled up a chair beside her daughter, wiped the strawberry blond hair back from her face, squeezed her frail little shoulder. She’d been looking into those dark brown eyes for a million years. The girl around them had grown and changed, but those eyes seemed as eternal as the moon.

“Willow. Really,” Bethany said. “Where did you ever get such a wild imagination?”

Willow looked at her sharply, incredulous, and then they both started to laugh. They laughed until they were weeping with it, both of them clutching their middles. And Bethany thought how much she loved her wild, defiant child, how she’d failed at almost everything, lost so much, but that none of it mattered because of the one thing about her life that was right.

“So how have you been feeling, Jones?”

Useless, aimless, broken, Doc. Really just miserable . Was that true? No, not totally. But Jones felt as if Dr. Dahl would be happier if that’s what he said.

“Good,” said Jones. “You know. Keeping busy.”

“Keeping busy with what?” Dr. Dahl had this earnest way about him. He always accompanied his questions with a hopeful, inquiring lift of his jet-black brows.

Jones offered a shrug, took a sip from the coffee he’d carried in with him. He’d brought one for the doctor, too. But the other man had declined. I’m off coffee , he’d said. Thanks . This refusal somehow seemed petty and superior to Jones; it made him like the doctor a little less. And Jones didn’t like Dr. Dahl very much to begin with.

“The house, mostly,” said Jones. “An old house like ours requires quite a bit of maintenance.” He paused, but the doctor didn’t say anything. Jones felt compelled to go on. “My neighbors have been relying on me a lot lately-watching their homes while they’re away, checking mail, helping some of the older people with jobs around the yard. You know.” Why did it sound so lame?

Dr. Dahl looked pensive. Jones thought the doctor was a little too pretty, with girlish lashes and smooth skin. Too well maintained. His nails shone a bit, as though he’d had a manicure. Why it should bother Jones that the guy took care of himself, he didn’t know. But it did.

“It’s been a year since you stopped working,” said Dr. Dahl. The doctor’s tone implied a question, but Jones knew he wasn’t asking. The doctor was making a point.

“About that long, yes.” Jones felt his shoulders tighten with the urge to defend himself. But he didn’t say anything else. The doctor seemed to wait for Jones to go on. When he didn’t: “So. You’re a relatively young man. Have you given much thought to what might come next? If you might embark on another career?”

Jones looked around the room, his eyes resting on a tribal mask that hung on the wall. It was the only thing in the space that was not generic, that told him anything about the doctor. In the landscape of gold and cream surfaces, within walls featuring the most banal art images-a sailboat at sunset, a still life of flowers, another of fruit-that mask was the single object that Jones could tell wasn’t picked from some catalog. Sometimes during his sessions he found himself staring into its hollow eyes, fixating on its snarling mouth.