Dean Koontz - The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Looking toward the hall, she said, “Where are the kids?”

As she started to turn away from him, he grabbed her by the arm. “Wait. Waking up on top of a freshly made bed isn’t the big thing. I haven’t told you the big thing.”

“What-did Grandma do your laundry, too?”

He felt as though his heart were coming loose in his chest and sliding lower by the moment.

“This is going to be hard. I’m sick to my stomach trying to think how to tell you. It’s a wonderful thing and a terrible thing.”

A change in her eyes, the steadiness and clarity of her stare, suggested that she knew he needed her as never before and that she was ready.

He kissed her forehead, and with his lips still against her brow, he said, “I love you.”

Head bowed, not looking up, as if the words were as solemn as a prayer, she said, “I love you, too.”

They had gotten this far months ago, but no further. He had assumed that the next step, which seemed excruciatingly overdue, would be consummation, the physical commitment.

No one before her had ever held him in expectation with such exquisite charm.

Now he realized that consummation had never been the next step, could not have been, should not have been. The next step must be revelation.

“Come with me,” he said, and led her to his study.

All three dogs were waiting there, lying quietly together, as though they knew-or as though one of them knew-that the supreme test of Brian and Amy’s relationship would occur in this room.

His apartment study had two wheeled office chairs for those occasions when one of his employees came from downstairs to work here with him. He rolled both behind his desk.

He directed Amy into one chair, and he sat facing her in the other. They were knee to knee.

In their front-row seats, Fred, Ethel, and Nickie watched with grave interest.

When Brian held out his hands, palms up, Amy at once put her hands in his, giving him the courage to speak. “There’s something I should’ve told you, Amy. Long ago. But I thought, the way things were, maybe I’d never need to tell you.”

When he hesitated, she did not press him. Her hands had not gone damp in his, or cold. Her gaze remained steady.

“When I was younger, much younger, I was an idiot about a lot of things. One of them was sex. I thought it was easy, women were a kind of sport. God, that sounds awful. But it’s the way so many of us came out of college in those days. Life had nothing to teach me. That’s what I thought.”

“But it never stops teaching,” she said.

“No. It’s one long lesson. So…there were a number of women, too many. I left all the precautions to them, because they seemed to think it was a sport, too. I knew they wouldn’t risk pregnancy. They didn’t want consequences. They just wanted to get it off. But one of them was…different. Vanessa. We weren’t together long, but she didn’t take precautions. I fathered a child.”

His mouth had gone dry. His throat felt swollen, a trap to keep in all his words.

“I think about my daughter every day. I lie awake at night wondering-is she all right, is she ever given a chance to be happy, is she at least safe? With Vanessa…she can’t be safe. I tried to find her. I couldn’t. I’ve failed as a father, as a man, at the fundamental things.”

Amy said, “No failure is forever.”

“It feels like forever. I’ve only seen her once, briefly, when she was an infant. How can I love a child so much when I’ve only seen her once?”

“The important thing is, you can. You’ve got that capacity in you.”

“She’s a Down’s syndrome girl,” he said. “I thought she looked like an angel, beautiful. I doubt she even knows I exist. I’ve wanted to see her so bad, for ten years I’ve wanted to see her, but I never expected to see her again. And now…everything is changing.”

Amy squeezed his hands and said, “Not everything. There’s still you and me.”

The bedspread is tight and tucked, the pillows plumped. No dust dulls any surface.

Piggy is required to keep her room clean, and periodically her mother conducts an inspection with stern standards and with sterner punishments.

Harrow suspects that the child would keep a spotless room even if she were not required to do so. The threat of chastisement is not what guarantees her cleanliness.

She exhibits a desire for order, for quiet continuity, and a longing for fixity in all affairs. This is evident in the way she marshals the images in her collages and in the classic patterns of decoration that, with thread and needles, she applies to the dresses of the dolls.

“Piggy, you can’t eat just the sandwich,” says Moongirl. “You don’t know what a balanced diet means, but I do. Have some potato salad.”

“I will,” Piggy replies, but she still makes no move toward the plastic container.

In Moongirl’s company, the child seldom raises her head, and she rarely makes eye contact. She knows that her mother wants humility from her, and self-abasement.

As with the yearning for order, humility is not something Piggy learned to please her mother. This quality is as natural to her as feathers to a bird.

Self-abasement, on the other hand, she resists. She has a quiet dignity that should not have survived ten years like those she has endured.

She accepts the scorn, the insults, the meanness that her mother visits upon her, every affront and vexation, as though it is what she deserves, but she refuses to disgrace herself. She can be dishonored by another but never abased.

Harrow suspects that the girl’s innate dignity, free of pride, is what has kept her alive. Her mother recognizes this quality in her and wants, more than anything, to destroy it before she destroys the child.

To please Moongirl, this breaking must precede the burning; the spirit must be fatally wounded before the flesh is fed to fire.

Now Piggy opens a lunchbox bag of potato chips, and her mother says, “That’s why you’re fat.”

The child neither hesitates nor stuffs the chips into her mouth defiantly. She proceeds calmly with her meal, head down.

With greater diligence, Moongirl rips out the needlework from the doll’s dress.

Piggy is permitted to have these toys only so they can be taken from her as punishment. So it is with all she has.

Each time Moongirl sees that the child has grown fond of one doll above the others, she acts. She seems to have determined that the one on which she now works is such a favorite.

Sometimes, the child cries quietly. She never sobs. Her lower lip trembles, the tears roll down her face, and that is all.

Harrow is certain that often, if not always, the tears are false, summoned with an effort. Piggy knows that tears are wanted, that her mother is a creature who feeds on tears.

This is metaphorically true, but it is also a fact. He has never seen Moongirl kiss her daughter, but twice he has seen her lick tears from the corners of the child’s eyes.

If Piggy did not occasionally give her mother a reward of tears, she might be dead by now. The tears have suggested to Moongirl that in time her daughter can be broken; and it is this breaking that she desires more than all else, for which she has been patient.

The pent-up violence in Moongirl is like the megadeath condensed in the perfect sphere of plutonium in a nuclear weapon. When a blast is finally triggered, the explosion will be awesome.

Having cut most of the needlework out of the doll’s dress, she now rends the dress itself, not with the scissors but with her bare hands, grinding her teeth with satisfaction as she rips each seam.

Perhaps she has begun to suspect that her daughter’s dignity can never be taken from her. This would explain why she might commit to burning Piggy tomorrow night.