Manuel Munoz - What You See in the Dark

She listened for voices but heard nothing except Dan’s footsteps and drawers being opened and shut. Her nightstand clock glowed a surprising five minutes past eleven.

“Dan?” she called from her open room. A light shone from underneath the door to his room. “Danny?”

The noise in his room stopped for a moment, and Arlene stood at the threshold of her bedroom, waiting to hear an answer, wondering why Dan was taking so long to respond when he had clearly heard her voice.

“Dan?”

He opened the door and stuck his head out, the same brown hair as Frederick’s, the same hard line of a nose. The same long jut of clavicle and the coarse ring of hair around the nipple. She caught a glimpse of his white underwear. She remembered Frederick’s coarse laughter when she had told him about her brother, about having no idea where her brother had gone during his first night home.

“What’s going on?”

“Sorry, Mama,” he said nervously, his body half-hidden behind the door. “Go on back to sleep.”

“If you have a girl in there …” Arlene teetered between stepping forward and stepping back. She braced herself for the embarrassment of confronting a naked girl sitting on the edge of Dan’s bed. She steeled herself as she had when Frederick shushed her, Dan’s little-boy footsteps in the hallway, tiny and fearful.

Through the sliver of open door, her view partially blocked by Dan’s body, she saw the edge of the bed. It was bare.

“What’s going on?” she asked again.

“Mama …,” he protested, but the absence of the girl allowed her to approach the door insistently. It was her house. Then she saw the suitcase.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going, Dan?” She put her hand on his door and he pushed back. She was surprised at her strength, but knowing she couldn’t hold her ground, she slid her hand on the jamb, fingers in full view, daring Dan to close the door and bruise her.

“Mama!” he yelled. “Leave me alone!”

“You better not be running off!” she yelled back. “The two of you are too young to be doing that!”

She pushed harder against the door — hard enough to surprise him, a peek of his face coming through the sliver of doorframe — and she gasped at the similarity of his face to Frederick’s. But then she spotted the cuts.

“What’s that on your cheek?” she demanded. “Dan, answer me!” She put her hand on the jamb, fingers laid out as fragile as eggs. She felt him stop pushing on the door, a silent truce.

“Mama,” Dan said quietly, “give me a minute to put on some clothes. Okay?” His voice was jittery, now that she heard him speak a complete sentence. “Okay?”

“All right,” she agreed, but she kept her fingers on the jamb. She heard the rough slip of Dan getting into a pair of dungarees, the slide of a drawer as he searched for a shirt. Then he slowly opened the door.

Dan’s suitcase sat open on the bed, a story she didn’t yet know. Next to it was the black bank deposit bag from their front office. He stood with his hand on the doorknob.

“What’s that on your cheek?” she asked, but now she didn’t want to know the answer. A black eye or a crust of blood under the nostril or a swollen lip would have made it easy to imagine too many beers at the Bluebird, the inability of men to keep their mouths shut against bravado. Dan’s cheek was something more dreadful in its simplicity: four little half-moons, caked in purple. A small hand doing that to his face.

“Something happened, Mama …”

“Oh, dear God …,” she said, and took her eyes away from the scratches on his cheek and saw the mess, the spilled contents of his bureau and, on top of it, his white shirt with dark stains, the deep, ugly sheen. She couldn’t help but touch it, her fingers electric against the damp, and she flinched. “Oh, dear God …”

He was a blur of motion, hurrying over to the suitcase, gathering the black bank bag and shoving it inside, snapping the thing shut. She followed him out helplessly, incredulously, as he made his way to the kitchen, pulling the cabinets open and yanking down bread, boxed crackers, a jar of peanut butter, a tin of canned meat. In a flash, he spied the keys to her sedan hanging by a hook near the door and grabbed them before she could stop him.

“Dan … what on earth happened?”

“Listen, Mama,” he said, stuffing the keys into his pocket. He became calm once again, the tone in his voice suggesting he was not going to repeat himself. “You listen to me, now. I’m not telling you where I’m going. And I’m not going to tell you what I did.” His voice quivered and broke. “You know what I did.”

She thought of her brother, after all that time in a prison up-state, and the way he took a cigarette in his mouth and blew out the smoke.

“What did you do, Dan?”

“Listen to me! The police are going to come around here soon enough. So I’m not telling you anything. You don’t know anything, so they can’t call you a liar.” He patted his pocket, as if to assure himself the keys were there, then reached under the sink for a paper bag and gathered the food.

“Dan, you can’t do this …”

“Mama …,” he said sternly. “I took the cash from the office and I’m sorry about that. But you get rid of that truck. Okay? Take it up into the mountains and burn it or push it into the river. Just get rid of it.”

“I won’t do any such thing,” she said, with a firm voice, a glimmer of defiance, the same tone she had used when speaking to Frederick those years ago in this very kitchen, when he threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop pestering him about his late hours. Frederick had looked at her with a stare as thin and deadly as a razor.

“You do what you want,” Dan said. He gathered the food and the suitcase and butted his way to the front door, unstoppable, and she wanted to reach out to him, remembering how her mother had reached out to her brother to embrace him when he came back.

To her surprise, Dan put his things down and hugged her. He held her hard and she allowed him to. She closed her eyes against the half-moons on his cheek, their ugly certainties, and willed everything to stop, to stay as it was.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “I am.” He gathered the suitcase and the paper bag of food and bounded out to the parking lot. She ran out to the porch, almost following him down in her bare feet. She watched his dark form fumble with the keys, heard the click of the door as he unlocked the sedan. The night was still, no cars on the highway, no sound at all, the entire city asleep, and her car roared to life, startling her. The inevitability startled her, the coming change. The motor gunned and the lights, weak willed and scant, dimmed as Dan put the car into reverse and wheeled right out of the parking lot. Just like that. Just like Frederick, whom she had not witnessed leaving, only finding an envelope on the kitchen table announcing his departure. The envelope held the deeds to the motel and the house and a bit of cash, but otherwise no indication about where he had gone. But the dark silhouette in the sedan tonight was not Frederick — it was Dan, making a hurried right turn onto the highway, heading south, the red taillights disappearing, the rumble of the engine receding, and Arlene on the front porch alone and looking at the dark.

Dan’s black Ford pickup stared at her, parked lengthwise, its one visible headlight a wary eye. It sat there like a still but breathing animal. The truck spooked her, a dark hulk in the empty space of their parking lot, and Arlene had to step away from the door, a foolish fear of the truck somehow turning on and idling there. It reminded her of falling asleep in front of the television set and waking up to static that unnerved her, filled her with a shaky dread as she rose from the armchair and moved toward the set, deeper toward the source of her irrational fear, just to turn the thing off.