Darkness, Take My Hand

  “My father,” I said, “burned me with an iron to teach me a lesson.”

  “Teach you what?” she said.

  “Not to play with fire.”

  “What?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe just that he could. He was the father, I was the son. He wanted to burn me, he could burn me.”

  She raised her head and her eyes filled. Her fingers dug into my hair and her eyes widened and reddened as they searched mine. When she kissed me, it was hard, bruising, as if she were trying to suck my pain out.

  When she pulled back, her face was wet.

  “He’s dead, right?”

  “My father?”

  She nodded.

  “Oh, yeah. He’s dead, Grace.”

  “Good,” she said.

  When we made love again a few minutes later, it was one of the most exquisite and disconcerting experiences of my life. Our palms flattened against each other and our forearms followed suit and at every point along my body, my flesh and bone pressed against hers. Then her thighs rose up my hips and she took me inside of her as her legs slid down the backs of mine and her heels clamped just below my knees and I felt utterly enveloped, as if I’d melted through her flesh, and our blood had joined.

  She cried out and I could feel it as if it came from my own vocal cords.

  “Grace,” I whispered as I disappeared inside her. “Grace.”

  Close to sleep, her lips fluttered against my ear.

  “’Night,” she said sleepily.

  “’Night.”

  Her tongue slid in my ear, warm and electric.

  “I love you,” she mumbled.

  When I opened my eyes to look at her, she was asleep.

  I woke to the sound of her showering at six in the morning. My sheets smelled of her perfume and her flesh and a vague hint of hospital antiseptic and our sweat and lovemaking, imprinted into the fabric, it seemed, as if it had been there a thousand nights.

  I met her at the bathroom door and she leaned into me as she combed back her hair.

  My hand slid under her towel and the beads of water on her lower thighs glided off the edge of my hand.

  “Don’t even think about it.” She kissed me. “I have to go see my daughter and get back to the hospital and after last night, I’m lucky I can walk. Now, go clean up.”

  I showered alone as she found clean clothes in a drawer we’d agreed she could commandeer, found myself waiting for that usual sense of discomfort I feel when a woman has spent more than, oh, an hour in my bed. But I didn’t.

  “I love you,” she’d mumbled as she drifted off to sleep.

  How odd.

  When I came back to the bedroom, she was stripping the sheets from the bed, and she’d changed into a pair of black jeans and a dark blue oxford shirt.

  I came up behind her as she bent over the pillows.

  “Touch me, Patrick,” she said, “and you die.”

  I put my hands back by my sides.

  She smiled as she turned with sheets in hand and said, “Laundry. Is that something you’re familiar with?”

  “Vaguely.”

  She dropped the pile in a corner. “Can I expect that you’ll remake the bed with fresh sheets or are we sleeping on a bare mattress next time I come over?”

  “I will do my best, madam.”

  She slid her arms around my neck and kissed me. She hugged me fiercely and I hugged back just as hard.

  “Someone called when you were in the shower.” She leaned back in my arms.

  “Who? It’s not even seven in the morning.”

  “That’s what I thought. He didn’t leave his name.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He knew my name.”

  “What?” I unclasped my hands from her waist.

  “He was Irish. I figured it was an uncle or something.”

  I shook my head. “My uncles and I don’t talk.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re my father’s brothers and they aren’t any different than he was.”

  “Oh.”

  “Grace”—I took her hand, sat her beside me on the bed—“what did this Irish guy say?”

  “He said, ‘You must be the lovely Grace. Grand to meet you.’” She looked at the pile of bedclothes for a moment. “When I told him you were in the shower, he said, ‘Well, just tell him I called and I’ll be dropping in on him sometime,’ and he hung up before I could get a name.”

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Not many people call me before seven, and when they do, they usually leave a name.”

  “Patrick, how many of your friends know we’re dating?”

  “Angie, Devin, Richie and Sherilynn, Oscar, and Bubba.”

  “Bubba?”

  “You met him. Big guy, always wears a trench coat—”

  “The scary one,” she said. “The one who looks like he might just walk into a Seven-Eleven one day and kill everyone inside because the Slurpee machine isn’t working.”

  “That’s the guy. You met him at—”

  “That party last month. I remember.” She shuddered.

  “He’s harmless.”

  “Maybe to you,” she said. “Christ.”

  I tilted her chin toward me. “Not just me, Grace. Anyone I care about. Bubba’s insanely loyal that way.”

  Her hands ran the wet hair back off my temples. “He’s still a psychopath. People like Bubba fill emergency rooms with fresh victims.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I don’t ever want him near my daughter. Understand?”

  There’s a look a parent gets when she’s feeling protective of her child and it’s an animal’s look, and the danger that steams off it is palpable. It’s not something that can be reasoned with, and even though it stems from the depths of love, it knows no pity.

  Grace had that look now.

  “Deal,” I said.

  She kissed my forehead. “Still doesn’t solve the identity of the Irish guy who called.”

  “Nope. He say anything else?”

  “’Soon,’” she said as she came off the bed. “Where’d I leave my jacket?”

  “Living room,” I said. “What do you mean—’Soon’?”

  She paused on her way to the doorway, looked back at me. “When he said he’d be dropping by your place. He waited a few seconds and then he said, ‘Soon.’”

  She walked out of the bedroom and I heard a weak floorboard creak in the living room as she walked through.

  Soon.

  7

  Shortly after Grace left, Diandra called. Stan Timpson would give me five minutes on the phone at eleven.

  “Five whole minutes,” I said.

  “For Stan, that’s generous. I gave him your number. He’ll call you at eleven on the dot. Stanley’s prompt.”

  She gave me Jason’s class schedule for the week and his dorm room number. I copied it all down as fear made her voice sound tiny and brittle, and just before we hung up she said, “I’m so nervous. I hate it.”

  “Don’t worry, Doctor Warren. This will all work out.”

  “Will it?”

  I called Angie and the phone was picked up on the second ring. Before I heard a voice, there was a rustling noise, as if the phone were being passed from one hand to another and I heard her whisper, “I got it. Okay?”

  Her voice was hoarse and hesitant with sleep. “Hello?”

  “Morning.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “It’s that.” There was another rustling noise from her end, a disentangling of sheets, and a bed spring groaned. “What’s up, Patrick?”

  I gave her the rundown on my conversation with Diandra and Eric.

  “So it definitely wasn’t Kevin who called her.” Her voice was still sluggish. “This makes no sense.”

  “Nope. You got a pen?”

  “Somewhere. Let me find it.”

  More of that rustling sound and I knew she’d dropped the
phone on the bed as she rummaged around for a pen. Angie’s kitchen is spotless because she’s never used it, and her bathroom sparkles because she hates filth, but her bedroom always looks like she just unpacked from a trip in the middle of a windstorm. Socks and underwear spill from open drawers, and clean jeans and shirts and leggings are strewn across the floor or hang from doorknobs or the posts of her headboard. She’s never, as long as I’ve known her, worn the first wardrobe she’s considered in the morning. Amid all this carnage, books and magazines, spines bent or cracked, peek up from the floor.

  Mountain bikes have been lost in Angie’s bedroom, and now she was looking for a pen.

  After several drawers were banged open and change and lighters and earrings were moved around on the tops of nightstands, someone said, “What’re you looking for?”

  “A pen.”

  “Here.”

  She came back on the line. “Got a pen.”

  “Paper?” I said.

  “Oh, shit.”

  That took another minute.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  I gave her Jason Warren’s class schedule and dorm room number. She’d tail him while I waited for Stan Timpson’s call.

  “Got it,” she said. “Damn, I got to get moving.”

  I looked at my watch. “His first class isn’t till ten-thirty. You got time.”

  “Nope. Got an appointment at nine-thirty.”

  “With who?”

  Her breathing was slightly labored, and I assumed she was tugging on jeans. “My attorney. See you at Bryce whenever you get there.”

  She hung up and I stared out at the avenue below. It seemed cut from a canyon, the day was so clear, striped hard as a frozen river between rows of three-deckers and brick. Windshields were seared white and opaque by the sun.

  An attorney? Sometimes in the heady flush of my past three months with Grace, I’d remember with something like surprise that my partner was also out there living a life. Separate from my own. Her life with its attorneys and entanglements and minidramas and men who handed her pens in her bedroom at eight-thirty in the morning.

  So, who was this attorney? And who was the guy who handed her the pen? And why should I care?

  And what the hell did “soon” mean?

  I had ninety minutes or so to kill before Timpson called, and after I exercised, I still had over an hour. I went looking for something in my fridge that wasn’t beer or soda, and came up empty, so I walked up the avenue to the corner store for my coffee.

  I took it back out onto the avenue and leaned against a light pole for a few minutes, enjoyed the day, and sipped my coffee as traffic rolled by and pedestrians rushed past on their way to the subway stop at the end of Crescent.

  Behind me I could smell the stench of stale beer and soaked-in-wood whiskey wafting from The Black Emerald Tavern. The Emerald opened at eight for those getting off the graveyard shift, and now, close to ten, it sounded no different than it did on a Friday night, a gaggle of slurred, lazy voices punctuated by the occasional bellow or the sharp crack of a pool cue making impact with a rack of balls.

  “Hey, stranger.”

  I turned and looked down into the face of a petite woman with a hazy, liquid grin. She had her hand over her eyes to block the sun and it took me a minute to place her because the hair and clothes were different and even her voice had deepened since the last time I’d heard it, though it was still light and ephemeral, as if it might lift off into the breeze before the words had time to dig in.

  “Hi, Kara. When’d you get back?”

  She shrugged. “A while ago. How you doing, Patrick?”

  “Fine.”

  Kara pivoted back and forth on her heel and rolled her eyes off to the side, her grin playing softly up the left side of her face, and she was instantly familiar again.

  She’d been a sunny kid, but a loner. You’d see her in the playground scribbling or drawing in a notepad while the other kids played kickball. As she grew older and took her place on the corner overlooking the Blake Yard, her group filling the place my group had abandoned ten years earlier, you’d notice her sitting off to herself against a fence or porch post, drinking a wine cooler and looking out at the streets as if they seemed suddenly foreign to her. She wasn’t ostracized or labeled weird because she was beautiful, more beautiful by half than the next most beautiful girl, and pure beauty is valued in this neighborhood like no other commodity because it seems more accidental than even a cash windfall.

  Everyone knew, from the time she could walk, that she’d never stay in the neighborhood. It could never hold the beautiful ones and the leaving was entrenched in her eyes like flaws in the irises. When you spoke to her, some part of her—whether it was her head, her arms, her twitching legs—was incapable of remaining still, as if it were already moving past you and the boundaries of the neighborhood into that place she saw beyond.

  As rare as she would have seemed to her circle of friends, a version of Kara came along every five years or so. In my days on the corner, it was Angie. And as far as I know, she’s the only one who thwarted the strangely defeated neighborhood logic and stuck around.

  Before Angie there was Eileen Mack, who hopped an Amtrak in her graduation gown and was next seen a few years later on Starsky and Hutch. In twenty-six minutes, she met Starsky, slept with him, gained Hutch’s approval (though it was touch-and-go there for a while), and accepted Starsky’s stumbling marriage proposal. By the next commercial break, she was dead, and Starsky went on a rampage and found her killer and blew him away with a fierce, righteous look on his face, and the episode ended with him standing over her grave in the rain and we were left knowing he’d never get over her.

  By the next episode, he had a new girlfriend and Eileen was never mentioned or seen again by Starsky or Hutch or anyone in the neighborhood.

  Kara’d gone to New York after a year at U/Mass and that’s the last I’d heard of her, too. Angie and I had actually seen her board the bus as we came out of Tom English’s one afternoon. It was the middle of summer, and Kara stood across the avenue at the bus stop. Her natural hair color was a wispy, wheaty blonde, and it blew in her eyes as she adjusted the strap on her bright sundress. She waved and we waved back and she lifted her suitcase as the bus pulled in and scooped her up and took her away.

  Now her hair was short and spiky and ink black and her skin was pale as bleach. She wore a sleeveless black turtleneck tucked into painted-on charcoal jeans, and a nervous, half-gasping sound, almost a hiccup, punctuated the ends of her sentences.

  “Nice day, huh?”

  “I’ll take it. Last October, we had snow by this time.”

  “New York, too.” She chuckled, then nodded to herself and looked down at her scuffed boots. “Hmm. Yeah.”

  I sipped some more coffee. “So how you doing, Kara?”

  She put her hand over her eyes again, looked at the slow-motion morning traffic. Hard sunlight glanced off the windshields and shafted through the spikes of her hair. “I’m good, Patrick. Really good. How about you?”

  “No complaints.” I glanced at the avenue myself and when I turned back she was looking into my face intently, as if trying to decide whether it attracted or repelled her.

  She swayed slightly from side to side, an almost imperceptible movement, and I could hear two guys shouting something about five dollars and a baseball game through the open doorway of The Black Emerald.

  She said, “You still a detective?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good living?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “My mom mentioned you in a letter last year, said you were in all the papers. A big deal.”

  I was surprised Kara’s mother could climb out of the inside of a scotch glass long enough to read a paper, never mind write her daughter a letter about the experience.

  “It was a slow news week,” I said.

  She looked back at the bar, ran a finger above her ear as if tucking back hair that wasn’t there
. “What do you charge?”

  “Depends on the case. You need a detective, Kara?”

  Her lips looked thin and oddly abandoned for a moment, as if she’d closed her eyes during a kiss and opened them to find her lover gone. “No.” She laughed, then hiccupped. “I’m moving to L.A. soon. I landed a part on Days of Our Lives.”

  “Really? Hey, congrat—”

  “Just a walk-on,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m the nurse who’s always fiddling with papers behind the nurse who stands at the admitting desk.”

  “Still,” I said, “it’s a start.”

  A man stuck his head out of the bar, looked to his right, then to his left, saw us through bleary eyes. Micky Doog, part-time construction worker, full-time coke dealer, a former local heartthrob from Kara’s age group, still trying to hold the line of his youth against the advance of a receding hairline and softening muscles. He blinked when he saw me, then stuck his head back inside.

  Kara’s shoulders tensed, as if she’d felt him there, then she leaned in toward me and I could smell the sharp odor of rum floating from her mouth at ten in the morning.

  “Crazy world, huh?” Her pupils glinted like razors.

  “Um…yeah,” I said. “You need help, Kara?”

  She laughed again, followed it with a hiccup.

  “No, no. No, I just wanted to say hey, Patrick. You were one of the big brothers to our crew.” She tilted her head back toward the bar so I could see where some of her “crew” had ended up this morning. “I just wanted to, you know, say hi.”

  I nodded and watched tiny tremors ripple the skin along her arms. She kept glancing at my face as if it might reveal something to her, then looked away when it didn’t, only to come back to it a second later. She reminded me of a kid with no money standing in a group of kids with plenty at an ice cream truck, as if she were watching cones and chocolate eclairs pass over her head into other hands, and half of her knew she’d never get one, and the other half held out hope that the ice cream man might hand her one out of error or pity. Bleeding inside from the embarrassment of wanting.

  I pulled out my wallet and extracted a business card.

  She frowned at it, then looked at me. Her half-smile was sarcastic and a bit ugly.