What We Lost in the Dark

“How did you handle finding out?”

  “It was a rumor that was running around for a while, but we all figured, years from now. Everything is always years from now. Then, yesterday, Andrew told us the game was on. He didn’t want to tell any of us until all the approvals were secured. The Danish scientist is an MD. I spoke to your dad last night … yes! I spoke to your dad about him. Louis knew all about him.”

  I didn’t know what to say in response. I scoured my memory for the last time I’d heard my mother refer to my father by his given name, Louis, and that page of my memory was unmarked by a single recollection.

  She went on. “This guy found out something by accident, last summer, that made it all fit. The best things happen as the result of mistakes, sometimes. Like, the obvious example is penicillin. That went from nothing to the standard in a few years.”

  “Why is the obvious example penicillin?”

  “You know why. It was bread mold.”

  “That’s not my discipline, Jack-Jack.”

  My mother got up and slid into the big chair next to me. “This could be the key,” she said. “It makes sense, that’s why I’m hopeful. It could be your chance to be … like anyone else. I mean, better. But do anyone-else things. Like … go diving in a place that isn’t cold and dark.”

  She meant me, of course, but she meant herself, too. Not diving. Being like anyone else’s mother. You couldn’t blame her.

  Unreasonably, I thought of Rob’s father.

  Mr. Dorn (“Just call me Dennis, just Dennis”) didn’t ski, although Rob’s mother, who had been a champion tennis player in college, was not only an avid skier but also an amateur athlete of every kind. Mr. Dorn sold sporting goods equipment, but a little jogging and the occasional five hundred rounds of golf with clients were about it for him. Still, he sat in the cold until midnight, at the bottom of the runs, to watch Rob hiss down to a flourishing stop. He even came up to Torch when we skied. He did it all the time.

  Sometimes, I thought, this is what Mr. Dorn gets with Rob—the glorious now. This is what he gets in place of a future. This could be his whole life as a father. And it seemed that the Dorns were more or less at peace with that.

  My mother, ferociously, was not. She never had been. She would force me to be well by sheer force of will.

  When I was little, my mom took me to a support group with other XP children, several of them older and already sicker than I. The counselor led us to draw things we wanted to do and be, and without exception, everyone drew something impossible. They wanted to be tennis players, not design ping-pong tables. They wanted to be rock singers, not studio musicians. What kid wouldn’t?

  Of course, the counselor led us around to see how we could be what we wanted, sort of—which meant human-not-really. My mother got pissed off. This is not that uncommon for her. After three meetings, she began to sigh really loudly.

  After four meetings, she said, “Could you frame this more hopelessly if you tried? You’re telling them to be happy with less. Kids aren’t supposed to be happy with less. It’s not … biological. Kids aren’t supposed to want less. They’re supposed to want everything.”

  “Mrs., uh, Flynn,” the psychologist said, doing what people always did, looking at my mother and assuming that “Kim” was a misprint. “I have a PhD in counseling and guidance …”

  “And I have an RN,” snapped Jackie, who didn’t yet have her master’s at the time. “Even I know that you don’t tell kids to start giving up their dreams as job one.” She stared at the counselor’s feet. “Like you. You wanted to be a ballerina. And you went pretty far with that before you got too … too busty. But you could have made costumes for other girls who weren’t as good as you were, when you were little. You could have helped them to be Giselle, when you wanted to be Giselle yourself. Why didn’t you do that?”

  The message suggesting that we might be happier outside “group” was waiting on the answering machine when we got home. My mother would sooner have taken me to a class in ritual sacrifice. I asked her, how did you know the lady wanted to be a ballerina?

  Of course, Jackie said, it was both nature and nurture: the slight ducky-ness of a dancer’s stance, taught young, lasts forever.

  “Are you happy?” my mother said to me that night, finally.

  “I’m happy,” I said. “I don’t want to be too happy.”

  “I know,” my mom said. “The thing about happy is you can’t protect yourself from being too devastated by not anticipating the best. It turns out that you might as well hope for the best because it doesn’t change the outcome.”

  “In movies, guys say they’ll never love anyone again, except the girl who died, because they could never bear to feel that kind of loss.”

  “That,” my mother said, “is a cheap way for men in movies to get sex without commitment. Not that this is that bad an idea, in some very specific circumstances.”

  Too much information. The last time I’d visited her at the ER, my mom had been leaning back against a counter in an undeniably sexy pose, smiling up at some college-aged guy she introduced to me as “Trent.” It just got worse; the doctors looked like they should be dating me. Pretty soon, they would look like my younger brothers. I blotted out the image of my mother having sex with someone who didn’t need to shave every day. The blotting was difficult because I did suspect from a few things Gina had said that my mother was thinking about dating someone. I didn’t know who the lucky suitor was, and Jackie was not confiding—in me, at least. But I felt sure that he was younger.

  On the other hand, every square inch of my skin was about to combust with longing for Rob’s touch, and my mother had been single for thirteen years. Who was I to judge her? I knew that she would gratefully be celibate for the rest of her life if I could be well.

  We both sat quietly in the chair for minutes. Then I said, “It’s too late for Juliet.”

  Jackie said, “It is.”

  My throat caught. “Just such a little bit too late,” I said.

  She nodded. “Everything about this is wonderful except that part. It was not the first thing I thought, but it was up there. I will have to tell Ginny and Tommy myself. I don’t want them to hear it on some news report about the clinic.” I wanted to go on talking, but Jackie got up and hugged me so hard she knocked the breath out of me.

  “I won’t sleep, though. It’s like Christmas morning.”

  I was almost as happy for her as I was for myself.

  Happier.

  18

  THE PAST DARK

  That day, which turned out to be the last day of even-close-to-normal, I didn’t end up sleeping very much, either.

  Finally, sensing it was dark, I decided to hell with pride and everything else. I would call Rob. I couldn’t wait to talk to Rob.

  Everything was changed.

  We’d had a fight, or at least, he’d had a fight … or something, but the news about the clinical trials trumped that. It couldn’t even wait three more days until he got home. I thought I remembered him mentioning that his uncle was bringing his kids out there, too, after Christmas, so I knew Rob would be busy. The news about clinical trials was too good to keep to myself.

  How would it be to go on our honeymoon in St. Lucia? How would it be to go hiking in a sunny mountain meadow? We might actually be able to … do things. We might have experiences so lush and light-filled that I could hardly ever think of them real. You had to pay to get to them, but the experiencing, the memories, anything your senses could accommodate—that was all free. How could anyone ever be bored in a world where there was sun?

  For me, the thought of the possibility of being able to do things the way Daytimers did was like being blind and trying to imagine the color orange. I certainly knew what it felt like to be out in the sun, under my protective gear, but to feel its heat? Unafraid?

  I took our phone into my room, and I called him.

  No answer.

  Ducking downstairs, I liberated my mother’s phone from her purse
and sent texts asking Rob if he’d heard the news from his parents, hoping that referring to “the news” would pique his curiosity. Then, I carried Jackie’s cell phone around like I was in seventh grade in case a text pinged. Nothing. Finally, I looked up the resort called Heavenly, called the desk, and asked if I could speak to anyone in the Dorn family. The phone rang and rang. Finally, the operator at the hotel took a message.

  Roiling, I left a note for my mom and took Angie directly from the bus to the movies. Mom was nowhere in evidence, although the car was there. This normally would have spiked fear in me, at least since the cavalcade of Tabor’s surveillance photos of my family; but now, I thought she might be at a meeting about the clinical trials or having an afternoon delight with a resident named Spencer.

  At 4 P.M., it was already more or less dark. There was a new cartoon horror flick at the mall halfway between Iron Harbor and Duluth, based on a crazy Neil Gaiman story about twin babies raised by doting vampire godparents. So we hunched in our seats and ate our way through that—consuming two tubs of popcorn with double butter and brewer’s yeast. Afterward, we drove back home to Gitchee for a real meal. At 6:30 P.M., the town was as dark as midnight.

  The place was deserted.

  Gid sat in a booth by himself, reading the Sunday New York Times. His new wife (I’d never spoken more than three words to her) was spinning around on one of the stools at the bar. On this early January night, an older couple sharing a modest foccacia were his only guests.

  Angela and I sat down in the booth.

  “You hungry?” Gid said.

  “Always,” Angela answered.

  Out of deference to our mom, we ordered vegetarian: a large double-cheese with mushrooms, onions, olives, pineapple, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted eggplant, and two kinds of bell peppers. We insisted on paying, although I hadn’t paid Gid for food since middle school. To defeat me, he gave us two pizzas and a jug of homemade cream soda.

  While we ate, he sat with us.

  “I get depressed after Christmas,” he said. “I get depressed before, too.”

  “I think that’s common,” I offered.

  “I’m very depressed,” Angela said. “My cousins, Merit and Mia, have a budget for clothes for a year, and it’s five hundred dollars. Each. They’re like … eight years old.” Angela wouldn’t be ten until May, so this made both Gid and I laugh.

  “Go play pinball,” I told Angie, giving her seven quarters.

  As soon as she was happily bashing away at the machine, Gid said, “Where’s Rob?”

  “Colorado. He went skiing in Vail with his parents. I think some cousins came out there, too. His dad’s sisters and their kids.”

  “Bet that’s beautiful.”

  “You’ve never been?”

  “Never been out West. Never farther away than Tennessee. And wherever the team went. Florida once. And then only two years.” Gideon looked at me as though I’d asked a question, which I hadn’t. “Yes, Allie. I went to college. Baseball scholarship. A full ride.”

  “What position did you play?”

  “Pitcher. Like Cy Young. He was a Lac du Flambeau Chippewa. An Indian like me. You’ve heard of the Cy Young award.” I hadn’t, and I didn’t care, but something in Gid’s eyes made me nod.

  “Why only two years? What happened?”

  “I wrecked my arm. Rotator cuff. It’s common for young guys. I spent a year rehabbing it. I got back in and wrecked it again. The doctor said if I didn’t stop I could lose the use of the arm. So I came home. Got married. My father was a cook up at the Timbers. We bought this place together. We bought up land, wherever we could. Rentals. Cabins. Real estate. My dad retired to Tennessee. Him and my mom have a cabin on Stirrup Lake that’s the size of a strip mall. Three stories. He did good. Me, too. I don’t have to do this, Allie.” I realized then that I had no idea how old Gideon was. He could have been forty or sixty. “I like running this place because I get aggravated if I’m not around people. Plus, I don’t want the Tabors to buy it no matter what the price. But I could live on what I have forever, and leave plenty to my sons.”

  “That’s great, though, Gid. You didn’t have one dream. But you got another.” So far as I knew, however, he didn’t yet have any sons, although he’d recently married again.

  “I would give it all up to have played two seasons in the show.”

  “What show?”

  “Pro ball.”

  “Well,” I said. “I’m sorry. What did you want to study?”

  “Playing ball. College was nothing to me without it. That was all I wanted to do. You going to college, Allie?” Just him saying that lit an electric wire in my chest. All I’d thought about was Rob, and my last encounter with the mad Mr. Tabor, and then the clinical trials. But next week, I would be a freshman in college. Life just kept contriving and contriving, the way Thornton Wilder said.

  “In ten days, Gid.”

  “You graduated?”

  “Early.”

  “What do you want to do? Where are you going?”

  “I’m not going anyplace but my room. It’s all online, because of my … you know.” Angie came back. This time Gideon dug deep into the pockets of his work pants and pulled out a fistful of quarters for her. “I’m going to study criminal justice. I want to be a forensic scientist.”

  “This because of Juliet?”

  “It was true before Juliet. But sure, more now.”

  “Why before?”

  “Gid, that time when Garrett Tabor chased me over here?”

  Without warning, Gideon stood, pulled a rag out off a shelf nearby and began swabbing the table. His jaw flickered. He retrieved a white box with a laughing chef on it and began to pack up the quarter of the pizza Angie and I had left, packing another box with the one we hadn’t touched. Then he said under his breath, “That piece of shit.”

  “I know he’s bad, Gideon. He’s really bad. He’s done bad things, and I can’t prove it even though I’ve seen the proof.”

  “How bad?”

  The room suddenly felt very small and hot, and my voice very loud. My head began to pound as though the veins were bursting; the pizza threatened to boil up at the back of my throat. “As bad as you can do, Gideon.”

  “Like he killed somebody.”

  “Like that. Yes.”

  He nodded without so much as a blink. “I have known that bastard all his life and all of mine. Even when he was a kid, he gave me the creeps. He would pick girls up at the bus stop, girls who came up here from Chicago? Or down from Canada? Bring them in here. I would hear him talking about his family’s chalets and their ski stores and how they owned this whole town. And the girls would just be dazzled. You could tell he could do anything he wanted with them. But never the same one two times.”

  I wanted to ask him about Samantha Kelly Young, with her curly blonde hair and her pendant that formed the Japanese letters for sky. But how would Gideon remember one particular girl? The way Gid drank, he was lucky to remember his way home, and he lived upstairs.

  “Do you know his dad?” My voice was almost too quiet for me to hear, much less Gid.

  “He’s a very nice man. The mother was even nicer. My dad played American Legion ball with Steve in the summers when they were young. And I guess Steve and Merry met young. Merry taught music at the school for a while. She was a dancer. I guess she majored in music before she was a nurse.”

  “Did you know about the accident?”

  Gideon glanced around to see if Angela was nearby. “I was the one who saw it, right after it happened. I was driving home that night with my mother, from a big dance at a relatives’ house. We stopped, but my mother made us go on to town and get the fire department. You could tell there was nothing that could be done for poor Merry.”

  I pressed him. “And what about Garrett?”

  “He was standing there. Hands in his pockets. He was looking at his mother like it was interesting to him. I think that was when I first got the idea something was missing t
here.”

  I gathered my big sweater closer around me. If only the mother I imagined Gideon’s mother to be—a great strong brave bear of a woman, like Gid—would have grabbed that little girl from her car seat before they’d sped away for help. It would have been the wrong thing to do, in every way, in the first aid sense. But maybe she would have been alive today.

  Still, was that possible, even for Tabor? Was his own little sister his first victim?

  Gideon added, “And I never should have sold him that land.”

  “What land?”

  “Where he’s building his ‘ski school.’ ” Gid made air quotes with his thick fingers. “He’s supposedly been building it for five years, and it’s been ten years since I sold him the property, but when I go out there, all I ever see is a light on up in his boink pad …” He looked up. “I’m sorry, Allie. He has a big chalet, and apparently, he just uses the bottom for storage, because he’s always up there in the loft part with some chickie.”

  I was having a hard time breathing. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve got eyes, don’t I?” Gideon smiled slowly. “I got binocs, too.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Out by my dad’s house, the house where I stay during summers.”

  “Where the teepee is?”

  “Right. You guys stayed there that one night. Yes, where I have my teepee. Up on the south ridge of Lutsen Mountain, the soft ridge. You know where I mean. His land is about a mile before my dad’s old place. Under the ridge. There’s a good logging track that goes up slow. You can see it right from Cannon Road.” He managed a sad smile. “Allie, I know you and Rob and Juliet skied out there.”

  “We did, but when we stayed in the teepee, Rob’s dad drove us up there. Why did we only come one time? That was the coolest night ever. I’m trying to place it …”

  “If you think of looking over the left shoulder of Torch Mountain …”

  “Oh! I know now.” And I did. The trails that circled that part of Lutsen Mountain were too gentle to be much fun on anything except cross-country skis, but they made cross-country a little bit more of an adventure. The three of us had gone there a few times. “There aren’t many houses out there.”