Into That Darkness (10 page)

It's my goddamn eye, he said. It's my goddamn eye.

You're stealing their food, Anna Mercia said. Her voice sounded thin, impatient. They got two little girls. You think they won't need that?

Please, he said. You got to help me. Oh my goddamn eye.

What're you doing? Stealing food from everyone around here?

Goddamnit, he said.

She looked off up the road and then down at him where he kneeled.

Go on up there, she said.

He did not move and she shoved him with her foot as she would a stubborn dog and she felt at once sorry for it. But he unfolded and got unsteadily to his feet.

She went inside and found a pan and rinsed it with water from the tank behind the toilet and then she found some tweezers and a bottle of iodine and she held this up to the window and peered at it wondering how old it was and if it was still good. Then she went back outside to the front steps. Her hand was shaking as the barber kneeled in front of her and she took his jaw in her hand and tilted his head to the side. In the pale afternoon light she very gently began to unwind the bandage from around his head. A smell of ash in the thick air. The gauze was yellow and she peeled it softly from his socket and there was a watery pink blood and some clear fluid oozing out from his swollen eyelid. He was biting his teeth down hard.

What happened to you? she asked him.

His hands were gripping her knees tightly.

Easy, she said. Just be easy now.

She reached down for the water and ran it lightly over his forehead to clean the eye and then she took up the tweezers from the pan and she folded back the red flap of skin. The eye was scarlet and gruesome and it rolled wild and unseeing.

Something's definitely in there, she murmured.

He groaned.

Don't move. Try not to move.

She slipped the tweezers under the lower edge of the eye and he screamed and pulled away.

Do you want me to do this or not?

His head was lowered and he did not reply at once.

We don't have to do this.

No, he said. Please.

He set his head again into her lap and she slipped the tweezers in under the jelly of the eye and felt the tip tap against something hard. And withdrew in a single long strand of sticky blood a fragment of iron a quarter inch in length. She held it up in front of him and he looked at it wonderingly.

My god, she said.

It's a goddamn nail, he said.

And then he leaned over and was sick.

The afternoon passed. She did not know how it passed. She had some vague sense of drifting through the rooms of her house, sitting at the blown windows, standing on the lawn staring blankly up the street. She did not attempt to right anything, repair anything. The sun slid lower in the sky, the shadows thickened in the grass, the light faded. She thought of her son watching the sun descend somewhere out in the city and then she thought of her daughter and then she did not think of either for the terrible feeling was in her and she could not.

When she turned to go inside the house she saw the message in white paint on the door of the house:
Kat Mason I am alive and
looking for you Love Mom.

She had found the tin of paint in the basement and the brush in the wreckage down there where the fire had not reached and she was remembering this now where she stood. Then she was remembering the body pulled out of the gymnasium that morning and how the firefighters had lifted the stretcher clear with great gentleness as if bearing the injured and not the dead up into those slats of sunlight, slats of shade. How she had leaned on the low hood of a car and the sun-hot metal under her thighs. The firefighters' steel helmets burning like halos of fire.

Then she was inside again and there was a grey blanket on the couch for her to sleep under and the house was already dark. Down the hall she could see a light burning under the door of the bedroom where the barber and his wife lay. She made her way down to the bathroom but as she neared she could hear them speaking in low voices through the door and she paused a moment in the darkness to listen.

The wife was speaking quickly and then her voice grew louder and then she said, angrily: And what does she think? The girl was here and left?

She doesn't think anything. She's just looking for the girl.

Anna Mercia almost could not hear him.

His wife said something then that Anna Mercia did not hear and the barber spoke again, quickly. That's ridiculous Aggie. Why would she do such a thing.

How do you know she's not lying?

I don't think she's lying.

The wife's voice came again muffled and unclear. Then there was a creaking of the bedsprings as something shifted and then she could hear both voices very clearly.

—Cole. You know what I'm talking about.

Come on, Aggie. Her picture's on the floor there. It's her. She's trying to find her family.

You mean the girl.

Yes. The girl.

I don't trust her.

You don't need to trust her. How's your leg. Let me take a look at it.

You get her out of here. I mean it.

It's her house.

I don't care. Get her out of here.

The barber was silent.

The bed creaked again. You know what's going on out there, his wife said. You saw that family in the Volkswagen. You want that to be us? Is that what you want?

The barber said something more but Anna Mercia could not hear what it was and then she made her slow way back to the living room. She left the drapes undrawn. The sky outside was orange from the fires that still burned across the city and the room was bright as it had been on moon-filled nights before the earthquake and she lay with her broken arm folded carefully across her sternum and her face turned to the hall.

She did not understand what they had been saying about her daughter. It did not seem to her that Kat could have come here yet. She knew she was weakening but her mind remained hard.
That is good
, she thought.
Keep your thoughts very clear.

She remembered how when Kat was a child her husband would hang a silver globe in their window in the days leading up to Christmas. Glinting as it turned in the slow light from the street below. She remembered this and how her daughter would lie in their bed staring up at it as the sound of carols drifted from the radio next door and the snow drifted in the darkness outside. The white flakes coalescing on the cold glass. Her little eyes opening, closing, and David laughing through the wall with his friends. A sweet scent of cloves as they smoked and smoked and her daughter asleep in the cot with her.

The silver globe in their window, spinning and spinning.

And too that last visit from her father. Pulling out of her garage in the car, late for work. As her father came hefting a garbage can in his big arms and setting it in the dirt at the curb. How she had thought he was coming to say farewell. The bag had come apart and scattered eggshells and coffee grounds into the low weeds and he stood a moment with his hand atop his white hair before stooping there. The lagoon below shining harshly in the early sunlight and the tide beyond draining out. Her radio had come on playing an aria of some old Italian opera and moved by this she saw a grace and sadness in her father she had not seen before. She slowed the car and her old father straightened holding in his hands the dripping trash, father and daughter regarding each other without expression through the car window and neither speaking. The father staring past his own watery reflection to find his daughter's face.

She opened her eyes.

All at once she was remembering the voice on her daughter's cellphone and she knew with certainty that it was the barber she had spoken to. She was shaking.

She did not know how long she lay there. After a time she kicked back the wool blanket and pressed her shoes to the armrest of the couch and her heart was thundering inside her.

She got up from the couch and made her way back down the hall, trailing her good hand along the charred wallpaper. She knocked softly on the bedroom door where she had slept all those years and then she turned the knob woozily with one shoulder to the wall to steady herself. When she opened the door the barber had already got up from sleep and was standing just inside holding a lit candle and she gave a start.

What is it? he said. The shadows strange in his bandages.

Anna Mercia could hear the barber's wife snoring softly in the gloom. She said, I need to talk to you.

The barber glanced back at his wife then stepped out into the hall and shut the door to the bedroom. They stood a moment in the candlelight, the wax melting slowly over his thumbs.

She's sleeping, he said. What's wrong with you. Are you sick?

I need to talk to you.

In here.

He opened the door to the bathroom across the hall and they slipped through. He set the candle onto the edge of the sink and then leaned back on the bathtub.

Sit down, he said. I thought you might come. What is it.

Anna Mercia watched him a moment then sat on the crooked toilet. The bathroom walls were black from the fire and the ceiling dangled in strips over them. The floor littered with pieces of masonry and small bottles and jars. She could feel the slick of sweat on her arms.

I know she was here, she said.

Who?

You know who.

He was looking at her and the light deepened and stretched in his face. The skin around his good eye looked swollen. Who are you talking about? he asked.

Katherine. My daughter.

The barber frowned suddenly and in the flickering candlelight his bandaged head looked grotesque and deeply ugly. Your daughter hasn't been here, he said. I already told you that. Jesus. He looked at her very hard. What do you want? he asked.

I want my daughter.

You're confused.

I'm not, she whispered.

Yes.

I called her cell earlier. You answered it.

He looked at her for a long moment.

How'd you get her cell?

He shrugged angrily.

How'd you get her cell? she asked again.

He was looking at her with a dark expression. I found it, he said. Here. In the house. But she hasn't been here, nobody has. You know there's nothing going on here.

You're lying to me, she whispered. Why're you lying to me? But then she leaned over and held her face in her hand and then her shoulders were shaking. She felt like she could not breathe and she gasped and she shook.

They sat in silence for a while, the candle burning down. At last the barber shifted his feet and the glass crunched under him.

That's enough, he said quietly. There was something in his voice. She did not hear it at first and then she did hear it and she looked up.

In the hazy orange light he was standing where before he had been leaning on the lip of the bathtub and she realized how much bigger he was than her. He said to her, Why'd you come to me really? What do you want?

She did not like how he was looking at her.

He said, You never thought your daughter was here. Did you.

She said nothing.

Come here, he said.

He unbuckled his belt and opened his pants. His penis was standing out.

Suck it, he said.

She blinked at him, uncomprehending.

He leaned across to her and gripped her chin hard. He said, Suck my fucking cock.

She glanced over to the door. Across the hall his wife would be sleeping. Don't do this, she said. Please.

Get on your fucking knees, he said.

He pushed her down. The bathroom floor was black with char and there were chunks of rubble and shards of glass from the mirror gouging her knees. She could feel herself starting to cry but she made no sound. His penis was warm and sticky and tasted of sweat when he forced it into her.

He was gripping her hair hard and he made small grunting noises as he went. Her good hand was thick and cold in the dirt and slapping there and suddenly there was something sharp under her palm. A slice of glass from the mirror. She was coughing and spitting. He was thrusting deeply and his coarse hair was scratching her nose and chin and all at once she took up the shard and pressed it under his scrotum. His fists were still on her head but he stopped abruptly. She could feel a line of blood opening in the folds of his skin.

She was crying and spitting.

What did you do to her? she cried. Her lips and chin were wet. She held the blade hard against him. What did you do to her?

He looked at her, frightened. Nothing, he said. I swear. I never saw her, she didn't even come here. I swear it.

She could feel his sticky penis withdrawing across her wrist where her hand was pressing with the blade of glass.

Please, he said.

She thought very coldly and very clearly of her daughter coming home and meeting this man and she stopped crying and she made herself look at him. Then she pushed the shard in with as much force as she could manage and twisted it sharply and it snapped off in her fist.

He screamed.

He screamed and still screaming fell thrashing against the side of the bathtub. There was something warm and slick running down her arm and the front of her sweater and she got to her feet and stood with her back against the wall and watched him. In the candlelight she could see the barber curling up under the edge of the bathtub in his shirttails and with his trousers tangled at his shins and he was gurgling in a strange, brutal, guttural agony.

Then she stumbled out. As she passed the bedroom she could hear the barber's wife calling for her husband but she did not slow and she stumbled for the front door breathing hard. She kicked the door wide and took the steps two at a time half-running onto the lawn. She could feel the shard of glass cutting into her hand and she threw it into the grass. Something was rising in her throat but she swallowed it back down.

Then she slowed. Stopped. Stood in the street under the pale burning sky and turned back and looked at her house dark in that undarkness. She thought: Kat could still return. Kat could go there still. She did not fear the barber any longer but she understood that she could not let the barber's wife find her daughter. She knew this suddenly and with a burning clarity.