The Hour Before Dark (11 page)

I walked by Croder-Sharp-Callahan, and casually looked through the glass, but could not bring myself to go inside. I wanted to see Pola, but I did not know what I would say to her if I saw her. My pulse quickened a bit, thinking of her, and I knew I was doomed to replay the goodness and richness of a high school romance in my head until the end of my days.

Still, she had come by the house after my father’s death.

She still cared, and I still cared, and I kept hoping that one of my father’s famous quotes, stolen no doubt from others, would be true: that the universe rewards belief.

I still believed that love couldn’t die. Down in my toes I believed it. Even with the bad things in life, even with murder and sorrow, I believed that love just couldn’t die if it was real between two people.

And I knew I was a doomed fool to believe it.

After picking up some eggs and bread at the local grocer’s, where, thankfully, no one talked to me, I went by the old store my father had run.

The storefront was smaller than I’d remembered. The closed for the holidays sign was in the window, and when I peered through the windows, it looked as if nothing had changed since I’d been eighteen.

3

Back home an hour or so later, I caught Bruno peeling back some old wallpaper in the dining room that was never used.

“Look at this,” he said. “Three layers of wallpaper under here. This must’ve been Great-Grandma Raglan’s pattern.” He pointed out a dulled rose pattern. “About 1905,” he said. “Or 1904. Boston. I’m willing to bet it cost a pretty penny then.”

“Brooke’s gonna shit when she sees you tearing at the wallpaper,” I said.

“It’s amazing how old this house is. Think of all the things. Our rooms have been painted over so much,” he said. “I scratched at my bedroom door and—get this—it’s really made of glass.”

“Glass? It’s wood.”

“No,” he chuckled. “People have been painting over it so much, the center of that door is a thick oval of glass. And it’s etched. I bet there are little treasures around here like that. Last night I was going through the shelves at the back of my old closet, and I found a small pantry behind it.”

“Full of treasures?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing, really. A couple of little ceramic salt and pepper shakers and a naked doll with its head cracked. Probably Granny’s.”

Bruno apparently had taken to picking at parts of the house—looking through cabinets, finding the old secret staircase—a narrow child-sized staircase that led from the laundry room—through a cabinet door—down to one of the kitchen cabinets on the first floor. As kids, we used to play hide and seek in it, and our father would raise unholy hell when we leapt out of the kitchen cabinet while he was cooking supper. Bruno found several items that had been missing for years: his old teddy bear, a dust mop after a nineteen-year disappearance; he also discovered that there was a way to reach between the walls in his old bedroom, by way of removing a thin board in his closet.

He found his old sketchbook there, which he had forgotten that he’d hidden away at twelve and kept private from the rest of us. He showed some of them to me. They were scenes from the Ice Queen stories—and how the goblins ended up torturing the Queen eternally for her crimes. The Ice Queen was poorly drawn, but could be identified by the crescent moon in her hand and her hair, which was straw-yellow and flowing. It was pretty vivid stuff for a little kid, and I suspect that Bruno had been getting some of his frustrations out on paper.

“You made up the stories,” he reminded me. “I was just using crayons to illustrate your books.”

“Only you never showed me,” I said.

“I’m showing you now. I’m not the artist that Brooke is. But I tried.”

“It’s pretty violent,” I said, ever the observer.

“So were the stories. I wonder why we liked them so much,” he said, flipping through the sketchbook. “Dad would’ve had a fit if he’d seen these. He’d think there was something wrong with me.”

“There is something wrong with you,” I said, grinning. “You’re a Raglan.”

“We were a pretty creative bunch.”

“Not a lot to do in the winter.”

“Remember the words we made up?”

I nodded. “Jumblies.”

“Gran made that one up. I mean like the Greasels.”

“The result of Weasel and Groundhog mating,” I said with some authority. “And the Eyestopper.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That was a bad one. The evil poison that turns children blind when they see the sun.”

“And the goblinfire,” he said. “Look.” He showed me a page in the sketchbook of a boy who might’ve been me, but with pointed elf ears, and a blackness of night all around him. In the middle of the blackness was a smudge of fiery yellow and orange.

We looked through some more of the sketches, pointing out what we remembered. The little ogre-girl who gobbled up people who said no to her; the boy whose skin was made out of bubblegum and blew up in a big pink bubble when he wanted to fly.

The most unusual one had me, Bruno, and Brooke all standing in a row with our mouths open in screams, and the tops of our heads were exploding.

Underneath this, Bruno had written in purple crayon: BRAIN FARTS!!!

And then there was the picture that was of us playing the Dark Game.

I barely glanced at it.

In a circle, holding hands.

Three children.

Bruno, Brooke, Nemo.

Blindfolds over their eyes.

“I wasn’t much of an artist,” Bruno said, and quickly closed his sketchbook.

I awoke the next meaning, with Bruno standing over my bed.

He had on what looked like long underwear. Something about the way he looked, his hair all scruffy in his face, and something of an excited expression on his face, reminded me of him as a kid. “Get up! Nemo, you gotta see this!”

1

After I’d rolled onto the floor, sleepily trying to find my bathrobe, Bruno dragged me from room to room until we came to my father’s bedroom. It was exactly as I remembered it: the king-sized bed with my grandmother’s quilt thrown over it and one goose down pillow at the head.

A small black-and-white television on a metal stand by the window.

A lamp by the bed, with a small round table beneath it, on which my father kept the TV guide and his nail clippers. Above the bed, a photo of him and my mother on their wedding day.

“Look at this, look,” Bruno said. He opened the doors to the wardrobe, the very one we had all squeezed into as children. It had wide doors, and when he drew them back, they revealed my father’s clothes, hanging. Bruno parted these. There was no back to the wardrobe. It was open and went to the wall. The wallpaper had been scraped back around a hole about four feet tall.

“What the hell?”

“Yeah and it gets better,” Bruno said. He crouched down, stepping into the wardrobe, and withdrew a stack of papers and magazines. “Haven’t completely gone through these, but want to see what Dad was up to in here all by his lonesome?”

He passed me the magazine on the top.

Slaves of Lust was the title. On the cover, a not-so-beautiful model with large, sloppy breasts covered from head to foot in rubber, only her face showing through a zipper. Others in the pile included:
Master and Harem
,
Love Torture
, and
Punish the Naughty Lady
.

“He was an S&M porn hound,” Bruno said.

2

I didn’t expect my father not to have a private sex life that involved his hand (this somehow kept him purer for all of us, who had hoped he’d remain true to our mother, a fantasy in its own way for kids whose mothers have run off), but when Bruno dumped the magazines on the bed, they were plainly the kinds of pornography I’d never seen before. I mean, I’d watched porn in college when someone had videotapes, and I’d flipped through the odd Penthouse and the other assorted girlie magazines.

But they’d seemed tame in comparison to what my dad had been stashing away.

The kind that made me flinch a little and not think well of people who were pornographers. (Porn is a funny thing. When you see the mainstream pornography, what Granny used to call “marriage manuals,” it all seems full of happy, willing participants. There’s an element to human beauty and fantasy in it. But when you see this kind, it looks as ugly as anything that is human can look. Call me puritan. But watching people being whipped or tied up wasn’t my idea of eroticism. Not to say it’s not someone else’s. To each his or her own. Obviously, it was my dad’s idea of a turn on. Call me prude, but the last thing I wanted to find was my dad’s porn stash.) “You think it was ‘cause Granddad used to beat him?” Bruno asked.

“What?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. If a guy is into this, doesn’t that just mean he had a lot of punishment as a kid and it became eroticized? I’ve known a few guys who liked this kind of stuff, and they all seemed to have this whole discipline thing going on. Granddad had that bullwhip or whatever that he kept above the door. It must’ve had some effect on Dad.”

“You’re talking about Dad. Christ. Gives me the willies.”

“Yeah. I guess it’s freaky. Who knew?”

“Let’s just throw it out,” I said.

“It’s not the porn that I care about,” Bruno said. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hole, groaning a bit where he scraped his back. He back-crawled out, and brought with him a stack of letters. “Lots of this stuff. I put some in my room, too. Look,” he said. “All this stuff. And two thousand cash.” He pointed to the dresser. I went over to it, and touched the top of what turned out to be three stacks of hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in plastic bags, and bound with rubber bands.

“His bank account?”

“Mad money,” Bruno said. “And these, too.”

He came over to me, and passed me the letters he’d found. At first, I thought they were letters from my mother to him. Love letters from when they were young.

I picked one of them up. Turned it over.

3

Dear Mia, 

Please come back to us. 

The children miss you more than you can imagine, and I am going crazy without you. 

I didn’t know loneliness until you left. Please fulfill my greatest wish, that you love me again, that you love your children again. 

Nemo is nearly fourteen and is going to be a man soon. But he needs his mother. He doesn’t always make correct judgments, and I’m just not good at understanding why he’s different than I was as a boy. But you were so good with him. 

Brooke is as beautiful as you, and as bright. You must see her. And Bruno still cries for you at night, even though he hardy remembers what you look like. 

Please come home, Mia. Please. 

I love you and I wish that night had never happened between us. 

I love you and always keep a light on at Hawthorn for you. 

If you ever think for a moment that I have lost all love for you, or that I hate you, know in your heart that you are mistaken. 

You are the only one for me. You are the love of my life. You are my only light. I beg of you, on my knees, and to God, and to everything holy and sacred in the world: Come home and be a mother to your children, and if you feel even an ounce of kindness and pity for me, come home. Come home and take care of them, be their mother, hold them close. I am so sorry for what happened between us. 

Love always, Gordie

4

The letters were dusty and written on various kinds of paper— parchment, typing paper, notepad paper, as well as elegant stationery. The envelopes, from which my father had torn the letters before stacking them all together, had a single address on them: a house in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My mother’s name: Mia Raglan.

It gave me a lonely feeling to read through them, between the porn, like a parade of the sacred and the profane.

I went and sat on his bed, and then lay back and put my head on the pillow.

I read letter after letter.

5

We ended up tossing the porn in the garbage without telling Brooke, since she was a bit judgmental about anything to do with pictures of naked women.

But the letters I passed to Brooke.

We also gave her the money that was found, although Bruno really wanted to keep some of it (he had debts, he said, and I told him I had bigger debts, but it still should be for Brooke since there were bills to pay at home).

On the sofa in the living room, while Bruno played something on the piano that sounded vaguely like a classical lullaby, Brooke flipped through the letters the way she might look over legal documents—with a kind of spirited disinterest. “He wrote these all the time.”

“He didn’t send them,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

“He may have. They might’ve been returned. He said that some came back undeliverable.”

“Look at the dates,” I said.

She glanced at the top right-hand comers of some of the letters. “Every week,” she said, nodding. “That makes sense. He always went to the post office on Monday morning. Sometimes there was nothing to mail, and he still went. I saw him writing to her once. He told me he did it because he had to keep the faith.”

“He really loved her.”

“I suppose he did,” she said. “I was never sure of it. I’d guess he was angry with her. For leaving. I always wondered if they really loved each other at any time. He told me she had mental breakdowns more than once. Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t just a caretaker for her. But I guess he still wanted her to come home. All these letters. Sent back. She must’ve hated all of us.”

I didn’t jump on her comment, which seemed cold. It had been a rough time for all of us.

Bruno, playing the piano, stopped. He said, “He never sent them. Check the envelopes again.”

Brooke held up one of the envelopes. “Oh. We missed it.” She passed it to me. “Bruno’s right. No postmark. He must’ve just written these and held on to them.”

“Poor guy,” I said.

Bruno turned around on the piano bench. “He used to hit her,” he said, that Brunoesque anger rising in his voice as if he could go from “calm” to “storm” in seconds flat.