Into the Darkness (5 page)

Mom relaxed with a slight smile. We both had that gentle, almost habitual softening in our lips and eyes. More times than I could count, people had remarked to me how my mother was always so up, so friendly and pleasant to talk to. I think some people stopped in the store to do just that and in passing might pick up a small gift for a relative’s or friend’s birthday.

She turned to me. “Don’t worry about the dishes tonight, Amber. Go for your walk. Get to know the neighbors, and find out all the dirt on them before Risa Donald does and burns up a few cell phones spreading stories.”

Dad laughed.

“What are you laughing about, Gregory Morton Taylor? She was the first to spread that rumor that we were in economic trouble during the recession, and all those people who had orders with us were worried about their deposits.”

“I go with Katharine Hepburn,” Dad said. “I don’t care what they say about me as long as it isn’t true.”

“Who’s Katharine Hepburn?” I asked.

“Who’s . . .” Dad’s smile started to fade until Mom and I laughed. “You be careful, young lady,” he said, waving his right forefinger at me again, “or I’ll force you to watch a Turner Classic Movie marathon.”

After dinner, I went upstairs and checked my hair and my lipstick and did Mom’s favorite little trick:
spraying the air with her cologne and then walking into it. I looked at myself in the mirror and fiddled with some strands and then debated putting on some eyeliner. Some men, like my father, were put off by a woman who wore too much makeup. Dad always compared this one or that one to Mrs. Hassler, an eighty-four-year-old widow who had her face so caked that Dad said she had it done by Michael Tooey, the funeral director, just so she wouldn’t look much different in the coffin.

“Why are you carrying on so much about your hair and your makeup, Amber Taylor?” I asked my mirror image. “You just spoke to this boy for five minutes, if that. You didn’t get this concerned when you went on dates with boys you’ve known almost all your life. Get hold of yourself.”

I stared at my image and then suddenly saw a little rage flow into my eyes.

“I don’t feel like getting hold of myself,” I said with defiance. “I feel like loosening those reins I keep on myself. Tonight I’d like to gallop,” I added, and then smiled at one of my pretend multiple personalities. Moments later, I was bouncing down the stairs as if it was my sixteenth birthday again and I was looking forward to wonderful presents. My parents couldn’t help but hear me.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” I shouted. “Don’t call Sherlock Holmes if I’m gone more than a half hour.”

“You know who Sherlock Holmes is?” Dad returned.

“I saw the remake,” I replied.

“Oh. Well, watch out for Risa Donald,” Dad continued from the living room. “Word has it she’s hiding
in the bushes with binoculars and just waiting for new gossip.”

I heard Mom’s laugh as I went out the front door. For a few moments, I just stood there, wondering what to do next. How would Brayden know I was coming out of the house unless he had been waiting and watching my front door for the last hour? I didn’t have to wonder long. He was there in the street, just vaguely visible in the glow of the moonlight through some hazy clouds. Our street had no lights. No one in the neighborhood wanted them. They were willing to sacrifice the feeling of security for a more natural northwestern sky, often dazzling with shooting stars.

He raised his hand, and I walked slowly to our front gate. He didn’t come forward. He waited for me to reach him, with a look of self-satisfaction on his face. I thought,
That’s a bit arrogant.
I certainly didn’t like being taken for granted, certainly not by someone I had just met. He hadn’t even changed his clothes, whereas I had agonized over what would be attractive to wear on a walk.

“What were you doing? Waiting out here for a few hours?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“You weren’t being a Peeping Tom again, were you?” I asked, now suspicious. Had he planted himself at one of our windows and therefore known when we had finished dinner and when I had gone upstairs to get ready? Or maybe he had been watching my bedroom and seen me make all those preparations, fussing about. I couldn’t remember now if my curtains were fully closed, but if he had seen that, I would be almost as embarrassed as I would had he seen me naked.

“Absolutely not,” he said, raising his hand to imitate someone on the witness stand in a courtroom. “I learned my lesson about gawking and peeping.”

I looked at his house. There were barely any lights on. The entire downstairs was dark.

“Are your parents at home?”

“My father’s gone on a trip somewhere in the Middle East. My mother is upstairs, painting.” He turned around and started down the street.

I walked quickly to catch up. It was as if he were going with me or without me. I thought that was rude, too, but I didn’t complain or turn back. It would be a long time before I would decide for sure whether it was good or bad that I had continued. So many things we do in our lives seem right or wrong at the time but take on a different meaning when years pass and wisdom and experience change our views.

“Painting? What do you mean, painting the house inside?”

“No, hardly,” he said, continuing what I thought was a rather fast pace for a get-to-know-you walk. Why was he in such a rush to get away from his house? “My mother is an artist. Some of her work has been in MoMA.”

“MoMA?”

“The Museum of Modern Art in New York. And other places, especially art magazines. She goes by the name Saraswati.”

“Sara what?”

He laughed. “It’s her little joke, I think. Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of all the creative arts. Most people just think it’s her real name.”

“Is your mother Hindu?”

He finally slowed down but showed no signs of being out of breath. He looked back at his house. Had he just left without telling his mother? Would she be annoyed or something? Whether he knew it or not, he was making me feel uncomfortable.

“Well?” I said when he didn’t respond.

“Not exactly, but she does believe in reincarnation, one of the main Hindu beliefs.”

“She believes you can have more than one life?”

“Absolutely. If you’re good, you come back as something or someone better. If you’re bad, just the opposite.”

“So, were you good or bad in your previous life?”

“I’m still deciding,” he said. “And so is she,” he added, but he dropped his voice until it was close to a whisper.

“Most of the parents I know think their children are God’s gift,” I said, and he laughed.

“Ain’t that the truth.” He paused and looked toward the lake. “I found a path that will take us to the lake quickly. Want to try it?”

“There are No Trespassing signs everywhere around Echo Lake. It has no public access.”

“I don’t think they have armed guards watching, do you? Besides, I can’t believe you’re so law-abiding. I bet you jaywalk.”

“Most of the year, there’s not enough traffic here for it to matter.”

“Rationalization,” he said. “Well? Want to risk going to prison with me?”

I looked in the direction he wanted us to head. It
went through thick woods. Even with the moonlight, it was quite dark. I had expected that when he suggested a walk, he meant a walk to the village, maybe to have a soda or something. Why did I spend so much time on my face and my hair if I was going to walk in the darkness?

“Are you afraid of being in the dark with me?” he asked when I continued to hesitate.

“It’s not just you being a stranger. You just moved here days ago. How do you know how to navigate through the woods and all? I certainly don’t and I’ve been here all my life.”

“Oh, I have radar like bats. I haven’t been sitting inside the house. I’ve been exploring. Trust me,” he said. “It’s worth the walk.”

“If I ruin these shoes . . .” I’d had no idea that he wanted to go off the road. I was wearing a relatively new pair of soft buck leather comfort shoes.

“We come to any puddles or mud, I carry you across. Guaranteed. Well?”

There was something about the way his eyes picked up the moonlight when it sidestepped the clouds. They didn’t reflect it; they absorbed it. They seemed to grow larger, brighter. Maybe he did have radar. I was a little annoyed at the way he smiled at me as I considered where he wanted us to go, but I was also quite intrigued. It was more like a challenge, as if he expected that I would back away and run home or something, and yet he looked as if he was really enjoying the debate I was having within myself.

“What are we going to see?”

“No way to describe it,” he said. “But I’ll bet it’s a view of the lake you’ve never experienced.”

“How could you know that? You haven’t been here long enough to know more than I do about my hometown and what I’ve seen and not seen of the lake.”

“If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize,” he said.

Was this crazy? Was I about to go deep into the darkest part of the woods in our village with a boy I had just met literally hours ago and with whom I had spent no more than fifteen minutes? All I knew about him was that he had a mother who was an artist who believed in reincarnation and a father who was gone most of the time doing top-secret economic research or something. Their house looked barely inhabited, and he wouldn’t even tell me exactly where he was from. Daddy’s joke about Jack the Ripper came tumbling back through my mind.

But then he reached for my hand and took it so gently I stopped thinking bad thoughts instantly.

“Okay?”

“Yes,” I said. For a moment, I felt hypnotized. During that moment, it was as if I would follow him anywhere, even through a raging fire.

He held on to my hand, and we crossed in between the Knottses’ and the Littlefields’ houses. We could hear the televisions going in both, since both families had their windows open. It was a cool summer night, the kind of night when you at least wanted the air flowing through your home, if you didn’t go out for a walk or something as we were doing.

“I bet if you could check, you would be hard-pressed to find a house in this village or any town or city where
young people our age aren’t planted in front of a TV set or a computer screen right now.”

“So?” I said.

“So? So, it’s a Facebook world where no one sees himself or herself anymore. They look into the new mirrors of our world, and instead of discovering who they really are, they see who they dream of being.”

He nodded at the Littlefield house and continued.

“They swim in illusions and disappointments. The sound of someone’s voice, the feel of her hands in yours, the scent of her hair, and the electricity of her very life in her eyes is diffused and filtered until what was once warm and human is now a matter of megabytes. I have seen best friends trapped in flash drives.”

I stood there, mesmerized. “You don’t have a computer?”

“With a father like mine, how could I not have a computer? He had a laptop in the delivery room.”

I laughed, but I felt energized, inspired. How bright was he? “What grade are you in?” I asked.

“When I left, I was in the eleventh. You’re going to be a senior this year.”

“I don’t remember telling you that.”

“Just like for a walk in the woods, I research first,” he replied.

“So we could have classes together?”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be here.”

“What?” I paused. “I don’t understand. Your parents rented the house?”

“Sorta.”

“How can you sort of rent a house?” I asked.

He started us walking again. We sidestepped a ditch and stepped through a patch of blueberry bushes.

“So?”

“It’s like a test run.”

“Test run? You mean, to see if you like it, like living here?”

“Yes, exactly. We’ve done that before—many times before, actually.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense. When you say ‘many times before,’ what do you mean? How many?”

“Ten, twelve.”

“I don’t know what it must be like to move so much. I’ve lived only in one place, one house.”

“Believe me, you’re lucky,” he said. “No matter what you think of your hometown.”

“I don’t think badly of my hometown. I know I’m supposed to. I’m supposed to be like everyone else and talk incessantly about when I’ll finally get out. Some of them make it sound like we’re in a prison.”

“We’re all in one sort of prison or another,” he said. “Wait until they get to live in big urban centers and feel the indifference. Nothing makes you feel insignificant as much as walking down a street with about five thousand other people. They’ll wish they were back here.”

“You talk like you’ve lived for centuries.”

“It’s not how long you live; it’s what you live, where you’ve been, what you’ve done. Life’s like a glass you can fill with either water or wine.”

I realized how interesting, even exciting, it would be to have someone like him in my school, in my classes—actually, in my life.

“Well, in case you do stay on and attend our school, you know we have a summer reading list with reports to make and . . .”

“I’m sure I’ve read everything you’ve been assigned,” he said, not with disdain as much as with self-confidence.

“How can you be so sure of that without seeing the list?”

“Watch it!” he cried instead of answering, and then tugged me a little more toward him to avoid a large dip in the ground. For a moment, he wrapped his right arm around my shoulders. I didn’t pull away, but he released me. “Sorry, if I was too rough, but I was worried about those shoes.”

“No, it was fine. Thanks.”

He stared at the gaping hole. It was about two feet wide.

“It looks like a mini-sinkhole,” he said. “I saw some enormous ones two years ago when we were in Israel. They were at the Dead Sea. Could easily swallow up a house when the ground collapsed.”

“You’ve been to Israel?”

“One of my father’s conferences. Something to do with technology and satellites.”

“Where else have you been?” I asked as we continued walking carefully.

“Italy, France, Germany, England, and yes, Greece, but I was pretty young for most of those trips and probably got little more out of them than I would have from Disneyland. We just go between those two tall pine trees,” he said, nodding ahead. It was obvious that he did know exactly where he was going and how to get there.