Into the Darkness (6 page)

“When were you here? When did you make this fantastic discovery?”

“Last night,” he said. “There’s a lot of pine up here, and nothing is cooler than being in a pine forest in the summer. Oh, I forgot Switzerland. My father had a major conference in Zurich. My mother and I took a train to Paris and visited the Louvre. I was in seventh grade then, so I remember all of that well. It’s where you can see the Venus de Milo,” he added.

“I’ve been to Los Angeles and to New York twice. That’s where my father’s sister, my aunt May, lives. She’s married to a surgeon who works at Sloan-Kettering. I have two cousins on my father’s side, Eden and Keith. Keith is a senior at Columbia planning to be a doctor also, and Eden is attending William and Mary. She plans on becoming an international journalist. If it weren’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t have much to do with them. They’re so far away, and they never seem to have time to come here. My aunt wasn’t happy living here. She says she felt out of touch with everything going on in the world. We’re too rural for her, and she didn’t want any part of our family’s jewelry business. Look at me,” I said, pausing. “Running off at the mouth. I hate the way I sound.”

“Why? You have a beautiful voice. I loved every syllable,” Brayden said. “You don’t have any relatives on your mother’s side?”

“She was an only child, like me.”

“And me,” Brayden said. “We should form a club. We can call it the Club for Those Smarter Than Their Brothers or Sisters.”

“Ha ha.”

We paused, and then he nodded at the path in the woods.

“Just walk right behind me. It is kind of dark through here,” he said.

How could he see so well? I wondered. The moon was blocked again, and the forest looked more like a solid dark wall.

“Maybe we went far enough?”

“You’ll see we didn’t in a few minutes,” he promised.

I stayed right behind him, almost walking on his feet at times, but just as he predicted, we came out at a place on the lake I had never been. It was a small lagoon. How could he have known, made such a discovery so quickly? Why hadn’t I ever seen it?

As the moon broke free again, the water glistened, and we could see about a dozen Canadian geese floating just a few feet from shore. I turned at the call of a Northern goshawk looking down at us as if we had intruded in his space. Off to the left were about a half-dozen Great Blue herons.

“Look,” Brayden said, pointing toward the cattails and reeds in the water. “Two yellow-headed blackbirds. Aren’t they beautiful?”

In all the years I had lived in Echo Lake, I had never seen so many different varieties of birds gathered in one area. Like most everyone my age I knew, I took it all for granted. Unless we were assigned some science project involving birds, I didn’t pay them as much attention as they obviously deserved.

It wasn’t only the birds and the surprise opening on
the shore that gave us a wide view of the lake, with the moonlight and stars making the water dazzling, that impressed and delighted me. It was the unique silence when so many beautiful things seemed asleep or even, I should say, meditating. Never before had I felt so much a part of it all. It was as if I had suddenly come to appreciate my own home. I felt like someone who had been wearing blinders all her life and suddenly had them removed.

“I can’t believe you’ve been here only a matter of days and you found this spot so quickly,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. I didn’t want to disturb even a water bug.

He said nothing. He just stared out with what was now a soft smile set in a face framed with such longing I felt my own heart ache.

“Anything wrong?” I asked.

“What? No. Am I forgiven for making you trek through the bushes and woods?”

“Absolutely. I wonder what it’s like here in the daytime.”

“It’s pretty, but it’s not the same. Darkness always adds something special. Ironically, it’s as though the light blinds us, washes away important things that are right next to us or right in front of us.”

“Is that why your family keeps the lights so low?”

He looked at me strangely. I thought there was some anger in his eyes, anger and annoyance.

“I was just curious,” I said.

He looked out at the lake again and was silent so long I thought he would say no more. I was about to
suggest that we start back when he turned to me again and said, “My mother is not well.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”

“She suffers from severe depression. Because of that, she sleeps most of the day and retreats to her art studio for most of the night. It’s not uncommon to see the light on in the attic and nowhere else, no other room lit, so don’t be surprised. And don’t be surprised if you rarely see her outside during the daytime. My father has arranged for things to be delivered regularly. She doesn’t like shopping.”

“How sad. Especially when you think of her being in a strange new place without any friends. I mean, you don’t know anyone here, do you?”

“No, but that’s not so unusual for us. Or it hasn’t been, and now, with the way she is, it might not matter.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Can’t someone help her?”

“I do what I can.”

“No, I mean, well, your father, of course, but doctors?”

“She’s seen doctors. She’s on some medication and is seeing a therapist now. My father . . . my father is more comfortable with statistics than with people. He’s not much help when it comes to something like this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I hated repeating myself, but what else could I say? As it was, I felt I had stumbled into more information than he wanted to give, but I also knew how hard it would be for him to live in a town as small as Echo Lake and keep people from knowing what his family life was like. I suspected that most of the boys and even most of the girls, despite his good looks, would be turned off.

“I’d rather, if you can avoid it, you not talk about us with your friends,” he said, as if he could read my thoughts. “It would be horrible for my mother if people came around to gawk or something. That’s mainly why my father wanted to move here. He thought it was far enough away from . . . that it was innocuous. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Of course.”

“I knew you would.”

“I hate gossip. My mother hates it the most. My father acts indifferent about it, but it bothers him, too. I can tell you this for sure, my phone rings the least of any of my classmates’. They know that if they tell me something, it dies with me, and that’s no fun.”

“No boys scratching at the doors and windows?”

“None I care to let in at the moment,” I said, and he finally smiled again.

Then he nodded to the right. “Someone once lived out here.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a small, very old cabin about a thousand yards farther down. It’s hidden by the overgrowth. None of your friends knows about it?”

“We don’t hang out on lake property much. They have regular lake patrols, and the Echo Lake police will jump if someone in the Echo Lake Corporation calls. The properties around the lake are the most expensive and owned by very influential people.”

“No one seems to be doing anything with this area,” he said.

“I’ll find out why not. I’m sure whoever owns it is
just keeping it to wait for a better price or something.”

“Whatever. It’s my favorite place, so don’t talk too much about it and suddenly have dozens of your friends sneaking onto the property to have little private parties.”

“This is your favorite place? How can you have a favorite place? You haven’t seen very much of the town, have you?”

“Enough to know that this place is special.”

I said nothing. We stood looking out at the water, drawing from its energy and beauty. I felt his hand find mine in the darkness.

“Maybe we should go back,” he said, turning. “I’m sure you told your parents you were taking a walk with the strange new neighbor who was gawking at you through the hedges. They’re probably sitting on pins and needles.”

“I didn’t mention the gawking, and I didn’t say you were strange. My father wouldn’t have let me out of the house,” I replied, following him.

He paused. “You really don’t find me strange?”

“Not strange—different.”

“Different works,” he said, nodding. We walked on silently for a while until we were out of the woods and he could reach for my hand again. I gave it to him without hesitation this time.

“Are you going to try to get a job or something for the summer?” I asked.

“No. I have to take care of my mother. You might not see that much of me.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help . . .”

“That’s nice of you. No, there’s nothing, but if you’re around when I’m around, and you don’t mind doing simple things with me occasionally . . .”

“Thoreau things?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

We passed between the Knottses’ and the Littlefields’ again. The TVs were still going, but now we could hear music from upstairs in the Littlefields’ house. Angie Littlefield surely had some of her friends over. She was a year behind me but more popular than most of the girls in my class when it came to the boys in my class.

Brayden caught me looking up at her bedroom windows.

“Why are you really so uninterested in doing things with kids your age, Amber?”

“How do you know that’s true?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

He nodded.

“What?”

“Something frightens you,” he said.

“Frightens me? Okay, what, Dr. Phil?”

He hesitated, staring at me.

“So?”

“The same thing that frightens me now.”

“And what’s that, oh, wise know-it-all?”

He didn’t laugh. He walked on, cloaked in those same moments of silence that just as before made me think he would not answer. As we drew closer to his house, he paused and looked at me.

“You’re frightened about revealing too much about yourself.”

“Like what?”

“Things you won’t even admit to yourself,” he replied. He nodded at the now dark house. “Gotta go. See you,” he said, and headed toward the front door. “Oh,” he added, pausing to look back. “Thanks for walking with me.”

“I enjoyed it. I think,” I said. “It was like walking with Socrates or someone.”

He laughed.

“Maybe you were. Remember,” he said, “reincarnation.”

He laughed again, and then I thought I heard his mother calling for him the way she had when I first met him, her voice sounding so far-off and thin.

Or maybe it was just the breeze strengthening and weaving its way over rain gutters, over wires, and through trees. I looked up and then back toward town.

When I turned to look back at him, he was gone, and again, I hadn’t even heard him open the front door. Maybe he had to tiptoe around her, I thought. Maybe he was forced to live in the same world of silence.

What had he said about prisons? We all lived in one sort or another.

Having a mother like his put him in a sort of prison for sure, I thought.

How sad for him, and yet he didn’t seem depressed. He just seemed more thoughtful, like someone who had been forced to put away childish things.

A part of me envied him for that, but another, perhaps stronger, part pitied him, too.

One thing I knew for sure from just this short time I had spent with him. He didn’t like being pitied.

He didn’t want sympathy.

“What does he want?” I whispered to myself.

The sound of his mother calling his name lingered like a dream that would never be forgotten.

“And the judge’s decision?” Dad called from the living room when he heard me enter the house.

I really didn’t know what I was going to say, but I stepped into the living room anyway. Both of them were reading, my mother a novel and my father the newest book about World War I.

My father was a self-appointed authority on the First World War, because my great-great-grandfather on his side had fought in and survived the Battle of the Somme, in 1916. Local residents and other store owners would often stop in the store to ask my father a question or settle a debate about it. My great-great-grandfather was only eighteen at the time but earned the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, both of which were now framed and hanging in our living room beside the dark oak bookcase. There was a picture of him in uniform, too. When I was little, I would study it to see if I could find resemblances to my father. I thought I saw them in my great-great-grandfather’s nose and mouth. I knew Dad was happy to hear it.

When my great-great-grandfather was in his late
twenties, he married and immigrated to America. It was my grandfather who eventually moved the family to Oregon and started the jewelry store, because my grandmother’s father was in the jewelry business in New York and had gotten him involved when my grandparents married. Dad had pictures of his relatives in three good-size albums. Our pictures of my aunt May and her family weren’t up-to-date, however. It had been almost two years now since I had seen my cousins. Like me, Dad tried to stay in touch with his sister with phone calls and e-mails, but there was always the sense that they were drifting further and further apart. There was only a four-year separation in ages, Aunt May being younger. Whenever her husband could take time off for a vacation, however, they preferred to go to Europe or the Caribbean rather than visit us.