The Hour Before Dark (3 page)

“Ike is like that, too,” Paulette said. Her burly and often-sullen husband gave a grunt at that. Paulette mentioned to Joe Grogan later on that Brooke had seemed preoccupied, as if speaking to them had been a disturbance for her.

“I thought she was very sad. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days,” Paulette had mentioned, giving Joe Grogan something that was as close to the Evil Eye as he had ever in his life witnessed. “But you know, Joe, women like that. Well, they don’t sleep much. Do they? I’d say more, but I’m a Christian woman, and I don’t like to speak like that.”

6

Because our father often hiked the mile to the village and got rides home with neighbors or anyone he could talk into giving him a lift, this was just another ordinary day.

Brooke had her own inner turmoil.

She told others that she had been anxious and somewhat depressed. She talked to Dr. Connelly in the village a week earlier about perhaps getting a change in prescription for her sleeping medicine. “Are you depressed?” he’d asked.

“Not depressed,” she said. “Just not quite feeling like myself.”

He had asked her if she might want to see a therapist on the mainland—he knew a good one in Falmouth. She told him she’d consider it, but she didn’t think talking out her problems would be the answer.

She fought the urge to be impatient with Mab and Madoc. They’d run off to the woods chasing squirrels or rabbits, and returned a long while later, covered head to foot with mud. She went and checked on the cabin—the damage to the roof was extensive. She made a mental note to talk to her father about just tearing it down before it turned into some kind of eyesore.

The snow melted where the sun hit it. In the shade, the duck pond had a thin scum of ice on its surface that had not hardened.

At four, she noticed that lightning had split one of the trees near the smokehouse. She said she had been standing in the greenhouse, with the windows steamed over, and feeling the warmth of the place.

“I was looking at something—I thought it was mist coming in from the road. It was nearly beautiful. It was twilight— dark came early—and this romantic, soft mist just slowly poured along the road. Remember how Granny used to say you could see angels in the fog? I remembered her saying it, and I almost saw an angel in the mist,” she said of it. “And then, I noticed the half-fallen tree.”

One of the hawthorns in particular, but also the young oak that had not quite grown to adulthood yet.

Lightning, she assumed, had ripped across the trees. She was thankful there hadn’t been a fire.

She went to see if there was any other damage.

Her feet crunched in the glaze of snow that hadn’t quite melted in the shadow of the smokehouse.

She saw his shoe, his brown Oxford, stuck in mud—now frozen, she found, as she tried to pull it out. She ended up leaving it where it was, mired.

She glanced first up to the road, perhaps hoping that Paulette and Ike would still be there.

Then to the fields and the pasture—and beyond it, the woods. Mab and Madoc were running down into the duck pond, splashing around.

She glanced up at the sky with its overcast gloom.

Then she went to the low door of the smokehouse and touched it. Something told her not to—she told me later that it was an electric shock of memory—of never liking the smokehouse since before she could remember. Of remembering my screams as Dad spanked me there, or of remembering Bruno crying there for no reason at all when he was six or seven, sobbing and telling her that the smokehouse gave him nightmares.

When she touched the door, it moved a bit.

She grasped the latched handle, expecting the deadbolt that had been applied years ago to keep it shut, and surprise, surprise, it opened outward.

And that’s when she found him.

(She told me later, “I wasn’t sure whether it was him or not for a second. It was something I’d never seen before in my life. It was as if something had exploded, but had been reconstructed again. Something about it was like a dream—or a nightmare—something I’d visited before. As if I’d had some premonition of this. And my brain just short circuited. It just seemed to fade, and I couldn’t think. I went somewhere else in my mind, I suppose. Somewhere safe.”) She sat and stared at him for hours before contacting anyone. I don’t want to even imagine how she could’ve sat there on the cold floor, blood everywhere.

My father.

And Brooke sat there in the icy stench of death. 

She called someone just after ten that night. Her older brother. 

Me.

1

I had a nightmare for all those years, and it repeated itself in a never-ending loop, now and again, at my most anxious times: In it, we played the Dark Game and could not stop.

It was as if the Dark Game had kept playing in some compartment of our minds even as we each grew up.

2

Brooke left no message for me other than to say “Nemo” on my answering machine.

My real name, Fergus, was redubbed Nemo in my early years when Brooke discovered Jules Verne—or at least the Disney version of Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
. She decided that because of my interest in sailing craft and my willingness to eat fried squid in a dare with Harry Withers, I must be kin to the infamous captain. Since I preferred Nemo to my real name, which just didn’t fit for me, I had taken it on while on the island. After I left Burnley, once in college, I reverted to Gus, a diminutive of Fergus that didn’t annoy me too much. But the islanders knew me as Nemo Raglan. As did my sister.

“Nemo, Nemo,” she repeated.

After saying it, she hung up.

I listened to it twice, then erased it. I called her back. The phone rang several times. I heard the familiar clicks and that strange wind tunnel-like noise that I always heard whenever I called the island. Finally, the message machine picked up.

“Brooke? It’s Nemo. Good to hear from you. What’s up? Call me back.”

Later, I got a nervous call from my younger brother, Bruno.

3

“Brooke said she called you,” my brother said. “You’ve been out.”

It was nearly one A.M. I was half-asleep. Beth, whom I’d been out with that night, lay beside me and turned over, clutching a pillow.

“Hey. Who’s asleep. Bruno? That you?” I asked.

Beth made some small noise that was part-snore and part-groan. I reached over and stroked her back lightly. She made my bed smell of roses and something murkily sexual, a musk, an odor of femaleness that I enjoyed. I loved her scent. I pulled the sheet up around her shoulders to keep her warm. I wanted to kiss her again, just on the back of the neck. She turned over, annoyed even in sleep.

“Someone’s with you,” Bruno said, his voice not quite as Yankee as it had once been. It was gentler.

“What’s up?” I repeated, annoyed that I could not cuddle up with Beth and drift to sleep. “I tried calling Brooke back, but there was no answer.”

“You need to come home now. Tomorrow. A lot’s going on.”

“Like?”

“Dad’s dead.”

We both were silent for what seemed like minutes.

I gasped a word or two, meaningless. I felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me. I leaned back on the pillows. I looked up at the shadows that the bedroom windows cast on the ceiling, with the curtains moving slowly back and forth from the slight draft. I closed my eyes and fought back a stupid anguished cry that wanted to come out of my body.

“Call me tomorrow,” Bruno said. “We can talk then. Tonight’s bad. There’s more to it. Fly in tomorrow. I’ll pick you up in Boston.”

Then he hung up. No more details. Bruno was like that. Sometimes he spoke in telegrams, as if he were being charged by the word.

I called him back several times, but there was no answer.

4

I spent a sleepless night, made worse by not knowing how exactly my father had died.

When I did close my eyes—for what felt like a few minutes—a dream came abruptly with the ferocity of a nightmare. I watched outside myself (in the dream) as twilight descended on Hawthorn. The trees seemed to list to the side as my consciousness broke through them. I saw three children, standing in a circle, holding hands. It was me as a little boy, my sister, and my brother. Walking slowly to the left and then the right in the summer grass. Then, with the swiftness and brute force that can accompany shifts in a dream, I stood in the darkness, somewhere, and heard my little brother Bruno say the words, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed.”

In the dream, the phone began ringing, and I cried out, “Someone get the phone! The phone’s ringing! Get the phone!”

Someone asked, “What are you afraid of?”

I awoke. Covered in sweat. Breathing hard.

I gave up on sleep for the night.

It was maddening. I tried to call my brother back every few minutes until dawn. I left message after message. Finally his voice mail must have been full and stopped taking my messages. I could only stare at the walls. I went in the bathroom and curled up on the floor, just to feel its coldness and to be in a small space.

For some reason, small, dark spaces often made me feel protected. I felt like a child. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to imagine my father’s face. I fought to pretend that somehow this wasn’t the whole story, that perhaps my father had a stroke and Bruno had gotten it wrong. Or perhaps he was in a coma—as much as that doesn’t sound better than death, it is. It would give me hope.

I wanted to hope badly. I hadn’t seen my father in years, and I had loved him, but I had hoped that in a few months, I’d go back and see him and we’d have a good conversation and he’d tell me that I’d turned into a good man.

It was never going to happen. Nothing worse than lying on a cold bathroom floor at four in the morning and looking at the bottom of the white wooden door and wishing that the world could somehow change, magically, to suit your own needs.

I returned to bed, snuggling against Beth, as if I could just plow into her flesh and disappear, along with everything pounding in my head.

Beth left well before sunrise, annoyed by my pacing and turning in bed.

It was hard not to want her. She was one of those women who seemed to know that she was headed for great things in life. She had a great body and cute face to accompany her vision of the future, and even a first-rate mind. How could I not want her? She was a prize.

I knew why she wouldn’t want me. I’d been laid off a few days earlier. I wasn’t headed, apparently, for
great things in life
. I could predict the most ordinary life ahead of me, and somehow, I knew I’d muddle through it. I burned for more, but in my twenty-eight years my only extraordinary contribution to the world was that I’d written a novel that apparently no one had read. Younger, I’d wanted to change the world. But by that morning, I was just hoping that I could rise above the usual storms of life and get through it.

I suspect that I was looking for a woman to rescue me and make love the extra ingredient, and perhaps not even love, but some kind of great sex that passed for love in a city like Washington, D.C.

I had lowered expectations for all that life had to offer.

When we kissed goodbye, it was brief and forgettable. Our lips barely touched. I got the sad feeling one gets at the end of a misbegotten affair: as if it reminds us that we’re merely animals, enjoying mating for mysterious reasons in order to pass time until something else comes along.

“My dad died last night,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She kissed my cheek. “That’s terrible.” Silently, she telegraphed without moving her lips once:
I need to get to the office.

“I need to go up there," I said. "To the island."

I didn’t expect her to say too much else at that point.

It was over between us. I was the one feeling discarded. I was the revenge in life for all men who treated women badly—I was the lightning rod of the wrath of women whose loves had walked away from them. I didn’t really give a damn. I just wanted to pretend for a minute with her. And for her to play along. I wanted her to embrace me and emanate human warmth. To experience the smallest spark of sexual fire between us so that I’d feel that there was something else in the world other than the ice that had crept into my blood during the night.

She looked at me as if worried for a minute that I might fall apart on her—and that she might have to deal with it, when all she wanted was to be out of my life.

“Look,” she said. “You—”

“No, it’s all right,” I said.

“What I mean is, what you need isn’t here. So don’t feel bad about leaving.”

“What do I need?” I asked, a somber puppy staring at her.

“Something you left behind somewhere,” she said. “I don’t know what it is. I just know it’s not here. You’ll find it.” She kissed me on the forehead like I was a little boy. “You’re the kind who finds what he’s after.”

She meant these as words of comfort, but something in her tone gave me a slight chill.

It created a slim dread within me—as if I knew that something was scratching at my window in the middle of some endless twilight.

As if her words echoed something I felt, but not something that was good within me. Something about the home I’d grown up in that had never felt right to me.

And I was after whatever that bad thing might be.

5

I watched her dress, knowing it would be the last time.

In my head, the words “Death and the Maiden.”
My father’s voice.
Sometimes his voice was in my head, in times of crisis. My imagining of his voice comforted me. His voice soothed the nicks and scars of life. In the years since I last saw him, last set foot in his house, I internalized him.

What we do in life that determines who we are, we do alone.

6

I had already drunk a pot of coffee by eight thirty.

I made reservations for a flight to Logan Airport, charging it on a credit card I should not have even had, let alone used. Somewhere in there, I called my father’s house more than ten times without an answer. I had a minor-league migraine by nine. Black circles under my eyes, a feeling of dry mouth and that wound-up tightness in my gut of caffeine overflow. Showered in less than five minutes, and dressed carelessly in whatever was not lying on the floor of the closet. Packing involved throwing everything in three suitcases. When that was done, it seemed I had left nothing of value in my apartment. I looked at the suitcases: None was huge. My life, in three suitcases.