The Hour Before Dark (14 page)

“Yes.”

“Your sister called you the previous night. Do you recall precisely when?”

“No. It was sometime before midnight. I was out that night with a friend.”

“Does your answering machine log the time?”

I shrugged. “Yes. But I erased the tape. I always do. Once... I’ve heard the messages.”

“But you can guess that at the earliest, she might’ve called when?”

“Well, she told me she called around nine.”

“But she might’ve called earlier.”

“I hadn’t been home since morning. I went to work, then went out after work.”

“You left Burnley when you were eighteen?”

I glanced at Joe. Then back at the investigator. “Yes.”

I glanced at Joe again. “Is this something I need a lawyer for?”

Raleigh smiled. “Let me tell you, we’re having a tough time with this one, Mr. Raglan. For various reasons. It would be helpful if we could at least learn more about your father’s relationship within his own family.”

“Well, it was a good one. I was a bad kid, basically. I don’t know why. There was just something here that made me want to get away. I hated this village, and this island. I felt stuck. I was also stupid. I just wanted to get away, so I did. I haven’t been that close to my sister or brother or father since then. Well, ‘til now.”

“Did you know about your sister’s mental state?” she asked.

“What?”

“Detective,” Grogan said.

She continued. “She’d been depressed. Neighbors mentioned to us that she sometimes wandered at night—since late November. She was seen once out on the road in front of the house, completely naked. Your brother mentioned finding her in such a state, sleepwalking. She’s even contemplated suicide.”

“Brooke? I don’t believe that.” I stood up, pushing the chair back. “I’m sorry, Joe, but it sounds like you’re looking to scapegoat Brooke.”

“She told us,” Raleigh said. “She didn’t hide it. She showed us scars on her aims. Have you seen them?”

3

“It wasn’t exactly a suicide attempt,” Bruno snapped when I told him. “She said that she’d been asleep. She’d been taking a bath, and she has the little plastic pillow that floats—in the tub—and she fell asleep. She almost drowned. But it wasn’t an attempted suicide.”

“I don’t think it was about the bathtub,” I told him.

We were at yet another of our favorite watering holes in the village that night, having one beer too many. “This investigator said there were scars. On her arms.”

“It was the upstairs bathroom,” Bruno said, testiness in his voice. “With the sliding glass door for the shower. Dad’s.

When she woke up, she panicked, coming up from the water, and smashed it. She cut her arms a bit, but nothing much. Nothing deep. It freaked her out. She was embarrassed. She said she tracked blood into her room and had to wash it all up that night.”

“Were you there?”

“No. But I know Brooke. If she’d tried to kill herself, she’d have done the job right.”

4

Out of curiosity, I went upstairs and down the long hallway of rooms to my sister’s bathroom one morning when she was sound asleep. The glass doors to the bathtub were gone, although the frame around them remained.

It definitely broke. I left it at that.

For the time being.

I grew restless. I began to feel as if Hawthorn had become a prison. We certainly were too incestuous, too much in each other’s business, too much on top of each other’s lives. I felt like hopping the first ferry off the island, just to be away from both of them: Bruno and Brooke, brother and sister.

And that house.

And that smokehouse with its residue of murder.

At twilight, I took a walk into the village, wrapped in a big overcoat and gloves and hat—feeling as if I just wanted to freeze a little, just feel the cleanness of air and the freshness of the sea breeze.

5

As I walked along the road, snow fell so lightly that it was barely perceptible at first.

By the time I reached the village, it was pitch black with very little moon shining through the overhang of clouds. The streetlamps of Main Street were well lit, but the block I strolled along was completely empty. Half the shops were boarded up for the winter; the other half, on the north side of the street, were open. A few had just closed for the night.

I stood for a few minutes and watched the faint beginning of snow spin downward, and I watched some of the shopkeepers lock up their stores.

Croder-Sharp-Callahan was still open.

It was a longish building with Victorian flourishes along its rooftop and a wraparound porch. It probably had begun its life in the village as a great spread of a house. When the store had taken over, it had worked hard to retain that charm of the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as had many of the shops on Main Street. The lights were on inside, and I could see the rows of food and household supplies.

And then I saw her there. Through the slightly blurry window of the store.

Pola Croder.

It was as if I were not standing across the street, with a car or two passing between me and the store. It was as if I were right there, next to her, looking at her.

She stood behind the old lunch counter, an apron wrapped around her broad and lovely hips, her blond hair pulled back. She had gained a little weight since high school, but I had to admit, it looked damn good on her and gave curves to her formerly angular body.

Work up the nerve, you mouse,
I told myself. I wished I could’ve downed a beer just to give myself that warm, false courage of hops and foam.
You’ve spent your life running from her. You have to make it right. Somehow. You have to let her close the door on you. Again.

6

I went into Croder-Sharp-Callahan, its front door practically slapping me on the ass as I stepped over its threshold.

Inside, the lights were bright and flat. I saw a few faces I recognized. You can’t grow up in a town that small and not know everyone. Even if you move away for several years, you come back and you still know everyone. Truth is, time truly does stop there and only begins again upon your return. “Neem,” they said, and I said “Hey” to each of them and they said “Hey” back, and then we all got down to the business of ordering what might be the worst Chinese food on the planet, but the only kind available on the island.

“Pola,” I said.

I wasn’t sure if she would ever look my way.

1

In her teens, her hair had been white-blond, and she had glossy red lipstick and let cigarettes hang out of her mouth as if she wanted a guy to flick them out and kiss her. She was the closest thing to glamorous we had in Burnleyside.

Pola. That name came from her Russian father, but it had been an unfortunate one in our childhood. We had called her Pola Bear on the playground, and because she had the usual amount of baby fat straight up until her teen years, this nickname no doubt hurt.

All right, I had never called her Pola Bear. I was an outcast even then, and I felt a great deal of sympathy for anyone who was bullied or called names. The fact that we all had funny names (with the exception of the few Bills, Daves, Annes, and Debbies among us) didn’t seem to stop any of the kids from picking out someone to ridicule for name alone. As Nemo, I was often called “Feebo” (you figure out how it got from one to the other, and you will have discovered the secret of childhood cruelty).

But there was Pola, at Croder-Sharp-Callahan. She was no longer the pointy-chinned little weirdo from childhood, the girl with a dirty face and a dirty dress. By high school, I had found her completely irresistible, and we’d fallen in love fast and stayed that way until about the end of my senior year. I had adored every inch of her, the smell of her, the brain of her, the laugh of her.

She finally turned and said her “Hey,” and took my order of chicken chow mein and egg drop soup. I wasn’t sure if she recognized me at all. My heart seemed to beat too fast. I felt my throat dry up a bit, but soothed it with some warm tea.

Seeing her again, I will admit, I felt that lust hunger that wasn’t as awful as I suspect women think it is.

I wanted to hold her, and kiss her, and somehow be with her again.

I figured it would never happen.

I felt five times the loser for even wanting it.

2

The chicken chow mein was as smooth as ever, and the soup, though tepid, satisfied. It was difficult to even notice the taste because Pola was nearby. I kept glancing at her, out of the corners of my eyes. Had she recognized me at all while I slurped at the cup? While I wiped at my chin? Pola didn’t seemed to have noticed me beyond the way she might notice any other local entering the place. Certainly others said their “heys” with more marked enthusiasm, and with questions about my travels to the outer edges of the universe. Here’s what I can recall of Pola, standing behind the counter with her smudge-stained white apron, her breasts so noticeable as to be an entirely separate creature parasitically attached to her chest, her hair shiny in the fluorescent lights that hummed above us: She was a beauty, and not just on the small-town Burnley Island scale, but she would’ve been a beauty anywhere, and it was not her bra size, or the blondness, but it was her eyes and her rather direct use of them when happy, sad, annoyed, or disturbed.

She looked as if she had lived her life once with some recklessness, and now relived it with wisdom and understanding and a certain amount of unpleasant resignation.

And so, there was I; there was Pola; and between us, a metal counter, an apron, and my understanding that there would be no time to again make out beneath the school bleachers, or to dance beneath icy moonlight on the edge of a clear and frozen lake while my father’s car idled at the roadside, nor would there be another second of stealing a kiss and feeling like a thief. Whether it came at thirty, or at forty, or at fifty, it didn’t matter. I had already begun to long for what was past and what could not be grasped again.

And then the little miracle began.

She came over to me and drew a chair back across the table.

“It’s terrible what happened,” she said. “Your father was a good man.”

“Yeah,” I said. I wanted to say: I tried to call. But that sounded so lame. I wanted to say: I’ve thought about you for the past ten years. I just wasn’t sure what that really meant.

Instead, we got to talking families and pasts and presents, but always with some kind of unanswered question about where love goes. How does it ever really change? You can tell me that when you were truly in love with someone, and it ended, that you no longer love that person, but I won’t be the one to believe you. Anyone I had ever loved—in my heart, not just in my flesh or in my mind, I still loved. They had remained with me in some way that was maddeningly difficult to pinpoint.

Pola seemed to have set her expression in stone: neither smile nor flatline, her lips were slightly parted as if she were about to whistle. Then, “Well, it’s good to see you here, anyway. You should come around and meet my son.”

“Ah.” That was all I said. Mention of her son reminded me of all the reasons I’d left Burnley Island behind. She and I were in love. I was in love with her. She was in love, but not with me. She had fooled me for a time into believing she adored me. But she had already moved on—she was pregnant at eighteen, and she told me, tears in her eyes, that it was another boy, a few years older. She was going to marry him. She wept on my sleeve, and I held her on a long summer’s night. She had kept saying to me how right it was that we should break up, that she wanted to stay on the island, that she loved it there, and that I was going to get out in the world and would’ve hated her more for trying to keep me there. The whole time she’d told me this, when we were both eighteen, I had hated her. Hated her in the only way that a lover could. It seemed careless of her—to me—that I should give her the purity of my love and be willing to dedicate my life to her, and she had just trampled on that by deciding on a more suitable guy. And I felt myself turn cold. Even at eighteen. Bitter and cold, and I never wanted to see her again.

She had turned on me, and I had been too immature to handle it. I had run, and used any excuse I could to go.

But now, seeing her, it brought back everything. The pop songs and the clichés were all correct: Love is a stranger. Love is a battlefield. Love is a four-letter word. Love is a miracle.

But I added a new cliché to the mix when I was eighteen: Love is a prison, and the only way out is to open the door yourself, and walk away.

I glanced at her hand. I just stared at that sucker, and I wanted to touch it. I wanted to hold her hand. To listen to her for a while. I could not get the idea out of my mind that we should be in each other’s arms, pressing together, melting against each other.

We talked old times, and laughed, and hesitated a little. She shut the store down, and I told her I’d walk her home.

Just as I had done as a teenager.

Outside, the snow continued.

3

The snow swirled and shivered as it fell beneath the streetlamps.

Pola would not look at me as we walked along Main Street with all its yellow and blue and red holiday lights strung along the stores. She still wore the large white apron, and it spread across her hips, tied tight around the back, accentuating her curves; her hair was pulled back severely, and an impish part of me wanted to pull at the bands holding it up and let it fell down around her shoulders.

She stopped. As if she could read my mind. The snow moved around her face as she stood beneath the lamplight at the end of the street. Her eyes seemed radiant to me. “Sometimes the past is stupid,” she said. “Would you do things differently if you could go back?”

I nodded. “Pretty much everything.”

She gave me a knowing look. “Well, me, too.”

Her brief words,
me, too,
confused me.

I felt something I’d never quite experienced. It was like a small voice in my head that said:
You can spend your whole life not telling the truth about who you are inside. Life is easier that way.