The Hour Before Dark (24 page)

Even that seemed stupid.

Admittedly, everything I thought of to counteract the idea that it was “a ghost,” which is how Harry described it (gullible believer in all that he had always been), all my arguments both within my head and outside in the world that I could see around me—it all meant nothing. Something inside me felt as if this voice coming from me in the smokehouse did have some significance and meaning. I just could not decipher what any of it meant.

It reminded me of the Dark Game far too much.

In the Dark Game, we would pretend that we were talking to the dead sometimes. We would pretend that Granny was still there, and that she was with us. The Dark Game allowed us to open our eyes within our minds and draw back what our father had called “the illusion of reality.”

As children, this had been powerful for us. It was as if we had a childhood imagination to the nth degree. It became a place for incredible creativity—after we’d played for long periods of time, I’d go in my room and knock out a story about the Underland, or Brooke would start drawing on pages and pages of paper, as if she couldn’t stop—as if she had some inner vision and wanted to get it all down.

I suppose it’s where Brooke got her talent in art—something she had tried to hide, but was now coming out in those paintings—and where Bruno got his wild musical talent that allowed him to compose some interesting melodies from out of nowhere. And in my own modest way, it was probably where my ability to make up stories had appeared, not that it had brought me anything other than anxiety.

But the Dark Game was a creativity firecracker that we each had within us, even as adults.

1

I clung to the possibility that Harry’s and my adventure in the smokehouse was somehow less than it seemed. Maybe the Dark Game that we’d played to pass the endless winter days had some detrimental effect on each of us, on our subconscious minds, the way a hypnotic suggestion might. Maybe we were all susceptible to hypnotic suggestion because the Dark Game was its own powerful form of self-hypnosis.

Well, of course it was, I reasoned as I trudged in the snow-swept street.
Of course, the Dark Game was just hypnosis in the form of a game.
That’s why Harry could hypnotize me so easily. That’s why I spouted silly things to him when I was a kid. Our father had taught it to us, but he had learned it from his granny and modified it in the war to survive. It was a bit abusive for him to teach it to us as a method of momentary escape, but what could you do? Childhood was like that—full of pulls and pushes from grown-ups who had no conception of what they were doing half the time to fuck up their kids.

I felt heavy from the weather and the burden of destiny that had already been loaded on my shoulders. My father’s memory didn’t need more irrationality.

I left Harry’s place, book under my arm. I wondered if perhaps I was going insane—just the post-traumatic stress kind of thing. After all, my dad had been butchered. I had gone into the very place where it had happened. His blood was still on the walls. It might not be a stretch for a guy to break down and start babbling. Since Harry had been a kid who really believed in far too many things, and since Harry had been stuck on the island his entire life, I figured that maybe he’d gotten into island lore a little too much. He had spent part of the evening talking about the ghosts of the Native American dead who had been seen up on the white cliffs at The Oaks in a terrible fog; or the ghost of the infamous pirate Johann Redd, who supposedly still protected his buried treasure on the islands up and down the coastline, unable to remember where he’d buried it, so he went from island to island in search of the doubloons. I had known these stories since childhood, and even if they’d fascinated me as a kid, I’d never met anyone who had actually seen one of these ghosts.

2

Walking along the slippery sidewalk on Main Street, I drew out my cell phone and tried to call Pola, but the phone wasn’t working. It’s a Dead Area. The whole damn island’s got to be a Dead Area for making calls most of the time. I ended up calling her from the pay phone at Hanley’s Mobil station. She immediately picked up.

“I knew it was you,” she said. “I thought you were mad for me. Then you drop off the face of the earth.”

“Can I come over?” I asked, a plaintive whine in my voice that I could not knock out.

“Something’s wrong?”

“Not really,” I said. “I just want to see you.”

“Ready to meet Zack?”

3

Pola’s house had once belonged to a man I knew as a kid— his name was Fisher, and he paid me a lot of money to mow his lawn in the summer and keep his driveway clear in the winter. He’d sold it to Pola and her husband four years before, and then, when they’d gotten divorced, Pola had kept the house while, according to Pola, “he kept just about everything else.”

It was a small, cozy Cape Cod, just two bedrooms, a living room that seemed no longer than one of the bedrooms. I adored it on sight—Pola was everywhere in it, in the pastel of the walls and the stencils near the ceiling of her son’s room, to the old captain’s trunk in the living room that served as both coffee table and footrest. The living room was decked out in full Christmas regalia—and it made me painfully aware of how, since our father’s death, my own family had not bothered with cheer or decorations. Her tree was small but heavy with homemade touches, cranberry and popcorn string, what looked like eggs decorated with beads and ribbons, no doubt a school project for Zack; and along the edges of her windows, small, blinking, colorful lights. At the fireplace, a long red stocking with Zack’s name on it. Presents nestled beneath the tree.

“Zack!” Pola said, calling her son down from the attic. She turned to check my expression. “You sure you’re ready to meet him?”

“Of course,” I said. “Why’d you lock him in the attic?”

“He’s going to be an inventor,” she said. I heard the dip-clop of his shoes as he came down the narrow stairs that went to the top of the house. “It’s barely a crawlspace up there, but he has his inventions. It’s his mad scientist laboratory. You know how kids are. It’s where he and his friends can play games and have a little privacy.”

A lanky boy of nine came running, his white sweatshirt covered with what might’ve been axle grease. He had a mischievous look on his face, and he had his mother’s eyes and smile.

“Is it supper yet?” he asked.

He looked at me just as curiously as I looked at him. “He looks like you,” I said.

“Some people think so,” she said. “I can’t really tell. He looks like himself.” She said this exuberantly, and as he came down to the bottom step, she went and grabbed him around the neck and shoulders in a swinging hug. “Zack, this is an old friend of mine.”

“Hello!” Zack shouted, as if I wouldn’t be able to hear him. Then he shrugged off his mother’s arms and walked rather formally toward me. He put his hand out, and I shook it. His grip was firm. “Good to meet you, sir.”

“Zack, this is Nemo Raglan.”

“That’s a funny name,” Zack said. “Nemo Ragman."

"Zack,” his mother said. “Raglan."

“Oh,” Zack said, as if he suddenly understood. He grew more serious. “You’re the one whose dad got killed.”

4

Zack explained to me that he was sad about his dad, too, because his dad had left and found another mom two years before, and Zack didn’t really like the other mom that well because she wasn’t the real thing.

Supper consisted of homemade chili that was the most delicious I’d ever had; Zack talked nonstop through supper, and wanted to know all about things that had nothing to do with the island. What was Washington like? Boston? Had I ever been to Chicago and seen the Sears Tower? Had I ever seen the World Trade Center before the bad guys knocked it down? What was my favorite hockey team? He liked Wayne Gretzky but only because he thought the name was funny. His favorite band was the Bare Naked Ladies, although I suspected that it was because of the group’s name and not because of the music. Ditto for his second favorite: Alien Ant Farm. He asked if I had ever played lacrosse, or if I had ice skated like he did out at Hanley’s Pond. He said his best friend, Mike, had taught him how to cross-country ski, but he’d only done it once. He told me that he wished he had met Albert Einstein, and he wondered if I had. When I told him no, I did tell him my favorite Albert Einstein quote. (It goes: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is that nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” He thought this quote was cool.) He asked me if I’d ever read anything by J. K Rowling. Then he proceeded to regale me with why he thought the Harry Potter books were the best books ever written, why he believed there might really be a Hogwarts School, and why I should make sure to go read the books even if I’d seen the movie.

Pola got up at one point and came back to the table with a copy of my novel,
Igdrasil
. I felt my face flush. I wanted to rub dirt all over myself. It felt more than slightly embarrassing to know she’d read my only published novel.

As if to ward off any criticism, I immediately said, “I really wish it hadn’t been published.” It was a lie, but I just didn’t want to face that book, the failure of my dream.

“I love this book,” Pola said. She flipped the pages. “Look how dog-eared it is. I re-read it all the time. It’s just like having you here to talk to.”

Zack looked at me with wonder after that and told me that I should think about writing books the way J. K. Rowling did, “the kind where every kid wants to read them.”

After supper, it was nearly his bedtime. Pola went upstairs for a while to make sure he got into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and was ready for a little late night reading. It was utterly charming. He did the reading (from a book called Great Inventors Through the Ages), and she sat in a chair by the bed, and listened. She invited me to read some, too.

I asked Zack what his favorite book was and told him that I’d read a few pages to him. He asked me to read some of my novel.

“You may not like it,” I said.

“I will love it,” he said. “I will think it’s the best book if you read it to me.”

Such was his enthusiasm that I read the passage from my novel about the hero when he was a boy, and how he had learned the language of the wind and rain. Zack smiled the whole time.

When he closed his eyes and yawned a bit too much, I flicked off his bedside lamp and joined Pola, who had been in the doorway while I read.

Pola and I stood outside his door, just watching him in the shadows.

“He likes you,” she whispered.

“I’m guessing a kid that great likes everybody he meets,” I said.

“Poor little guy,” she said softy. “He’s got his troubles like anyone else.” She didn’t elaborate, but I figured it had to do with the divorce. I remembered how abandoned I’d felt when my mother had run off. I doubted a wound like that ever would heal, but would always remain a bit of a scar no matter how many years passed.

Even for Zack.

It was the closest I had ever come to having my own family, that moment. Standing with Pola, leaning against the doorframe, watching her son in bed, all covered up, drifting off to sleep.

I think it was nearly like being part of a normal family. A family that seemed at peace.

Sure, I knew it was fake. I wasn’t Zack’s dad; Pola and I still had the past to contend with, and would have to deal with it one day; the scene was all make believe.

But it was a moment taken out of time for me.

It was like lingering at the edge of a wonderful dream I had always wanted to have.

Loitering with intent.

5

I’d like to say that we did the mature thing and went downstairs, sat in the living room, and just held hands.

But the truth was, I couldn’t keep my mitts off her. It was a sacred love turned remarkably profane; The feeling of being part of her life again was just a complete turn on. I felt horny the way I had at sixteen with her, and I had this urge to merge. I wanted to touch her and feel her warmth, just be as close to her as I possibly could get, our lips touching, our bodies wrapped around each other.

But that was in my head. We mainly kissed and cuddled, and the intensity of her warmth went right down to my toes.

After a bit of making out, she drew back.

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “But you sounded bad on the phone. Want to talk about it?”

I didn’t respond at first, still in a sort of passion-driven stare, the aroused, animal moment that needed to simmer down a bit.

“Is it meeting Zack?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “No, it’s not anything like that. I hate even bringing anything up.”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “We don’t have to talk.” We began kissing again, and after a few minutes, she drew back from me again. This time she sat back up and moved to the end of the sofa. “Something’s up. I can tell.”

“It’s crazy,” I said, wondering at her powers of observation.
Could she read me that easily?

“It’s probably not crazy,” she said.

And then I just let it out. I felt as if the largest burden of my entire life released in one fell swoop, and I began jabbering about it all—about feeling something in the greenhouse, about Brooke and her painting, about the money in the wardrobe, and finally, about what had happened with Harry Withers in the smokehouse.

The voice.

6

“Do you believe in supernatural crap?” I asked. It was the only way I could put it without laughing at myself. It sounded ridiculous.

“I’m not sure belief is an issue,” she said thoughtfully. “Nemo, are you sure it wasn’t your voice?”

“Positive.”

“You don’t think Harry did some kind of trick?”

I shook my head. “No. He believes it’s a supernatural phenomenon. He thinks there’s a ghost.”

She ginned, and then said, “Really? A ghost?”

“I know. I don’t believe in them, either.”

She looked at me with an unsettling concern in her face.