Read Voices in the Dark Online
Authors: Andrew Coburn
Voices in the Dark
Andrew Coburn
VOICES
IN THE
DARK
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
For Bernadine, without whom nothing would be possible; our daughters Cathleen, Krista, Lisa, and Heather; my sister, Julie; and my toughest critic, Nikki Smith.
1
ON THE LAST DAY OF HIS LIFE HE READ A WARNING IN HIS horoscope and cast the newspaper aside when a woman asked if she might share the bench. Sitting close, her shirt open to a dash of white, she doubled a leg beneath her and said, “Let me guess, you’re fourteen.” He was sixteen, he told her, which was the exact truth, though he was slight for his age and wore braces on his teeth. It was his birthday, which he didn’t tell her. She said, “I was never sixteen.”
His involuntary smile revealed the braces. “You must’ve been, once.”
“No, I skipped it.”
They were in the Public Garden, where daffodils flung out bells and tulips were cups awaiting offerings. Beyond, in the direction of the lagoon where swan boats carried children and tourists, brilliant forsythia clashed with red rhododendron. The Boston sky was veined marble.
“My name’s Mary. What’s yours?”
He would have guessed something less ordinary, Naomi or Daphne. Her auburn hair flowed from each side of the center part, and her left cheek bore a small blemish, like postage, as if she had come a way. Her face, expressive, was a puzzle beyond figuring. His was delicate, marked by pallor, and harbored an air of privacy. His name he meant to keep to himself, but it came out anyway. “Glen.”
“Fits you,” she said.
He hoped not. It was too light a syllable, too quick a sound, which seemed to dismiss him as soon as he said it. He would have preferred Anthony, which had strength and was the name of someone from school.
The woman, her tone winsome, said, “I love Saturdays, don’t you?”
Not particularly, and he let the click of a heel claim his attention. An extremely attractive black woman with dangling chains of hair strutted by on legs as splendid as those of his stepmother, whom he thought the most beautiful creature in the world. Then came a rush of guilt, for his loyalty lay with his mother, with whom he lived.
The woman touched his arm. “Are you all right?”
His heart was racing, his breathing was dense. More than a year ago, a Saturday, the doctor had given him the odds and the minister had laid his future in the hands of God, which made him feel like a tossed coin that would eventually land heads or tails. Heads was hope, tails a tunnel at the end of which, some people claimed, was a blast of light. He didn’t believe it. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
What had struck was already passing, leaving him with no epiphanies, only vague understandings he didn’t bother to sort out. Instead he watched a trim man with gray locks and dimples feed bread to pigeons. The man didn’t scatter torn pieces but sailed out whole slices onto the grass, which raised a clamor and provoked battles.
The woman said, “Would you rather be alone?”
Though his horoscope hung heavy, warning of a false friend, he said, “No, ma’am.”
“Call me Mary.”
Looking her full in the face, he likened the flaw on her cheek to the bruise on a windfall apple: Eve tempting a callow Adam. She looked thirty-five, but he was no judge. She could have been much older or much younger. With a frown he read his watch. “I’m waiting for my father.”
A shape advanced, but was not familiar. It passed, followed by sauntering youths with legs muscled into jeans, baseball caps worn askew. Pigeons racketed around the man who had finished feeding them, some pied, some shedding fluff, a few nursing hurts. Several, beating their wings, seemed set to fly up at the man. Bigger birds might have done it.
Mary’s whisper heated his ear. “He’s not coming.”
“What?”
“I would bet on it.”
Her smile, a challenge, went unanswered, for he presumed that all contests were fixed, all events predetermined. Adults kept score. She pulled her leg from under her and softened her smile.
“People tend to disappoint us. Isn’t that the first thing you learned when you were little?”
The question was meaningless, for he had doctored most memories and lately had learned to walk a wire from one mood to another. A drop of rain spotted his shirt, though the sun continued to shine. A sudden breeze raised a disturbance in the woman’s hair.
“We mustn’t let it bother us,” she said. “Worst thing is to dwell on it.”
Dwelling on nothing, he drew in sights and sounds existing only for that moment. Sparrows sprayed from a Norway maple and took flight. Children near the weathered statue of a warrior raced and rolled on grass, arms and legs flying out as if detached.
“The trick is to relax, accept what comes along. Can you do that, Glen?”
He held out a hand to feel for more rain, but his palm stayed dry. The breeze vanished, the world went on. From other benches old men, craning their necks, sunned themselves like turtles on logs.
“You’re an only child, aren’t you?”
Everything she said was a sort of surprise that gave him a turn, as if they had met in another life, planet Pluto, winds whistling around them. “How did you know?”
“Something in your eyes.”
He was interested. He wanted to know more about himself, particularly on this special day, with candles yet to be lit. “What else do you know about me?”
“You’d smile more if it weren’t for those braces.”
“They don’t bother me,” he lied and concentrated on people parading by, the intensity of this man, the lack of it in that one. Here was a woman with effortless steps, another with labored ones, the sun scalloping her. Suddenly he was tired. An eye twitched as he flung his watch a final look.
“I told you,” she said.
She was on her feet, as if a little clock had chimed. Her shirt, plum with white buttons, traced her breathing. In her face was a kind of caring, aloof but vivid, alive but contained, leaving him without thoughts, only sensations.
“Your age, every problem is magnified.”
He knew that, he didn’t need to be told. He had graduated the past week from Phillips Andover, the youngest in his class, fitting into no social cluster, possessing only his own thoughts, with the sin of Onan to put him to sleep at night.
“You mustn’t fear anything.”
“I don’t,” he boasted, but the truth was that he suffered nightsweats, had demons in his dreams, and didn’t feel wholly human in the morning. But the feeling always passed.
“And you won’t. Promise.”
He didn’t want her to leave. Sunstruck, her face was a palimpsest of feelings, with no way for him to read through the rough to the original. Her blemish acquired the textured translucency of a watermark. “I won’t,” he promised, his tone rash, as if he had bitten into the apple with no thought of the worm.
“I won’t forget you,” she said.
Each moment expecting her to look back, he watched her stride toward Beacon Street. A few minutes later he rose reluctantly and strode in the opposite direction, past dogtooth violets and coral bells, to Boylston, where cars bumper to bumper honked and fumed. At a crosswalk girls with riots of glazed hair and candy faces colored the air, their torsos in the squeeze of tank tops and bicycle pants. He picked out the prettiest and stashed the image for another time.
In the gray air of the subway station, he sidestepped a derelict who smelled like old fish and bumped through a turnstile. On the platform, people compacted around him. A train flowered with graffiti reverberated by on the opposite tracks, the cars like massive coffins destined for slots in hell. On one side of him was an Hispanic youth with the consumed look of a user and on the other an elderly woman preoccupied with her pocketbook. From behind a man’s voice, private in his ear, startled him. Twisting, he glimpsed gray locks and a dimpled smile aimed at no one.
The crowd shuffled and, at the rumble of an approaching train, pressed forward, forcing him to the verge of the platform, the view of the rails naked. The Hispanic youth gave off a cloying scent of cologne. The woman clutching her pocketbook exuded lilac.
“Better worlds are coming,” the dimpled man whispered in his ear.
The beam of the train, an unearthly eye, appeared abruptly, and in the prick of the moment Glen’s mind filled with childhood drawings his mother had preserved for him on a wall, like cave art. The colors were brilliant, primary, waxing in his mind with the roar of the train.
“Now,” the man said in his ear.
• • •
A half hour away in the bedroom town of Bensington, Police Chief James Morgan was crossing the village green while watching robins worm the ground. With his loose, easy stride, he was a limber figure in an old sports jacket and narrow chinos. His step slowed when he glimpsed a woman near a billowing red maple, and his spirit quickened when she lashed her thighs over a boy’s bicycle, bent forward, and pedaled toward him. But then she glided past him without a word, only a slender smile one might have given a stranger. Picking up speed, she vanished behind explosions of forsythia and moments later reappeared on the street.
From a bench, he craned his neck and watched her sail by the white facade of the town hall, by the Blue Bonnet Restaurant with its window boxes of geraniums, by the war memorial near the ivy-matted library, by the pink brick of the post office. Then he lost sight of her behind a curving bank of parked cars beyond the Congregational church.
Waiting for her to reappear on the far side of the green, he stretched a leg and viewed with mixed feelings the backdrop of chic little shops that had sprung up in the long stretch between Pearl’s Pharmacy and Tuck’s General Store. Brand-new, Minerva’s Tea Room announced itself in tasteful gold leaf lettering. Relatively new, Prescott’s Pantry sold gourmet food and catered private parties, and Elaine’s dolled up children in designer clothes. The Gift Shoppe featured crystal and Wedgwood in its window.
Burger King had sought entry near the green but was relegated to the outskirts of town, near wetland that now harbored a fleet of Japanese cars.
From his vantage point Chief Morgan watched comings and goings of Saturday shoppers at Tuck’s. From the street came the toot of an old station wagon’s horn. A familiar hand waved from the open window, and Morgan waved back. He knew nearly everyone in town, certainly all the natives and not a few of the wealthy newcomers who occupied the Heights, a prestigious area once unmolested woodland and now groomed with extended lawns, ornamental ponds, and geometric gardens surrounding grand houses. As a boy, pretending to be a pioneer blazing a trail, he had wandered those woods.
He pulled his leg in when he heard the crunch of grass. Surprising him, the woman on the bicycle had breezed up from behind and was now wheeling in front of him. Abruptly she braked and stood straddling the crossbar. She was tall, husky, and athletic. Morgan could almost see the gallop in her legs, the spring in her toes. She was from the Heights.
“Are we speaking?”
“It’d be foolish if we didn’t,” he said, his head full of her. A widower, he enjoyed women, and with them he had a livelier voice, a warmer smile, special eyes. Each new woman in his life was a tonic.
“I didn’t mean to stand you up,” she said. She had thick blond hair bundled back, a striking and aggressive face, and an orotund voice thrilling to men and intriguing to other women. Before marrying and moving to Bensington three years ago, she had been a television reporter in Boston. “I’m sorry,” she added.
“It’s okay,” he said, though it was not. Yesterday he had waited two hours for her in the lounge at Rembrandt’s, a restaurant in neighboring Andover. It would have been their first date. “Did you get cold feet?”
