What We Lost in the Dark (21 page)

In time, the former resorts vanished.

In the broad glow from the brights, the snowfields smoothed out, broad pectorals and concave abs like a goddess
lying on her back. Here and there was a summer home, sheltered under the nanny cluster of tall pines or thrust out on a short cliff. These places were lush, and motion lights picked me up, hundreds of yards away. While lamplight burned in a couple of windows, I didn’t think there were people asleep in there. The way up was steep, but Gideon’s truck was more than a match for it. I imagined Rob and I fishtailing around in his Jeep on this road, already mushy, as the temperature was on the rise. I drove slowly, stopping periodically to shine my light over what appeared to be breaks in the snow, looking for the well-worn fire track that Gideon had described.

I was in the right place. I could see the summit of Torch Mountain and the lighted windows of the Timbers a little to my right and in front of me, to the north, its gondolas glittering in the darkness like a slow-swaying string of bright beads. There were a couple of what seemed to be driveways or snowmobile tracks with dark, hunched buildings at the terminus—and these would probably have been hunting cabins of some kind. About half a mile farther on, the road crested and widened, flattening out.

And there it was. The wide track swept away from Cannon Road, and in the distance, I could see faint lights from some kind of big house. I turned into the road, slowly, and stopped, first opening the window and then killing the engine.

This was the place to get out.

With every part of my body, I did not want to abandon the safety of that big Dodge truck, with Gid’s implied presence. But this was as far as I could go without being detected. If anyone were to be up there, if this was even the right place …

Backing out, I drove another mile, to where the road bucked up again, and cinched on itself back toward the front of the mountain. Gideon’s summerhouse was up there;
I knew that much. When Rob and Juliet and I were about twelve, we’d spent a night camping in Gideon’s teepee. It was everything a genuine teepee should be—hide-made, thirty feet in diameter at the base, rising to a height of eighteen feet on tall lodge poles, with a neat fire ring and thick log benches as comfortable as any mattress. That would have been the spot, then, I thought, if Gid’s directions were right. Gid’s wife at the time (number two or three) had brought us big plates of venison stew and fry bread, which tastes like what they would feed you every morning in heaven. At the urging of Gideon’s wife (why had he divorced that one, Kerry or Cherry? She was nice! She’d probably divorced him …) we sat at the base of a tree until the animals all around believed that we were landscape. In time, a grey fox led her huge-eyed kits around our feet, so boldly that one of the tiny pups rolled right over Juliet’s leg. Deer and their gawky, spotted babies came out into the meadow, where Gideon had a big salt block. Despite having grown up with these animals all around us, their proximity, in that setting, was thrilling.

Usually, kids who camp out stay up all night.

But after we’d seen the animals, we couldn’t resist the combination of our sleeping bags and those grooved, satiny log benches. A single ghost story from Gideon’s wife—about a woman who had run her white Cadillac off the road at eighty miles an hour, and who appeared on dark nights in the road to help other drivers do the same thing—and we were out until the song of Gideon’s flute merged with the song of birds waking in the trees around us.

That night changed me.

A few summers later, I began taking Angela on moonlight picnics. We took leftovers, or just a bag of trail mix: food was never the point. We had seen things together that only
people who lived in the dark could ever see. The art of stillness was something that I had learned in a CT scanner, in an examining room, in hours alone, at age eight and nine and ten, wondering what other kids were doing in the sunlight and why I could never be with them. I convinced Angela to try stillness when she was so small it was almost impossible for her to do. By the time she was in school, she was so good at it that she could eavesdrop on almost anyone. One night, a timid, gigantic moose cow crossed before us, with her spindle-legged calf. A fish eagle dived just before dawn to feed her enormous, wobble-headed chicks. We lay on our backs, and I made up stories about the constellations. I didn’t tell the traditional myths, but stories of two sisters, one who would shine in the morning and one who would shine in the night, and how they met in the middle.

“I’m the shine-at-night sister,” said the seven-year-old Angela. “When I grow up, I’m going to stay up all night.”

“When you grow up, maybe I’ll be able to come out in the sun. Maybe I’ll get better.”

Last summer, when we’d taken a picnic, nine-year-old Angela looked away from me, studiously, sharply, her thick brows drawn down in a scowl. “I’m going to be the only sister,” she said. “When I’m grown up, you’ll be dead. That’s what happens to people with XP.”

“Yes, I know. That is true. But I hope not.”

“That’s what Keely says to me. That you’ll die soon.”

That I would die soon was something that Angela should not have had to pace her way through, every day of her life. But the odds were good that one day, she would have to say goodbye to me, much sooner than was justified. Jackie and I had opted not to tell Angela about the gene therapy trials until there was something to really tell.

Angela!

What was I doing out here after midnight, gathering up strands of my old life just as my new life—with the hope of a cure for XP and the life of a college student—were literally rising in front of me?

How could I pull something like this on my mother?

What did I think, that I could surprise Garrett Tabor in his lair? Find him sifting through skeletons and smack him down with my big screwdriver? Jackie would be home now, not suspecting that I was anywhere except with Rob. I glanced down at my phone. If there could be negative bars, I would find them here. People who lived out this way must have satellite dishes mounted on poles seventy feet tall.

I was Allie Kim, not the Great and Terrible, but the small and meek.

Still, I off-roaded Gideon’s truck into a thicket of trees so as to go unnoticed. I nearly screamed when the thing promptly sank into a drift so deep it would make opening the driver’s side door a challenge. I was a Minnesota girl, adept at rocking cars, but this was beyond me. The truck was mired beyond rocking and would require tow-truck intervention. Well. I had my skis. I couldn’t be more than five or six (or eight) miles from my house. I would ski on over and see what was there, in that soft cluster of lights, and then I would ski back home and confess my wickednesses to Gideon via a phone message. I would offer to pay for the tow. I knew he would refuse. I hadn’t hurt the truck in any way, at least. Before I left the rapidly cooling warmth of the cab, I suited myself up for a ski, regretfully leaving my boots behind in the cab and slipping on a pair of extra wool socks under my cross-country boots. With any luck, I could pull myself from the cab into the bed of the pickup truck without having to
drench myself in the drift. Somehow, I stuffed the thermos into that backpack and wadded the little blanket in around it. I hadn’t fallen on skis since I was ten, but there could be a first time. Picturing myself on this road waiting out the night with a sprained ankle did not make for pretty daydreams. After the night would come the morning, and those images were even less attractive. I could burrow into pine needles under the blanket, but that warmth wouldn’t last as long as the protection. I’d have a nice-looking frozen corpse.

I looked down at my watch. It was after two. I was running out of night.

Enough.

Standing on the running board, I swung myself easily over in the dry cab, secured my skis, and easily traversed the drift. In case he should come looking for me, or for his truck, I left Gid’s keys on the antenna, strung from their rawhide lanyard.

I adjusted my miner’s lamp on my head but didn’t turn it on. It was too warm for Juliet’s hat, although it was in the pack. Most of the failures in my brief life, I’d observed, were failures of patience. So I stood in the dark until I could make out—by the light of the moon that had emerged from behind shreds of clouds—the track, the trees, the distant outlines of some kind of structure. And then I took off, in easy glides that soon felt like doing nothing. If I were going off on a fool’s errand at least it helped to be strong-legged and aerobically unassailable.

No more than twenty minutes later, though, my skis were almost useless. I was on gravel, unsure what lay to the left and right of me. It looked like snow-glazed dirt. I thought of my boots, back in the cab of the truck.

Allie, there’s always a way to screw up
, I said to myself.

Well, I could try to break some kind of trail.

It was like skiing on black ice. Slippery and nearly impossible. I didn’t know how much time had passed until I looked at my watch. It was just a few minutes after three.

Closer now, I could see the building Gideon had described. A massive chalet, its most beautiful feature was a wide floor porch that wrapped around the second story. The first floor looked to be taken up half with a garage and half with some kind of pretty glassed-in room that wouldn’t be in use this time of year. I studied the lights. One glowed in a lushly paneled room on the second floor. I took out my camera and peered through the telephoto lens. I could see the décor—dark red couches and chairs, blond wood moldings, a big fireplace of brick and stone. There were overhead lights, dim, recessed, in that room. To the left and right were other rooms, but someone had drawn blinds over those sliding doors. I imagined a plush bedroom or two, and a big kitchen.

Nothing stirred. The light gleamed still and steady.

With a starling plop, a big dollop of snow hit the ground right behind me. To this day, I wonder why I didn’t think, where did that come from? I wasn’t standing next to a tree …

He was a nurse, after all, and nurses know all of your places. With two firm fingers and a knowledge of the nervous system, a nurse—or even a social worker—can take someone down who’s three times the person’s size and strung out on anything from love to uppers. I wasn’t strung out at all. That was what Tabor did with me. A slight pressure on my shoulder, and I went sprawling, before I could resist, and by the time I could get the use of my arms and legs back and start kicking, he had dragged me to a steel door and pulled it open, shoving me into that garage—into the windowless, stinking dark.

“You don’t listen, do you Allie?” he said.

I knew he couldn’t see in the dark any better than I could. So I said nothing. I let my backpack fall to the floor and made sure I knew where the outside pockets were.

“By the time your pal the drunk shows up, the fumes from this little thingamajig I’ve got here will have killed you. I’d like to say it’s been nice knowing you, and it was fun for a while, but now, it’s just too much trouble. Although …” He squatted down close to me. “I could stay for a few minutes if you were nice to me.” I could smell his breath, meaty and minty. “Maybe you can live if you’re nice. But you can’t keep your mouth shut, can you Allie?”

He slid his body up next to me, grabbing the mitten off my left hand and putting my warm palm on his lower thigh. Blue jeans. My right arm was stronger.

I let my left hand go limp and Tabor inched it up his thigh. That was where I stabbed him.

“You bitch!”
he screamed.

He was up and out the door before I could react and wedge something in it. It didn’t snap closed automatically, because of the drift of the snow. But it was on some kind of spring, and it began rapidly to eat the column of paler darkness. Shucking my remaining ski, I jumped to my feet and tried to jam it into the door. I pushed my shoulder against it. It must have been six inches thick. I could hear Tabor outside, swearing and muttering as he made for the car I’d evidently missed.

He couldn’t have been hurt too badly, not unless I got lucky and hit an artery.

I kneeled near the doorway trying to get my hands around the edge of the door before it slammed. But I was too slow, and I fell away in defeat. At least Tabor hadn’t been able to turn on some engine or propane or whatever he’d said he had. Maybe he never had anything at all.

All I had to do was bundle up … and wait. I collapsed back, pushing myself away from the door that was colder than the meadow outside.

Then I heard the clank and slither, behind me. I smelled the foulness in the air—an animal smell that had nothing to do with cars or gas.

It was quicker than I was.

I stood, but before I could jump to one side, it sprang and jerked me down, by my shoulder and my hair.

“Bear? Did I hurt you? I couldn’t let you leave without me. I should have let you go …”

I was crying before I could speak. I reached out with both hands to pull her to me. In the darkness, we fell on some kind of thin rug. I held my Juliet, what there was left of her. For minutes, that was enough. She stank of dirty hair and wounds and messes that had never been cleaned.

I’m a pristine person. I held her closer. I wouldn’t have cared if she were radioactive.

Finally I whispered “Is it really you?”

“It’s really me. Bear, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry. No. Don’t be sorry. Did he hurt you?”

“I’m not hurt. I did everything wrong. I did everything wrong.”

“You’ve been here all this time?”

“Since the night I threw boiling water on him in his penthouse. I convinced him I wanted to make tea … he thought I still believed him, about Bolivia. If I didn’t go, he said he
would wait until you were out driving with Angela, and then—”

“I know.”

“So I took a hot shower … and I let the towel fall off around me …” She breathed in, and I could hear the rattling in her chest. She was sick. But she would get better. I willed it so. “That makes me want to throw up now. Oh, Allie!”

“It’s okay, Juliet. It’s okay! I promise. I’m here now.”