Dark Places(80)

“Did you tell the police that?”

“Aw, Libby, come on. Come on. This is not how I want this to go.”

“Did you?”

“No, I didn’t. What difference would it have made? They already knew we had a fight. I tell them we had two? That’s … there’s no point. I was there maybe an hour, nothing happened besides that, it was inconsequential. Entirely.”

We eyed each other.

“Who’s Diondra?” I asked. I could see him try to go even more still. I could see him thinking. The sneaking out may have been true, may not, but I could tell now he was about to lie. The name Diondra chimed him, I could picture his bones humming. He tilted his head to the right just a little bit, a funny you ask that tilt and caught himself.

“Diondra?” He was stalling, trying to figure out exactly what I knew. I gave him a face of slab.

“Uh, Diondra was a girl at school. Where’d you come up with Diondra?”

“I found a note she wrote you, sounds like she was more than ‘a girl at school.’”

“Huh. Well, she was a crazy girl, I do remember that. She was always writing notes that, you know, she was a girl who wanted people to think she was, wild.”

“I thought you didn’t have a girlfriend.”

“I didn’t. Jeez, Libby how do you go from a note to a girlfriend?”

“From the note.” I tensed up, knowing I was about to be disappointed.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I wish I could say she was my girlfriend. She was, just totally out of my league. I don’t even remember getting a note from her. Are you sure it had my name on it? And how’d you even get a note?”

“Never mind,” I said, removing the phone from my ear so he knew I was leaving.

“Libby, hold on, hold on.”

“No, if you’re going to work me like some … convict, I don’t see the point.”

“Libby, hold the hell up. I’m sorry I can’t give you the answer I guess you want.”

“I just want the truth.”

“And I just want to tell you the truth, but you seem to want … a story. I just, I mean Christ, here comes my little sister after all these years and I think, well, here might be one good thing. One good thing. She sure as hell wasn’t helpful twenty-four goddam years ago, but, hey, I’m over that, I’m so over that the first time I see her, all I am is happy. I mean there I was in my fucking animal pen, waiting to see you, so nervous like I was going on a date, and I see you and, jeez, it’s like, maybe this one thing will be OK. Maybe I can have one person from my family still in my life and I won’t be so fucking lonely, because—and I mean, I know you talked to Magda, believe me I heard all about that, and so yeah I have people who visit me and care about me, but they’re not you, they’re not anyone who knows me except as the guy with the … and I was just thinking it’d be so goddam nice to be able to talk with my sister, who knows me, who knows our family, and knows that we were just, like, normal, and we can laugh about goddam cows. That’s it, you know, that’s all I’m asking for at this point. Just something as tiny as that. And so I wish I could tell you something that won’t make you … hate me again.” He dropped his eyes, looking at the reflection of his chest in the glass. “But I can’t.”





Ben Day


JANUARY 2, 1985

5:58 P.M.


Diondra had a little belly, it freaked Ben out, and for weeks now she’d been talking about the “quickening.” The quickening had happened, the baby was moving, it was a very special, important moment and so Ben had to put his hand on her stomach all the time and feel the baby kick. He was proud of making the belly, proud of making the baby, the idea of it at least, but he didn’t like to actually touch that area or look at it. The flesh was weird, hard but globby at the same time, like ham gone bad, and touching it was just embarrassing. For weeks, she’d been grabbing his hand and pressing it there, watching his face for a reaction, and then she’d yell at him when he couldn’t feel anything. For a while, actually, he’d thought maybe the pregnancy was just one of Diondra’s jokes to make him feel dumb—he’d sit there with his hand sweating on that gross mound of skin, and think, maybe that rumble, was that it, was that the baby or was that just indigestion? He worried. He worried that if he didn’t feel anything—and he hadn’t those first weeks after the quickening—that Diondra would yell at him, It’s right there, it’s like a cannon going off in my womb, how can you not feel it? And he worried that if he finally said he did, that Diondra would blast him with her laugh, that laugh that bowed her at the midsection like she’d been shot, the knee-grabbing laugh that made her gelled hair shake like a tree after an ice storm, because of course she wasn’t really pregnant, she was just fucking with him, didn’t he know anything?