People of the Dark (23 page)

I continued, "I understand why you said it, Will," referring to his comment that Erika was "still in the house somewhere."

"Do you?" he said, and looked confusedly at me.

"Yes." I didn't want to elaborate. I launched into my theory that the people around the house were religious fanatics. He stopped me in mid-monologue. "Sure," he said, "but where'd they go, Jack?"

"Where'd they go?"

"They're not there anymore."

"Sure they are."

"No, Jack. I saw some deer on my way down. I saw a raccoon—I almost hit it, as a matter of fact—and I think I saw a few bats. But I didn't see any of those people. I think they went home, Jack—wherever that is."

I shook my head. "They were everywhere this afternoon. I went looking for Erika, Will. And they were everywhere." I stopped, remembered driving back from Cohocton, passing the house, parking the car on the shoulder, driving back to the house. I shook my head again, in confusion now. "I'm sure they were," I whispered.

"They're not there anymore," Will said, paused, went on, his tone low, as if he were speaking in confidence, "You think they've got her, don't you?"

"Yes," I said. "Of course they do."

He leaned forward, put his elbows on the table, and folded his hands in front of his face. He said, eyes straight ahead, "Okay, so when she gets tired of them, she'll come back to us."

I said nothing.

"She
will
come back to us, Jack."

"'Us'?" I said.

He was quiet for a moment; then he shrugged as if his remark had been merely casual. "Sure," he said. "She'll come back to us. In time."

I sighed, crossed to the window that overlooked the side yard, and parted the curtains slightly with my hand. The spotlight was on—I didn't remember turning it on—and in its light I could see an opossum trundling off toward the mountain behind the house. The opossum had its own peculiar hitching walk, probably from tangling with a car, so I recognized it as one that Erika had been leaving food for on certain nights. I watched it until it was beyond the perimeter of the spotlight. "Is that why you came here tonight, Will?" I turned my head to look at him. "To apologize?"

"No," he answered at once, and paused.

"Go on," I coaxed.

"Uh-huh," he said, and nodded as if in resignation. I sat at the table. "What's going on, Will? Why'd you come here tonight?"

He shook his head and grimaced a little, as if at a bad taste. At last he said, "I talked with Erika, Jack. I talked with her today." Another pause. I could say nothing. At last he continued, "You weren't here. I came to see you, but you weren't here. Where were you?"

"Stick to the subject, Will."

He nodded again, said, "Sure," smiled quickly at me, then looked back at his hands still folded in front of him. "She was here, Jack."

"Here? You mean she was in the house?"

He shook his head. "No." He shook his head again, as if for emphasis. "No. She was outside." He lifted his chin slightly to indicate the side yard. "She was out there, just inside the woods. Christ, she scared the hell out of me, Jack. I was coming up to the door, and I heard, 'Hello, Will.' I stopped and I looked around because I recognized her voice, of course—I could hardly hear it, but I recognized it." He paused again, briefly. "I called to her. I didn't know where she might be because I had heard her say only that one thing, so I called to her a couple times. Then she said my name again and I turned and saw her." He lifted his head once more to indicate the same area. "Just inside the woods, Jack. She was standing just inside the woods. And when I saw her, I said something like, 'Good Lord—Erika!' and I started for her." He looked confused, went on, "I can't explain this, Jack. I don't know how to explain this. But when I started for her, when I took a couple of steps toward her"—he shook his head—"she wasn't there. I mean, I kept my eyes on her while I was walking toward her; I kept my eyes on her, and I was smiling, of course, because I was happy to see her. And maybe
because
I was smiling, because I was so very happy to see her . . . I don't know, I was crying too, and when you're crying"—he was on the verge of incoherence now—"it's very hard to see, isn't it? I mean, you're not concentrating on seeing, you're concentrating on
crying
! So I think she must have just . . . stepped back into the woods because I became aware—I looked, and I became aware—that she just wasn't
there
anymore."

"You went looking for her, didn't you, Will?"

"Jesus, yes, I looked for her. I looked for an hour and a half. I didn't find her; hell, I called to her over and over again, and I kept telling myself that I could hear
something
; I didn't know what it was, Jack, but it wasn't her, then I finally convinced myself that I'd been seeing things. Why not? Everyone sees things, don't they? I convinced myself that because I," he looked down self-consciously at the table—"because I do love her, Jack"—he looked up, grinned an apology—"that I'd kind of conjured her up out of the trees and the bushes and the rain." He shrugged. "I can't say it's impossible. I've done stranger things. It was a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy, Jack." Another grin of apology.

"I understand," I told him.

"I wanted to see her, so I saw her. That's pretty simple, isn't it?"

"Sure it is, Will."

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"Don't believe what?"

"That I saw her. You don't believe I saw her."

"I don't think
you
believe it, Will."

He shook his head, smiled sadly. "I've thought about this, Jack. Ever since it happened I've thought about it. And I
know
that I saw her. She was there. And then she wasn't. It's as simple as that."

I sighed. I didn't know what to say to him.

"I saw her," he repeated, as much to himself as to me. "And Christ, Jack—it was like seeing a ghost."

T
his turns out to be Erika's story.

Will's story, too.

And
Knebel's
, Sarah's, mine; the several hundred people who called Cohocton their home.

But mostly it turns out to be Erika's story.

O
ur memories haunt us. Mostly, they haunt us. We can peer at them and smile and say that they feel good. But they recall the past, which is what it is, and so our memories haunt us. It's all our memories can do, ultimately.

We want to be rational. We take photographs, movies; we write in our journals every day or every couple of days. And for the sake of the future we do the things that need doing. We fix the gutters because the rain that plummets from them will undermine the foundation after a time. We repair the roof; we replace some tiles here and there; we check for dry rot because we know if we don't the house will fall down around us in a few decades. We live for what will be. And we live for what might be.

Sarah
Talpey
said, "There are snakes with two heads, and there are fourteen-hundred-pound men, and amino acids in meteorites that have fallen in China." And those are the things that are really important.

T
hat night, after Will left and before I went up to bed, I made sure all the doors were unlocked. I said to myself,
She might have lost her keys
.
She'll have no way in if she's lost her keys
. I checked each door from the outside, and then I went down to Hunt's Hollow Road, in the darkness, and called for her. I got no answer, of course, and what I could see of the road was empty, but I kept calling. Not out of desperation, and not out of anger or futility, but because, for the first time, I believed that she was there, near the house. And I was calling to her as if she knew I was calling and she only needed a little time to answer. Perhaps until she got tired of being away from me—a few minutes, or a few hours, or a few days. Longer, maybe. I was letting her know that I was still interested. "I'm still interested, Erika!" Silence. "I still love you." Silence. "The doors are unlocked. There's nothing I'd like better than to wake and find you beside me." Silence. "That would be a real treat. I'd like that. We could talk. I think we need to talk." Silence. "Do you want anything? A coat? A pair of gloves?" I was grasping now. "You must be getting awfully hungry. Come back; I'll feed you." Still nothing. "What do they do for you, Erika? What's the attraction?" I smiled as if she were there beside me and I was trying to put her at ease. "What do they do for you that I don't?" I shrugged in the darkness. "Hey, I'm sorry." I could feel myself slipping into a pose. "Everything has to revolve around
me
, right, Erika? How many times have you told me that? And it's true—it's been true—but that will change." I peered into the darkness. There was a heavy cloud cover, so the darkness was nearly total. "We'll talk about you, Erika. We'll talk about
your
needs, finally." Another smile, one of invitation—
Go ahead
, it said,
talk about yourself
. I waited, heard nothing, saw nothing, began to feel foolish, and cold, realized that I had to use the bathroom. "Erika?" I called at last, "I'm going into the house now. But remember, please remember, I'm here for you; I'll always be here for you." And I heard, to my right, "You're fooling yourself."

I recognized the voice, though I couldn't see the man. "Martin?"

He said, "Are you looking for your wife, Mr. Harris?"

I hesitated, felt anger welling up, fought it back. "What in the hell do you know about Erika?"

"Not very much, my friend. But a bit more than you do, apparently."

I inhaled quickly and deeply in order to keep my anger from building. The air was cool. "If you have something to say to me, perhaps you could come over here and say it." The beam of a flashlight stabbed at me then. I closed my eyes. "Christ, stop that, you idiot!" I hissed. I heard the flashlight click off.

Martin said, "We take care of them from time to time, Mr. Harris." A pause. "They get confused. They come here. And we take care of them."

"Christ, will you make some sense?!"

"Listen to the woman," he said. Then, faintly, I heard footfalls in the tall grass to my right, where his voice had been.

"Martin?" I called. "We're not done here." I listened. I heard nothing. "Martin,
goddamnit
, I said we're not finished talking here." Silence.

I went back to the house.

E
rika and I have talked about having kids. In the first couple of years of our marriage she was very keen on the idea. We discussed names; she proclaimed that she wanted a boy, and I said I wanted a girl, and then we said in unison, "Whatever we get, we'll keep," which made us laugh.

We worked hard for several years at having kids. We put everything we had into it, even to the point that it was becoming a chore (which, we were told later, probably "increased the difficulty due to tension").

Eventually we decided that each of us had to have a thorough checkup. I was first and I was fine—everything worked. Then it was Erika's turn. She was reluctant, needed persuasion, but she had her checkup and everything appeared to be in good working order with her, too. We decided that we were just having bad luck, so we redoubled our efforts.

It did no good. At the end of our fourth year of marriage we had stopped actively trying to have kids.

Two years later we came here, to the farmhouse.

And one day, not long after we'd moved in, she came to me and said, "We're going to have kids, Jack," which I naturally assumed meant she was pregnant. It made me very happy, of course. I threw my arms around her and lifted her—I thought, as I had several times before, that she was awfully light—kissed her, and said "Great!" again and again.

Then she said, "Not that I'm pregnant, Jack. I don't mean I'm pregnant."

I set her down. Maybe she was talking about adopting. I asked her if that's what she meant.

She shook her head. "No. I mean, literally, we're going to have children."

"Oh, it's a kind of wish, is that what you mean? Here we are, set up in our house in an idyllic country setting, so of course, eventually, we're going to have children. Is that what you're talking about?"

"Sure." But she seemed unconvinced.

"That's not what you mean, is it?" She was confusing me.