Dark Places(69)

“What’s that?”

“A new question. I didn’t think there’d be new questions anymore. Congratulations.” I caught us both sitting in the same posture, one palm on the edge of the table like we were about to push back from a meal of leftovers. Runner’s posture, I remember it from the last time I saw him, me twenty-five or twenty-six, and him wanting money, asking all flirty and sweet at first—do you think maybe you can help your old man out, Libbydear?—and me telling him no, straight off, a bat cracking a line drive, shocking, humbling. Well, why not? he’d snapped, and his shoulders shot back, his arms flipped up, hands on my table, me thinking: why’d I let him sit down, already calculating the time I’d waste getting him back up.

“I snuck out that night,” Ben said. “I came home, me and mom got in another fight.”

“About Krissi Cates?”

He started at that, then let it slide over him.

“About Krissi Cates. But she believed me, she was completely on my side, that was the great thing about Mom, even when she was pissed as hell at you, she was on your side, you knew that. In your bones. She believed me. But she was angry, and just, scared. I’d kept her waiting for, I don’t know, sixteen hours with no word—I didn’t even know what was going on, you know, no cell phones back then, you’d go a whole day and not talk, not like today. I hear.”

“So, but—”

“Right, we just got in a fight, I don’t even remember if it was exactly Krissi Cates or that’s where it started and went from there, I wish to God I could remember, but anyway, she kinda grounds me, sends me to my room, and I go there and after an hour I’m pissed off again, and I leave the house, leave the radio on and the lights on so if she peeks out she thinks I’m still there. I mean, you know the way she slept, wasn’t like she was going to walk all the way to my room to look in on me. Once she was asleep, she was pretty much asleep.”

Ben made it sound like an unbelievable journey, those thirty-some steps, but it was true, my mom was useless once she was asleep. She barely even moved. I remember holding tense vigils over her body, convincing myself she was dead, staring til my eyes watered, trying to make out breathing, trying to get even a moan. Nudge her, and she’d flop back into the same position. We all had stories of encountering her on coincidental overlapping visits to the bathroom in the night—turn the corner to find her peeing on the toilet, robe between her legs, looking through us like we were made of glass. I just don’t know about the sorghum she’d say, or That seed come in yet? And then she’d shuffle past us back to her room.

“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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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.”