Full Dark, No Stars

had clients in al the northern New England states). Sometimes the smel meant a trip to look at someone’s coin col ection at an estate sale, because not al the numismatic buying and sel ing that went with their side-business could be accomplished by computer, they both understood that. The sight of his old black suitcase, the one he would never give up no matter how much she nagged, in the front hal . His slippers at the end of the bed, one always tucked into the other. The glass of water on his endtable, with the orange vitamin pil next to it, on that month’s issue of Coin & Currency Collecting. How he always said, “More room out than there is in” after belching and “Look out, gas attack!” after he farted. His coat on the first hook in the hal . The reflection of his toothbrush in the mirror (he would stil be using the same one he’d had when they got married, Darcy believed, if she didn’t regularly replace it). The way he dabbed his lips with his napkin after every second or third bite of food. The careful

arrangement of camping gear (always including an extra compass) before he and Stan set out with yet another bunch of nine-year-olds on the hike up Dead Man’s Trail—a dangerous and terrifying trek

that took them through the woods behind the Golden Grove Mal and came out at Weinberg’s Used Car City. The look of his nails, always short and clean. The taste of Dentyne on his breath when they

kissed. These things and ten thousand others comprised the secret history of the marriage.

She knew he must have his own history of her, everything from the cinnamon-flavored ChapStick she used on her lips in the winter to the smel of her shampoo when he nuzzled the back of her neck

(that nuzzle didn’t come so often now, but it stil came) to the click of her computer at two in the morning on those two or three nights a month when sleep for some reason jilted her.

Now it was twenty-seven years, or—she had amused herself figuring this one day using the calculator function on her computer—nine thousand eight hundred and fifty-five days. Almost a quarter of a

mil ion hours and over fourteen mil ion minutes. Of course some of that time he’d been gone on business, and she’d taken a few trips herself (the saddest to be with her parents in Minneapolis after her kid sister Brandolyn had died in a freak accident), but mostly they had been together.

Did she know everything about him? Of course not. No more than he knew everything about her—how she sometimes (mostly on rainy days or on those nights when the insomnia was on her) gobbled

Butterfingers or Baby Ruths, for instance, eating the candybars even after she no longer wanted them, even after she felt sick to her stomach. Or how she thought the new mailman was sort of cute. There was no knowing everything, but she felt that after twenty-seven years, they knew al the important things. It was a good marriage, one of the fifty percent or so that kept working over the long haul. She believed that in the same unquestioning way she believed that gravity would hold her to the earth when she walked down the sidewalk.

Until that night in the garage.

- 2 -

The TV control er stopped working, and there were no double-A batteries in the kitchen cabinet to the left of the sink. There were D-cel s and C-cel s, even an unopened pack of the teeny tiny triple-As, but no goddarn frigging double-As. So she went out to the garage because she knew Bob kept a stash of Duracel s there, and that was al it took to change her life. It was as if everyone was in the air, high in the air. One lousy little step in the wrong direction and you were fal ing.

The kitchen and the garage were connected by a breezeway. Darcy went through it in a hurry, clutching her housecoat against her—two days before their run of exceptional y warm Indian summer

weather had broken, and now it felt more like November than October. The wind nipped at her ankles. She probably should have put on socks and a pair of slacks, but Two and a Half Men was going to come on in less than five minutes, and the goddarn TV was stuck on CNN. If Bob had been here, she would have asked him to change the channel manual y—there were buttons for that somewhere,

probably on the back where only a man could find them—and then sent him for the batteries. The garage was mostly his domain, after al . She only went there to get her car out, and that only on bad-

weather days; otherwise she parked it in the driveway turnaround. But Bob was in Montpelier, evaluating a col ection of World War I steel pennies, and she was, at least temporarily, in sole charge of casa Anderson.

She fumbled for the trio of switches beside the door and shoved them up with the heel of her hand. The overhead fluorescents buzzed on. The garage was spacious and neat, the tools hung on the