When Darkness Loves Us

They both got in on the driver’s side, and Leslie started the engine. It coughed. He wanted it to roar. When it caught, he tried to spin around, spitting gravel fifty feet behind him. Instead, the truck died, and the headlights dimmed again and again as he ground the starter. He cursed it to life, and the truck with its two drunken passengers lurched out of the drive as Martha and Leon watched them go.

“Take me home, Leslie,” Priscilla said. “I don’t feel too good.” She leaned out the car window and puked.

“Sonofabitch! All over my truck, you cunt. I’ll get your ass, Leon, and that weird retard, too. Son of a bitch!” He pounded on the steering wheel.

Leon turned out the light and locked the door. He went to Martha, standing in the doorway, staring straight ahead. She was trembling, and perspiration stood out in little drops on her forehead.

“Martha? You okay?”

“I don’t know. I feel . . . for a moment there, I felt . . . while you were in here and I was in the bedroom, I almost . . .”

“Shhhh.” He put his arms around her and held her close for a moment, then guided her gently back to bed. He got in next to her and held her, a very young man and his very strange lover. He did love her, in a way.

“I felt out of control, Leon.”

“Fear can do that. I was afraid, too.”

“Out of control?”

“Not exactly, but men are supposed to be braver than women.”

“This wasn’t brave, or scared. This was . . . was . . .” she shuddered. “Something else, like taking hold. Inside.”

“They’re gone now. And they won’t be back.”

She leaned up on an elbow and looked at his eyes, shining in the faint light.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

She lay back down and traced the lines of his cheek with her finger, trying hard to forget the terrible, ter­rible feeling.

CHAPTER 20

Harry limped in from the fields about ten o’clock one morning, his left arm hanging useless at his side. Fern took a look at his pale face and knew he was dying. Her healing powers had become so attuned to life that she could discern the least imbalance. Harry had been not well for about a week, and today he would die.

Oh God, she thought, where have our lives gone? She knew it was coming. They were not young anymore; Harry still drove himself too hard, he was never happy. God had not gifted Harry with laughter. Life was a serious business to him, not something to be joyous about.

She looked at his gray, worn face and flashes of their relationship flitted through her mind. The good times. The times when they had made love, when they were courting, the oftentimes humorous things he would say by mistake, his embarrassment at her laughter. She saw him as he used to be—young, virile, handsome, and muscled. Where did all the years go?

Now he was old and gray, skin matching closely the yellowed color of his hair. His face was wrinkled and marked with brown spots. We should have retired years ago, she thought.

She dried her hands on a kitchen towel and put her arm around him, helping him to the bedroom, where she undressed him and put him into bed. She sat on the edge, smoothing the hair away from his pale forehead. He’d had a stroke. His body was worn out. If she were to heal him now, there’d be another one tomorrow.

“There’s nothing I can do, Harry.”

His gaze wandered over the room, avoiding her face.

“We’ve had a good life together, you know.”

The breath caught in his throat. He closed his eyes, resting for a moment. Then he looked up at her, moistness collecting in the tanned wrinkles around his eyes. “How can you say that, Fern?” The words were slurred, his tongue thick.

“Because I’ve spent my life with the two people I love. That’s all.”

“It’s been hard. I’ve been . . .”

“It’s not been easy. But then . . . that’s how it is, sometimes.”

“You’ve been a good wife.” He reached for her hand and pressed it to him.

“Don’t be afraid, Harry.”

She reached down and kissed him slowly, tenderly, on the cheek. He closed his eyes and died.

She pulled the covers up to his chin, smoothing the quilt that had been his parents’, that had been on this bed when he was born. The empty ache inside her burned like a fire, from the pit of her stomach up through her throat. The tears were lumped behind her eyes, but they wouldn’t come. She wandered around the room for a moment, hanging up his work clothes, touching his things, then she went back to the kitchen to finish the breakfast dishes.

Martha, sensing a difference in the atmosphere of the house, came out of her room and sat quietly at the kitchen table, waiting. Fern poured a cup of coffee and sat down next to her, taking her hand. Martha’s hand was not young, and hers looked like a claw on top of it. She sipped.

“Your father died.”

Martha nodded.

“I loved him very much.”