Confessions From the Dark Read online

  “What’s on today’s agenda?” I asked Mom.

  “Massages, manis and pedis. You want to go?” She jammed an elbow into my side.

  “Thanks, but I have plans with Sam and Lucy.” My eyes roved to the front window, where a Christmas tree should have been standing. Neither Kat nor I had the heart to set it up this year. “Besides, I need to shower.” I tugged my running shirt away from my skin.

  “How many days in a row now?”

  “Close to a year.”

  “You run even in the snow?”

  I nodded.

  Mom’s beady eyes darted around the room, as if she was trying to find a way to tell me the truth—the truth about the running and about the darkness I’d never be able to escape.

  I placed a hand on her shoulder to let her off the hook. On some level, my brain had grappled with the knowledge, but I didn’t know how to stop. Couldn’t stop.

  “Okay, I’m ready.” Kat brushed her lips against my cheek. “Let me know if you’re going to be late for dinner at Barb’s tonight.”

  “Will do. Have fun.”

  A horn blared outside.

  Mom rolled her eyes. “I think Barb is demanding we get the lead out.”

  Kat rammed one arm through her pea coat and then the other. “Ever so subtle.” She blew me a kiss.

  I had an hour to kill before my lunch date, but my feet remained rooted to the floor. I was unable to tear my eyes off the empty window, and my mind off what the emptiness symbolized. I hugged my chest with both arms and got an unexpected whiff of my running clothes. Time to shower.

  After a quick rinse, I wandered through the house in my bathrobe. The nursery, untouched since last year, didn’t have a speck of dust. All of the onesies were neatly folded and powdered in the drawers. That didn’t surprise me, even though I’d never witnessed Kat cleaning Charlotte’s room. A breeze worked its way through the room, jingling the mobile over the crib. I gazed out the window, where Kat and I had planted an apple tree the day we’d found out she was pregnant with a girl. It was to provide our daughter with privacy. Apple trees symbolized youth, happiness, and health. I let out an anguished sigh and flipped the light off.

  In Kat’s studio, several works in progress were propped up on easels. In the past, her paintings always had a frantic but colorful, hopeful vibe. The ones before me were reminiscent of Goya’s black paintings, although not as bleak. At least there wasn’t one of Satan devouring his son, but Charlotte’s loss existed in every dark brushstroke that slashed across the canvas. Not all were dreary—only the ones she was prepping for an upcoming show. It was as if she needed to proclaim to the world how much she hurt, even without uttering a word. Kat was Bostonian to the core. Her strength helped me face each and every day, but I knew she was in silent agony.

  My phone buzzed, reminding me about my lunch plans.

  ***

  Samantha Clarke and I sat in our usual rickety booth for four in Mulligan’s, an Irish sports pub in the heart of Boston, where we’d been meeting every Sunday. The Pats pregame was on two of the three screens directly behind Sam’s bouncy blonde head. SportsCenter was on the third. I focused on the ticker that listed the games for week fifteen. My brain was constantly glomming onto things it could understand, like team names, kickoff times, rankings—anything but why did my daughter have to die before she even had a chance to smile or laugh at least once?

  “Do you want to go someplace less… cheerful?” Sam’s sincere amber eyes tormented me.

  Moments earlier, a herd of runners dressed in Santa suits for a charity event had swarmed the pub, eager for brewskies to slake their thirst and maybe to dull the soreness of running in fifteen-degree weather, minus the wind chill. The Santas had racing numbers pinned to their costumes and their faces were scarlet from the cold and the blustering wind gusts off the Atlantic.

  “What? No.” The carols on the radio and the blinking Christmas lights along all the walls were an excruciating reminder of what had occurred the previous year, and the Santa invasion amplified it—not that I would admit that aloud, though. “We’ve watched every game this season here.” My eyes scanned the cheerfulness. “It’s okay…” My mouth and brain ceased cooperating.

  “How’s Kat doing?”

  I sighed and tried to smile, which I feared looked more like a grimace. “It’s harder on her.”

  It’d been nearly a year since we’d buried our daughter, Charlotte. I rubbed my forehead in an attempt to blot out the memory of the tiny casket. Baby-sized caskets are an evil abomination; they should not exist.

  My thoughts flashed back to cradling Kat’s broken body in my arms as Charlotte vanished into the ground. The sense of hopelessness swirling around the two of us, the smattering of cold snowflakes that never reached the ground.

  “I suspect it’s hard on both of you.” Sam hoisted a pint glass to her pink, glossy lips, observing me with sympathetic eyes. I could tell she was trying to figure out how far to push me. I still hadn’t opened up much, even to my closest friend.

  Tears formed. “Would you excuse me?” I blurted before making a beeline for the restroom.

  I hid in a stall and wiped my eyes. Taking several deep breaths, I tried to bully my resolve. I was here to cheer on the Pats with Sam and her girlfriend Lucy, not to have a breakdown. Come on, Cori. Be strong. I blew my nose on the coarse toilet paper, straightened my black Polo sweater, and fled the confines of the graffiti-covered stall, stepping over pools of suspect liquid and half-disintegrated tissues that were smeared into the gray cement floor. Before the accident, I’d never set foot in such a mess. But I’d been finding myself hiding a lot, and in increasingly darker places. My nightmares forced me out of bed at all hours, seeking anywhere that would keep my mind busy.

  Lucy had arrived during my absence. She stood and gave me a quick hug, the scent of her rose-petal perfume invading my nose. I didn’t wrap my arms too tightly around the skinny brunette, afraid my gangly but strong arms would sever Sam’s girlfriend in half. Lucy ended the hug with a peck on my cheek, something out of the norm for the reserved novelist of conspiracy thrillers, who spent most of her days locked up in her office, alone with her Mac. It seemed that no one, not even the off-the-charts intelligent Lucy, knew how to handle the situation.

  The situation—had I really just referred to Charlotte’s death that way? The callous ploys and mental gymnastics I had to utilize to survive day after day made me shudder.

  “Shall we order a pitcher of PBR and a shitload of greasy food?” Sam rubbed her palms together in a brave effort to pull me out of my funk.

  “Yes!” Lucy and I said in unison.

  When suffering, eat and drown your sorrows in cheap booze and food. The girls had been dragging me out of the house at least once a week to do just that. Before the accident, we’d met regularly, but now, the meetings were like clockwork and I’d come to rely on them. Kat wasn’t your typical dyke. She abhorred sports, despite showing an interest lately, for my benefit. My mom and aunt had been taking her out for pampering while I let my inner-jock out in an effort to escape the darkness for a few hours.

  “What’d you think? Will the Pats win the Super Bowl two years in a row?” Lucy asked, while Sam ordered at the bar.

  I nodded, appreciating her attempt to divert the conversation from reality. My reality, at least. Sports had become the safe topic for the three of us. Several years ago, the Red Sox had played a role in rekindling my friendship with Sam, a former high school classmate, and now any sport was preserving my sanity. The other day, Kat had wandered into my office and found me watching synchronized swimming on YouTube. I was taking it almost as seriously as the competitors were.

  I used any method I could to keep it together. I had to, for Kat’s sake. Or so I kept telling myself.

  Sam returned and launched full-force into debating the Pats’ odds.

  “Carolina is strong this season.” I stopped nibbling on a hangnail for a moment to toss
out that nugget.

  Lucy shoved her tortoiseshell glasses back in place. “Where in the hell did the Panthers come from this year? I can’t remember the last time they were still involved in the conversation after week three.”

  Sam tapped the tip of her nose. “Who knows?”

  A server set a large platter and a pitcher of beer in the middle of our table and then forced her way past another wave of Santas, who’d just finished the race. This pub, on normal days at least, was spacious, even when every table was taken. Today was anything but normal. Christmas was right around the corner, the end of the NFL season was quickly approaching, and then there were the Santas—even one with an inflatable palm tree. That couldn’t have been easy to run with in the howling wind.

  “What’s up with Harold? I heard there’s a new girl in the picture. Did he and Amber break up?” I dipped a fried cheese stick into the ranch dressing.

  Sam bit her upper lip in an attempt to stop her mouth from twisting into a grin. She placed both hands on the table, indicating the importance of the conversation. “Harold, Amber, and new-girl Simone have officially become a throuple.”

  “Throuple?” Lucy poured beer into a spotty pint glass; Mulligan’s was not known for its cleanliness.

  More Santas joined the throng of other red-suited runners behind us. Several did chest bumps, and a couple of them stumbled into the back of the booth, but Lucy managed not to spill a drop from the pitcher as she refilled my glass.

  Sam glared over her shoulder but then relaxed into a smile. “Hey, Rick. I didn’t know you were running today.”

  Rick raised a glass victoriously. “Just finished. You should join us next year. The company has a team.”

  “Really? Send me an email.”

  Sam and Rick nodded to each other as a way of ending the conversation.

  I pantomimed for Sam to continue about throuples.

  She rolled her eyes. “What, you haven’t encountered throuples in any of the British novels you teach?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Unless you mean the Bronte sisters,” I said without thinking.

  She covered her mouth so she wouldn’t spew her beer. “Nope—not unless Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were in a committed sexual relationship with each other.” She shrugged and then ripped apart a buffalo wing dripping with blue cheese.

  I tried not to focus on the name Charlotte. I sipped my beer to wash away the memory. It took several seconds before I said, “Who would have thought? When I met Harold, he was a twenty-something virgin living with his mom. Now he’s the hippest one out of the group—hipper than Kat, and I never thought anyone could outdo my wife.”

  Both of them fidgeted, picking up on the warble in my voice. I sensed Sam was mentally kicking herself for mentioning the name Charlotte. It was no secret Kat had named our daughter after the author. Handmade wooden animal puzzles, in the shape of letters, still spelled out the name on the dresser in the nursery.

  Lucy gnawed on her bottom lip, and Sam quirked an eyebrow, imploring her girlfriend to divert the conversation to safer waters. “If you ask me”—Lucy paused for a sip of PBR—“the throuple is doomed to fail. Please pass the ketchup.”

  I scooted the sticky plastic Heinz bottle, which had clearly been refilled repeatedly, across the table.

  “Why’s that?” Sam forked a jalapeno from the nachos and popped it in her mouth.

  “Harold’s head over heels in love with Amber. Sure, it’ll be exciting for the first few weeks, but can sexual exploration sustain a loving and equal relationship among three individuals? It’s hard enough having two people in a relationship—the compromises, tiffs, misunderstandings, and such.” Lucy immersed a cheese stick in the ketchup. It made my stomach lurch, but Lucy loved ketchup on almost everything. She even put it on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, which was truly repugnant in my opinion.

  “Sexual exploration?” Sam giggled, but I wondered whether it was forced, considering the angry glint in her eye when she glanced at Lucy.

  It was my time to divert the conversation. “How’d they meet this Simone?”

  “Your mom’s erotic book club, where else?” Sam’s wicked smile worked wonders on a Santa who was passing the table. The Mrs. Claus on his arm noticed and pummeled his shoulder. Ignoring them both, Sam added, “She’s a librarian.”

  Sam meant Simone, not my mother, Nell Tisdale. Mom and Kat had formed the erotic book club before Kat and I married, and I still wholeheartedly believed they’d only done so to get under my skin. It had worked then, and it still worked today.

  The club had halted for many months after the accident. Kat recovered physically within weeks, but it was closer to six months before she was mentally on the road to dealing with the loss. We hadn’t made love all that winter and most of the spring. When we finally broke through the barrier, we realized we only experienced sparks of life during those intimate moments.

  “Of course she is. Harold has probably had a million wet dreams about librarians. What does she look like?” I asked.

  Sam pulled an iPhone out of her back jeans pocket, fiddled with it for two seconds, and then whirled it around on the laminated tabletop for me to have a look-see.

  “Jesus!” I whistled. “Harold’s my hero.” In the photo, Harold had his arms around two women. Amber, the paralegal Kat had fixed Harold up with years ago, was attractive in a mousy kind of way. But Simone’s image conjured up nonsensical phrases, such as bada bing. She was blonde, curvaceous, and drenched in sex appeal.

  “I know, right?” Sam grinned.

  “She looks familiar.” I stretched my fingers on the screen to enlarge the photo.

  “Married with Children ring a bell?” Sam asked.

  I snapped my fingers. “Yes. Christina Applegate, but not as slutty—on the show, I mean. Or…” I swiped the photo to enlarge it even more. “Slutty with a touch of class.”

  Lucy shook her head. “Still, I give it two months.”

  “Even if that’s the case, it’ll be the best sixty days of Harold’s life.” Sam glanced at me out of the corner of her eye and winked. I suspected she didn’t want Lucy to see, to avoid a “discussion” later that night. Sam had confessed to me last week that “discussions” were happening regularly.

  The Santas erupted into a jolly cheer, and my eyes briefly hunted for Rudolph, until I realized the Pats had scored a touchdown.

  The three of us clinked our glasses and took healthy swigs.

  “Do we get to meet Simone?” I asked.

  Lucy snorted, which was her signal it was time to move on to a new topic. I wondered about the level of trouble in paradise. All couples experienced ups and downs, true, but was I witnessing the beginning of the end? Again. They’d been broken up when Sam and I had reconnected a few years back.

  “I’ll ask Harold the next time I see him. Maybe he’ll bring both girls to our Christmas soiree this Saturday.”

  “About that—”

  Sam shot a palm into the air. “Nice try, but you’re coming. It’s our first holiday party, and we’re hoping it will become tradition. You are one of my oldest and dearest friends, so you have to be there.” She brandished a half-eaten wing in my face. “Oops, sorry,” she said, dropping it back onto the plate, clearly having remembered I was a vegetarian.

  Lucy shot Sam an admonishing look that would wilt most people’s resolve, but not Sam’s. Sam had a smile that’d charm the horns off Satan, and she carried on grinning.

  “I’m not trying to wiggle out of it. Kat asked me to casually inquire what we should bring, even though the invite says only our presence is required, not ‘presents.’ Cute.” I made quote marks. “So how about it?”

  “This is your definition of casual?” Sam smiled.

  I hoisted one shoulder. “I’m not good at fishing for intel. That’s usually my wife’s department.”

  “True.” Sam leaned over conspiratorially and half whispered behind a hand, “I won’t refuse a bottle of Dom
.”

  I laughed. “Duly noted.”

  Lucy’s mouth dangled open.

  “What? I was just kidding,” Sam said, not meaning a word.

  Luckily, another torrent of cheers distracted Lucy. The Pats had intercepted the Titans on their five-yard line.

  The interception roused Lucy’s mood, and Sam volunteered to order another pitcher from the greasy-haired and overly tattooed bartender. Moments later, she returned with the pitcher and a tray of tequila shots.

  “Does anyone need training wheels?” She gesticulated to three lime wedges and a saltshaker.

  “Training wheels?” I scoffed. “If Harold is man enough to be in a throuple, I can at least do a proper shot of tequila.” I boosted my shot glass, waiting for Sam and Lucy.

  Lucy eyeballed the wedges. Clearly losing her nerve, she admitted she needed the lime and salt to make the Mexican liquor more palatable.

  We tossed them back, each of us waving our arms and puckering our lips at the sourness.

  “Yowsers! No more shots. I have my weekly family dinner tonight at my aunt’s.” I pushed the shot glass toward the end of the table. Even the smell was unsettling.

  “Can you ask your mom what book they’re reading next month?” Sam fluttered her lashes.

  “Since when did you join The Smut Patrol?”

  “Wow, you really don’t approve of the group, do you?” Lucy asked with wide eyes.

  “That’s the name of the group, actually.” Sam came to my rescue.

  “Really, I expected it to be—”

  “Less obvious?” I interjected.

  “Yes, and clever, considering your mom’s literary awards.” Lucy ran her finger along the top of her glass, and I had a vision of her developing a mania for making music with water glasses.

  “Mom has always preached that writers should ignore the hundred-dollar word for the more effective one that everyone knows the meaning of.”

  “So, slutty instead of salacious?” Lucy swallowed a jalapeno pepper smeared in ketchup. “She’d get along great with my editor.”

  “Mine too.”