The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 34

In the sky’s distillery, the afternoon light was a weak brandy.

Standing at a study window, Brian said, “She seemed like a free spirit-bold, edgy, but fun. After we’d been together awhile, I began to realize something was wrong with her.”

Amy had sampled Vanessa’s e-mails. The ten-year collection was large. She got the flavor from a few, and didn’t care to read more.

“I wanted to end it, but she had this magnetism.” In disgust, he repeated, “Magnetism. Truth. She was hot, totally hot, and I knew she was unstable, but I was weak. That’s the sick truth.”

He had begun this account facing Amy, but even ten years after these events, shame led him to prefer to confess to the window.

She wanted to move behind him, put a hand on his waist, and let him know this changed nothing between them. But perhaps he needed his self-disgust to be able to purge himself of these secrets; she sensed that her affection might weaken his resolve, that he was aware of this, that she must trust him to know when he could face her again.

Fred and Ethel snoozed back to back, bookends without a book. Nickie remained awake, more interested than she pretended to be.

“I never imagined she wanted a child,” Brian said. “Of the women I knew back then, she was the least likely to pine for motherhood.”

If Amy should not touch him just now, she could stand at another window, sharing the pre-twilight view to which he unburdened himself.

“When she got pregnant, it was an ugly scene. But not how you might expect. She said she wanted my baby, needed it, she said, but she never wanted to see me again.”

“Don’t you have common-law rights or something?”

“I tried to discuss that with her, but all she wanted to talk about was how I took the crown as the world’s biggest loser.”

“If that’s what she thought of you, why did she want your baby?”

“It was weird. She was vicious. Such contempt, loathing. She ripped my taste in clothes, music, books, my financial prospects, everything-some true, some not. I had to get away from her.”

The westering sun fired the intricacies of a fretwork of clouds. The majesty of the light and sky was a striking contrast to the base story that he had to tell.

“I expected her to call. She didn’t. Told myself good riddance, it wasn’t any of my business now. But some things she’d said about me had the sting of truth. I didn’t like what I saw in mirrors anymore. I kept thinking of the baby she was carrying, my baby.”

Whatever faults he had in those days, he’d grown into a good man. Later, he might want to hear that from her, but not now.

“I needed a month to realize, if I didn’t have that baby in my life, then my life would never be right. It would be distorted, more distorted every year. So I called Vanessa. She’d changed her phone number. I went to her apartment. Moved. No forwarding address.”

Amy remembered he had once seen the baby. “But you found her.”

“Three months I tried mutual acquaintances. She wasn’t seeing them anymore. Pulled up all her roots. Eventually I got some money for a private detective. Even he had some trouble tracking her down.”

Spilling across the clouds from the tipped snifter of the sun, the light was a richer shade of brandy than before, and the blue sky itself began to take some of the stain.

“She had a huge, expensive apartment overlooking Newport Harbor. A wealthy land developer named Parker Hisscus was paying the rent.”

“That’s a big name around here.”

“She was six months pregnant when I visited her. Gave me five minutes, so I could see the style he kept her in. Then she had the maid show me out. Next morning, a friend of Hisscus came to see me.”

“He was that obvious?”

“I don’t mean muscle. The guy was unsavory but polite. Wanted me to know Hisscus would marry the lady after the birth of their baby.”

“If it was their baby, why wait?”

“I wondered. And then this guy offers me a commission-a custom home to design for another friend of Hisscus.”

“If it were his baby, he wouldn’t try to buy it that way.”

“I turned down the commission. Went to an attorney. Then another attorney. Same story from both. If Vanessa and Hisscus say he’s the dad, I have no grounds to push for a DNA test.”

Threads of self-disgust and quiet anger had been sewn through Brian’s voice thus far, but now Amy heard something like sorrow, too.

“I kept trying to find a way, and then one night she came to my place with the baby not two weeks old, born premature. She said…”

For a moment, he could not repeat Vanessa’s words to him.

Then: “She said, ‘Here’s what you pumped into me. This stupid little freak. Your stupid little freak has screwed up everything.’”

“So it was over with her and Hisscus.”

“I never understood what was going on there anyway. But it was over, it wasn’t his baby, and she was out. She wanted money, whatever I could pay for the baby. I showed her my checkbook, savings-account balance. So there I was, made a baby and put it in a situation where it’s up for sale, I’m no better than she was.”

“Not true,” Amy said at once. “You wanted the girl.”

“I couldn’t get the money till morning, but she wouldn’t leave the baby with me. She was crazy bitter. Her eyes were more black than green, something so dark had come into them. I wanted to take the baby, but I was afraid if I tried, she’d kill it, smash its head. She needed money, so I thought she’d bring the baby back for it.”

“But she never did.”

“No. She never did. God help me, out of fear, I let her walk away that night, take my baby away.”

“And she’s been tormenting you ever since.”

The low orange candle of the sun spread the warm intoxicating light farther across the western sky.

“Unless it’s a federal case with the FBI,” Brian said, “it’s not possible to track somebody from an e-mail address. I can’t prove I’m the girl’s father. Vanessa’s careful what she says in the e-mails.”

“And private investigators haven’t been able to find her?”

“No. She lives way off the grid, maybe under a new name, new Social Security number, new everything. Anyway, what she’s done to me doesn’t matter. But what has she done to my daughter? What has she done to Hope?”

By intuition, Amy understood his last question. “That’s what you’ve named her-Hope.”

“Yes.”

“Whatever Vanessa’s done,” Amy said, “what’s important now is, you might get a chance to make it right.”

This was the “big thing” of which he’d spoken earlier, bigger than the drawings that he had done of Nickie’s eyes, bigger than the auditory hallucinations and the mysterious shadows he had glimpsed at the periphery of vision, bigger than his dream and waking up on the inexplicably made bed. After ten years, he might be able to get his daughter back.

Amy had read his e-mail to Vanessa, in which he avoided argument and manipulation: I am at your mercy. I have no power over you, and you have every power over me. If one day you will let me have what I want, that will be because it serves you best to relent, not because I have earned it or deserve it.

After waking from his dream of storm-racked Kansas, Brian had found a reply from her. He held it in his hand now, as he stood at the window.

You still want your little piglet? You piss me off, there in your cozy life, everything the way you like it, never sacrificed a damn thing. You want this little freak on your back? All right. I’m ready for that. But I want something from you. Stand by.

The quality of light had changed enough to permit upon the pane a transparent reflection of Amy’s face.

With his secrets all revealed, and with his own face forming on the glass before him, Brian turned now toward Amy.

She joined him at his window and took his hand.

He said, “She’s going to want every dime, everything I own.”

Smiling, Amy repeated, in this new context, what she had said earlier. “Not everything. There’s still you and me.”