The dark within them, p.20
The Dark Within Them, page 20
She was in a box. Footsteps vibrating against wood, against her ears. A scream was rising—trying to swallow it—so little air. And no light. No light. Like a worm, she needed to use all her senses. Needed to work a hole up to the surface. Find space to breathe.
And then came a scraping. No, a tapping. No, a shaking on her shoulder and—light! A set of eyes! The face of a white-gowned woman…her mother! Her pupils were vast, searching. I’ve reached the surface, she thought, and her mother agreed—“You were never underground, Amber.” There was something about these words which rang true. But it was an uncomfortable feeling. Was she meant to be underground? I don’t deserve to be here—a voice, sounded like hers…
The gnawing of her stomach had increased to a roar. She woke, sweating, registering the attic. Her head ached and though she knew she should walk around the room, stretch her legs, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She lay in a ball on the bed, remembering the tiny crescent moon of Ivan’s body against her milk-filled breasts.
She was so still, she became aware of every sound around her. The birds skuttling around on the roof. The pounding of her own heart. Then, hours later, a shuffle outside the door. She was sure of it. She raised herself onto her hands.
“Chad? Is that you?” She raised her voice. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m really thirsty. Chad?”
There was no answer, but then the door lock clicked open and Chad’s arm entered with a glass of what looked like Fanta. He placed it on the floor, and withdrew. The door lock clicked shut before she had had time to react. She rushed to the glass and drank half immediately, saving the rest.
“Chad? Please stay and talk to me?” She could hear his sneakers scuff the wood. He wasn’t moving away yet. “Is Ivan downstairs?” There was a pause. And then his footsteps set off, echoing away from her. She pounded her palm into the floor with a strangled cry. “I need food!” she called after him, but knew his footsteps were not returning. He could punish her in this way. Control what she ate, or didn’t, until her mind became weak like her body.
Gingerly, she found space in the corner of the attic, where sink met door hinge, and positioned herself upright, palms firmly planted against stone. Closing her eyes tightly, she hummed a lullaby and tilted her head skyward. In the song’s aftermath she waited, toes clenched. It would be her first and last attempt to talk to the Lord: she wanted to see Gilly and Ivan, just once, on the other side, but since watching Ivan…since her hopes of her husband being a redeemable man had crumbled, she had struggled to feel connected to anything. Least of all God.
Fists followed, balled up like a boxer. She breathed deep, long, hungry, but did not open her eyes for fifteen minutes, before hot tears fell and so did her body, folded between wall and sink basin like a broken doll. She lay there then for an hour, wondering how she had ever heard the voice of the Lord, of spirits from the other side in the first place, or if she had only ever imagined it. The floor’s damp seeped through her clothes and chilled her bones.
“Your honor, the state is ready to proceed with motions against Amber Lakes.”
“Thank you, please proceed.”
There he was. An orange jumpsuit. Shaved head. It didn’t suit him. Chad’s head was not egg-smooth. He stopped in front of a security guard and they removed his handcuffs. He proceeded to the witness box and looked her dead in the eye. It was an honest meeting. Neither tried to reassure the other or apologise with their eyes. But neither did he look at her with hate. Remembering his anger, his spittle decorating the door, asking why, why, why would she ever try to end his life, he, the one who had committed such brave acts in her name, in the name of the church that gave them both meaning? She gulped. She felt panic trickle down her neck: sweat, laid upon stale sweat. These courtrooms had no air. They didn’t care if people could breathe, or if they rose and then fainted at the foot of justice.
She studied him forensically, the man who had claimed to love her to the point of insanity, in such a short space of time…When he smiled, she looked away, down at her hands and clenched them hard. She would not cry.
A day later, she sat on the floor cross-legged, pushing her left-hand cuticles down with her right hand’s nail edges. She’d taught Gilly to do this with her nails in or after a hot bath, to prevent the cuticles from breaking.
“What if I never do it? Does the cuticle keep rising and rising, until it covers the whole nail?” Gilly had asked. Amber had snorted—still made her smile now. She hadn’t given her an answer, but she’d searched the internet for it later—a Mom should always have answers, or do the research—and she’d found a wealth of conflicting information.
She knew that her marriage was over. With nothing left, the only thing stopping her from sending Chad to the law was that locked door in front of her. She thought of what the interview room would look like, bare and clinical. The Sheriff’s pursed lips: “The thing is, the mind can do strange things. Extreme stress, such as a disappearance of your children, can lead us to strange conclusions about where they could possibly be and what could possibly have happened to them. In fact, many studies show that our brains jump to the worst-case scenarios as a kind of…coping mechanism. Do you think that could apply to you?” She felt her teeth grind.
How long would she be in here? How long would he withhold food? She had the energy now, if he opened the door, if she distracted him for just a second, to catch him unawares and slip past him, wraith-like. Then she wouldn’t stop running until she got to the Sheriff’s office, not for one second. But if he left her here for days, weeks…She massaged her temples, knowing the dark around her was already playing tricks on her mind. Her mother hadn’t spoken to her in a dream for years. And her dreams of bringing the law down on Chad had been so vivid, it had taken hours to convince herself that no justice was in fact in motion. Not yet.
Could she just leave him? She bit her lip. In the beginning, there had been attraction, yes, but it was not that she loved him. Had she ever? She’d only ever known love for her kids; that had always been enough for her. Love didn’t seem to have a place in a Mormon marriage, or at least, it wasn’t useful. Not if you wanted status, stability—because the two were linked, and when she had seen Chad, she had believed that he offered those things. She had thought that her days as a single mother, constantly budgeting and saving face when people spread gossip about her choice of work, the travelling, could be over. Gilly had scorned her for wanting to leave her independence behind. Perhaps she should have listened to her daughter. She had thought Chad weak-minded, simple, even. That his blind adoration for her would mean he could never overwhelm her, despite his obvious strength advantage. She had been wrong. Underestimated him. And that left her with questions. Seeing his firm hand descend on Ivan’s shoulders…it threw everything into doubt. A man who could do that to a child could do it twice. And she needed to know the whole truth of the night Gilly died, before she planned her escape from here.
*
When she next heard his footsteps, and, judging by the sun’s heat rising and falling, it was two days later. The hunger in her belly betrayed her desperation.
“Chad!” She pressed herself against the wall to listen. He paused, cleared his throat.
“I have food for you. Sorry it took so long. We had some stuff to sort out.”
She swallowed. His voice was robotic, but she knew he must be talking about Ivan.
“Why don’t you open the door, Chad?”
She thought he wouldn’t answer her for a few seconds.
“No.”
“You moved him?”
“I buried him.”
A strangled cry escaped her and she forced her hand over her mouth to stifle it. This could be her only chance to escape. She couldn’t let Chad know how deep her hatred settled.
“I don’t know what came over me before, Chad. It was irrational. I wasn’t thinking straight. I hope you can forgive me.” She closed her eyes tightly, gritting her teeth, glad he couldn’t see her. “I love you very much.”
Silence. But what did she expect? Then she felt his feet start to move and the door creak open. The bowl offered was filled with rice, tacos, salsa…even a can of lemonade. She dug right into the rice without looking at him, and he went to leave again.
She put down her bowl. “No!” She pressed her hands against the door so that he couldn’t close it. “Chad, you know you love me. What I did was wrong, but you need to let me out. Sit down, right there on the bed, and look at me, right into my eyes. Remember, we are meant to be together. We’ve already been together in so many lifetimes and…” She gulped. “And in those many lifetimes, we’ve seen times worse than this.” Though she couldn’t believe this herself, she could tell he was listening, his foot hovering, deciding whether to turn towards or away from her. Then, jaw set, as though it pained him to obey her, he came into the room and locked the door behind him. He went over to her bed and perched at the end of it. He spread his hands towards her as if to say, ‘Well?’ She chose her words carefully, controlling the pace at which she formed each word. “You are not a bad person, Chad. Not the kind of person who keeps his wife locked up.”
“Of course I’m not a bad person,” he hissed through his teeth, pounding his fist against the bedframe. She flinched, drawing her legs up against her chest. “I’m doing the Lord’s work. I’ve been speaking to Brett—”
“Brett?” Amber sat back against the wall, wary. Had Brett told Chad to lock her away?
Chad nodded, up at the skylight. “Brett has always been there for me. Brett and Jim. I should have known a wife could only bring me trouble. The men in my life have always had my back and the woman, once led astray by a snake, simply grows up and becomes one.”
She let his words drip off her body like melted honey. His spite could not hurt her. His actions had already done their worst. “And what do you and Brett discuss?”
“Brett was there for me when Gilly…And when Momma asked…She asked me to help her…He’s the only one who knows about that, and what I did. And he has never judged me, never told me I’m a bad person.”
“What are you talking about?” Her head reeled. She knew Chad’s father had walked out when he was very young, and his mother died when he had been very young also, but he had always been evasive about how; the how and why just hadn’t seemed important to crack open…
She heard his feet slump off the bed and hit the floorboards. “My Momma was sad. Real sad. One night, I was six years old, and she told me, Chad, you’re a great kid. You’re a real great person. And Uncle Jim just loves you, just as much as I do. And she gave me this empty bottle, those small yellow prescription ones. She said, Chad, I’m going to go lie down now. And I want you to hold my hand. Let me sleep for a very long time, until the sun rises twice over, and then ring your Uncle Jim. It was after my father passed. Momma just didn’t want to live anymore.”
A numbness spread throughout her limbs. They sat in silence, breathing shallow. She found she could still feel empathy for him, for the child who had lost his innocence. “Did you hold her hand?” she whispered.
“Yes. But she let go.” He sobbed softly and she found she could cry for him too. She let him run dry and then she said:
“Chad, honey. Shall we unlock the door now?”
“I can’t do that.”
She held her breath for a moment, watching the swoop of a lark’s wing across the skylight. She had thought his moment of vulnerability would make him open to helping her. “That must have been really hard for you. Seeing your Mom pass away.” Chad grunted. He didn’t want her sympathy. Perhaps, then, it was time to twist the knife. “You said you’d been talking to Brett, about Gilly. Does he know what you did?”
Chad snorted. “Know about it? He planned it.”
“What?” She looked at the can of lemonade. Thought about smashing it across his face, tearing open the rip pull further to create a sharp tool. A kind of motion sickness gripped her head, though she felt she could barely move. “What are you telling me, Chad? You’re the one who buried my child. You picked her up from that party.” The malice had crept in, she was too tired to hide it.
Chad looked at his hands. “He was there. Brett. It was his car.” The voice that slipped through her ears was composed, robotic. “It was an accident, Gilly running like a mad woman. Brett’s car coming up round a blind bend. These things happen.” These things happen.
“Why was he there?” she choked out.
“I called him. Gill had her tongue down someone’s throat. Lord knows I didn’t sign up to this marriage to deal with that. So, I called him, and like always, he came and helped me out, you know?”
“Helped you?” She felt as though the world had tilted, and expanded, all words falling skewed from his mouth, wrong.
“I told you,” he said, voice rising. “It was an accident. And not worth blackening Brett’s name in the Church for.”
“Do you really believe that?” She realised she was holding her breath, and released it with a quiet sob. Before, she had been looking for answers: who really was the man she had married? Was he the stable, quiet and simple man she had hoped? Or was he hollow, malleable and dark? He answered a different question. One she hadn’t dared to ask: why?
“He would blacklist me. For allowing…for facilitating…he said assisted suicide is a federal crime. That I’d go down for it.”
She stumbled to her feet, rattling against the locked door handle. “Let me out Chad. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“I won’t do that.” He stumbled to his feet and shoved her hard to one side. Her right knee crumbled on impact, her left foot catching the end of the bowl, rice exploding over the wooden boards as Chad slammed the door shut behind him and turned the metal key with a loud clang. She screamed and screamed and screamed, drowning out the thud of his shoes on the pine staircase.
“You buried my baby because you are a SELFISH BASTARD!”
“No one can hear you,” he called. “You know there’s no one about for miles. And even Jim’s gone into town.”
Even Jim’s gone into town. She knew Chad was telling the truth. Brett had killed her baby. And, using the shadowed protection of the Church, his omnipotent influence over Chad, he’d made his act disappear into smoke. She wiped spittle from her cheek and downed the rest of the lemonade. She thought about the time she had visited his office. Tried to remember if there had been a tell-tale spreading of guilt across his face, in the shake of a hand…He thought the law couldn’t touch him. And he’d thought Chad would never tell her…Brett had underestimated her if he thought she wouldn’t die trying to see him behind bars. It was time to tell the law exactly what she knew, and bring the whole lot of them, the whole Church if she had to, down with her.
Dragging herself to her feet, she held her hand high, towards the skylight. A metre more, and then she could touch it. The bed was flimsy, easy to move. Still, she needed to be on tiptoes to brush the clasp of the window clip with her fingers. She tested her balance on the bedhead. One foot, then the other. Her head ached but her focus was clear and it stabilised her. Rust crumbled under her nails. The window couldn’t have been opened in years. And when it creaked open, it opened just a crack, balanced on a metal hinge. It wasn’t enough space, not even to squeeze her head through. Fuck.
She flopped onto all fours on the mattress and gazed around her, though she knew there was nothing. No. There were the photo albums. She flew to them, flicking through each tome for something sharp, something heavy. They wouldn’t be enough…But at the bottom lay a photo frame. Chad, about two years old, with half an ice cream smeared across his face. She seized it and simulated throwing it smack bang into the centre of the window. Her aim was poor, always had been and she didn’t trust herself. After the crash, Chad might return. She wouldn’t have long then. She practised with the photo albums first, swinging her arm back like a bowler and propelling herself forward until the centre of the window had bonged its approval several times. Now. She grasped the photo frame in both hands, a tremor setting in. This will work Amber. It’s only crappy single glaze.
The glass cracked and, with one final prod of the frame, showered onto the bed sheets. Mercifully, it wasn’t loud. She brushed the debris off as much as she could, before wrapping the sheets around her, down her bra, tucked around her pant line, anything that would give her secure padding for the inevitable fall. Clambering back onto the bedhead, she found a precarious balance on her tip-toes. Then she hoisted herself up, until more of her upper body rested over the ledge, exposed to the open air, than the proportion which remained dangling in the room. The roof was flat. She said a prayer of thanks and dragged herself up and out into fresh air.
She knew from the movies that the drainpipe was her only option if she wanted to keep her bones intact. Every part of her body shook, but she didn’t allow herself to look down, or question the strength of the pipe against the wall. She edged down, clinging onto the metal, her feet gripping tight, her fingers grasping at screws, against the ripping of the pipe from the house. A half shuffle, a slipping, a fall, on her ankle. She barely felt the burn, eyes on the road, the road, feet pounding towards it, and it felt like she was alive. She was running for Ivan, for Gilly, for herself.
After five minutes, her feet began to burn against the soles of her worn shoes, and she slowed to a panicked jog. After ten minutes, a stabbing pain developed in her left-side, her body pleading for fuel. Sweat prickled her forehead. Looking behind her for friendly drivers, of which there were none, she kept to the side of the dirt track, as light fell behind the threadbare trees. She panted, her throat drying. If no one passed by her in the next fifteen minutes, she felt sure Chad would find her. Her legs would not carry her far enough. Her arms could not pump at the speed of a furious truck’s engine.
