Dark Places - Gillian Flynn

On the other side of the glass, he held the phone in his hand, cleared his throat, then looked down, started to say something, then stopped. I was left looking at the crown of his head for almost a minute. When he looked up, he was crying, two tears from both his eyes trickling down his face. He wiped them away with the back of a hand, then smiled, his lips wavering.

“God, you look just like Mom,” he said all at once, getting it out, and coughed, wiped more tears. “I didn’t know that.” His eyes flickered between my face and his hands. “Oh, God, Libby, how are you?”

I cleared my own throat and said, “I guess I’m OK. I just thought it was time I came and saw you.” I do sort of look like Mom, I thought. I do. And then I thought, my big brother, and felt the same chesty pride I’d had as a kid. He looked so much the same, pale face, that Day knob of a nose. He hadn’t even grown much since the murders. Like we both got stunted that night. My big brother, and he was happy to see me. He knows how to play you, I warned myself. Then I set the thought aside.

“I’m glad, I’m glad,” Ben said, still looking at the side of his hand. “I’ve thought about you a lot over these years, been wondering about you. That’s what you do in here … think and wonder. Every once in a while someone’ll write me about you. But it’s not the same.”

“No,” I agreed. “Are they treating you OK?” I asked, stupidly, my eyes glazed, and suddenly I was crying and all I wanted to say was sorryI’msorryI’msosorry. Instead I said nothing, looking only at a constellation of acne scattered around one corner of Ben’s lips.

“I’m fine, Libby, Libby, look at me.” My eyes to his. “I’m fine. I really am. I got my high school degree in here, which is more than I ever prolly would have done outside, and I’m even partway to a college degree. English. I read fucking Shakespeare.” He made the guttural sound that he always tried to pass off for a laugh. “Forsooth, you dirty bugger.”

I didn’t know what the last part meant, but I smiled because he was waiting for me to smile.

“Man, Libby, I could just drink you in. You don’t know how good it is to see you. Shit, I’m sorry. You just look like Mom, do people tell you that all the time?”

“Who would tell me that? There’s no one. Runner’s gone, don’t know where, Diane and I don’t talk.” I wanted him to feel sorry for me, to float around in my big empty pool of pity. Here we were, the last of the Days. If he felt sorry for me, it would be harder to blame me. The tears kept coming and now I just let them. Two chairs down, the Indian woman was saying her good-byes, her weeping just as deep as her voice.

“Ya’all by yourself, huh? That’s no good. They should’ve took better care of you.”

“What are you, born again?” I blurted, my face wet. Ben frowned, not understanding. “Is that it? You forgiving me? You’re not supposed to be nice to me.” But I craved it, could feel the need for the relief, like setting down a hot plate.

“Nah, I’m not that nice,” he said. “I got a lot of anger for a lot of people, you’re just not one.”

“But,” I said, and gulped down a sob like a kid. “But my testimony. I think, I may, I don’t know, I don’t know …” It had to have been him, I warned myself again.

“Oh that.” He said, like it was a minor inconvenience, some snag in a summer vacation best forgotten. “You don’t read my letters, huh?”

I tried to explain with an inadequate shrug.

“Well, your testimony … It only surprised me that people believed you. It didn’t surprise me what you said. You were in a totally insane situation. And you always were a little liar.” He laughed again and I did too, quick matching laughs like we’d caught the same cough. “No, seriously, the fact that they believed you? They wanted me in here, I was going to be in here, that just proved it. Fucking little seven-year-old. Man, you were so small …” His eyes turned up to the right, daydreaming. Then he pulled himself back. “You know what I thought of the other day, I don’t know why. I thought of that goddam porcelain bunny, the one Mom made us put on the toilet.”

I shook my head, no clue what he was talking about.

“You don’t remember that, the little bunny? Because the toilet didn’t work right, if we used it twice in an hour it stopped flushing. So if one of us crapped when it wasn’t working, we were supposed to close the lid and put the bunny on top, so no one else would open the lid and see a toilet full of crap. Because you guys would scream. I can’t believe you don’t remember this. It was so stupid, it made me so mad. I was mad I had to share a bathroom with all of you, I was mad I lived in a house with one toilet that didn’t even work, I was mad about the bunny. The bunny,” he broke into his confined laugh, “I found the bunny, like, it humiliated me or something. Unmanned me. I took it very personally. Like Mom was supposed to find a car figurine or a gun figurine for me to use. Man, I would get so worked up about it. I’d stand there by the toilet and think, ‘I will not put that bunny down,’ and then I’d get ready to leave and I’d think, ‘Goddamit, I gotta put the bunny down or one of them’s gonna come in here and all the screaming—you guys were screamers, high, Eeeeeeeaaaahh!—and I don’t want to deal with that so fine here’s the goddam bunny on your goddam toilet!’” He laughed again, but the memory had cost him, his face was flushed and his nose was sweaty. “That’s the kind of stuff you think of in here. Weird stuff.”

I tried to find that bunny in my memory, tried to inventory the bathroom and the things in it, but I came out with nothing, a handful of water.

“Sorry, Libby, that’s a strange memory to throw at you.” I put one tip of my finger near the bottom of the glass window and said, “That’s fine.”

WE SAT IN silence for a bit, pretending to listen to noise that wasn’t there. We had just started but the visit was almost over. “Ben, can I ask you something?”

“I think so.” His face went blank, preparing.

“Don’t you want to get out of here?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you give the police your alibi for that night? There is no way you were sleeping in a barn.”

“I just don’t have a good alibi, Libby. I just don’t. It happens.”

“Because it was, like, zero degrees out. I remember.” I rubbed my half finger beneath the counter, wiggled my two toes on my right foot.

“I know, I know. You can’t imagine.” He turned his face away. “You can’t imagine how many weeks, years, I’ve spent in here wishing I’d done it all differently. Mom and Michelle and Debby might not be dead if I’d just … been a man. Not some dumb kid. Hiding in a barn, angry at Mommy.” A tear splashed onto the phone receiver, I thought I could hear it, bing! “I’m OK being punished for that night … I feel … OK.”

“But. I don’t understand. Why were you so … unhelpful with the police?”

Ben shrugged his shoulders, and again the face went death-mask.

“Oh God. I just. I was such an unconfident kid. I mean, I was fifteen, Libby. Fifteen. I didn’t know what it was to be a man. I mean, Runner sure wasn’t helpful. I was this kid no one paid much attention to one way or the other, and here all of a sudden, people were treating me like I scared them. I mean, presto chango, I was this big man.”

“A big man charged with murdering his family.”

“You want to call me a stupid fuck, Libby, please, go ahead. To me, it was simple: I said I didn’t do it, I knew I didn’t do it, and—I don’t know, defense mechanism?—I just didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. If I’d reacted the way everyone expected me to, I probably wouldn’t be here. At night I bawled into a pillow, but I played it tough when anyone could see me. It’s fucked up, believe me I know it. But you should never put a fifteen-year-old on a witness stand in a courtroom filled with a bunch of people he knows and expect a lot of tears. My thoughts were that of course I’d be acquitted, and then I’d be admired at school for being such a bad-ass. I mean, I daydreamed about that shit. I never ever thought I was in danger of … ending up like this.” He was crying now, wiped his cheek again. “Clearly, I’ve gotten over whether people see me cry.”

“We need to fix this,” I said, finally.

“It’s not going to be fixed, Libby, not unless they find who did it.”

“Well, you need some new lawyers, working on the case,” I reasoned. “All the stuff they can do with DNA now …” DNA to me was some sort of magical element, some glowing goo that was always getting people out of prison.

Ben laughed through closed lips, the way he did when we were kids, not letting you enjoy it.

“You sound like Runner,” he said. “About every two years I get a letter from him: DNA! We need to get some of that DNA. Like I have a lockerful of it and just don’t want to share. D-N-A!” he said again, doing Runner’s crazy-eyed head nod.

“You know where he is now?”

“Last letter was care of Bert Nolan’s Group Home for Men, somewhere in Oklahoma. He asked me to send him 500 bucks, so he could continue his research on my behalf. Whoever Bert Nolan is, he’s ruing the day he let goddam Runner into his home for men.” He scratched his arm, raising his sleeve just enough for me to see a tattoo of a woman’s name. It ended in -olly or -ally. I made sure he saw me notice.

“Ah this? Old flame. We started as penpals. I thought I loved her, thought I’d marry her, but turned out she didn’t really want to be stuck with a guy in prison for life. Wish she’d told me before I got the tat.”

“Must’ve hurt.”

“It didn’t tickle.”

“I meant the breakup.”

“Oh, that sucked too.”

The guard gave us the three-minute signal and Ben rolled his eyes: “Hard to decide what to say in three minutes. Two minutes you just start making plans for another visit. Five minutes you can finish your conversation. Three minutes?” He pushed out his lips, made a raspberry noise. “I really hope you come again, Libby. I forgot how homesick I was. You look just like her.”

Patty DayJANUARY 2, 1985

11:31 A.M.

She’d retreated to the bathroom after Len left, his livery smile still offering something unsavory, some sort of help she knew she didn’t want. The girls had flooded out of their bedroom as soon as they heard the door shut, and after a quick, whispery caucus outside the bathroom door, had decided to leave her alone and go back to the TV.

Patty was holding her greasy belly, her sweat turned cold. Her parents’ farm, gone. She felt the guilty twist of the stomach that had always made her such a good girl, the constant fear of disappointing her folks, please, please God, don’t let them find out. They had entrusted this place to her, and she had been found wanting. She pictured them up in the clouds of heaven, her dad’s arm around her mom as they looked down on her, shaking their heads, What in the world possessed you to do such a thing? Her mom’s favorite scold.

They’d have to move to an entirely different town. Kinnakee had no apartments, and they were going to have to cram into an apartment while she got a job in some office, if she could find one. She’d always felt sorry for people who lived in apartments, stuck listening to their neighbors belch and argue. Her legs puddled and suddenly Patty was sitting on the floor. She didn’t have enough energy to leave the farm, ever. She’d used the last of it up these past few years. Some mornings she couldn’t even get out of bed, physically couldn’t make her legs swing out from under the covers, the girls had to drag her, yanking her with dug-in heels, and as she made breakfast and got them somewhat ready for school, she daydreamed about dying. Something quick, an overnight heart attack, or a sudden vehicular clobbering. Mother of four, run down by a bus. And the kids adopted by Diane, who would keep them from lying around in their pajamas all day, and make sure they saw a doctor when they were sick, and snap-snap at them til they finished their chores. Patty was a slip of a woman, wavery and weak, quickly optimistic, but even more easily deflated. It was Diane who should have inherited the farm. But she wanted none of it, had left at eighteen, a joyful, rubberband trajectory that had landed her as a receptionist at a doctor’s office thirty mere-but-crucial miles away in Schieberton.

Their parents had taken Diane’s leaving stoically, as if it had always been part of the plan. Patty could remember back in high school, them all coming to watch her do her cheerleading thing one wet October night. It was a three-hour drive for them, deep into Kansas, almost Colorado, and it rained lightly but steadily the whole game. When it was over (Kinnakee lost), there on the field were her two gray-haired parents and her sister, three solid ovals, encased in rough wool coats, all rushing to her side, all smiling with such pride and gratitude you’d have thought she’d cured cancer, their eyes crinkled behind three sets of rain-speckled glasses.

Ed and Ann Day were dead now, had died early but not unexpectedly, and Diane was now a manager in the same doctor’s office, and lived in a mobile home in a tidy trailer park bordered with flowers.

“It’s a good enough life for me,” she’d always say. “Can’t imagine wanting anything different.”

That was Diane. Capable. She was the one who remembered little treats that the girls liked, she never forgot to get them their yearly Kinnakee T-shirts: Kinnakee, Heart of America! Diane had fibbed to the girls that it meant Magical Little Woman in Indian, and they’d been so gleeful about it that Patty could never bring herself to tell them it just meant rock or crow or something.

DIANE’S CAR HORN intruded on her thoughts with its usual celebratory honkhonkhonk!

“Diane!” screeched Debby, and Patty could hear the three girls racing toward the front door, could picture the mass of pigtails and muffin-bottoms, and then imagined them still running, straight out to the car, and Diane driving away with them and leaving her in this house where she would make everything go silent.

She pulled herself off the floor, wiped her face with a mildewy washcloth. Her face was always red, her eyes always pink, so it was impossible to tell if she’d been crying, the only advantage to looking like a skinned rat. When she opened the door, her sister was already unpacking three grocery loads of canned foods and sending the girls out to her car for the rest. Patty had come to associate the smell of brown paper bags with Diane, she’d been bringing them food for so long. That was the perfect example of the fall-short life Patty had made: She lived on a farm but never had enough to eat.