If Darkness Takes Us Read online

  She thought for a minute. “No, the one by the park.” The garden by the park was on Palace Parkway. Darla was going as far from us as she could get without leaving the neighborhood. No way I could watch over her down there.

  I noticed that Darla always came home fairly clean, so I asked her how she managed to build a garden without getting dirty.

  “Just good, I guess,” she said. Good at something, I thought.

  Then one day Harvey Zizzo said, “Darla’s supposed to help in that garden we’re building, but she never shows up.”

  “She leaves the house every morning. What’s she doing?”

  “I’ve seen her around her house a couple of times,” Harvey said.

  “She’s not going inside with all the germs and poison, is she?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Shoot. Now I would have to confront Darla.

  Tasha asked often if she and Keno could ride to their old neighborhood to “see friends.” I didn’t want to tell her that many of those friends would have moved away, that some might be ill or even dead. So, I gave excuses, like, “Not today. We need to weed the veggies,” or bake squash in the solar ovens, or shuffle and organize goods at the Mint to prepare to hand out rations.

  She still cried at night. All the indignities of our new life seemed to upset her more than they did the rest of us, and her complaints were never-ending.

  “Why can’t I wash my hair? It’s gross.” “I can’t use this stinky toilet anymore. It’s full of pee.” “I’m sick of smelling like wood smoke.” “I can’t just cook and garden all the time.”

  But Tasha’s most valid complaint was this: “Why can’t I do something important? You always talk to Keno about stuff, but not me. I’m gonna go crazy, I’m so freaking bored!”

  My eldest granddaughter was still pissed at me for keeping her from the water excursions, which continued to happen twice per week while Jack tried to convince his friend to let us use his truck. I kept Tasha home to separate her from Chas, but I was stifling her, even I could see that, and I needed to fix it. So, when she again bitched about boredom, I offered her some ways out.

  “You could teach school to the little kids,” I suggested.

  “That’s babysitting. Still boring.”

  “Okay, do you want to build something, or repair things?”

  She thought for a moment. “What could I build?”

  “Outhouses?”

  “Oh, puke,” she said, and she looked like she might.

  “Silly. They’re not full of poop when you build them. How about trellises for gardens? Maybe we could grow grapes and you could be in charge of them.”

  Twisting her mouth sideways, she said, “Maybe.”

  “You could learn about folk medicine. I have gobs of books about it.”

  “Another girlie job, being a nurse.”

  “Tasha, if you really studied it and learned a lot, you’d be more like the neighborhood doctor. You could find medicinal plants and grow them, study anatomy and the way the body works. That is super important work.”

  “It sounds hard,” she said.

  “Almost everything worth doing is hard. Will you at least think about it?”

  “I guess,” she said.

  I gathered all the standard and folk medicine books in the Pico house and dragged them in a box to Tasha’s room.

  “Do I have to read all those?”

  “If you want to be good at this, you do. I have more books over at the Mint.”

  “Great,” she said, and left the room without opening a book.

  One evening after supper, Tasha yelled at me when I asked her to help with the dishes.

  “I’m tired, Nana! Can’t you do it yourself?”

  “Tasha, don’t yell.” I stared at her, astounded, as she grimaced back. Then she twisted away, took off up the stairs, and slammed her bedroom door.

  How much longer could I put up with this shit? I was supposed to be retired now, the wise and adored matron of a large, loving family, taking long afternoon naps, going on sea cruises, making quilts. I wasn’t meant to be raising yet another set of stubborn children. God, did I ever miss Hank at a time like this. He had a real talent for managing recalcitrant teens.

  The other grandkids were stonily silent. “Kids, I’m sorry you have to work so hard and aren’t getting to have the lives that you wanted.”

  “Nana,” Keno said, “Tasha had a fight with Chas today. He thinks he’s such hot shit.”

  “Don’t say ‘shit’,” Mazie said, covering her ears.

  “Hush, Mazie. . . . And Keno, please refrain from using that word in front of the little kids.”

  “There’s only one little kid here,” Milo said. “Not two.”

  “Yes, Milo, it’s true you’re not little anymore, but you’re littler than Keno and Tasha, and you shouldn’t be using those words.”

  “’Shit’ isn’t that bad of a word.”

  “Milo, hush. Keno, please finish the story.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I saw them arguing on the corner. Chas grabbed Tasha’s arm, and I started to go save her, but she jerked loose from him and ran home.”

  “Maybe that’s why she’s upset,” I said. “She doesn’t need to see that boy.”

  “I know,” Keno said, “but Tasha thinks he’s cool.”

  Bad-boy infatuation. I hated it.

  “And,” Keno added, “she says you make her do everything.”

  “I don’t do that, do I? I make all of you do more than you want, because that’s what it takes for us to survive.”

  “But you don’t do nothin’, Nana,” Mazie said.

  “What?”

  “Mazie, be quiet,” Keno said.

  I looked from one grandchild to the next, trying to read their thoughts, to get clues from their steely faces.

  “You guys think I don’t work? You know I’m old and have health problems, don’t you?”

  “We know,” Keno said. “The little kids don’t always understand it, though.”

  “I am not little!” Milo insisted, and he stomped off up the stairs as well.

  “Milo, wait! Keno just means that you’re younger than he is. He’s always teased you about being littler. Why are you upset about it now?”

  “I don’t think it’s funny anymore!” He slammed the door to his room.

  Not much of anything was funny anymore.

  Darla had been upstairs in the game room, doing God knows what, while this bickering went on. Now she came downstairs, looking troubled.

  “Sorry for the arguing,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she muttered. She went to the kitchen and washed the dishes in cold, soapy water. No one had asked her to help.

  “I’ll get you some hot water to rinse with.” Keno went to the grill to retrieve the water pot we always set to heat as soon as supper was cooked. Maybe when Tasha complained about her workload, she meant that I should make Darla do more.

  But Darla was too depressed. Trying to make her work was depressing for me. She’d get such pained expressions, as though my words caused her physical distress. I needed to have a private conversation with Darla about this.

  But first, I had to talk to Tasha. I trudged upstairs to knock on her door. She didn’t answer until my third try. She let me in, and I sat beside her on the edge of her bed. We collapsed against one another, sighing and apologizing.

  “Nana,” Tasha said, “you don’t make Darla work. Can’t she live somewhere else?”

  “You still don’t like her?”

  “No. She’s weird. She’s lazy, and she eats scraps off our plates.”

  “Tasha, she’s different than you. Try to be more tolerant. And it’s good she eats scraps so they don’t go to waste.”

  “Well, I don’t like her.” Tasha tried to be cute by pouting her lips, but I didn’t buy it.

  “Think about how lonely she is. Maybe that will help.”

  “You like Darla more than you like me. You baby her.”


  “Honey, you’re my granddaughter. I absolutely love you more. But Darla’s lost her whole family.”

  “I lost my family, too,” Tasha said, tears brimming.

  I exhaled a loud breath. “I’m sorry if you don’t know how sad I feel for you, how much I worry. I think about it all day, every day.”

  “You do?” Tasha half-smiled. She took a stuttering breath. “Darla uses my makeup.”

  Lord, it just kept coming. “Then put the makeup in your room.”

  “She came in here once. I saw her.”

  “Tasha, what do you want me to do? Kick her out? She’ll starve.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “What’s wrong with you? You can’t let this disaster make you hard-hearted. All you have is your soul, my love, but lately you don’t seem to care about that. You’re still seeing that boy you snuck into the woods with, the one who called me a bitch. I don’t want you near him.”

  She leaned away from me. “He didn’t mean it. He was hungry and mad about it.”

  “If you fall in love with a boy you have to make excuses for, he’ll do you wrong every time.”

  “You make excuses for Grandpa.”

  “Tasha!” My blood pressure spiked. I felt it in my head. Tasha had me pegged on that one. I tried to calm down and think.

  “Grandpa Hank is my husband and your grandfather. It’s complicated. You’re right that I make excuses for him. But you should listen to me about Chas because I’m the only adult around who has your best interests at heart.”

  “But Chas won’t treat me bad. He loves me.”

  “Tasha, people can say anything. It’s what they do that matters.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then bring him inside tomorrow night so I can get to know him.” Maybe I could influence him to behave better, since I couldn’t seem to make him disappear.

  “He’s busy.”

  “At night? Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. Stuff.”

  “Busy avoiding me is more like it.”

  “He’s not avoiding you. He’s just—”

  “What do you see in him? He’s hyper, and he’s mean.”

  “No, he’s cool. He’s not afraid of anything. You just don’t know him.”

  I scrutinized my granddaughter, who was growing into a stunningly beautiful woman. But she was much more troubled than she would admit, and she was cruisin’ for an emotional bruisin’ with Chas. It wouldn’t have done any good for me to harangue Tasha about her attitude. Curing it was a long-term project.

  Though I would later come to regret it, I patted her hand and left the room.

  When I slipped down the stairs, Mazie and Milo were playing Yahtzee by candlelight, and Keno and Darla were sitting close together on the dark patio. Geez, was everyone falling in love around here?

  I hadn’t even thought to stock up on condoms. I could be such an old woman sometimes.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ABOUT THE TIME our kids started leaving home, the biggest problem between Hank and me involved those two world-class marriage wreckers: fairness in the treatment of stepchildren, and the equitable distribution of a finite supply of money.

  Lord knows Hank and I worked hard and made reasonable salaries, but he brought home more money than I did. We set up a college savings account, and Hank had a 401(k), but we had little in other savings. It took all our income to maintain a home and two cars, and to feed, clothe, and educate five kids.

  As the kids started finishing high school, it became clear that only Jeri and Wayne wanted to go to college. We divvied the college savings equally between them. The other three, Peter, Eddie, and Erin, wanted money for cars, for deposits on apartments, for furniture, and so much more. We told them if they weren’t going to college, we could only loan them the money. They whined, yet they had little choice but to accept our terms.

  This was years before I got my inheritance, which I’d had no inkling was coming. Hank and I had debt coming out our ears. Our house needed tons of work. We couldn’t afford to give away so much money, no matter how much we loved our children.

  Once they were out of the house though, Peter and Eddie kept coming up with more things they needed money for: tires and car repairs; tools, boots, and clothing for jobs they expected to get. They seldom—if ever—made payments on their loans. Erin didn’t start out paying either, but I taught her how to budget, and I stayed after her until she whittled her debt away. But when I tried to do the same for Hank’s boys, Hank freaked out.

  “Leave them alone! They’re my kids. I’ll work it out.”

  “But you’re not working it out. You keep giving them more money. This isn’t what we agreed on. How is it fair to Erin to make her pay and not them? And how is it fair to us? We need a new roof.”

  “I said, ‘Leave them alone!’”

  “But it’s not right!”

  We had this same argument over and over, until Peter and Eddie owed us ten thousand dollars between them. Finally, Hank let the true reason behind his intransigence out of the bag.

  “Bea, I make more money than you do, and I can give it to my boys if I want to.”

  Whoa! What had Hank just said? That he loved his own kids more than he loved mine?

  I’d thought they were all “our” kids, that we’d agreed to treat them as equally as possible. I was too stunned to keep arguing.

  So, I fixed Hank, and I fixed him good. I drained our savings and gave five thousand dollars to Erin. Plus, since Wayne always needed more help with college expenses than Jeri did, I gave two thousand to her. I told my daughters we were giving money to all the kids—which was effectively true—but they were not to mention it to Hank or their siblings. I didn’t want them to be hurt by Hank, though I was furious with him.

  Because I managed the family money, it took Hank months to learn what I’d done. But one day, he called the bank to check our savings balance when he needed another car. He came home from work red-faced and raging, screaming at me for taking “his money.” In the midst of our argument, he slammed his fist on the table and stormed out the door. He didn’t speak to me for a solid week, and when he started speaking, it was terse and business-like.

  Soon he was working even on weekends and not coming home until bedtime. With the kids out of the house, I was left lonely and miserable. Then I discovered that Hank had opened his own savings account. I was so pissed that I couldn’t confront him about it. I sat home during the evenings and stewed for months.

  At last I thought, “Screw him!” and I got involved in nonprofit work, helping Habitat for Humanity raise funds and serving on the board of the Wheatsville Food Co-op, often coming home at midnight.

  After nearly two years of this, Hank asked me to be at home more in the evenings.

  “Why? You’re never here. The kids aren’t here.”

  “Because,” he said, “I miss you.”

  I missed Hank, too. I missed our sense of a close family. I missed Hank’s touch so much that I was having an affair. With a great deal of pain, I ended the affair and tried to rededicate myself to my husband.

  Hank used to take me dancing, especially when he was wooing me, but also for the early years of our marriage. It was during those slow dances that I first let him into my heart. He towered over me and wrapped his arms around me tenderly, tightly. He sighed when he drew me close. The particular song that reeled me in was Marcia Ball’s, “The Power of Love.”

  “I feel the power when we touch

  And I love you, I love you so much

  I just can’t get over . . . the power of love.”

  Intoxicated with his muscles and aftershave, I let Hank kiss me during our first dance to that song. Thereafter, I initiated the slow-dancing kisses. Hank was a little embarrassed to kiss in public, but I wasn’t. Once I planted my lips on his, he didn’t shirk me away.

  At least he didn’t for many years. Lately, he never even touched me in public. I thought he still loved me, though. I certainly hoped he
did.

  God, what if Hank was alive but hadn’t come home because he didn’t love me anymore? I wished I’d never thought of that.

  But I did think about it as yet another thing to lose sleep over. And when I seriously delved into the question of love between Hank and me, I came to understand that Hank had fallen out of love with me years ago. And as a consequence, I’d lost most of my regard for him as well.

  Tasha had been right. I did make excuses for Hank, especially to myself. I’d made so many, I’d failed to grasp that my husband didn’t love me at all.

  What a hateful thing to realize—just the kind of revelation I did not need in the midst of so much loss.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  AT LAST THE weather turned cold for a few days at the onset of December, and this brought us a new set of problems. Our homes weren’t built for cold weather—they were designed to keep us cooler in summer, which was an especially good thing for most of the year, now that we had no air conditioners. But during late fall and winter in Austin, the weather vacillated between warm and cold, and we needed ways to keep warm.

  Most of the time extra layers of clothing were enough, and sitting near the grill while meals were cooking. Extra blankets had to suffice for sleeping. But a few days in early December were real bears, the kind of cold we hadn’t seen in a decade. We even had light freezing rain, which was as it should be, but we weren’t prepared.

  “We can’t go get water tonight,” Keno said. “It’s not safe to light fires out there.”

  I should have been worried about the people with no water, but I was infinitely relieved that Keno wasn’t going out.

  The Pico house was an awfully big place to heat with its one fireplace. The open floor plan meant no doors between upstairs and down, so that any heat went straight to the second-floor ceiling.

  I taught the kids how to build fires and keep them going, how to use the damper to keep out smoke. I told Mazie and Milo they could only work with fire under supervision—another thing that made Milo bristle.

  Since the kids were stuck inside, I tried to get them interested in reading, as I had a big library of books for all ages. But if the kids, other than Keno, picked up a book, they wouldn’t stay with it long. They said they couldn’t see, but they wouldn’t use lanterns either.