A Box Full of Darkness

1

Violet

Long Island, New York

September 1989

When I wake in the middle of the night, I don't always see darkness. Sometimes I see fog outside the window of my old bedroom, the way it curled like smoke, and I can hear water dripping from the trees. Sometimes I see my daughter's face on the day she was born. I can often picture with perfect clarity our old kitchen in the house where I grew up, or the patent shoes I wore until I outgrew them and handed them down to Dodie, or the yellowing secondhand paperbacks I used to pilfer from Vail's bedroom bookshelf.

Other times, the faces of the people I've seen over the years appear in my mind: the girl in the stairwell at my high school; the man in the window of a neighbor's house, gesturing for me to come in; the woman underwater in the lake, still wearing her wool dress and straw hat. I never forget any of them, and I think somehow they know it. That's why they show themselves to me.

Why I can see them when no one else can, I'll never know.

For a moment, in the dark, it's almost peaceful to recall their faces. Then I turn my head and catch something from the corner of my eye, and for a moment I think I see-

But no, never. Not for years.

It doesn't matter how long it's been. I'm always afraid it's there.

And then I close my eyes and wonder what it's like to see nothing at all.


The day was clouding over as I took my equipment from the trunk of my car. Buckets, cleaning solutions, brooms, mops, gloves. The house stood a few blocks from the shore, a split-level that was dark and empty of life. My employer, Tess, had given me a key.

I stepped through the front door and paused, taking in the silence. The quiet of a house that is no longer lived in is somehow different from any other silence-a little like pitch-darkness. The place was tidy, dim, slightly dusty, the blinds drawn. From what Tess had told me, the elderly woman who owned it had died in a hospital, not here. That was something, at least.

The easiest place to start in a job like this is the bathroom-small, and just about everything must go. I started with the guest bath, leaving the upstairs bath for later. Then I moved to the cabinets and bookshelves in the sitting room, sorting rapidly.

I was a cleaner, but of a specialized kind. The company I worked for cleaned out dead people's houses, sorting and distributing their belongings. Some people died with no living relatives left to do the job; others were, for whatever reason, not on speaking terms with everyone they ever knew. Some isolated themselves, and others were genuinely loathed. When that happened, my employer would get a call from a landlord, lawyer, or other far-removed person, and Tess would send me.

It was an efficient process. Since I had no connection to the person who had died, I could do the job without shedding a tear or feeling a pang of guilt. Throwing out the used toothbrush made me feel nothing. I didn't care that this woman had listened to Lawrence Welk records or had been prescribed antibiotics in 1981. I could toss out the old handmade Christmas ornaments. I could box up the family photos without being tempted to look at them, even for a moment.

I'd gotten into this line of work when my own mother died, alone in a rented apartment, far from the house where my siblings and I were raised. I'd wanted nothing to do with her belongings, hadn't wanted to touch her dresses or whatever items she'd kept of my father's for all those years. I had never even been to her apartment and didn't want to go now. So I'd found a service to empty it for me.

Tess was the one I'd hired. She and I hit it off. She always needed cleaners, and when I offered, she was willing to hire me even after knowing the dark corners of my history.

Now I cleaned for other people like me, and I never judged. Because I knew what it felt like to want to walk away from someone and forget.

At lunchtime, I tugged each finger of my rubber gloves to pull them off, then rooted through my bag for the sandwich I'd brought. I used the old woman's kitchen phone to call Tess, because the woman had died only a week ago and her phone line hadn't been disconnected yet.

"Good afternoon, this is Tess," my boss said when she answered. She was most likely sitting at her desk in her office, doing accounting and making schedules.

"Tess, it's me."

"Violet, hi. How's the job going?"

"Just fine, I guess." I looked across the counter to the sitting room, which was almost completely sorted. "This one's not too hard."

"Anything valuable?"

"Not much." We talked about scheduling the trash pickup, the charity pickup, the appointment with the secondhand dealer who would take items of value on consignment. I glanced at the ceramic salt and pepper shakers on the counter, the plastic napkin holder. I'd start on the kitchen this afternoon.

"Your ex called," Tess told me. "He said to tell you your daughter won't be coming to stay the weekend. Something came up."

I put down the crust of my sandwich. I'd been expecting that, though it still hurt. "Something always comes up."

"I know, Vi. He's being a grade A asshole. You should call a lawyer."

I shook my head, though she couldn't see me. "I don't need a lawyer." Lisette was fourteen, and the custody battle had been over long ago. I'd lost. Lisette visited me less and less lately, but whether that was her decision or Clay's, I didn't know.

"I'll help you pay for it," Tess said, because she was a good person, and we'd been friends for years. She also thought I needed money, which I didn't.

"There's no point," I said. "He'd just use my past against me, like he always does. You'd waste your money. Lisette will be an adult in a few years anyway."

"I don't care what Clay says. She isn't better off growing up away from you."

That was debatable. Even I admitted that. But I said, "I appreciate the vote of confidence. I really do."

"Find yourself another man, Vi. Get out there. A woman who looks like you-jeez. If I was single and had your legs, no man on Long Island would be safe."

I ignored that. Any man who knew exactly how damaged I was would run screaming. "Anything else?"

"Yeah, a weird one. I got a call from a man who was looking for you. He said he was from Daylight Landscaping, in Fell, and he was calling about the house."

Shock sent heat up the back of my neck and made my vision blur.

"Violet?" Tess asked on the other end of the line.

I braced my palm against the Formica countertop and closed my eyes. The landscapers had been hired years ago, and there had never been a problem. Not once.

Something was very wrong.

"Violet?" Tess sounded alarmed.

"I'm here." I cleared my throat, tried to sound even a little bit normal. "They called you?"

"He said you weren't answering your home line, and the answering machine didn't pick up, so he wasn't sure he had the right number. You'd left him the office number in case of an emergency, so he called here."

There couldn't be an emergency, not a real one. There was no one living at the Fell house. Unless the place had burned down. The thought gave me a jolt of panic. "What did he want?"

"You have a house upstate?" Tess's tone was curious, even a little suspicious. She'd seen me for years as a down-and-out former mental patient, not a person who owned property. Property big enough to need landscapers, no less.

"It's . . . my parents' old place," I explained lamely. "No one lives there. The landscapers keep it up."

"Huh." There was an unpleasant tone in Tess's voice. "You're full of surprises, Violet."

Her meaning was clear. Tess thought I had confided in her, told her everything, and she didn't like that I hadn't. Because she knew I'd spent time in a mental hospital, because I'd taken a job with her, she thought she knew the important things about me. But she didn't, and now she was catching on.

There went another friendship. I'd add it to the pile.

I fumbled around next to the old woman's phone and found a pen and a pad of paper for taking messages. "Give me the number," I said.

She recited the number, which was long-distance. I scribbled on the pad, then hung up with Tess. I left the pad and pen where they were and walked out the door to the small back deck, trying to gather my scrambling thoughts.

I wasn't going to call. The last thing I wanted to do was call. Whatever was on the other end of the line was bad-I already knew that. The landscaper wasn't calling with an idle question or a problem with an unpaid bill. I felt a sinister tug, like on a long-slack fishing line. The house in Fell was waking up, pulling on its strings. I wasn't going to answer.

My course of action decided, I went back into the house. I was annoyed that the call had come to me instead of to Dodie or Vail, that I was the one who had to deal with these things. Dodie was in New York, modeling for shampoo ads, and she was never home at her tiny apartment to take a phone call. And Vail? Our brother, the middle child, was in a cabin in the woods somewhere in Montana. He called me from a different number every year, and I'd had to track down one of his ex-girlfriends to get his latest number, which he might have changed again. Vail was extraordinarily good at disappearing when things got hard.

I would start on the kitchen of this dead woman's house and forget about all of it. I picked up my rubber gloves from the kitchen counter, turned, and froze.

A woman stood on the stairs, her hand on the railing. She wore a plum-colored dress from the thirties, and her dark hair was pulled back from her face in a classic style. When our eyes met, a chill of cold air whispered over my skin.

She didn't speak. In all the years I'd been seeing them, they'd never spoken.

"Okay," I said to her when I had found my voice. "I understand."

The woman turned and glanced behind her, up the stairs. Her free hand worried the fabric of her skirt, twisting it. She turned back to me.

I nodded at her, reassuring her again. "It's all right."

She was afraid of something. They sometimes were, especially when it came to the bedroom. She didn't want me to go upstairs and look. Sometimes, they were afraid of what I'd see.

It might be the birth certificate that revealed she wasn't who she said she was.

Or the divorce decree from the abusive husband she'd fled at eighteen and never told her children-or her second husband-about.

It wasn't just the women. The men had secrets, too. The letter from an old lover, dated twenty years after they swore they'd never see each other again. I'd once found an old photo, lovingly framed and hidden, of two men in the army, their arms flung over each other's shoulders as they posed for the camera, both of them smiling and happy. Whatever that photo meant had died with both of them.

The sight of this woman on the stairs wasn't a shock to me. All I felt was a weary kind of familiarity, the exhale of taking on another burden. I would remember this one, just as I remembered all the others I'd seen since childhood, the people no one else saw. Whatever secret this woman didn't want spoken would stay unspoken with me. It was part of doing this job, of being here to see the dead when there were no other living people left to do so. It was what made me who I was, and I had paid the price for it.

"I won't tell," I told the woman.

She didn't move. Maybe she didn't believe me. I felt my pulse heavy in my neck, my temples, a blood rush. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, she was gone.


It didn’t take me long to find the item the woman was worried about. It was in her dresser drawer, half-hidden beneath her jewelry. She had lived alone, not worried that someone she lived with would see her secrets. And she had wanted the photograph in easy reach.

It was of a baby, a few months old, fat and smiling, lying on a blanket. On the back of the black-and-white photo the word Thomas was written in careful pencil. No last name, no date. No indication of who Thomas belonged to or what had happened to him.

I ran a finger over his little face and decided the woman had given him up for adoption. She was too young, and she'd given him away, said the story in my head. Thomas had been adopted by a nice young couple and had a great life now, with kids of his own. I couldn't bear to think of any other story for him, so I didn't.

I slid the photo into the back pocket of my jeans. When I turned around, I saw sitting in the middle of the bed, stark in the sunlight from the curtained window, the note with the phone number I'd left next to the old woman's phone.

I hadn't brought it upstairs, and I felt a surge of irritated anger instead of fear. The people I saw didn't move things around, didn't give me their bossy directives about my choices. What gave this woman the right? Who the hell did she think she was?

"I'm not going to do it," I said aloud, my voice a rasp in the chilly silence.

But I did. As if the woman in the plum dress had scolded me, I crossed the room and snatched the note from the bedspread, picking up the bedside phone. "You can pay the long-distance charges, then," I snapped, jabbing my finger into the rotary dial. "Serves you right."

"Daylight Landscaping, can I help you?" A man's deep voice answered the phone. "Henry speaking."

"My name is Violet Esmie," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "I'm returning your call."