Into That Darkness by Steven Price Page B

you don’t even know.
    Usually I just lock her in a closet. With bread and water.
    I used to send your mom out in the fields for the day. I think she should send you out to the fields maybe.
    We don’t have fields here Poppa.
    Neither did we, honey, the woman said.
    You could tie her to the rack, her father said. Or shave off all of her hair.
    The woman laughed. I think she already did that.
    You’re both hilarious, the girl said, all at once distracted and immensely bored. She lifted the glazed head of the cookie jar and peered in, then slid lazily off the counter and sauntered out, a cookie in either hand, another in her teeth.
    Can I have a cookie too? her son asked.
    No.
    I remember when you were that age, her father said.
    No you don’t.
    He looked at her. Well. You were perfect. You were a perfect angel.
    You said before that Mom was a little devil.
    Hey? You want to be grounded too?
    Her son shook his head. After a moment he looked up. Kat’s grounded?
    You get out of here. Go on. Go see what your sister is doing.
    Her son scrambled down from the table.
    She looked at her father. He’s going right into his sister’s room to tell her she’s grounded. You know that.
    Her father smiled. It is nothing. I had five brothers.
    And two sisters.
    Yes.
    She said nothing then. She looked towards the sitting room. In the gloom its couches were lumped and misshapen, the old fireplace cold in the shadows. Embers of darkness coalesced within. The smell of the yard came in through the open window and she could hear a dog barking beyond their fence. She wiped the countertop down with the dishcloth and shook its crumbs into the sink. Filled her tarnished kettle with water, plugged it in.
    Through the walls a thrum of music started up and the woman smiled grimly, regarded her father. The floor tiles under their socks shaking.
    He stood. I will ask her to turn it down, he said.
    You’re great with them, she said.
    I could stay longer.
    No. You should go.
    He nodded but did not move.
    I could take them out on the boat on Saturday.
    No.
    Anna Mercia. What do you think I am doing here?
    But she made a cutting motion with her hand and he went quiet.
    He had always loved the ocean. When she was a girl and he would telephone on her birthday or on Christmas he would ask first about the changing light on the water. In the West Indies he had owned a small boat and it was one of the first things he purchased when he returned here, to this colder ocean. He had been famous in his country as a public figure. She wondered suddenly at how things alter.
    She turned back to the sink. Standing there feeling slack and grotesque and old. She held a warm plate staring at it without interest and she set it again aclatter in the rack. She thought her father had left the kitchen but all at once she felt his hands on her shoulders and he turned her gently so that she was facing him. He took her chin in his palm.
    He said to her very softly: They love you. You are their mother.
    They need a father.
    They do not.
    She looked into his face. Everyone needs a father, Dad.
    Everyone wants a father, he said. There is a difference.
    She looked at his soft sloped shoulders and doughy face in the kitchen light and it seemed to her then that he was asking something of her she could not give. At first she did not recognize it and then she did and it was something she remembered from when Mason was very little. She felt all at once as if she were older than her father and feeling this filled her with a great sadness.
    You were a good father, she said to him.
    Even as she said this she knew it was not true and she knew that he knew it also.
    There were many things else, he said quietly. But I did always love you.
    No you didn’t, she said, and looked at him. You didn’t, Dad. That wasn’t love.
    She opened her eyes.
    She was very cold. She felt something flutter across her face and it felt like a moth and the darkness before her