Places in the Dark by Thomas H. Cook Page A

corridor the following night. “She could have lived with me. Or with you. Maybe even moved back in with Dad. At least, that way, she wouldn’t have laid there, all alone, helpless…”
    A nurse swept past, pushing a metal cart.
    “She wanted to be alone,” Billy said, defending her to the last, no less convinced than she’d always been of the decision she’d made, the path she’d followed. “That’s why she moved out there in the first place.”
    I shook my head at how extreme her action had been, how unnecessary that our mother had so isolated herself.
    “She wanted freedom, Cal,” Billy said emphatically.
    “Freedom?” I mocked. “And what did she hope to get from that?”
    “Wisdom,” Billy answered.
    He clearly admired her for it. And since his death, I’ve often wondered if, had he lived, my brother might have done the same.
    It was a thought that occurred to me again as I sat with my mother that morning—months later—doing the best I could to show her that she still had one son left, though the one who’d most believed in her was gone. I thought of all my brother might have learned. All he might have given. And in that instant, I saw him as an elderly man, sitting beside Fox Creek, feeling the sun’s warmth, letting it all fall into place, his eyes beginning to sparkle as he closed in upon a final wisdom. I saw a smile form on his lips, heard his voice in the air around me,
Now I know, Cal. Now I know.
    “Cal?”
    My mother’s voice drew me back to the present. “Yes?”
    “Cal … I?”
    A dreadful unease seized her eyes, as if she’d glimpsed something terrible in her own mind, something she couldn’t say but which I took to be yet another expression of her loss, her grief, the fact that the one who’d most nearly shared her vision of the world, taken most to heart her wild instruction, believed in her as much as she’d believed in herself, her one true son, was dead.
    I took her hand and squeezed it gently. “I know” was all I said.
    T he snow had begun to fall again when I left her an hour later. It lay in a crisp white layer over the sidewalk and outlined the bare limbs of each tree and shrub. I remembered how often Billy had taken his sled up thehigh hill behind our house, then hurtled down it, colliding with the huge drifts that lay at its bottom, then leaping to his feet, rapturous, covered in snow, laughing, dared me to join him on his next plunge. I heard his voice again,
You miss all the good stuff, Cal.
    It was only a short walk from the house to Fisherman’s Bank. Joe Fletcher, the bank president, sat behind his desk, a few papers neatly arranged on his blotter, others impaled on a thin metal stake.
    I took the chair in front of his desk, asked my first question.
    “Miss March came in every Monday morning, as I recall,” Fletcher answered. “She’d make a cash withdrawal of twenty dollars.” He was a broad-chested man, dressed in a dark double-breasted suit. Overall he had the look of a man long used to holding others in suspension, dashing or fulfilling thousands of small dreams. I could tell that he was treating my request for information about Dora as if it were a loan, trying to determine how I might use whatever he gave me, gauge its profit or its loss.
    “Did you ever learn much about her?” I asked him. “Not really, no.”
    “Did she open an account of her own?”
    “You’re thinking she may have tried to pull one over on Ed Dillard?” The suggestion amused Fletcher. “Old men are easily taken in, of course. And Miss March was quite lovely, as you know, but…”
    The phone rang.
    “Excuse me,” Fletcher said as he picked up the receiver.
    While he spoke, I looked out the window into the narrow street that ran through Port Alma, shops on either side, a piece of the bay snagged between the hardware store and the bakery, frozen and opaque, dull as a dead man’s eye. The snow was falling relentlessly now, lacing the power lines in white, gathering