Dark Places

now. She grabbed Michelle by the arm, harder than she meant to.
    “What do you mean, Michelle, what do you think you know?”
    “Nothing, Mom, nothing,” Michelle blurted. “I was just saying, I don’t know.” She started to blubber, as Michelle did when she got in trouble and knew she’d done wrong.
    “Ben is your brother, you don’t talk hateful about your brother. Not inside this family and definitely not out of it. That means, church, school, whatever.”
    “But Mom …” started Michelle, still crying. “I don’t like Ben.”
    “Don’t say that.”
    “He’s bad, he does bad things, everyone at school knows …”
    “Knows what, Michelle?” She felt her forehead start burning, wished Diane were there. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. Has Ben, are you saying Ben has done anything … bad … to you?”
    She had promised herself she would never ask this question, that it was a betrayal of Ben to even think it. When Ben had beenyounger, seven or eight, he’d taken to sliding into her bed at night, and she’d wake up with him running fingers through her hair, cupping a breast. Innocent but disturbing moments in which she woke up feeling sensual, excited, and then darted from the bed, pulling robes and nightgowns around her like a horrified maiden.
No, no, no you don’t touch Mom like that
. But she never suspected—until now— that Ben might have done anything to his sisters. So she let the question hang, while Michelle got more and more agitated, pushing her big glasses up and down her pointy nose, crying.
    “Michelle, I’m sorry I yelled at you. Ben is in trouble. Now, has he done anything to you I need to know about?” Her nerves were jagged: she had moments of pure panic, followed by moods of complete remoteness. She could feel the fear rising now, that propulsion, like taking off in an airplane.
    “Done what to me?”
    “Has he touched you in a strange way. A not brotherly way?” A free-floating gap now, like the engines shutting off.
    “The only time he touches me is when he’s pushing me or pulling my hair or shoving me,” Michelle droned, her usual litany.
    Relief, oh, relief.
    “So what do people say about him at school?”
    “He’s a freak, it’s embarrassing. No one likes him. I mean, just look in his room, Mom. He’s got all sorts of weird stuff.”
    She was about to lecture Michelle on not going into Ben’s room without his permission, and wanted to slap herself. She thought about what Det. Collins had said, the organs of animals, in Tupper-ware containers. She imagined them. Some dried in tight, wooden balls, others fresh and assaulting when you opened the lid, let the smell hit you.
    Patty stood up. “What’s in his room?”
    She started walking down the hall, Ben’s goddang phone cord tripping her up, as always. She marched past his padlocked door, down the hall, turned the corner left, past the girls’ room and into her own. Socks and shoes and jeans lay everywhere, each day’s flotsam abandoned in piles.
    She opened her bedside table and found an envelope, In Case of Emergency scrawled on the front in Diane’s elongated cursive thatlooked just like their mother’s. Inside was $520, cash. She had no idea when Diane had sneaked that in her room, and she was glad she hadn’t known, because Runner would have sensed her holding out. She lifted the money to her nose and smelled it. Then she tucked the envelope back inside and pulled out a bolt-cutter she’d bought weeks ago, just to have on hand, just if she ever needed to get into Ben’s lair. She’d been ashamed. She started back down the hallway, the girls’ room looking like a flophouse, beds against each wall except the doorway. She could picture the police wrinkling their noses—
they all sleep in here?—
and then the aroma of urine hit her and she realized one of them must have wet the bed last night. Or the night before?
    She debated switching out the sheets right then, but made herself walk straight back to Ben’s, stood eye-level with an old Fender Guitar sticker he’d partly scraped off. She had a quick moment of nausea when she almost decided she couldn’t look. What if she found incriminating photos, sickening Polaroids?
    Snap. The lock fell to the carpet. She yelled at the girls, peeking out from the living room like startled deer, to go watch TV. She had to say it three times—
gowatchTVgowatchTVgowatchTV-
—before Michelle finally went away.
    Ben’s bed was unmade,