Dark Places

my stomach gone eely. The fact that the definitive voice on Ben’s guilt had changed her mind was sickening me. As was meeting yet another person who was positive I’d committed perjury.
    “Well, you’re trying to, right? I think it’s almost impossible to undo these things after all these years—his time for an appeal, per se, is up. He’d need to try for habeas corpus and that’s … you all would need some big new evidence at this point to get the ball rolling. Like some really compelling DNA evidence. Unfortunately, your family was cremated so—”
    “Right, well, thank you,” I interrupted, needing to get home, right then.
    “Again, I wrote the book after the verdict, but if I can do anything to help you, let me know, Libby. I do bear some culpability. I take that responsibility.”
    “Have you made any statements, told the police you don’t think Ben did it?”
    “Well, no. It seems like most people concluded a long time ago that Ben didn’t do it,” Barb said, her voice going shrill. “I assume you’ve officially recanted your testimony? I’d think that’d be a huge help.”
    She was waiting for me to say more, to explain why I’d come to her now. To tell her, yeah, sure, Ben was innocent and I was going to fix all this. She sat eyeing me, eating her lunch, chewing each bite with excessive care. I picked up my sandwich—cucumber and hummus—and set it back down, leaving a thumbprint in the damp bread. The room was lined with bookshelves, but they contained only self-help books.
Open the Sunshine!; Go, Go, Girl; Stop Punishing Yourself; Stand up—Stand Tall; Be Your Own Best Friend; Moving On, Moving Up!
They went on, and on, the relentless, cheerful, buck-up titles. The more I read, the more miserable I felt. Herbal remedies, positive thinking, forgiveness of self, living with mistakes. She even had a book for beating tardiness. I don’t trust self-helpers. Years ago, I left a bar with a friend of a friend, a nice, cute, crew-necked, normal guy with an apartment nearby. After sex, after he fell asleep, I started nosing around his room, and found that his desk was covered with sticky notes:
    Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff.
If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a

pretty good time.
Enjoy life—no one gets out of here alive.
Don’t worry, be happy
.
    To me, all that urgent hopefulness was more frightening than if I’d found a pile of skulls with hair still attached. I ran out in full panic, my underwear tucked up a sleeve.
    I didn’t stay much longer with Barb. I left with promises to call her soon and a blue paperweight in the shape of a heart I stole from her sidetable.

Patty Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
9:42 A.M.
    T he sink was stained a sludgy purple from where Ben had dyed his hair. Sometime in the night, then, he’d locked himself in the bathroom, sat down on the closed toilet seat, and read through the instructions on the carton of hair color she’d found in the trash. The carton had a photograph of a woman with light pink lips and jet-black hair, worn in a pageboy. She wondered if he’d stolen it. She couldn’t imagine Ben, chin-to-chest Ben, setting a dye kit on the checkout counter. So he’d shoplifted it. Then in the middle of the night, her son, all by himself, had measured and combined and lathered. He’d sat with that mudpile of chemicals on his red hair and waited.
    The whole idea made her incredibly sad. That in this house of women, her boy had colored his hair in the night by himself. Obviously, it was silly to think he’d have asked her for help, but to do such a thing without an accomplice seemed so lonely. Patty’s older sister, Diane, had pierced Patty’s ears in this bathroom two decades ago. Patty heated a safety pin with a cheap lighter and Diane sliced a potato in half and stuck its cold, wet face against the back of Patty’s ear. They froze her lobe with an ice cube, and Diane—
hold still, hold
stillllll
—jabbed that pin into Patty’s rubbery flesh. Why did they need the potato? For aim or something. Patty had chickened out after the first ear, had plopped down on the side of the bathtub, the lancet of the pin still sticking out the lobe. Diane, intense and un-budging in a mountainous wool nightgown, closed in on her with another hot pin.
    “It’ll be over in a second, you can’t do just one, P.”
    Diane, the doer. Jobs were not to be abandoned, not for weather, or laziness, or a throbbing ear, melted ice, and a