The Darkest Evening of the Year

cookie-sucking mouth,” she says.
    Harrow finds ruthlessness erotic.
    “Piggy at the trough.”
    Power is the only thing that he admires, the only thing that matters, and violence—emotional, psychological, physical, verbal violence—is the purest expression of power. Absolute violence is absolute power.
    Watching Moongirl now, he wants in the worst way to take her down into their windowless room, into their perfect darkness, where they can do what they are, be what they do, down in the grasping greedy dark, down in the urgent animal dark.

 
    Chapter
34
    I n the sky’s distillery, the afternoon light was a weak brandy.
    Standing at a study window, Brian said, “She seemed like a free spirit—bold, edgy, but fun. After we’d been together awhile, I began to realize something was wrong with her.”
    Amy had sampled Vanessa’s e-mails. The ten-year collection was large. She got the flavor from a few, and didn’t care to read more.
    “I wanted to end it, but she had this magnetism.” In disgust, he repeated, “ Magnetism. Truth. She was hot, totally hot, and I knew she was unstable, but I was weak. That’s the sick truth.”
    He had begun this account facing Amy, but even ten years after these events, shame led him to prefer to confess to the window.
    She wanted to move behind him, put a hand on his waist, and let him know this changed nothing between them. But perhaps he needed his self-disgust to be able to purge himself of these secrets; she sensed that her affection might weaken his resolve, that he was aware of this, that she must trust him to know when he could face her again.
    Fred and Ethel snoozed back to back, bookends without a book. Nickie remained awake, more interested than she pretended to be.
    “I never imagined she wanted a child,” Brian said. “Of the women I knew back then, she was the least likely to pine for motherhood.”
    If Amy should not touch him just now, she could stand at another window, sharing the pre-twilight view to which he unburdened himself.
    “When she got pregnant, it was an ugly scene. But not how you might expect. She said she wanted my baby, needed it, she said, but she never wanted to see me again.”
    “Don’t you have common-law rights or something?”
    “I tried to discuss that with her, but all she wanted to talk about was how I took the crown as the world’s biggest loser.”
    “If that’s what she thought of you, why did she want your baby?”
    “It was weird. She was vicious. Such contempt, loathing. She ripped my taste in clothes, music, books, my financial prospects, everything—some true, some not. I had to get away from her.”
    The westering sun fired the intricacies of a fretwork of clouds. The majesty of the light and sky was a striking contrast to the base story that he had to tell.
    “I expected her to call. She didn’t. Told myself good riddance, it wasn’t any of my business now. But some things she’d said about me had the sting of truth. I didn’t like what I saw in mirrors anymore. I kept thinking of the baby she was carrying, my baby.”
    Whatever faults he had in those days, he’d grown into a good man. Later, he might want to hear that from her, but not now.
    “I needed a month to realize, if I didn’t have that baby in my life, then my life would never be right. It would be distorted, more distorted every year. So I called Vanessa. She’d changed her phone number. I went to her apartment. Moved. No forwarding address.”
    Amy remembered he had once seen the baby. “But you found her.”
    “Three months I tried mutual acquaintances. She wasn’t seeing them anymore. Pulled up all her roots. Eventually I got some money for a private detective. Even he had some trouble tracking her down.”
    Spilling across the clouds from the tipped snifter of the sun, the light was a richer shade of brandy than before, and the blue sky itself began to take some of the stain.
    “She had a huge, expensive apartment overlooking Newport Harbor. A wealthy land developer named Parker Hisscus was paying the rent.”
    “That’s a big name around here.”
    “She was six months pregnant when I visited her. Gave me five minutes, so I could see the style he kept her in. Then she had the maid show me out. Next morning, a friend of Hisscus came to see me.”
    “He was that obvious?”
    “I don’t mean muscle. The guy was unsavory but polite. Wanted me to know Hisscus would marry the lady after the birth of their baby.”
    “If it was