The Darkest Evening of the Year

The figurine ricocheted off her forehead, cracked against an oven door, and fell dismembered to the floor.
    Amy stepped into the kitchen, and Brian pushed past her, saying, “Leave her alone, Carl.”
    The drunkard’s head turned with crocodilian menace, eyes cold with a cruelty as old as time.
    Amy had the feeling that something more than the man himself lived in Brockman’s body, as though he had opened a door to a night visitor that made of his heart a lair.
    “Is she your wife now?” Carl asked Brian. “Is this your house? My Theresa there—is she your daughter now?”
    The sweet song rose from the girl, her voice as clear as the air and as strange as her eyes, but mysterious in its clarity and tender in its strangeness.
    “It’s your house, Carl,” said Brian. “Everything is yours. So why smash any of it?”
    Carl started to speak but then sighed wearily.
    The tide of foul emotion seemed to recede in him, leaving his face as smooth as washed sand.
    Without the anger he had shown previously, he said, “See…the way things are…nothing’s better than smashing.”
    Taking a step toward the table that separated them, Brian said, “The way things are. Help me understand the way things are.”
    The hooded eyes looked sleepy, but the reptilian mind behind them might be acrawl with calculation.
    “Wrong,” Carl said. “Things are all wrong.”
    “What things?”
    His voice swam up from fathoms of melancholy. “You wake in the middle of the night, when it’s blind-dark and quiet enough to think for once, and you can feel then how wrong it all is, and no way ever to make it right. No way ever.”
    As clear and silvery as the music of Uilleann pipes in an Irish band, Theresa’s small voice raised the hairs on the nape of Amy’s neck, because whatever the girl’s words meant, they conveyed a sense of longing and loss.
    Brockman looked at his daughter. His sudden tears might have been for the girl or for the song, or for himself.
    Perhaps the child’s voice had a premonitory quality or perhaps Amy’s instincts had been enriched by the companionship of so many dogs. She was suddenly certain that Carl’s rage had not abated and that, concealed, it swelled toward violent expression.
    She knew the iron would swing without warning and take the broken wife in the face, breaking her twice and forever, shattering the hidden skull into the living brain.
    As if premonition were a wave as real as light, it seemed to travel from Amy to Brian. Even as she inhaled to cry out, he moved. He didn’t have time to circle the kitchen. Instead he scrambled from floor to chair to table.
    A tear fell to the hand that held the iron, and the fingers tightened on the weapon.
    Janet’s eyes widened. But Carl had drowned her spirit. She stood motionless, breathless, defenseless under a suffocating weight of despair.
    As Brian climbed toward confrontation, Amy realized that the bludgeon might as likely be flung at the child as swung at the wife, and she moved toward Theresa.
    Atop the table, Brian seized the weapon as it ascended to strike a blow at Janet, and he fell upon Brockman. They sprawled on the floor, into broken glass and slices of lime and puddles of tequila.
    Amy had left the front door open, and from the farther end of the house came a voice: ”Police.” They had arrived without sirens.
    “Back here,” she called, gathering Theresa to her as the girl’s song murmured to a whisper, whispered into silence.
    Janet stood rigid, as if the blow might yet come, but Brian rose in possession of the tire iron.
    Braided leather gun belts creaking, hands on the grips of their holstered pistols, two policemen entered the kitchen, solid men and alert. One told Brian to put down the tire iron, and Brian placed it on the table.
    Carl Brockman clambered to his feet, left hand bleeding from a shard of embedded bottle glass. Once burning bright with anger, his tear-streaked face had paled to ashes, and his mouth had gone soft with self-pity.
    “Help me, Jan,” he pleaded, reaching out to her with his bloody hand. “What am I gonna do now? Baby, help me.”
    She took a step toward him, but halted. She glanced at Amy, then at Theresa.
    With her thumb, the child had corked her song inside, and she had closed her eyes. Throughout these events, her face had remained expressionless, as though she might be deaf to all the threats of violence and to the crash of iron on oak.
    The only indication that the girl had any connection