She got out of bed, she could not sleep. She made for the bathroom, flipped on the light. The light was too bright, the walls too white. Were the Wilson boys afraid of the dark? Was that why Frank painted everything white—an antidote to the dark? The cans in the basement, the bootie was for painting, Frank and Maria put booties on to protect their shoes from the paint, and having painted their house they had gone to Alaska. Camping. Or Maria had taken her sons back to Mexico.
Was it Frank who feared the dark? He was a leaker, he’d been taken away from his parents, who could imagine why. Fear of the dark is the first fear, never quite relinquished. She remembered Freya, all her terror of dark rooms, dark spaces. “There’s nothing there, there’s nothing there, sweetie,” Kay would say, Michael would say, turning out the light. But Freya was sure of what the dark contained, and how the boogeyman folded up like a lawn chair when you turned on the light. You could not see him, but he was there.
Perhaps Maria could not sleep, Maria running a bath in the middle of the night, Maria staring at her face in the mirror, nowhere to hide in the blast of 100 watts. Look at yourself, who you are, what you’ve become for your husband, your children. Maria, alone on the hill with her boys and Frank. “Hard in the winter,” Alice had said, the house bound in by walls of snow, too deep for the plow, this foreign cold Yankee country.
When Tom had been a baby and they’d had to move to London and Tom did not sleep and so neither did Kay, she had learned about night; not the place you sleep or dream, not the place you leave, but the one you come to, wide awake at 2 a.m.
As long as Kay had walked, Tom would not cry, so she paced, hour upon slow dripping hour, she walked miles inside the room of night, across deserts, the Arctic ice, all the places she could no longer go. Tears leaked out of her like the milk Tom refused to drink, night’s windows reflecting back to her the hunched, grey-faced woman holding a mewling baby. No one was watching, so no one could see the hunger of the baby; sometimes Kay felt Tom’s tongue slip out of his mouth and into hers, seeking the interior of her, to suck her out like a raw egg. “You chose this,” she heard herself mumbling. “You chose this, chose this, chose this.”
Even after Tom began to sleep, Kay didn’t. Three, four hours a couple of times a week, sometimes three days passed without sleep. In the daylight, Kay drifted, blurred, uncertain. When she spoke she had to listen carefully to make sure the voice was outside of her, not merely in her head.
But at night, she sharpened like a cat. Her heart picked up beats, rattling like a castanet. At night, she could see everything, even what wasn’t there, hand-prints on mirrors, how sound rippled the air like water. If she shut her eyes, her heart jolted her with a sharp current; she must remain vigilant.
And she had sweated, a sour, acrid smell almost like fear; she smelled even during the day, she couldn’t wash it off. She shuffled around the supermarket, smelling herself. Her eyes, contracted in their sockets like shy fish, ached. In the mirror, she looked over-medicated or under-medicated. People stepped away from her.
Until Sam—not Michael, not her own husband, father of her children—came to say hello, to bring the children toys. He took one look at Kay—“Mary Mother of God, Kay, you look like an aborted baby left out in the rain”—handed over a bottle of Valium and commanded, “Sleep!” And she slept.
It had been a long time since she’d woken like this, eyes peeling wide, in the middle of the night.
She locked the bathroom door, clambered up onto the toilet. She waved her phone like a wand to catch the magic airwave. Two bars. She logged on to Google, began a deeper search for Benjamin Comeau Vermont. Scrolling down from the Chamber of Commerce listing, she skimmed over a few random entries with the names Comeau, an antiques dealer, a car dealer, Facebook pages, to a post: STATE V BENJAMIN L COMEAU.
CASES HEARD BY JUDGE THOMAS A. MURRAY
DATE/TIME/PLACE
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4
8:30AM
COURTROOM 1
STATE VRS COMEAU BENJAMIN
203-4-16 CRIMINAL
PLAINTIFF, STATE (PAUL J. STEINER)
DEFENDANT, BENJAMIN L. COMEAU
Criminal could mean anything from murder to trespass. So she created an account with BeenVerified, paid the 20 bucks with Paypal, and within minutes had a full report. There was a bank lien on his house, a finance company lien on his logging equipment, and a scattering of lawsuits over the years—though none, apart from the one brought by Paul Steiner, had gone to court. It was currently under appeal.
She wrote Paul Steiner in her notebook. Frank, Maria Wilson, Ben Comeau.
“What are you writing?” Michael would ask, if he had walked in, seen her scribbling in this corner, this midnight. “What are you writing?” he’d asked in London, almost surprised that she wasn’t folding laundry or unpacking groceries. No longer wars or coups but a piece for Parenting magazine about the pressure mothers feel to breastfeed or an interview with an organic egg baron for the business supplement of a fading broadsheet. “Interesting?” Michael would ask a few tepid questions, as if he’d read somewhere—some paint-by-numbers marriage manual—how to attend a wife whose career was now a hobby.
Ammon, she wrote.
Ammon, simply Ammon.
“Whose house was that?” Freya had wanted to know as they’d driven away from Ammon’s.
“A local man.”
“It’s creepy.”
Tom had quieted his sobs: “Were those dead dogs, Mum.”
“No. They were coyotes.”
“Did he kill them?”
“Probably.”
“Why?”
“Some people like killing wild animals.”
“Why?”
“The fur, they can sell the fur.”
“But you said they like killing them.” Freya paid attention.
“Maybe they don’t like or not like. They just don’t mind. I think it’s different for some people, killing things.”
“Like bunnies.”
“Yes, Frey. That’s a good point.”
“How does he kill them?”
She didn’t answer, and Tom thought she hadn’t heard.
“Mum, how does he kill them?”
“Traps. He sets traps and the coyotes get stuck in the traps.”
“And the trap kills them?”
Kay had taken a breath. What was she supposed to say? Should she withhold the truth? Is Santa real? The meat we eat, the clothes we wear, the forests we annihilate, the atrocities we commit every day just by breathing, the traps, the hammers, the bunnies. “No, love. They get caught in the trap, their legs get caught and they can’t get away and he shoots them.”
“How do the traps caught their legs?”
“Tom, my love,” she had said. “I can’t answer these questions anymore.”
“But—”
Freya had put her hand on her brother’s shoulder, and this quieted him. In silence, they’d driven back down Ammon’s rough track, onto the road, and she’d chided herself for taking them there in the first place. She knew Ammon had a gun, people used their guns here.
She went downstairs and locked the door.