STIRRING A POT of miso soup Wednesday evening, she notices, to the right of the stove, the corner of a yellow scrap of paper poking out from underneath the blender. She pulls at it with her fingernail, and a Post-it emerges. Written there, in Ali’s cramped print, are the words “Dwight called.”
The message is stained with some sort of cooking oil and decorated with juvenile doodles in purple ink; it is not even close to fresh.
There is nothing left on the answering machine but this morning’s automated message from GEICO, informing Penny that her quarterly car-insurance premium is coming due, and suggesting online payment as the most convenient and secure method. Whatever Dwight had to say to her has been erased by her daughter.
She slams her hand into the machine, so hard that the thing flips over twice, and the small plastic hatch to the battery compartment pops off. She stares at this minor wreckage as at another’s handiwork. She thinks of marching to her daughter’s room and forcibly extracting her face from the screen of her desires and demanding to know exactly, exactly, the message that was left by a man who may, or may not, be asking for some kind of comfort.
Reaching for her purse on the counter, she shouts to Ali that she’s going out.
There is no response.
• • •
A light shines from above Dwight’s front door, reaching to the small patch of grass; a precautionary measure in his absence, it would seem, meant to deter criminals. An example of grim psychological conditioning, Penny speculates to herself, or maybe just good practical sense.
And sitting in her car parked on Hacienda Street, reading his house as though it’s a poem in disguise, Penny attempts now, in desperate earnest, to take a hard look at her own psychological conditioning, such as it has been. The glittering false premise of her many years of adult training: the insistent sifting for patterns and symbols that can be broken down into constituent theories, to be coolly sorted and weighed for meaning in the clinical laboratories of the mind.
To somehow find a way, his way, to throw away all that. To call it what it is. To be able to say, tonight, simply because she needs it to be so, that maybe this light shining in the darkness is just that—a light in the darkness—and enough to live by.