The night I met the girl who was afraid of the dark, I was working a double shift at the bar.
It was Tuesday night and the place was packed. I stayed busy popping bottle caps off for obnoxious sports fans until I looked up and saw it was midnight. The crowd quickly dissipated until there were just a few regulars and a woman I'd never seen before.
She was sad, and pretty in her sadness, with dark lips and hair. She wore a corduroy jacket and ripped jeans and had dark circles under her eyes. She asked me what time we closed. I told her she had two more hours.
"Is there a coffee shop or something after that?" she said.
"There's a diner. You trying to stay up or something?"
"Sort of. I can't go home."
I looked at her as she stared at her drink, swirling it with a straw. After a few seconds I saw it. Right below her lips -- a bruise. She'd covered it with makeup but it still looked like it had hurt.
"It's not your fault," I said. She looked at me, confused.
"It's not your fault, no matter what he says. Look, I know you don't know me. But I have a couch you can sleep on. Just for tonight."
"Tonight?" she said. "No, it's not that simple."
"I'm not saying you're easy," I said, misunderstanding. "How about I pay for a motel room for you? By yourself. I'm not trying to get into your pants."
If I were to be completely honest now, looking back, I can say that was a lie. I was definitely attracted to her. I'm always attracted to troubled women; I don't know why. So yes, I wanted to sleep with her, but I didn't ONLY want to sleep with her. She needed help.
"No, I mean it's not as simple as me going to sleep. I have to stay up. OK? I can't let my guard down."
This is bad, said the voice in my head. Stay away from this one, Mikey. The last thing you need is some crazy boyfriend looking for you.
I ignored it. "Then how about we hit that diner," I said. "By the way, I'm Michael."
She took a long time to respond. I think she was making up a name. But then again, aren't all names just made up?
"Claire." She sipped her drink very slowly until we closed.
The diner had the type of food you needed to be drunk to enjoy. Since I'd been clean and sober for five years, I settled for toast. Claire had a turkey sandwich. We told the waiter to keep the coffee handy.
"You probably want to know why I don't leave him," she said.
"Kids?"
She laughed. "No. God, no. Not with him. No, it's because he's a pastor."
I've gone to church twice in my entire life, both with a friend's parents who I later determined were trying to subvert the influence of my scandalous father (They failed.) I knew nothing about what was considered proper for a reverend, pastor, or whoever. "I thought they weren't allowed to marry," I said.
"A, you're thinking of priests. B, I would never marry this man. We're living in sin," she said, and laughed again. This time it sounded genuine.
"I'm going to tell you something," she said, "and you aren't going to believe me. I'm OK with that. But I have to tell somebody. I've never even told HIM this."
I gulped some coffee, which tasted like black water. She took a giant, unladylike bite from her sandwich and continued:
"Are you happy being a bartender? I mean, no offense. But there's other stuff, yeah? Like other interests that are more important to you."
It was a rhetorical question, but it made me think of the notebook of poems on my nightstand. I hadn't written anything in a few weeks, though, so maybe they weren't that important.
"Well, in my twenties, I wanted to be in a band," she said. "A real band. Not just a 'local band.' I wanted fame and a record deal and videos."
"What do you play?"
"Guitar. And singing. Used to, anyway. I got together with some friends and after a few nights, we clicked. Wrote like 10 songs in a month. Practiced five times a week, no matter what. We were tight. I think we sounded pretty good."
She took out her phone and showed me her band's website. There she was, about ten years younger, with three other long-haired, insouciant musicians. They all looked bored but passionate. At the top of the page was their band's name: The Violent Majority.
I had never heard of them, but I didn't follow new music. All I knew was that she'd worked hard towards her goal and eventually got a record deal, which impressed me. "So you did it," I said.
She scrolled further down until something else came into view. It was the names and birth-death dates of her band mates. The page was a memorial.
"Usually when a bunch of band members die," she said, "it's a plane crash. But they all went separately. Overdose. Car accident. Cancer. All within a year."
I'm not a superstitious man but I respect other people's beliefs. I knew I had to be careful with what I said next or I'd risk offending her. "If the same thing happened to me," I said, "I'd be scared, too. But this was years ago. And you're still here."
"For now," she said. "But I'm the main prize. I'm the one that made the deal."
"You wrote the songs," I said. "So you're right, there wouldn't be a record deal without you."
"No, I made the DEAL." She pointed downwards.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. I tried to cover my mouth and pretend it was a cough but it was too late. Surprisingly, though, Claire didn't look offended. She even smiled.
"I'm glad you don't believe me," she said. "Because I don't want you to know you can do it. He doesn't lie, you know? Satan, I mean. He tells a version of the truth. We got our record deal. We got our fame.
"We had our dream for five years. That was the catch. He never said anything about a time limit. I was so excited that I just agreed to the terms."
She was so serious that I couldn't have laughed again, even if I'd wanted to. Part of me wanted to drive her from the diner to a mental hospital. Another part wanted to kiss her.
"So how does this tie to the pastor?" I said.
"He thinks I like him for his personality. Little does he know. He's a holy man, and that protects me. That and light. During the daytime, I'm OK. When I'm with him, I'm OK."
"Too bad he beats the shit out of you."
She took this in and stared off into the distance. "Yeah. It just got worse and worse until tonight."
I paid the bill, reached across the table and took her cold hands into mine.
"Let's stay up and talk," she said. We left.
She sat on the sofa and I sat on a dining room chair I'd dragged into the room. I was trying my hardest to be a gentleman. She needed comfort and I didn't want to be just another scummy guy taking advantage of someone.
"You don't play guitar anymore?" I said.
"It hurts. I mean these." She held up her fingers. "I can play about ten minutes before my hand cramps up. So now I sing."
I asked her to sing me something. There was no hesitation; she straightened up in her seat, closed her eyes, and belted out a verse from what I presumed was one of her songs.
"That's beautiful," I said. Our eyes locked. There was nothing I could do now; I was powerless. Some force moved me to the seat next to her. We kissed, soft at first, then hungrily. We gripped one another, tried to pull us into each other. I was about to unbutton my shirt when the lights went out.
"No!" she said, jumping up. "No, we have to leave them on!"
"Wasn't me," I said. I went to the front window and saw that the entire street had lost power. I told her as much.
She turned her phone on for the light. "This is no good," she said. "We have to go. We have to find a dance club or something. Or another diner. We need light, we have to have light --"
I flicked a lighter and lit a candle I'd pulled out from the closet. I set it on the table and pulled out another one, then another and another. "I grew up in earthquake country," I said. "You can never have enough candles."
We put them all over the table, then all over the breakfast bar that divided the living room from the kitchen. Then we left the bedroom door open as we put them on the dresser, on the book shelf, on almost every flat surface we could find. When we were done, it might as well have been daytime. My whole apartment glowed with hazy candlelight.
"You're not worried about a fire?" she said.
"I didn't say that. Don't knock anything over."
She laughed. For such a troubled soul, she laughed a lot. Sometimes she even meant it. I took her in my arms and we fell onto the bed.
When I woke up, she was gone.
Dawn slipped into the windows. I heard the refrigerator's humming and knew the power was back on. I looked for her in the bathroom, in the living room, hopeful. She wasn't there. I sighed and sat on the couch.
"I'll be lucky if her holy boyfriend doesn't beat the shit out of me," I said. Then I heard her phone beep.
I went back in the bedroom and for the first time saw her clothes still bunched up at the foot of the bed. Her phone was tangled up in the sheets. I took it out and saw a message from someone named Keith: "Can we talk?"
Then I saw that the candles had all gone out. They should have burned until at least the middle of the morning, well into daylight, but all of them had extinguished at the same midpoint.
"Claire?" I said. I said it again, louder. I checked under the bed, in the closet. I called her name again and again as I searched my one-room apartment, as if there were a million places to hide in there.
After an hour, her phone rang. It was Keith. I muted it. The sun was now well in the sky and I wanted to go out in it, bathe in it, be protected by it.
END
Submitted June 29, 2016 at 03:17AM by finewiththefog http://ift.tt/291fH7D nosleep
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