Page 2 of Dark Ugly Places

Down the hall, limping, limping, I bang on Emmy’s door, her laptop squawking away with the sound of a teenage girl with a British accent talking about some celebrity’s latest plastic surgery.

“Get dressed, Em!”

She’s into something on YouTube called CelebrityStalkShow, run by a Hollywood-obsessed kid who seems to beat all the paparazzi to the punch. She yells something at me through the door, my signal to disappear from her area, and I depart down the flight of stairs at the speed of a centenarian.

At the landing, I sense something wet on my bad foot and look down at it in the center of Scotch’s cold pee puddle. The foul smell hits me, and I curse.

Not “fuck.” Not “shit.” The bad one. The one my mother would hate to hear me say. Rhymes with hunt.

“Classy.”

I look up. Emmy is behind me on the landing. Isn’t it funny how teenagers have this tremendous gift of sneaking up on you precisely at your worst possible moment?

“Scotch peed,” I say lamely.

“I can see that.”

“Let him out, Em, will you?” I ask, my voice tired and insistent.

“I think he’s already relieved himself right here. In our kitchen. Where we eat.”

I release a long, exasperated sigh, and Emmy pushes down the stairs past me, her hair matted in place, showing the pink crest of her scar. I try not to stare and pinch the spot on my hand that Dr. Constance said would be calming in moments like these. But it’s 7:32 a.m., and I don’t feel calm. I feel angry. And tired. And like I want to be teleported out of my own life for even a brief minute.

I give Emmy the look, the one my mother gave me and that her mother probably gave her. The one that lets her see a little into the quiet, grieving parts of me. Lately, I’ve been peeling back the layers often and letting her see more than usual. Maybe too much.

Emmy opens the back door to the shared courtyard and takes Scotch outside. I mop up his mess, then peel the pee-soaked black sock off my bad foot and dump it in the trash. One stair at a time, I haul myself back up to wash off my foot and leg in our tub—the one crusted with brown rings and white soap stains still because I don’t have the strength to scrub it, despite what the physical therapist tells me.

I hobble back downstairs. Emmy is still with Scotch outside, wandering around with his plastic bag, trying to figure out what to do with it. His little white body shakes and shivers as he follows Emmy and sniffs at the ground. I never wanted a dog, or a Westie for that matter. Scotch—including the name—was Ben’s idea.

Ben. Our good Ben. Dead Ben …

For a moment, I think that if I can just close my eyes, more details will emerge.

The car—so brilliantly white it hurt to look at it.

Those shoes. Black and heavy.

The scent of freshly applied cologne.

A single tattoo around the man’s middle finger, like a wedding band.

He was that close, and yet, for some reason inexplicable to me, I cannot remember his face.

My ears ring for a moment before I snap out of it. I go to the window over the kitchen sink and silently mouth, “Garbage can. Don’t bring it inside,” and then put breakfast out on the counter. Cereal and the last of the milk, but not the organic kind like we used to get. I place Emmy’s pills beside her bowl on a paper towel. There are things we still haven’t found a way to talk about.

When I look up, Emmy has pulled open the sliding glass door, no bag of shit in her hands.

“Relax, I threw it away.”

“A+,” I say sarcastically and instantly regret it. Why can’t I just say thank you?

“You’re welcome.”

She washes her hands, then hops silently up onto the breakfast stool and turns to gaze outside at the shared courtyard of our apartment complex. Her hair is still growing back over her scar, but it’s patchy, uneven, and it looks awful. I reach for her arm, but she flinches. She turns. Her eyes are cold and blank.

“Can I stay home today? I don’t feel great.”

“Em. It’s your first day.”