Light > Darkness

Lane shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know what to tell you, Brie. It is what it is. If I can’t change it, why complain about it?” That’s what he said aloud, to quiet his sister’s persistent coaxing for him to open up to her. But inside, his heart ached and his head spun. This isn’t what I signed up for. I wish I could change it. I wish I could go back and—no, I wouldn’t—but then again, would I?

“Just tell me how you feel about it! Damnit, Lane, for once don’t leave me in the dark! I’ve been standing by you through all of this and I’m tired of the silence!” Brie stood up and faced her brother, her face burning and hands clenched into fists. She stood for a moment in the quiet, waiting for Lane’s response. She was tired of the silence but not unwilling to bear it with him.

Lane finally looked up at her, legs still swinging off the dock. “Sorry, Brie. I don’t know what to say.” He shifted his gaze back to the water. He never looked away as he listened to her footsteps on the aged wood fading until they turned into soft crunching on the gravel, and then true silence.

Leave you in the dark? Lane breathed a laugh out his nose and lightly shook his head. It’s dark standing by me through this, eh? Try living through this darkness. You can walk away and go back to your family, and you’ll be back in the light. I get up off this dock and go back to Sara, and it’s still darkness. All my light has left. Haddie and Matt are gone, unable to share their little lights from six-feet under. Sara’s here, but the light has been absent from her eyes since the accident, since she lost her mind. But I’m bound to her. For better or worse, I promised. And now it’s proven to be for worse. The sun had been slowly dropping in the sky as Lane thought, and now he realized the light on the water was from the moon. He lifted his eyes to the stars and sighed. How can the world continue to hold so much beauty when all I have is pain? He was disappointed to receive no answer, though he hadn’t directed his question at anything or anyone.

With a final deep inhale, Lane stood. Mildred would be pacing by now; he should have been back to take over Sara’s watch at least half an hour before. Hands in his pockets, he walked slowly up the gravel drive past several other cabins, the cool of the late-fall air biting his face, until he saw their cabin. He stopped for a moment. A young woman sitting on the porch of a nearby cabin called out a greeting. He glanced over and she smiled sweetly at him. He looked back to his cabin and closed the distance quickly, stomping his boots free of dirt on the top step with a bit more force and for a bit longer than necessary. Finally, he walked through the front door of the same cabin they’d stayed in for their honeymoon six years earlier, this time with dread rather than excitement at seeing his bride.

Unsurprisingly, Mildred’s round face was red and bothered, waiting for him at the dining table just opposite the front door. “You’re late,” she mumbled for him and not Sara to hear. Her expression was fretful but kind. She heaved her aged body out of the seat with great effort. He grimaced at the sight of the caregiver who almost needed one herself. He went to her side and put a hand under her arm to walk her to the door. “She ate a few bites of supper. She’s easily angered tonight, L.J. Just…have patience,” said Mildred with one last sorrowful glance before fixing her attention on the step down onto the porch.

“Goodnight, Mildred,” Lane said and shut the door as quietly as he could.

It wasn’t quiet enough, and Sara’s shrill voice resounded from the next room. “Mildred? Mildred! Get this out of here!” He heard a crash and knew the plate had shattered. He tried to conjure up the patience Mildred had suggested and then walked into Sara’s room.

“Even when there is no star in sight, you’ll always be my only guiding light,” the Mumford and Sons lyrics rattled in his brain long after their waves made their way from the old sedan’s radio to his ears. He had no guiding light, he thought. Nothing guided him as he drove too fast around the tight, mountainside curves, out in the dark, in the middle of night.

Sara had taken more than two hours to be consoled. Nothing seemed to stop her cries of nonsensical words and unintelligible shouts. Nothing he did helped her. She eventually cried herself to sleep after wearing herself out yelling and hitting or scratching him. It had been a particularly rough night, likely because he was late which threw off her routine. Lane was convinced the full moon did something to her, too. The doctors talked about the parts of her brain that were affected by the impact, but he didn’t understand much of it. His desperation had built over the past five months since the accident to the point of almost believing it could be a wolf bite and some supernatural effects making her act this way. He’d never been much of a science guy, but not superstitious, either. His mind didn’t have a category for the change that overtook his wife.

He’d found by this point that if she fell asleep in tears, she would be out for several hours without a stir, and likely wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning without a forced awakening. He often took those quiet, late hours to apply for jobs on his laptop or walk around the lake, but despite the coming storm, he decided that night to go for a drive.

Mist soon covered his windshield, then steadily built into drops that grew larger and fell harder with every curve. His hand automatically reached to flick the wipers on, but he stopped with his finger on the arm. He kept driving without the wipers and it soon became a game. It was thrilling. Nothing in the darkness of the past five months had made him feel alive like this. A piece of his mind was conscious of the danger he faced as he played his game, the road getting slicker, his foot heavier and the visibility worse. Yet these months with Sara’s insanity had been testing his own. As he took on the darkness of his guiding light, he had begun to lose taste for the light. He felt his tire grab dirt and he jerked the wheel to pull the car back on the road, his heart skipping a beat. Then he wondered why he corrected it. He glanced at the headlight switch and considered turning them off. Light became more repulsive to him by the second.

He reached to flick the lights off and—

A massive white form appeared brightly before his car and instinct slammed on his brakes for him. His body began to surge forward at the sudden stop, but his seatbelt caught him, and his head absorbed most of the impact as it hit the headrest. He cursed. His neck was all that seemed to have been harmed, but he’d had whiplash before and expected to recover in a few weeks. Why had he buckled his seat belt? Lane thought. And what the hell just happened?

Lane woke up to the sun shining blindingly through the open window. He started to sit up and then collapsed after turning his neck wrong. He began to remember the previous night. A white horse had stopped in front of his car right before—he shuddered at the thought of what almost happened.

The following events had occurred in somewhat of a trance. He put his car in park and called Brie. The rain ceased immediately, and the clouds shifted so the moonlight practically turned the night into day. Lane clearly watched a white horse ambling away from his car and he knew that had been the mass that interrupted his roulette. He stepped out of his car to follow it, stopping short as he realized the bumper of his car was hanging over the lip of a cliff. He sat on the edge and dazedly asked his sister to come to him. Miraculously—though not the greatest miracle of the night—she found him within a few minutes of receiving the call, and she sat with him for hours as he poured out the darkness that had been building inside him since before Sara’s accident, before losing his children, his job, everything that kept him sane. She listened. He thought that admitting the darkness inside would be the end, when the last straw fell and somehow his life would become even darker. But when he said his last word, he looked at Brie, expecting disgust, expecting her to walk away…and she smiled. She laid a hand on his shoulder and prayed for him.

Still in a haze, he had driven back to the cabin and got in bed with Sara. He had touched her and was met first with a shudder, and then he pulled her in closer to him than he had since before the accident, and she melted into his arms. Now, as he slowly woke and rubbed his eyes to dispel his grogginess, he realized the other side of the bed was empty. His heart skipped a beat. She shouldn’t be up before me.

Despite the pain in his neck at his quick motion, he sprung out of bed and checked the bathroom for a sign of her presence. Clean towels were stacked on the edge of the counter. He hadn’t done that. How late did he sleep? Did Mildred come already? No, today is Saturday, she doesn’t come on Saturdays, he thought. Suddenly he heard the faint sound of singing. He left the bathroom and sped down the hall, to the kitchen.

He smelled the coffee before he saw her at the sink. He was struck by the beauty of her silhouette as the sun shone through the window in front of her. She was washing dishes and singing, “When I heard your voice, the distance caught me by surprise again…” He watched in wonder of the change he was witnessing. Her long hair was brushed, and she wore a sundress, the same one she had worn on their anniversary trip to the cabins the year prior. But it didn’t make sense—she hadn’t brushed her hair or dressed herself since the accident. “But fix your eyes on me, I guess I’m all you have, and I swear you’ll see the dawn again…”

Sara turned when she heard his harmony join her melody. She smiled and his heart broke with hope. “You’re finally up. I ate breakfast already, I couldn’t wait any longer,” she laughed sheepishly as she glanced at the floor. “But there are more eggs, I can fix yours,” she said as she moved around the kitchen to the stovetop. Then she turned and looked directly at Lane again, this time with heaviness and confusion in her expression. “But Lane…I…” She searched the ground for clarity, and, finding none, continued. “I don’t remember coming back to the cabin…is it our anniversary? For some reason, I can’t really remember, like…what day it is…I mean…”

Lane closed the gap between them in a few long strides and embraced her. She was shaking slightly, and she gripped him tightly. “It’s okay,” he whispered. He stared over her shoulder at the radiance of the day and smiled through his tears. How can the world continue to hold so much beauty when all I have is pain? he remembered asking. Why did I hold onto the pain and the darkness when there was beauty all around me? Why did I wait for this? For better or worse, he had signed up for this—all of it, the darkness and the light. But he was done living with eyes for only the darkness. ‘Cause even when there is no star in sight, you’ll always be my only guiding light.