The Dark

In the days before she died, Doug’s wife had given him detailed instructions about how he should comport himself in his future romantic endeavors. (“Ellie,” he said, “I do not want to talk about this.”)

First, he was not to introduce their adult children to any women for at least a year. (“Ellie, please—”) Second, he might have some Viagra on hand in case grief and guilt affected his performance. (“Jesus, Ellie!”) Third—and somehow, this was the most important to her—Doug should beware of blond women in their sixties.

Now, almost two years after his wife’s death, Doug Coates finds himself on his first date in forty years, sitting in a coffee shop across from a beautiful, sixty-year-old blonde.

She swirls her chai tea and smiles. “Children?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, two,” says Doug. “Aaron works here in Spokane. As a city planner. Maya is a designer who lives with her wife in LA. Actually, in Santa Monica. Well, technically, Pacific Palisades. Or, you know, in between.”

Actually-technically-in-between? Why is he dithering like this? What’s the matter with him? His tongue feels like it’s swollen, like he’s just been to the dentist. When Doug was young, conversations with women came so naturally. He thinks he might even have been charming at one time. Smooth. Funny.

“Grandchildren?” the woman asks.

Doug concentrates, channeling his old smooth, funny self. “Not that I know of,” he says, and then, for some reason, he winks.

Doug and the blond woman both cock their heads.

They look down awkwardly at their drinks, and for a long time, no one says anything.

 

“Not that you know of?” Aaron is delighted by his father’s haplessness. Doug has driven straight to his son’s house and is once again struck by how much Aaron looks like his mother when he laughs.

“Wait, wait.” Aaron holds up a hand. “So, were you saying that you were so promiscuous in your youth that you fathered children you don’t know about, who maybe fathered children they don’t know about? Or that Maya and I are so promiscuous we’re just out here dropping grandkids that you can’t keep track of, like those women who leave babies in department store dressing rooms?”

Doug wonders if he missed a story about babies in department store dressing rooms. What is wrong with this world? “Honestly,” Doug says, “I have no idea what I meant.”

“So, tell me this, Mr. Suave,” says Aaron, “are you planning to see this woman again?”

Doug sighs. “Not that I know of.”

 

A week before the end, not long after Ellie gave Doug her awful dating advice, hospice sent over a nondenominational pastor. Doug was confused when he answered the door; he and Ellie had been clear about not wanting this. Doug was a geology professor who valued science over superstition. But Ellie had lapsed from her family’s evangelical church as a teenager, and for her, the decision was more personal.

In the kitchen, Doug explained this to the pastor, a woman named Astrid. He spoke quietly, so as not to awaken Ellie from her morphine sleep. Doug said that while he appreciated Astrid coming by, they had been quite intentional in checking the agnostic/atheist box on the hospice forms. “We specified no last rites or—”

“Doug?” Ellie called from her bed in the living room. He was surprised at the power of her voice. They’d been speaking in whispers for days. “It’s okay,” his wife said. “I asked to see her.”

Doug experienced something he later suspected was common to every married person: the fear that he didn’t know his spouse nearly as well as he thought. He’d felt this before, of course, but to experience it now, so profoundly, at the end—Doug was overcome with shame, and a self-pitying anger rose in him: how could he not know this? How could Ellie not tell him something so important?

“I—I’m sorry,” Doug said to the pastor. “Please follow me.”

The pastor was one of those ageless older people: lineless face, long slate hair. She followed Doug into the living room, where Ellie lay reclined on the rented hospital bed, looking out at a bird feeder that Doug had hung from the rain gutter so they’d have something to watch out the window. But squirrels had figured out how to hang from the rain gutter and eat the bird seed. When this was all over, the first thing Doug planned to do was take that stupid feeder down.

“Thanks for coming,” Ellie said to the pastor.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” Doug said. Then he went to the kitchen and wept.

 

Give it a year, everyone said. His kids, his sister, his therapist. The first year, you will feel bereft, they said. And he did. Don’t do anything drastic, they said. And he didn’t.

He got up, went to work, came home, stared at her clothes in the closet, and watched that one-year date like it was a finish line.

But, of course, when the date arrived, nothing changed. Somehow, he thought he would be transformed, or at least that he might feel like being out in the world again, maybe even meeting someone. But Doug found himself indulging the thought—or the fantasy—that, after a year, he might get to see Ellie again.

This, too, was normal, said his counselor. Getting through the funeral and the first year of grief, the bereaved often entertained a subconscious belief that, once the obligations were all met, their loved one would be allowed to return.

It gave Doug no consolation, hearing that his anguish and delusion were so routine.

“Have you been considering self-harm?” the counselor asked.

“I haven’t, actually,” Doug said. “What would you suggest?”

The counselor didn’t even smile. This made Doug miss his wife even more; she would’ve loved that joke.

In many ways, the second year was even more difficult than the first, as the distance between him and Ellie seemed to grow. He was haunted, too, by the realization he’d had during Ellie’s last days, that he had never really known his wife, that the gap between them had always been impossible to breach, as if what he and Ellie had was a kind of mirage, a temporary detour from the existential horror of being alive and alone. And her decision to see the pastor—what was that? Though he knew it was irrational, he kept imagining that Ellie knew something that he didn’t, and that she’d found a secret door to some afterlife that, as a nonbeliever, he would never find. He would lie awake at night and hear his own pleading voice in his head: Ellie, where are you?

As the second, hard year dragged on, it was suggested by those same people—kids, sister, therapist—that Doug needed a change.

So, he took early retirement, sold the house in Portland, and moved back to Spokane, where he and Ellie had met forty years earlier, and where his son, Aaron, lived. Maybe he could reconnect with old friends from Gonzaga University. Or maybe he could meet new people—

Which is how he ended up at coffee with his sister’s friend, the suspiciously blond woman who no doubt had left their only date believing that Doug was a crazed, promiscuous grandfather.

 

“I wake up every day feeling like I’ve been left behind,” Doug tells his son after the blond disaster. “Like I’ve missed a train or something. Like there’s been a huge mistake.”

“You’re letting yourself feel that way,” Aaron says. He slides a beer across the counter to his father.

“I don’t think so.” Doug takes a drink. The city feels different, for one thing. His college friends are gone, his favorite restaurants and bars closed. Downtown was once filled with offices and department stores; now it’s all condos and coffee shops. Aaron lives in a neighborhood that didn’t even exist forty years ago, a strip of train tracks and vacant fields replaced by townhouses and wine-tasting rooms.

“You want me to see if I can get them to put the train tracks back in? Come on, Dad.” Aaron points to the phone in Doug’s hand. “Focus.”

Doug sighs and looks back down at the open search page on his iPhone: Best online options for people over sixty. Match. Zoosk. Bumble, eHarmony.

“What are these names? SilverSingles? That one sounds like a slot machine.”

“Give it here.” Aaron holds out his hand, and Doug recognizes something familiar in his son’s expression. Then he remembers: Aaron as a boy, struggling to cut the steak on his plate, shaking the whole table, until Doug finally said, “Give it here,” took the knife, cut his son’s meat into small, chewable bites, and slid the plate back.

At the counter, Aaron exudes that same caring impatience as he drums his thumbs on the screen of Doug’s iPhone. “All right, I’m setting you up on OkCupid.”

“Sure. Because I’m saying, ‘Okay, Cupid, I’m ready to date,’ or ‘Hey, Cupid, just find me someone okay.’”

Aaron hands the phone back. “You really should save this banter for the ladies.”

 

A week before she died, Ellie talked to Astrid the pastor for almost an hour while Doug sat alone in the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of whiskey, stared at it a while, then poured it down the sink.

Finally, Astrid came out of the living room and told him that Ellie was resting. “It’s a difficult time,” the pastor said. “A time of transition.”

He fought the urge to grab her by the shoulders. (Are you kidding? Transition? It’s the goddamn end of the world!) Instead, he thanked her for coming.

She asked if he wanted to talk.

“I don’t think so,” Doug said, and he showed her out.

He returned to the living room, where the sun was setting and the only light—casting a faint, warm glow—came from a floor lamp that Ellie had taken from her parents’ house when her father died. His wife was facing the window with the squirrel feeder, but her eyes were closed, lips pressed together, as if concentrating on a problem.

“How was it?” he whispered.

“Nice,” she said, without opening her eyes.

He didn’t know what else to say, so he asked what he always asked. “How’s your pain?”

She opened her eyes and turned on the pillow to face him. “Eighty-six. Got a nice rhythm. Easy to dance to.”

He used to think of them as one thing: a dougandellie. But, of course, they weren’t. Not really. There had always been a Doug. And an Ellie. They had come together for almost forty years, but now they would be apart again.

A sparrow flitted outside the window.

“Can I ask,” Doug said, “what are you thinking now?”

“Everything,” she said.

 

Doug’s second date in forty years, via OkCupid, is a petite, age-and-hair-appropriate woman named Marcie. They meet outside a craft pizza place near Downriver Golf Course.

This time, the conversation flows. They bemoan the smoke from the August fires and reminisce about the clear blue skies of their childhood summers. Marcie has three adult children, and she smiles and nods at his recent observation about Aaron’s impatience over Doug’s technological ineptitude.

“So true,” she says and laughs. “They parent us as impatiently as we parented them.” It’s a nice laugh, unforced, not too high.

“Or maybe I’m just not cut out for online dating,” Doug says.

“I think you’re doing fine,” she says.

What is that feeling? A shiver in his spine, his guts.

Menus come, wine is ordered, then appetizers, then more wine. Doug feels himself relaxing. He looks down at the menu again: the pizzas here are named for streets in the Downriver neighborhood.

He wonders aloud if the pizza names are chosen to reflect the people on those streets—if, say, the folks on Alice Street are more likely to be vegetarians than those on Gordon Street.

Marcie smiles. “Right. Or this one is for the down-home pulled pork and slaw folks over on Dalton.”

They choose two small craft pizzas—a chicken curry and a cauliflower/brussels sprout—then settle into polite, gentle questioning. Retirement, hobbies, travel. This time, when grandchildren come up, Doug simply says, “Not yet, how about you?”

“No, thank God,” says Marcie. “I can’t imagine learning to date again and being a grandma at the same time.” She swirls her wine and seems to get lost watching it in her glass.

But then she looks up suddenly, and says: “Was it hard, losing your wife?” Before he can answer, she shakes her head. “I’m sorry. That was a terrible question.”

“No,” he says. “It’s a fine question. And yeah. It was.” What you can’t ever imagine is the distance, he wants to say. But he’s not sure she’ll know what that means. He’s not sure what that means.

She nods, reaches out, and covers his hand with hers. The feeling of her hand on his hand is so intense, Doug is almost relieved when she pulls her hand away. He takes a deep breath through his nose.

She tells him about her divorce then, how she suspected that she and her husband weren’t as connected as they had been, but how she imagined that when the kids were gone, they would find each other again. But their youngest went off to college and a week later, her husband left. “You try not to be surprised, but—”

Doug nods. No need to finish that thought.

“It’s been a year, and it still feels so raw.” Marcie looks down into her wine glass again. “I don’t think I’ve dealt with it very well.”

Doug says, “I think you’re doing fine.”

She smiles at the repeated line, then shakes her head. “I can’t even bring myself to use my maiden name.”

“Well,” Doug says, “this seems as good a time as any.” He offers his hand. “Doug Coates. Nice to meet you, Miss—”

After a moment, she smiles, extends her hand, shakes his, and says, “Gearing. Marcie Gearing. Nice to meet you!”

As they shake, Doug feels a different shudder. Their hands separate. “Um, where did you go to high school?”

“Ah, yes,” she says, “the classic Spokane question. Surprised it took us this long. Shadle Park. You?”

“I didn’t grow up here,” he says, distracted. “I moved here for college. My wife did, though.”

Yes, his late wife Ellie, who also went to Shadle Park High School on Spokane’s north side, and who would tell you, if she were here, that she had only ever hated one person in her entire life, a cruel girl from high school named Marcie fucking Gearing.

 

Over the years, Doug repeatedly asked Ellie not to use that word when telling the story of Marcie Gearing and tenth-grade cheerleader camp, but Ellie was incapable of saying “that woman’s name” without the profanity in between. And she told the story often. Whenever their kids encountered any social trouble at school, Ellie would inexplicably trot out the tale of Marcie fucking Gearing.

“It’s important to always have an archenemy,” she would explain to the kids, one of Ellie’s occasional moments of insane parenting advice that Doug would counter by shaking his head and mouthing, “No, it’s not.”

The story went like this: Sophomore year of high school. Cheerleader camp. Chubby nerd Ellie Martin comes back from summer break two inches taller and ten pounds lighter, sans braces—blossomed, one might say—and committed to changing her lowly high school status by trying out for cheerleading.

At camp, the girls are each mentored by a current cheerleader; Ellie’s mentor is that pretty paragon of popularity, Marcie fu—

“Ellie,” Doug would interrupt as she told the story to eight-year-old Maya and six-year-old Aaron, who were both enrapt.

“Oh, sorry,” Ellie would say. Then she’d carefully enunciate each word. “I meant to say, Marcie. Fucking! Gearing.” Then she’d smile at Doug, who would put his hands up in surrender.

So, back in 1980, Marcie Gearing tells blossoming Ellie to try this tumbling run and to hold her pompoms thusly and to practice those dance moves, and then, on the last day of camp, when the cheerleading mentors introduce their charges to the other cheerleaders, who will vote on the new girls, Marcie Gearing stabs Ellie in the back by standing up and introducing her this way:

“This is Ellie Martin. You might know her as one of the smartest kids in school. And a clarinetist in the marching band. Like I told her, it would be so neat to have someone like Ellie on the squad this year.”

The first time he had heard the story, Doug looked around, thinking: wait, that was it? Had he missed the cruel part?

“Someone like Ellie! Do you seriously not hear that, Doug?”

He did not.

“She was basically saying, Look, this fat band girl wants to be a cheerleader.”

“Look—I don’t—I mean—” Doug stammered. “Anyway, you would’ve hated being a cheerleader.”

“Of course I would’ve hated being a cheerleader. Do you think that’s the point of the story?”

“Ellie,” he said, “you grew into a successful, happy, beautiful woman. Who cares what some sixteen-year-old cheerleader said? Why can’t you let it go?”

“Let it … go?” She stared at him like weevils were crawling out of his eye sockets. “Sometimes I don’t think you’re human.”

 

“Would you excuse me a moment,” Doug says to Marcie Gearing. He stands and walks to the bathroom, where he stares at himself in the mirror. Creased skin around tired eyes. Thin, graying hair. It surprises him, sometimes, this old man’s face.

Jesus, what kind of test is this? He likes this woman, really likes her; she is the first person he’s connected with since Ellie died. She is pretty and nice and maybe a little fragile, like him. He can still feel the charge from her hand on his.

And yet, of all the people in the world, this is literally the one that he cannot date. Not okay, Cupid.

What’s he supposed to do now? Go back to the table and yell at Marcie fucking Gearing for something she surely doesn’t even remember? Sneak out the back door and stick her with the bill? Get Ellie’s revenge all these years later?

Or no—perhaps this is another kind of test. He thinks about the pastor, Astrid, and wonders if there is a heaven, and the only way he can help his beloved Ellie ascend to paradise is this: here on Earth to forgive his wife’s pointless, lifelong grudge.

Sure. Right.

He can almost hear Ellie’s voice in the men’s room: “And how do you propose to do that, Doug? By actually fucking Marcie fucking Gearing?”

In the bathroom mirror, Doug watches his reflection slap its forehead.

 

Three days before Ellie died, Doug finally asked: “What did you talk about with that pastor?”

Ellie’s eyes opened slowly. She took a deep breath. “My parents. The church. God. Not God. Our kids. You.”

“Did she say anything … I don’t know—”

“Comforting?” Ellie licked her dry, cracked lips. “She did, actually. She said we are the ones who teach babies to be afraid of the dark.”

Doug cocked his head, unsure what this meant.

“She said: ‘We put in night lights. We leave lamps on. We are the ones who create that fear.’ She said: ‘Why would babies be afraid of the dark when it is the place they have just come from?’”

 

In the pizzeria bathroom, Doug comes to a decision. His wife is gone now. Nothing can change that. And sitting out there, waiting for him, is a beautiful, seemingly kind, intelligent woman.

He will go back out there and explain to Marcie why he was gone so long, tell her the reason he reacted so strangely a few minutes ago—that his deceased wife had gone to the same high school as her (without mentioning cheerleader camp), and, hopefully, they will laugh about the coincidence and decide to see one another again.

He takes a deep breath and walks out of the bathroom. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says as he settles into his chair. “This is going to sound weird, but—”

“No,” Marcie Gearing interrupts him, and now he sees that her eyes are red, that she’s been crying. “I’m sorry. While you were gone, I … I realized—” She covers her mouth. “I’m not ready for this. Forgive me. It’s not you. I just—I’m sorry.”

Then Marcie Gearing stands, grabs her purse, and rushes out the door. In the thrum of the crowded restaurant, Doug can do nothing but stare at her empty chair.

He sits by himself this way for a while. He looks down at the two half-full wine glasses, then at the tables around him: mostly young families and couples; someone is breaking off pizza crusts for a baby in a highchair, and this nearly ruins him.

But, after a few minutes, a strange sense of calm comes over Doug Coates. Happiness, even.

He hums a laugh, finishes his glass of wine, toasts the empty chair in front of him, and reaches for her glass. He honors the Asian population of D Street by having a few slices of their signature curry-style pizza. The other pizza he has boxed up for lunch tomorrow.

“Is the lady not coming back?” asks the waitress.

“The lady is not,” Doug says.

And when the bill comes—ninety-six dollars before tip—Doug smiles and realizes that he cannot wait to tell Aaron about this—his second official date.

No! Aaron will say, and he will smile just like his mother.

Oh yes! Doug will say. Marcie f-ing Gearing!

Then Doug will explain how they were having a great time when she suddenly left and stuck him with the bill, and while his delighted son laughs, Doug will think that maybe we never stop loving the people we love, even when they’ve gone back to the dark from which they came. But maybe, if we’re lucky, we get to feel them again, in this case, in the small, shared experience of getting fucked over by Marcie Gearing. And, again, in the warm, familiar laughter of the people we once made together.