The Darkest Evening of the Year

stop in the street, and the headlights flared off the reflective numbers on the curbside mailbox.
    She shifted the Expedition into reverse. Backing into the driveway, she said, “In an iffy situation, you want to be aimed out for the fastest exit.”
    As she killed the headlights and the engine, Brian said, “Iffy? Iffy like how?”
    Getting out of the SUV, she said, “With a crazy drunk guy, you just never know.”
    Joining her at the back of the vehicle, where she put up the tailgate, Brian glanced at the house and said, “So there’s a crazy guy in there, and he’s drunk?”
    “On the phone, this Janet Brockman said her husband, Carl, he’s crazy drunk, which probably means he’s crazy from drinking.”
    Amy started toward the house, and Brian gripped her shoulder, halting her. “What if he’s crazy when he’s sober, and now it’s worse because he’s drunk?”
    “I’m not a psychiatrist, sweetie.”
    “Maybe this is police business.”
    “Police don’t have time for crazy drunk guys like this.”
    “I’d think crazy drunk guys are right down their alley.”
    Shrugging off his hand, heading toward the house once more, she said, “We can’t waste time. He’s violent.”
    Brian hurried after her. “He’s crazy, drunk, and violent ?”
    “He probably won’t be violent with me.”
    Climbing steps to a porch, Brian said, “What about me?”
    “I think he’s only violent with their dog. But if this Carl does want to take a whack at me, that’s okay, ’cause I have you.”
    “Me? I’m an architect.”
    “Not tonight, sweetie. Tonight, you’re muscle.”
    Brian had accompanied her on other missions like this, but never previously after midnight to the home of a crazy violent drunk.
    “What if I have a testosterone deficiency?”
    “Do you have a testosterone deficiency?”
    “I cried reading that book last week.”
    “That book makes everyone cry. It just proves you’re human.”
    As Amy reached for the bell push, the door opened. A young woman with a bruised mouth and a bleeding lip appeared at the threshold.
    “Ms. Redwing?” she asked.
    “You must be Janet.”
    “I wish I wasn’t. I wish I was you or anybody, somebody.” Stepping back from the door, she invited them inside. “Don’t let Carl cripple her.”
    “He won’t,” Amy assured the woman.
    Janet blotted her lips with a bloody cloth. “He crippled Mazie.”
    Mouth plugged with a thumb, a pale girl of about four clung to a twisted fistful of the tail of Janet’s blouse, as if anticipating a sudden cyclone that would try to spin her away from her mother.
    The living room was gray. A blue sofa, blue armchairs, stood on a gold carpet, but a pair of lamps shed light as lusterless as ashes, and the colors were muted as though settled smoke from a long-quenched fire had laid a patina on them.
    If Purgatory had formal parlors for the waiting multitudes, they might be as ordered and cheerless as this room.
    “Crippled Mazie,” Janet repeated. “Four months later, he…” She glanced down at her daughter. “Four months later, Mazie died.”
    Having begun to close the front door, Brian hesitated. He left it half open to the mild September night.
    “Where is your dog?” Amy asked.
    “In the kitchen.” Janet put a hand to her swollen lip and spoke between her fingers. “With him.”
    The child was too old to be sucking her thumb with such devotion, but this habit of the crib disturbed Brian less than did the character of her stare. A purple shade of blue, her eyes were wide with expectation and appeared to be bruised by experience.
    The air thickened, as it does under thunderheads and a pending deluge.
    “Which way to the kitchen?” Amy asked.
    Janet led them through an archway into a hall flanked by dark rooms like flooded grottoes. Her daughter glided at her side, as firmly attached as a remora to a larger fish.
    The hall was shadowy except at the far end, where a thin wedge of light stabbed in from a room beyond.
    The shadows seemed to ebb and flow and ebb again, but this phantom movement was only Brian’s strong pulse, his vision throbbing in time with his laboring heart.
    At the midpoint of the hallway, a boy leaned with his forehead against a wall, his hands fisted at his temples. He was perhaps six years old.
    From him came the thinnest sound of misery, like air escaping, molecule by molecule, from the pinched neck of a balloon.
    Janet said, “It’ll be okay, Jimmy,” but when she put a hand on the