Places in the Dark Read Free Page B

someone carving hugs and kisses in the soft bark of a tree.
    I ’m sure Dora relived this moment many times as she made her way over the Rockies and across the Great Plains, taking the same roads I later took, following the last slim lead I had.
    She reached the East Coast, lingered for a time, then fled northward, no doubt winding through New England along Route 1. Finally, in late October, the leaves in their autumnal glory, she reached Port Alma, atown fixed to a rocky coast, bordered by a seawall, graced with a long stone jetty and a jeweled island in the bay.
    Local legend had it that Port Alma had been named for a sea captain’s wife. It was Billy who set the record straight in a little talk he gave two days before his sixteenth birthday, the town historical society gathered in the front room of the old lending library to hear him speak.
    “Alma was the captain’s lover, not his wife,” Billy explained. “She was a beautiful young woman who lived in Seville.”
    According to Billy, Captain Brennan had sailed up the Guadalquivir River, master of an eighteenth-century merchant ship in search of olive oil and Spanish sherry. The captain had been graciously entertained by the local Spanish aristocracy, invited to their dances, shown their fabled gardens, where flowers hung in perfumed abundance from brightly painted walls. It was during one of those long, scented evenings that Brennan had met Maria Alma Sanchez. Seventeen. Olive-skinned. Raven-haired. They’d walked along the narrow streets of Santa Cruz, kissed at the Torre del Oro, alongside the same river down which Columbus had set sail.
    Then the story darkened. The couple was forced to part. Worse things after that. Alma’s suicide. Captain Brennan set wandering again. He’d finally settled on a remote beach in Maine, where he’d built a small trading post. He christened it Port Alma. “It was the perfect place for Captain Brennan,” Billy concluded, relishing the high romance of his tale, glancing at our mother, who watched him approvingly from the front row, “because every other place served only to remind him that he had sacrificed the one true love of his life.”
    That was the last line of Billy’s talk. And I remember how Mrs. Tolliver dabbed her eyes at the end of it. How strangely Mr. Tolliver gazed at her, as if some long suspicion about his wife had been suddenly proved true. I don’t know if my brother noticed their reaction, but had he noticed it, I know he would have been pleased. For all his life Billy loved the idea that people had secrets they held within themselves like gemstones in a velvet pouch, precious, dazzling, rare. Perhaps that was what initially drew him to Dora. Not her beauty, but how grotesquely it had been marred. Not what she let him see, but what she
hid.
    “It was a beautiful talk, Billy,” my mother said as the three of us stood together on the steps of the building, the main street of Port Alma crowded with its usual weekend throng. Her eyes were like soft blue lights. “Very beautiful.”
    “Thank you,” Billy said. He smiled happily. “Cal’s giving a talk next month.”
    She turned to me. “Really? What about, Cal?”
    “Civil disobedience,” I answered.
    She laughed. “Against it, I suppose?”
    “Adamantly.”
    She pressed her hand to my cheek. “Your father’s son,” she said with a bright, indulgent smile. She turned back to Billy. “Well, congratulations. It was a lovely talk.” With that she strode down the stairs, turned to the left, and grandly sailed down Main Street like a great ship through a tangle of lesser vessels.
    “She’s so sure of herself,” I said once she was out of earshot. “So sure that she’s right about her view of things.”
    With an insight that even then struck me as older than his years, Billy said, “If she weren’t, she wouldn’tbe able to live. She would die, Cal. She would just curl up and die.”
    We went for a walk after that, more or less following our