A Place Where There Is No Darkness

Twelve

It was getting harder to stay focused, but Mitchell’s words were interesting enough to keep my eyes open. Which was, in the end, my only real goal.

“In high school I had this teacher, Mr. Gartner, who taught Math. Once, when I snuck out of school with a girl, he caught me. But he didn’t give me detention. Instead, he told me I had to come to his family dinner that Sunday. To act as a buffer, he said.” Mitchell smiled. “Turns out, he did that to a kid every week. Ever since, I was happy to accept any and all detention that came my way.

“Your turn.”

I looked in his direction, eyebrows quirked. “Is that all? I thought you were going to tell me something a little more … you know … important?”

He shrugged. “Hey, I had to start, so I get to pick the first story. Deal with it.”

I sighed and looked out of my window. Fine, if he wanted to do it this way. Two could play at this game.

“Okay. When I was in kindergarten, there was a girl. Sally. She was a mean b***h, if I may say so myself. One day, she came up to me, holding a cupcake in her hand. She looked like she wasn’t really enjoying it. I was about to walk away, when all of a sudden, she grabbed a handful of the cupcake and threw it at my head. It landed in my hair and it wouldn’t go out until I washed it that evening.”

“Mean,” Mitchell commented. I shrugged.

“The next day, I chewed up as many chewing gums as I could possibly fit into my mouth and when she came along, I threw that disgusting ball at her head. It landed in her hair, too. But she wasn’t as lucky as me. Her mess didn’t come out until she cut her hair.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. I guess I was always kind of big on revenge.”

And so it went on. We traded funny, unimportant little stories, which still felt like forbidden glimpses into the other’s life. Over time – over the course of twenty-two minutes –, we became bolder. Mitchell started telling me something about his family – a Christmas party one year when his brother had got sick, and I almost found myself giving him a story about Willy in return. Almost. As soon as I realised what I was about to do, I stopped myself and changed course.

After that, Mitchell looked at me really funny and then averted his gaze when I wanted to counter it. I shut up instantly and waited. For something big. For him to finally tell me something significant.

He didn't disappoint.

„My dad, he, uh … he wasn’t a nice guy,” Mitchell said. I refrained from speaking, knowing that he deserved to tell me all about it, just the way I’d been able to tell him all about my days in a home. He’d given me free reign then to say and hold back whatever I wanted and now it was only fair to return the favour.

So I waited. Even though he was silent for a long while. Even though the pain was intense and the blood from the wound was starting to seep through my jacket, which wasn’t much help anymore. Still, I waited.

Then, “He – you know, he beat my brother and me, the way bad fathers do. He drank. Probably did drugs here and there … he was a really messed-up guy. Had lots of problems with himself, because of himself, and he blamed everyone else for it.

“One night, it was really bad. He’d just been fired and he was really pissed off. He had this annoying habit of parking wherever he pleased, as if the whole world should kneel before the drunk guy with his two sons and his mess of a car. Only, that afternoon, after he’d come to pick up my brother and me from school and almost passed out in the schoolyard, I’d convinced him to let me drive, even though I didn’t have my driver’s licence yet. And he’d let me.

“You know, with parents, even when you know that they’re bad people, even when you know that they did wrong by you, you still try to protect them. Try to justify their actions – hey, he only did it because I was naughty. He’s not a bad person. And you still admire them, want to make them proud. I think that’s part of being a kid. Or maybe being human. I dunno.

“Anyway, I parked in this no-parking zone near our house, just like my dad would have. That in itself should have been a clear warning sign. I locked the car and I even remember examining my surroundings. There were three other free parking spaces. Three. But I was proud to have left the car somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be.

“And we went home. And we slept.

“The next morning, I found out that a fire had broken out in one of the nearby houses. An ambulance was called, but my car was in its way. The paramedics, of course, got there eventually, but they weren’t fast enough. A boy died that night.

“Maybe he would have died anyway, I don’t know. I asked everyone, including the paramedics and some doctors and the Big Guy himself, and no one was able or willing to give me an answer. Maybe he could have lived or maybe he never stood a chance in the first place. Fact is, the ambulance couldn’t get there because of me and a kid died.”

The story ended abruptly on that cruel note. A tear slid down my cheek and I didn’t even bother wiping it away. I knew what an experience like that felt like. The pent-up frustration and hatred that would never fully go away. I knew this was why he’d joined the FBI and chosen the path he was on now, but also why he was so good at all of it. Motivation like that doesn’t go away. Ever. It either destroys you or makes you stronger forever.

Him, it had clearly made stronger.

I nodded and looked down. My hands were covered in dark red, and the jacket was soaked. I looked past all that to something farther away.

I had to give something back.

“You know that couple they say I murdered?”

His whole posture changed. From beaten and crushed to something else entirely. Attentive. Focused. He tensed, shuddered. His head perked up almost imperceptibly. “Yeah?”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Murder them?”

I nodded.

We were quiet. The tires underneath us screeched, the engine huffed and puffed, but our silence was louder than all of that.

“What, am I just supposed to take your word for it?” he muttered finally.

It hurt more than I would have thought possible. I steeled myself against it and put on a tough façade. It was one of the things I’d mastered over the years. “I don’t care what you do, I just wanted to tell you.”

His right hand formed a fist and came down hard on the steering wheel. He pursed his lips and looked to the left, out of his window.

“Tell me everything,” he demanded and against my better judgement, I started talking. Like a puppy looking for its master’s approval.

“It was the Elite. As you might imagine. No idea what the couple had done or why the Elite needed them dead. I just know that I was dispensable for them at the moment and they needed someone to take the blame. They took me to the crime scene, put my fingerprints all over the place and pushed the murder weapon into my hand.”

“Why would you let them do that to you? Why would you go to prison for them?”

I rolled my eyes. “I thought you would have it figured out by now.”

“Willy,” he said. It wasn’t a question as much as it was a statement.

“Yeah. They had him. They still do.”

“But you never confessed.” He threw me a sidelong glance.

I shrugged. “They never told me to. I wasn’t going to do more than strictly necessary. Believe it or not, I’m not feeling much generosity in that department.”

“But you would have probably got less time if you had confessed.”

I looked at him sternly, trying to gauge how serious he was being. He looked pretty solemn. That meant that he deserved a genuine answer, or as much of one as I was able to form in my dizzy head.

“Well, at the time, my dignity seemed more important than prison. You know? It was my own little battle. Against myself and my stupid situation. Maybe also against the Elite, even though it changed nothing for them. I wanted to stand my ground and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” I laughed. “Oh, well, maybe it wasn’t quite the whole truth, but there you go. Close enough.”

“So you opted for not saying anything at all?”

A shrug again. “As I said, it made sense in my head.”

“Yeah. Yours and nobody else’s,” he grumbled.

I would have loved to dive into another heated debate with him, but by that point, everything was spinning viciously around me. I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t anymore. Driving wasn’t really helping my confused mind, and as I looked out of my window to gain some sort of clarity, my stomach roiled.

“Uh, Mitch!”

“Yeah?”

“Gonna be sick!”

He only took one look at me before jumping into action. We slowed down dramatically and pulled over. The jolt almost made me expel everything in my stomach, but I somehow managed to hold it back, focusing instead on getting the door open with my shaky hands. Mitchell was faster – he’d jumped out of the car quicker than I’d ever seen him and was at my side in a matter of seconds. He pulled the door open and helped me stumble out.

My wound flared. I stifled a cry and grabbed Mitchell’s shirt tighter.

“It’s okay, I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” he whispered into my ear. His plan was probably to guide me a few metres onwards to a patch of grass, but I simply collapsed where I was and started heaving.

He crouched down next to me, gently combed my hair back with his hands and held it off my face.

We stayed like that for a long while. He kept saying things that didn’t truly register but calmed me down all the same. It was like listening to someone consoling a kid in a foreign language – even if you couldn’t understand the words, you were still comforted.

At some point, I had given all I had to give, but the heaving hadn’t yet subsided. Mitchell brushed a soothing, cool hand over my sweaty forehead. I was leaning forward, his strong arm around my waist, keeping me from falling over into my own mess.

There was no energy left. I gasped, leaning back against the only thing that would hold my weight – Mitchell’s broad chest.

“You’re okay,” he said. “We’re almost there. Like, five more minutes, maybe. I think.”

I nodded, indicating I had heard the words, but I didn’t move a muscle.

One of his nimble hands crept forward and lifted my jacket ever so slightly. He cursed. “Ella, we have to get you out of here and to a doctor.”

“The Elite has its own doctor.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure that’s the place I want you to be right now.”

I looked up at him. His face was right above mine and so close. His eyes shone bright in the early morning light, but the sun wasn’t the only thing making them glow. There was something on their surface, swirling around. An emotion. Like worry, maybe, but it was hard to tell. Eyes were notoriously hard to read. A window to the soul, yes, but no one said that seeing one’s soul could make you understand it. No, I believed it was a lot more complex than that.

“That’s sweet,” I ground out, trying to smile through all the pain and the dizziness and the yuck.

He shook his head at me, moving even closer. I could see his white, white teeth and also the darkness behind. The mystery. “I mean it,” he said.

“I know.” I nodded. “But I need to be there. We need to be there. You for your own reasons and I for Willy. You know that.”

“I don’t think any of that is …” He looked as if he had realised in the middle of the sentence that he’d been about to say too much.

I wanted to hear it. “What?”

He looked away. Hid something or let something go, no idea. Then he turned back, looking as stoic as ever.

“… as important as your life.”

I smiled again, but this time naturally and fully. He didn’t return the gesture, just pursed his lips and tightened his jaw. There was a lot of tension on his face.

“Oh, Willy is,” I told him without skipping a beat. “You’ll se once you meet him.”

He nodded curtly and brushed a quick hand down his face, apparently jumping back into his role as FBI agent. I struggled to jump back into mine as criminal.

He cleared his throat. “Very well, then. If we don’t want to be late, we’re going to have to go.”

I agreed and let him help me back to the car. Once there, I collapsed onto the seat and it took everything I had in me not to scream my lungs out. I didn’t, though, maybe partly because of Mitchell. Or for him. It was the least I could do, after everything.

“Oh, by the way,” he said casually as he started up the engine.

“Yeah?”

“Did you call me Mitch earlier?”

I bumped his shoulder playfully, enjoying the banter even though the movement made my body scream. “That was just because the whole name wouldn’t come out. I was kind of on the verge of hurling, you know.”

He smiled tightly, but it didn’t really reach those chocolate-brown depths. Then he shrugged. “No, no, by all means, keep doing it. I really don’t mind. Like, at all.”