Things We Do in the Dark

“She was attracted to his kindness and his acceptance. Unlike every other man Paris had known, Jimmy Peralta had never asked her for anything.”

At the center of Paris’s complicated love stories is the relationship that she finds with the semi-retired comedian more than twice her age. This foreshadows the novel’s revelations of her dark history of abuse at the hands of two father figures.

“She’s also the woman whose daughter Paris killed nineteen years ago.”

This is the first indication of Paris’s secret life and her criminal past. Paris has thus far been an ambiguous but sympathetic figure, arrested for a crime she did not commit and pilloried in the popular press and social media as a gold digger and a manipulative seductress. This is an obscure admission of guilt for a crime that Joey did and did not commit—here begins the journey into the past.

“It was more than friendship for her […] She loved you, Drew. Like, loved you loved you. Would-have married-you-and-had-your-babies-and-grown-old-with-you loved you. Not a crush. I don’t think Joelle was capable of anything shallow.”

That Drew has to be told this, 20 years after the fact, by Joey’s caseworker sets in motion his own crusade to solve the cold case of Joey’s murder. The depth of Joey’s feelings for Drew runs counter to the media depiction of her as a heartless, conniving gold digger.

“Ruby was out of her chair, and before Joey could react, her mother’s lit cigarette pressed into her neck just above her collarbone, a centimeter away from the chain of her new necklace. She cried out, the heat from the Marlboro searing and intense.”

Hillier describes Ruby Reyes’s abuse in a graphic way that envelopes the reader in a sensory experience: She establishes the precise scene to the “centimeter” with tactile and sonic qualities. This scene underscores Joey’s helplessness and the physical and emotional damage of Ruby’s behavior.

“Do not make this about you, you selfish, self-righteous asshole. You might hate my job, but your opinion doesn’t matter to me anymore. You left me. You left me.”

At the emotional center of Joey’s traumatic adulthood is Drew’s failure to act on his love for her. That failure, coupled with his own “self-righteous[ness],” leads to this showdown over finding Joey stripping for a living. This establishes a sense of moral ambiguity in contrast with Drew’s moral absolutism: Joey suggests that Drew’s corrosive guilt is justified since his failure doomed Joey.

“Her uncle moved closer until their shoulders touched. His hand was back on the base of her spine, and she could feel his finger moving in slow, lazy circles. He was looking at her. He sighed, his whiskey-tinged breath caressed her cheek.”

Hillier again describes abuse in detail, focusing particularly on tactility to make the experience tangibly horrifying for the reader. The description of the smell of whiskey also makes the reading experience more immediate.

“I’m broken [...] I’m no good to you. I’m no good to anyone.”

Joey resists Drew’s offer of love because she does not believe she is worth loving. Her view of herself highlights The Traumatic Impact of Abuse. She cannot believe she is worth anyone’s commitment of love and sees her body as a commodity to be used. It will be the challenge of Drew to see to her emotional redemption.

“What. The. Actual. Fuck.”

As Drew sees the wedding photos of Jimmy Peralta and Paris in People, he has the first epiphany of his long road back to Joey: He sees that Joey married Jimmy Peralta and that Joey is not dead. Like the supernova collision that Paris dreads, past and present implode. The stark reaction with monosyllabic sentences indicates that Drew is ready now to begin his own detective arc.

“They had fifty years of friendship and laughter and stories and inside jokes. Elsie had seen Jimmy in all his incarnations, had stood by through all his ups and downs. Paris had been Jimmy’s wife, but Elsie may well have been his soulmate.”

That the novel’s most compelling love story happens “offstage,” as it were—or “in the dark,” to use the novel’s own metaphor—reveals and conceals secrets at the same time. Elsie Dixon’s love for Jimmy Peralta is the novel’s most resilient love story: 50 years of caring and selfless support during some of Jimmy’s worst years. In the end Jimmy never understood the dimensions of that love. The fact that the reader never sees Elsie with Jimmy makes her story unverifiable and her characterization ambiguous.

“In the dark, it didn’t happen.”

This logic is how Joey squares her work in the strip club: her pole dances, her lap dances, and the sessions back in the private rooms. It also explains how she handles her memories of her abuse and violence. Her separation between her actions and her memories highlights The Traumatic Impact of Abuse.

“The decision to burn Mae’s body took three seconds […] For the past year, Joey had been telling herself that she’d know when it was time to start over somewhere new. She was certain that there would be a moment when it was crystal clear to her.”

Here, Hillier explores the impact of being treated like a commodity. Joey thinks with the cool logic of survival. She sees her best friend’s corpse not as a person to mourn but rather as an invitation to act on her own best interests. Hillier makes Joey’s quick reaction chilling as she switches to the cool logic of survival mode.

“You knew, Mama? You knew what Charles was doing?”

It is unfathomable to Joey that Charles Baxter’s abuse was part of her own mother’s negations to become Baxter’s wife. She put her own young daughter in the hands of a predatory pedophile all as part of her endgame to move from mistress to wife. That Joey’s question is rhetorical reflects the end of their relationship, since she expects no response.

“A sound beating would have hurt less.”

In a novel that depicts so many physically abusive moments in Joey’s young life, Hillier draws attention to the impact of emotional abuse: in this case, the burning of her books. She finds in books a sweet escape during her difficult years with her aunt and uncle. When her cousin defiles her books and Joey loses her temper, her aunt burns all of her books right in front of her.

“Under any other circumstances, Joey might have wanted to be Charles’s stepdaughter. Except there was already one monster in the family.”

Joey is first molested in the bedroom of Charles Baxter’s own daughter when the family is away. Here she thinks for a moment how wonderful it might be to be his daughter but then realizes who and what Charles Baxter actually is and cannot fathom admitting a second monster into her family. Hillier refers to Ruby indirectly as the “monster” and allows readers to infer who it is, reflecting Joey’s attempts to dehumanize her mother in her anger.

“The only way for Joey to save herself was to save herself.”

Given Joey’s emotional traumas and her victimization, she thinks only in terms of survival. Here, she is about to perjure herself on the witness stand, thus guaranteeing that her mother will be locked away and out of reach for years. Her lie puts her mother in prison for 20 years. The tautology of the statement reflects a simple lesson that Joey’s abusive background has obscured.

“Only when the sun came up and the room was bright did her eyelids finally grow heavy, and she slipped the box cutter back between the mattress and the bed frame, back into the crack where nobody looked, because nobody cared.”

The bloody attack on her uncle reveals her ferocious sense of self-defense, which creates a red herring regarding the question of who killed Jimmy Peralta. It suggests to the reader that perhaps Paris may have stabbed Jimmy in the bathtub. What is missing, however, is motive. Joey’s uncle was a clear and present danger—Jimmy’s was the love she needed. While creating a red herring, this stabbing hence subtly hints that Paris did not kill Jimmy.

“Joey Reyes and Paris Peralta cannot both be here. And yet, looking at Drew through the glass of her back patio door, this is exactly what’s happening. They should both explode into nothing, like a supernova.”

In this dramatic moment, Paris understands that the forces with which she has been playing must ultimately reveal the truth. She cannot pretend the past never happened. Nor can she pretend the present is not informed and shaped by the past. The explosive supernova image heightens the intensity of the drama for the reading.

“Telling me you’re sorry is just your way of manipulating me into letting my guard down, so that I’ll talk to you. But the truth is, you were the person who judged me more than anyone else ever did.”

Here Paris/Joey reveals The Traumatic Impact of Abuse. Confronted at last by real love, she is unsure how to respond. Her reaction is distrust, paranoia, and protective isolationism. Hillier draws attention to the sexism that Joey experiences when she is judged in the strip club, however, by highlighting the truth in her assessment of Drew.

“You don’t know what it is like to be born into a life of cruelty and abuse, and you don’t know what it’s like to have to claw your way out in order to have any sense of self-worth […] I decided a long time ago that I am done being everybody’s toilet.”

This passionate moment sums up the emotional life of a young girl who was used by everyone she trusted and who learned bitter and difficult lessons about love. The mundane image of a “toilet” develops the reader’s sense of Joey/Paris’s debased sense of herself.

“You don’t have to hide from anything or anyone.”

With the arrival of Zoe, Paris can say that she is a free woman and that she is free to have friends. This is a tipping point in her character development and her movement toward the moment when she rips up the check to her mother and asserts the direction of her own life.

“It’s not exactly a fresh start, but it’s safe to say they’ve turned a page.”

Zoe, Jimmy’s close assistant, had long been an emotional issue with Paris. Uncertain whether she should be jealous, Paris has alienated Zoe after Jimmy’s death, even firing her. Here the two make amends, another significant moment of character development for Paris; it is a movement toward Paris’s reclamation of her emotional well-being and ability to trust others.

“Something’s not right.”

Hillier constructs the epiphany when, through all the red herrings, guesswork, and ratiocinations, the killer is at last revealed in a grand moment. Paris notices that Jimmy’s collection of straight razors had been tampered with, leading her inevitably to knowing the identity of the killer.

“For fifty goddamn years, I loved that broken, selfish, arrogant man, and half the time he couldn’t even remember when we had plans […] He told me it was none of his business and to get a life. Can you imagine?”

Elsie’s lamentation about her unconditional love for the man who never acknowledged her commitment to him stands as the novel’s most passionate revelation. Elsie, as Jimmy’s lawyer, had moved through scenes without raising suspicion. Her speech highlights the dark side of The Resiliency of Love.