In the Middle of the Night (12 page)

Denny and his mother went to church every Sunday. His father never went to mass. “Why?” Denny asked as they walked to St. Martin’s Church.

“Your father is religious in his own way,” she said. “He doesn’t go to mass, but he prays.” She did not say anything for a while and then said: “I think, Denny, he has his own church: the cemetery in Wickburg where most of the children are buried, the children who died at the Globe. He used to disappear every Saturday for a few hours, even when we lived in Bartlett. Finally, he told me where he went. To the cemetery. Where he prayed for the souls of the children. That’s his church, Denny, that cemetery.”

A sudden memory came clear: “He took me there once when I was a little kid,” Denny said. “I remember we knelt down. I remember that there were tears in his eyes. But he didn’t explain why we were there. I must have been only five or six years old …”

“He still goes there once in a while, Denny.” She touched his shoulder, as if trying to create a bridge between her and him and, by extension, his father. “He’s such a good man, your father. He …” Her voice trailed off.

“What?” Denny asked. “He … what?” Sensing that his mother wanted to say more.

“I was thinking of that terrible day at the Globe. The first time I saw him. He wasn’t like other guys at school, in my neighborhood. He seemed to care. About those children. Even about us, the helpers. Trying to do his best. He was …” She paused, as if searching for the right word: “Nice. I know that doesn’t sound glamorous, Denny.
But that’s exactly what your father was, still is—a nice guy.”

She stopped walking, turned toward him. “I never told him what I saw that day. I saw the balcony crash down. I saw him falling with it, saw him swallowed up in all that debris. I thought he’d been killed, that nice guy I’d just met. Later, when I found out he was alive and heard the accusations people were making, I wrote him a letter …”

“And the rest is history, right?” he said, keeping his voice light but oddly touched that his mother had shared this memory with him.

A sudden rising wind hastened them along the street. His mother looked up at the clear blue sky. “Oh, Denny, maybe this year will be different. Maybe it won’t be like other years …”

Denny didn’t say anything, did not want to spoil this beautiful moment on the way to church.

T
he telephone rang almost every afternoon now but Denny ignored it, using all his old defenses: flushing the toilet in the bathroom, turning up the volume on the radio, or, finally, leaving the apartment.

On the street, he faced several choices, none of them exciting. Once or twice, he walked the streets of the neighborhood, beginning with the adjacent ones and then branching out, searching for Dawn, his lost friend from the bus. Which was ridiculous, in a way. The odds against spotting her were enormous unless he got lucky and walked by her house at the moment she came out the door or happened to be raking the lawn. Most of the lawns and sidewalks were covered with leaves, some of them beautiful in their hectic colors, but Denny didn’t respond to their beauty. Falling leaves meant October, and October meant
Halloween, which also meant the coming anniversary. Soon, Halloween decorations would begin to appear, and he’d ignore them, too.

He usually dropped into the 24-Hour Store after school, although he had given up any hope of being hired. Sometimes Dave wasn’t working. Or he was too busy for conversation, or appeared distracted and withdrawn, as if he had worries on his mind. Other times, he greeted Denny warmly and could be entertaining.

Once he told Denny he did a lot of traveling between jobs or on vacations and had a hobby: tracking down unusual statues all over the world. He ignored statues of generals and politicians, he said, but loved, for instance, the statue in Dublin, Ireland, of a woman who sold fish from a wagon. “Imagine that, Denny: a statue to Molly Malone, who wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow …” Singing the words in a high tenor voice, forgetting to touch his roof but his dentures gleaming in the fluorescent light. Denny glanced out the window now and then, hoping to see Dawn nearing the store, or looked with anticipation toward the door when it opened, hoping to see her come in.

At Normal Prep, he went through all the proper motions. Minded his own business, as usual. Avoided the bleachers after lunch, finding a quiet spot to study. Studying, particularly doing his homework, was the key—knowing the information so that he passed the tests, knew the answers when teachers called upon him in class, did not force attention on himself. Jimmy Burke pulled him aside once as he left school.

“Still marking time?” Jimmy asked. Denny thought
about Lawrence Hanson under the bleachers, not fighting back.

“Elections are coming up next week,” Jimmy said. Denny shrugged. “Let me think about it,” he said. “Great,” Jimmy responded, his enthusiasm blazing in the air.

I only said I’d
think
about it, Denny told himself as he turned away, a bit flustered at the opening he’d given Jimmy Burke.

The
Barstow Patriot
always arrived before his parents came home and Denny would check it out, grateful every day at the absence of a story about the anniversary. Now, at the 24-Hour Store, he glanced through the
Wickburg Telegram
, looking for Les Albert’s byline, his heart leaping at the sight of it. The reporter was writing a series of stories on arson in low-income housing projects in Worcester County.

Once in a while, he took out Les Albert’s card and looked at it, wondering whether he should take up the reporter on his offer. He’d be able to tell his father’s side of the tragedy, show that his father was a good man, hardworking, a little stiff and formal maybe, but kind and gentle in his own way. Denny wasn’t sure that was the kind of thing the reporter wanted for a story, despite what he’d said. Aside from the occasional phone calls and letters, his father’s life was, well,
b-o-r-i-n-g.
Denny always ended up not doing anything about the reporter’s request. Told himself he was merely postponing the decision. Then placed the card back in his wallet.

“When do you start your new job?” his father asked, catching Denny off guard.

After learning from Mr. Taylor that the job was not available and with dim hopes that he would ever be hired, Denny had avoided the topic when he was with his parents, had been relieved when his father made no inquiry.

But now his question stopped Denny cold as he made his way through the living room after supper. He had planned to start the campaign for his driver’s license tonight, having figured out a compromise: applying for a learner’s permit, which would allow him to at least start driving lessons. But suddenly he was on the defensive.

“There’s no job,” he admitted, looking away from his father’s direct gaze. “The guy who offered me the job had the wrong information. The store doesn’t hire teenagers, only old people.”

“You told us that you were hired,” his father said.

Denny forced himself to look into his father’s eyes. “I thought I was,” he said, realizing how one lie leads to another, with maybe more to come.

“But now you’re not.” His father’s voice was edged with sarcasm. Does he suspect me of lying? Denny wondered.

“This guy was only the assistant manager. He didn’t know about the policy.”

His father looked at him for what seemed a long time. Then: “Too bad …”

Denny was taken by surprise, because his father seemed to be genuinely sympathetic.

He decided to push his luck.

“Maybe there’ll be openings at the mall …”

A frown crossed his father’s face, and he turned to pick up his newspaper. “That, I think, would be a problem. The mall is too far to go.”

Denny knew that he had said the wrong thing. He also knew that tonight was not the right time to bring up the learner’s permit.

At the bus stop, the monsters behaved like monsters as usual, jostling each other, pushing, shoving, swearing. Every morning somebody was knocked to the pavement.

“Hey, Denny, is your girlfriend mad at you?” Dracula called out, causing a sudden silence and a halting of activity while everybody looked at him. “She don’t show up anymore.”

Denny ignored him.

Which only encouraged the monster to continue.

“Guess she found another guy, right, Denny? A good-looking guy this time, right, Denny? Like a guy with a car, right, Denny?”

Denny envisioned himself walking over to the monster, knocking him down with a vicious blow to the jaw, leaping on him, strangling him slowly while the kid turned blue, struggling at first, then dying slowly, painfully.

Then he told himself to forget it: he was a monster all right, but still just a kid.

One afternoon, he stood outside Barstow High School in another attempt to find Dawn. He had discovered that Normal Prep’s school day ended a half hour earlier than Barstow High’s and that he could, with luck and perfect timing, reach Dawn’s school a minute or two before hundreds
of students burst out of the place as classes ended for the day.

He had stationed himself in front of the school near the nine orange buses whose engines throbbed while waiting for their passengers. Denny figured Dawn would be getting on one of the buses.

The bell rang, once, twice, three times, and doors all over the building flew open, followed by a wave of students, going in all directions as if sprayed from a hose. Denny’s eyes darted here, there and everywhere as crowds of students headed for the buses. He saw a lot of girls—short, tall, dark, light, in jeans, skirts, one blond girl in a flowered dress that reached her ankles—but no Dawn.

Ten minutes later, the buses had lumbered away, engines roaring, gears grinding. Denny felt suddenly conspicuous standing on the sidewalk in his Norman Prep uniform, a stranger among the few stragglers who lingered in front of the school. His big chance had passed. Loneliness clutched him. Along with the knowledge that he faced a three-mile walk home. Alone.

F
inally, he answered the afternoon call.

He had not planned to do it, was used to hearing it ring every day. Why did he pick up the phone at that particular moment?

He didn’t know why, exactly.

He was lonesome in the empty apartment, was not in the mood for homework, not in the mood for anything. At that moment the phone rang.

Without thinking of the consequences, he picked it up.

He pressed the receiver to his ear, did not speak, did not say hello. And, thrilled, heard that smoky voice:

“Is that you, Denny? I hope it’s you. I can hear you breathing.”

He drew in his breath and still did not say anything.

“Please don’t hang up, Denny, like last time. I’ve been calling and calling, wanting to talk to you so badly …”

Still said nothing. Hypnotized by her voice, her words. Wanting
to talk to you.

“Aren’t you lonesome? Alone every afternoon? New in town and no friends to talk to …”

How does she know all that? he wondered.

“Who are you?” he asked. Maybe she’d tell him this time.

“Someone just like you. Who knows how it is to be alone.”

“Are you the same person who calls my father during the night?”

The question came out of his mouth as spontaneously and unplanned as his act of picking up the phone had been.

Big pause. Her turn to be silent. The shoe on the other foot, as his father would say.

“I think a lot of people call your father, Denny.”

“Why do
you
call him?” he asked, softening his voice but sensing that he was on the right track with this line of questioning.

“I don’t know about the others. I only know that I can’t sleep at night and that’s why I call.”

“That’s a rotten thing to do. Do you know what it feels like to hear a phone ring like that in the middle of the night? My father hardly sleeps anymore.”

“But I’m calling
you
now,” she said. “Daytime, afternoon …”

He sighed, and his question came on the breath of that
sigh. “Why?” His anger spent, genuinely curious. Why should she be calling him?

“I want to get to know you, Denny. And maybe you can get to know me … and if you get to know me, you might understand a lot of things you don’t understand now.”

“What things?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you the next time I call. Will you talk to me again, Denny? I have so much I want to tell you …”

“I don’t know,” he said, and hung up abruptly, just as he had spontaneously picked up the telephone a few moments earlier.

T
hat
boy’s voice
, Lulu says,
so sweet, such a sweet voice.

But Lulu’s voice is not so sweet, and I see what is flashing in her eyes, the mischief there. More than mischief: malice. Mischief is playful but the thing in Lulu’s eyes is not playful at all.

Such a nice boy
, Lulu says, her voice flat and deadly and not nice at all.

Are you going through with it, then, Lulu?
I ask.

Was there ever any doubt, Baby?

She still calls me Baby, but not tenderly like in the old days. We laughed a lot in those days, and loved the same things and practically thought the same thoughts. She says she still loves me and that she has taken care of me in my
dark days and so I must take care of her through her own darkness.