Midnight Voices (7 page)

Alicia Albion looked worried when she opened the door for Andrea Costanza. Worried, and tired.

“I’m afraid I’m being much worse about this than Rebecca is,” she said fretfully, the fingers of one hand nervously rubbing those of the other, which looked a little swollen. “My arthritis,” she went on as she saw Andrea looking at her hands. “Most of the time it doesn’t bother me, but sometimes. . . .” Her voice trailed away, and she shrugged the whole matter off as if it weren’t even worth talking about. “She wanted to go to school, but we kept her home. She’s still in bed, and I’m making her some soup.”

For the first time, Andrea noticed the aroma wafting from the kitchen. It was a strange scent, almost bitter, smelling nothing like the wonderful chicken soup her mother used to make, which had imbued the whole house with the aroma of herbs and spices. Alicia Albion’s soup smelled almost medicinal, and the only image it brought to Andrea’s mind was of a bowl of lukewarm grayish broth that was offered to her when she’d been in the hospital having her appendix out at the age of ten. Even now the thought of that soup made her stomach knot in rebellion. “May I go in and see her?” she asked, avoiding any comment on the strange odor emanating from the kitchen.

“Oh, please do,” Alicia said. “She likes you so much.”

As Alicia disappeared into the kitchen, Andrea made her way down the hall into the big corner bedroom that was Rebecca’s. Rebecca herself was propped up against a bank of pillows, and though she looked a little pale, her eyes lit up when she saw Andrea. “You did come!” she said.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Andrea countered. “When I heard you were sick, wild dogs wouldn’t have kept me away.”

“I’m not really sick,” Rebecca assured her. “I felt much worse on Saturday, and I’m going back to school tomorrow.”

“You are if Dr. Humphries says you are,” Alicia pronounced, coming into the room with a steaming bowl of soup on a white wicker bed tray. She set it carefully in front of Rebecca, then tucked a huge napkin around the girl’s neck. “Don’t burn yourself,” she cautioned. “It’s hot.”

Rebecca dipped a spoon into the soup—which was every bit as thin and colorless as the stuff that had been served to Andrea in the hospital years ago—blew on it for a second or two, then slurped it noisily into her mouth. If it tasted as bad as it looked, Rebecca was managing to put on a far better face than Andrea could have. “Want some?” the little girl asked.

“I made it for you,” Alicia protested.

“Couldn’t Andrea have just a taste?” she begged.

“I can’t imagine she’d want one!”

Rebecca turned back to Andrea. “Tell her you want some. It’s really good.”

Through the exchange between the young girl and the middle-aged woman Andrea had been watching and listening as carefully as she knew how and everything she’d both seen and heard had told her that there was nothing amiss in this household.

Rebecca had the flu.

Alicia Albion was taking care of her.

Both of them seemed totally relaxed with each other.

Then why did she have the sense that something was wrong?

She stayed another half hour, and even managed to try the soup, which she told herself couldn’t really be as bad as it tasted, since Rebecca was still slurping it down as if it were the best thing she’d ever eaten. Other than the soup, which was obviously a problem only for herself, Andrea got no sense of anything at all being amiss, and finally, at ten, she took her leave.

It’s me,
she told herself as she started back toward the elevator.
It’s me, and this creepy building.
But just as she was about to get back in the elevator cage, a man of perhaps sixty appeared at the head of the stairs. Tall, with thick iron-gray hair framing craggily handsome features, he wore a black suit and carried an old-fashioned medical bag. When he looked at Andrea she thought she saw something in his eyes.

Surprise?

Uncertainty?

Or hostility?

The moment passed so quickly she wasn’t certain it had happened at all; the man was already hurrying down the hall. A moment later he knocked at the door of Apartment 7-C.

“Dr. Humphries!” she heard Alicia Albion say a moment later. “Thank you for coming. Rebecca’s in her room.” Andrea reached out and pressed the button that would take the elevator back to the lobby, but just before it began its descent she saw the black-clad man turn and look at her again. This time, she was quite sure she knew what she saw.

It was, indeed, hostility.

And from a man—apparently a doctor—she’d never seen before in her life.

Even though he’d been at Columbus Middle School for almost four months, Ryan still hadn’t gotten used to it. “It’ll be all right,” his mother had promised when she told him he wouldn’t be going to the Elliott Academy anymore. “You’ll see—you’ll like it.”

But he hadn’t liked it.

He hadn’t liked it at all.

That first day, when he’d stepped inside his classroom, everyone had stared at him, and made him feel like some kind of alien or something. But it wasn’t just that. A lot of the kids—girls as well as boys—looked like they were mad at him, even though they’d never even met him before. And at the very first recess, he found out why. The teacher had told them the one thing he’d hoped she wouldn’t: what school he’d come from. Only the week before he’d been walking home with some of his friends from the Academy, and suddenly a bunch of public school boys had come around the corner. Right away, they’d started yelling things at Ryan and his friends, trying to pick a fight. But Ryan—and all the rest of the boys from the Academy—had remembered what their teacher had told them. “Just ignore it—those children don’t know you, and they don’t want to know you. All they want is to pick a fight with you, and if you give in to them, you’ve sunk to their level. Just remember who you are, and walk away.” But that first day at Columbus Ryan was right there in the middle of them, all by himself, and there was nowhere to walk away to.

Half a dozen boys had formed a circle around him, and started calling him names. He didn’t even know what some of the words they shouted at him meant, but not knowing exactly what they were calling him didn’t make it hurt any less. At first he’d tried to do exactly as Mr. Fields at the Academy had told him, and just walk away. But every time he tried to escape from the circle of his classmates, they shoved him back, more roughly every time, and finally he decided it was safer just to stand there and try to shut it all out.

Now, four months later, nothing much had changed. Even though some of his classmates had stopped teasing him all the time, the kids from the next grade had started a game they called “Cryin’ Ryan” where the winner was the first guy who could make him start crying. He’d known better than to tell the teachers what was happening, certain that the best thing that would happen was that the teachers would tell him to fight back, and the worst was that the older kids would find out he’d told on them, and start beating him up after school. So he tried to just tough it out, figuring that maybe if he could just keep from crying, they’d get bored. But when he’d stopped reacting to their words, they’d started punching him instead, and it hadn’t taken long before he’d figured out that the safest thing to do was just start crying and get it over with.

Now, as he approached the lunchroom with his brown paper bag containing a peanut butter and honey sandwich, an apple, and a carton of warm milk clutched tightly in his hand, he felt the first pangs of now-familiar anxiety grip him. Lunchtime had been the worst part of the first day, when a kid he’d never seen before had grabbed his lunch bag, dumped the contents of it out onto the table, then split them up among himself and his friends. By the second week, Ryan had learned to hunt for a table he could have to himself—those first weeks, no one at all would come and sit with him—and eat his lunch as fast as he could, before someone could steal it. The last couple of months he’d started having lunch with three other boys from his class, who’d started acting a little friendlier when they found out he was pretty good with a soccer ball. They weren’t exactly friendly—they never wanted him to hang out with them after school unless it was a soccer day—but at least they weren’t trying to steal his lunch anymore. But today, as he wound his way through the tables to the far corner where they were sitting, he could see that something was wrong.

Larry Bronski stared at him for a few seconds, then whispered something to Jeff Wheeler and Joey Garcia. By the time he got to the table, they were all glaring at him, and when he sat down, none of them spoke to him.

The knot of anxiety in his stomach congealed into a nauseous feeling. “What’s wrong?” he finally asked, glancing from one face to the next. “You guys pissed at me?”

Jeff Wheeler rolled his eyes. “Why’n’t you go eat somewhere else, jerkface.”

Ryan barely flinched at the words, but his eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about? What’d I do?”

“How come you didn’t show Saturday?” Larry Bronski demanded.

“Show for what?” Ryan asked, even though he knew exactly what Bronski was talking about.

“Soccer, dummy. Remember? We was all gonna play after lunch? But you didn’t show, so we was one guy short.”

Before he could even think, Ryan blurted out the truth. “My mom had to go to work, and she won’t let me go to the park by myself.” Too late he realized his mistake, and as Jeff Wheeler’s voice rang out above the hum of talk and laughter that had filled the lunchroom only a second ago, Ryan’s face burned with humiliation.

“Your mommy wouldn’t let you go? Your mommy? Hey!” he yelled out to anyone within earshot, which was everyone in the suddenly quiet lunchroom, “Did you hear that? Cryin’ Ryan can’t even go to the park by himself. His mommy has to go with him!”

“I didn’t say that—” Ryan began, but it was too late.

“Then what did you say?” Larry Bronski asked. “Does it have to be your nanny, instead of your mommy?” Snatching Ryan’s lunch bag away from him, Larry tossed it to someone at the next table, but as Ryan lunged after it, the bag sailed over his head to someone else.

And suddenly, after four months of humiliation, taunts and abuse, Ryan had had enough. Swinging around to face Larry Bronski, his eyes blazing with sudden fury, Ryan reached out, grabbed the other boy’s shirt, and yanked him across the table. “Get it back!” Ryan yelled. “Get my lunch back, or I’m gonna smash your face in!”

“Leggo of me!” Larry cried out. “Jeez, what’s—”

But the rest of his words were lost in the melee as three guys from the next table grabbed Ryan, yanked him off Bronski, and threw him to the floor. Suddenly kids were screaming all around him as he felt a foot lash into his side, and another strike his face. Then, as he tried to protect his face with his arms, he heard something else.

“All right, that’s it!” a man’s voice commanded, and as the crowd of kids around him began to quiet down, a hand reached down, closed on his arm, and pulled him to his feet. “Okay, who wants to tell me what’s going on?” the voice asked.

As Ryan tried to wipe his bleeding nose and streaming eyes with his sleeve, he heard one of the kids say, “Evans started it! He grabbed Bronski’s shirt, and started screamin’ at him for no reason at all! We was just helpin’ Bronski!”

Five minutes later, still nursing his nose, Ryan found himself sitting in the principal’s office.

And the principal was calling his mother.

“It’s for you, Caroline.”

Caroline could tell by the tone of Claire Robinson’s voice that the call wasn’t about business, and she could also tell that Claire was fast losing patience with her. This was the third non-business call that morning; the first had been from someone at Visa asking when they could expect the minimum monthly payment on her maxed-out credit card, the second from her landlord, suggesting that if she couldn’t pay the rent, perhaps she should be looking for a less expensive apartment. And if her voice hadn’t been enough to let Caroline know that the thin ice she was skating on was rapidly melting out from under her, the tight-lipped glare Claire gave her as she shoved the phone toward her certainly made the message loud and clear.

Three minutes later, having heard the news that Ryan had been in a fight and that she needed to go to the school both to collect her son and to discuss his situation, Caroline kept the phone pressed to her ear for almost a full minute after the principal had hung up.
Don’t panic,
she told herself.
You’ll get through this. Just deal with one thing at a time.
And the first thing was Ryan. The rest of it—the money for the bills and the rent—would just have to wait. She finally set the receiver on its cradle and turned to face Claire Robinson, who was standing a few feet away, her back so affectedly turned that Caroline knew she’d been straining to hear what her caller might be saying.

“I’m going to have to be gone for awhile,” she said. “I’m sure it won’t take more than an hour.” She hesitated, but then decided she might as well get it all said at once. “And when I get back, can we talk about the possibility of me getting an advance on my salary?”

Claire Robinson’s expression hardened. “Actually, I wanted to discuss your salary with you, too. I think it’s time you went on full commission. It might motivate you to sell more, and of course the commission will be higher, since there won’t be a guarantee.” She hesitated, then spoke again. “But of course if you’re not going to be able to put in all the hours necessary. . . .” She left the implication of her words hanging, having no need to spell it out for Caroline.

“I’m sorry,” Caroline said. “I’ll make up the hours. I’ll keep the store open later. I’ll—” She cut off her words, hearing the desperation in her own voice. She took a deep breath, regained control of her emotions, and when she spoke again, her voice was steady. “I’ll be back in an hour.” Grabbing her shoulder bag, she started toward the door, where Kevin Barnes intercepted her, a worried look on his face.

“You okay?”

Caroline hesitated, then nodded. “I’m fine,” she said. “Of course, the bills are past due, my son has a bloody nose and is about to get suspended from school, and Claire wants to cut off my salary, but hey, what could be wrong?”