That Night (16 page)

They continued on, repeated another circuit and then headed back the way they had come, doubled back, added a few new streets to their route. They no longer missed the sounds of their radios. There was the hard, ripping drone of their engines. They could feel it in their feet and all up and down their legs.

The next time they passed her house, the boy in the front passenger seat of the first car gave the gathered audience his enormous Sergeant Bilko grin.

Rick sat low in his seat, staring out past the shoulders of his friends, through the green-tinted windshield that his own dark glasses made black. He was only vaguely aware of the passing shadows of trees, lights coming on here and there. He no longer thought of all the other days and nights he had passed by these houses and along these streets.

None of it was familiar to him now. He saw it only from the corners of his eyes and what he saw seemed vague and indifferent, and somehow threatening in that indifference. Nothing else seemed to know that the world had changed in the past few days. Or not even changed, he thought, but become again, with a vengeance, what it had been before he met her: flat, uncaring, withdrawing all that it offered every time he put out his hand. Handing him jokes. He remembered a movie he had seen once as a kid, a scene from it that had bored itself into his nightmares: a little girl holding a bundle, a baby in a bonnet, squirming and crying. She tries to quiet it, begins singing a light song. The crying grows louder and louder and the squirming more violent. You wonder how a little baby can squirm so much. You’re afraid she’ll drop it. Then there’s a nose, a little hoof flinging itself from the blankets. The girl looks down and sees it’s not a baby at all but a pig—the baby has turned into a pig, or it had been a pig all along. She drops it with a start. The creature runs off, the satin bonnet flapping against its hide.

Everything he was handed withdrawn or suddenly, inexplicably, transformed. Waking from a nap, coming home from school or in from play to find that nothing in the flat, indifferent world had changed: the television might still be on, wet clothes might still be in the washer, a piece of meat left on the counter to thaw: only she had disappeared.

He could feel the sweat on his neck, smell the musky odor of the car and, mingling with it, the odor of cut grass. He could feel the heat of his friends pressed beside him.

“Right?” Victor said, and he nodded. The world swinging slowly across the dark windshield: house, lawn, lamppost, street. He would simply walk up to her front door.

“How much longer?” one of them asked.

“Give it time,” he said. The streetlights were touching the cars, the back windshield of the car in front, the hood and doors of the one he rode in, the one behind, rolling over them again and again. His friends shifted their feet; the chains on the floor made a small clink.

“Not too late,” one of them was saying. “You don’t want it to be too dark.”

“No,” Rick told them. “I know when.”

He would simply walk up to her front door. He’d done it a million times already. He would make everything be the same, push back the time, wrestle whatever had changed to the floor. He didn’t care if it took a million friends, a hundred cars, chains the size of boulders. He would make it go back to what it was. She had said it herself, she had promised him: nothing else would matter to them, friends, family, getting older, good luck or bad.

The lights were passing slowly over the cars. The engines were straining to keep their slow and steady pace. They moved invisibly now, no one watching, no one coming to their windows or their doors.

He would simply go into her house and pull from it what had been. He would say no for the first time. He would say, No, I’m not taking it, I’m not taking this. His mother disappearing, standing right before him and disappearing, taking with her that part of him she had filched when she was well. His father drawing in, curling into a ball, his skin, hair, bones, voice growing thinner and thinner by the hour, his father getting ready to disappear.

As a kid, he had imagined forcing open her mouth, reaching his hand in, pulling his real mother out the way the hunter had pulled the swallowed citizens from the wolfs stomach. He had imagined, just yesterday, just this morning, kicking the crutches out from under his father’s arms, bending his back straight, forcing him to return.

It was the same: He would walk calmly up to her front door. He had his friends, the wide engines of these three heavy cars, the chains. He would make it go back to what it was.

They turned slowly, one, two, three, onto Sheryl’s block. Victor gripped the wheel.

“You know what to do,” Rick said, encouraging him.

Victor nodded. “We know.”

He pressed himself into the seat, between the fat leather shoulders of his friends. He would simply walk up to her front door: nothing’s changed. The other boys were tense and silent. Their scent suddenly moved like a draft through the car.

The sound was violent, blinding. The first car gunned and spun and Victor’s arms were moving in wide, quick arcs over the steering wheel. They felt the leap, the banging over the curb, the sound. The sound of it seemed unbelievable. And then the doors on one side swung open. Everything outside was still.

He knew he had done it as soon as his boot touched the walk. The exhaust hung in the air like gunpowder, like magician’s dust. He had done it. Wasn’t the house there as it always had been before? Wasn’t he walking toward it as he had done a million times before, the sound of his heels neat and confident?

He calmly mounted the steps, politely rattled the front door. He slipped his hands into his back pockets, waiting. Then he leaned forward, cupping his hands to his eyes. There was the familiar living room, dimmed by the screen, drained of color. In a minute, he would enter it, as he’d done so many times before. In a minute, she would come, smiling to see him.

Something moved in the shadows. He stepped away. Hadn’t he done it?

Wasn’t he back?

That night Sheryl and Pam laid out the pattern they had bought on the living room floor. Pam showed Sheryl how to use the dart wheel and tracing paper, how to cut in a straight line with pinking shears, to match fabrics and base seams. She set up the ironing board and ironed the material with every step, the smell of old starch and steam filling the warm air. Pam’s husband and children were down in the family room with her parents, watching television, but Roger, the youngest, kept wandering up to see what his mother and Sheryl were doing. Eventually, he stayed. He stretched out on the floor beside them as they cut the material, and then fell asleep while Sheryl guided the material through the machine, Pam standing over her. He slept like an infant, his cheek flat against the carpet and his mouth open, his arms straight at his side, the back of his small hands to the floor. When the dress was finished but for the hem and buttons, Pam went into the kitchen to make popcorn and pour Cokes for everyone. Idly, Sheryl knelt beside the sleeping child, running her hand back and forth through the thick carpet.

At about ten o’clock, Pam and her husband got ready to go home. Her husband was tall and blond, not handsome but somewhat sweet and comical in his Bermuda shorts. Sheryl watched him as he gently lifted Roger from the floor. The child whimpered a little as he rose through the air, but then settled against his father’s body as if it had been made for his rest, the shoulder carved to fit his cheek, the arm bent simply to cradle him.

This evening, each time she had gone into her room to try on the new dress, Sheryl had noticed the swelling in her stomach and breasts.

Lulled for the moment by the calm industry of the evening, but the pleasant house filled with more family than she had ever known, she had thought with some curiosity and a kind of pride of the baby she carried, the child she would be mother to. She had even stood sideways before the mirror, her hands on her stomach, her eyes meeting her own in the mirror, large and soulful, the classic pregnant madonna pose. She had even smiled.

But now as she watched her cousin’s husband turning casually and only a little stiffly to see where the other two children had gone, the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

She cried out, a short, breathless shout, or, in the bustle of their departure, merely stood silently, tears in her eyes.

Seeing her, hearing her, Pam turned and said, “Oh, honey,” as if something precise and delicate had toppled over, so close to its completion.

Sheryl turned from them all and went into her room alone.

At eleven-thirty, her mother called to say, in a thin and angry voice that made her seem a stranger, “Well, we had a visit from your boyfriend tonight.”

Sometime later, when most of the lights had been extinguished around the house and Sheryl lay awake in her strange bed, Pam came into her room. She was back from her own house, where she had gotten her children to sleep, and then returned just to speak to her. (For in her fierce sympathy, her boundless energy, she had made Sheryl her project, her quest, had taken her on as a few years later she might take on a career, a degree, a lover, a few years later when the chasm that was now at the heart of her life as a mother and a wife had been revealed to her as something shared and justifiable and capable of being healed only by a virtuous selfishness.)

Seeing Sheryl was awake, or hearing her crying from the hallway, she stepped into the dark room. From the window came a pale blue light, the outer edge of the one light that was kept on throughout the night. It fell through the corner of the shade in a straight bar. She stood by the girl’s bed, a reverse silhouette, pale against the darkness but without detail.

Whispering, she asked if she could stay, if she could speak. Sheryl only turned toward her, her eyes alone catching the bit of light and shining briefly with it.

The squeak of the thin bed frame, the heavy weight on the mattress and the rustle of Sheryl’s legs beneath the sheet as she moved them away. The house was quiet but for the distant rumble of a passing truck. The air was hot and humid.

“Honey,” she began. She began with a gentle attempt to convince the girl that she understood perfectly what she was feeling.

“I know how hard this is for you.” “I know this is a difficult time.”

“I know this isn’t easy.”

And then, to win her to her side, “I know how much you must have loved your boyfriend.”

The blue light lying like a bandage along the side of her face, along the fleshy shoulder and bare arm. “You probably miss him a lot. Your mom said you saw him every day. It must be terrible, suddenly being separated like this. I remember.”

The story she then told was as all attempts at sympathy are: an effort to match in form and size and detail what another has known: to hold one experience next to another the way lovers and children match fingers and hands, as if these two, side by side, are linked by their likeness, are both identical and unique.

“I was once in love with a boy, too. When I was just about your age. And we were separated. And I thought I would never be able to go on living. I thought I’d kill myself or die of a broken heart—just not wake up some morning after crying all night.” There was a facetiousness in her voice that Sheryl could not fail to hear. The smirk behind the words of an adult who has too readily joined a child’s game. Her cousin was old enough, had been married long enough, to know that this sort of love was not it, this romantic love for a boyfriend or young husband was not, after all, what lasted; that it was foolish, even adolescent to believe it might. She was young enough in her life as a mother to feel quite certain that only the love she had for her children was worth the drama and intensity the young gave to one another. It was what she had meant when she told Sheryl, just wait: it was the only love that could even begin to match the other’s foolish claims.

“But every morning I did get up,” she went on. “I didn’t die. And days kept on, one after the other, and things slowly began to change. I began to feel better, little by little. Little by little, I thought of other things. I met someone else. I got over it.”

In the dark room, in the single shaft of the blue night light—the light kept burning merely to demonstrate to the night that the family in this house is watchful, determined to be safe—it is the only wisdom an adult can offer the child. It is both an incantation and a prayer:

You will and you must. Not merely get over the loss, but also learn that its insult is not nearly as great as it once seemed.

“I know it doesn’t seem possible now, but in a few years you’ll be different and what seems like a terrible loss to you now will only seem natural, a small part of your life. You’ll have trouble remembering just how you feel today and why. You’ll meet someone else. You’ll have other children, lots of them, and then you’ll see. You’ll be happy.”

What she couldn’t have known, in her sympathy, her easy wisdom (for she was right, it would happen even to Sheryl exactly as she had said), was how the girl had linked her father and Rick, the way she had determined to love them. She couldn’t have known that for Sheryl, bereft as she was, peace was annihilation and to say that love could fade, that loss could heal, was to admit forever that there would be no return of the dead.