That Night (4 page)

I was at the age when I believed that if either of my parents died, I would simply die too, would simply disappear, as if with their last breath they would draw me back into themselves, just as they had once told me they had kissed each other and breathed me into life. (Which was not the mere bit of whimsy it may seem. I had asked them what all that heavy breathing they did in their bedroom was meant to achieve.) That Sheryl still lived, that she dressed herself in the morning, ate food, sometimes even smiled, all with her father dead, seemed far more remarkable to me than the fact that she was also growing into an adult.

Apparently, it struck our neighbors the same way: more than our first female teenager, she was our first parent less child.

And Rick, given her fatherless ness the way she had trembled in her tight skirt and dark stockings, the way her thick makeup had seemed so pathetic on her childish face, bruised with weeping, Rick must have seemed merely a pleasant diversion for the poor girl, maybe someone she could talk to. Not the best boy in the school, but better at any rate (let’s face it) than someone like Larry Lawlor, who ate whole sticks of butter, played the clarinet and still, at seventeen, appeared costume less every Halloween to rattle an orange milk carton in your face and to say in his girl’s voice, “Trick or Treat for Unicef.”

Mr. Carpenter was wrong: no one could have seen it coming, could have anticipated the girl’s logic, the way she had determined to love. Certainly I didn’t, and I was someone, perhaps the only one, she’d taken the trouble to explain it to.

They had met sometime during that fifteenth summer, the summer before Sheryl went away and the fight took place. At least they’d started dating then, because they must have known or seen one another in school before that. Rick was two years older, but he’d dropped out or been suspended often enough to end up in many of Sheryl’s classes. Still, it was that summer when we first saw them together.

Sheryl had a friend named Angie, who lived four or five blocks away. Early that summer, we used to see Sheryl and Angie, freshly made up and, you could be certain, smelling of Ambush cologne, meeting on our corner at about seven thirty each evening. They would then walk down toward the schoolyard, their hips bumping, their black shoes scraping over the sidewalk. Early that summer, we would see them come back, too, just after dark. We would hear their voices, made twangy and snappy by the gum they chewed. They would call good night to each other as Sheryl went inside and Angie walked back to her own house alone.

There was a sadness in Sheryl’s voice as she called to her friend, one that I associated then with her father’s death but that I’m certain now had more to do with her reluctance to see the evening end, to see the children disappear and the lights come on in the houses all up and down the street-lights that would burn her eyes when she stepped inside, that would flatten the room’s tables and chairs and make the green living room walls seem as discouraging as the triumph of stupid people. Reluctance to hand over a summer evening to small stuffy rooms and a television and the company of two” lonely widows when it is only nine o’clock (Sheryl’s mother was strict about her daughter’s hours) and the boy you would like to love will be free in the wide world until eleven or twelve.

Sometime in July it must have been, in the deeper, stiller days of the season, Sheryl came home in a car just about the time my parents and I were getting ready to go in. It was a sleek, navy-blue Chevy, and with its motor running, it seemed to tremble by the curb in front of her house as if it thrilled to the significance of this event as much as she did. She let herself out, bent to say something to the driver we had caught him just briefly as the door opened and the light went on inside: a boy, in sunglasses—and then with a wave of her hand she ran across the lawn to her door. The car tooted its horn, leaped to a start, screeched to a stop at our corner and then tooted again as it took off down the street.

That was the last we saw of Angie.

On Saturday night, when the car returned and Rick got out, my mother said, “Oh, Sheryl has a date,” and I should remind her the next time she tells me the chosen Miss America isn’t nearly as pretty as the one who looked like Sheryl that she had said it with a kind of gratitude, as if the girl deserved it, after all she had been through, as if the boy were merely being kind. Late in that summer, just before school started, I brought my pajamas and my pillow to Diane Rossi’s house. We stayed awake through most of the Late Show, and when we heard the car pull up outside, we turned off the television and crawled over the bed to the window. Kneeling on our pillows, we could see them walk toward Sheryl’s house. Rick had his arm across her shoulder. She held the hand he had draped there. At her steps, they kissed again (it was the first time we’d seen them kiss, but even at that age we knew it was again). I remember how painfully her head seemed to bend back as he leaned over her. She climbed the steps, but after she’d opened her front door, she turned and came back down again. She paused above him.

He pressed his face into her chest and she wrapped her thin arms around his head. In the yellow pool of light from her hallway they were nearly silhouettes. Only a bit of light caught his shoe, the pale material of his shirt, her white arms. Delicately, she turned her head, touching her cheek to his hair. She seemed to sigh or, with a dancer’s grace, to softly lift her body and settle it down again with one breath. Then, abruptly, she threw her head back, his face still pressed to her breasts, and looked straight up at the sky. Some light from a neighbor’s house seemed to penetrate the fine ends of her ratted hair, seemed to touch her throat and her forehead.

She bent her head again, dipped it back into the shadows, kissed his forehead and lips and throat in a kind of blessing, turned and went inside.

He moved quickly once she had closed the door and again tapped his horn as he pulled away, setting someone’s dog barking.

Diane and I sank down into our pillows. We could feel the warm night air on our faces. We could smell the summer dust on the windowsill. We could hear her brother, Billy, his summers numbered, snoring in the next room. I think we must have gone right to sleep.

In the days that followed the fight, and they were all hot days, humid and cloudless, the front door of Sheryl’s house remained closed and only the shades in the front window, opened in the morning, pulled down in the evening, hours before it was time to turn on a light, reminded us that her mother and grandmother still lived there.

In the middle of one hot afternoon, a black car with a blue police light on its dashboard pulled into the driveway and a man in a thin, somewhat shiny blue suit got out. He wearily climbed the steps, rang the bell and then rapped on the aluminum screen door. We saw him reach into his inside coat pocket as he waited, saw when Sheryl’s mother came to the door how he held his wallet up to the screen.

She let him in. There was an Ace bandage around her wrist.

Days later, my mother told me that Sheryl’s mother and grandmother were gone. She said she supposed they went to Ohio, where Sheryl was. I’d been outside for most of the day every day and so I imagined they’d left very early in the morning, maybe before dawn. I imagined them running between the house and the car like fugitives, rolling quietly down their driveway, turning on their headlights only when they’d reached the boulevard.

I wonder now what heartache it caused them, the mother especially, fleeing her home like that, the home she had made with her husband. I wonder now how bitterly she had looked back across the year and a half that saw her lose her husband, her daughter, her home. With what envy she had looked at the other houses along our block as she drove past them for the last time that morning. How peaceful, how untouched they must have seemed to her, those houses where the brave men slept, their wives tucked under their arms, their children nearby.

Or perhaps as she drove past the shuttered houses, with their damp lawns and purring window fans, she saw instead how precarious their peace was, how momentary. Maybe she saw instead the coming troubles: the scattering of sons, the restlessness of wives, the madness of daughters. Maybe she was aware, in her flight that early morning, that all futures were as uncertain as her own, that even as she drove away, her mother crying quietly beside her, the very blood that pulsed through their veins and set the rhythm that kept their wives asleep was moving pain and age and sorrow to the hearts of the good men.

The house remained empty all the rest of that summer. A police cruiser passed by twice a day and, according to my parents, twice every night. We had all been forbidden to go near the property, and although I had once, on a dare, run up the driveway and rung the side bell, it wasn’t hard to keep us away. Up close and face to face, the house seemed sad, but if you pretended to forget it or let it remain in the corner of your eye as you teased Timmy or George Evers or flirted with Billy Rossi or Billy Carpenter, it seemed almost thrilling, almost like a dare. A reminder of the risks and pitfalls of a journey we were taking only the first, tentative steps toward—one that would give us the power for the first time in our lives to bring our entire family to ruin.

Just before Halloween, the Meyer twins tried to start a rumor that Sheryl and her mother and grandmother and even Sheryl’s baby were still living in the house, in the top, attic, floor, that the police brought them food and clothing in the middle of the night, but none of us would go for it, even when they claimed they had peeked into the kitchen window at three a.m. and seen four eggs boiling in a pot on the stove.

They had gone to Ohio, we were certain of it. And we named the state as if it were another dimension. Ohio. The sound of it shaped like a drain, a well, like a mouth that had opened to receive them. Ohio. We would spend our whole lives in this neighborhood, in these very houses, even, but she, we were certain, would never come back.

I imagined sending a cryptic message to the jail. I imagined him circling the country until he found her.

We were chalking a spiraling hopscotch into the street before my house and the fingers we moved along the tarred road were growing cold. It was mid-November. The dark tire marks in Sheryl’s lawn had lost their sharp edges, like scars that had begun to heal. Our fathers were raking leaves, receding already from the summer’s men’s club, ducking their heads after muffled greetings. Two cars pulled up to her house. A woman got out of one; a couple about our parents’ age got out of the other. The three climbed the steps, the couple looking behind and around them as the boys in the gang had done that night. The woman opened the door and then stepped back to let the couple inside. Behind the screen were the white stripes of the stairs. The shades in the living room went up, and after a bit of a struggle (we could see the woman’s forearms behind the glass, and then the man’s), the front windows groaned open. The moving vans were there by the first of the year.

The bowling alley in our town was air-cooled: the decal on the door showed the letters capped with blue and-white glaciers, dripping like mounds of ice cream. Inside, the cold air smelled of foot powder and warm socks. There was a row of pinball machines in the entryway, a cigarette machine, two mahogany-colored phone booths with seats like Ping-Pong paddles and doors that turned on both a light and a fan when they were pulled closed. As you entered, there was always the seemingly faraway echo of rolling balls and falling pins. There was the sense, especially in the dimly lit area behind the alleys with its wiry carpeting and small square tables, its trophy hutch and padded bar, of a public place striving to become, for an hour or two, a place to call your own: a homey, ingratiating sense matched only by certain movie theaters and the basement rec rooms of some of our neighbors.

From here Rick made his first troubled call, a day or two, perhaps as much as a week, before that night.

He had not seen her at the supermarket where she worked and where he usually picked her up on summer evenings. The kid who collected the steel carts from the parking lot said she’d already gone home.

He may have thought of driving to her house, but he was young enough to still be wary, even of her: young enough to fear that any change of routine could portend a sudden and inexplicable change of heart. He drove instead to the bowling alley, where he knew his friends would be. He called from there, the fan whirring above him, the distant sound of the balls and the pins like that of a battle heard from across a wide sea.

Her mother’s voice was sad and determined. Sheryl wasn’t there. There was no saying when she’d be in.

He rubbed his palms on his thighs before he left the booth, and outside he began to shrug even before his friends had turned to see him. “I don’t know where the hell she is.

“Shopping,” one of them said.

In a taunting voice, “Maybe she’s buying you a present, Ricky.”

Only the thickest of them failing to imagine the worst, what was coming for him: the end of the romance.

He stayed with them long after the hour he usually drove off alone with Sheryl. He leaned against his car, one foot hooked back onto the bumper. He grew impatient with their conversation, yet discouraged them when they said, “Let’s move.” He called her again. The summer-league bowlers had begun to play, and through the glass panels of the booth he could see the backs of their bright, identical shirts, foolish and indifferent—Mr. Carpenter and my father among them. He let the phone ring twenty-three times and then hung up and dialed again. Now it was busy.

He left the booth before he could imagine her: carefully re cradling the receiver.