What We Saw at Night (2 page)

“Most certainly negatory,” I said. “Rob has as much of a chance with Juliet as Howard.” (This in reference to a custodian of indeterminate age, who had worked at the hospital and clinic since shortly before time began. All of us knew Howard because he never really seemed to leave. Any time any of us had ever been there, he was either pushing the big rubber dumpster through the halls or lying down inside it, singing some of his favorite religious hits.)

“I just thought you should have them,” Mom said.

“Isn’t this the kind of thing you’re supposed to find hidden away somewhere? Then start crying and saying your little girl is all grown up?”

My mother sighed. “That would be conventional,” she said.

Even now, I couldn’t tell if she would be happy if I actually took the birth control pills or if I didn’t. So I kept them in my underwear drawer.
I
was the one who almost cried whenever I saw them, because I knew I was the last person on earth who would ever need them.…

Juliet’s voice came down from above like a mortar shell.

“Live once!” she shouted. “Ready?”

“For a year now,” Rob muttered. “What stupid thing is she doing?”

“She’s okay,” I said, and I called softly, “Ready, Juliet!”

“She doesn’t have a light,” he pointed out.

“You don’t know that. She could have had it in a fanny pack under her sweater.”

Until recently, my little sister actually assumed that people with XP could see better in the dark, like cats. Which is absurd: on average, we probably see worse. A lot of people with XP damage their eyes with light when they’re little before they even know they have it. Rob and Juliet and I kept miners’ headlamps and little Maglites in our backpacks if we had to pick a lock or peer down a ravine or around a dark corner.

“Are you right where I left you?” Juliet called, very far away. “You have to watch every second of this. You’re my witnesses!”

I called back, “We’re right here!”

One of the things you learn pretty quickly if you live your life at night is that—unless you’re literally standing on someone’s front porch—you can pretty much be as loud as you want. No one will hear you or see you. Definitely, no one will care. We had Juliet’s dad to thank in part for our freedom, of
course. Tommy Sirocco was one of the Iron County sheriff’s deputies, and he worked the midnight shift solely because his family’s life was set up around his daughter. Whenever he spotted Rob’s Jeep, Officer Sirocco would quietly turn his squad car away to give us privacy.

I heard a shuffling and loud scraping above. Rob tensed. Juliet was making her way across the flat graveled roof of Gitchee Gumee Pizza. The Indian name for Lake Superior is Gitchee Gumee; that wasn’t just something Longfellow made up for a poem. (Hiawatha was real, too, by the way.) The second floor of Gitchee Pizza housed the apartment of its owner and founder, Gideon Brave Bear—also a genuine Indian, a Bois Forte Chippewa; he got pissed if you used the term “Native American.” Every kid in town ate at least one meal a week at Gitchee. Fortunately, in addition to being a very good purveyor of pizza, Gideon was also a very stereotypical drunk. He wouldn’t have heard Juliet if she had been up there setting off fireworks.

We heard the scraping again, and then a few short taps.

“Juliet!” Rob cried out. “What the hell?”

Then Juliet jumped.

FOR A SHATTERING instant, I thought I was a witness to my best friend’s death: a spectacular original suicide, for an audience. It was just the kind of stunt Juliet would pull. My mind slowed to syrup as I waited for her body to hit the ground between Rob and me. Juliet had always sworn she would die her own way. Not in some bed in the darkened living room of her house or hooked up to an IV in a sterile hospital … or after an overdose with a note pinned to her pillow, which is how many lives end for people like us.

But this wasn’t death. This was
life
. The moment Juliet
launched herself from the roof, she became a whirling constellation. I couldn’t see her face. A long line of glow-in-the-dark blue stars, outlined in silver, soared out above our heads between the buildings, wheeling in space, completing a full circle. Then the stars were gone. She’d already landed on the opposite roof—hooting in her victory dance—when my brain caught up to my eyeballs.

Juliet Sirocco had just traversed a twelve-foot gap, twenty feet off the ground … while performing a front flip in mid-air. She must have shed her sweater on the roof. That explained the feverish swirl of glowing stars. She’d stenciled them on her bodysuit, all up one leg and one arm, as well as her face. Rob fumbled for the switch on his Maglite. The faint beam flickered over the roof. Juliet was punching the air and grinning down at us. I broke my promise, because I screamed. I couldn’t help it. The word exploded from deep inside: “Amazing!”

“Shut up, Allie!” Rob hissed.

“What? That was pretty amazing.”

“She could have been killed!”

I had to laugh. “What else is new?”

T
he three of us met in the sandbox. In the sandbox, at night.

You think of a happy child. That child is playing in the sun. She’s picking flowers in a field with the sun’s rays painting threads of platinum in her hair. She’s running with a kite, her chubby legs just a little tanned with the balmy blessings of midsummer. Think about it: even the
Sesame Street
theme song begins with the words, “Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away.”

That sunny day would kill us.

We were happy children, I suppose, but we ran to the swings to play when kids our age were listening to bedtime stories. In the hospital, I’d once overheard a toddler telling his parents he’d seen ghosts in the Iron Harbor playgrounds, the ghosts of children. I remember I was afraid to speak to the nurse after that because I thought I might cry. We hadn’t come back from the dead, but we did live in a parallel universe. It was our own country, the night country. We lived
there with our parents, many of whom chose to be Persephone and abide in the netherworld for the sake of love.

We also had each other.

I couldn’t even remember a time before the three of us were friends. So I knew from those playground days that Juliet would never stop. She was always the first to dive naked into Ghost Lake, black water so cold that it would freeze the blood in your veins. She was the first one to get a set of lock picks so that we could steal a joint from the back room of the guy who hand-loomed ugly ponchos for tourists. We got the weed but we only had one toke apiece. If you have XP, you really can’t smoke. Heat damage risk is huge. You can, however, drink. Juliet helped us celebrate the New Year last year by sneaking into the hot tub of a famous New York talk show host’s ski chalet, drinking the champagne we’d lifted from one of the twelve cases of Veuve Clicquot in his wine cellar.

But there was a flipside to Juliet’s adventurousness, the side that haunted Rob and me. She was the only one who took off, for weeks at a time, alone, away from us. First she had a legitimate reason: for four years, from ages eleven to fifteen, she managed to ski competitively. Sunlight be damned, she hurtled down the slopes swathed like a mummy in oversized goggles. But then, a year and a half ago, she’d suddenly stopped. Yet the disappearances continued. Like every month or so, for a few days or a week, we wouldn’t hear from her beyond a text saying
C U Soon
.

She always came back though. That was the silent mantra I repeated to myself whenever the absences seemed to reach a breaking point.
Juliet always comes back
.

JULIET CAME CLATTERING down the fire escape.

“Did you see me? Did you see me?” She was jumping
around like one of the Cat Dancers on the pom squad at Iron County High where we were students but never actually went.

“I saw you!” I said. “What made you do that?”

“What in the world would inspire even you to do something that idiotic?” Rob snapped. “That was screwed up, even for you.”

“What do you mean, even for me? Somebody who’s not a wuss?”

Rob rolled his eyes. “My point is: you don’t even know what you’re doing. People work out for years before they try anything like that.”

“I’ve been practicing it for months!” Juliet’s hair had come loose from its braid and cascaded around her shoulders. Her face blooming in the cold, she looked like a movie star, the only imperfection a little shadow of a cleft in her chin.

When she got mad, her eyes changed color, like somebody had retouched them with gold flecks. Juliet had no scars. Most people with XP who don’t find out until they are two or three years old have a lot of dark freckles: scary dark scars from sunburn. Rob had some on his back and neck. They found out he had it when he was one, and they were pushing him in his stroller at Disney World. Some lady looked at him. His mom thought she was going to say how cute he was, but instead she screamed, “What did you do to your baby?” Rob’s neck and back had morphed into an angry field of huge, dripping blisters.

I didn’t have any scars, either. But they found out I had it before I was born. Ironically, my dad is a genetics researcher. He had a cousin with XP, the fatal allergy to sunlight. (Clinically,
Xeroderma Pigmentosum
.) So they tested the unborn baby for it. And they found out—yay!—she didn’t have it.
Then she was born. Surprise! I did have it. Tests aren’t always right.

Then Dad took off.

Lots of dads do. I hadn’t seen him since I was four. He existed for me as some very nice handwriting in a few letters and a bunch of fat guilt checks that allowed us to own our house and have some nice things. Mom adopted Angela instead of latching on to some guy, which I completely admired her for, because most XP kids are only children.

What makes XP even stranger is that there are seven kinds of variations involving eight genes. Some kinds only affect your eyes and skin. But others involve cell changes from exposure to sunlight, too. Juliet and I have Type A, and Rob has Type C, but none of us have the kind that makes a child start out smart and beautiful but lose more and more every year … reading and drawing and words and steps just disappearing, like water into dry earth. If you can be grateful for something that’s impossible to be grateful for, I was grateful for this small blessing. And for my mom, especially. I couldn’t even imagine trying to raise a kid who was not only doomed to a life without sunshine, but also to lose her mind.

Juliet continued to pirouette before us.

“You’ve been practicing this alone? What if you hit the ground?” Rob demanded.

“What if I did?” Juliet said. “I’d die. Gideon would find me the next morning. Somebody’s going to find me dead sooner or later anyhow.”

As the douchebag Henry LeBecque pointed out, one of the truly extra-terrific things about XP is that you’re forced to live like a vampire, except you’re not immortal. Most people with XP die before they’re forty, although in every other way,
you’re totally normal. Juliet lived like she was dying. Some XP people do. Others just hide in the dark and wait.

Nobody said a word.

Juliet finally glared at both of us and growled, “I’m getting my sweater.” In a flash, she hurtled back up the rickety fire escape to the pizza parlor roof and came stomping back down, clearly outraged at Rob—and me, too, although I hadn’t done anything. “Go on and leave. I’ll walk home. I’m taking it you’re not interested.”

Her home was a long, lonely uphill hike from Gitchee.

“Interested in what?” I asked, glaring at Rob, too. “We’re not leaving you.”

“She can do what she wants,” Rob said in a toneless voice. He was shaking out the keys to his Jeep, mumbling about going home early. It wasn’t even three. We hardly ever went home before five. Then he relented. “Get in the car, Juliet.”

Her eyes sparkled in the darkness. “Don’t you even want to try it? Don’t you want to learn? I have two DVDs and some books. It’s the most incredible feeling. Like flying. Like an orgasm while you’re flying.”

“Sounds good already,” I said under my breath. I’d never flown in an airplane or had sex, at least with anybody else.

“I can show you how to be safe,” Juliet encouraged.

“Yes, I could absolutely see how safe you were up there,” Rob replied.

Juliet stopped in the middle of the street, her hands on her hips. “It’s a discipline, Allie. It’s called Parkour, Rob. It was invented, like, fifty years ago in France, and it’s based on strength, speed, skill, self-confidence and safety.” She opened her blue eyes wide. “
Safety?
Get it? It’s a way of getting so strong you can move as fast as you want past obstacles, or over or under them, without ever being hurt.”

“I’ve seen the videos on YouTube,” Rob said. He was already in the driver’s seat.

“One of the founders said it’s a way of touching the earth and everything on it, being part of it instead of just having it shelter you.” Juliet ran over to Rob’s side of the car. “We’ve had enough shelter, don’t you think?”

“I’ve seen the memorials too.” Rob made air-quotes. “ ‘He died doing what he loved.’ That’s as stupid as one of those stories about how some fourteen-year-old kid’s uncle shoots him while they’re deer hunting and everybody’s okay with it.”