In the Middle of the Night Read online

  “You’re Denny Colbert, right?”

  Denny nodded, flinching a bit. He wondered whether he had been found out already.

  “Listen, we’re organizing a new Student Council this year,” Jimmy Burke said. “And we’re looking for two representatives from each class. Would you be interested?”

  “Why me?” Denny asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “You’re new here. And we need new blood, new ideas.”

  “I don’t know,” Denny said. Classic stall. He didn’t want to serve on the Student Council at Norman. He had seen a book one day in the Barstow Public Library titled A Separate Peace. Later, he had thought: I’ve declared a separate peace. That’s what he wanted to say to Jimmy Burke. But didn’t, of course.

  Stepping back from Denny and pointing to the residence and the two classroom buildings, Jimmy Burke said: “Everything looks normal at Normal Prep, right?” Shaking his head sadly, he said, “Wrong. This is a great school. No drugs, no guns. But we’ve still got problems. Guys who want to take over, pushing people around, intimidating young kids. It happens at other schools, too. But it’s more damaging here. We’re small, only two hundred students. Everything gets magnified …”

  Denny had not noticed the problems Jimmy Burke talked about. But he hadn’t noticed very much, really.

  He said, “I’ve got a lot of studying to do, trying to catch up. I don’t think I’d have time for the council.”

  Jimmy Burke nodded thoughtfully. Then a frown creased his forehead and his eyes lowered. But he looked up immediately, eyes bright again with hope, possibilities. “Look, don’t give me a definite answer right now … Think about it …”

  Denny admired guys like Jimmy Burke who passionately believed in a cause, who never took no for an answer.

  “Okay,” Denny said, knowing his answer would not change.

  Later, on the bus going home, he wondered whether he really wanted a separate peace, after all. At Norman Prep, maybe. But not at home. Not with his father, now that the telephone calls had begun.

  The opposite of peace was war. Maybe that’s what he wanted—a battle against whatever or whoever had thrown a shadow over his family. But, he wondered, how do you start a war?

  He entered the apartment to the sound of the telephone splintering the afternoon silence of the rooms. Closing the door behind him, he put down his books and stood in the small foyer, waiting for the phone to stop ringing. Five, six, seven.

  Shrugging, he practiced his old method of ignoring the sound, making it a part of the atmosphere, accepting it and going about his usual routine.

  In the kitchen, he poured himself a glass of orange juice, spilled a bit on the floor, wiped it up with a paper towel. Twelve, thirteen.

  He dug some chocolate chip cookies out of the porcelain jar that said “Coffee.” His mother had a strange approach—fourteen, fifteen—to labeling. Her own little codes.

  Maybe I should answer it.

  He knew the rule.

  He stood there with the glass of juice in one hand, the cookie in the other. Did not take a drink, did not take a bite.

  Seventeen, eighteen.

  He remembered confessing once to a friend, Tommy Cantin, in the seventh grade that he was not allowed to answer the telephone. Tommy had stared at him in disbelief, as if he were a creature from an alien planet. Everybody in America answers the phone, Tommy had said. Not me, he had answered. But he was sixteen now—that made a difference.

  He went to the bathroom. Closed the door and flushed the toilet, watching the swirling water, the sound obliterating the ringing of the phone. He had used this ploy before.

  Emerging from the bathroom, he swore softly—“son of a bitch”—as the phone continued to ring. He had lost count. Must be up to twenty-nine, thirty by now. Still going strong, the sound ominous and threatening.

  The record for the afternoon was eighteen rings last year. This was absurd. Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?

  Maybe it was an emergency.

  His father injured at work. Or his mother in an accident.

  An urgency now in the ringing, filling the rooms, filling his ears, vibrating throughout his body.

  He had to stop this crazy ringing.

  But he knew the rule. His father’s rule: Do not pick up the phone. Let your mother or me answer it. If it’s for you, I will hand it over. Alone in the house, you do not answer.

  Emergency or not, he had to stop the ringing.

  More than that: he wanted to start a war, do something. Maybe this was a place to begin.

  He snatched the phone from its cradle, glad for the sudden absence of ringing, and was astonished to hear his name coming from it.

  “Denny … Denny … is that you?”

  He pressed the receiver against his ear.

  “Hello … hello,” the voice said.

  He listened, didn’t know what to say.

  “How are you today, Denny?”

  Today? As if they had been speaking yesterday.

  “I know you’re there, Denny …”

  A funny voice. Not funny really, but strange, the voice almost familiar, a low smoky kind of voice—a woman? a girl?—intimate, secretive.

  “I’d really like to know, Denny: How are you?”

  “Fine,” he said, having to reply, to say something, but his voice suddenly hoarse.

  “Gee … that’s nice. I’m glad you’re fine …”

  Definitely a woman’s voice. Not an old woman but not a girl. Or maybe a girl. He was confused. Confused also because her voice seemed to be mocking him, suggesting that he wasn’t fine, not fine at all. Which, at this moment, was true, of course.

  Clearing his throat and swallowing hard, he asked: “Who are you?” Blunter than he intended. “I mean—who is this speaking?”

  “Somebody,” she said. “A friend, maybe. But we don’t know each other that well, do we?” Amused now, as if she had said something very amusing. Then: “Yet.”

  That yet hung on the air, like an omen, a black crow on the telephone wires.

  “What do you mean, yet?” he asked, pouncing on the word. Then realized that he shouldn’t be holding this conversation and that he really didn’t want to know what she meant.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Puzzled about why he should be apologizing. “I have to hang up.”

  He took the receiver away from his ear, his hand moving in slow motion as in a dream.

  “Wait a minute … I—” Her voice was amputated as he put down the receiver.

  Palms moist, heart thudding, he let himself go limp, as if he had just escaped some terrible fate, like being sucked off a cliff.

  He picked up the glass of juice, simply because he had to make some kind of movement. But he didn’t drink it, just stood like a statue in the park.

  He could hardly believe that he had broken his father’s rule.

  Denny remembered the day his father had made the rule, a long time ago, so long ago that it was only a dim memory, but one that seized him now with a new immediacy: his father stalking the kitchen, anger like small bolts of lightning in his eyes, then finally standing in front of him like a giant, his legs like stumps of trees.

  “Do not ever … ever … answer the telephone again. Understand?”

  His father’s anger had made tears spring to Denny’s eyes, blinding him. As huge sobs racked Denny’s body, his father had enfolded him in his arms, holding him close, all anger gone, all softness and gentleness, murmuring words that soothed him like soft music. Then his mother had joined them, and as the three of them held each other, rocking back and forth, Denny had felt suddenly well loved and protected, despite the phone call and those terrible words …

  Seven years old. Third grade. Home from school. The house quiet, a stillness that disturbed him, as if someone had turned off the volume of a giant television set. His footsteps echoed on the linoleum as he searched the rooms, calling for his mother. He eventually found her in the bathroom, kneeling on the floor in front of the toilet bowl, lim
p and moist, her hair damp against her forehead, the smell of vomit in the air.

  “Oh, Denny, I’m so sick,” she gasped. Then, seeing his anguish at her sickness, “It’s just a twenty-four-hour thing. I’ll be all right in a while …” After which she turned, retching, toward the bowl.

  He shut the door softly, at a loss, the thought of his usual after-school lunch of a peanut-butter sandwich repugnant. As he sat in the living room, restless, resisting turning on the television set or even opening a book, not wanting to enjoy himself while his mother was sick in the bathroom, the telephone rang. He hesitated to pick it up. His mother and father always answered the phone. “Let one of us do it,” his father always said.

  The ringing of the phone emphasized the loneliness of the house. He realized that he was seldom, if ever, alone at home. His parents were always there. Never had a babysitter, even as a child. He counted the rings. One … two … three … Squirmed in the chair, the phone at his elbow. Suppose it was something important. Suppose his father was calling. He strained his ears. Was that a siren he heard in the distance?

  The phone continued to ring.

  He picked it up.

  “Hello,” he said, his voice hollow in the room. He had never talked on the phone.

  “Who’s this?” a voice demanded, a harsh voice, angry. “This isn’t the murderer. Who is this? Who’s speaking?”

  “Me,” he answered. Did the voice say murderer?

  “Who’s you?” Impatient, still angry.

  “Me, Denny.” Then adding his last name: “Colbert.”

  Pause, then. He looked around, guilty about answering the phone, wishing his mother would come in to take over the call.

  “Oh, the murderer’s son!”

  “You have the wrong number,” he said. He had heard about wrong numbers, people making mistakes. Wrong number echoed distantly from the past. “There’s no murderer here.”

  “Course there is,” the voice said, suddenly not angry anymore, almost gentle. “Your father’s John Paul Colbert, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Almost stammering that simple word. That simple word that was hard to say all of a sudden.

  “Well, if your father is John P. Colbert and you’re his son like you say you are, then you are the son of a murderer. How old are you?”

  The question, asked in a return to the angry voice, caught him off guard. “Seven,” he said. “Going on eight.”

  “Too bad,” the voice said. “Too bad to be the son of a murderer at seven years old.”

  “My father is not a murderer,” he said, shouting into the phone. “My father is John Paul Colbert and he is not a murderer.”

  The telephone was snatched from his hand. He turned to find his mother standing beside him, all paleness gone, her face flushed, eyes flashing, her eyes so blazing with—what?—he did not know what, had never seen it there before. Anger, yes, and something else. She slammed the phone down on the receiver. Took a deep breath and swiveled around.

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” he said, tears springing to his eyes, turning the world liquid, like he was underwater.

  “Hush, hush,” she said, her voice funny. “I’m not mad at you.” She clutched him to her. He dove into her, his face in her skirt, ignoring the terrible smell of vomit that still clung to her, that obliterated the perfume she always wore, the smell of flowers in the summer after a rain.

  “That man on the phone. He said that Daddy …” He could not say the word, could not get it out.

  She thrust him away from her, looked deeply into his eyes with those deep dark eyes of hers, like the color of black olives in a jar. “Your father is not a murderer.”

  “Then why did that man say he was?” he asked. Surprised by the loss on her face, in her eyes, he supplied his own answer: “Was he joking? Playing a trick on me?”

  She smiled, sadly, wanly, a thin smile, a smile without warmth. “There are strange people in the world, Denny. Crazy people who do things that are hard to understand.”

  And suddenly she was sick again. He saw the sickness in her pallor as if someone had opened a faucet and drained the blood from her face, and she murmured something he did not understand before running off to the bathroom, where he once more heard the terrible sounds of her retching.

  Putting his hands over his ears, blotting out the awful sounds, he heard, dimly, the telephone ringing again. He bolted from the room, ran to his bedroom, slammed the door behind him, fell on his knees and crawled under the bed, into the darkness, curling up, arms hugging his knees, eyes closed, glad to be here in the dark where he could not hear the telephone ringing or his mother vomiting.

  When his father came home from work, he made the rule:

  Never, never, answer the phone.

  Now, on a September afternoon all these years later, he had broken the rule. The sky hadn’t fallen. Lightning hadn’t struck. He wondered why he had waited so long.

  Suddenly, he was eager for the telephone to ring again.

  But it didn’t.

  That night, he awoke to a deafening silence. Checking the digital clock as usual, he saw that it was 3:10, almost the same time as last night’s phone call.

  The house was quiet—more than quiet: wrapped in an absence of sound so profound that it seemed to be a sound in itself.

  But something had awakened him.

  Noise in the hallway now, familiar to his ears: a footstep, a door closing, another footstep. His father, of course.

  Denny had never feared a burglar prowling the rooms, because his father often wandered the apartment during the night. Investigating, Denny sometimes found him sitting at a window in the dark or reading a day-old newspaper in the living room, or watching television with the sound turned off.

  He wondered now if his father had been waiting for the phone to ring all those nights, had been keeping some kind of rendezvous. He remembered a poem he had read in school during studies about World War I:

  I have a rendezvous with death

  At some disputed barricade …

  Was that the kind of rendezvous his father would keep someday, some night?

  Stop dramatizing, he told himself.

  He slipped out of bed and stood uncertainly in the dark, the linoleum cold under his bare feet. He made his way to the door, feeling his way in the dark, and passed noiselessly through the hallway toward a dim light in the living room.

  His father was sitting in his easy chair, not reading, not watching television, just sitting there. Looking at nothing. The expression on his face puzzled Denny. He tried to find a word to describe it. Sad? More than that. Sad and lonesome. Yes, but something else. His eyes lost in thought or memory. Forlorn—that was it, a word that emerged from somewhere, maybe from a book he’d read. Sitting there, forlorn, in the middle of the night. But he and his father and mother were living in a kind of middle of the night even when the sun was shining.

  He knew that even if he tried, he could not count how many nights his father had sat up like this, waiting for the call, then answering the telephone. Anger flared within him. His father should retaliate. Hurl the telephone against the wall. Shout at whoever was at the other end of the line. Do something. Instead, his father only waited. Meek and mild.

  Denny stood there for a while, then finally made his way back to his bedroom, through the long shadows, wondering what his father thought about, sitting up like that, in the middle of the night.

  What are you writing about now?

  That’s Lulu, coming out of nowhere.

  I hesitate, cover the page with my hand but know that I can never lie to her.

  Aren’t you going to tell me?

  The Globe, I say. What happened there.

  Oh.

  Sorry, I say. My poor Lulu.

  She goes away, leaving scorn behind her like dark weather in the room.

  I still dream after all this time of the way she stared at me out of the wreckage, did not really stare because her eyes could not see. Those blank eyes, frozen in her face, a
nd the smear of blood across her cheek.

  The rest of her was buried in the wreckage; only the rim of white lace at her throat was visible. Debris covered her body and I felt like I was screaming but couldn’t be sure because everything was still, a huge silence surrounding me while I looked down at her in horror.

  Then an explosion of sound, screams and cries and someone yelling in my ear, hands pulling and tugging at me, pulling me away. I began to sneeze, once, twice, three times, horrible, dust rising from the rubble, dust clouds blocking out light. My stupid sneezing and my nose running.

  My sister, I cried. She’s trapped in there.

  A voice at my ear: Come on, boy, come on.

  My sister. She might be dead.

  I know, I know, but come on, the rest of the balcony could fall. Come on.

  Outside, clear sky, faces, sirens screaming, slashes of red fire trucks, white ambulances, everyone running and stumbling, harsh colors bright, hurting my eyes, and I closed them and someone picked me up and rocked me and I smelled smoke and sweat and heard voices:

  His sister’s dead.

  I know.

  No pulse, nothing.

  Moaning, I opened my eyes, saw other eyes staring down at me, filled with pity. But I didn’t want their pity, I wanted my sister back. I didn’t want my sister to be dead. Even though I knew it was too late, even for prayers.

  The weeping and the moaning, and what Aunt Mary called the “keening” from the Denehans upstairs, filled the house as if even the walls and ceilings were mourning the dead. Three of the Denehans gone—Eileen and Billy and Kevin—and Mickey in the hospital with a broken pelvis, contusions and abrasions.

  Even with her own dead, Mrs. Denehan came down, lines fierce in her face, like gashes, bloodless and deep.

  Aunt Mary and Mrs. Denehan wept together, clutching each other while I roamed the rooms, not knowing what to do, where to go, unable to sit or lie down, unable to eat or drink. On the prowl through the rooms, looking for something but not knowing what. I was afraid to close my eyes because I knew what would happen: I would see Lulu’s eyes, open and staring and seeing nothing.