A Friend at Midnight (2 page)

Now in the airport, Michael picked up the phone. His throat was sore. He closed his eyes and saw the memorized number, all those digits. He dialed the phone company's 800 number and then he dialed his own area code and phone number. The phone pinged and told him to dial the number being billed. You always had to think about money, Lily had explained.

Again Michael poked the numbers for his home phone and this time he added Mom's PIN number. For years, her PIN number had been 3000, because she said that three children in the house felt like three thousand, especially when the three children were Rebecca and Lily and Michael. But then Mom got remarried, and a year later, Nathaniel was born. Mom went and got a new PIN number: 4000.

Lily said Mom had no right to get divorced, no right to get remarried, no right to have another kid, and absolutely no right to go and change her PIN number.

Michael, however, thought 4000 was an excellent PIN number because Nathaniel had four thousand toys and had broken four thousand pieces off things (mostly Michael's things) and had definitely worked through four thousand diapers. Every night felt like four thousand nights, too, because Nathaniel could not fall asleep without sobbing for half an hour.

They were all pretty grumpy about Nathaniel. Especially Michael, because he had to share a bedroom with this unwanted half brother. Kells built a double-sided bookcase across the bedroom, which supposedly gave Michael privacy but really just turned Nathaniel's side into an echo chamber. At least Nathaniel was still in a crib. He was old enough to climb out but never had and Michael certainly never demonstrated. Nathaniel belonged in a cage.

When Michael left home, Nathaniel had been twenty-two months old and Michael had figured not to see him again for a year. But his brother would still be twenty-two months old when Michael got back.

The call went through. Michael pictured all the phones and all their ringing: the kitchen phone in the great messy sunny room where everybody was always cooking; the portable phone in Mom and Kells's room; the TV room phone.

He hung up in the middle of the second ring.

It was too early to call.

Things might change.

Lily was putting Nathaniel down for his nap. When the phone rang, she was delighted, because Nate, like some little trained dog, honored the ring of a phone. Reb and Lily often called each other on their cell phones just to shut Nate up for a minute.

“I'll be right back, Nate,” Lily told him. “I have to answer the phone. You put your head down and close your eyes. Before you know it, my phone call will be over and I'll be back.”

Nate was still pretty easy to dupe. He said, “Okie, Wiwwy,” which was how he said “Okay, Lily,” and even though Lily tried to harden her heart against Nate, she adored him when he put his head down and murmured, “Okie, Wiwwy.”

Lily whipped out of the room without looking into Michael's half. Michael's three quarters, actually. Nate had exactly enough space for his crib and one person to stand next to it.

Michael had stripped his side of every possession, taking every baseball card and toy truck and Lego and book and video game and CD and of course York. He had even taken the sheets off his bed—Michael!—who believed that laundry belonged on the floor and changing sheets was for sissies. After Michael threw his used sheets in the laundry room that day, he came back to admire the bare mattress: Proof. He was leaving. For good.

Lily understood Michael's decision to go. They all wanted to storm away when Mom remarried and they all wanted to storm away again when Nathaniel was born. But when Michael really did storm away, Lily knew in her heart why she and Reb had not. They knew better.

It gave Lily a bit of peace to know that Michael had York the Bear with him. York would never let Michael down.

The second ring was cut short. There was not a third one. Lily pounded down the stairs to look at the caller ID on the kitchen phone and see who had hung up. Probably some solicitor who had managed to avoid the Do Not Call list.

Lily adored the telephone. She loved e-mail and text messaging, because she loved every variation on communicating, but mostly Lily loved the sound of her own voice. Just since yesterday's phone calls, she had a hundred new things to tell every friend she had. If she got lucky, Nathaniel would fall asleep and give her two fine nap hours for phone calls.

Mom and Kells would not be back till after midnight. They had driven Reb to college. It was the first semester of Reb's freshman year, and Lily had been counting the days right along with her sister, excited about seeing the campus and the dorm, meeting the roommates, helping unpack, hanging clothes and posters. But when the last box and suitcase had been wedged into the car, there was no room for Nate's car seat and no room for Lily.

“That works!” cried her sister brightly. “You guys stay here.”

Lily was crushed. “Let's divide everything in two cars,” she offered quickly. “Mom drives one car, Kells drives one. No fair leaving me and Nate behind.”

How pleadingly her older sister looked at her. Reb, like Michael, wanted to enter a new world. She didn't even intend to use her nickname from now on. Michael had left forever, and now Reb would turn into some college woman named Rebecca, while Lily would be abandoned in a swamp of dirty diapers and educational toys.

Their house was chaotic in the best of circumstances, because not only did Mom drop everything everywhere, using the dining room table to match socks and the living room rug for stacking catalogs, but she piled her concert band's music on the stairs and left broken school instruments she needed to repair on the kitchen counter and lost whole series of CDs under the sofa. Lily even saw a cell phone peeking out from under a sloppy heap of paper napkins. Had to be Mom's—everybody else held tightly to essentials, or they would vanish forever in Mom's chaos. It was hard to believe that their messy mother easily controlled a four-hundred-student band program. Today the house was strewn with stuff Reb wasn't taking after all. Styrofoam packing peanuts lay like snow, and under all this was the debris of a toddler.

Lily had only one gift for a sister who wanted out. She managed a smooth smile for Reb and Mom. “Nate and I will be fine on our own. You guys drive safely.”

Mom was anxious. “It's such a long time, though. It's a six-hour drive, more if there's traffic. We can't be back till after midnight. What if something happens?”

“Then I'll handle it,” said Lily. She decided not to tell Mom about the cell phone under the paper napkins. A phone in her purse would mean Mom calling twenty-five times to check up on Lily. What could possibly happen that Lily couldn't handle?

Yet the sight of her family driving away had been awful, as if they were being sucked down a tube, never to return. Then of course Nathaniel wanted to play Jump Off the Back Step, a game that involved jumping off the back step. Lily's job was to applaud and cry, “Wow!” with lots of emphasis on the
w
, and Nate would whisper “Wow”—a good word for him, since he had
w
nailed. They played Jump Off the Back Step until Lily figured that even losing Reb and Michael wasn't as bad as playing Jump Off the Back Step one more time, so she coaxed Nate in for a very early lunch of tuna salad. Nate loved tuna salad. He always had cat breath because he did not love having his teeth brushed.

Now he was down for his afternoon nap way too early because she was the one ready for a nap.

Lily reached the kitchen. The stingy tart smell of the Magic Marker with which Reb labeled her boxes mixed with the fishy scent of tuna salad she'd forgotten to refrigerate. On the kitchen phone, the caller ID showed some out-of-state number. Undoubtedly a sales call. Kells was polite to telephone salespeople. “I'm so sorry,” he would say, “we don't purchase items over the phone, but thank you anyway.” Mom handled it differently.

“Stop phoning me!” she would shout. “I'm never going to want it, whatever it is! Hang up! You hang up first, do you hear me?”

Neither approach worked. Neither, apparently, did signing up for Do Not Call.

Lily deleted the number.

Michael continued to hold the receiver. Even though he was connected to nothing, he felt safer hanging on.

A shadow fell across him. He looked up to see a uniformed officer standing over him. Michael was not allowed to watch shows like
COPS
because of the violence, but of course he watched them all the time anyway, and he knew what police did in situations like this. They went after the dad.

“Hi,” said Michael. “Is that a real gun?” Michael knew perfectly well it was a real gun. This was a cop. What would he have—a cardboard gun? “Have you ever used it?” said Michael. “My mom doesn't like guns. She won't let one in the house.”

The officer smiled. “It is real and your mom is making a good decision.”

Michael turned to the phone, hoping the officer would leave.

No such luck. “Where are your folks?” said the cop. His voice was pleasant and warm.

Michael gestured vaguely. “I just called my sister,” he said. “She's leaving for college.” He was seized by horror. When was Reb leaving? What if they had already left? All of them? What if his house was empty? What if he called and the phone rang and rang and rang and rang—
and nobody came
? What was he going to do?

“Well, it was nice to talk to you,” he said to the cop, letting go of the comforting phone. It was like letting go of York in the dark. “Bye.” He was only steps from the parents on toy wagons. He needed parents so the cop would forget about him. But all the parents were paying close attention to their children and would speak up if he tried to look like theirs.

There was one couple kissing and smooching over by the windows. They looked as if they had no children; as if they never planned to have children. Michael flopped down at their feet, flat on his face, and hoped for the best. He felt sick from not eating and his head whirled. Under the seats lay used coffee cups and discarded magazines. He could see the feet of the officer, who was moving on, satisfied.

How silent the house was.

Lily put the tuna salad into the refrigerator.

It was quiet times that bothered her most these days. Michael had been a nonquiet brother.

Michael was a very busy kid, and most of all, he was busy talking: he talked all the time to everybody. He was busy with sports: hitting balls, kicking balls, pitching balls, dunking balls. He was busy going places: on foot, on bike, on skateboard. He was busy with projects and friends, busy in the cellar, busy in the attic, busy in the yard.

He was a dirty noisy nosy little eight-year-old.

One thing that kept him busy was making lists of everything he planned to do next. “I want to learn how to fish,” he would say. “I want to scuba dive.” He loved equipment. You could never have enough equipment.

Lily remembered Michael sitting by the road with all his equipment, waiting. Silent, because in all those hours, nobody—including Michael—knew what to say.