A Friend at Midnight (6 page)

Lily flung on makeup. She fastened her hair the way Reb had it in the passport picture. Lily despised pink, but Reb wore it all the time and she had worn it for her passport photo. Lily grabbed silvery pink cotton pants Reb had once given her and filched an expensive short-sleeved pink shirt of her mother's, tying a thin, lacy white sweater around her waist in case the air-conditioning was freezing. She looked as close to eighteen as she was going to get.

She stuck a new box of playing cards in with the Cheerios. Nate loved cards. He chewed them, bent them, ripped them, stacked them, threw them. She double-checked her credit card and Reb's passport, stuck the cell phone in her purse and they set out.

Nate loved the bus and everybody on it. He stood on his seat, holding her shoulder or hair to steady himself, and he studied everything and talked to everyone.

Lily's thoughts leaped and sputtered like a fire being doused with water. Michael, be safe, she thought. God, keep Michael safe, she ordered Him.

She couldn't tell if He was listening.

The ticket agent took Reb's passport and the piece of paper on which Lily had written her ticket confirmation number, glancing so briefly at Lily it could have been a blink. Kells had said once that people were busy thinking about themselves, and even when it was their job to think about you, they were probably still thinking about themselves. He seemed to be right.

Lily lifted Nathaniel onto the high counter so he wouldn't jump up and down around her ankles calling, “Wiwwy! Wemme see too!”

The attendant asked her the routine questions without making eye contact. Perhaps she was allergic to toddlers, a tendency Lily could certainly understand.

Had Lily left her luggage unattended? No.

Had anybody unknown to her given her something to carry? No.

“Checking any luggage today?”

“No, thank you.”

“Here's your boarding pass. Your row is empty at this moment. If you're lucky, nobody will sit there, and then your little brother gets his own seat. If you're not lucky, he sits on your lap the whole flight.”

And that was it.

I really must look eighteen, she thought. Awesome. Always wanted to be eighteen. Always wanted to be Reb.

At the security barriers, the guards wanted Nathaniel to walk through by himself, but he was having none of it and had to be peeled off her. Then Lily walked through while Nathaniel sobbed in panic and then the torture was over and she could cuddle him while the guards patted him on the back and told him what a brave boy he was.

They had a few minutes to spare, so she let Nathaniel walk, and he cried out in wonder at all the exciting things. The best was a big soft pretzel dipped in cinnamon sugar. Instantly, even though she just gave him a crumb, Nathaniel was smeared head to toe with sugar and butter.

Probably the best explanation to give Mom and Kells for the sudden reappearance of Michael was the simplest: Michael didn't like it there after all. It wouldn't occur to them that Dad hadn't bought Michael a ticket—how could that occur to anybody? Mom wouldn't be thrilled that Lily had taken Nate on public transportation to LaGuardia, and she'd complain that Lily ought to have called neighbors to drive her, but with any luck, Mom would be so pleased to find out Michael had decided
her
house was better than
his
house that she wouldn't press it.

It would be a real kick in the face if Dad was the one who spilled the facts—which he might, because he didn't even care, and Mom was bound to call. Lily would e-mail him. His address was “denrose”—a good name for him, now that she could never use the word “Dad” or the word “father” again.

At the gate, Lily thought: I haven't heard from Michael since we left home to catch the bus. He has to call me; I can't call him.

She whipped out her cell phone.

It wasn't hers.

She had smashed her cell to pieces.

She had Mom's phone.

Michael could call all day and nobody would ever answer.

chapter
4

T
he night before he left to go live with his father, Michael had set two alarms to make sure he did not oversleep, into which he had put new batteries to make sure they did not fail. He also wore his watch to bed, and from twelve-thirty in the morning until four-thirty, he watched the glowing digital numbers change.

Now, in the airport, he did not know what he had been expecting when he lay awake all night long. Whatever it was, it had not existed, and Michael was filled with dread at what stretched ahead.

So many things he could not ward off.

Like Jamie.

Jamie worshipped his own dad, who ran the town soccer program when he wasn't running his company, which delivered heating oil. Jamie got to help repair engines and fix furnaces and his dad played every ball game with Jamie, or took him to one. Since Jamie's dad was perfect, Jamie had explained that Michael's dad too would be perfect, and that going to live with him was a perfect idea.

Michael would never betray his father. He decided never to talk to Jamie again so that Jamie would not suspect.

Michael slid into the midst of some young men who stood in a long ticket line. They never looked down to where Michael was. For eleven minutes he was safe. Then an airline attendant began working her way down the line, examining each ticket and making sure the person was in the right line.

She got closer. She was heavy, very black, with complex braids. She was stern with people, but nice about it. Michael almost said to her, “I don't have a ticket. I don't have anything,” because she would make it better. But it wouldn't be better for Dad.

Grown-ups got into deep and serious trouble when they left kids on their own. There had been this woman who left her two little kids in car seats while she went into the grocery for a gallon of milk, and she was gone five minutes, and got charged with child abuse.

Of course, her kids had been babies.

Michael was no baby.

Still.

If I can get home, he thought, nobody will know Dad did anything wrong.

Especially not Mom, who in some terrible divorce way would rejoice. See? I was right! she would say. Kells would not say any such thing. Kells stuck to subjects like baseball and dinner.

It came to Michael that his stepfather was a better person than his real father.

He could not allow such a thing to be said. He could not permit a comparison. The ticket agent got closer, so Michael slid out of line and went back to the play area.

He passed a gift shop selling stuffed animals. They were colorful: monkeys in lime green and puppies in orange. He thought of York in a landfill. Filthy broken things thrown on top of York to stain and crush him. Michael wished he had gone to the landfill with York. It wouldn't be any different, and at least he'd have York to hold.

He picked up a newspaper somebody'd left on a bench and felt slightly better. Every single person at the airport was carrying something, and now Michael was carrying something too. He fit in.

He tried the stairs and found an observation room, where he sat for quite a while, nose pressed to the window, watching Southwest planes come and go.

The four hours seemed a forever thing, his heart and soul suspended like a plane.

Nathaniel was so perfect on board the plane that Lily could have sold him for enough money to pay for the tickets.

The flight attendants adored him.

The lady across the aisle played his favorite card game, where Nathaniel threw the card on the floor and the other person picked it up.

The man in the seat directly behind them shook hands with Nate about six hundred times through the crack in the seats and each time, Nate burst into giggles of joy.

“What's the fun part?” asked another passenger, after about a hundred times.

“Who knows?” said the guy. “He sure likes shaking hands, though.”

“Is he bothering you?” asked Lily, who knew perfectly well that Nate was bothering him; that was all Nate did—bother people.

But the man just laughed. “It's a short flight,” he said.

Lily had run into enough kind people to staff a hotel. How come her very own father wasn't one of them?

Her heart was pounding faster and faster, as if she were turning into a hummingbird. Michael could not call her. He had had complete faith in her, and now she too had abandoned him at the airport. Three times she'd called that pay phone Michael had used. Nobody answered the first time, a stranger answered the second time and nobody the third time.

Nate tucked himself up in her lap and ate Cheerios one at a time, curling his stubby fingers carefully around a Cheerio and squishing it into Cheerio dust just before he put it on his tongue.

“Gonna get Miikooo?” he said fifty times.

“Going to get Michael,” she agreed fifty times. Half the Cheerios got dropped on the floor. Lily needed to conserve snacks, so she picked them up and stuffed them back in the bag.

I don't want to save denrose with excuses, she thought. I want him to be punished! I want him to suffer. I want him to end up in the meanest, roughest jail in the world. One with snakes and rats and cholera.

Enraged, she was panting like a dog in summer.

How dare you? she thought. How dare you?

Michael's need to talk to Lily almost tripped him, like an invisible wire strung across the corridor. But no matter how calm he tried to be, no matter how carefully he tried to press the right numbers, he couldn't make the call.

I told Lily I had her number by heart, he thought. But I don't.

The list of things he had done wrong seemed so long. Michael could not see how he could go on. Or why. What was he worth, anyway?

Nothing to Dad.

Michael tried the phone number at other phones in other locations. He never got the numbers right.

Darkness enveloped Michael. He had no thoughts to go with it. He thought he would fall down, but there were still things to do: he had to cover for Dad. Nobody must know or see or guess.

The darkness became deeper. He could hardly keep his eyes open from the suffocating pressure of it.

I didn't grow up, he thought. That was the problem. Dad is right. I have to grow up. Right now.

Instead, he had an odd enticing vision of those open girders high above the ticket counters. He saw himself balancing there for a moment, and then letting go on purpose.

Nate picked out a Cheerio and gave it to the guy who had been shaking his hand.

“I especially like the lint on your Cheerio,” said the guy's seatmate.

“Eat it!” demanded Nate.

In an act of true love, the guy ate it.

Around the third hour, Michael remembered that he had to find the luggage carousels because he was meeting Lily at Baggage Claim. How could he have wasted all this time without finding Baggage Claim?

It took forever to locate the escalators down. He was sick with fear that he had missed her. He hadn't had his watch on when they left so fast in the morning, so he had to check the time on the flight monitors, and the complexity of the information up there made the clock part hard to find.

The carousels were motionless. Security guards stood there anyway, also motionless, frozen until they were needed.

Michael trudged along car rental counters and past free hotel phones. There were lots of brochures for places to go and things to do. Michael took every one he could reach. He hated reading, but he could take his brochures back to the toy yellow and blue plane, curl up under a seat, and look at pictures.

“Passenger MacArthur, Passenger MacArthur,” said an overhead voice. “Meet your party at the information booth at Baggage Claim.”

That was where Michael was.

Two middle-aged women were definitely the ones worried about Passenger MacArthur. They bobbed up and down, peering this way and that. It was several minutes before Passenger MacArthur appeared, and Michael was astonished to see another little chubby middle-aged woman. Passenger MacArthur had sounded like a dad to him.

I could have Dad paged, he thought.

The three women hugged and cried, “It's so good to see you!” and “The car's in short-term parking, not much of a walk,” so Michael walked with them.

I thought we would play catch, thought Michael. I thought we would be outside in his yard and play catch.

He clung to his brochures.

The garage was a cavern, like a sunken Japanese car dealership, hundreds of black four-door sedans lined up between great concrete pillars and tiny glowing Exit signs. Michael went over a few aisles where the shadows were thicker. He turned around and could no longer see where he'd come in, and when he tried to find the terminal, it wasn't there, and when he found a door, it led in some other direction entirely, and when he ran back to the four-door sedans, there were none. Only huge SUVs brushing side-view mirrors with the next SUV.