A Friend at Midnight (7 page)

When they finally landed, Nathaniel was exhausted. He desperately needed a nap. Lily had no stroller. She was going to have to carry him and hope he slept against her shoulder. She felt very thin, as if her slamming heart had made her lose weight, and lose brain capacity, and lose hope.

It had been four hours since she talked to Michael.

Nathaniel began to cry that infuriating whine of little kids who should be asleep.

He was unbearably heavy.

She thought of the word “unbearably” and wondered if “bear” was inside it.

Bears. York.

She was filled with fear.

She could think of a thousand terrible things that could have happened to Michael during these hours of silence. Things much worse than what Dad had done.

The flow of people carried Lily along. She didn't have to make choices. Everybody else knew where to go. They paraded to the baggage claim, where Michael should be.

But there was no Michael.

chapter
5

M
ichael woke up. He was sleeping on a mattress of travel brochures, deep inside the wooden play plane. Lily! he thought. When is she coming? What time is it? I have to get to the baggage claim!

He crawled out and ran into the terminal—read the time on a monitor.

It was 4:12.

Lily had landed more than fifteen minutes ago. He had missed her! What if she'd given up and gone home? Where was the escalator? He had to find Baggage Claim.

It seemed to Michael that hundreds of people—tall people, fat people, white people, black people, uniformed people, old people—stared at him and pointed at him. He fled and threw up in a men's room.

He hadn't eaten in so long there was nothing to throw up, and the acid burned his throat.

When he left the bathroom, he had to walk with his fingertips brushing the wall to steady himself.

He had to find those escalators. He stumbled past the gift shop, but it was not the gift shop he remembered. It had stuffed animals on display, but different ones. I'm lost, he thought. I missed Lily's plane and I'm in the wrong place.

The gift shop was entirely open to the hall, and right in front was a little display wagon filled with teddy bears. One of them looked a little like York. Michael could not help touching its pitching arm, and then he could not help lifting it out of the rack, and then he could not help hugging it.

A woman yelled at him from her cash register. “Hey!” she yelled. “You stealing that?”

“I'm just holding it,” he whispered.

The woman stomped over to him.

A security guard stomped over to him.

Michael could not seem to stop holding the bear. He could not seem to give it back to the woman.

“What's your name, son?” said the officer.

I'm not a son, thought Michael. Sons have fathers.

The woman folded her arms and glared at Michael while the officer said, “Where are your parents?”

He remembered Baggage Claim, the absolute necessity to get there. His head throbbed, the phone number that he had learned wrong hammering inside his head. I'm a thief, he thought. My father doesn't want me. I don't have York. “I'm waiting for my sister,” he said weakly, and he looked down the great concourse as if she would be there and he saw that not only were the passengers and the crews and the workers and the guards rushing to meet planes, they were all pausing to stare at him, the little boy caught shoplifting.

From far away came a voice as high and clear as a piccolo. “Miikooooo! Miikooooo!”

Hurtling among knees and suitcases came his little brother, legs churning, arms out. Michael set the stolen bear on the little wagon and went to his knees and Nathaniel flung himself on Michael and Michael knew what it was to be loved completely and without judgment and without thought or knowledge.

Lily was screaming at him from down the hallway. “I was on time!” she yelled. “I was
here
! I couldn't
find
you! I thought you were lost! I thought something awful happened! Where have you been! What are you doing! How could you scare me like that?”

Lily was as tall as the policeman. In only two and a half weeks, Michael had lost track of stuff like that. She looked old and angry. She had Nathaniel's tote bag and Michael thought, Bet she's got food. He was suddenly starving to death.

“Your brother was stealing this bear,” said the stuffed animal woman.

“I was just holding it,” he told Lily. “I held it too long. Lily, I didn't—”

“We'll buy the bear,” said his sister to the woman. “I'm sorry he upset you. He was wrong. All of us are wrong. I even gave him the wrong cell phone number so he couldn't let me know what was happening. It's my fault. How much does the bear cost?”

“Oh, forget it,” said the woman, irritably. “Just go! He didn't hurt the bear. I can still sell it.”

“
I
wanna bear,” said Nathaniel hopefully.

Michael with a paper bag of fast food and Nathaniel with the bear (Lily figured one more charge on the credit card wouldn't make a difference) went separately through security and were the first to board. They stared out the window at Baltimore/Washington International Airport.

Nathaniel fell asleep in Michael's lap, chubby legs spread apart, face buried on Michael's skinny chest. His little mouth hung open. He wasn't swallowing in his sleep and Michael's chest was getting wet.

“What do we tell Mom?” whispered Michael.

Lily hated all this whispering, as if Michael's lungs had been dented. “You tell Mom you missed us,” she suggested. “It wasn't any fun down there and you wanted us back.” They both knew Michael had not missed them.

What a huge and awe-ful gift to a father: I'm yours. I'm all yours. I'm throwing everything away in order to be yours. And the father didn't notice. The father had better stuff to do. Toss the kid back. Will the kid make it home? Who knows? Who cares?

“I know what,” said Michael. “I'm very sick. I'm going to lose all my hair and have brain surgery.” Because it would be okay to be sad, pale and wasted if he had IV needles and visitors and a funeral.

“No,” said Lily. “Mom would race you to the pediatrician's and he'd give you shots. That won't work. And we don't want a reason where Dad throws you out. We want one where you throw him out. Let's make Dad disgusting. That won't be hard. He is disgusting. You left because you found out that he kicks puppies. Shoots bald eagles. Leaves loaded guns around the house for eight-year-old boys to play with.”

“No,” said Michael.

“He stages fake car accidents to get insurance money. He's up all night on disgusting Internet sites. He deals drugs at elementary schools.”

“No, no and no.”

“He won't let you play baseball. He says it's too slow and he can't be bothered.”

Michael flinched. “Yes,” he whispered, even more softly. “Lily, I thought we would play catch.”

Lily had not known that she could despise denrose even more.

How could Mom have married this man to start with? Mom—

Mom.

She'd probably been calling the house all day, leaving frantic messages, wondering where Lily and Nathaniel were. She might even have called Amanda to see if Lily had gone over there.

Lily and Amanda had been friends since they were six weeks old and placed in the same infant care. Lily and Amanda shopped together, did their hair together, took the same classes, texted hourly, over the years had taken ballet and flute and tennis together.

Lily had not thought of Amanda once today. Lily had forgotten the whole world except Michael. She wondered whether to tell Amanda any of this. For once, Lily had no idea what Amanda might say or do.

“I better phone Mom,” she told Michael, “so she doesn't worry.”

“What are you going to tell her?” said Michael anxiously.

“Lies.”

Michael gripped her arm. How small and cold his fingers were. Whereas Lily was burning. She was a furnace. “I don't want to talk,” Michael whispered. “Don't tell her I'm here.”

Lily nodded. Since she had Mom's cell, she called Kells on his. “Hi, Kells, can I talk to Mom?” she said, hoping to brush right past her stepfather.

“Sure can,” he said, always cheerful. It was good that somebody in the family had that attitude.

“Lily!” cried her mother. “Where are you?”

No need to respond to difficult questions. “Guess what. Michael's coming home.”

“Michael's coming home?”

“Yup. I guess it didn't work out. When are you getting back? Do you like Reb's roommate? What's the campus like?”

“Michael's coming home?”

“Yup,” said Lily. “Nathaniel and I are picking Michael up at the airport. Nate's sound asleep, he doesn't even know what's happening. Did Reb cry when you left her at her dorm or did she kick you out in ten seconds?”

“Lily! This is so wonderful! I'm so happy! He's coming home! This is—Oh, dear. I guess I should call your father.” Mom hated talking to Dad. She had to gird herself for days to make a call.

“I handled it,” said Lily. “I bet from now on you can skip phone calls. The occasional e-mail should do it.”

“Michael's coming home,” Mom repeated, as if in prayer. “What airline, Lily? When does the plane land? Oh, Lord, now I have to worry about plane crashes.”

“I have to go, Mom,” said Lily.

“Wait! Do you have any money? How are you getting back and forth?”

“I raided your desk drawers and stuff. Don't worry. Everything's under control. See you. Bye!” She hung up.

“You didn't tell any lies,” said Michael, marveling.

The plane took off.

Lily fell into a useless, terrible sleep.

A dream crept up on her. It began with a smashed telephone, but in the horrid way of dreams, the phone kept getting up and throwing itself at Lily while her father's voice crawled out of it, like spiders. The phone stuck to her fingers and she couldn't peel it off. She ran through the dark web of an endless terminal filled with sneering gawking people while the phone clung to her fingers and a terrible roar filled her ears. The roar of the nightmare was her own voice, dragged up from such depths that her lungs bled.

You are not a father. I will never use that word “father” again.

When they finally got home, the house might have been some ancient sanctuary or temple. Lily wanted to be inside it as she had rarely wanted anything in her life.

In the front hall, she turned on the light and stood on the old strip of rug. The same old watercolor hung over the same narrow table, cluttered with the same old music and catalogs and library books and pencils and pieces off things.

All her life, Lily had yearned for a neat and tidy house, and never had she seen anything as welcoming as the chaos of home.

Because the dumb flight went south in order to go north, and because of a layover, even though Lily had spent her last dollars to hurry home in a taxi, it was almost midnight.

Nathaniel disintegrated into sobbing exhaustion. Ignoring him, she poked the messages on the answering machine. Four from Mom. All earlier in the day, when she had not been able to reach Lily.

We're talking panic here, thought Lily, and remembered that she personally had not panicked.

There was no message from Dad.

Did my little boy get home okay? Tell him I'm sorry. Tell Lily I was wrong. Tell my kids I love them.

No. There were no messages like that.

Michael walked through each room of the house, staring, as if maybe in
that
room, he would understand.

Nathaniel moved from sobbing into screaming. Lily had the passing thought that if anybody should be abandoned at an airport, it was a cranky two-year-old.

“Wiwwy.” Nathaniel chinned himself on the waistband of Lily's pink trousers.