What We Saw at Night (5 page)

Juliet and I wore La Sportive Fireblades because they fit narrower feet. Rob had K-Swiss. That kind of shoe costs over a hundred, easy. Rob’s dad got the shoes for us for practically nothing, because of his job. He’d also bought us rock-climber gloves, with “sticky” pads on the fingertips and palms.

In less than a minute, we were up the side of the skeleton of that new building, though we’d agreed we wouldn’t make this a speed course. We adjusted our headlamps. Faces in the dark are always silvery, but Rob’s was lighter, almost glowing. The waves were slapping down now. I could see whitecaps in the black abyss. When I was really little, and we moved to the north shore, the waves used to keep me awake—until my mother told me that they were saying,
“Shush. Shush.”

Years later, long after the time they had put me to sleep, I thought of them as saying,
“Now? Now?”

My pulse pounded as we stood silently on one of the construction workers’ platforms and studied the roof next door. It looked further than twelve feet away, the distance Juliet had assured us. (Later, I would find out it was twenty feet.) To me the roof appeared tiny, distant—as though we were going to try to jump from a mountaintop onto a dinner plate. Rob said, randomly, that the building was much nicer than the taller one upon which we were perched. Juliet sniffed. Of course the building was nicer: It was old, with thick walls, and the apartments were huge. Each took up half of one of the floors. Except the top floor. That was all one even huger apartment.…

“So we’re going to land on top of some rich person’s roof like a bunch of giant raccoons,” I said.

“Yeah, but one at a time,” Juliet said. “Remember, you drop and roll. No one will care. It’s two in the morning. And anyhow, the bedrooms are in the front bit, not back here.”

Only later did I wonder:
How did she know?

“I’ll go first,” Rob said.

Before either of us could speak, he backed up and hurtled himself over the gap and down. We heard him land, but for a second, both of us were afraid to look. Then we heard a yell: “It’s good! The wind’s behind you and the drop helps.”

The waves were thrashing the shore now. His voice was almost lost.

Juliet turned to me. “I don’t want to leave you alone,” she whispered.

I could barely hear her over my thumping heart. What the hell were we doing?

“I know you think that I don’t give a damn if I live or die,” she added. “And maybe I don’t. But I would never, not ever, willingly hurt you.” She hugged me briefly. “So you go ahead, Bear.”

The moon burst from behind a mound of cloud and I didn’t give myself time to think.
It’s just a jump
, I said to myself. Then I was in the air, my back arched, my body poised to drop and barrel-roll. As I did, I expelled the air from my lungs.

My eyes bulged as Juliet landed, softly as a gull, several feet past me.

Parkour is not competitive. I would have been jealous otherwise. On the other hand, Juliet had saved me and bested me. I
was
jealous.

“Down,” she said.

We lined up at the edge. I could feel my heart pounding again. We would need to drop and hang from the edge of
the roof and then swing, building up enough momentum to let go with one arm and grab the rail of the balcony below, about five feet to the right. After that, we’d grab the railing with our other hand and “muscle up” onto the balcony before the next drop—to another balcony, about five feet to the left.

The balcony of the penthouse apartment was long, with room to spare for the three of us.

Rob swung down first. But he shook his head in the shadows.

“It’s harder than it looks,” he hissed. “I can give you a hand.” Obviously, Juliet wouldn’t allow that. Her biceps were like little apples under her jersey. She copied his exact moves and scrambled up the railing onto the balcony beside him. When my turn came, I gave myself a boost by taking a few steps and swinging myself two-handed. I’d planned to grab the railing of the balcony with my free hand and pull up, but I ended up hurtling myself over the rail and into my friends’ arms.

At that moment, the sky above the lake split open.

Two crippled fingers of lightning reached down for the black water. Only a few seconds passed before a deafening thunderclap. The air sizzled with the smell of sulfur. I winced. That stink is probably why the ancients believed lightning and thunder were harbingers of all things demonic. Why not? My idea of Hell could easily include being exposed on a balcony as a Lake Superior tsunami kicks in.

We crouched together.

“Let’s see if there’s a fire escape,” Rob said. “And get the hell out of here.”

We looked back toward the town. Another blast of lightning blotted out what few lights there were above Oxford
Street. To my shock, I realized I was high enough up to spot my house on Trinity. If the thunder woke my mother, she would be up roaming and accelerating into hysterics after realizing I wasn’t there.

I leaned over the balcony, looking for a way down that didn’t involve becoming a human lightning rod, when the lights in the penthouse came on.

Rob pulled me back. Juliet scrambled into the shadows beside us.

All I could see was white. One massive room: white walls, white carpeting, white woodwork. Except … right in the middle of the floor, next to the sliding doors, a young woman with dark hair—probably not much older than we were—was on her back. She wore only a bra. A man with his back turned to us was leaning over her. He seemed to be kissing her, then slapping her, then trying to pull her up.

Rob swore, softly, under his breath.

We stared for an instance in horrified silence as the man lowered his face to hers. He had short-cropped dark hair, darker than Rob’s, with a wide white streak of platinum blond down the back in what appeared to be a dyed slash of a lightning bolt.

Rob pointed to the fire escape: a sleek ladder that descended straight from the far side of the balcony. The glass doors were floor to ceiling but he pointed and guided me toward it. We dropped to the balcony floor and crawled past a potted pine to get to the edge of it. I was already ten steps down when I heard Rob say, “Juliet! Juliet! Come on.”

The rain began to fall, hard, cold drops on my hot face.

Rob said again, “Juliet! He’ll see you!”

Juliet didn’t seem to care who saw her. She descended
languidly, almost like a ballet dancer, and leaped the last few feet to the ground. The rain began pounding. The inside of my eyeballs were wet.

After a fevered sprint, Rob and I threw ourselves into the car. Juliet ran around in the dark, picking up her tripod. When she jumped into the back, I turned to her. She was messing with the camera, dripping wet though not breathing as hard as either Rob or me.

“I think this stuff is okay,” she gasped. “I was scared it blew into the lake!”

I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. “Was that girl … what was wrong with her?”

Juliet lifted her shoulders. “She looked like she was passed out. And he was trying to wake her up.”

Rob didn’t even seem to be listening to our conversation. “We triggered some alarm when we landed on the balcony—which is why the lights came on … right?”

I said, “That girl looked dead.”

“Dead drunk maybe,” Juliet dismissed, drying her camera with her shirt.

“He was doing, like CPR, right?” I asked, mostly to myself.

“Good date gone bad,” Juliet replied. Her voice was flat. “It scared the hell out of me, though, when that light went on.”

The lightning crashed again. We heard a hollow boom—a tree or a light pole down. It happened all the time.

Then Rob said, “Who has a date in a room with no furniture?”

We all turned to the apartment. It was dark.

I
woke up screaming, my sheets drenched with sweat.

At least Angie and Mom weren’t there.

You try to breathe through things like that. Out with the bad air. In with the good air. Out with the bad mind pictures, in with the good mind pictures. That girl’s face was slack and rubbery. She was a young person with an old person’s skin. A dead person’s skin. I felt my throat constricting.

My little sister has allergies. So we probably occupied the only house in Iron Harbor except the hospital and the assisted-living facility that had air conditioning. I rolled out of bed in my T-shirt and underpants and tugged at the window—panicking when it would not open, forgetting I had to slide the latch—then finally laid my face against the blackout screen and sucked in as much piney air as my lungs could hold. In the distance, I heard birds chirping. Back in bed, I began to text Rob.

Then I realized it was noon on a Saturday. Rob and Juliet were asleep.

As I should be. My mind raced, wondering why I didn’t have alternative, non-lethal pursuits and alternative non-criminal friends. Maybe I could stay away from Juliet for a little while. There was still Nicola. True, school was out for the summer, but she’d be on yearbook committee with me next fall, right? We could plan ahead. We could even do some non-yearbook stuff. We’d gone to the movies precisely six times in my life. Once I’d stayed over at her house, too. Plus her dad collected all these old pinball machines, all with horror themes, that were definitely fun. He also had the first edition of every single Stephen King book, signed. That was sort of cool.

Come to think of it, I would probably have been better friends with Nicola if Juliet hadn’t taken up so much real estate in my friendship pasture. But how could I call Nicola out of the blue? I hadn’t seen her for months. (
Hi, Nicola! I just saw a girl who was possibly dying and I’m totally creeped out, so I don’t want to hang with my best friend.…)
My thoughts wandered back to the penthouse.

The dead-looking girl probably
was
dead drunk.

Why wasn’t there any furniture in the apartment?

The guy was probably a construction worker. Maybe he’d snuck in there with his girlfriend and they’d gotten wasted.

Why was he trying to revive her?

They were just two innocent people looking for some privacy.

Why was her face bone gray like that?

Not for the first, fifteenth, or fortieth time, my friendship with Juliet disturbed my sleep—though I was sure, not hers.

I had knockout pills I could take. I only needed them once a month, when I had cramps. Some XP kids had to take them
routinely because they could never get used to the reversed biorhythmic schedule.

I rummaged in the drawer and took two of them. Then I prepared to do my whole sleep ritual, which I had neglected the night before. I made my Goodnight tea with honey. I put fresh sheets on the bed. I jumped in and out of a dangerously hot shower, smeared myself with my one vanity—expensive cream that smelled of the Caribbean Islands I would never see—and pulled and pegged my blackout shades so the room was utterly lightless. Then I got out my big sleep mask, the one that was ten inches long and lay across my face like a soft log filled with flaxseed and lavender … and after all that, I still could not banish the lurid image: the guy with the platinum streak down the back of his head, jerking that girl’s limp body up off the white carpet.

But that’s what you did to revive someone. It wasn’t gentle.

Right?

And if he really was a guy who was working on that new apartment and in there with his wasted girlfriend, the last thing he’d want is for her to barf all over a pristine sea of total whiteness. Of course she wasn’t dead. If she was dead, there’d be blood. And gunk. Bodily fluids. I’d spent half my life in a hospital; I
knew
. That place was spotless. Still … living-but-passed-out people shouldn’t be that pale.

On the other hand, what was I basing this on? The number of passed-out-drunk people I’d seen in my life numbered zero.

I lay back on the bed. The best way to put yourself to sleep is to listen for a sound that’s almost outside your ability to hear. I closed my eyes and searched for the loon and finally found it, a sound as familiar to me as my own music after all these years, yet still, even during the day, lonesome and eerie.
My legs began to tingle.
Please, let the pills kick in
, I thought.
Please
.

I woke up at eleven that night and quickly grabbed my phone.

Rob had texted:
Sleeping in
.

Juliet had texted nothing.

THREE DAYS PASSED. Then three more. I didn’t hear from Juliet once. She didn’t answer any texts or calls.
Here we go again
, I thought.
Another vanishing act
. Rob became oddly withdrawn too, claiming he wasn’t feeling well. I couldn’t argue with sickness. The nights seemed to grow longer, even though summer shortened them. This was supposed to be our time together.

I devoted myself to not thinking about Rob or Juliet. Not thinking about best friends is almost a discipline in itself. I tried to start a journal. Unfortunately, I’m no writer, and the entries kept coming back to Rob in ways that were at best embarrassing and at worst excruciating. I wondered if he was as shaken by what we’d seen as I was.