That Night (17 page)

That night Sheryl got out of bed while the pale blue light still shone through her window. She dressed in a tight pair of black jeans and a loose yellow shell that was stretched out enough to cover her open fly and the thick rubber band she now used to fasten her waist. She put on her makeup in the dark, brushed and teased her hair, then filled her pocketbook with her comb and her makeup, a can of deodorant and one of the half-empty bottles of perfume. She left her room with her shoes in her hand. In the living room, the windows glowed with a vague light, but the center of the house, the hallway before her, the carpet beneath her feet, was dark and indefinite. She could hear the distinct, inharmonious sounds of her aunt’s and uncle’s breathing, one sighing long sighs that seemed to end each time with a click or a kiss, one sawing hollow logs, angry and insistent.

She went again to the hall closet, carefully slid open the door and reached inside. She moved one hand down the length of each coat sleeve and into each pocket, hoping each time to be surprised by the feel of a coin. She found a dime in her aunt’s raincoat, a quarter and a nickel in her uncle’s slick windbreaker. She now had nearly twelve dollars. This evening when her mother had called, shrill and tearful with the tale of Rick’s visit, Sheryl had asked her to send more money. She dismissed the request impatiently. “What do you need money for?” she’d snapped. “Haven’t you got everything you need?”

Sheryl couldn’t say, “I need it to get out of here.”

There was a small high window in the front door, and as Sheryl turned from the closet, she saw that the pale light that came through it caught some of the picture frames on the opposite wall and made the glass shine blankly, as if the faces and figures beneath had somehow vanished. But she knew which one she wanted simply by its shape, and she lifted it carefully and slipped it into her bag. She turned quickly and descended the next set of steps. She crossed the family room, the linoleum cold against her bare feet, and quickly opened the door. She had already begun to perspire, but the air was cool and she felt a wave of nausea as she hit the grass. She began to walk toward the spot where she knew the sun would rise.

It was still dark, but what stars there had been were nearly gone and the air seemed close. She held out her hand as she walked, occasionally brushing at her cheeks and her bare arm as if she felt someone’s breath upon them. The ground, which had looked flat and fairly even from the house, was riddled with sockets and hills and small weeds that scratched at her bare ankles. She stumbled once or twice and began to feel frightened. But then her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and soon she could make out a distant line of trees.

When she had gone a good distance from the house she put her pocketbook down, slipped the rubber band from the button at her waist and squatted. She could see the spotlight on the side of the house, white and sharp as a low star. She tried to make herself believe she would never return to this place, that it would be forever a small and ever fading part of her past, but her time there had been too short, her memory even now too new and indistinct. It seemed more a future she had only, briefly, glimpsed than a part of her history, left behind her. When she stood again, she saw how round and white her belly was in the darkness.

There was a heavy underbrush beneath the trees and she could hear birds waking as she passed. She put her pocketbook on her head to keep the bats out of her teased hair and raised her legs high with each step as if she were walking through snow. She caught her foot in a vine and, stumbling, swung her pocketbook into the trunk of a tree. There was the sound of metal and glass. A dog barked somewhere in the distance.

There was a high fence at the edge of the trees and she climbed it quickly, the metal singing, the wires familiar in her fingers—the heady swing over the top. Then down a steep hill, which she took at a run, and she was at the edge of the highway. It was deserted and, except for her own heavy breathing, silent. Just across it, the sky was turning a weak orange, but the wide road itself was still deep gray. The grass that split it and continued on the other side was still as dark as the sky behind her. There was a high white light off to her right and a single star at the horizon. She stood for a minute trying to catch her breath, to figure out what side of the road she should stand on. She had imagined it would run east and west; north and south was no good to her.

She backed up a little and lowered herself onto the grass.

Her hand was trembling when she lit a cigarette, and when she wiped her wrist across her forehead it glistened with sweat. Her shoes were damp, and she rubbed a line of mosquito bites along her ankle.

In the darkness and the silence, she tried to think of Rick but knew he would be asleep now, unconscious; his anger or his fear or whatever it was that he’d felt as he pulled her mother from the house would be as good as forgotten at this moment. She recalled a night last winter when they’d both fallen asleep in his car and had woken cold and startled, lost in the world and momentarily strangers. If he were woken now, at this minute, if she called him on the phone at this minute, he couldn’t say where she was or even that he thought of her. No one could.

She heard a car approaching on the opposite side and for a second believed it was Pam, out looking for her, already determined to retrieve her. But the car passed quickly with a flash of headlights and Sheryl could see nothing beyond its black windows.

There was a kind of loneliness in its wake, a tense new edge to the silence.

In the minute before he died, her father had pulled his car to the side of the road, loosened his tie and raised one leg to the seat beside him. He must have thought of her and of her mother, but they hadn’t known it. She was drawing elaborate butterflies in the margins of her algebra exam. Her mother was on the phone with Mrs. Sayles when the policeman came to the door.

Sheryl tossed the cigarette into the road and rested her chin on her hands. His bracelet gleamed in the half light, but when she put her cheek to it, it seemed ice-cold. She sat back suddenly to ease the strain of fabric against her waist. She searched the horizon for that one star, but it had already faded in the growing light.

Had they been more vigilant in their love, she was certain, they would have saved him. The car in the driveway would have signified his return.

Another car approached, on her side this time, and she stood quickly and held her thumb out. It sped by her, the grit and the hot air stinging her eyes. Again she hadn’t been able to see anyone inside, and the ensuing silence made her feel she was dreaming. She had an urge to shout, to test her voice. She felt a rising panic in her throat.

Three more cars passed, ignoring her, but the fourth stopped a good way down the road and then backed up as she ran toward it. She saw the driver through a haze of stinging tears. He was young, with a dark crew cut. He had to lower the radio to ask her, “Where you headed?”

“East,” she said.

He leaned across the seat to open the door. Their sudden speed struck her as miraculous.

By the time the sun began to set, she had almost completely lost her bearings, and although her last ride, two teenage girls about her own age, had assured her that the exit where they had left her led to a road that traveled due east, she hesitated trying it. By now she was certain her aunt and her mother had the police out looking for her and she would have to find some back roads to make her way on. She’d had nothing to eat all day but the few potato chips the girls had shared with her and a bottle of Coke a trucker had bought her in West Virginia.

She turned back to the road the girls had taken, a smaller tar road that seemed to have risen in the middle like a loaf of bread. She walked along a dry gully at its edge, the afternoon heat still burning through the soles of her shoes and making everything ahead seem to shimmer. Thick trees lined the road beside her and through them came an occasional yellow and blinding glare of the setting sun. It was the time of day and of summer that made her think of barbecues and sunburn. Going upstairs to dress for the hot summer night ahead. Dotting perfume behind her thighs.

She walked slowly, the pocketbook heavy in her hand. The cars that passed her seemed dangerously close; some tooted their horns as they went by her, but she tried not to veer. She felt a blister forming on her heel. The time of day and summer when she would lean across the tiny child’s desk she had transformed into a vanity table with sheer white curtains, lean into the plastic mirror lined with round bulbs, the movie-star mirror she had gotten for her thirteenth birthday (her father looking truly puzzled when she opened it, looking across the dining room table, across the remnants of cake and ice cream to ask, “No more dolls?”), and draw perfect black lines across her eyelids.

She walked steadily through the dust and the heat, uncertain of where she was going but knowing that sooner or later she would come upon something. A place to rest and to eat. It had to be. There was the smell of hot tar in the air, the lingering odor of passing cars. The sun shot through the trees, red now, lower than it had been but still bright enough to make her squint. The time of day neighbors came out to their porches and their driveways, patting their bellies and sucking their teeth. When she would wait to hear Rick’s boots on the steps, the thrilling rattle at the door.

The darkness had begun to come in like water, filling up the wells already formed by the shadows of trees and leaves, when she saw a white sign at the edge of the road ahead and then came upon a small restaurant, squat and low with brown shake shingles and a wide, dusty lot.

There was a cigarette machine in the entry and a long, green-topped counter across the far wall, red plastic booths and stools. The waitress who leaned against one looked up as she came in. Just over her shoulder, there was a narrow pass-through window from the kitchen. The cook behind it looked at her, too, only a nose and a pair of eyes.

Sheryl walked quickly to the furthest corner and slid into a booth, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze. She lit a cigarette and immediately turned to the window.

The waitress was about her mother’s age, short and plump, and she said, “Isn’t it hot?” as she swabbed the table with a gray rag. She wore a charm bracelet and a thin wedding band. Her arm was freckled.

Sheryl said, “Yes, it is.”

“Is there just going to be you?” the woman asked.

Sheryl paused for a moment, uncertain.

“Are you waiting for someone?” the waitress said.

Sheryl shook her head. “Oh,” she said. “No.” And she began the lie she had rehearsed: “My mother dropped me off.”

But the waitress merely nodded and set one napkin before her. “You want a Coke?”

Sheryl said yes. When the waitress brought it, she ordered a hamburger and french fries and then asked, “Is it all right if I use the bathroom?”

The woman laughed. She had a small flat nose and narrow eyes. “Sure.

I won’t let anybody sit here.”

In the bathroom, Sheryl dug out her makeup and saw the glass over the picture had cracked in two places. She ran her index finger over one of the cracks and was surprised to see blood streak the glass. She looked at her finger and only slowly felt the pain. She put the picture on the sink and ran cold water over the cut. In the photograph, her mother and father were young-looking and smiling, her father with his mouth open a little, as if he were saying something. She, a toddler, was sitting between them. There was something old-fashioned about their clothes, her mother’s plaid skirt and her father’s white socks and black shoes. Something old about the chalky colors of the picture.

Months after her father died, her mother had said suddenly at dinner one summer evening, “I can’t remember what Daddy sounded like.” She seemed about to panic, as if she had just lost the memory and knew it could not be retrieved. “I can’t think of how he sounded, can you?”

Sheryl had said of course she could. She would remember it always. But what she really remembered, she knew, were the words he had used, “Holy cow,” and “Let’s everybody keep a level head.” The sound she gave him was the sound of her own voice, repeating the words he had used or merely imagining others. His real voice and the words he had actually used, what he’d been saying the second the photograph was taken, for instance, was lost to her, although she hadn’t realized it until her mother asked if she could still remember.

She returned the picture to her pocketbook and slowly reapplied her makeup, studying her eyes and her lips and her round flat face to see what the people she had ridden with today had seen, what the waitress and the cook saw. If, adrift as she was, she had changed. She lifted her arms and sprayed herself with deodorant. Combed her bangs and re teased her hair. Her shell rode up over her belly and as she pulled it down she saw the imprint of her open fly. She lifted the blouse, tucking the hem of it under her chin, and tried once more to pull up her zipper, to close the button at her waist. But even though she held her breath, the rubber band merely buckled a little, her belly only strained against it. She pulled her blouse over her waist again and saw clearly that she hadn’t fooled anyone.

She left the bathroom carrying her pocketbook before her like a child.

Back at the table, she ate slowly, feeling the others watching her. Each time the cook finished an order, he glanced through his window toward her. An elderly woman in the next booth smiled at her each time she looked up from her plate. The men at the counter turned indifferently to glance at her over their shoulders. There were some teenagers at a table in the opposite corner, two teenage couples and an extra boy. The girls giggled continuously while the boys grew louder and louder in their talk. Sheryl gathered they were all going to a movie nearby. She knew the single boy had somehow lost his date.