That Night (7 page)

When Sheryl came into the room that summer morning, her mother was already awake, her hand held over her eyes. In the year and some months since her husband’s death, she would have found no change in her sense of loss, or in her disbelief that the loss was hers, but it might have become with each morning more and more difficult to raise the tears that she had thought would wake her for the rest of her life.

She might have been remembering some moment from their early marriage, or from their last days together, perhaps some argument they’d once had, turning the memory over and over, searching for whatever it was that would fill her with the appropriate sadness, the only feeling she had become willing to wake for, the only feeling she still feared to lose.

Sheryl appeared in the doorway and said, “Mom,” in much the same way she might have said it years ago, hoping to be kept home from school. She wore lacy baby dolls, lavender and white, no makeup, but her eyes still smudged with mascara. Her legs and arms were bony, lightly tanned. Her hair, flattened from sleep, was pressed back behind her ears.

Sheryl walked into the room and knelt on the floor beside her mother, who only turned her head, her hand just lifted off her brow. Reflexively, without tenderness, she reached out to brush the bangs out of her daughter’s eyes.

She might once have thought, or been told, that if she lost her husband, her children and grandchildren would save her, but she had learned by then that this simply wasn’t true. Sheryl had her father’s mouth and full face and something of his coloring, but she was beside the point somehow. Their child, that was all. Another life, not theirs. She was only vaguely aware of the betrayal in this. What, then, were children for?

The light in the pale blue bedroom was the early light of a thousand such summer mornings. The windows were open, and through them came the sounds of the first children, out surveying the grounds, revving up bicycles, me knocking on Diane Rossi’s side door.

“Mom,” Sheryl said softly, kneeling beside her mother, her hand touching the mattress in some approximation of herself at three, demanding to be pulled into her parents’ bed. “I think maybe I’m pregnant.”

Her mother rose immediately and went to the phone on what had been her husband’s side of the bed. In the months since his death, she had often thought that if it hadn’t been so swift and unexpected, so immediately complete, she would have done well. If he had woken her in the middle of the night, clutching his heart, she would have phoned the police, their doctor, the hospital, she would have supervised the attendants who carried him down the stairs and sat calmly beside him in the ambulance. If he’d had cancer or some such slow disease, she would have learned to use hypodermic needles or catheters or whatever he needed. She would have set up a hospital bed in the living room, slept beside him on the couch every night, drawn the curtains and adjusted the pillows so he could see the street, the progress of his lawn (which she would have tended for him), the cardinals and jays perched on the hedge.

She would have proven to him, and to herself, that she was capable. She would have done well.

She asked Sheryl, “When did you have your last period?” and then quickly spoke the answer into the phone. It was nearly three months ago. She said, “Right away,” and checked the bedside clock. When she hung up, she told Sheryl they would see the doctor that morning. Sheryl was now sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap. Her mother went to her then, put her arm around her shoulder, maybe kissed the top of her hair, which smelled of cigarette smoke and hairspray. “Okay,” she said. “It will be okay.” Thinking already of her sister in Ohio and if it wouldn’t be better for Sheryl to fly out there as soon as they knew for sure, maybe tonight.

She took control of her daughter’s tragedy in a way she had been unable to do with her own and turned the anger she had learned, the nastiness, to what would have seemed to her to be good use. For in these matters, it was well accepted at the time, the girl must disappear and the hoodlum boy never know.

That night, as soon as I’d managed to break out of my mother’s grip, I left our porch and went into the street. All the children were doing it, not even running but almost staggering, somewhat reluctantly, in our fathers’ wakes, going only as far as what seemed to be the prescribed borders of the fight: about six feet or so from the cars and her lawn, which left us scattered across both sidewalks on either side and down the middle of the street. When the first police car approached, we merely turned our heads, stricken, I suppose, with that strange paralysis that seems to grip all crying and moaning children. Georgie Evers and I were the first two in his path, and it never occurred to us to step out of his way.

But by then the officer had seen the cars on the lawn and the brawl that took place beyond them.

He stopped, then turned on his siren and his lights, got out quickly and stood dumbfounded for a moment with one foot still in the car and his hand on the open door. He shouted, “You kids,” waving his arm (still none of us moved), and then dove into his car again. He turned off the siren, made a call on his radio (the Meyer twins, who stood nearly at his elbow, claimed he said, Mayday! Mayday!), then leaped from the car again, the nightstick in his hand.

But the boys had begun a retreat as soon as they heard the siren. We saw them shaking our fathers from their legs and their arms, dropping their chains and even their jackets to the lawn if that was the only way to get rid of them. Some of the boys were bloodied, the blood black shadows that covered their mouths or their ears. They were shouting each other’s names. I saw one of them was lifted and pushed into a car by the others. Car doors slammed. Even as the poor young officer jogged toward the fray, the first car, the one in Sheryl’s driveway, the white one with the painted flourish, backed up with a screech and, turning its front wheels over the curb, headed out—passing within inches of some of the children who still stood crying or who, seeing the car come toward them, had leaped into bushes or onto the grass.

Again the cop turned to us and with another wide wave of his hand cried, “Get out of the street.” But at the same time, the car that had led the procession did a sudden U turn across Sheryl’s lawn, its horn a staccato yell, and pulled out from her driveway. The next instant, I saw Rick. The light was on inside the remaining car, the one he had emerged from. I saw him through the back passenger window. I almost thought he was turning toward me, but he was simply curling forward in pain. He had lost his sunglasses. His hands, streaked with blood, were cupped over his face. I later learned his nose had been broken, but at the time I was certain he was crying. Then the door closed and the light went out.

While our fathers were still pulling at its doors, pounding at its windows, the car suddenly spit out in reverse and then raced backward down the street, wavering in the streetlight like a fish. Just past the north corner it stopped, darted forward and disappeared.

It seemed the whole world was wailing. In the now nearly total darkness, the sound made you think you should see an orange glow in the sky just beyond the rooftops, see the red flames of some city being consumed by the final conflagration. There was the disappearing siren of the young cop’s car, the approaching sirens of his reinforcements, little Jake screaming in his mother’s arms. There were the other children, who had been blasted into the hedges and the grass by the escaping cars (and who were lying tragically now, unharmed but unwilling to stand until their own part in the adventure, their own brush with death, had been fully recognized), the children like Georgie Evers, who had never stopped wailing, the mothers who were now running to their battered husbands’ sides, even Sheryl’s grandmother, who had finally opened the door again and now stood crying in Polish from behind the screen.

It seemed our whole neighborhood had raised its voice in one varied, inharmonious wail.

Amidst all this, I saw my father and Mr. Rossi, who had a glistening gash on his head and on his arm, help Sheryl’s mother up the steps and into the house. My mother followed. Just before I caught up with them, I saw Billy Rossi and Billy Carpenter burst out of their driveways on their bicycles, headed in the direction the hoods had gone and whooping like Indians.

Inside, Sheryl’s living room seemed soft and comfortable (there were the green drapes and the green carpeting, the small velvet paintings hung high on the walls) and yet at the same time, perhaps because of the plastic slipcovers, sheathed in a thin layer of ice. Her grandmother stood trembling and crying by the single floor lamp, the only light on in the room. She was a small, plump woman. She wore a light cotton shift, her neck and freckled shoulders bare. Her sunken eyes were dark in the dim yellow light. Sheryl’s mother sat on the couch. The men were trying to get her to lie down, but she kept saying, “I’m all right, I tell you. I tell you I’m all right,” her voice quivering. She was shoeless, and her legs looked clawed. There was dirt on her palms and on her knees. My mother came through the dining room from the kitchen, a glass of water and a wet dish towel in her hands.

“Here, Ann,” she said.

Sheryl’s mother refused the water but took the cloth and wrapped it around her wrist, sighing and telling them she was all right.

“Mama,” she said suddenly and quite crossly to the old woman who stood by the lamp, crying and murmuring, clasping and unclasping her plump hands. “I’m all right.”

I saw my parents exchange a look. What can you do for a woman like that?

Then the police cars pulled up outside, their sirens dying. Their blue lights moved eerily behind the drapes. We heard the doors slam, heard the cops’ and our neighbors’ voices, heard the spit and sputter of the police radios, those small muttering sounds that seem to accompany all disasters.

A policeman rattled the screen door and then let himself in. Two of them, both large and hippy with their gunbelts and nightsticks. One of them was carrying a small black pad. The other, who was somewhat older, tipped his hat to the ladies and asked their forgiveness for barging in. Sheryl’s mother immediately gave them Rick’s name and what she knew of his address. The other cop took it down while the older one simply smiled. “We’ve got one of the cars already,” he said. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “It’s not going to be any trouble picking them all up.”

Taking a seat on the edge of one of the thick plastic covered chairs, he leaned forward and in a soft, fatherly voice advised her about pressing charges. She nodded, listening. Yes, of course, of course. The quiver had left her voice.

At one point, my father crossed the room as they spoke and gently took my mother’s arm. She was still holding the glass of water she had gotten for Sheryl’s mother, and wordlessly, he urged her to drink it. She did, looking all the while like a runner-up in a game with only one perfect prize. (Later that night, after a botched, embarrassed and only sporadically explicit attempt to explain what Sheryl had done, she told me, “Let’s just say the stork missed our house and landed on hers.”)

When the officer stood again, the plastic slipcovers or his leather holster groaning, he told Sheryl’s mother he’d be glad to drive her to the hospital if she wanted to get her legs and her wrist taken care of, have a doctor make sure everything else was okay. He turned to Mr. Rossi, who now held a handkerchief to the wound on his head. He said it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to come along, too.

The cop turned to my father. “You okay?” he asked. My father’s shirt was ripped and there was grass and dirt on his pants and in his thick hair, but he said he was fine.

“How about you, tootsie?” the cop said to me.

Involuntarily, I smiled. I had always liked policemen, but now my loyalties were torn.

Suddenly, Sheryl’s mother said, “I know you.” We all turned to see that she was looking carefully at the officer with the notepad.

“You’ve been here before,” she said. “The day my husband died. He died in his car.”

The cop pushed back his hat and said, “That’s right,” as if he were making a confession. He looked sheepishly at the other men, Mr. Rossi, my father, as if he feared they’d think him a harbinger. “Maybe I can come back sometime when the news is good,” he said.

Sheryl’s mother continued to study him. Then she said, “No,” shaking her head, still not crying. “No,” she said.

Outside, the men who were to go to the hospital were easing themselves into the police cars. The others were sitting on the curb or standing on the lawn, waiting to go to the police station. The lawn itself had been badly ripped by the tires and was littered with chains and sunglasses and a leather jacket, but as they waited, our fathers leaned on their rakes or their hoes, Mr. Carpenter crouched beside his upright baseball bat, and so they gave the scene a somewhat wistful portrait-of-America air. They might have been farmers standing over their plowed fields, sandlot baseball stars. Mrs. Sayles, almost luminous in her tennis whites, picked her way among them, offering praise and consolation and cool face cloths.

In the distance, the bells of an ice-cream truck tinkled gaily. Mr. Rossi, still holding a handkerchief to his wound, took a deep breath and told my father to take a look at that sky. “Planets,” my father said. He turned to my mother. “You always know which ones are planets.” But she refused to look up for him. Instead, she began what was to become the women’s second chorus of the night. She put her hand over her heart and whispered, “Stupid kids. Those stupid, stupid kids.”

My mother’s determination to have another, or as she so often put it, just one more, child had always confused and puzzled me. My brother was born first and then I had been born and it seemed to me her luck in having one of each, both talented and healthy and, in my opinion at least, perfectly formed, should have filled her with gratitude and pride, not longing. And yet, through our thin walls had come the nightly thumping, the hard quick breaths. Listening to them each night, I would imagine both my parents as I had once seen them an hour before the start of one of their New Year’s Eve parties: my mother in her slip and her jewelry, my father in his undershirt and good suit pants, puffing frantically into one balloon after another, apparently trying to fill the room. They had seemed to give themselves entirely to each, blowing into it with one long breath (always futilely for the first few seconds, then a miraculous blossoming), quickly examining it, then blowing again. The fruits of their labor, yellow and green and blue and red, bobbing at their feet, bright and useless.