A Friend at Midnight

  Contents

  Title Page

  part one: september

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  part two: the following september

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  About the Author

  Also by Caroline B. Cooney

  Copyright

  chapter

  1

  For miles, nobody spoke.

  Then the driver stopped right in the road and said, “Get out of the car.”

  Michael’s fingers struggled with the latch of his seat belt. The driver reached over with such irritation Michael expected a slap, but the driver just released Michael’s seat belt. It was gray and shiny and slid away like a snake.

  The car door was heavy. Michael opened it with difficulty and climbed out onto the pavement. The passenger drop-off made a long dark curve under the overhang of the immense airport terminal. Glass doors stretched as far as Michael could see. Men and women pulled suitcases on wheels and struggled with swollen duffel bags. They hefted briefcases and slung the padded straps of laptop carriers over their shoulders. The glass doors opened automatically for them and the airport swallowed them.

  “Shut the door, Michael,” said the driver.

  Michael stared into the car. He could not think very clearly. The person behind the wheel seemed to melt and re-form. “You’re not coming?” Michael whispered.

  The driver answered, and Michael heard the answer. But he knew right away that he must not think about it. The shape and contour of those syllables were a map of some terrible unknown country. A place he didn’t want to go.

  “Shut the door,” repeated the driver.

  But Michael could neither move nor speak.

  Again the driver leaned forcefully over the passenger seat where Michael had sat. Michael backed up, the heels of his sneakers hitting the curb. The driver yanked the door shut and the car began leaving before the driver had fully straightened up behind the wheel.

  Michael stared at the back of the car, at its trunk and license plate, and immediately his view was blocked by a huge tour bus with a red and gold logo. Passengers poured out of the bus, encircling Michael, talking loudly in a language he did not know.

  The bus driver opened low folding doors covering the cargo hatch and flung luggage onto the sidewalk. Bus passengers swarmed around the suitcases. Michael watched as if it were television. When all the luggage had been distributed, the driver folded the doors back, leaped into his bus and drove off.

  Michael could see down the road again, but the car that had dropped him off was long gone. AIRPORT EXIT, said the sign above the road.

  Three cars drove up next to his feet. Families got out. People kissed good-bye. They vanished into the maw of the airport. Another bus arrived, all its passengers either old ladies carrying big purses or old men carrying canes and newspapers.

  Michael felt eyes on him. Not bus people eyes, because the bus people were too busy making little cries of pleasure as they spotted their suitcases.

  He didn’t have to look to know they were police eyes focused on him. He was not going to tell the police. Not now, not ever.

  Michael eased into a knot of bus people, resting his hand on the edge of an immense suitcase towed by a fat chatty lady. Another even fatter lady towed an even larger suitcase. Wherever they were going, they could hardly wait to get there. The ladies hauled their suitcases into the terminal. Michael went with them. The women never noticed him, but surged forward into a ladies’ room. Michael stood in the midst of a vast open area. Hundreds of passengers hurried by, separating on either side of him as if he were a rock in a river. They gave him no more attention than they would have given to such a rock.

  Michael threaded his way down the concourse until he came to flight monitors high on the wall. Michael was not a good reader. Charts, like the departure and arrival lists on these screens, were difficult for him. Craning his neck and squinting, he struggled to interpret the information. There were several flights to LaGuardia. He counted six in the next two hours. He hung on to this information, as if it might be useful.

  Michael was wearing new jeans. It was too hot for jeans, but he had been told to put them on. The crisp pant legs were rough against his skin. His T-shirt, though, was old and soft. It had been his sister Lily’s, and he had filched it from her to use as packing around a fragile possession. He had been wearing it lately, even though it came to his knees.

  He felt those eyes again. He walked into the men’s room to get away from the stare. It was packed. So many men. Fathers, probably, or grandfathers or stepfathers or godfathers. He closed himself in a stall, but the toilet was flushing by itself, over and over, as if it intended to drown him, and he fled from the wet sick smell of the place.

  Back in the open space, Michael distracted himself by looking everywhere, even up. The ceilings were very high, with exposed girders in endless triangles that looked like art. He had been in this airport once before and had imagined swinging from those girders, leaping from one to the next, sure of his footing. Michael was not sure of anything right now, not even the bottoms of his feet.

  He sat on a black bench that had curled edges, like a licorice stick. Ticket counters stretched in both directions: American, Southwest, Continental, Frontier, Delta. People stood in long slow lines that zigzagged back and forth, separated by blue sashes strung between chrome stands.

  Maybe I just didn’t understand, he thought. Maybe the car just went to park. Maybe if I go back outside…

  He felt better. He went back outside.

  Taxis and hotel limousines and vans from distant parking lots were driving up. Wheeled suitcases bumped over the tiled sidewalk as loudly as guns shooting. Clumps of people stumbled against him and moved on. New buses took the place of the last set, and their exhausts were black and clotted in his lungs.

  The terrible words the driver had flung at Michael had been lying on that sidewalk, waiting for him to come back, and now the words jumped up and began yelling at him.

  Michael tripped over a suitcase and fell hard on the pavement. The suitcase owner picked Michael up, dusted him off and examined his bare elbows for scratches. “I’m sorry about that,” said the man pleasantly. “You okay?”

  Michael could hardly hear the speech of the man, banging against those terrible last words from the car. He couldn’t answer.

  “Where’s your mom and dad, kiddo? Who are you with?” asked the man.

  Michael recovered. “My grandmother,” he said, astonished by how easily the lie came to him. Michael was not much of a fibber. He had always meant to get good at lying, because he was always leaving tracks he’d like to cover, but he never got around to thinking of good lies, and stupid ones were too stupid to bother with, so usually he just admitted whatever he’d done.

  Where had that fib come from? Had the bottom of his mind been getting ready to lie?

  “Where is your grandmother?” asked the guy, standing tall and scouting out the sidewalks.

  “In the bathroom,” said Michael. “She has to go a lot. I figured I had time to look around.”

  The guy laughed. “Better find her before she panics.”

  “Okay,” said Michael. “Thanks.” He went into the terminal again and did not look back.

  This time when he walked past the ticket counters, he saw that they broke in the middle and that beyond them was another huge hallway. Michael entered new territory and slid gra
tefully into a magazine shop.

  There were clerks at three registers and a line at each one. Every passenger at the entire airport was buying a snack before boarding. Michael had not had supper last night, and of course this morning there had been no breakfast, and now it was almost lunchtime. He walked around, staring at the racks of small bags. Honey mustard pretzels and jelly beans. Peanut butter cups and barbecue-flavored potato chips. Sugar-free gum and chocolate bars.

  Usually Michael didn’t care that much about food. His big sisters, now, Reb and Lily, they loved food. They were always moaning how they couldn’t have this or shouldn’t have that, because they might gain a pound. Looking at this food, Michael got hungry. But if he stayed, pretty soon the clerks would notice him.

  Michael went back into the hallway. The next store sold gifts. Its front display held teddy bears. He studied the one in front, bright red and not half as good a bear as York.

  Michael had gotten York when he was very small. York was very soft and easily squished, rusty brown the way a bear should be, with a knitted New York Yankees sweater and a tiny New York Yankees baseball cap. York had not washed well. One arm—Michael considered it York’s pitching arm—had come off and although Michael carefully kept the arm for months, eventually it got lost. York’s fur had acquired lavender streaks, something his mother blamed on bleach.

  For years now, Michael had been trying not to sleep with York. He had graduated to keeping York in a cardboard box under the bed. That way, when Michael’s friends came over to play, York was hidden. But at night, when he was tucked in, and the lights were off, Michael’s hand would sneak out from under the covers and wave into the darkness under the bed until his fingers located the cardboard. Slowly, carefully, he would pull the box out into the room and go to sleep holding on to York’s remaining arm.

  York had seemed perfectly safe under the new bed. But he hadn’t been.

  Michael thought about his possessions, still sitting in the new room. What would happen in that new room now? When he was ordered into the car, Michael had not known what the plan was. He hadn’t known they were going to the airport. He had brought nothing with him.

  Nothing.

  He had not known the meaning of that word before. He had nothing.

  He walked past more stores.

  His sisters loved shopping even more than food. How many hours had Michael spent with his feet dangling from some bench while his sisters fingered every single sweater in a store the size of a stadium? And when his sisters were finally done shopping, what did they have to show for it? Usually nothing. They never had any money, either.

  Michael wanted his sisters so much that for a terrible moment he thought he might cry.

  He paused at a restaurant with two hostesses. They weren’t busy—the restaurant was almost empty. The women frowned slightly, watching this eight-year-old all by himself. It had been a mistake to stop walking because one hostess opened her mouth to speak. Michael averted his face and yelled down the hall, “Mom! Wait up!” He broke into a run and ran smack into the security gates.

  Passengers were hefting bags onto the X-ray conveyor belt and tossing their car keys and shoes and change into little boxes. On the far side, they were being wanded by security people or putting their shoes back on. There were three types of security: people in uniforms like flight attendants wore; people in police uniforms; and people in camo, probably National Guard.

  It was a policewoman who spotted him.

  He didn’t move fast enough. The officer was next to him, bending over, smiling, and he couldn’t let her ask questions, because he didn’t have answers, so he smiled back and said, “I can’t find the bathroom. My mom let me go to the bathroom and now I can’t find it.”

  She led him back the way he’d come, to a different break between the ticket counters; another route to the front half of the terminal. “There it is,” she said, pointing.

  “Thanks!” Michael trotted, as if he were desperate, and he was desperate, just not for a bathroom. He killed time in there, seeing which soap spout actually delivered soap, and this time when he went back toward the shops, he found a little-kid playroom behind a stairwell. He joined children playing on toy trucks that doubled as benches for the parents.

  On a far wall were pay phones. The phones had no booths and no seats. Not one was in use. Probably most people had cell phones. Michael did not have a cell phone. Mom and Kells and Reb and Lily all had cell phones but Michael was “too young.” He had said a hundred times to his mother that nobody was “too young” for a phone.

  I could call home, thought Michael.

  But if Mom or Kells answered, Michael would have to hang up, because he wasn’t ever telling the thing that had happened and the thing that had been said, and since he knew already he would just hang up on them, what was the point of calling?

  Unless he could be sure of reaching Lily.

  Somehow, Lily had known he would need to call home. She had been so sure, she’d trained him. What exactly had Lily known that Michael had not known?

  Lily was fifteen and difficult. Michael adored her but steered clear if he could manage it. The day before he left, when he was literally hopping with joy, Lily dragged him into her bedroom and slammed the door. “It won’t work, Michael,” she said, referring to his Plan. “But since you’re going anyway, you’re going to memorize something.”

  How Michael was looking forward to a life with no big sisters pushing him around. “No,” he told Lily.

  “Yes. Or I’ll stomp you.” Lily stomped him routinely and then said innocently to their mother, “Me? Fighting?”

  Oh, well, he had told himself. Tomorrow Lily will be history. “Fine,” he said grumpily to the sister he was sick of. “What do I have to memorize?”

  Now in the airport, Michael picked up the phone. His throat was sore. He closed his eyes and saw the memorized number, all those digits. He dialed the phone company’s 800 number and then he dialed his own area code and phone number. The phone pinged and told him to dial the number being billed. You always had to think about money, Lily had explained.

  Again Michael poked the numbers for his home phone and this time he added Mom’s PIN number. For years, her PIN number had been 3000, because she said that three children in the house felt like three thousand, especially when the three children were Rebecca and Lily and Michael. But then Mom got remarried, and a year later, Nathaniel was born. Mom went and got a new PIN number: 4000.

  Lily said Mom had no right to get divorced, no right to get remarried, no right to have another kid, and absolutely no right to go and change her PIN number.

  Michael, however, thought 4000 was an excellent PIN number because Nathaniel had four thousand toys and had broken four thousand pieces off things (mostly Michael’s things) and had definitely worked through four thousand diapers. Every night felt like four thousand nights, too, because Nathaniel could not fall asleep without sobbing for half an hour.

  They were all pretty grumpy about Nathaniel. Especially Michael, because he had to share a bedroom with this unwanted half brother. Kells built a double-sided bookcase across the bedroom, which supposedly gave Michael privacy but really just turned Nathaniel’s side into an echo chamber. At least Nathaniel was still in a crib. He was old enough to climb out but never had and Michael certainly never demonstrated. Nathaniel belonged in a cage.

  When Michael left home, Nathaniel had been twenty-two months old and Michael had figured not to see him again for a year. But his brother would still be twenty-two months old when Michael got back.

  The call went through. Michael pictured all the phones and all their ringing: the kitchen phone in the great messy sunny room where everybody was always cooking; the portable phone in Mom and Kells’s room; the TV room phone.

  He hung up in the middle of the second ring.

  It was too early to call.

  Things might change.

  Lily was putting Nathaniel down for his nap. When the phone rang, she was delight
ed, because Nate, like some little trained dog, honored the ring of a phone. Reb and Lily often called each other on their cell phones just to shut Nate up for a minute.

  “I’ll be right back, Nate,” Lily told him. “I have to answer the phone. You put your head down and close your eyes. Before you know it, my phone call will be over and I’ll be back.”

  Nate was still pretty easy to dupe. He said, “Okie, Wiwwy,” which was how he said “Okay, Lily,” and even though Lily tried to harden her heart against Nate, she adored him when he put his head down and murmured, “Okie, Wiwwy.”

  Lily whipped out of the room without looking into Michael’s half. Michael’s three quarters, actually. Nate had exactly enough space for his crib and one person to stand next to it.

  Michael had stripped his side of every possession, taking every baseball card and toy truck and Lego and book and video game and CD and of course York. He had even taken the sheets off his bed—Michael!—who believed that laundry belonged on the floor and changing sheets was for sissies. After Michael threw his used sheets in the laundry room that day, he came back to admire the bare mattress: Proof. He was leaving. For good.

  Lily understood Michael’s decision to go. They all wanted to storm away when Mom remarried and they all wanted to storm away again when Nathaniel was born. But when Michael really did storm away, Lily knew in her heart why she and Reb had not. They knew better.

  It gave Lily a bit of peace to know that Michael had York the Bear with him. York would never let Michael down.

  The second ring was cut short. There was not a third one. Lily pounded down the stairs to look at the caller ID on the kitchen phone and see who had hung up. Probably some solicitor who had managed to avoid the Do Not Call list.

  Lily adored the telephone. She loved e-mail and text messaging, because she loved every variation on communicating, but mostly Lily loved the sound of her own voice. Just since yesterday’s phone calls, she had a hundred new things to tell every friend she had. If she got lucky, Nathaniel would fall asleep and give her two fine nap hours for phone calls.

  Mom and Kells would not be back till after midnight. They had driven Reb to college. It was the first semester of Reb’s freshman year, and Lily had been counting the days right along with her sister, excited about seeing the campus and the dorm, meeting the roommates, helping unpack, hanging clothes and posters. But when the last box and suitcase had been wedged into the car, there was no room for Nate’s car seat and no room for Lily.