A Friend at Midnight

  Instead, he had an odd enticing vision of those open girders high above the ticket counters. He saw himself balancing there for a moment, and then letting go on purpose.

  Nate picked out a Cheerio and gave it to the guy who had been shaking his hand.

  “I especially like the lint on your Cheerio,” said the guy’s seatmate.

  “Eat it!” demanded Nate.

  In an act of true love, the guy ate it.

  Around the third hour, Michael remembered that he had to find the luggage carousels because he was meeting Lily at Baggage Claim. How could he have wasted all this time without finding Baggage Claim?

  It took forever to locate the escalators down. He was sick with fear that he had missed her. He hadn’t had his watch on when they left so fast in the morning, so he had to check the time on the flight monitors, and the complexity of the information up there made the clock part hard to find.

  The carousels were motionless. Security guards stood there anyway, also motionless, frozen until they were needed.

  Michael trudged along car rental counters and past free hotel phones. There were lots of brochures for places to go and things to do. Michael took every one he could reach. He hated reading, but he could take his brochures back to the toy yellow and blue plane, curl up under a seat, and look at pictures.

  “Passenger MacArthur, Passenger MacArthur,” said an overhead voice. “Meet your party at the information booth at Baggage Claim.”

  That was where Michael was.

  Two middle-aged women were definitely the ones worried about Passenger MacArthur. They bobbed up and down, peering this way and that. It was several minutes before Passenger MacArthur appeared, and Michael was astonished to see another little chubby middle-aged woman. Passenger MacArthur had sounded like a dad to him.

  I could have Dad paged, he thought.

  The three women hugged and cried, “It’s so good to see you!” and “The car’s in short-term parking, not much of a walk,” so Michael walked with them.

  I thought we would play catch, thought Michael. I thought we would be outside in his yard and play catch.

  He clung to his brochures.

  The garage was a cavern, like a sunken Japanese car dealership, hundreds of black four-door sedans lined up between great concrete pillars and tiny glowing Exit signs. Michael went over a few aisles where the shadows were thicker. He turned around and could no longer see where he’d come in, and when he tried to find the terminal, it wasn’t there, and when he found a door, it led in some other direction entirely, and when he ran back to the four-door sedans, there were none. Only huge SUVs brushing side-view mirrors with the next SUV.

  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

  Michael 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.

  Michael hoisted Nathaniel and kissed him. “Come on, Nate. I’ll give you a bath. That’ll make you feel better. Then we’ll both go to bed. Remember how we share a bedroom?”

  “Wiwwy come too,” Nathaniel demanded.

  “No,” said Lily. “I’m taking a shower.”

  In her bathroom, she tried to wash the whole day down the drain, but she couldn’t get it off her skin. She put on her summer pajamas and went to check on Michael and Nathaniel. They had tubbed together and were squeaky clean and wrinkled like prunes.

  Still to come was Nathaniel crying himself to sleep.

  Lily reminded herself that good sisters did not throw their little brothers down the cellar stairs but were patient.

  Michael put Nathaniel in his crib and tucked a blanket around him. “Don’t do any crying, Nate. You’re too old. Grow up.”

  “Okie, Miikooo,” said Nathaniel. He closed his eyes and went to sleep, a recruit taking orders from his sergeant.

  Lily dragged herself downstairs, wrapped the smashed cell phone in old newspaper, as if it were particularly disgusting garbage, and even took it outside to the trash barrel and fastened the lid tightly.

  The kitchen phone rang.

  She tottered back in to answer.

  “Darling?” cried her mother. “We’re almost home! We’re on the Whitestone Bridge! Did you get Michael? Is e
verything okay? Why didn’t you call me? I’m a wreck! Is Michael all right?” Michael had run downstairs to signal yet again that he did not want to talk.

  Lily did not know how she could do more to protect Michael. But protecting Michael had hardly begun. Lily could not let the school system have any idea what had happened. Was anything more vicious than a gossipy teacher? Yes.

  A gossipy counselor.

  Schools lived for that word “dysfunctional.” It was right up there with the all-time favorite phrase “low self-esteem.” Teachers loved to say to each other, “Little Michael comes from a dysfunctional family, you know. Predictable result. Low self-esteem.” He’d be in Special Needs in a heartbeat. He’d spend his life with people whose idea of kindness was to rip open a wound every week, so it never healed, but bled in front of everybody. Lily had seen what the Self-Esteem crowd could do to a kid.

  Perhaps counseling had its place. The problem was, it didn’t keep its place. It spread like a virus, infecting a kid’s whole school year, and creeping into the next year, and the next, invading every classroom and lodging in the mind of every teacher. Once said out loud, it would go with Michael all the days of his school life: divorce issues; abandoned by father; subsequent reading problems; low self-esteem; needs counseling.

  “Michael’s asleep, Mom,” Lily told the teacher she loved most in the world. “And I’m asleep on my feet. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Lily, I want details!”

  “There aren’t any details. And Mom, don’t wake us up early tomorrow, okay?” Tomorrow was Sunday. Usually Lily complained about church, but this week it would serve a purpose. It would postpone conversation. “Wake us up with exactly enough time to get dressed,” she said.

  “First you’ll need a sturdy breakfast.”

  Lily never needed a sturdy breakfast. Lily liked weak, fragile breakfasts—a sip of orange juice and a single blueberry pried out of a muffin. “See you in the morning,” she said, and disconnected. With any luck, even at this hour, Mom and Kells would run into traffic and Lily really and truly would be asleep before they got home. She dragged herself upstairs, but the sleep that had flattened her on the plane did not come. She couldn’t even get her eyes to close unless she weighted them with her hands. After a while, she got up and went into Michael and Nathaniel’s room.