After Midnight

by Lynn Viehl

  “That was a good game.” My brother sounded relieved, and then he caught my expression. “It was a great game.” When I punched his shoulder, he chuckled. “Fine. You were right.”

  We walked down to join the crowd of parents waiting outside the exit door of the locker room, and several of the dads there spoke to Trick and praised Gray’s performance. I watched all the shoulder-slapping and loud guffawing my oldest brother had to endure while I tried to keep a straight face.

  Gray got pummeled quite a bit himself as he emerged from the locker room. He sported a band-aid over his right cheekbone and a fresh graze on his chin, but he nodded and smiled as he worked his way through the crowd to us.

  “Hey.” He was trying not to beam and failing miserably. “You waited for me. So, what did you think of the game?”

  “You were terrible,” I told him after I gave him a hug. “Really. Only six touchdowns, Grim? Beyond pathetic. We were so embarrassed that we’re thinking about moving to Tibet. Without you.”

  “Brat.” He messed up my hair, but his expression became more uncertain as he turned to Trick. “Thanks for coming, bro.” He moved his shoulders. “I know football isn’t your thing.”

  “Yeah, well.” The stern set of Trick’s mouth slowly stretched into a wide smile. “It is now.”

  The final surprise of the night was waiting for me when we got home. I knew Trick and Gray would probably want to talk about the game—guys loved to analyze sports to death—so I said good night and went upstairs to shower. When I went into my bedroom, however, I smelled something sweet and followed my nose to my bed.

  I drew back the covers and found on my pillow a long-stemmed white rose. Then I looked over at the window and saw it had been left open a few inches.

  “Jesse.” I lifted the delicate bloom to my face to breathe in the fragrance, which was subtle and slightly sharp, the way the air smelled after it snowed. I knew there wouldn’t be a note; the rose said it all. “I miss you, too.”

  As Jesse and I continued to meet in secret every night, school gradually stopped being an ordeal for me. Whenever I saw other kids looking at me or heard them whispering—which happened in every class—I just thought of Jesse and smiled at them.

  Grayson’s stellar performances at the weekly football games also helped. By the time September turned into October, my brother was being called the best quarterback Tanglewood had ever had, and being his sister didn’t hurt. On the contrary. I never sat at an empty table during lunch again, and kids in all my classes started being more friendly to me. Most of the girls who talked to me mainly wanted to know if my brother had a girlfriend, but I didn’t mind. Gray was finally fitting in, and I was happy for him.

  Tiffany was still there, and three days after spraining his ankle during tryouts Boone came back on crutches, but I hardly noticed them anymore. Their popularity had ebbed to the point of where most of the kids ignored them. Sometimes I caught Boone watching me, but he never again tried to corner me the way he had in the cafeteria.

  Barb also finally reappeared after being absent for a week, but she seemed as miserable as I was happy.

  “Why were you out for so long?” I asked her at lunch on the day she came back. “Ego said you were sick, but did you have the flu or something?”

  “No, it was my teeth. One of my molars cracked, and it got infected.” She took out a little pill bottle and opened it. “My whole face swelled up. I looked awful.” She nodded toward the pink pills she shook out into her palm. “Now I have to take these every day until I’m like thirty.”

  “Antibiotics?” I asked.

  “I guess.” She put them back into the bottle. “I can’t stand it anymore. I’m going to flush them. I hate pills. I really hate doctors.” She looked down at her tray before she got up, threw away her food and left the cafeteria, as if she’d completely forgotten about me and Ego.

  I frowned. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know,” Ego said, sounding just as mystified. “But I can tell you, those aren’t antibiotics she’s taking.” When I glanced at him he added, “They’re only effective for seven to ten days.”

  “Well, maybe they’re painkillers.” Barb had seemed a little sluggish. “Are you going on that zoo field trip at the end of the month?”

  “For that night-with-the-animals thing?” He shook his head. “My foster parents work at night, so I have to stay home and make sure the dogs don’t eat the furniture.” He yawned. “Why are you going? You don’t seem like the zoo type.”

  I smiled. “I like the night life.”

  The real reason I’d signed up for the trip was the unique timing, which I explained to Jesse that night at the manor.

  “In biology class we’ve been studying the habits of nocturnal animals,” I said as he finished building a fire for us in the old hearth. “This is also the month that the zoo has a ‘Night with the Animals’ week and stays open until dawn. Our teacher decided to take the class there. We’re supposed to go on a guided tour and write a lot of notes on what we see.”

  He sat back on his heels as flames enveloped the old dry branches he’d stacked over a mound of browned pine needles. “Creatures who hunt at night are interesting. You should enjoy it.”

  “I want you to go, too.” I crouched down beside him. “It’s perfect for us. The tour doesn’t start until after sunset, so there’s no danger of you getting burned.” He wasn’t saying anything, and it was beginning to make me nervous. “You could meet me there and we could check out all the critters together. I’ll introduce you to my friends. It’ll be fun.” I watched him stand up and frowned. “Jesse?”

  “I’m flattered that you would want me to escort you on this trip.” He sounded upset now. “I would also very much like to meet your friends. But I can’t go with you, Catlyn.”

  “Why not?” I got up. “My brothers aren’t going to be there. It’ll be a bunch of kids from school, our biology teacher and a couple of parent chaperons. They probably won’t even notice you.”

  “What if they do?” He tossed another log onto the fire. “Have you thought about how you’re going to explain who I am? Why I’m there?”

  “I was just going to say that you’re one of the kids who takes classes by computer from home, and that I’m your tutor.” I didn’t understand why he behaving as if he were upset. “If you’re worried about your parents finding out, we can come up with a fake name. How about George?”

  He smiled sadly. “I can’t ride Prince to the zoo.”

  “So meet me at the high school, and I’ll sneak you on the bus,” I told him. “You can walk to the school from the docks, right?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not? You ride across town to meet me every night.” A thought occurred to me, and I stepped back. “Jesse, are you ashamed of being seen with me? Is that why you don’t want to go?”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “I see.” I turned away. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize why you wanted to keep our friendship secret.”

  “Catlyn, you’re not … ” He made a frustrated sound. “Every time I come here to see you, I break a promise I made to my parents. I do that because I can’t stay away, but also because I know now that nothing bad will happen. When you’re with me, you’re safe. Away from here … ”

  He wasn’t making any sense. “What could happen at a zoo, Jesse? We walk around. We get some popcorn. We look at animals with insomnia. How is any of that going to hurt me or you?”

  “There are reasons my family lives on an island,” he said. “Every time I leave it, I’m vulnerable. Every night I come here, I put myself and my parents in danger.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re afraid. Jesse, whatever your parents want, you can’t live on that island forever.” He gave me such a bleak look that I caught my breath. “Is that what they made you promise? That you would never leave? How could they ask you to do that?”

  “I’m not like you, Catlyn. I’m sick, and I’m no
t going to get better.” He looked up at a dusty medallion carved into the plaster ceiling. “Being around all those people is dangerous. I can’t risk it.”

  I felt a sharp pain in my chest, as if my heart had just broken in two. “Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?”

  “Don’t you see? When I’m with you, I can be just like anyone else. You’ve never treated me as if I were different. Do you know how wonderful that feels? To ride and talk and laugh. To be normal.” His head sagged. “But I’ve been fooling us both. I can’t have this life. We live in two different worlds, and I can’t walk out of my shadows into your sunlight.”

  I felt tears sliding down my cheeks. “You don’t have to be alone, Jesse. No one does.”

  He cradled my face between his hands. “Do you mean that?” He sounded desperate.

  “Of course I do.” I closed my eyes and hugged him. “I’ve never felt like this with anyone but you.”

  He put me at arm’s length. “I have to show you something. Will you come with me?”

  I nodded, and he seized me hand and almost dragged me out of the house. After he tossed me up on Prince, he jumped onto the saddle in front of me and we took off.

  We rode down the trail that led to an enormous old barn about a mile from the manor, where Jesse brought Prince to a halt and helped me down.

  “Open the doors,” he said, pointing to them.

  When I pulled the old sliders aside, he walked Prince into the barn, and I followed them.

  Once inside he dismounted and handed me the reins. “This is where I used to practice before we moved to the island. I used to live in this barn.” He went around and began lighting oil lamps, setting them into high shelves on the walls until a golden glow filled the air.

  I saw a center ring, just like the kind they had in the circus, surrounded by little colorfully-painted wagons and racks of some sort of equipment. Sawdust had been scattered all over the ground, which felt as hard as cement under my feet. I turned to Jesse, who was removing Prince’s saddle and blanket.

  I felt completely bewildered now. “You wanted to show me that you used to practice for the circus?”

  “I want you to know who I am,” he said, and removed Prince’s bridle before he slapped the big black on the haunches. Prince leapt neatly over the rim of the foot-high, red and white painted wooden ring and began galloping in a circle.

  I drew back. “Jesse, this isn’t a good idea. You could get hurt.”

  He smiled at me. “I was practically born on horseback, Catlyn.” He walked backward toward the ring, and then sprang into a high, long backwards somersault. When he landed, he was standing on Prince’s back.

  I would have shrieked if I hadn’t clapped my hand over my mouth. He’d just jumped onto a galloping horse without looking back. I’d never seen anyone perform such a stunt, not even in the movies.

  Prince kept galloping in circles while Jesse turned around and flipped head over heels, landing on his hands this time and lifting his legs straight up in the air. He turned his head to look at me, and his hair fell back from his face.

  All the strength went out of my legs, and I sat down hard on the sawdust-covered floor. I’d seen this before. The horse was black instead of white, and the ring was in a barn instead of under the big top. They were different, but the trick rider performing the handstand wasn’t. He’d done this before, and it had been captured on black-and-white film.

  Geza Ravenov in performance, 1873.

  Fifteen

  Jesse reversed his handstand before rolling to one side of Prince and then the other, lowering his legs as he held onto the stallion’s neck. He used the ground like a springboard and the horse like a piece of gymnastic equipment. I watched him do things I’d never thought were possible on the ground, much less a galloping horse.

  And all the while I kept seeing the image of Geza Ravenov, frozen forever in a handstand he performed over a hundred years ago.

  Prince slowed to a trot as Jesse straddled him and used his hands on his neck to guide him to the center of the ring. The big black turned in a tight circle, faced me, and went down on his forelegs, dipping his head. Jesse vaulted up and over Prince’s head and landed on his feet, lifting his face and spreading his arms as if expecting applause.

  That was my cue. I got to my feet and clapped a few times, but my heart wasn’t in it. “Bravo.”

  He bowed low and then came up with a grin. “What did you think?”

  I thought that he and Geza Ravenov were twins, or doppelgangers, or clones of each other. A thousand things ran through my mind as I walked over to the ring. “Riding like that, you should be in a full-body cast.”

  He seemed to see my face for the first time. “You didn’t enjoy it.”

  “I don’t know. I was too busy prying my heart out of my tonsils.” I looked around the barn. “Jesse, why are you doing this? Do you how dangerous it is to perform acrobatics on the ground, much less on the back of a galloping horse? If you’d fallen off—”

  He looked annoyed. “I never fall.” He put Prince’s bridle on and led him past me out of the barn.

  I turned around and called after him. “I know better, remember?”

  I could hear the sounds of pumping and water gushing into a trough, and the horse drinking, but I stayed inside. My thoughts were as jumbled as puzzle pieces rattling around in a box with a picture of Geza Ravenov on the outside. I couldn’t make anything fit. Jesse lived on an island; he had a house in the woods. He was dependent on his parents; he owned half the state. He came to see me every night; he couldn’t go to the zoo.

  Nothing connected. Nothing belonged in the same box.

  A hand touched the back of my neck. “Catlyn?”

  I didn’t know why I blurted it out, I just did. “Are you Geza Ravenov?”

  He flinched. “How do you know that name?”

  “I found a picture of him on the internet. Geza Ravenov, making a handstand on the back of a white horse in the eighteen hundreds.” I glanced down at his right hand. “He had your ring. And your body. And your face.”

  “Geza Ravenov died in eighteen seventy-four.”

  I felt impatient. “Jesse, just tell me the truth.”

  “I am not lying to you, Catlyn. He is dead. The Ravenov performers were attacked in the mountains. Most of them were murdered.” He recited the facts as if they meant nothing. “That was the reason my family came to America. The show could not go on.”

  I tried to regroup. “Do you think you’re him? That you’ve been reincarnated or something?”

  He smiled a little. “No. I may look like Geza, but I can never be him.” He looked over at the ring. “No matter how hard I try.”

  “Then explain this to me,” I demanded. “Why are we here? Why did I need to see you do this?”

  Before Jesse could answer me, Prince let out a loud screech and slammed into the side of the barn. We hurried outside, only to see the big black galloping off into the woods.

  “Something must have spooked him.” I caught Jesse’s arm as he started to go after him. “It’s only a mile. We can walk back.”

  “We can’t walk.” His eyes shifted to the trees behind the barn. “The sun will rise in less than an hour.”

  I checked my watch, and saw it was close to five a.m. “All right, then you’ll have to stay here.”

  “I can’t,” he insisted. “The barn has too many gaps; it won’t protect me.”

  We’d ridden Prince together from my house; Sali was still in our barn at the farm. I thought hard. “Will Prince go to the manor?”

  “I don’t know. He might follow the trail.” He took my hand. “Can you run?”

  I nodded, and took off with him. He had a longer stride so I had to run a little faster to keep up. Halfway down the trail Jesse picked me up off my feet.

  “Put me down,” I said as soon as I’d grabbed his neck. “You can’t carry me and run.”

  He didn’t listen. “Hold onto me.”

  I laced my finge
rs together as he picked up his pace, and a moment later he was running so fast the trees started blurring around us. I didn’t know how he could move faster while holding me than he had when I’d been running beside him, but I wasn’t afraid. Jesse was different, I understood that, and he’d taken me to the barn to try to explain how.

  Now he might die because of it.

  The closer it came to sunrise, the slower Jesse moved. We arrived at the manor just as the sky began to turn a dark blue, and his arms trembled as he put me down on my feet. Prince wasn’t there waiting for us, and didn’t answer Jesse’s whistle.

  “I’ll look for him,” I said. “Go inside the house.”

  “There are too many windows, and nothing to cover them.” He sat down on the steps and braced his arms against his knees, leaning against them as if he were tired.

  I saw red dots speckling his brow. “You’re bleeding.”

  He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, leaving a red streak across it. “Is there a vault in your house?”

  “A vault?”

  “It would be under the house,” he said, panting the words. “Like a cellar, but no windows.”

  I tried to remember what Trick had told me about the house. “There used to be an old root cellar, but it wasn’t safe so they filled it in.” I looked at the manor. “Is there one here?”

  He shook his head. “It flooded after a storm, and the walls collapsed.”

  I thought of the surrounding farms. “Maybe one of my neighbors has one.”

  “It’s too late now.” He sounded dull.

  “No, it’s not. I don’t know any of the neighbors, and asking will waste time, so I’m taking you home.” I went over and pulled him up. “Come on.” I put his arm around my shoulder and led him down the path to the road between our properties and up the drive to my house.

  “I’ll be right back out,” I told him, propped him against Gray’s truck. “Don’t run off anywhere.”

  He gave me a wan smile. “No, I won’t.”