One Mixed-Up Night

by Catherine Newman

  “Totally,” Walter said. “I was just thinking about that.”

  And we lay there quietly reminiscing about rye and challah, oatmeal and honey-wheat, until Walter sighed and said, “I practically smell toast!” Which was when we realized that the curtains were on fire.

  We started a fire, and our night went up in smoke.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “Oh my god oh my god oh my god.” I was trying to stamp out the fire with my foot, although it had already climbed up the curtain, which was blazing and crackling now. I was afraid of setting my hair on fire. “Walter?” I said, or maybe yelled. Where was he? Maybe he was blowing out all the candles. “Walter?” I yelled his name again, just as a horrible siren started blaring. The fire alarm! It was like a flock of a million geese all honking at once, in a really high-pitched way, over and over again. A bright white light was flashing from the wall, and the siren was screaming, and I was panicking, trying to pull the curtain down from the demo curtain rod.

  We were going to be in such big trouble. If we didn’t get incinerated first.

  And all of a sudden, there was Walter, leaping into view with—yes—a red fire extinguisher in his hands. “Kiai!” he yelled, like he was in our old karate class, about to kick his foot out. He did kick his foot out. Then he spun around, spraying whiteness everywhere. It was a huge cloud of white powder, and I couldn’t see a thing—just the horrible flashing light, just the lick of flames at the edge of the powder fog. Just the…I looked up and—“Oh no!”—saw one of the sprinkler heads near the ceiling lower itself and spin partway around, felt a drop of water, felt dizzy, pictured water showering down from all the ceilings, across the entire store, drenching everything like the world’s worst indoor Swedish thunderstorm.

  But the cloud of fire-extinguisher stuff was settling and clearing, and Walter was triumphantly leaping into the air. “It’s out!” he yelled over the noise of the alarm. “It’s out!” And it was. The flames were gone, the curtain hanging black and white and steaming. The alarm stopped. The light went off. The head of the sprinkler screwed itself upward, popped back up into the ceiling with a click. Walter blinked at me. It was dark now, but he was dusted in powder, practically glittering. And he was grinning again, even though, oh my god, we were in so much trouble now. There was really no way around that fact anymore. “Walter,” I said, just as he grabbed my arm.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” I said. But just at the moment I did, in fact, hear it. Something. Footsteps? Quiet ones, but definitely footsteps.

  There was a pair of hanging EKORRE chairs—they’re like a cross between a tent and a swing—and Walter shoved me toward one, then jumped into the other. We scrunched down into the swaying cocoons as far as we could, and I more or less held my breath.

  I could hear the footsteps getting closer, like in a scary movie. They were about the same loudness as the sound of my heart banging away in my ears. Maybe it was just my heart banging? My brain was too scrambled to figure anything out.

  “Hello?” This was not my heart banging. This was a real-live human voice. “Hello?”

  I couldn’t see Walter’s feet hanging out of his chair anymore. “If that’s you, Walter, I am going to kill you,” I whispered, but Walter didn’t whisper back.

  Because it wasn’t Walter. The footsteps stepped into my line of vision, and I saw a person reach a hand out to touch the still-smoldering curtains. I saw a navy-blue shirt tucked into belted navy-blue pants, a matching navy-blue cap, a flashlight the size of a tree limb in one hand.

  Security guard.

  There was a folded piece of paper in the other hand, and I cringed to recognize it. Our stupid note about the pillows. If I hadn’t been trying to be quiet, I would have slapped my own forehead. Not that it really mattered at this point, I guess. It’s not like the fire wouldn’t have given us away.

  The person turned around. She did. It was a she. She drew a long arc with the beam of light, swinging it past us, then past us again the other way, then training it back and forth between the two chairs.

  Zeke used to think that the way you played hide-and-seek was to sit in plain view of the seeker, but as still as possible, with your eyes closed—or maybe a dish towel draped over your head. If you did that, then they couldn’t find you. He’d put a hand over his mouth to stifle his own loud giggling, as if that would really help when he was sitting there right in front of you, but honestly? That’s what Walter and I were like now. The flashlight beam was on us, and we sat completely still, completely silent, like if we wished hard enough we would become invisible.

  And in case you were wondering? We did not become invisible.

  “Mixed-up files,” I heard Walter whisper. Indeed, yes. If we could have terminated our mission then and disappeared into thin air, I’m sure we would have.

  The person spoke. “So, you thought you’d light a fire,” she said, and shook her head. “You thought you’d break into Ikea in the night and make a huge mess and flood half the store and drive the forklift and then you thought, Hey, let’s set the whole freaking place on fire!”

  I sat, frozen in the beam of light. Paralyzed with fear. The guard’s lips were so tightly pinched together now that they looked like narrow white lines. My stomach felt like it had a sack of marbles rolling around in it. “We didn’t,” I said, even though it wasn’t what I meant to say and, also, was stupid. And then I said, panicky, “We did.” I couldn’t turn my chair around to see Walter, but I imagined he looked as panicky as I felt.

  The security guard sighed and angled her light down a little so that it wasn’t shining right in our eyes. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, as if we were wild animals. “Why don’t you guys come out of there, and we can start to figure this out.”

  We climbed out of the chairs. Or tried to. It turns out to be very, very hard to climb out of a swinging chair when you’re freaking out. I got my leg caught and ended up tipping myself out backward, while Walter somehow dove toward the floor headfirst, his butt sticking up in the air. While he tried to free his sneakers, his butt kept bobbing up and down, and it was not elegant. The security guard actually had to put her light down and help us, saying, “Wait, hold on a sec,” while she untangled our legs and clothing. You could tell she was trying not to laugh, but she was chuckling a little anyway. “Yikes!” she said, and “Oof. Hang on.”

  By the time we were freed, the three of us were sitting on the floor, and she was smiling. “I’m Shirley,” she said. “Security guard. Civilian personnel.” She put out her hand, and we each shook it.

  “Walter,” Walter said quietly. And I said, “I’m Frankie,” and then added, pointlessly, “We’re in sixth grade.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Shirley said, and then we sat quietly for what felt, uncomfortably, like a hundred hours.

  Shirley stood up finally, walked over to the wall, and flipped on some of the overhead lights. Walter and I blinked in the brightness.

  “Sooo,” Shirley said, and shrugged. She sat down with us again. “Maybe you first? I mean, I’ve been working here a long time, since this place opened, and I can tell you—I have never met any kids in the night before. Never met anybody in the night, actually. Well, there was a stray cat who snuck in to have her kittens in a basket. But other than her. So, yeah, anyway.” She smiled, raised her eyebrows, waited.

  This was not the movie scene I would have imagined, with mean, angry cops, everybody yelling, Walter and me terrified as they pushed us into a car, yanking us around by our hair and clothes. In fact, what I felt more than anything was relief. This was bad, in a way, and it was going to get worse, I imagined. And yet, I had been so filled with dread about trying to get Walter to leave—it was almost reassuring that I had a way out now, one that wasn’t my idea.

  “Did you turn all the pretty lights on for us?” Walter asked. And Shirley nodded.

  “I did.” Shirley was sitting in that awkward cross-legged way that grown-ups sit, where you can tell they’
re not used to sitting on the floor. I could see her black socks.

  “Like a trap or to be nice?” Walter asked.

  “Uh, to be nice, I guess,” she said, and cringed. “But I probably should have stopped you guys a long time ago.”

  “You sighed once,” Walter said. “I heard you.” Shirley shrugged, smiling.

  “Wait. Did you call us?” Walter said. And Shirley said, “What?”

  “On the phone,” Walter said, then shook his head. “Nothing. Forget it.” It was silent again.

  “This is not what you think,” I finally said, because I couldn’t bear the silence and because that’s what people always say: It’s not what you think! But also because I thought it was true.

  “Uh…” Shirley shook her head a little. She half smiled. “You’re not in Ikea in the middle of the night?”

  “No, no. I mean, yes, we’re here, obviously.” I laughed a little. I felt like words were just going to spill out of me into a puddle of nervous talking. “But we’re not, like, runaways or anything. We just had this idea about spending the night here. We read this book once—oh, well, it’s kind of a long story. But I just mean we’re actually happy kids. Happy kids from happy homes. Not, like, escaping some horrible orphanage or, like, terrible parents or anything. I just mean…” What did I mean? “I just mean, it’s bad, what we did, but it doesn’t mean anything bad about our lives.”

  Shirley nodded and smiled, but Walter was shaking his head. “No,” he said.

  Maybe it was because of the light, or maybe it was because of the fire-extinguisher powder that still clung to him, but his face looked more gray than the warm, familiar brown I was used to. I felt my chest tighten—felt the word cage inside rib cage.

  “Walter,” I said, and scooched closer to him.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Don’t.” His voice broke on don’t. I didn’t understand.

  “Don’t what?” I said. “Walter,” I said again.

  He was sitting with his long giraffe legs crossed, and he bent over them and covered his face with his hands. I pressed my palm onto his back, and Shirley looked politely away while Walter started to cry.

  Walter cried. He cried and cried, not loud, but hard—the kind of crying that makes your shoulders quietly shake and shake. I sat with my arm around him, feeling helpless.

  I thought about what my own dad had said pretty soon after Walter’s dad died. I’d come home from their house one day, sat down on the couch, and burst into tears. “I can’t do anything to help,” I’d said. “Walter is just sad, and I go over, and he’s sad, and I leave, and he’s just as sad as he was before. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’re already doing it,” my dad had said gently. “You just keep showing up and showing up. It’s all you can do, and it doesn’t feel like it’s helping, but it is. Just being there is the most important thing.”

  And so I kept showing up. And I had imagined it had gotten better.

  But now I was starting to think I didn’t know. Self-storage. Maybe Walter was storing his self too. I didn’t know everything—only the parts that I’d seen. That he’d shown me.

  Walter cried and I held him and Shirley looked away. “He’s sad,” I explained stupidly. Like, in case she couldn’t tell. Eventually, she stood up and went somewhere, came back with a cup of water and a box of tissues, which she set down gently on the carpet. Her forehead was creased with worry, and I liked her for that.

  Poor Walter. He laughed at some point, from underneath his crying, and said, “Snot everywhere,” and I passed him a tissue. Then he sat up and wiped his face on his sleeve. “I’m not going back,” he said, and hiccuped, and Shirley nodded gently. “I can’t,” he said. He cried a little more then, like an extra shower after a rainstorm, and then he said, “I can’t go back. She’s so sad. Frankie, you have no idea. She just cries all the time. She thinks we’re asleep, but we’re not, and she just cries and cries in her bed, where we usually are too. Then Zeke cries because she’s crying, but she can’t comfort him, so he presses up into me and cries, and he drapes himself all over me, crying, and everyone is crying except me, because someone has to comfort them, and it’s awful.”

  He put his head in his hands again. “The only person who’d be able to help her is my dad. But, of course, he’s not there. Because he’s dead, which is why everyone’s crying. And I miss him so much, but I don’t even really talk about it ever because I don’t want to make it worse.” His words had come out in a rush, but now he stopped talking and hiccuped again.

  “Walter,” I said again. Walter. My Walter. He was right. I had no idea.

  In Mixed-Up Files, Claudia says that people end up telling their secrets because it’s no fun to have a secret and not tell it. But this was not that kind of secret. This was the dull, aching kind of secret that was just your own untold feelings, rusting away in your brain. In your heart.

  “I’m not going back,” Walter said again. He picked at some invisible something in the carpet. “You can go, Frankie, but I’m not going with you.”

  “I don’t even know what you mean,” I said. “I mean, I know what you mean about how bad it is at your house. But I don’t understand what you’re saying about staying, what your plan is.”

  Walter shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, and then, because he’s always totally his own sweet-hearted self, “Shirley, will it be complicated for you, my not leaving here?”

  Shirley nodded slowly, chuckled a little. “Um, yep,” she said. “Pretty complicated.” She took off her hat then, held it in her lap, and smoothed her short dark hair back from her forehead. “Look,” she said. “It’s none of my business, the part about your personal life? But I’ll tell you something. I ran away too, when I was a little older than you guys. And I stayed run away. I didn’t go home again after, and it’s too long a story to explain. Let me just say I was not, uh, supported by my family.” She ran her fingers through her hair, looked at us through her clear green eyes, and smiled. “I think that’s why I left you alone for so long, maybe. It was not the right thing to do. I don’t know what I was thinking. But I wanted you to have your time.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And Shirley said, “You’re welcome.”

  She continued. “Look, I’m definitely no therapist. I’m not even so great with feelings, which make me uncomfortable a little, I have to tell you. But, Walter, your dad died. That’s a big deal. I’m sorry that happened. But I’m sure your family loves you. It’s obvious your friends do, or at least this one does.” She pointed at me. “Maybe you just need a little more time.” Shirley sighed. Walter’s shoulders felt still beneath my arm now. He was calmer. “I’m not just trying to talk you out of staying here,” Shirley added. “Although, no, you can’t stay here. I need to say clearly that you’re minors, so it’s all going to be okay, but it’s fully illegal for you to be here. As in, against the law.”

  What had we done?

  I had the strangest feeling of looking down at ourselves from far away, like an overhead camera zooming out: us on the carpet, in a showroom, in the concrete building, at the edge of the highway near our town, which was on this continent in the middle of the ocean, on the spinning blue-and-green planet. I think this might be called vertigo. If I hadn’t been sitting down, I would have needed to sit down.

  “I’ll give you guys a minute to sort yourselves out,” Shirley said. “But I’m going to have to call your parents. And we’re going to need to figure out who’s paying for all of this, and how.” She gestured toward the burnt curtains, the burnt carpet. I thought of the ruined wall behind the couches, the exploded pillows.

  Walter shook his head. “Ugh. I’m going to have to add disappointed to the list of my mom’s unbearable feelings.”

  I pictured Walter’s mom, with her face shining over the pieced-together Ikea birthday cake—her radiant love for him. “I don’t think so,” I said to him. “Maybe she just needs to, you know, wake up a little.” I was thinking that that’s exactly what Walter
had needed to do too—had done. And maybe I had too.

  “This will definitely wake her up,” Walter said. “Especially the phone ringing.” He sighed. “Okay,” he said, and held out his wrists. “We’re ready. Go ahead.” When Shirley looked at him quizzically, he said, “Cuff us.”

  But she only laughed and said, “You wish.”

  What happened next was these things, in this order: (1) Shirley called my parents and Alice. (2) Walter persuaded Shirley to heat us up some meatballs, in a kind of prisoner’s-last-meal scenario. (3) Walter ate vegetarian meatballs, and I ate meat ones. Shirley ate a few too, although she expressed her doubts about whether this was the right thing for her to be doing just then. “I almost never eat them anymore!” she said between bites. “But they really are good!” (4) The grown-ups and Zeke arrived in Alice’s car an hour later, with messy hair and serious expressions.

  Walter and I waited for everyone on the same couch where we’d started the day. The day before, I guess I should say. Shirley wanted to meet them at the doorway, to talk to them alone first. I think she had a different picture of the kind of people they were—like they were going to come in furious and rage at us—but I was happy enough to have this last bit of time with Walter.

  “It’s like pins and needles, you know?” he said.

  “What is?”

  “When your feelings wake up.” Walter laughed a little, shook his head. “You know, like when you’re lying funny on your hand, and then you can’t feel it. But then it comes back to life and it hurts. That’s what it feels like. Prickly and painful.” His voice got quiet. “But I think it’s going to be better than the numbness.”

  We heard them just then, clattering up the stopped escalator. I saw my mom press her lips into a tight line when she saw us, shake her head. But she hugged me when I stood up, and Alice put her arms around Walter. My dad was holding Zeke, but he smiled at me. He either blinked funny just then or winked at me—I never found out which.