Beyond Midnight

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Helen said, "I hope my son wasn't in your car long enough to break anything."

  "Actually," Nat said, "I offered to take him for a quick spin around the block. He wasn't interested." He laughed and said, "Maybe if I had just handed him the keys.. ."

  "Don't even joke about it," Helen said, shuddering. "I don't know where his endless fascination with fast cars comes from. It must have something to do with the ones his father drove as a trooper."

  "Hmm, yeah, they're pretty fast. I've been up close and personal with them more than once."

  "Speeding tickets?"

  "More than once."

  She was thinking, Well, here's the perfect role model for my son. "Probably you can guess how I feel about going too fast," she said.

  He smiled ruefully and said, "I'm guessing you're not for it. Am I right?"

  She gave him the same rueful smile back for his answer. He laced his fingers through her hand and gave it a little squeeze. "Speeding is addictive," he said. "But—scout's honor—I'm trying to stay nearer the limit. I look on it as therapy."

  "Good for you," said Helen, her spirits rising again. "And in the same vein, I'll try to be punctual next—"

  Oops.

  He laughed and lifted her hand to his lips and said, "Next time. Yes. Tomorrow. Do that."

  "No, Nat," she wailed. "Not tomorrow. I've got two kids! I don't have time for this relationship. Neither do you. Katie—"

  "Katie's in bed," he said smugly. "Hey, a thought! Make your kids go to bed at seven."

  "If I knew how to do that, I could write a book and retire on the royalties," she said as they sidled up to the fast-food kiosk.

  She ordered a clam roll; he ordered a hot dog. Iced tea for her, beer for him, fries to share. They wandered off toward the boardwalk with their bag of cholesterol and found a vacant bench, just as the sparrows hoped they would.

  Nat threw the beggar birds a bit of his roll and took a monster bite of his hot dog. "Mmm. Mmm. Yeah. This is good. Wonder what's in it?" he said between chews.

  "Ground clam bellies, without a doubt," said Helen, dangling a breaded version in front of him. She popped it in her mouth, relishing the squish of it.

  It felt so much like a date. Every other time she'd been with him had felt, somehow, like business. But this was theirs alone—the junk food, the sparrows, the boardwalk, the boats.

  All theirs.

  "This was a good idea," she said with a companionable sigh.

  "Mmm," said Nat between slugs of beer. He burped, groaned, and said, "God, I'm gonna be sick as a dog tonight. I haven't eaten food like this since I was a kid."

  She gave him a skeptical look. "I suppose you eat beansprout sandwiches at your desk?"

  He surprised her by saying, "Or a salad. Something healthy, anyway. Workaholics die young, and I've got a lot to live for: Katie—and more, maybe, someday."

  Helen felt an entirely inappropriate wave of heat wash over her. He could've been talking about anyone or anything; but she chose to believe he was hinting about her.

  Careful, stupid, she warned herself. Women make mistakes at moments like these.

  "Well, junk food or not," she let herself say, "I still think this was a good idea."

  "Here's another one," he said suddenly. "Will you go with Katie and me on a nature walk next Saturday evening? Katie wants to learn about owls. She's fixated on the subject, ever since that owl showed up in the yard."

  "It's still there?" Helen was surprised to realize that she was troubled by the fact.

  He shrugged. "It seems determined," he said, tossing a piece of French fry to the ground. The sparrows ignored it. "Our neighbors came back for the summer and cleaned out the seed from their potting shed, so the mice are gone; but the owl's hanging around anyway. God only knows what it eats. Katie, by the way, is turning out to be a ruthless little bugger. She wants me to buy mice at the pet store to feed it. She says if I can't find mice, maybe hamsters will do."

  He crushed the last of his hot dog roll into crumbs and threw them all out at once. Sparrow pandemonium. "Looks just like the commodities pit," Nat said with a snort.

  He turned back to Helen. His look was tentative, almost defensive. "So? How about it? Saturday at eight?" Taking a cue from her, he added, "Very low impact on your day."

  Nothing that involved him was low impact, but Helen said, "I could do that."

  "Good. We'll come get you half an hour before," he said, quietly pleased.

  The mood between them turned quiet. He finished his Coors, then bent the can over on itself, and then again. Helen wondered briefly, wildly, whether they'd run out of things to talk about. But that wasn't it. He simply wasn't bothered by what radio and TV people called "dead air."

  She remembered Gwen's reading of him: a shy man who only acted at flirting. If Gwen was right, then at that moment Helen had every right to feel flattered—because there was neither banter nor flirting coming from him. Just pensive silence, pierced by the chirps of brawling sparrows.

  "You're not much of a people person, are you?" she ventured.

  "I work at it," he said briefly. He pitched the crushed can into a nearby trash bin. It bounced on the edge, then fell in. "But I was an only child, raised in a marriage of convenience. I'm not that great at baring my soul."

  And that, at bottom, was what this date was supposed to be about: baring his soul.

  She tried another approach. "How did you end up in the stock market, anyway?"

  He laughed softly. "Funny you should ask. I've thought about that a lot, lately. I search my childhood—what I remember of it—for a defining moment. And all I can come up with is one. One lousy epiphany in forty years."

  Helen had the sense that they had begun to tiptoe together into a dusty corner of his soul. She stayed very still, like a hiker who's stumbled onto a fox at dawn, as she waited for him to continue.

  "I was five, maybe six," he said, letting his gaze settle on a powerboat that had begun to back out of a nearby slip. "I was summoned to the bedside of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Bentley Byrne, who was near death. Since I hadn't been allowed to see him for a week, I knew something big was up.

  "His bedroom, once the master, is now Katie's. I remember his bed: massive, carved, ornate. Like many of the furnishings, it came over from China on one of the family's ships during the early eighteen hundreds. Above the bed, where Catholics hang crucifixes, there hung a portrait of Houqua, the senior hong merchant in Canton and—if you remember your Salem history—the richest man in China back then."

  "The portrait that's now in the hail," she said, recalling the gaunt, balding man with the droopy Mandarin mustache.

  "Yeah. Houqua was a real hero in my family," Nat said. Helen couldn't quite tell how he meant that, so she waited for him to go on.

  "The thing is, by the time my great-great-grandfather Joseph was born, Salem was through as a seaport. His— my—ancestors had been adroit at moving their ships from the China trade to the more profitable India trade; surviving Jefferson's embargo in 1807 and then moving into the Baltic trade; surviving the war of 1812 and then moving into new markets in South America and Zanzibar.

  "But ultimately, they blew it. The railroad went to Boston and New York, empowering them as key ports. The Erie Canal gave New York an even bigger boost. But Salem? No railroad, no canals, and worse than that, the silting of the harbor made Salem unnavigable for larger ships.

  "But Joseph stayed here anyway. He'd made a promise to his dying father that he'd stick with Salem, and he did, struggling to make a profit in coastal shipping with smaller vessels."

  Nat got up from the bench, took a step or two, and pitched the brown paper bag into the trash can. He scanned the harbor, much as his ancestors must have done. But there were no lofty clipper ships, no majestic Indiamen to be seen—only small and rather precious powerboats that slept six and huddled in the harbor if the wind blew over ten knots.

  To the southeast lay Derby Wharf, once the heartbeat of it all, once
thick with stores and warehouses and crammed with wooden ships with lofty masts and tangles of rigging, and brawny men—boys, really, some no older than Russ— who thought nothing of spending months at a time on the killer sea, then braving pirates, shoals, and disease at their destination, only to return, if they were lucky, over the killer sea again.

  All that was gone now. What remained of Derby Wharf was a long spit of grass-covered dirt, and the ghosts of all the rest.

  Nat turned his back on the scene and said, "I had the history down cold when I was five; the saga of maritime trade was a big, big deal in my family. Which is why, when I was summoned to Joseph's deathbed, I took his last words to me so seriously. As I say, it was the one true epiphany of my life."

  Helen waited.

  He smiled, apparently impressed with her patience. "My grandfather was a hundred and three. There wasn't much left of him by then: skin, bones, a few white hairs. To me his agedness made him look all the more formidable. I knew that old Houqua had been a very important, very wise man; but my great-great-grandfather was even skinnier, even grayer, even more used up with wisdom.

  "I remember him calling me closer, crooking his index finger, twice, in slow motion. I remember walking up to the bed as solemnly as I could, just the way I had the week before when I was ring boy at a wedding. Joseph was propped up on three fat pillows, I suppose to make it easier for him to breathe. He spoke just four words to me ... four words ... but they were the last he ever uttered on earth."

  A small, bleak smile deadened the lines of Nat's face. "'Go where money is,' he told me."

  "Ah-h," said Helen. It explained so much.

  Hands in his pockets, Nat sat back down on the bench and stretched his legs in front of him. Lost in thought, he stayed that way for a long moment, then said, "Actually, since he wasn't wearing his teeth, the words came out 'Go where money ish.'

  Helen didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She said, "So you went to Boston."

  "That's where money ish."

  "And instead of tea and silk and pepper, you trade shares. Instead of clipper ships, you move around on 747s. The tradition goes on."

  After another long moment Nat said, "I used to wonder: why did Joseph target me, and not my father? But my father had always been perfectly content to live off the interest; if he had to, the principal. I expect the puritanical Joseph at some point washed his hands of him."

  "What about your grandfather and great-grandfather? Why didn't Joseph put the money curse on them?"

  Nat shrugged. "I never knew either of them. One died in a riding accident; the other got tripped up in the Depression. I don't think either one ever had the ability to make real money."

  "But you do," she conceded, trying not to sigh.

  "It's a knack," he said with laughable understatement.

  "How ironic," she mused. "You're being driven by ghosts of your past, while I'm being prodded by—"

  She pulled back suddenly from the confession. It would've been so easy to blurt out something about the bizarre events that had been plaguing her, but what would that prove? That her ghost was better than his ghost?

  No. He was opening up to her at last. No.

  "I never thought of it before, but a talent like yours must be a huge responsibility," she said, completely without irony.

  "Lena—"

  Helen looked at him, surprised to hear the name. He said, "I overheard your aunt call you that. Do you mind?"

  "No," she said, although no one besides her aunt Mary had ever done it. The name sounded so different on his lips, so completely, utterly erotic. Her response to it was almost embarrassing: a hot, wet rush of desire.

  "You seem to've said the magic word," she confessed with a stricken smile.

  He had taken her by the shoulders; his eyes burned bright with obvious desire. "Lena," he repeated, shaking his head. "Oh my God. Lena. How did we get here?"

  His mouth descended on hers, and it was the kiss of her dreams, the kiss she'd imagined during every empty night of the last four years, the kiss that made her forget, if only for now, how much she'd loved her husband. Long and deep and full of aching need, it left Helen wanting more. Her lips opened and her tongue met his, as she slid her arms around his back and returned the kiss with a breathlessness that left her light-headed.

  Dizzy from him, drunk from him, she gave herself up completely to the sensation of being wanted again by a man. Satisfied and frustrated all at the same time, she found herself staggering along a high-wire of emotions without a pole.

  Get down safely while you can, a voice warned her from the ground. But who could hear it above the roar of her desire?

  "We can't ... do this," she said in panting snatches between more kisses. "We're ... on a ... bench."

  "The sparrows don't care," he said, nuzzling her neck, kissing the lobe of her ear. He brought his soft lips back to hers, tasting her, heating her, driving her mad.

  "Ooo-ooo-ooo," came a taunting voice from a pack of kids as they walked by, nudging and elbowing one another.

  That did it.

  "They care," Helen said, her warmed cheeks burning with a whole new heat. She began to pull away, afraid to look at the kids for fear there'd be someone she knew. Hard on their heels came a frowning older couple, not at all amused.

  "And those two definitely care," she added, averting her face from them. Reluctantly, she took hold of Nat's wrists to unhand herself from him. "If either of my kids behaved like this in public, I'd feed 'em to the gulls," she said, sobering up at last.

  He laughed and said, "You'd rather they did this in private?"

  She thought about it and said, "God, I hate teenagers."

  "C'mon," he said, standing up and offering her his hand. "Let's walk."

  They went back to Derby Street, then walked out to the end of ghostly Derby Wharf to see what they could see and feel what they could feel. Nat knew an astonishing amount about Salem's maritime history and brought it all to life for Helen, who became shivery and teary-eyed as he described the mind-boggling hardships of life aboard a full-rigged ship.

  They sat on the grassy finger of land and looked out at the twilit sea; and they kissed, and eventually they strolled back down the empty wharf, stopping to kiss again along the way. The night, warm and still and the shortest one of the year, had descended at last, wrapping itself around them like a soft black veil.

  The dark has come much too late, Helen thought, deeply moved by all she'd seen and heard. I have to go home now.

  Nat was telling her of an argument one of his merchant ancestors supposedly got into with Nathaniel Hawthorne during the time the author, strapped for cash, worked as surveyor in the Custom House just across the way from where they stood.

  They stared appreciatively at the elegant Federal-style brick structure with its massive stone steps, tall Palladian windows, and eight-sided cupola. Helen had seen the building thousands of times in her life; and yet, before tonight, she had never really seen it at all.

  "If Mr. Hawthorne were at his perch there now," she mused, "I doubt that he'd be too impressed with our behavior."

  "Hey, he stuck up for Hester Prynne," Nat said. "I don't think he'd mind."

  He kissed Helen again, just to prove his point, and Helen thought of Hester and her scarlet letter and shivered unaccountably. "Poor Hester," she said, brimming with emotion when he released her. "They were so cruel."

  Nat became more thoughtful as he caught her hand in his and they resumed their walk. "The Puritan ethic produced some damn good capitalists," he said, "but I guess we know the downside."

  Repression. Intolerance. The infamous witch trials.

  He'd pressed one of Helen's hot buttons. "Who could forget?" she said. "No one in Salem, that's for sure. Every time you turn around, you bump into a witch on a broom handle. The damn logo is everywhere: on our paper's masthead, souvenirs, stores, restaurants—the doors of our police cars and fire engines, for pity's sake! We seem awfully proud of that summer of hysteria," she s
aid with her usual distress. "What an image to cultivate!"

  "You're one of the sensitive ones," he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulder and stealing a kiss. "Why doesn't that surprise me? Look at it this way. The Puritans were the original capitalists; and now the capitalists, with their cartoon witches, are exploiting the Puritans. I see poetic justice there."

  "But there's so much more to Salem!"

  "Oh, admit it," he teased. "The occult is fun."

  Helen felt the blood drain from her cheeks. "I don't think so," she said faintly. "Not 'fun.'"

  He tried with a light touch to kiss away her seriousness, but Helen protested. "It's not that I'm down on tourism—"

  "Helen, you don't have to apologize," he said, laughing. "Lots of Salemites are ambivalent about the witching trade. But if it shores up our tax base, I say—go for it!"

  He took her in his arms and rubbed his chin in the curve of her neck, taking a long, deep breath of her. "You smell divine," he said.

  Don't tell me Enchantra, she thought. Don't.

  "Earthy and sexy and—God, Helen," he said, his voice catching in his throat. "You're making me crazy."

  Of course she was, she realized; he hadn't had sex in months. It wasn't hard for her to convince herself that Nathaniel Byrne was simply deprived and on fire. But there was nothing she could do to convince herself he believed in ghosts.

  She wanted, suddenly, to get away. She was playing with fire and in danger of being caught with the matches. If he had any idea that she believed she'd been contacted by his dead wife...

  "Wow," she said, sighing. "I'm beat. This has been just an incredible day."

  It was the verbal equivalent of wriggling out of his arms. Nat looked surprised and rebuffed, but he said softly, "You must be. I'll walk you to your car."

  ****

  Becky was waiting for her. She took one look at Helen and said, "Mother! You did it with him!"

  "I did not!" Helen said, scandalized. She thumped her bag on the hall table and marched past her daughter into the kitchen.

  Becky was right behind her. "Your mouth is all puffy and your face is flushed," she noted with glee.