Beyond Midnight

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Get me through this, Helen begged her friend. You're a mother. You know what this is like. Help me.

  "Mom? You home?" yelled Becky.

  "In here, honey," said Helen, forcing herself to sound composed.

  Becky wasn't fooled for a minute. She stomped into the sitting room, still in her combat boots.

  "What happened?" she said, pulling up short at the sight of her mother's tearstained face.

  Helen couldn't possibly tell her. Instead she pointed to Becky's shoes in a diversion tactic. "Shoes. Off. Now. There are rubber marks all over the hall floor," she said, in a poor imitation of her usual scolding.

  Becky dropped onto the hassock in front of her mother's chair. "You had a fight," she said, unlacing her heavy shoes. "Please don't tell me you had a fight. I knew something would happen to screw this up! He made a move on you and you decked him."

  "Not even close," Helen said faintly.

  Becky stopped midlace and looked at her mother. "He didn't make a pass?"

  Helen gave her a pitiful fragment of a smile.

  "You didn't deck him? You—? Oh-h-h ...."

  Russ chose that moment to make one of his rare appearances in the sitting room. "Ma, I told Becky to wait in the car but she came inside the house to get me anyway. In front of everyone!"

  "Oh, horrors," said Helen, reassured by her son's mundane lament. It was so normal. He was so normal. She loved them both so much.

  Becky was able to study her mother and taunt her brother at the same time. "I baby-sit there. Why shouldn't I go in?" she said. "I suppose you wanted everyone to think you were going home in the Porsche?"

  "I wouldn't be caught dead in it," Russ said fiercely. He gave his mother a furtive look, noticed that her eyes were red-rimmed, did a double take, and promptly started backpedaling out of the room.

  Helen said, "Wait. I need to talk to you both."

  Becky, shoes in hand, stayed where she was on the hassock. Her face, always lively and curious, settled into an expression of thoughtful repose. She looked captivatingly beautiful; it made Helen want to cry again. Her Rebecca; innocent Becky—how dare anyone?

  She said, "I know I told you both not to go around bragging about your spray-paint caper, but I have to ask you. Did either of you tell anyone about that night?"

  Russell's logic was impeccable. "If we did you'd kill us, so what's the point?"

  Becky had none of her brother's flippancy. "Mom, how can you even ask me that? It was the worst night of my life," she said, her face turning a lighter shade of pale.

  Becky was looking for some kind of reassurance that the night wasn't coming back to haunt her. Helen couldn't give it. Instead she turned to Russ and said, "Would any of the other boys have said anything?"

  She'd only met one of them since the night of the arrest: a more or less presentable kid who was Russ's age but who was being sent by his parents to private school in the fall, apparently to shape him up. (Helen, on the other hand, preferred to keep her son in public school and shape him up herself.)

  Russell was taking his time to think his mother's question through; he seemed to understand that the answer was important.

  "Martin wouldn't say anything," Russ decided. "He'd be laughed outta school. Kurt wouldn't bother; it wasn't a big enough deal. And Binny—well, you met Binny. He said he didn't tell, but he likes this girl," Russ said with a philosophical shrug. "Anything's possible with Binny."

  "Which of the artwork was Binny's?" Helen asked drily.

  "I told you. He likes this girl. Sarah. But he's too dorky for Sarah."

  "Takes one to know one," Becky got in.

  Russ gave his sister a slanty look and sighed, clearly uncomfortable speaking of Matters Sexual. "Kin I go now?"

  "Thank you very much for your patience and your thoroughness," Helen said with the irony she reserved exclusively for him.

  He got away, but not before whacking a chair with his way-too-big feet, which made Becky roll her eyes and Helen sigh. One look at Russ and anyone would know: He was much too clumsy to make a decent Satanist.

  Becky turned to her mother with an intelligent, troubled look in her green eyes. "Who else has found out?" she asked, already blushing a speculative shade of pink.

  "I don't know that anyone has—for sure," Helen hedged. "There's talk going around, but it's so garbled that it's hard to make heads or tails out of it."

  "Oh, that's great," she said morosely. "I just know this story's going to follow me to college."

  "Honey, it won't."

  "I'll have to go to the West Coast, leave Salem forever; it'll be too embarrassing to stay. If this gets to any of my friends ...."

  She stared at the middle distance and blinked once or twice. "Jessica's mother looked at me really weird the other night," she said suddenly. "Oh, I'll die. Although, Jess didn't say anything—but she wouldn't—to me. But she would to Nicole. Mom!" she cried.

  "Becky, Becky, get a grip!" said Helen, trying to make her daughter feel silly. "I only asked you both about it because I heard that a local journalist is researching a story about gangs and graffiti," she said, coming up with a plausible lie. "I don't even know what publication it's for. But I didn't want you two volunteering to do an interview, thank you very much."

  "Oh." Mollified, Becky said, "Really, Mother. You're the one who should get a grip. Russell and Binny, palming themselves off as gang members? Puh-leeze."

  She stood up, obviously relieved, and said, "I'm going to bed." With a tired sigh she added, "I can hardly wait for Russ to get his own license."

  "Oh, me, too," said Helen dryly.

  Becky hesitated, then said, "Mom? It's okay, you know, about—y'know. You're over the age of consent."

  "I suppose you're right," Helen acknowledged, blushing at her daughter's uncanny perceptiveness. "However ...."

  "I am not," Becky finished for her. "I know. G'night, Mom," she said, throwing her arm around Helen and kissing her on the cheek. "Sweet dreams."

  "I'm sure," said Helen. But she knew her dreams that night would be anything but.

  Chapter 22

  Two more on Sunday.

  Helen tried halfheartedly to press the parents for the truth behind their withdrawals; but she couldn't bear to hear it, any more than they could bear to tell it.

  "It's an impossible situation," she told Nat that evening when he came by. "Part of me wants to confront them, but a bigger part of me—"

  "—is too proud," he said as they sat on the chaises in the garden, speaking in subdued voices.

  Helen didn't deny it. She'd spent the day in a pendulum-swing from anger to helplessness and back to anger again.

  "What can I do?" she said. "The rumors are beneath contempt. There are no facts. It's infuriating. Doesn't my reputation have any value at all? What about Becky's? She's baby-sat for years. Kids adore her. There has never been a single criticism about her."

  Helen pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around her shins. "It gives me chills, to know there are people willing to believe garbage like that about my children. As for the ones who spread the garbage—well, let's hope I never meet them in a dark alley," she said grimly.

  "I'd like to have a piece of that action," Nat said in a voice that was, if anything, more grim than Helen's.

  Something about it made Helen turn to him and say, "Have you heard anything more?"

  "Yeah. I don't know whether you're going to laugh or cry at this one. It turns out that my neighbor Connie Bonham's hairdresser is married to your plumber. Are you ready for this? He says your house is haunted. Something about your hearing knocking in the pipes, and he couldn't find a thing."

  Helen's heart dove straight through the chaise lounge. In all the agonizing hours since Nat had told her about the rumors of Satanism, she'd never once considered the effect her plumber could have on her career.

  "This is unbelievable," she whispered. Her mind was racing ahead to a new and even more terrifying scenario: what people would think if they knew abou
t her profound awareness of Linda Byrne's ...

  Ghost.

  Nat had stood up and was extending his hands to her. "C'mon," he said. "We'll go for a walk."

  Helen let him drag her out of the chaise, but a walk was out of the question. She was far too shaken by this latest twist in the ongoing drama. She shook her bowed head and said, "I'd be really, really lousy company right now, Nat."

  "You'd be really, really fantastic company," he argued softly, slipping his hand under her chin and tilting her face toward his. He kissed her very gently, a kiss that she knew was meant to reassure, not to excite.

  "Listen to me," he said, drawing her close and stroking her hair in a comforting way. "Since you refuse to defend yourself, you're bound to lose a certain number of parents. That's a given. You have to be willing to let them go."

  "You're right," she said unhappily. "But I would so much rather they stayed."

  "I know, darling, I know."

  In the meantime she was thinking, Only Aunt Mary knows about Linda Byrne. She won't say anything. As for me, I'll go to my grave before I tell another soul.

  Nat added, "I want you to know, though, that I reserve the right to defend your honor if someone comes gossiping to me."

  She smiled. "Just don't go challenging anyone to a duel. I'm pretty sure there's a law against that in Massachusetts."

  "Fine. I'll meet 'em in Rhode Island."

  She laid her cheek against his chest, breathing in the scent of him. The roses were in full bloom in the garden, and so was an umbrella of fragrant red honeysuckle nearby. No matter. It was the scent of him that was leaving her drunk as a bee. She lifted her face to him, filled with a wistful desire that they could just meet, and court, and make love like everyone else in ordinary life.

  But Helen's life just then was anything but ordinary, and so as soon as their kiss reached flash point, she drew reluctantly away, her lips still in a slow burn.

  He understood. "Not now ... not tonight," he agreed without her having to say a word. "But soon, Helen," he whispered. "Because I want you very much. And I know that you .... Well. Soon."

  "Will I see you tomorrow?" she said, immediately contradicting herself.

  "On Katie's first day of school? A thousand-point rally couldn't keep me away."

  She laughed at the absurdity of it; but he was making her feel better by the minute. This is what I haven't had for the last few years, she realized. Someone in my corner.

  She walked with him to his car, and they kissed good-night. Her last words to him were, "And thanks for not bringing up ... the sanctuary." Even as she said it, the slow burn on her lips spread through the bones of her cheeks and then to the tips of her ears.

  "I'm still too overwhelmed," he said, sounding almost baffled. "But don't think it isn't always on my mind."

  He got in the Porsche and drove off. Helen, still wrapped in the heat of him, went back inside her house. She put the kettle on and waited for it to boil, her mind so filled with concerns that they cancelled one another out and left her catatonic.

  On top of all else, she was desperately worried about her aunt, who'd seemed listless and out of sorts all week, complaining of the cold despite temperatures in the eighties.

  This morning Helen had finally insisted that her aunt go in for tests. Aunt Mary, fearing she'd end up under the knife, had refused. Eventually the two women ended up in the still unresolved cataract-operation argument.

  It took the shrill whistle of the teakettle to jolt her out of her daze.

  Pay attention, jerk! the teakettle cried. Make the tea, then see your aunt, then look over the waiting list for The Open Door. And while you're at it, stop brooding over that guy Byrne. You don't have time for him now. Pay attention, jerk!

  Helen took a deep breath, then blew it out, then poured the tea. She was walking out the kitchen door with it to go across the hall when she noticed, on top of the fridge, the framed wedding photo of Hank and her that usually sat on her bureau.

  Putting the teacup aside, Helen went back to the family room, looking for her son. The television was droning but Russ wasn't watching. His nose was buried in a copy of Hot Rod Magazine.

  He didn't look up right away, which gave Helen a chance to look at him and size him up as any stranger would. Motherly bias aside, she was amazed that anyone could look at him and see evil. It simply wasn't there.

  She'd seen hardened fourteen-year-olds—kids whose emotional lives had been deadened by repeated blows to their bodies or minds—but Russ wasn't one of those children. She studied the boyish lines of his angular, softly freckled face. It was a moody face, a troubled face. But not a hardened face.

  "Hey, kiddo. Are you the one who put the wedding—?"

  She looked around and blinked. A steel-framed photo of Hank in his trooper's uniform sat on top of the television. Another of Hank, her, and the kids in a rowboat at Lake Kennebago had been set on the lamp table next to the blue denim-covered sofa. Another one of Hank with a basketball—this photo filched from Becky's room—was sitting on the drop leaf table under the far window. The room had been turned into a regular Hall of Fame for Trooper Henry Evett, husband of Helen Evett and father of two.

  She picked up a small, paper-framed high-school graduation photo of Hank that had been placed strategically on the steamer trunk in front of the sofa. "I think maybe this one is pushing it a little, honey," she said wryly. "Don't you?"

  It had been years since she'd seen the photograph. She wondered how Russ had managed to find it, since he often couldn't find the milk carton on the refrigerator shelf.

  Russell looked up from his magazine with round green eyes. "'Scuse me?"

  Helen sat the frame, with its blunted cardboard corners, back on the trunk. "I think it's wonderful that you respect and miss your father so much, Russ, but truly, you don't have to worry. No one could ever take his place; not in the same way."

  "Yeah, but what about some other way?" Russ retorted. His young face, so naive, so desperately melodramatic, was poised on the verge of tears.

  Helen sat back on the rolled arm of one of the easy chairs, trying not to crowd her son with intimacy. "It's true that Mr. Byrne and I have started ... seeing one another. But that doesn't mean that I've forgotten your father, or that I ever want you to. Why would we do that?" she asked simply. "When he was such a wonderful person."

  "You talk about him as if he's—gone," her son said, setting his full lips in a straight line of resentment.

  Helen folded her hands in the lap of her pale-print skirt. "Oh, honey, he is gone," she said softly. "Not the memory of him; not the sound of his voice, or his laugh, or the way he used to guess the questions on Jeopardy. But he is gone. And no matter how much we want to change that—no matter how much we want to hug him or arm-wrestle him or shoot a few hoops with him—we can't. We have to hold on to the memories, and talk to him in our thoughts, and concentrate on hearing his voice—which is hard; we have to work at it or we'll forget."

  With a breathtaking effort, she beat back the sudden image of Hank laid out on a slab—an image that she had managed to keep at bay for several months now—and said, "But, Russell, we can't bring him back. Don't you think I would if I could?"

  The tears that Russ had been holding back broke and made a run for it, mortally embarrassing him. He looked down at his magazine, then at the television, then around the room in dismay. His father was everywhere, and yet nowhere.

  "I loved my dad!" he said, throwing down the magazine and jumping up. "And I'm not ashamed if someone knows it!''

  He ran, crying, from the room. Helen picked up the tattered paper-framed photo of her high school lover and held it to her breast.

  She had spoken the truth to her son when she said they couldn't bring him back. But for the first time, she understood that Hank had never gone away; that no one ever did. In some way, in some form, part of them stayed behind to watch over those they loved. Occasionally their voices were shrill, but often they were faint—in which case it was
up to those they loved to listen hard.

  Hank, she said silently, I love him. A little in the same way I loved you ... a lot in a different way. Tell me it's all right.

  She listened, as she had so many times in the last four years, for the sound of his voice. And now, at last, she heard it: in the steady beating of her own heart.

  ****

  Helen stayed up late with schoolwork and, quite amazingly, overslept the next morning, the first of the summer program. She threw on a challis sundress of deep maroon with tiny flowers the color of wheat, slipped into a pair of low-heeled shoes, and grabbed a straw hat on her way out with Russell. What the straw hat was for, she had no idea. In the back of her mind was the thought that Nat would be there not only to drop off his daughter, but to pick her up again after school. Maybe they could all go for a walk on the Common.

  As for Russell, Helen could tell by his face that last night never happened as far as he was concerned. He kept to the subject—basketball—and expected his mother to do the same. She drove across town and dropped him off at basketball camp (part of the deal she struck with him after the spray painting), then continued on her way to the preschool.

  Part of her was expecting no one but the staff to be there. They knew nothing of the rumors—not from Helen, anyway. She'd agonized over it but in the end had refused to legitimize the gossip by discussing it, even with the staff.

  Helen was relieved to see plenty of parents milling around the parking lot, talking in small groups. Then she noticed that some of the kids were in the playground and some of them, still with their parents. Apparently no one was inside, which is where they were supposed to go directly.

  Was The Open Door still closed? It didn't seem possible. Helen pulled into a staff space and got out of the car, then waved to the closest of the parents and said, "Has no one arrived to open up yet?"

  "They're inside," said one mother, and then she turned away.

  Stung by the rebuff, Helen hurried with a sinking heart along the flagstone path that led from the parking area to the front door. So distracted was she that she didn't notice the graffiti until she was nearly on top of it—and then it hit her with the force of a two-by-four across the face.