The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  “You have to consider that as a factor too, right?” I asked.

  He gave a swift nod and said, “We’ll be considering every possibility.” Then he led us to the front desk, where he shook my mother’s hand and promised to be in touch. We followed the same young officer back to his squad car.

  We were halfway across the Colorado Street Bridge when my mother finally broke into long, shuddering sobs. I wanted to lie and tell her that everything would be okay. I tried to touch her but my limbs, like my mouth, wouldn’t move. She pressed her face into her hands, and the officer flicked on the beacon lights. We accelerated, cars parting around us, the streets blurring in dusty smears of color and wind.

  It wasn’t fair, the sameness of everything, the way the world hadn’t changed. To everyone else it was just another Santa Ana, but when I looked out the living room window, I saw pieces of my father in the skeletal branches clumped in the gutters, in the guts of clawed-open garbage bags gushing out into the street. He was the shredded paper scraps, the chalk imprint of gray ash, the sharp, jagged trunk of a tree torn in half. Everyone else would clean up the mess, replant their front yards, and forget that a fire had ever come so close. But what about us? How could we possibly sweep up the debris and move forward?

  In the kitchen, my mother filled the teakettle and used a match to light the stove. “We should take out some candles,” she said as steam rose from the spout. “We don’t know how long this power outage will last.”

  I nodded, but after a while, when the light started fading, neither of us moved.

  Inside our house, my father’s presence clung to everything. Even his whiskey still coated my teeth, though the taste had eroded into something only vaguely acidic. In the dark, at least, I wouldn’t be confronted by the records and the loose picks and the indent on his side of the couch. And thank God my mother had done the dishes that morning; the sight of his used coffee mug in the sink might have undone me. I drank my peppermint tea quickly, sloshing it around with my tongue before swallowing. The liquid burned the roof of my mouth, but I kept drinking, wanting to feel the heat, to focus on something small and understandable.

  I couldn’t tell how late it was because all of our clocks were electronic, connected to the telephone, the microwave. I worried that we might remain in limbo forever, just sitting at the kitchen table as the daylight disappeared, waiting for someone to tell us what we were supposed to do next.

  “Why can’t we have a funeral?” I asked. My voice seemed too loud in the still room.

  “Your father never wanted to be buried,” my mother said.

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.” She looked into her tea as if searching for a way to explain. “A long time ago.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that he didn’t want to be buried.”

  I tried to picture them, the faces from the photograph: twenty years old and lying on the hood of a car at twilight, discussing death as if it were something romantic. She was right—he would have hated being confined in the ground, reduced to a plaque and a prescribed speech in some dank, pink-walled funeral parlor. But I needed it. I needed the veneered cherrywood of a coffin and flower-lined aisles so sappy and pungent that the scent nearly suffocated me. I needed a ceremony at some sun-filled cemetery, like the Hollywood Forever, near the duck pond and the statue of Johnny Ramone. I needed a place where I could keep him, because he already felt so faint that I feared losing him completely.

  I said, “A burial is different than a funeral.”

  My mother traced her fingers over the table. “We’ll make sure to do something. Just the two of us.”

  “What if someone else wanted to come?”

  “Like who?”

  The Vital Spades, I wanted to say. But then I remembered: I’d never actually met them. I did not know where they were, or how to get in touch with them, or if they even wanted to be found.

  “Joe Thompson,” I offered after a while. “And the guys from the bar.”

  My mother frowned at the table. “Those people fueled your father’s habits. That’s all.”

  “Then what about us?” I asked.

  My mother stood up and walked to the window.

  “We didn’t stop him,” I said. “We’re just as much to blame.”

  “I need you to know,” my mother began, concentrating hard on some point beyond the glass, “that I never wanted this. Not for a second. Your father and I had problems, but never—even during the worst of it.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She stayed there for a long time, staring out into the yard, but from where I sat the night was already too dark to see anything.

  “Where was he going?” I asked.

  My mother reached a hand up to her face. After a moment, she turned back to look at me. She had just opened her mouth to speak when something clicked and screeched, a skidding sound like worn-out tires. Then music began to play.

  Startled, I jumped up, searching for the source of the noise. The record player had started spinning in the living room. Only after I shut it off did I consider that the song might have been a sign from my father. Miniature bumps rose on my arms. I turned around to ask my mother if she felt him, too, his ghost passing through her—but then I noticed the glint of her hair beneath the overhead lights, the green zeros blinking from the microwave.

  The power had come back on. That was all. And it occurred to me then that the record must have started playing from where it stopped the night before, during the last track of the album, at the exact moment my father’s car crashed into the telephone pole and disconnected the electricity.

  I lifted the record from the player by its edges and put it back in its sleeve, in its rightful place on the shelf. Even though most of the spines were indecipherable, worn and frayed in a familiar mosaic, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround: Part One stood apart from the rest. I yanked it back out of the lineup and hurled it at the floor, willing it to break into a thousand little pieces—which of course it didn’t. The floor in the living room was carpeted.

  I began moving then, tearing the records from the wall. First one and then a dozen, I pushed them off the sides, threw them back, clawing at the covers until my mother grabbed my arms from behind and, surrounding me, pulled me down to the floor. “All we can do is keep living,” she whispered, and put one cold hand on my cheek. My tears pooled in the spaces between her fingers as I thought about the impossibility of more life after this, and how wrong it felt that in another minute, when my body stopped shaking, we would pull apart and pick up the records and without saying anything, stack them back on the shelves.

  That night, from the center of a thick, black dream, I woke to the sound of my mother whispering. My eyes opened in slits, too tired to pull apart any farther. I vaguely remembered that at some point earlier, she had coerced me to the sofa, rested my head in her lap. She weaved her fingertips through my hair until my throat hollowed and dried and my mind emptied into sleep. Now, the living room was dark except for a thin slice of yellow light cutting through the hallway. Her words spilled out, soft, intangible.

  “I never would have thought,” she began, and stopped. “No, of course I did, but not the extent of it. How can anyone ever really know what is going through someone else’s mind?”

  For a while, she was quiet. A heavy silence pushed into the living room, sinking me back toward unconsciousness before her voice grasped me again. “But this—nothing prepares you for this.”

  I guessed she was on the phone, but could not think of a single person whom she would speak to with such frank, unguarded sincerity. She had no close friends, no remaining family. My grandmother (who existed in my memory as vague, bony fingers and silk) died when I was a baby, following her husband, who passed a few years prior. My mother rarely spoke of them. At some point I must have decided the memories were too painful, because I didn’t push her for any further information. She only had the two of us, my father and me.

&n
bsp; “What do I do now?” my mother said after a moment, her voice coarse and raw. “I need you. We both do.”

  I heard the squeak of the bed as my mother’s voice faded to a murmur. In the darkness, I imagined she was talking to my father. They were lying on top of the bed, facing each other, their noses an inch apart. His eyes still held blue. His smile crooked. She said, “I need you.” When he reached out to touch her face, a feeling like wind in her veins.

  Six

  I WOKE EARLY to an empty house dense with heat. My arms were sore and my mouth tasted like dust, but during those first few blissful seconds, I didn’t remember anything. It was just another morning.

  Then I noticed the records.

  Though they had all been restacked neatly on the shelves, even a split-second glance revealed their scattered spines and arbitrary order. The memories roared back. My father’s absence felt crushing, dizzying—like I had lost him all over again.

  I waited for something else to happen: a knock at the door, a record to start playing, a fault line to split beneath my feet and suck me straight down into the earth’s core. I closed my eyes, bracing myself. Nothing.

  After a minute, I noticed a soft grunting noise coming from the yard, so I went outside. Sun glared through the smoke-stained sky and I raised one hand to shield my eyes, squinting at the shape of my mother squatting in the flower bed. She wore loose cotton pajamas, muddy sneakers, and a ratty SeaWorld cap with her hair pulled through in a ponytail. Dabs of moisture clung to her chin.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Pruning,” she said. She gripped the base of a thick stock of weeds and jerked the roots out with all the force of her upper body. “You want to join? It helps—” Her voice faltered, caught in her throat. “It helps to keep busy.”

  I shook my head and went back inside, watching from the window as my mother clawed through the soil for her next victim, grabbed it with both hands, and yanked.

  For the next few days, she worked in the flower bed while messages from the outside world accumulated on the answering machine: the cremation was complete, the high school wanted to extend their deepest sympathies, the rental car was ready, and would we like that delivered to our doorstep for a small extra fee? The catering company wanted my mother to know that a third missed shift would result in termination from the company. Detective Melendez also left one brief message, requesting that my mother contact him as soon as possible. I suppose she must have; after that, we never heard from him again.

  All the while, my mother labored with a maniacal fixation that likely should have worried me, but in some small way, I think I understood: this was how she kept living.

  Truthfully, I envied her. If I could have thrown myself into some mundane activity, separating my mind from the pain for just a minute, I would have. Nothing worked—not even the guitar. I attempted to play “Love Honey,” but couldn’t make it through the first verse without something going wrong. In less than five minutes, I lost three of my father’s tortoiseshell picks into the sound hole, split one of the cuts bridging my left lifeline, nearly smashed the guitar through the living room window when I couldn’t shake the picks loose, and finally shoved the Martin between unused winter coats in the hallway closet because I couldn’t even bear looking at it.

  I couldn’t go in the studio, either. I tried once, on the second or third night, unable to shake the possibility that somewhere inside was a clue to what really happened the night he died. But when the door clicked open, a strange, musty smell slammed into me—a hodgepodge of metals and rye. My father, I realized quickly. Preserved inside the sealed-up room his scent had swelled, and I closed the door immediately, afraid of losing it, the essence that had already vanished from our house the way the smell of cheap laundry detergent fades from your clothes as soon as you put them back in the drawer. The realness of it—him, in there, the lack of him everywhere else—knocked the wind from me.

  In fact, the only distraction I seemed to tolerate was my mother, so I spent most of my time that week sitting under the dappled shade of our avocado tree, in a lawn chair half-broken by the winds, watching her jab at the dirt. I didn’t think about school. I didn’t think about work. I didn’t wonder why my own boss hadn’t called.

  One day, I woke from a nap to a silhouetted body blocking the sun above me. An extended hand clasped a piece of crumbled paper.

  “What’s this?” I asked, taking the note from my mother. In crisp blue pen she had scribbled the names of half a dozen flowers.

  “I’d like you to pick these up from Home Depot,” she said.

  As a child, I hated Home Depot. I looked down at the list and felt lost already among the foreign names. Alyssum. Lily of the Nile. “Wouldn’t it be smarter if you went? Maybe you’ll see something you like better and change your mind.”

  The phone rang inside the house. My mother paused, mouth half-open in the formulation of some thought, and craned her ear in the direction of the living room window. Neither of us moved. I felt my heart accelerating as the answering machine clicked on, wondering if this would finally be the call from one of my father’s friends, someone from the Spades or Joe Thompson’s bar who had heard about our loss and wanted us to know how sorely my father would be missed. Then, I wondered if the caller was Nick. A moment of suspended silence clogged the line before the person hung up.

  “I trust your judgment,” my mother finally said, eyes still trained on the window. “And getting away from the house will do you some good.”

  “Maybe you should take your own advice,” I mumbled.

  “What?” She turned to me.

  “I said, ‘A car ride actually sounds kind of nice.’”

  As I cruised down busy side streets in our sterile rental car, purposely avoiding the 134 Freeway, I flipped through the local radio stations until I found the familiar, slippery bass line of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” I turned up the volume.

  Paul McCartney crooned about Desmond and Molly and their simple little family, and I was suddenly transported back to this time my father came to Career Day at my elementary school. Ms. Hopkins, my fourth grade teacher, had expected him to talk about working in corporate computer distribution. I could still see her eyes widening as he sauntered up to the front of the room in his blue jeans and biker boots, the Martin strapped to his back. He started playing without any introduction, nodding to the other parents in the back, a signal for them to join in. By the end of the song everyone had started singing, even Ms. Hopkins and the kids who wouldn’t know the Beatles from bees swarming the playground. But not me. I was consumed with pride, watching the other fathers—stern-faced lawyers, accountants in stiff suits—transform under his spell.

  Then someone behind me honked. The light had turned green, and my reverie was shattered, and for those first few seconds I could not accelerate—could not even remember where I was going. The car continued honking as it swerved around me and whizzed by.

  Turns out my mother was right: It did help to keep busy. So when I returned home I decided to help in the garden.

  We worked side by side for most of the afternoon, hardly speaking, lost in the monotony of digging and filling holes. At one point, as I sat back on my heels to take a break, I looked across the street and noticed that the EVACUATED sign remained in the Murphys’ window. I was wondering why the family hadn’t returned, when a sleek black Jetta pulled up in front of their house. For an instant, I marveled at the coincidence. Then Cara stepped out of the car.

  She crossed the street, waving hesitantly, and waited on our curb as though unsure of whether or not she should come closer. A blurry, heat-twisted image of Lance and Travis clouded my mind but I stood, shaking off the memory with the dirt on my hands. I shuffled down the driveway to meet her.

  “Hi,” Cara said, perching her sunglasses up on her head. Her curly hair had turned wild in the static breeze.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Cara glanced at my face, at the ground, down the street, where a mailman put
tered from door to door, whistling. I crossed and uncrossed my arms. An uncertainty had bloomed between us and we stood in silence for what felt like a long time before Cara finally shook her head and looked back to me. Her eyes had welled with tears.

  “I only just heard,” she said, bottom lip trembling. “I’m so sorry.” She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

  My face caught in the net of her hair and I inhaled hairspray. I said, “It’s okay,” though it wasn’t, and all at once I was glad we hadn’t had any sort of funeral. I didn’t think I’d have been able to handle the flood of grim, pitying expressions and tilted heads that assured me he’s in a better place now. All I wanted was the tiny luxury of questioning everything—to be allowed to feel weak and tired and lost.

  Cara said, “He’s in a better place now.”

  The phrase made me wince. I knew she believed in heaven, but other than the sweeping, unending emptiness that slogged through me, I found it hard to believe in much of anything. Silence expanded between us, and I felt a weight pressing against my chest. I was exhausted. Nothing seemed more important right then than going inside and falling asleep.

  “The school,” Cara said suddenly, brightening as she offered me a binder neatly divided with colorful tabs. “They wanted someone to bring your assignments so you don’t fall behind. We tried to organize everything so it’d be easier, but I’m warning you in advance: some of this stuff is such a snore, especially for Mr. Burnell’s class. I swear he speaks in monotone on purpose.”

  Opening the binder, I flipped through the pages.

  “Nick helped,” she said.

  My heart lurched. I remembered how his eyes glistened, splashed with hope, when he waved at me across the quad. The words on the paper blurred together.

  “We’re just friends,” Cara continued. “Honestly, it’s better this way. People always say not to mix business with pleasure, you know? And sometimes ASB feels like a full-time job.”