The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  “Well, eat more, then. Please. We still have tons of food.”

  “Maybe just another bite of salad. Do you mind passing the salad, Diane?”

  As the bowl changed hands, their fingers touched. It was only a second, but I saw something jolt between them.

  “Can I be excused?” I asked.

  “May I,” Vivian chimed.

  I gritted my teeth. “May I be excused?”

  “You’ve hardly touched your dinner,” my mother said.

  “I ate a big lunch.”

  She sighed. “Well, I suppose I can bring out the dessert now.”

  “I’ll clear the plates,” Vivian offered, but my mother insisted that she sit down.

  “Susannah will help, and then she can be excused.”

  I grabbed my plate and the basket of bread and followed her into the kitchen.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered when we were alone.

  My mother took the dishes from me and placed them next to the sink. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “He’s my teacher, Mom.”

  “Roger and I have been friends a long time.” She began loading the bread into a Ziploc bag.

  “He’s my teacher,” I said again, louder, though I must have recognized that the teacher part wasn’t actually the problem. I liked Mr. Tipton at school—I really did. But the man here at our dinner table was not the familiar teacher or the kind, curious choir dilettante who rushed around the room trying to get us to sing louder as he slapped emphatic time signatures against his knee. This was somebody else. Somebody from my mother’s world, her past, the place before my father existed. A place I never wanted to be.

  “Susie, please,” she begged. “Lower your voice.”

  “It’s barely been six months since Dad died, or did you already forget?”

  My mother stopped, one hand hovering above the bread basket, and turned to me. “That’s not fair.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I’m not trying to replace your father,” she said. “No one could ever do that. And yes, perhaps things are a bit more complicated than—”

  I scoffed. “Complicated. Right. Twenty years have passed since you were kids. You don’t even know him anymore and yet you’re throwing yourself at him, like you can just pick back up right where you left off. Like nothing ever separated you—”

  “You’re being completely irrational about this—”

  “—but something did separate you. I’m right, aren’t I? There’s a reason why you didn’t pick him. And maybe there’s a reason why he never got married.”

  My mother looked past me, frowning.

  I swerved around. Roger stood behind me, a tall stack of dishes perched in his hands, the remnants of a smile fading from his face. “The cooks shouldn’t have to clean,” he said, and walked toward the sink. He turned on the water and began wiping the scraps from our plates into the garbage. Every few seconds he stuck his finger beneath the faucet, testing the temperature.

  “Roger, please don’t,” my mother said. “I’ll take care of that later. You’re our guest.”

  “I was married once,” Roger said. He picked up one of the plates and rotated its surface through the water. “Nine years.”

  My mother and I just stood there watching as he arranged the plates in the dishwasher, gently scrubbed the empty wineglasses with a sponge. Little phosphorescent bubbles floated up from his hands, dawdling through the air before popping.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  My mother shot me a look of warning. “Roger, you don’t need to talk about this. We have dessert. You still like white chocolate macadamia cookies, don’t you?”

  His hands kept moving beneath the stream of water. “She passed away,” he said, as if he hadn’t even heard my mother, and I knew then that he was talking solely to me. “Lung cancer. Never smoked a day in her life.” He trailed off, shaking his head.

  For a while, no one spoke. I wanted to leave, to make the conversation and the evening end, but my limbs felt too heavy. So I watched Roger wash our dishes. Next to me, my mother stared at the floor and bit at the inside of her lip, her expression pained but not surprised. Clearly, she already knew about Roger’s wife. I wondered what else she knew about him, how often she had seen him, what had transpired since the day she ran into us outside the choir room. I wondered what had happened on New Year’s Eve.

  “Well,” Roger said, turning off the water and drying his hands on one of Vivian’s dish towels, “this isn’t how I hoped the evening would unfold, but there it is.”

  “Roger.” My mother’s voice emerged as a whisper.

  “I’m just going to give my regards to the chef, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  My mother and I did not move from our spots on opposite sides of the kitchen sink as Roger walked out of view, offering a muffled thanks to Vivian in the dining room. The two spoke for a minute in hushed voices, and then moved toward the front door.

  “He’s a good friend,” my mother said quietly, twisting Vivian’s pearls around her wrist. “A good man.”

  I wanted to tell her I knew. Despite everything I had said, I knew Roger was genuine and caring, the kind of man who made the best of bad situations, who would volunteer to save a dying choir program and greet the challenge with zeal and warmth—only, I didn’t know how to express that out loud, or how to explain the inconsistencies that had split Roger the choir teacher and Roger the potential boyfriend into two separate people in my mind, because in that moment, I was hit by a more immediate truth: I just wasn’t ready to see my mother move on.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be.

  Out in the foyer the front door clicked shut. My mother waited a few more seconds, her jaw set. Then she turned away. Left alone, I looked around the empty, half-cleaned kitchen. In the big bay windows that overlooked the pool, I saw only darkness and my own reflection painted with shadows.

  “Well, that went horribly,” Vivian said when she entered the kitchen. She rummaged around for a minute, putting away spices, shaking the dirty linens over the sink. Then she opened the pink baker’s box that sat in the center of the island. “Cookie?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Vivian took her time before choosing one. “I always try to pick the one with the most chocolate. Why indulge at all if you’re not going to indulge completely?” she said, and began nibbling on the sweet, placing one hand beneath her chin to catch the crumbs. She tossed her head back and made an “Mmm” sound. My stomach roared.

  “You didn’t just randomly see Roger that day at the grocery store, did you,” I said.

  “Your mother told me that they ran into each other at the school. She seemed hopeful. Happy, for the first time since you came here. And your mother needs a distraction.” She took another bite of the cookie, dabbing a napkin at the corners of her mouth. “Don’t get me wrong—I adore that she’s single-handedly raising my property value, and the new view is marvelous. But what your mother really needs is a friend. She’s known Roger a long time.”

  I crossed my arms. “Everyone keeps saying that.”

  “I think Roger needs a friend, too.”

  “Why didn’t you like him?” I demanded.

  “Who, dear?” Vivian asked.

  “My father.”

  Vivian watched me sternly, no doubt deciding whether she should tell me the truth—not that she would lie. Whenever there were elephants in the room, she was the first to pull out a gun. This was one of the qualities I liked most about her, despite how harsh she could sometimes be, and I felt a strange prick of pride when she looked directly at me and said, “He wasn’t good enough for her.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “In every way.”

  “You didn’t even know him.”

  She sat on a stool at the island, as if the conversation had already exhausted her. “He was wild and uneducated and he didn’t have a stable job. He had no way of providing for a family, and no intention of doing so. He would d
isappear for days at a time and your mother would call me, crying. I’d tell her to leave him and come home.”

  Though I wanted to argue, to defend my father and all the pieces of him that Vivian couldn’t even pretend to know, a separate thought struck me. “So when exactly did you two stop talking?”

  “I needed to free her,” she said. “I thought he would ruin her life.”

  “What did you do?”

  Vivian sighed. “I did what I thought any sane parent would do. I gave her an ultimatum, an offer with only one logical choice. I told her to leave him and come home, or I’d cut her off. She’d already taken a leave from school by then, but we were still paying for her apartment, her gas, her groceries.”

  A fragment whirled back to me then: a warm door, a dark hallway. My parents’ angry voices rubbing up against each other before pulling apart. I stared at the black expanse beyond the kitchen window and focused, harder, willing the memory into precision. This was bigger than the amount of zeros on a check, my father had said. Your exact words.

  Then I remembered what Kurt told me the day we sipped iced tea on his patio in Pasadena.

  “But she did leave him,” I said. “Before I was born. She didn’t come to you?”

  “Did I ever tell you about your mother’s bike-riding routine?” Vivian asked. Her voice had softened, rounded to a supple lilt.

  I shook my head.

  “Your mother used to love riding her bike in the driveway when she was a little girl, but before she could, she had to walk back and forth across every inch of the pavement looking for bugs. Anything bigger—snails, worms—she would pick up and place in the grass, but if something like a trail of ants marched across the pavement, something she couldn’t easily relocate, she would mark the spot with a chalk line, so she knew not to cross it. Only then could she get on her bike and start riding. She couldn’t bear the thought of accidentally squishing any creature. Not even a—what do you call those little things? The gray ones that curl up?”

  “Roly Poly?”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  As Vivian shifted on her stool, the light caught the sheen of her blush. It looked too orange, almost tawdry, and her lipstick had rubbed off. I’d never thought Vivian looked particularly old, but right then, lost in her reverie, I could see in the lines of her face as she smiled just how many years she had already lived.

  “What was I saying?” she asked suddenly.

  “That my mother refused to ride her bike over bugs.”

  Vivian furrowed her eyebrows, as though straining to orient herself in her own story.

  “She’d pick them up and move them out of her path?” I said uncertainly. “Roly Polies?”

  She nibbled the cookie, thinking. “Hm,” she said. Then, “Well, your mother would have made an extraordinary marine biologist.”

  “She wanted to be a marine biologist?”

  Vivian nodded. “She always loved animals, but as she got older, she became fascinated with the ocean. There were so many possibilities out there, so many more unknowns. And she was so inquisitive. She had her father’s brain.”

  The only link I had between my mother and the ocean was the ratty old SeaWorld hat she used to wear when she gardened. When I listened to the waves, I thought of my father, not her. Not what might be living underneath.

  “My grandfather was an Eagle Scout,” I said hollowly, reciting the one thing I felt I knew with any certainty in that moment.

  “That’s right.” Vivian nodded, pleased that I remembered.

  “What happened to him?”

  “The same thing that happens to all of us, eventually.”

  “But how?” I asked before adding, “I should know these things. For, like, when I have to fill out all those forms at the doctor’s office, about family health history and stuff. I already have a big blank on one side.”

  “Heart attack,” she said. “Such cruel irony, isn’t it? The healthiest among us are often first to go.” She sighed, her narrow shoulders visibly rising, falling. “Your mother was only a teenager when he died. Younger than you, I believe.”

  “She never told me that.”

  “Yes, well. We were dead anyway, weren’t we?” When Vivian laughed, her voice echoed off the granite. Then she picked up the baker’s box. “Cookie?”

  “Still no.”

  “I always try to pick the one with the most chocolate.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to be led off track. “Doesn’t it make you angry that she let me believe you were dead?”

  “Love can make you do otherwise unthinkable things. None of us are immune.”

  “Well I think it was unfair,” I said. “To both of us.”

  “Your mother did what she thought was best. I can’t say I blame her. I didn’t make it very easy.” She paused. “You must understand. Things were different when I was a girl. Women had different roles. I heard the most awful stories about these young girls who fell in love with musicians. They would hop on to one of those tour buses and come home in a box, their arms pricked more times than a pincushion.”

  “But you could have called,” I said. “You could have visited, tried to make it right. She would have forgiven you.”

  “Perhaps.” Vivian looked toward the black window. “Perhaps not. Your mother’s a strong woman, Susannah. I’d like to think she got that much from me. But we’re stubborn too. Proud. It took me a long time to admit that the world was changing. To understand that your mother’s choice was not a direct stab at me.”

  The refrigerator started humming, its buzz filling the quiet room. Vivian said something else but I couldn’t hear her. “What?” I asked.

  She shook her head and placed two fingers on each temple, began rubbing the skin there.

  “Be a dear and fetch me a glass of water, will you?”

  I did as she asked. When I handed her the glass, she wrapped her fingers around mine, preventing me from letting go.

  “Don’t be angry with your mother,” she said, her eyes boring into me. “This family has been broken for far too long.” I started to protest, to explain why I was mad, but Vivian swept on. “Your mother is not the villain. If this story has one, I imagine that the most likely candidate is me.”

  She let my fingers fall. My whole hand fell, heavy, to my side. “I always thought I was the villain,” I said.

  “What a preposterous thing to say.”

  “If it weren’t for me, none of this would have happened. You wouldn’t have had to give her an ultimatum. No one would have had to choose.”

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” Vivian said, cutting me off, “but the same decisions would have been made without you. She saw in him a man worth saving. I saw a man who was wasting his life. You might have sped things up a bit, but the same bridges would have been crossed. Or burned.” She stood. “Both seem applicable, in this case.”

  “But—”

  “She loved him,” Vivian snapped. “No one will ever take that away. But he isn’t coming back. Do you understand that?”

  My entire life, I had always fractioned everything into sides. My father and me against my mother. My father, Lance, and Travis against me. My father versus Roger. Versus Vivian. Versus me. And maybe it didn’t have to be that way. I had spent so much time floundering beneath the weight of regret, thinking that if I had done something differently, he might still be alive. But I suppose all of us are doomed to think this way. We are, after all, the stars of our own stories.

  “Do you understand?” Vivian said again. I nodded. She placed one hand back on her head, trying to steady herself, and smiled. “Occasionally I forget that I’m not young anymore, but the world never tires of reminding me.” She shuffled toward the hallway, glancing back before leaving the room. “So you’ll give him another chance? I’m not saying tomorrow or even the day after that, but sometime?”

  Maybe I hadn’t inadvertently destroyed my parents’ lives all those years ago, I thought, but the asperity I had shown toward Roge
r? For that, the blame fell solely on me.

  “Yeah okay,” I said. “Sometime.”

  Eighteen

  LATER, AFTER I called Lynn and crawled out my window and edged down the dark driveway, I got into her car and we sped away from Orange Park Acres. Someone Lynn knew was having a party. The boys were already there.

  Lemon Heights had no streetlamps, and as we curved through the neighborhood, only the slim fan of headlights guided us. I would have been terrified driving like that, hardly able to see as the car climbed higher, the houses getting both larger and farther apart. But Lynn knew those streets well. Now and then we swung around a stretch of road right on the edge of the hill, and through a break in the foliage I could see the entire city blazing like a circuit board. From that vantage point, I could block all of Orange with my hand. My father’s voice echoed in my ears: Doesn’t everything look so calm from up here? It’s much smaller than it seems.

  “So are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or do I have to guess?” Lynn asked once we’d parked on a block cluttered with cars and headed in the general direction of distant music. Above us, dense clouds loomed, veined with moonlight. A breeze shivered over my arms.

  “It’s just stuff with my family,” I said, rubbing the goose bumps.

  “Nuh-uh. You don’t get to use that with me. I am the queen of ‘just stuff with my family.’ You’ve met my mother. There’s nothing you could possible say that I haven’t said myself.”

  Lynn offered me her cigarettes and I took one, unearthed the matchbook from my purse.

  “So you’ve said before that your mother is secretly dating your choir teacher—who, it appears, just happened to be her rather serious high school boyfriend? Likely the first man she ever loved, and maybe someone she still loves, has always loved? And here I thought I was special.”

  Lynn’s mouth dropped open, and smoke streamed out like dried ice. “Shut. The fuck. Up.”

  “I win,” I said drily, continuing toward the music. “I expect you to abdicate the throne by midnight.”

  “That’s completely unfair!”

  We rounded a corner and the party’s noises amplified.