Passing Through Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

before. She wasn't much of a TV person, not having the
time to watch much before now. She generally read when she couldn't
sleep. Technical, nonfiction sort of material about blood gases, shock
trauma, burn therapy —but she had no interest in it.
    She opened the front door and took in a deep, satisfying
breath of the sweet spring night. Without really intending to, she
pushed the screen door open and stepped out on the porch. The swing
looked inviting, lit softly from the lights within the house.
    She sat in it sideways, tucking her long terry robe about
her bent knees and around her bare feet, huddling close against the
chill and the constant breeze that blew across the prairie. She looked
up at the stars as they dangled quiet and peaceful in the black sky.
They sparkled like so many crystals in the window of a New Age
bookstore, mesmerizing her, clearing her mind. Once again she felt
small and insignificant, unseen from the stars, hidden and safe in the
night.
    For a long time she sat motionless, satisfied to let time
and the world pass her by.
    Gil Hewlett watched her from the fenced pasture not two
hundred feet away.

    He hadn't meant to disturb her. He'd bid his family good
night an hour earlier and had gone up to bed. He couldn't sleep. He
stood watching the dim lights in the distance for some time before he
took the back stairs down to the kitchen for a drink of water.
    He could hear the television program Matthew was watching
in the next room. The back door stood open to the cool night air. He'd
passed through it on an impulse.
    Unable to see the still, green wheat in the fields or
distinguish the shapes of cows as they huddled together on the horizon,
he was greeted with vast empty space. Miles and miles of nothing but
him and the earth, the sky hanging low, and the stars seeming to be
within his reach.
    His mind began to wander, and so did his feet.
    If he had to describe himself in one word, it wouldn't be
deep. But sometimes, and usually at odd times, "life as it might have
been" would creep up and smack him in the back of his head.
    He relived the heartache of letting loose each of his
dreams, one by one. Carving them up, reshaping them to fit reality.
Compromising them, trading them off, finally terminating them
altogether. The bitterness rose up within him like black tar boiling
over in its pot.
    With an effort, an effort that was less and less stressful
with the passage of time, he pushed that darkness from his heart. He
gathered the good things in his life close to him. His boys, his
friends, his home. He counted himself a lucky man.
    Some things just weren't meant to be, he had reminded
himself wistfully, looking up to find that he had roamed a considerable
distance from the house—more than halfway to the Averback
farm, as a matter of fact.
    It was no longer a cluster of lights on the skyline, but
homey windows with warm glowing lights shining through them. A familiar
sight from his childhood. How many times had he walked the mile to the
Averbacks', crossing the road, jumping the fence, picking his way
carefully through the pasture?
    He did it then from habit and was smiling to himself when
he heard the screen door open on the Averbacks' front porch, just as it
had a thousand times before when they had seen him coming.
    Only he wasn't a kid anymore, and the Averbacks were gone.
The figure on the porch was held in the shadows, but it was
unmistakably that of a woman. She sort of floated toward him, to the
end of the porch and sat down.
    He watched her for a few minutes and when she didn't move
again, he did. He took slow steps, quiet steps, until he reached the
fence. From there he watched her stare at the stars, motionless, a part
of the night, almost invisible in the dark.
    He couldn't imagine being alone in a house, ill and weak.
Who was this woman who had no one to care for her? No family, no
friends. Why would she travel from what she knew to a remote town full
of strangers and lock herself up in a