That Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

pointing toward her shoulder blade.
    I remember my mother and some of the other women saying how she had trembled as if she would convulse throughout her father’s funeral. How on the morning he died she’d been driven home from school by the principal himself. Most of the women were out on the sidewalk by then, drawn first by the sight of the police car at the curb and then by the news of what had happened. They saw her paw wildly at the car door before the principal had even managed to come to a complete stop and heard her call to her father, who was by then a good couple of hours dead, as she ran across the lawn and into the house.
    She was the first female child on our block to enter adolescence, but until the night of the fight, I don’t remember anyone taking notice of the fact. During the summer before, her fifteenth summer, when the sight of her might ordinarily have startled and touched the men, made the mothers wary and filled us young girls with envy and awe, Sheryl was marked by a different distinction. I would see her carrying her books and her pale blue looseleaf binder home from school, see her boarding the bus for the shopping mall, coming to the door when Rick picked her up for a date and kissing him good night when he dropped her off, and think not that these were freedoms and pleasures soon to be my own, but only that these were all things she did despite the knowledge that she would never see her father again.
    I was at the age when I believed that if either of my parents died, I would simply die too, would simply disappear, as if with their last breath they would draw me back into themselves, just as they had once told me they had kissed each other and breathed me into life. (Which was not the mere bit of whimsy it may seem. I had asked them what all that heavy breathing they did in their bedroom was meant to achieve.) That Sheryl still lived, that she dressed herself in the morning, ate food, sometimes even smiled, all with her father dead, seemed far more remarkable to me than the fact that she was also growing into an adult.
    Apparently, it struck our neighbors the same way: more than our first female teenager, she was our first parent less child.
    And Rick, given her fatherless ness the way she had trembled in her tight skirt and dark stockings, the way her thick makeup had seemed so pathetic on her childish face, bruised with weeping, Rick must have seemed merely a pleasant diversion for the poor girl, maybe someone she could talk to. Not the best boy in the school, but better at any rate (let’s face it) than someone like Larry Lawlor, who ate whole sticks of butter, played the clarinet and still, at seventeen, appeared costume less every Halloween to rattle an orange milk carton in your face and to say in his girl’s voice, “Trick or Treat for Unicef.”
    Mr. Carpenter was wrong: no one could have seen it coming, could have anticipated the girl’s logic, the way she had determined to love. Certainly I didn’t, and I was someone, perhaps the only one, she’d taken the trouble to explain it to.
    They had met sometime during that fifteenth summer, the summer before Sheryl went away and the fight took place. At least they’d started dating then, because they must have known or seen one another in school before that. Rick was two years older, but he’d dropped out or been suspended often enough to end up in many of Sheryl’s classes. Still, it was that summer when we first saw them together.
    Sheryl had a friend named Angie, who lived four or five blocks away. Early that summer, we used to see Sheryl and Angie, freshly made up and, you could be certain, smelling of Ambush cologne, meeting on our corner at about seven thirty each evening. They would then walk down toward the schoolyard, their hips bumping, their black shoes scraping over the sidewalk. Early that summer, we would see them come back, too, just after dark. We would hear their voices, made twangy and snappy by the gum they