That Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

sleep.
    In the days that followed the fight, and they were all hot days, humid and cloudless, the front door of Sheryl’s house remained closed and only the shades in the front window, opened in the morning, pulled down in the evening, hours before it was time to turn on a light, reminded us that her mother and grandmother still lived there.
    In the middle of one hot afternoon, a black car with a blue police light on its dashboard pulled into the driveway and a man in a thin, somewhat shiny blue suit got out. He wearily climbed the steps, rang the bell and then rapped on the aluminum screen door. We saw him reach into his inside coat pocket as he waited, saw when Sheryl’s mother came to the door how he held his wallet up to the screen.
    She let him in. There was an Ace bandage around her wrist.
    Days later, my mother told me that Sheryl’s mother and grandmother were gone. She said she supposed they went to Ohio, where Sheryl was. I’d been outside for most of the day every day and so I imagined they’d left very early in the morning, maybe before dawn. I imagined them running between the house and the car like fugitives, rolling quietly down their driveway, turning on their headlights only when they’d reached the boulevard.
    I wonder now what heartache it caused them, the mother especially, fleeing her home like that, the home she had made with her husband. I wonder now how bitterly she had looked back across the year and a half that saw her lose her husband, her daughter, her home. With what envy she had looked at the other houses along our block as she drove past them for the last time that morning. How peaceful, how untouched they must have seemed to her, those houses where the brave men slept, their wives tucked under their arms, their children nearby.
    Or perhaps as she drove past the shuttered houses, with their damp lawns and purring window fans, she saw instead how precarious their peace was, how momentary. Maybe she saw instead the coming troubles: the scattering of sons, the restlessness of wives, the madness of daughters. Maybe she was aware, in her flight that early morning, that all futures were as uncertain as her own, that even as she drove away, her mother crying quietly beside her, the very blood that pulsed through their veins and set the rhythm that kept their wives asleep was moving pain and age and sorrow to the hearts of the good men.
    The house remained empty all the rest of that summer. A police cruiser passed by twice a day and, according to my parents, twice every night. We had all been forbidden to go near the property, and although I had once, on a dare, run up the driveway and rung the side bell, it wasn’t hard to keep us away. Up close and face to face, the house seemed sad, but if you pretended to forget it or let it remain in the corner of your eye as you teased Timmy or George Evers or flirted with Billy Rossi or Billy Carpenter, it seemed almost thrilling, almost like a dare. A reminder of the risks and pitfalls of a journey we were taking only the first, tentative steps toward—one that would give us the power for the first time in our lives to bring our entire family to ruin.
    Just before Halloween, the Meyer twins tried to start a rumor that Sheryl and her mother and grandmother and even Sheryl’s baby were still living in the house, in the top, attic, floor, that the police brought them food and clothing in the middle of the night, but none of us would go for it, even when they claimed they had peeked into the kitchen window at three a.m. and seen four eggs boiling in a pot on the stove.
    They had gone to Ohio, we were certain of it. And we named the state as if it were another dimension. Ohio. The sound of it shaped like a drain, a well, like a mouth that had opened to receive them. Ohio. We would spend our whole lives in this neighborhood, in these very houses, even, but she, we were certain, would never come back.
    I imagined sending a cryptic message to the jail. I