In the Middle of the Night (17 page)

“There’s no going back, Baby.” Her hand still extended, palm up, waiting.

Denny poised himself to leap, placing his hands flat on
the chair on each side of his hips. Trying to get up from the chair, he found, to his horror, that he was unable to move his body, despite the surge of strength in his hands and legs. He was still trapped, his body caught in a strange inertia, refusing to obey the commands of his brain.

As he looked helplessly down at this body that was betraying him, panic in full sway now, he heard Lulu cry out: “What have you done, Baby?”

Glancing up, he saw Dave withdrawing the needle from Lulu’s neck, saw a small worm of blood against her pale flesh, saw disbelief and horror distorting her face.

“I love you, Lulu,” Dave said as she threw up her hands, losing her balance, then collapsing against the walker and stumbling over it, her hands grasping wildly for support and finding nothing to cling to. The floor trembled when her body struck it.

For one terrible moment, silence.

Still pinned in his chair, he watched as Dave knelt beside Lulu, cradling her in his arms. Bubbles of foam appeared on her lips; her body shook convulsively, then was still.

“I loved her,” Dave said. “She suffered so much and didn’t mean to be cruel.”

“She wanted to kill me,” Denny said, nodding at the hypodermic needle on the floor.

“My fault for letting it happen,” Dave said. “I shouldn’t have let it go as far as I did.” He settled himself
on the floor beside Lulu, holding her tenderly. “Get out of here, Denny. Please. Forget about us.”

“I can’t,” Denny said. Meaning: he couldn’t move and he couldn’t forget.

“That drug must be wearing off by now. Stand up. Leave this place.”

“What about you, Dave?”

Dave didn’t answer, his hand stroking Lulu’s face.

“What’s going to happen to you?” Denny persisted.

Dave looked at him for a long, long moment, depths of sadness in his eyes.

And Denny knew what Dave was going to do.

“Please go, please leave us.” Dave’s voice now a whisper, weariness in every syllable.

Denny rose from the chair, robotlike. With movement came an urgency to leave this scene of sickness and death, get away from that demented woman dead on the floor and the ravaged man beside her.

He stumbled to the door on quivering legs. Bracing himself, he looked back, saw Dave’s sad smile, those gleaming false teeth, saw him fumbling in his pocket.

“Good-bye, Dave,” he said, closing the door gently behind him.

Outside, his body surging with strength in the brisk night air, he began to run, wildly and blindly, his heart keeping hectic pace, through the neighborhood streets.

Out of breath finally, pain clutching his groin, he paused at the telephone cubicle from which he had called Les Albert. After a while, he groped for a quarter in his
pocket, placed it in the slot, heard the tumble of the coin in the mechanism, and prepared himself for what he had to say.

Later, he huddled in a doorway as an ambulance screamed past, a blur of white, followed by a police cruiser, blue lights twisting on its roof. He had not told the police dispatcher his name. Had told her what the police would find at the address he gave. He did not want Dave and Lulu lying abandoned and undiscovered in that apartment for hours or perhaps days.

He stood on the corner, looking at the neon sign of the 24-Hour Store down the street. The 4 was dark. Although cold, he stood there awhile.

He did not want to go home.

But there was no other place to go.

Maybe that’s what home was supposed to be, he thought, turning into his driveway.

And you were lucky to have it.

T
he monsters were acting up as usual at the bus stop, jostling and elbowing each other, calling out rude remarks to people passing by. A new monster had appeared, a kid no more than ten years old who stood apart from the rest, a sneer on his lips, along with a cigarette. He stood in a sort of half-crouch, revealing small sharp teeth when he inhaled. Denny searched his memory and labeled him Ygor II.

Looking up the street, he remembered the day—it seemed so long ago—that Dawn Chelmsford had arrived, and he wondered if she might show up again. He hadn’t called her. He didn’t know what he’d do if she appeared. She had become a pale presence in his life. But everything today was pale, like the early frost that had whitened windowpanes this morning.

Weariness tugged at his bones and muscles, and his eyes burned. He had not slept very much over the weekend.
The telephone had rung incessantly. Denny occasionally sat up with his father during the night hours, watching as his father listened patiently, the phone pressed to his ear, the lines in his face getting deeper as the night wore on. He remembered his father’s words, like a prayer:
I offer myself up to them.

Several times, he had wanted to snatch the telephone from his father’s hands and shout at whoever was at the other end of the line,
Leave us alone … you must he some kind of sicko … get a life.

Some of the weekend calls had been from reporters, to whom his father had repeated his familiar “No Comment.” Curious people walked by the house, craning their necks as their eyes swept the building. Some took pictures. One man wielded a cumbersome camcorder—maybe a TV cameraman.

Denny had left the apartment twice during the weekend. The first time was to walk by Dave and Lulu’s apartment. The house wore an air of vacancy, the window shades pulled down, advertising circulars strewn on the porch. The
Barstow Patriot
had carried a story that day on the obituary page. The headline was stark and blunt:

The story was matter-of-fact, not sensationalized like in the supermarket tabloids. For the first time, he found out Dave’s family name—O’Hearn—astonished that he had never bothered to ask what it was. He shook his head at the sad, sad words: “There are no known survivors.”

Denny knew it would be a long time before he would forget the events of that night.
Forget?
He would never forget. How close he had come to dying; the memory still caused his breath to catch. When he closed his eyes, the image of Lulu lying on the floor and Dave embracing her there came alive, like a movie in his mind. But real, not a movie at all.

Turning away from Dave’s house, he wondered if he would ever tell his parents what happened. Maybe when the anniversary was over, the phone no longer ringing. Or maybe never. Maybe he’d forget it more easily if he never talked about it.

The second time he left the apartment was to accompany his mother to the early-morning six-thirty mass at St. Martin’s. The church was almost empty. Kneeling in the fragrance of burning candles he thought about Lulu and the blankness. He wondered whether the blankness waited for everyone. He glanced at his mother, saw her praying devoutly, lips moving, eyes downcast. All the priests and nuns believed in heaven and hell and purgatory. Maybe the blankness was hell, as Lulu had suggested. He shuddered as a waft of cold stirred the air. He prayed the old prayers of his childhood—Our Father; Hail Mary, full of grace—the words automatic, but they filled his mind, took his thoughts away from Lulu and the blankness. Maybe the act of praying itself was the answer to the prayer. The thought caught him by surprise. It was something he would have to think about. Meanwhile, he kept on saying the prayers, over and over.

Now, as the bus heaved into view, Dawn arrived, in a rush, out of breath, swinging her bookbag.

She was still beautiful as she hurried aboard the bus, the monsters hooting and whistling but allowing her passage. Denny was the last to get on. He spotted her settling in a seat in the rear and made his way toward her, avoiding outstretched legs trying to trip him. Dismally, he saw that she had placed her bookbag on the seat beside her, the old signal that company was not wanted.

She was looking out the window as he passed by. He sat down two seats behind her. The bus lurched forward.

“Hey, Denny, your girl is back but I think she’s mad at you.” The voice of Dracula carried through the bus. Denny ignored him, as usual, concentrating on the advertising placards above the windows. “An Ideal Deal at Dealey’s Auto Barn.”

“Hey, Denny, how come you’re such a loser?” That same Jimmy Cagney voice.

Right, Denny, how come you’re such a loser?

He rose from his seat, was instantly thrown off-balance as the bus careened around a corner. He groped for support at Dawn’s seat. She continued to stare out the window, but he saw color staining her cheeks.

“Watch out, Denny—she might take a whack at you.” Dracula again.

“Would you?” Denny said.

She didn’t look at him, but said: “Would I what?”

“Take a whack at me.”

“I’m a nonviolent person,” she said.

Finally, she did look up. “You didn’t call,” she said.

Those blue-gray eyes were not angry but held a flash of—what?—disappointment,
maybe. Or hurt. He had never thought he was capable of hurting a girl that way.

“I read about your father in the newspaper,” she said. “Is that why you didn’t call? All that harassment stuff?”

A perfect cop-out: it would be so easy to lie to her. But he didn’t want to lie. Not to her, of all people.

“No, something else. Something I can’t talk about yet …”

She sighed, shook her head, muttered: “I must be crazy.” Then pulled her bookbag off the seat and placed it on the floor.

He sat down beside her.

And found that he had nothing to say to her.

At Normal Prep, he stepped off the bus into a chilling wind that scattered leaves across the sidewalk. Guys streamed past him as he glanced dismally back at the bus, thinking of Dawn, thinking,
Damn it. Damn it! What’s the matter with me?
She was beautiful and she’d made room for him on the bus—in her life—and he had sat there wordless, suddenly lonesome. For Lulu, of all people. For Lulu, who had tried to kill him, but lonesome for her anyway, for that voice on the telephone and the things that voice had said.
I think we were meant for each other, Denny.
How he’d loved that voice, loved even now the echo of it in his life. That meant he had loved nothing, loved nobody, because the Lulu who spoke those words to him had not been real, hadn’t even been a ghost or a phantom, only a fantasy.
I want you to love everything about me, Denny.

The first bell sounded. He trudged toward the gate,
books heavy in his arms. He spotted Lawrence Hanson hurrying along ahead of him.
You’ve got a lot to learn
, Lawrence had said. But how do you learn to say good-bye to someone who never existed?

The second bell rang. He walked slowly across the quad in November’s cold wind, and went up the steps into the school.

An ALA Quick Pick
An ALA Best Book for Young Adults

Robert Cormier (1925–2000) changed the face of young adult literature over the course of his illustrious career. His many novels include
The Chocolate War, Beyond the Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, Fade, Tenderness, After the First Death, Heroes, Frenchtown Summer
, and
The Rag and Bone Shop
. In 1991, he received the Margaret A. Edwards Award, honoring his lifetime contribution to writing for teens.