In the Middle of the Night

Part One

The ringing telephone blistered the night, stripping him of sleep, like a bandage torn from flesh. He looked toward the digital clock: 3:18 in vivid scarlet numbers. Instantly alert, he thought: it’s beginning again, but too early—much too early this year.

The first call usually came sometime in October, a week or two before the anniversary. This, however, was early September, in the final hours of a lingering heat wave. Fans turned lazily in the bedroom windows, fans that did not blur the sound of the telephone, incessant and insistent. Please make it a wrong number, he prayed.

Raising himself on one elbow, he listened, counting the rings, pausing after each one … six (pause), seven (pause) … and heard his father padding wearily down the hallway. Did not actually hear his father but felt him proceeding slowly, reluctantly, but going all the same.

The telephone’s ringing ended abruptly.

He waited, still half-sitting, half-lying, his elbow jammed into the mattress. Perspiration dampened his forehead. He strained to listen, heard nothing. Finally, he got out of bed and walked carefully to the door—his door was always open a crack—and, squinting, saw his father, his white shorts and T-shirt stamped against the darkness, standing with the telephone to his ear, listening. He watched him for long moments, not daring to move.

His father put down the telephone and stood there, mute and alone and still.

Denny knew then that it had not been a wrong number. He stared at his father as his father stared at the phone. Sighing softly, Denny turned and made his way back to the bed, eyes getting accustomed to the darkness now, shape and sizes assuming identity—CD player, desk upon which he did his homework, bulletin board—all of it stark, impersonal, like a hotel room. Chilly suddenly, he snapped off the window fan.

He stood at the window, looking out at the quiet street, subdued in shadows, the maple tree across the street like a giant ink blot. The windows of the other apartment buildings were dark. Down the street, a splash of light from the 24-Hour Store. He wondered what kind of person shopped at three o’clock in the morning. Or used a telephone at that hour.

Back in bed, finally, he tried to relax and bring on sleep. He tossed and turned, the sheet entangling his legs. Thinking of that terrible October date a few weeks away, he vowed that this time he wouldn’t stand by like his father and do nothing. He wasn’t a little kid anymore. He was sixteen. He didn’t know what he would do, but he would do something.

I’m not my father, he muttered into his pillow.

Sleep took a long time coming.

I hear her restless in the night, walking the floor, pacing up and down. I don’t move in my bed, pretending I’m asleep. I know what she wants to do. I know that she wants to call him. I hope she doesn’t. But I also know that Halloween is coming and she must call.

She always stands by my bed before calling. Making sure I’m asleep. I try to make my breathing regular. I fake snoring, not too much because then she’ll know I’m trying to fool her. What I want to say is: Please don’t call. Leave him alone. But it’s futile. Especially this year.

Last night, she went through the routine again. Pacing up and down, standing at the window looking out, then beside my bed.

I heard her punching the numbers on the phone. That eerie tune the Touch-Tone plays. I heard her voice. Quiet at first, gentle. Then harsh as she got angry, as she always does.

Why does he listen? I wonder. Why doesn’t he hang up? Why doesn’t he take the phone off the hook at night? Or have it taken out?

What does he say to you? I asked her once.

Nothing, she said. He just listens. But I can almost hear his heart beating.

Last night was different, though. She did not become angry and her voice was almost tender as she spoke to him.

When she hung up, she came and stood beside my bed. I knew she was there because I heard the soft slap of her slippers on the floor as she approached.

I opened my eyes and looked up at her.

I won’t call him anymore, she said.

A sigh escaped me, like a ghost abandoning my body.

Now it’s the son, she said. The sin of the father will be visited upon the son.

Oh no, Lulu, I said. Please don’t do that.

I have to do it, she said.

No you don’t.

I was the one who died, she said, not you.

She turned away from me, letting herself be swallowed up in the nighttime gloom.

The usual morning scene: Denny, his mother and his father.

His mother at the stove, waiting for the coffee to bubble in the little glass knob of the percolator; his father with the newspaper in front of him, rippling the pages as he turns them; Denny eating the tasteless shredded wheat like trying to swallow hay.

Back to his mother: still pretty but in a fading way, turning pastel. Streaks of gray lacing her still blond hair. Her skin like ivory, pale. Everything about her pale except for her eyes. Brown-black, sharp, radiant. Her best feature, she always says, although she has never done anything to enhance them.

He always checked his mother’s eyes when he wanted to confirm what she was really thinking. She was always aware of what he was doing, though it remained unspoken between them. When she’d turn away, he’d know instinctively that she was hiding something from him. Most often it had to do with his father.

His father. Behind the newspaper. Hiding behind the newspaper, especially this morning. Was he really reading the paper? He never discussed what he read in the paper. Did not react. The Red Sox lose another ball game, blowing it in the final inning? No reaction. Another senseless death on the streets over in Boston? A beating? A drive-by shooting? A gang rape? No reaction. Did he actually read the paper or was he only using it as a barricade?

Himself. What did his mother and father see when they looked at him? The obvious: dutiful son, good student—not brilliant, not a genius (definitely not a genius), but a regular kid. Did not give them cause for alarm. Polite. Oh, sarcastic sometimes when things piled up and no one spoke or said anything. Uncoordinated, awkward at sports, quiet. Spent a lot of time in his room. Reading, mostly junk but some good junk, too—the 87th Precinct novels he was racing through.

That’s what someone would see, peeking in the window: a regular family. Breakfast time. Mother at the stove. Father reading the newspaper. Son dutifully eating the dreaded shredded wheat because his mother said it was good for him.

But anyone looking in would not know about the telephone call.

He pushed the bowl away. The coffee began to percolate. His father ruffled the paper to show that he had not finished reading it. If he lowered the newspaper, he would encounter his son, his wife.

Denny had been in the kitchen for fifteen minutes and nobody had said anything except good morning. They seldom spoke much as a family, particularly at breakfast. His father preferred silence to a lot of talking and his mother took her cue from him. The silences were comfortable most of the time. This morning’s silence was different, however, and he wanted to break it.

Which is exactly what he did, finally.

I heard the phone ring during the night.

Dropped the words on the table, like stones striking a surface.

The newspaper trembled in his father’s hands.

Or was I dreaming? Hoping his father caught the sarcasm.

More silence. More waiting. Then more sarcasm: Or was it a wrong number?

He was tired of pretense, silences, a failure to communicate (a phrase he’d heard in an old late-night movie on television).

Finally, his father spoke from behind the newspaper. It was not a wrong number. He lowered the newspaper and began to fold it, slowly and methodically.

His father was a small slender man, compact, neat. Shoes always shined, shirt never wrinkled. He could fool around with a car engine or work outside and never soil his clothes. Never a dab of dirt or grease on his face. Denny attracted dirt and grime, and his shirts and trousers began to wrinkle the moment he put them on, before he’d even taken a step.

The telephone rang at exactly three-eighteen, his father said, in his formal precise manner. He seldom used slang. Spoke as if he was trying out the words for the first time. He was still folding the newspaper, had not raised his eyes to either Denny or his