“Want me to come in with you?” Tom asked.
“No. I’ll be fine. Thanks for everything,” I said. “I’m sorry I had to cut this short.”
“Make it up to me,” Tom said. “Go to Carter’s party with me.”
“New Year’s Eve?” I’d heard rumblings about a party at Carter Blessing’s house, but I’d planned to skip it.
“You have other plans?”
“No.”
“Then go with me. You owe me.”
He’d been a good sport about our interrupted date; I did owe him another one. And I’d never had a date on New Year’s Eve before. “Okay. I’ll go.”
“Call me if you need a ride home or whatever. Okay?”
“Okay. Thanks, Tom.”
I hurried inside. The bar was heavily Christmased out, hardly an inch of wall or ceiling left undecorated. A TV high up in a corner played It’s a Wonderful Life, the volume low.
Two drunks sat at the bar. The bartender, a haggard fortyish woman, clenched a cigarette between her teeth. Jonah sat waiting at a rickety table, rubbing his hands over and over.
“Bea,” he said.
“What is it? What happened?”
“Did I get you at a bad time?” He didn’t even smile when he said it.
“You’re kidding, right? Is there a bomb you want me to defuse? Is civilization as we know it at stake? This better be a real emergency, or I’m walking out of here—” I tried to think of something threatening, but the best I could come up with was the superlame “—in a huff.”
“Wait till you see this. It will make up for everything.” Jonah reached into his black backpack and pulled out a Christmas card: Jesus in the manger, surrounded by Mary, Joseph, the usual farm animals, and a haze of golden sparkles.
I opened the card. O COME LET US ADORE HIM, it said. SEASON’S GREETINGS. THE STAFF OF THE ST. FRANCIS HOME AND HOSPICE. No signature, but a bit of yellow and black fuzz was stuck to the card with a smudge of red clay.
“St. Francis,” I said. “In Lutherville. That’s one of the places we called.”
“They refused to tell us anything,” Jonah said. “They were one of the cagier institutions.”
I looked at the card again. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“It’s from him,” Jonah said. “From Matthew. He sent me a card!”
“How do you know it’s from him?” I said. “It doesn’t mention him.”
Jonah pointed to the yellow and black fuzz. “It’s Catso. Matthew’s favorite toy. That’s a bit of Catso’s fur. Look, I’ve got his twin.” He pulled a small stuffed cat out of his backpack. The cat was old and worn, black with yellow stripes and golden button eyes.
“When we were little, my mother gave me and Matthew matching cats,” Jonah said. “This one was mine. I named her the Evil Miss Frankenheimer. Matthew’s was the opposite, yellow with black stripes. He couldn’t talk, so I named his cat Catso. They were our favorite toys. We took them everywhere with us.”
I patted the Evil Miss Frankenheimer, then touched the fuzz on the card. The fur had the same texture.
“I assumed Catso had been buried with Matthew. After my mother died, I put Miss Frankenheimer away in a box in my closet and left her there.”
The Christmas lights blinked across Jonah’s face. Red. Shadow. Red. Shadow.
“It’s—you really think this is—”
“I don’t know how he did it,” Jonah said. “But somehow Matthew sent me this card. He’s calling out to me. And now I know where he is.”
“You two going to order a drink?” the bartender snapped from behind the counter. “This ain’t a bus stop, you know.”
I stood up. “I’ll get it. What do you want?”
“Ginger ale,” Jonah said.
“Two ginger ales,” I ordered. “One plain and one with whiskey.”
“Whoop-de-doo,” the bartender said. She gave me some flat yellow liquid in two fingerprint-coated glasses. I left her a three-dollar tip. Spirit of Christmas.
“Great. Now I can buy myself that fur coat,” she said.
“Which one has whiskey in it?” Jonah said.
I took a sip and gave him the whiskey glass.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
On the TV, George Bailey stood on a bridge in the snow, crying, “I want to live again. Let me live again.”
“I want to see Matthew,” Jonah said.
“Maybe for Christmas,” I said.
“Yeah.” Jonah straightened up. “For Christmas. That’s perfect.” He slid the glass of ginger and whiskey over to me. “Tomorrow’s the Night Light luncheon. We’re still going to that, aren’t we?”
“I’ll go if you go.” I tried not to show how happy I was.
“Good. So I’ll go to St. Francis on Sunday. Will you come with me?”
I sipped the drink. “Yes. I’ll come.”
Jonah stared at the TV while Jimmy Stewart ran joyfully through the slushy streets of Bedford Falls.
“I can’t believe you were out with Garber,” Jonah said. “Has your brain dissolved? How could you consciously agree to spend time with him?”
“He’s nice,” I said. “And you weren’t speaking to me. It has nothing to do with you, anyway. You have no say in this.”
“He’s sludge,” Jonah said. “You’ll see.”
“What did he ever do to you?”
“I’ve got a grudge against him.”
“I know what it is.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Does it have to do with me?”
“It happened before I knew you existed.”
“So what is it, then?”
Jonah shook his head. “Forget it. Just stay away from him.”
“Too late,” I said. “I promised to spend New Year’s Eve with him. To make up for tonight.”
“What? Are you trying to make me vomit?”
“It’s your fault! If you hadn’t interrupted us, he wouldn’t have asked me, and I wouldn’t have felt like I owed him.”
“The interruption was worth it,” he said. “Wasn’t it?”
I touched the rough sparkles on the Christmas card. “Yes,” I said. “It was worth it.”
On TV, the movie ended in a jangle of bells. Then it started up again from the beginning.
I was back in Jonah’s world, and everything was all right.
Somehow, I knew Jonah was listening when I turned the Night Lights on at midnight.
Herb:
We’ve been discussing a lot of different things, but the topic that won’t die, so to speak, heh-heh, is this: Do you believe in ghosts?
Kreplax:
We’re all going to be ghosts once the comet lands. It’s going to crash into the earth on January twenty-third. This January! Why won’t you people listen to me?
Herb:
We’re listening, Kreplax—
Kreplax:
The whole east coast of North America—flooded! The whole west coast of Europe—wiped out! Happy New Year, everybody! Get your jollies now because next month you’ll all be dead.
Herb:
Where will you be on January twenty-third, Kreplax?
Kreplax:
I’m getting out. I’m going back to 2110, if I can get there. If my stupid friend Tita would just hurry up and fix the time machine—
Herb:
[music playing] Try a monkey wrench, Kreplax. Next caller, you’re on the air.
Dougal:
Hi, Herb. This is Dougal from Hampden. First-time caller.
Herb:
Welcome, Dougal.
Dougal:
Um, I have a question for all the ghost experts out there. I’m a mortician. I live above a funeral home, and I spend all my time with dead people. I’ve dragged bodies out of car wrecks, I’ve picked them up from the hospital. They lie in their coffins one floor below me, night after night while I’m sleeping—
Herb:
How long have you been a mortician, Dougal?
&
nbsp; Dougal:
About thirty years. Here’s my question. I’ve always wanted to see a ghost. I really WANT to believe in them. I want to believe in something! But I’ve never seen one, ever. Never heard a creak in the night, a boo, or anything.
Herb:
That’s strange.
Dougal:
I hear your callers telling ghost stories all the time, about people they’ve seen come back from the dead…I really, really want to see a ghost. Why won’t they show themselves to me? I’m right here!
Herb:
I don’t know, Dougal. We’ll toss that one out to the listeners. Next Night Light, hello.
Myrna:
It’s Myrna. I believe in ghosts, Herb. I swear to God, one night when my late husband was in the hospital, not recuperating from his third and fatal heart attack, I was lying alone in my bed, and the ghost of Elvis came to comfort me. I use the word comfort as a euphemism, Herb. I’m sure all the ladies out there know what I’m talking about.
Herb:
Seems like most of our listeners do believe in ghosts, or some kind of life after death. It’s hard not to.
Myrna:
It sure is. How can I just disappear when I die, in a POOF!, like that? I can’t! I can’t imagine it. I’m here, I’m real, my thoughts, my spirit, where would they go? [Music starts.] One last thing, Herb. I want everyone listening tonight to know that when I die, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be here, driving down the streets of Baltimore, and all you better watch out. If you cross me, I’ll haunt you up so bad your hair’ll fall out and won’t never grow back. And all of us people, men and women, bald or beehived, we all love our hair. We sure do.
Herb:
Amen. Nighty-night. Next caller, you’re on the air.
Larry from Catonsville:
Everybody needs to calm down, Herb. There are no ghosts or evil spirits. There’s only love and heartache. This song is called “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.” I think that’s good advice. [A needle drops on a record. The song plays.]
For some reason, listening to that song, I started crying. I thought about Jonah, how he’d missed Matthew all these years, lived without him like living without a leg or a lung, and now they were about to be reunited. It had nothing to do with me, really, but every time I thought of that Christmas card with its little patch of yellow fur, a current of feeling flowed through me. I wasn’t used to that. It hurt.
I wondered if Mom was awake too, sitting in the bathroom putting eye shadow on or whatever she was into these nights. She acted as if she was missing something too, but I had no idea what it could be. What had she suddenly lost that had marooned her so far from me and everyone else? Why couldn’t she tell me what it was?
I took Larry’s advice. It was two-thirty in the morning and the sun was nowhere to be seen. By dawn I’d be dry-eyed and the sun would never know what I’d been up to all night.
CHAPTER 12
A certain kind of Baltimore bride—the kind who goes through a can of hairspray a day—had her dream wedding at Mario’s Italian Palace. “Their motto should be, ‘If it’s not made of crystal, gold, or marble, we spit on it!’” Jonah said as we walked through the splashy Hall of Fountains. Mario’s real motto (as advertised on the Night Light Show) was “You can buy class.”
Eighteen Night Lights showed up for Herb Horvath’s Christmas luncheon. Herb sat at the head of the long table, greeting everyone and passing out name tags. He was slicker-looking than I expected, sixtyish, with thick white hair and a square jaw.
“Nice to see you, uh, Robot Girl,” he said, reading the name tag on my scarlet sweater. Then he laughed. “Oh, you’re Robot Girl. You haven’t called in much, but who could forget the name?” It was strange to hear that mellifluous voice come out of a person instead of the radio.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m really excited to meet everybody.”
He turned to Jonah. “And Ghost Boy, what an honor. It’s wonderful to see young people at our luncheon. We don’t get too many young callers on the show, as you probably know.”
“We love the show,” Jonah said. “We listen every night.”
To my right sat a small woman with silver cat’s-eye glasses and blue-black hair teased into the tallest beehive I’ve ever seen. Her pink face was heavily powdered, eyes lined like Cleopatra’s, inky eyebrows drawn on. Her name tag said Myrna.
“Myrna from Highlandtown?” I said.
“That’s me, sweetheart.” She read my tag. “Robot Girl! I don’t believe I’ve heard you call since we took the carpet to Ocean City.”
“Oh, I’m way too shy to call,” I said.
Jonah was talking with a chubby middle-aged man with stringy hair, a goatee, and a smug look on his face. His hands and jowls trembled. Don Berman.
“Don, we’re huge fans,” I said.
“Don, we’re huge fans,” he shot back in a high-pitched voice meant to mock me.
What a jerk, I thought, but I didn’t care, because he was Don Berman, and that’s what Don Berman did.
The waitresses brought out iceberg salads with Italian dressing. Across from me sat a large black man wearing dark glasses. I saw the white cane next to his chair and realized he was blind.
“Here you go, Larry,” Herb said. He reached over and slapped a name tag on the blind man’s jacket. Larry from Catonsville, who liked to play old records, especially Engelbert Humperdinck.
I took his hand, shaking it. “Hi, Larry. I’m Robot Girl. I love that song you played the other night, ‘Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying’? And you’re turning me into an Engelbert fan.”
“Blech, not me,” Myrna said. “Engelbert’s too mushy. Elvis has guts.”
“Elvis had guts all right,” Larry said, patting his belly. “But Engelbert’s got that mellow sound. If I had a wife, I’d sing ‘After the Lovin’ to her every night.”
“Elvis can do mellow,” Myrna said. “What about ‘In the Ghetto’?”
“That song’s sad, not mellow,” Larry said. “Besides, he over-orchestrates it. And what does Elvis Presley know about the ghetto?”
“Plenty,” Myrna said. “Elvis knows pain.”
She showed me her Elvis charm bracelet, with a little head of Elvis—“Young, pudgy, mutton-chop, I like them all, every incarnation”—a guitar, a tiny Graceland, a Priscilla in a bridal veil, a little Lisa Marie, a hound dog, and a pair of men’s shoes.
“They’re supposed to be blue suede shoes,” Myrna said. “You can’t tell from looking at them, but it’s obvious.”
“Hey, Herb.” Burt from Glen Burnie reigned at the far end of the table. “Where’s Peggy? Couldn’t make it?”
“That Burt’s so mean,” Myrna said. “He knows darn well Herb’s sensitive about Peggy. Herb’s a widower. Why shouldn’t he have a girlfriend? I don’t know how Burt even found out there was a Peggy.”
After the salad we had veal parmesan with a side of spaghetti. “Wait till you taste Mario’s famous spaghetti sauce,” Burt growled. “It’s like watery ketchup.”
Herb tapped his glass and stood up. “I’d like to make a toast. Thank you all for coming. I hope that you, my most dedicated listeners, realize how much you mean to me, and I’m pleased to give you this chance to meet one another. To the new listeners, welcome.” He raised his iced tea. “Here’s to the power of radio to reach out and make a community out of those who prowl sleeplessly through the night.”
“Hear, hear.” Jonah and I clinked glasses. Burt muttered, “I gotta work at night. I’m no insomniac loser like the rest of you all.”
Myrna shook her head and clucked. “Why do they let Burt come to these luncheons? They should ban him.”
“You’re right, Myrna,” Larry said.
“No, they shouldn’t,” Jonah said. “Burt’s the greatest. I love it when he calls in from the Amoco station and you hear some kid in the background ask for a pack of Kools and Burt tells him to go to hell.”
“He upsets Herb,” Larry said. “That�
�s no good.”
Myrna elbowed me and gestured toward Jonah. “Is that fella your boyfriend?”
“No,” I said. “We’re just friends.”
“Really?” She peeked at him. “He’s nice-looking, in a bleachedout sort of way. I can see why he calls himself Ghost Boy.” She leaned close and whispered, “What’s your real name, honey? I won’t tell anyone.”
I looked through Myrna’s cat’s-eye glasses into her warm hazel eyes. Something about her made me want to tell her things. And my real name wasn’t a secret. I just enjoyed having an alias.
“Beatrice,” I whispered.
“And your boy’s?”
“Jonah.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Myrna said. “I don’t mind that you use fake names on the radio, but I can’t be friends with a person who won’t tell me her real name.”
“I understand,” I said.
“So why don’t you go out with him?” she asked.
“Jonah? I do like him,” I said. “I like him a lot. He’s my favorite person in the whole city of Baltimore. Maybe the world.”
“So what’s the problem?” Myrna said. “Sounds like love to me.” She lowered her voice. “Is he—you know—funny?”
“He’s very funny.” Then I realized my mistake. “Oh, you mean gay. Um, I don’t think so.” I’d never really thought about it. Was Jonah gay? Did he like girls? I had no idea. He never talked about boys or girls, except to say how much he didn’t like them. He was an equal opportunity disliker.
How to Say Goodbye in Robot Page 11