Night Owls

by Jenn Bennett

  He stripped out of his cardigan, giving me a peek at the brightly colored fish and lotus tattoos beneath the short sleeves of his T-shirt. “What’s inside the bag?” I asked.

  “Vegetarian bacon.”

  I made a face. He laughed and took back the bag to stuff his sweater inside it.

  “What Muni line are we taking?” I asked as we passed a stop.

  “The me line.” He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and stopped in front of a shiny black car that was parked in an impossibly tight space near the curb. It was an old two-seater sports coupe—all curvy and beautiful and compact, with a convertible black top and white scalloped insets in the door that looked like one side of an opened paperclip.

  “This is Ghost,” Jack said with unabashed pride.

  “Ghost?”

  “A 1958 Corvette.” He unlocked the passenger door, which was covered with dings and scratches in an other wise mirror-shiny paint job. “She was stolen last fall and taken for a joyride, which is why she’s a little beat-up on the outside. I decided to keep her that way for now so she wouldn’t look so showy. Plus it pisses my dad off, and that’s always a good thing.”

  The door squeaked when he opened it. I peered inside at dark red leather seats. A chrome steering wheel jutted from a space-age dash, every bit of it restored. “Holy smokes, Jack. This is gorgeous.”

  “She doesn’t have air-conditioning, and the convertible top leaks when it rains.”

  If he was trying to convince me that this wasn’t the coolest car I’d ever seen, he’d need to try harder. “Why do you even ride mass transit?”

  “You ever try parking in this city?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t drive.”

  “Do you ride?” That sounded sort of dirty, and the way he looked at me felt sort of dirty, too. No one ever looked at me like that.

  “Why ‘Ghost’?” I asked.

  Grasping the top of the car door, he leaned over it and spoke in a dramatic, foreboding voice. “Because she’s so fast she disappears down the streets at night.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  His dimple appeared. “The best things in life are. Hop in, Beatrix Adams.”

  I feigned difficulty getting inside the tiny bucket seat. He was right about one thing: It smelled a little mildewy. But apart from that, everything inside the crowded interior was polished and beautiful. I clicked the seat belt around my waist and exhaled nervously.

  After shoving the canvas bag into the tiny trunk, he somehow folded his long legs inside and fired up the rumbling engine. We rolled our windows down to let in a pleasant cross breeze. “You look pale,” he said as he plucked a pair of sunglasses off his visor. “You okay?”

  “Not much cushion between our flesh and another car’s bumper if you wreck.”

  He buckled up and put the car in reverse, a smile on his lips and dark shades covering his eyes. “Then I guess I’d better not.”

  It had been so long since I’d been in a car other than the paddy wagon or Howard Hooper’s shit-mobile, and I’d never been in anything quite like this. He wasn’t kidding about the fast thing: The fancy muscle car zipped up and down steep inclines as if the tires and asphalt were an old married couple. But Jack was a good driver, and I felt a little silly that I’d been nervous.

  I propped my bare elbow on the window frame, enjoying the warm breeze that fluttered the split in my short sleeve while the city sailed by. It was exhilarating, being so close to him again—almost as close as we were in the tea lounge, and more alone. I sneaked a few glances at his face and a few more at his half-tattooed arm as he shifted gears. When he caught me looking and smiled, I wasn’t as much embarrassed as thrilled.

  Despite one minor traffic jam that detoured us through the edge of Duboce Triangle, the drive wasn’t long. When he finally slowed down to find a parking space, it took me a minute to realize we’d been steadily going uphill, and that hill was Buena Vista Park.

  “You live around here, right?”

  “Don’t you have a photo of my address?” he teased as he stalked a couple in running shorts heading toward a parked BMW.

  “It was blurry,” I said. “Couldn’t read the house number, just the street.”

  “I live a few blocks away.”

  “Ah. Wait—didn’t someone get set on fire in this park?”

  “Someone gets set on fire in every park, Bex,” he joked. “Sure, it’s got a few park punks that squat in certain areas at night, but the police sweep through and kick them out. I come here all the time, especially when I just want to get out of the house and think. And you’ll probably only see Benz-driving families in the day, if that makes you feel better. Which it shouldn’t. Hello, parking space. It’s our lucky day.”

  Maybe it really was.

  After some tight maneuvering, Ghost was parked and we were strolling up a wide walkway into the park. Apparently, we weren’t the only people with the bright idea to commune with nature, because it was pretty crowded: moms with strollers, dads with picnic baskets, teens walking dogs. But a perfect June day was a hard thing to come by in San Francisco, and the best way to enjoy it was a mass pilgrimage to one of the parks to soak up the sun.

  But much like everything else worth doing in the city, the hike to the top of the park put a strain on my calves. Just when I was ready to ask Jack to slow his roll, he grabbed my hand and pulled me off the paved path and into the woods.

  “Hurry before someone catches us,” he said, tugging me behind some trees.

  My little legs pumped at double time to keep up with his, and as we dashed through the trees, my head was a balloon, inflating with the singular fact that Jack was holding my hand! His fingers swallowed mine, and his palm was hot and a little sweaty, but so was mine.

  One tug beneath a low-hanging branch and we burst out onto a shallow clearing of grass that clung to the side of the hill. I teetered on my tiptoes as Jack threw an arm around my waist to stop me from falling over the side.

  “Oh . . .” I said, breathless.

  The city lay at our feet, a dizzying labyrinth of rooftops and white buildings, spread out like a giant patchwork quilt. The Golden Gate Bridge stood in the distance, and the wrinkled coastal bluffs behind it.

  “Right?” he said a few seconds later, as if he could read my mind.

  “How did you find this?”

  “Exploring, when I was, like, ten.”

  I heard people talking from somewhere behind the thick shrubbery that lined the clearing, but they were too far away for me to make out what they were saying.

  “It’s just a few yards away from some steps that go to the top,” Jack noted as I glanced around. “So it’s extra-cool, because it’s private, more or less. I used to hide out here and feel like a total rebel, until one day I found a middle-aged couple out here. I was crushed.”

  I laughed. “Well, if they come back today, we were here first.”

  “Exactly. Now, help me with this.” He extracted two rolled-up padded black mats from the canvas bag that looked an awful like the ones for sale in the bookstore. I spread out one of the mats, and he butted the second one right next to it. They were square, and only big enough to sit down on, but I wasn’t complaining. “I’m just borrowing them. Not burgling them.”

  “I swear that’s not a real word, but I haven’t been educated at your fancy-pants private school, so I could be wrong.”

  “Be glad. There are a mere fifty people in my graduating class.”

  “I’ve only been going to Lincoln for a couple of years—since we moved to the Inner Sunset. But my class is over seven hundred.”

  He pulled off his gray Chuck Taylors and socks, and I took off my sandals, and we sat side by side on the mats and stretched out our legs in the warm grass, wiggling our toes.

  “I know some people at Lincoln,” he said, passing me a bottle of water from the bag. He named a few names I didn’t recognize. Then he handed me a piece of mottled red fruit I didn’t recognize, either.

>   “What is this?”

  “Pluot.”

  “Plu what?”

  “Plum crossed with an apricot. You’ve never had one?”

  “I’ve never said it, much less had it.”

  “Vegetarian bacon,” he said, squinting at me with merry eyes. He polished one on the hem of his shirt, lifting it up enough to give me a peek at A) a shiny silver belt buckle that was probably vintage and definitely stamped with the words 4-h club and B) the bottom half of a shockingly well-muscled stomach and an enticing trail of dark hair arrowing into his jeans.

  My pluot dropped out of my hand and nearly rolled off the cliff. Jack and his speedy arm caught it.

  “Thanks,” I said, concentrating superhard on cleaning off my alien piece of fruit, and concentrating even harder when I bit into the flesh. It was sweet and plum-y and tart. “Not bad,” I said, trying not to think about the 4-H belt buckle (which made me want to giggle) or the trail of dark hair (which made me want to stick my hands down the front of his jeans to see where it led).

  “The Zen Center has a lot of fruit trees in Marin County,” he explained while I flushed all the dirty thoughts out of my wandering mind. Fruit trees. Concentrate, Beatrix.

  “So you burgled these, too?” I asked.

  “No, these are from my lunch. I hoarded them. That’s completely different.”

  We grinned at each other, and his dimpled smile made me beyond glad I’d gone to the Zen Center.

  Chatting mindlessly, we polished off the fruit and pitched the pits over the side of the cliff as Jack said, “Make a wish!” and then, “What did you wish for?”

  “Not to nail someone on the head,” I said with a grin.

  “See? You’re already walking the Middle Path.” He scooted forward until he had enough room for his head on the mat, then settled on his back, using one thrown-back arm for a pillow. After a few moments I joined him, lying down with my shoulder against his. I didn’t say anything. He didn’t either. We just warmed in the sun and gazed up at the sky. Strangers chattered on the path beyond the trees.

  Silent minutes passed. I closed my eyes. It was so warm I nearly dozed off. His voice pulled me back to the present.

  “Have you ever heard of word salad?” he asked.

  My heart thudded, but I didn’t open my eyes. “It sounds familiar, but I’m not sure.”

  “It’s when your words get all screwed up, and you try to say one thing, but it comes out as gibberish. Like, instead of saying ‘I saw a man walking a dog on a leash in the park,’ it might come out as ‘I saw a man with a collar and claws walking a tightrope under the trees.’ ”

  “Okay.” Where was he going with this?

  “People with schizophrenia do it. Especially disorganized schizophrenia, which is one of the worst types. They aren’t as delusional as people with paranoid schizophrenia, but their reality is distorted, and they have major problems with disorganized thought and speech. Their thoughts get jumbled, and they have a tendency to blurt out weird things and laugh at inappropriate times. And the longer the disease goes on, the worse their speech gets, and the harder it is for them to communicate, and they can’t do simple things like, I don’t know, take a shower. Stress builds up; they get frustrated and lash out. Sometimes they try to hurt themselves or other people.”

  Oh.

  The day I’d gone down to talk to Heath, we’d tried to puzzle out what had happened with Jack at the hospital. We settled on it having something to do with Jack’s mother and wondered if she—maybe?—had cancer, but I realized now that we’d made the wrong diagnosis.

  “The person you’ve been visiting is in the psych ward,” I said softly.

  “For the last year and half. She was sick before that and hospitalized once, just for twenty-four hours. But eighteen months ago, she crossed the line.”

  He didn’t volunteer what that line was, so I asked, “Family?”

  “Yeah. My so-called ‘lady friend.’ ”

  We’d been right about that, at least. It was Jack’s mother. “Is she . . . okay?”

  “The meds help with the hallucinations and the panic disorder. Without them, she gets stressed and confused, and starts to hear voices, and all of it will eventually build until she’s completely agitated and has a violent episode. When she’s coming down from that, she’s emotionless. Like, just staring at the walls, completely flat.”

  “Sounds bipolar or something.”

  “They thought she was at first. Then the voices started.” He shook his head, as if he could erase the thought of it. “But anyway, she’d been doing okay recently. They experimented with a new antipsychotic, and she had a bad seizure. That was when I saw you at the hospital. She almost died.”

  “Oh, Jack.”

  “She’s all right now. Things are under control. She’s got good doctors, and there’s not really much we can do but trust them. She does. She feels better staying there. The routine and boundaries help. And the people working there care, you know? They aren’t just doing a job.”

  I thought of my mom and all the worrying she did for some of her patients. Their families, too. She brought them food. Listened to them. Sometimes even went to funerals.

  “How often you do see her?” I asked.

  “Family therapy is once a week. And she has a private room, so the orderlies have been letting me see her a couple days a week after visiting hours because she sometimes paces at night. I hang out with her while the other patients are asleep. Keeps her occupied. My dad gives massive amounts of money to the hospital, so they’re lenient with us.”

  “That’s how you ‘fixed’ things for me in the anatomy lab.”

  He nodded. “Would be much better if you’d continue to think I’m just that cool, and that it wasn’t the influence of my family’s money and name.”

  I gave him a soft smile. “I still think you’re just that cool—don’t worry.”

  “Do you?”

  I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, so I just kept staring up at the sky and reached between us to curl my pinkie around his. His chest deflated as he blew out a long, slow breath through his mouth.

  He threaded his fingers through mine and murmured, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. Part of me wanted to. I almost dialed your number a hundred times. But it’s a black cloud hanging over our family. My dad has to keep up appearances, so I’m forbidden to talk about it to strangers. Not that you’re a stranger, and not that I give a damn about what my dad would say if I told you. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I was worried you might cut your losses and bail if you found out. You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Do I need to shiv someone with a pencil? I might be small, but I’m sneaky.”

  His laughter rippled down his body. He sat up on one elbow and pushed his sunglasses on top of his head to peer down at me. “How do you that?”

  “What?”

  He lifted my bent arm and untangled our fingers to press his big fattened palm against my small one. “I’ve spent the last three days at the Zen Center trying to get back on my feet, and you just pull me up like it’s nothing.”

  I stared at our hands, unable to think of a witty comeback.

  As he folded the tips of his fingers over mine, the sun burnished tiny hairs on his forearm. For two people who’d mostly spent time together after dark, seeing him now, stretched out alongside me in warm daylight, was a luxury. Here, I could freely inspect all the small things, like the white half-moons at the base of his thumbnails, and the freckle on his elbow at the bottom of his lotus tattoo. And maybe the sun shone on other things I didn’t really know were there, like the fierce knot inside my chest that had been tightening since the last time I saw him. But as I lay there with him in the grass, it unwound and relaxed, and the sun lightened all the heavy things he’d just revealed.

  “I’m so glad you came looking for me,” he murmured.

  I remembered what he’d told me in Alto Market. “If you leave vague hints about where you are, I will f
ind you.”

  “Did I really say that?”

  “You did,” I confirmed.

  He groaned. “You should’ve punched me.”

  “It’s not too late.”

  His gaze roamed over my Roman orgy shirt and lit on my mouth. Everything inside me fluttered. Was he going to kiss me? Was he still staring at my lips? I couldn’t tell, because I was staring at his, and they were parted, and he was breathing heavily, and I could feel his leg against mine, and mother of God, this was happening. This was definitely happening, and I could hear—

  Scandinavian black metal.

  Jack arched away from my hip as my phone buzzed inside my pocket.

  Ugh. It was Heath. He’d changed my ringtone to play something that sounded like a screaming subway accident whenever his number came up. “Sorry,” I mumbled, sitting up and frantically fishing out my blaring cell, which everyone and their brother could probably hear through the trees. So much for our private hideaway. I finally managed to mute the phone, but not before my pulse cranked up to a zillion beats per minute.

  “Wow. I’d never pictured you as an angry-shrieking-vocals kind of music fan,” Jack said with a bemused look on his face.

  “It’s my jackass brother.”

  A text popped up from Heath: Where the hell R U?

  “Something wrong?” Jack asked.

  “It’s already five? How did that happen?”

  “I thought you didn’t have to work.”

  “I don’t. It’s worse than that. It’s”—I lowered my eyebrows—“family dinner night.”

  “Oh,” he said, pulling his hand away from mine. Was he disappointed our near-kiss moment was kaput? I certainly was. “Do I need to drop you off?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to leave, not when I’d already spent more than a week away from him, and not when I’d just learned all this stuff about his mom. I remembered how cold his father had seemed outside the hospital, and wondered if Jack would go home to an empty house that night.

  I leaned back on my hands. “What are your feelings about lasagna?”

  15

  JACK PULLED GHOST NEXT TO THE CURB IN A PRIME spot almost directly in front of my house.