The Midnight Hour

by Karen Robards

  Being a mother was a hundred times harder than Grace had ever imagined it would be. The responsibility was enormous, and the rewards were few. Even the endless, boundless love she felt for her daughter was in itself a painful thing.

  “You in there?” The other cop, Dominick, stuck his head through the curtain. His voice was loud, inappropriately hearty, and caused Grace’s eyes to pop open at once.

  Her gaze flew from him to his partner, who was once again leaning impassively against the wall. For a few moments, she had forgotten he was there. He looked almost pale beneath his tan, much paler than she remembered him being when they had entered the hospital, and she wondered if the sudden gray cast to his skin could be attributed to the harshness of the overhead lighting, or the sight—or smell—of Jessica being sick.

  Savagely she hoped it was the latter.

  For an instant, their gazes met. Again Grace got the feeling that he was judging her and finding her wanting.

  Seeing at a glance that he was indeed in the right place, Dominick came on through the curtain. His size made the small cubicle seem suddenly crowded.

  “How’s the little girl?” he asked in that same inappropriately hearty voice.

  His partner shrugged.

  “They’re waiting for the results of a blood test,” Grace said.

  The two cops exchanged glances, then, as if one, looked at Grace. She’d had about enough of those weighing looks, she decided.

  “Don’t let us keep you,” she said politely. “I know you must have things you need to do.”

  Again the cops exchanged glances.

  “Yeah, we oughta be going,” Dominick said, and Grace got the impression that he was talking more to his partner than to her.

  “You sure there’s nothing else you need us for?” This was Mr. Obnoxious. His gaze met hers.

  “I’m sure.” Grace looked from one to the other. Standing side by side, they shared an obvious resemblance. Both were tall, dark, and disapproving. Were they related? She neither knew, nor cared. Common civility plus a healthy dose of honesty prompted her to add, “Thank you for all you’ve done. Both of you.”

  They had found Jessica, after all, and she was grateful. She just didn’t much care for their bedside manner.

  “You’re welcome.” Her thanks must have lacked something in the way of graciousness, because Mr. Obnoxious’s acknowledgment was clipped. Dominick nodded, and fixed his partner with a meaningful look. Mr. Obnoxious’s shoulders came away from the wall, and he headed toward the curtained exit with Dominick behind him. As an obvious afterthought, just as he was getting ready to exit the cubicle, Mr. Obnoxious added over his shoulder, “If you need a ride home . . .”

  “We don’t. Thanks.” With him and his partner? He had to be kidding. She’d sooner ride with a pair of investigators from the Spanish Inquisition. “There’s someone I can call. But thanks.”

  “You’re sure?” Still he hesitated.

  “I’m sure.”

  “We’ll be in touch, then.”

  They left, the curtains fluttering in their wake. Grace was glad to see them go. Ever since the first one had arrived on her doorstep, their poor opinion of her as a mother had been a palpable thing.

  She didn’t need it. She felt bad enough about her mothering skills on her own.

  Grace sighed. Looking back at her daughter, who to all appearances was now truly asleep, she had to ask herself again: where had she gone wrong?

  Jessica looked like her. Her face, with its high cheekbones, wide mouth, and—the bane of her existence—long nose with the slight bump in its bridge, was identical enough to Grace’s so that casual observers had no trouble determining that they were mother and daughter. Her almond-shaped, thick-lashed blue eyes were Grace’s to the life. The pointy chin was her own, though, as was the scattering of freckles across her nose.

  With aching fondness, Grace’s gaze traced the butterfly pattern they made. Angel kisses, was how Grace had described them not so many years ago to a little girl who had come crying to her mother over what some other little girl had tauntingly called dirty brown spots all over her face.

  Jessica had been entranced with the idea of angel kisses. She had gone back to the other girl and told her, smugly, that the brown spots meant she was special, because the angels loved her best of all.

  Grace had secretly agreed.

  But the face Grace knew better than she knew her own was that of a young woman now. Grace could not kiss all her hurts and make them better. Grace could not spin fairy tales to keep the sometimes harsh realities of life at bay.

  She couldn’t make the diabetes disappear, or take it on herself. In that regard, all the mother’s love in the world did not change a thing.

  What she could do was remind herself that the specters of kidney failure and blindness and limb amputations that so terrified her were just that—specters. Grim ghosts of frightening future possibilities that did not have to be.

  Jessica had the power to prevent them from becoming reality. Grace couldn’t do it for her. Jessica had to do it for herself.

  So the question became, would Jessica take care of Jessica? Sometimes it seemed that she deliberately went out of her way to do the opposite. Until now, Grace had thought that the incidents that had brought on the various crises Jess had experienced since being diagnosed were the result of youthful carelessness.

  Suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

  For the first time it occurred to Grace to wonder: was defying the restrictions imposed on her by her illness the ultimate act of teenage rebellion against her mother?

  Oh, God, she hoped not.

  Jessica stirred and her fingers moved trustingly in her mother’s hold. Watching her, Grace’s throat ached with the pain of unshed tears.

  The curtains parted, attracting her attention, distracting her from her daughter and her thoughts. A thin, bespectacled man in a white lab coat entered the cubicle. A stethoscope hung around his neck, and he carried a manila file folder that almost certainly contained Jessica’s medical chart.

  “Mrs. Hart?”

  Grace nodded.

  “I’m Dr. Corey. It looks like we have quite a problem here. . ..”

  Chapter

  6

  “YOU OKAY, MAN?” Dominick Marino asked, clapping a hand on his brother’s shoulder as they stepped through the hospital’s wide double doors into the blessed freshness of the night. The moon, small and pale at such a distance, floated high overhead, veiled by moving wisps of clouds. Tiny stars pocked the midnight blue of the sky.

  “Yeah.” It was a brief answer, but the best Tony could manage under the circumstances. The sick nausea that had been churning in his stomach was only just now beginning to recede. The crisp breeze felt good against his damp skin, reviving him. He’d broken into a cold sweat in that treatment room; he couldn’t believe he’d done that, that just being in that damned hospital had affected him so, but it had.

  He’d thought he was over it, by now.

  Correction. He had hoped he was over it, by now.

  He was never going to get over it.

  “The mother was a real ball-breaker, wasn’t she?” Dominick’s hand was on his arm, steering him unobtrusively toward the parking lot when Tony would have walked blindly off into the night. He allowed his brother to guide him, concentrating on getting his body back under control.

  “Yeah.”

  It had been the smell that had done it, he thought, that unforgettable, indescribable hospital smell.

  That, or watching the suffering of another sick little girl.

  The halogen lights in the half-empty parking lot closest to the emergency room gave off an eerie yellow glow. Insects by the dozen fluttered in the vapory illumination.

  A small white moth flew directly toward him, targeting him with the precision of a kamikaze bomber. Tony dodged and felt its soft wings brush his cheek.

  “Damned bugs,” he said, swatting at it and missing. The moth circled back up toward the light.<
br />
  “You gonna go see the mother tomorrow, or you want me to?” Dominick asked. They had reached the Camaro, and Dom automatically walked around to the driver’s side. Ever the big brother, he thought it was his birthright to drive.

  Not that Tony minded. Dom had basically pulled him from the darkest pit in hell, sobered him up, kept him alive. Dom could drive if he wanted to.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  They got into the car. Its interior was stuffy, and Tony could still faintly recall the nauseating hospital smell. He didn’t know if it was in his mind or on his clothes, but it had to go or he would be sick for sure. He rolled down the window, breathing deeply, inhaling the murky smell of the nearby river and the acrid scent of some fresh-laid asphalt and the lingering gaseous exhaust of an old clunker that had chugged out of the parking lot two rows over.

  It didn’t matter what the smell was. Raw sewage was better than hospital.

  “You okay?” Dominick asked again.

  “Yeah,” Tony answered, with greater truth this time.

  As the car moved out of the parking lot, neither of them noticed the white moth make another dive, this time soaring right through the open window.

  For a moment, after that, the shape of a young girl appeared, sitting in the back seat. She was about eleven years old, small and thin, with straight black hair that reached her waist. She wore a frilly white dress, white ankle socks, and black Mary Janes. Her hands were folded primly in her lap.

  Her eyes, wide and dark and haunting, were fixed with a kind of sadness on the man in the front passenger seat.

  She was there for no more than a pair of seconds before she faded, becoming no more substantial than a shadow in the length of time it took to draw a single breath. Then she disappeared altogether.

  Neither man saw her.

  Tony took another, ineffectual swat at a small white moth as it flew past his cheek and out the car window, then soared upward into the great dark vastness of the night.

  Chapter

  7

  IT WAS APPROXIMATELY FOUR-THIRTY in the afternoon. Grace was so tired she could barely move, so tired it was an effort to focus on what was, fortunately, her second to last case of the day. The courtroom was overwarm and smelled of Lemon Pledge, musty carpet, and stressed-out human beings. The fluorescent lights concealed behind the translucent ceiling overhead were so bright as to be blinding. The combination did nothing for her incipient headache.

  “My grandma died, see, and I couldn’t get to school, and—”

  “Just a minute, Mr. Boylan. I fail to see what your grandmother’s dying or your inability to get to school has to do with your stealing a car.” Grace’s voice was dry as she interrupted the sixteen-year-old boy who stood before her. He was a big boy, close to six feet tall and two hundred pounds, she guessed, although it was hard to be certain of his height, at least, from her elevated seat at the front of the courtroom. He was dressed in an oversized white T-shirt with a blurry silkscreen of some rock band on the front of it, baggy jeans, and untied sneakers. His greasy blond hair hung limply to his shoulders.

  My grandma died was the equivalent of the dog ate my homework, excusewise. She had heard that one so many times in her three years on the bench that it held no water with her at all.

  Under her stern regard, he licked his lips and cast the lawyer standing at his side, a young black woman named Helia Shisler, a nervous glance.

  “Robert was very close to his grandmother—” Ms. Shisler began.

  Grace shook her head. “I want to hear it from him. Mr. Boylan? Would you care to explain how your grandmother’s death and your inability to get to school are related, and how they forced you to steal a car?”

  The kid chewed his lower lip before speaking. “Well, uh, my grandma, she drove me lots of places, and when she died she wasn’t there no more and I needed to get to school, see.”

  The pause as Grace considered the logic of that lasted no longer than a few seconds. There was no logic.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Boylan, but didn’t you steal the car on a Saturday night? I wasn’t aware that schools were in session then.”

  “There was a dance,” the kid said. His lawyer looked pained.

  “It was his stepdaddy’s car, Your Honor. It weren’t stealing, exactly. He just forgot to ask permission before he took it, and it made his stepdaddy mad, and he called the police. It shouldn’t’ve happened.”

  Grace looked past the boy to the woman who had risen to her feet just beyond the railing. Heavy-set, bottle-blond, with a ruddy, jowly face, she was perhaps thirty-five. Her black polyester pants and pink flowered blouse were a size too small. The blouse gaped open a little between the buttons securing it above and below her ample bosom, affording Grace a glimpse of a sturdy white bra. She looked worn down, and her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. From crying over her son? Grace wondered, then caught herself. It was just as likely to be from a totally unrelated cause, like allergies, or a need for glasses, or a late night and too much beer.

  “You’re his mother?” The resemblance between the two was unmistakable.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am.” The woman’s voice was so soft that Grace had to strain to hear. “He’s a good boy, Your Honor. He shouldn’t’ve taken Gordon’s—my husband’s—car, but it wasn’t really stealing. Honest it wasn’t.”

  Grace felt an unwelcome stab of sympathy for the woman.

  “Any priors?” she asked Herb Pruitt, the prosecuting attorney, brusquely.

  “He has one conviction for shoplifting, Your Honor. And he’s a habitual truant. Nine days absent so far this school year.”

  As school had been in session just over a month, that was an impressive total.

  “Was it his stepfather’s car he stole?”

  The prosecutor looked down at his notes. “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “It wasn’t stealing, Your Honor. Gordon lets him drive it sometimes. He was just mad.” The mother’s voice was pleading. Her eyes beseeched Grace. “Robby’s a good boy. He just . . . don’t think sometimes.”

  Ordinarily a parent would not have been allowed to speak out like that in Grace’s courtroom. She prided herself on running a tight ship. But as an embattled mother herself, Grace felt an unexpected kinship with the woman. There but for the grace of God went . . .

  The thought was unpleasant, and she dismissed it with determination almost as soon as it appeared. There was no comparison between Jessica and this boy.

  Yet.

  The sneaky little qualifier made its way into her head before Grace could completely close her mind to her own problems. She stifled a sigh.

  “All right.” Grace fixed the young offender with a gimlet gaze. “Taking a car without the owner’s permission is stealing, Mr. Boylan, whether the owner is your stepfather or not. I want to make that perfectly clear. Nevertheless, I am going to give you one more chance. One more, got that? Under these conditions: You get yourself to school every day, come rain, shine, or the common cold, and you stay out of trouble. Any more shoplifting, car stealing, or the like and you will be taken away from your family and remanded to an institution until you are eighteen. Do we understand each other?”

  “Uh-huh.” The kid nodded eagerly, looking relieved. His attorney poked him in the ribs with her elbow. “Uh, yes, ma’am. Uh, Your Honor.”

  “A social worker will call your school every week to make sure you’re attending and will report any absence to me. If I see you in this courtroom again, Mr. BoyIan, I promise you, you won’t like me.”

  It was a threat she used often. Every time she did, she half-expected a smart-alecky kid to come back with, I don’t like you now, but so far none ever had.

  “Yes, ma’am. Uh, Your Honor,” the kid said again, breaking into a wide grin. Grace pursed her lips, wondering if she was being played for a sucker. Once again her gaze went to the mother, who was shedding tears for real now and wiping them away with the b
acks of her hands.

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” the mother said. For a moment their gazes met.

  Grace nodded. The sense of fellow feeling the woman engendered in her was what had saved the kid from a probably well-deserved punishment. Grace didn’t know whether she felt good or bad about her unaccustomed leniency.

  At the moment she was too tired to worry about it.

  “Case dismissed.”

  She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed her temples as the Boylan kid and his mother embraced, then left the courtroom, attorneys in tow. Her head hurt. It had been almost seven A.M. by the time they’d gotten home from the emergency room, and she’d been in court since nine, with an hour break for lunch.

  “Next case,” she said, opening her eyes.

  It was an ongoing custody dispute, a particularly ugly one in which the father, a well-to-do dentist, accused his ex-wife, and former hygienist, of being an unfit mother because (he said) she was an alcoholic and entertained a succession of men in their home with their two daughters present. In retaliation, she accused him of being an unfit father because (she said) he physically, emotionally, and sexually abused her and their daughters. Both parties had appeared before her on at least half a dozen occasions, and by this time she believed neither one. Today’s installment involved the father’s request for lowered child support because, he said, he now had custody of the children more often than was specified in the divorce decree.

  She listened to the opposing lawyers’ arguments, unimpressed.

  “Dr. Allen, I don’t find that keeping your children over Super Bowl weekend while your ex-wife was out of town justifies a reduction in child support. I therefore rule in favor of the defendant. Case dismissed.” Thank God, she was done for the day.

  The dentist spluttered angrily, while his ex-wife looked smug.

  “Just a minute, Your Honor.” Dr. Allen’s attorney, Colin Wilkerson, was better known to her even than his client. In fact, she had made the mistake of dating him for three months in the spring and early summer, before coming to her senses. “May I approach the bench?”