The Midnights

by Sarah Nicole Smetana

  I bit my lip. “Last night. I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to sleep in my own bed, so Lynn drove me home.”

  “I see,” she said. “And now?”

  “What?”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Oh. Fine.”

  I chugged a glass of water straight from the faucet, staring out at the backyard. Sometime in the night, the wind had started blowing again, and the pool was strewn with a fresh layer of fallen leaves. An unsettling familiarity swirled in my stomach.

  Then Vivian entered the kitchen, and the reality of last night slammed into me.

  Did she remember what happened? I couldn’t tell. The version of Vivian worrying my mind was incongruous with the woman I saw in front of me now: elegantly dressed, with hair already curled and makeup applied. She looked so normal. I felt a knot of hope.

  Vivian poured herself some coffee. To no one in particular, she said, “I can’t seem to find my pills.”

  “Which pills?” my mother asked.

  I detected the briefest pause. “The ones for my headaches,” Vivian answered.

  “Have you checked that hidden zipper compartment in your purse?”

  “I think I’d know if they were in my purse, Diane.”

  “What about the glove compartment in your car?”

  “No, no, they’re not there.”

  “Could they have fallen beside the sink?”

  As Vivian checked off all the places on my mother’s list, I tried to think about whether I had seen her pills since that time I found them in the pantry, but my head throbbed, like my brain had become too thick for my skull, and I could not summon a single new place to look. I just kept thinking about what my mother had told me all those months ago, in front of the school: You don’t have to worry. And: Don’t tell her you know.

  “Well, please keep an eye out for them, both of you,” Vivian said. “This pain—”

  One flinching hand rose to her forehead. Without finishing the sentence, she strode back down the hallway, deserting her coffee on the kitchen counter. A minute later, I heard the clacking of heeled footsteps in the entryway, the rumble of the garage door opening. Vivian’s car whirred.

  “Where’s she going this early?” I asked, unable to disguise the strain in my voice.

  “Sometimes she goes to church.” My mother licked her fingers before flipping the page.

  “Since when does she go to church?”

  “Always. I mean, she doesn’t always go. But she’s always sometimes gone. Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged, sat down at the table.

  “She’s back long before you wake up. You usually sleep until noon on Sundays, if you’re even home.”

  “I guess I’m just surprised. Vivian doesn’t really seem like the religious type.”

  My mother paused then, lowering the paper. Even upside down, I could read the top headline: “Coyote Snatches Cat During Daytime Birthday Party in Huntington Beach.” There was a photograph of a little girl crying. It must have been her party, I thought. Her cat.

  “I think it can be a nice feeling for people,” my mother said, “thinking that there’s a greater force governing us and life isn’t just a random, meaningless series of events.”

  I knew she was right. People crave order in chaos. Ever since my father’s death, I’d been functioning under a skewed iteration of this exact idea. Right then, though, I preferred the opposite; I wanted last night to be a random, meaningless event. A momentary chemical imbalance caused by missed medication, provoking an old fuse in Vivian’s brain to spark. It happened all the time, didn’t it? My mother told me not to worry. Vivian was fine. She would be fine.

  But what if she wasn’t?

  Suddenly, my secret felt unbearable. Whatever happened last night was so far beyond a lost train of thought or a forgotten bag of groceries, and if there was any chance I could prevent something worse from happening to Vivian next time, or prevent the next time entirely, I had to tell my mother everything. I didn’t even care if I implicated myself and was grounded for the rest of my life, because somehow I’d traveled so far away from the person I thought I’d become when we moved here—when I sat in Ms. Grobler’s office and vowed to be different.

  “You look pale,” my mother said. Standing, she walked around the table and hunched over me. Her knuckles were frigid as they brushed my forehead. “You’re burning up.”

  “I don’t have a fever,” I said, batting her hand away. “You’re just always cold.”

  “I think we should take your temperature anyway.”

  “I don’t have a fever,” I repeated.

  “At least let me give you some Tylenol.”

  “Mom,” I said. “Stop. Please. Just sit down.”

  Outside, the sun had climbed above the hillside. It beamed viciously through the windows, glinting against the gold specks in my mother’s eyes as she lowered herself back into her chair.

  I said, “I have to tell you something.”

  The basic facts were easy enough to explain: Vivian had come into my room in the middle of the night and was, for some reason, misplaced in time. She thought we were twenty years in the past. She thought I was my mother. Disoriented myself, I decided to play along.

  After I relayed these details, though, the more delicate questions arose: Why did she come to my room in the first place? Why had I been making noise? Why had I still been awake at such an hour? I had not expected my mother to be more interested in my role in the story than Vivian’s, and instinctively, I evaded, resisting once too often with a shifting gaze and a shrug. I’d grossly underestimated how difficult it would be to tell the truth.

  My mother rubbed her hands over her face and spoke through her fingers. “Why must everything be a secret between us?”

  “What did you expect? You’ve been lying to me since the day I was born.” My voice emerged more harshly than intended. “And anyway,” I added with a half-moon smile, “aren’t all parent-child relationships like this?”

  My mother lowered her hands. She said, “You didn’t lie to your father.”

  Her words tore through me with a sharp sting of guilt. Of course I’d lied to him. I did so constantly, internalizing my true feelings until the pressure of everything I never said made me want to explode. But my mother wouldn’t know that; she had always been on the outside of our music, our midnights. To her, we must have seemed so connected. So impenetrable.

  “I’m in a band,” I said.

  At the edge of my vision, I noticed my mother’s fingers tightening around the grip of her mug.

  “And—” I swallowed. “I lied to you earlier. About last night. Where I was.”

  “So where were you?”

  “The Troubadour,” I said, looking back to her. “I played a show at the Troubadour. That’s why I came home so late, when Vivian heard me.”

  For an instant, I thought I saw some spark of surprise—maybe even pride—cross her face. Then her expression darkened.

  “You’re mad,” I said. “I knew you’d be mad.”

  “Of course I’m mad. You’ve been gallivanting around the city in the middle of the night.”

  “See? This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you. I knew you wouldn’t approve—”

  “You’re right,” she interrupted. “I probably wouldn’t have approved. But I wouldn’t have stopped you, either.”

  The wind kicked up outside, skittering a trail of leaves across the patio.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What could I have done? Put locks on your windows? Chased you down the street?” She paused for a moment, and I wondered if she expected me to answer. “I know what music means to you,” she said. “And besides. You’ve got his spirit. You’ll do what you want, regardless of what I say.”

  “That’s not true. When you grounded me, I stayed grounded.” The words shot from my mouth before I could stop them. “Mostly,” I amended. Then, “I’m sorry.”

  My mother sighed. “I know what hap
pens when parents try to dictate your life. And you were already so far away from me. I know we’ve never had the same relationship you had with your father, but after he died . . .” For a moment, her eyes pinched closed. “I was afraid. I didn’t want you to make my same mistakes.”

  “I’m not you,” I said.

  “No. You’re not.”

  I waited for her to continue, to punish me. I waited for her to tell me how to atone.

  “So I guess I’m grounded?”

  “You’ve already admitted that doesn’t work,” she said. And then her mouth crept into a tiny smile. “Maybe I should come up with a punishment that’s particularly cruel and unusual instead—something public. Humiliating.” She sipped her coffee. “Your grandmother used to threaten to show up at the high school in a bathrobe and curlers, face covered in an olive-green skin mask, the whole Sunday night routine on full display as she shouted my name through the hallways.”

  Her smile tilted, firmed.

  “Vivian threatened this often?” I asked.

  “Once or twice,” she said.

  “Well, I have it on good authority that you were quite the troublemaker. Running around with boys. Out all hours of the night.”

  “And where did you hear that?”

  “Vivian.”

  My mother smiled again, shaking her head. “I can’t believe she told you that.”

  “She didn’t,” I said. “Or not exactly.”

  Immediately, a shadow seemed to spread across us. Whatever memory had previously enveloped my mother flickered and was gone.

  “I’m sorry you had to experience that,” she said. “You did the right thing, letting the episode play out.”

  The way she said this made something tighten in my chest. “You already knew, didn’t you? That this was happening?”

  “I’m not sure ‘happening’ is the right way to put it. But I know it has happened, yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  My mother hesitated. “Because I wanted to protect you.” I tried to protest, to remind her that I wasn’t a child anymore, but she swept on. “It seemed like you were finally starting to be happy again, and until we knew something for certain, I wanted you to be able to live with one less worry. Not to mention Mom’s insistence that no one know.”

  “But I’m not just anyone. I’m family.”

  “I know. But your grandmother is very stubborn, and very proud. She couldn’t bear the thought of meeting you for the first time, and having that be the way you viewed her. Her heart was in the right place. You’re really so special to her.”

  I crossed my arms. “She has a funny way of showing it.”

  “I know. She makes me furious sometimes, but that’s just who she is. It took me a long time to understand that. When my own father died”—she reached for her mug, studied its center—“she went about her days as though nothing had happened, and I hated her for it. I know that’s harsh, but it’s true. And now . . .” My mother looked up. “When overwhelmed by all the things we can’t control, we grip tighter to the few we can. We have to give her that.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We wait. We schedule regular appointments with her doctor, and we monitor, and we wait.”

  “Does the doctor even know what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s not quite that simple, Suz. The brain is such a complex thing, affected by so many other parts of the body. But the good news is that the medications seem to curtail almost all of the symptoms. Unless, of course, she doesn’t take it.”

  “And she hasn’t been taking it,” I said, “for who knows how long.”

  “I know she had it Friday,” my mother said. “And if it doesn’t show up by the morning, I’ll call her doctor to get a new prescription first thing.”

  “But should she be driving? Shouldn’t we go after her, make sure everything is all right? What if she gets a migraine?” What if she swerves, or forgets, even for a second, what she’s doing? What if she crashes into a telephone pole, takes out the power, shuts down a freeway?

  “I know this is hard, but your grandmother is a tough woman, and she’s always adhered to a very independent lifestyle. Like I said, we’ll consult the doctor tomorrow, but at this point, we have to trust her to know when she’s not okay.”

  “Sometimes the healthiest are first to go,” I mumbled.

  My mother frowned. “That’s a rather pessimistic thing to say.”

  “It’s Vivian’s phrase,” I told her. “She said it about my grandfather.”

  My mother sat up straighter, her mouth opening slightly.

  “What? Did you not want me to know I had one? Kind of figured, biology and all.”

  “She’s not the biggest sharer of sad stories. I’m just surprised you two talked about him.”

  “We didn’t, much. She told me how he died. When. I still know hardly anything about him.”

  “Well,” my mother said, “what do you want to know?”

  I thought about all the concrete questions: where he was from, where he worked, how he met Vivian, what hobbies he liked. Did he also get dressed before coming into the kitchen for breakfast? Did he do crosswords on Sunday, or stay up late watching TV? Had he spent his teenage years driving down PCH with the windows open, the tinny sound of the Beatles rattling from the AM radio?

  There was so much I would never know, but this time, it was nobody’s fault. No one’s choices kept me from him.

  Perhaps for this reason, I decided there was only one question worth asking. “What was he like?”

  My mother thought for a moment. “He was kind,” she said slowly. “Thoughtful. Particular in his own ways, but understanding of those who differed. And he had these big, firm hands that would have been great for a carpenter or a farmer or something. I remember he drank coffee every morning, right here in this seat, and our mugs looked so small in his grip. Like a child’s toy.” My mother smiled. “Maybe he just preferred the smaller mugs or something, but in my memory, his hands were giant.”

  At first, I had trouble picturing it. My mother’s hands, like Vivian’s, were slender, small but long. “Piano fingers,” my father had called them. I’d always marveled at their elegance, so different from my bitten nails and bumpy knuckles, and figured I’d inherited my father’s hands. Now, I wondered if my hands were really a version of my grandfather’s.

  “He always told me I worried too much,” my mother continued. “That I was too young for that. I think he’d probably say the same thing, if he was here now.”

  “You still miss him?” I asked.

  “Every day,” she said, and while I knew this was the right answer, the only possible answer, it struck me—not because of how incredibly she’d hidden the feeling, but rather the idea that you could miss someone forever. Even my mother, strong and unwavering as she always seemed, acknowledged it would never get easier. Over twenty years could pass and still the wounds would not have healed.

  And right then, as I gazed out at the sun sloping down the hillside, something else began to frighten me even more: the possibility that the wounds inflicted by the living might not heal either.

  “Did you miss Vivian, too?” I asked.

  “Of course,” my mother said sharply. “She never stopped being my mother.”

  “But if Dad was still alive, and you didn’t need her help, you wouldn’t have called her. I still wouldn’t know she exists.”

  “I may have been the one to break our silence, but, as you know, I was not the only one who needed help.”

  A memory sped across my mind from the day Vivian showed up at our door in Eagle Rock: the perfect frame of her face through the peephole, the myriad misconceptions I had before discovering who she really was—misconceptions that were only now being rectified.

  “That’s part of why we moved here,” I said, working the pieces together out loud. “Isn’t it? She needed us, too.”

  My mother nodded. “Now you know everything.” She sipped from her mug, and
her face scrunched in disgust. “My coffee is cold,” she said, but kept drinking it anyway, and in that moment I felt something open between us.

  I said, “If I ask you a question now, will you answer me honestly?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I took a deep breath, considering all the mysteries. All the unknowns.

  “Do you think the crash was an accident?”

  My mother stood, moved toward the coffee decanter. She refilled her mug. I watched her back heave up and down. “I think your father had demons,” she said carefully. “And I think he made many wrong decisions because of it.”

  “That’s not really an answer,” I said.

  She turned around, folded her arms. “Susie, I don’t know what happened that night. We never will, and dwelling on all the things we’ll never know only makes it harder to move forward.”

  “I’m not asking for an irrefutable truth. I’m just asking you to tell me what you think happened.”

  When my mother finally answered, her voice emerged slowly, soft, as though dispatched from somewhere far away. “No. I don’t think he meant it.”

  “You don’t sound very certain.”

  “Do you remember the day we scattered his ashes out on the ridge?” she asked. “I thought you had a death wish, the way you walked right out to the edge of the cliff. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack, I was so scared. But then it was over, and you were fine, just like you said you would be, and you told me that he didn’t do it on purpose. You were so sure, despite everything the detective said. You knew that the facts only accounted for so much, and that day I decided to believe you. I still do. So don’t tell me you’ve gone and changed your mind now.”

  In the dark, remote caverns of our psyches, we both must have recognized that the pieces didn’t quite add up. But if my mother was lying, I knew it was for her sake as much as my own.

  “I haven’t,” I told her. “I just keep thinking, if I’d done something differently—”

  “What happened wasn’t your fault,” she said quickly. “We loved him with everything we had, and that’s what matters. That is the only thing that matters.”

  “Love,” I said. “It can still be present tense.”