Picture Us In The Light(70)
Harry starts to say something, stops. I say, “What?”
“Nah, never mind.”
“Okay.” I know him well enough to know if I don’t take the bait he’ll probably just say it anyway. I’m right; it takes about forty seconds. He clears his throat. I say, dryly, “There it is.”
“Yeah, shut up. I was just going to say if it were me and I really thought it had something to do with why my parents moved me to the boonies or if they were really trying to hide out, I wouldn’t let it go. But I guess you’re you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. I can just see you letting it go, that’s all.”
“I’m too tired to feel insulted, but check back in the morning after I’ve slept.”
He laughs softly. “You don’t sleep anymore. You have to be up in like four hours.”
We’re on my street now (it will never feel like mine) and he turns into the parking lot. The unprotected left I hate is easy when it’s late at night, when you wouldn’t mind it taking longer. I say, “Thanks for the ride.”
“Yeah, anytime.”
“You won’t fall asleep on the way home, right?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
I’m reaching to shut the door when he says, “Hey, Danny, wait.”
And I turn back, something in his voice drawing my pulse faster a few ticks. He says, “Ah—I go right out of the parking lot, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
He was going to say something else, I know. I heard it there. But he doesn’t; he smiles kind of tightly and then lifts his hand in a goodbye and waits for me to close the door instead.
When I get home it’s empty, and there’s a note on the table saying my dad won’t be home until three in the morning. I am, it turns out, more hungry than tired; also, I have a hard time sleeping when it’s just me here. I boil water for instant ramen and crack a few eggs into it, and then throw in some frozen broccoli, too, which always feels kind of like a bid for karma. I microwave some frozen dumplings and then lose my appetite two in. They’re better when my mom cooks them. She actually uses a pan.
There are two stairwells going up to our floor and they’re usually propped open, which defeats the purpose of them having a lock. The street we live on is mostly businesses, and everything starts closing down around five or six—by nightfall the street has emptied, gone thin with stillness. Out the window the streetlights make everything look darker, somehow, like the yellowish light is only there to show you all the shadows, and there aren’t any sounds tonight from the apartment next door. It’s strange how in a building of so many people—it’s three floors—you can feel so completely alone.
I never even had to realize how safe it always felt in Cupertino. Idyllic, even: there were literal deer wandering around our neighborhood sometimes—they’d come down from the foothills and scavenge in people’s yards, garden pests—and I never fully absorbed how comforting it was to live in the center of my life, my school and all my friends and all the places I frequented all huddled together in their safe, tight radius.
I take a shower—I hate showering when I’m by myself here; it creeps me out—and brush and floss and turn on all the kitchen and living room and bathroom lights and get into bed, and then I lie awake listening to cars pass by outside, watching their headlights trace swaths of yellow across my walls. I wish every noise from the hallway didn’t remind me of overhearing my mom say she’d be safer at the Lis’ house and of my dad’s practiced, instinctive fear.
But this is stupid. I am eighteen years old. I’m a legal adult. People my age fight in wars and have kids and work full-time. I can vote, and buy cigarettes, and I can damn well sleep in an apartment by myself at night.
Three hours until my dad comes home. Less than three. I picture him walking through the dark empty parking lot at the mall, coming up those unlocked stairwells here. I picture someone closing in on him, the stack of files he collected to protect himself hidden uselessly in a box somewhere. My heart is going kind of wildly, and I resent it, especially because I know all this would feel so different if it were daylight now.
Back in Texas, Ethan, who was a year older than me, was afraid of the dark. Afternoons in Austin all the kids would play out on the common lawn and I remember the day I announced that and watched that wave of glee roll over everyone, that immediate consolidation of forces against him. It was the first time I remember understanding that something someone told you in implicit trust could hold so much power, and I wish I could say I understood it only after the fact. A second grader named Stan Smith latched on to a chant of Ethan’s afraid of the dark, Ethan’s afraid of the dark that he kept running, almost methodically, while he climbed on the monkey bars and chased after a soccer ball, and all day two of the older kids kept running after him and putting their hands over Ethan’s eyes and laughing, asking if he was scared. He was someone who got quiet when he was upset—maybe he still does—and his face turned hard and finally, when the parents who were out there that day (they all traded off teaching sections and writing dissertations and watching all of us) weren’t paying attention, he kneed me in the crotch. By then I understood I deserved it. His expression was pure betrayal as he surveyed me rolling on the ground and said, quietly, “You’re afraid of the dark, too.”