What We Saw at Night (13 page)

Nothing is more pitiful than asking for what you know you can never have.

Along those lines, Rob wasn’t there, either.

Sure, there had been the kiss. And the accident. Was he really that tortured over it? I’d forgiven him!
I’d
have dropped the rope if Blondie had been gunning toward me. I’d hid behind the fountain like a coward, hadn’t I? By now, Rob should have still been able to be one of my best friends if he couldn’t be my boyfriend. But the longer we went without communicating, the harder it became for me to make the first move. We should have been able to overcome any awkwardness. Rob should have been sending me crazy YouTube videos of Parkour, or just random stuff to make me laugh, or texting me dumb jokes with excruciating puns. (
Don’t speak, my love. Just be mime.)
He should have been buying me gross desserts too greasy and fattening for any girl to eat and ordering pizza from Gitchee with four kinds of meat—one that Gideon insisted was venison, but which made us want to count the dogs in town.

Yes, with Juliet, there had always been that little crackle of caution, that inner voice:
Be slow, take care, nothing is what it seems
. Instinct. I knew to trust that now better than ever. But I’d never felt it with Rob. Something had changed though, as sure as you wake up after a night so hot you sweated through your sheets, and suddenly, it’s the fall. We
couldn’t have stayed the same forever, even if none of this had ever happened. The
tres compadres
could only last so long. Somewhere deep inside, we all knew it.

On the other hand, this was such a one-eighty that it seemed almost otherworldly. I was guilty; I hadn’t reached out. But that poisonous jealous notion kept snaking its way back into my brain, too.
Maybe Juliet and Rob have finally hooked up
. If that were true, they’d be ashamed, given what had happened between Rob and me before the accident. Still, they owed me, if not their loyalty, then an explanation. Right? They couldn’t be
that
selfish and spineless.

Maybe we weren’t
ever
the
tres compadres
.

In fact, although we’d always been friends, the true “forever” for Juliet and Rob and me—when we were inseparable—had been only the last three years, since Juliet stopped skiing.

What had I done all the years before that?

Not much. In fact, pretty much what I was doing now. Reading. Hanging with my mom. Watching the tube. I’d always been a little too omnivorous with TV, able to recite whole episodes from shows other kids never heard of, from
The Twilight Zone
to
The X Files
 … although there was one difference now. I spent more time with Angie when we both were younger. I guess I really did have some babysitting experience.

By the time she was about six, Angie could recite whole episodes from
The Twilight Zone
and
The X Files
, too. Sometimes, after a marathon of old reruns (and when Mom’s heroic efforts to keep her eyelids aloft were finally met with defeat) Angie and I would even sneak out into the backyard late at night. We would lie on our backs and I would show her things other kids don’t see during the day. If you could lie
still, a black porcupine would walk right past you, or a spectral opossum, carrying her grotesquely beautiful babies on her ridged back. During those days, I thought often of deaf people, how some make a choice to depart from the world of the hearing. It just doesn’t have much to do with them, as the Daytimers’ world increasingly had less to do with me.

A hard truth: even those days were lost to me now. Angie was worried about me, yes. But she no longer relied on me to explain why certain creatures only came out at night.

Three nights after Juliet and I spoke on the phone, I could have sworn Rob passed my house after dark and slowed down. The night after that, I was sure of it. The sound of his Jeep was unmistakable; I didn’t even have to part my blinds. The next night, he stopped. I lay still in my bed, listening. A door slammed, but the Jeep sped off into the night. He couldn’t bring himself to see me. Why? One part of me longed for him. The other part seemed to be closing up, like moonflowers do at night, and hiding the most private self away.

I’d been too naked, too honest with him that night in Duluth. Maybe he felt the same, as though he’d ripped some part of his soul and left it behind in my hands. Neither of us could pretend it was just a moment that happened because he was a boy and I was a girl. If it had been like that, if we hadn’t been best friends beforehand, there would have been two possible answers. Both started with “no.” That’s what girls did when guys wanted to have sex with them, wasn’t it?
No, I don’t think I’m ready
. Or:
No, not now, it’s a big step
. I’d done the opposite. I’d said, right here, right now. Or, if not, then whenever you say, with you.

How could we go back to before?

AS SOON AS the doctor gave me an okay to be active again, I was able to channel my anger and confusion. I poured it straight back into Parkour. I tested my weight on my little sister’s old swing set, which she never used anymore, and found that it was stable. Slowly, I began to swing, forcing myself to rely on and work my bad arm.

They say a broken bone heals stronger than before, and I had no reason to believe otherwise. But at first, using it hurt so much it made me want to give up, or at least to throw up. I asked for Vicodin. If you’re presumed to be a short-timer in the world of the living, doctors usually give you almost anything you want. (Although I learned from the absurd amount of TV I’d watched recently that this is not true for those on Death Row.) I doped up but kept going. When the pain consumed my whole being and not just my arm, I wrapped it in cold packs and took my knockout pills.

I used weights and my own weight. I grunted and sweated through progressively greater numbers of pushups and finally pushups only on my right arm. Sometimes I exercised for two or three hours, despite the torment of the mosquitoes. When I started to do jumps, I first had to re-master my balance. I worked until standing on the top crossbar of my sister’s old swing set became as natural as standing on the ground, and I never missed landing my back flip.

The nights grew longer and colder; the mosquitoes began to fade. The air emboldened me. Too much time had passed. If I really was a lone Dark Star, what could be braver than making the first move? Finally, one night, I picked up and put the phone down ten times—and then managed to call Rob’s landline. Worst case scenario: I wasn’t calling him, I was calling his dad.

“Hey, Mr. Dorn,” I said, trying to sound normal. I did
not say
I was secretly hoping Rob would pick up, so I could pretend I was calling you
. I kept my cool. I did not babble:
Tell-me-about-Rob-and-does-he-talk-about-me-and-is-he-in-love-with-Juliet-for-real-now
—“I have to ask you a favor.”

Rob’s dad said the thing all salesmen say. “What can I do you for, Jules?”

“It’s Allie,” I replied, ignoring the sting.

He coughed. “I’m sorry, honey. But shoot, you’re practically twins.” I stifled an angry laugh. Even when we were inseparable, we’d never sounded alike. Juliet had a low, husky voice, like somebody who sang in a honky-tonk and bummed cigs from the bartender. Mine was plain, girly, more soprano than I wanted it to be. But I got the subtext: Juliet still called all the time. Mr. Dorn heard a girl and expected the usual. “What’s up, Allie? Long time, no hear.”

“I need a horse.”

“Quarter horse? Thoroughbred?”

With all my might, I tried to force out the laugh I’d quashed. “Pommel horse, I think it’s called. You know, that gymnastics bar, the kind they use in the Olympics.…”

“Wish it was weighted tires that football guys use for agility training. I got a surplus of those. Pommel horses are not really my area. But let me make a call.”

Of course, the next night, while I babysat Tavish, he dropped one off at our house. He’d scored it from Coach Everhart, who taught all the gymnastics to the kids in Iron Harbor, little and big, boy and girl.

I didn’t know if Iron Harbor would always be known only as the home of the Tabor Clinic. As David Belle said, there is no limit. The goal is not fixed. It’s fluid. You need to push yourself beyond what you mastered. Or else why go on? I decided that I would make my own life as a
traceuse
. A
world-famous one. I would put Iron Harbor on the map in a way nobody could have ever foreseen. I would get down. I would get good. I would go places Juliet and Rob could only imagine.

I would mean my amigos no harm. I would just get along without them.

As soon as I saw the pommel horse waiting for me in the garage, I called to thank him. “Mr. Dorn! You’re like the go-to guy!”

“Since when am I Mr. Dorn?” he replied with a chuckle. “That’s Dennis to you, young lady.”

Suddenly, my throat clogged up. I used to have these fantasies of marrying Rob, with Mr. Dorn walking me down the aisle and giving me away, in a church lit by candles at midnight. The especially weird part about my fantasy was someone giving away his son and his son’s bride at the same time. Still, Mr. Dorn was about as close as it got, father-figure-wise, in my life.

“You’ll be out there again soon, Allie,” he said. “Along with your friends.”

I opened my mouth, and then closed it. I felt as if all the blood in my body was draining away, pooling at my feet. I heard myself ask, “Are they out there now?”

“Probably,” he said. “Torch Mountain, maybe? Though I’d bet on Superior Sanctuary. It’s funny. My dad used to go up there when he was a kid. It was a WPA project. I’ll bet you don’t know what the WPA was.”

I actually knew a good deal about the Works Projects Administration and the whole New Deal. (Since sixth grade, we’d never gotten any further in American History than the New Deal.) Rob’s dad went on to say that only a few of the buildings were finished but most of them were just rough
storage … but I stopped listening. “I guess that’s why they’re so good for Parkour,” he finished.

I tried to swallow. My eyes stung.

“Allie? You there?”

“Yes,” I finally managed. “Thanks again, Mr. Dor—Dennis. I’ll talk to you later. I have to go.”

I slammed the phone down on the hook and ran to my computer. Sure enough, YouTube confirmed my worst fears. Someone whose handle I didn’t recognize had posted a new Dark Stars video. Rob and Juliet wore black jeans and black hoodies. (Did they have fans now? Or were they just mocking me by choosing a lame alias: “nightclimber”?) They looked like they were having the time of their lives at some Parkour paradise: barracks-type buildings with long, descending stairs and iron railings that turned at right angles every eight steps—and wooden towers with wires and cables strung between them.

It didn’t matter who’d posted the video. The message was clear. They’d left me behind and moved on. Two dark stars: together.

T
he same week that I got my cast removed, we also started school.

For other people, that would have been:
Gah! We’re seniors! We rule!
For the Tabor Clinic Few & Proud, it meant that we received a syllabus from the school district and a bunch of books in a box. I made paper covers for them for the last time in my high-school life. A letter with the names of my new tutors was also enclosed. Then an email popped into my inbox—from Nicola Burns. The first yearbook meeting would be at her house. A ray of hope flashed through the darkness of my brain.
Nicola
! Why hadn’t I thought of her? When I wrote back, I asked her if we could do something first, hang out and catch up. She didn’t respond right away. Finally she replied: OK. No exclamation points or smiley-faces. But that was all right. At this point, I’d take what I could get.

THAT SAME NIGHT, Rob finally texted me.
I get if you don’t want to be with me, that way, but why r u not talking to me or J? I miss u. I really do
.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream or start crying again. How long had it been? Two months? Rob had never been so brick-thick before. True, he was the only guy I knew well. (Let’s face it: at all.) And having learned almost everything about the guy species from Jack-Jack, I figured there was a certain level with a guy, even an evolved guy like Rob, of not being able to grasp subtlety unless he wanted to (or unless he could punch it or eat it). But even so, by now I wasn’t sad so much as furious.