Night Kids

In this sort of story, you’ve got a boy and a girl. There’s magic, and the magic comes with the night. That’s not to say these kids can’t operate during the day. Their sweatpants have dirty knees. They never get picked last. She plays red rover in springtime fields covered with purple-flowered henbit. She busts through the line throwing sharp elbows. He plays capture the flag in the muck of the cold spring rains. He’s shifty quick. They both run so fast their thin legs blur.

In this sort of story, a mom has died, something Disney gets right. The boy’s mom passes when he’s old enough for memory to hold the shape of her. One night in the long hours when the house slept, before she got sick, he read Nights of Danger, imagining he was one of the boys in occupied France fouling Nazi plans. When one of the heroes had to say goodbye to his mother for good, it shook the boy. He’d never imagined the possibility. His father was away on business. The boy snuck upstairs, walking on the edges of the stairs to keep them from creaking, and laid down next to his sleeping mother so he could hear her breathing.

The girl reads Island of Blue Dolphins and hits the part where the heroine’s dog and only friend dies. In the sprawling night, the morning promise of sunlight and her little sister’s cacophonies stand so far away they might not exist at all. The girl feels an isolation that doesn’t ever end. She’s too proud to go to her parents’ bed, but she builds a small nest of blankets in the hall outside their door so her dog can sleep next to her.

In this story, the mom is already dead. The boy still remembers what she smelled like. Looking out his nighttime window across the expanse of blueblack snow, he wishes for comfort in the darkness, the comfort of someone who loves you even in sleep. He wishes this and the night hears. The night hears and the unknowing boy makes a deal that will shadow his entire life.

The girl’s lost a mom, too. Her mother is in Albuquerque, so she might as well be dead for all the mothering she provides. Her mother takes the annoying sister, too, leaving the girl in a house with a quiet, sad man who does not know what it means to raise a girl alone. In the nighttime, when the barn cats make noise that pierces the veil to the darker lands where the boy’s mother is (though the girl doesn’t know him yet and won’t for a very long time), she wishes for something she doesn’t have the words to conjure, though her heart does a solid job of it. The night hears and draws itself across the girl’s future.

The night hears them. It hears everything uttered under its shroud. The boy and the girl know that the night carries fangs, glowing eyes, voices calling your name that you should never answer. They also know the night grants wishes, but you never know how those wishes will be interpreted, what cruel, literal ironies they’ll make into law. The boy and the girl don’t care. The night listens. The boy and girl didn’t know it at the time, but they were kinda screwed.

The night is not a person, but it has a hundred thousand tender, expectant eyes. It has long fingers in the shadows. More than anything, it has ears. The daytime is stupid with noise. The night and its emissaries pitch their ears to the smallest movement, the death rustle of an overturned roach, the hiss of a beer can, the wetting of a pillow darkened by weeping. Bats and owls and mice and foxes tune their ears and the night collects the sounds they hear. The night is not a woman, but her words are the words of lost mothers—blanket, silence, settle, echo, mercy.

The boy and the girl discover what the night provides, its freedoms and lonelinesses. They’ve developed a hunger the night appreciates. They make sacrifices late into the night, reading under comforters, watching mute TVs, sneaking out the back door to look at the moon. In the morning, they pay in exhausted tears and stomachs taut with upset. The night adores this. Like all deities, the night loves those that worship to their own harm.

Across a thousand miles and more, the night sends them messengers in summertime. Fat junebugs ram the screens of their windows. Both the boy and the girl are afraid to look, because nighttime windows are treacherous. They don’t know that the night is sending them the same message in the blunderous taps of the junebugs: Be patient. Stay within my arms.

The boy and the girl make their wishes, leave me alone and I’m lonely. The night hears them. What is a wish but the promise of a vow? What is a vow but the kin of a curse?

*

In their teenage years, both the boy and the girl sneak through their windows. Their fathers, in their own solitude and selfish grief, didn’t think to look ahead and realize that having adolescents on the ground floor was a bad idea. The boy sneaks out with his best friend, who waits by his window staring inside with a crazed face under a white bucket hat like Gilligan. They drive in the friend’s battered Honda Accord and smoke weed and listen to the Boogiemonsters and Soul Coughing, music best listened to at night.

The boy sees shadow people, avatars of the night who have traveled across the screams of feral cats to see what foolish things the living get up to when they think no one is looking. The boy, high as a wayward cloud on Jamaican brick weed, believes that he can click his tongue a certain way to summon bats. He’d done this on evening walks with his mother. She marveled at the trick, thinking her son gifted and a little spooky.

Here are the costs he has accrued: the boy thinks he’s magic, meaning he’ll be insufferable up through his twenties; he has been put on the treacherous path of getting fucked up and enjoying the mess of himself; he sets night routines that a life’s worth of days will not break and that will take and take and take.

The girl sneaks out to drink Red Dog and apple pie moonshine. Sometimes she and a small group of friends go to a stand of trees by the Methodist Children’s Home, where the exterior brick of the institutional buildings promise the thrill of escape already achieved. Sometimes, they go mudding with boys through the black forests of the night, the pickup trucks rattling so the girls spill beer on their laps.

She learns about the nighttime stupidity of boys, a more dangerous, more exciting brand of their everyday stupidity. She learns how easily she can gain their attention and how, with equal ease, she can forget them. In the beds of their trucks on piled blankets, she resists their advancing hands and says, “Look at the stars,” then names constellations until the boys grew bored.

Here are the costs she’s accrued: a taste for risk that will haunt her twenties; an oppositional disdain and hunger for men that will trap her in an unsatisfied middle; a love of the sleep of exhaustion as dawn nears; a nighttime autonomy that bends the possibilities of a life she will accept.

Both the boy and the girl sit in first period geometry and fight sleep. He plunges a mechanical pencil’s point into his thigh to stay awake. She rests her eyes and then gives the right answer when Baptist bitch Mrs. Moore tries to catch her out. They each say, tonight, they won’t stay up. Tonight, they won’t sneak out. Then the nighttime comes, after their fathers relent to the disappointments of the day. The boy and the girl hear the night say, It’s so quiet out here. So open. You can rule this empty landscape.

So they do.

The night had quit sending messages that they’d no longer be alone. Even the night got tired of talking to teenagers. It held to its bargain though: You won’t be alone when you’re with me.

Decades later, the boy will sneak from the darkened hallway into the bedroom he shares with the girl. The boy cannot relinquish the night. He does not remember his bargain, but the night does.

When the boy finally does sleep, the girl awakens into the silence. The night says, Come out and spend some time in front of the big dark window. Come spend time with me.

And she does. The boy and the girl have their little life together, but they share it with the night, and the night, like a protective mother, can’t find it in her to let them go.