Read That Night for Free Online Page A

ridiculed. They shrugged. None of them knew Sheryl better than he did.
    At midnight, with all of them waiting for him in their cars, he called again. Her mother said this was no time for a boy to call. They were all in bed. She would not wake her.
    In the bowling alley, the stale cool air seemed hardly to exist, except as a smell and a chill from no particular source. Outside, without a breeze, only the summer heat, the lingering odor of sun-warmed parking lot, of cars and litter, he might have felt this sudden silence had stopped whatever it was that turned and refreshed the earth.
    Like most kids who can’t get along in high school, Rick had trouble at home. His mother was a strong woman with frail sensibilities who had decided on a fairly regular basis throughout his childhood that she would prefer not to live. She would then either swallow a bottle of aspirin or a box of baking soda or gather up as much cash as she could, combing the house for lunch money and pocket change, and leave town, often with a baby in the crib and the other children still in school.
    She would choose obscure, unpredictable routes: board a bus for Baltimore or Pittsburgh or take a train to some wealthy suburb of Connecticut or New Jersey. She would check into motels that faced six others on busy interstates or find a place that was an anomaly to its area: a tiny motor inn in a declining middle-class development, an eight-room hotel over a beauty parlor in a small working-class city.
    Rick’s father was a doctor then, although he’d long stopped practicing by the time Sheryl came around. He was a tall, heavy-boned man, either weary or kind, and he somehow brought his wife back home or back to life every time. Once or twice there had been a piece in the local paper: “Doctor’s Wife Sought / Doctor’s Wife Found,” but apparently the last, discreet line of these articles, “Mrs. Slater was reported missing once (twice, three times) before last year (January, month) and was once (twice, three times) again returned to her home,” became too vexing to compose. Or perhaps the editor realized that this was simply the difficult, enduring stuff of daily life, not news, and so the less said the better.
    When Sheryl met Rick, his mother was in a flexible main streaming program at the state hospital and was home most weekends, “doing okay,” her need to disappear or die somehow met by the distance between the sprawling campus of the hospital and the untidy lawn of her four-bedroom house.
    Rick’s father by then was almost always on crutches. A botched disc operation the same year he had abandoned his failing practice had set off a slow deterioration that subsequent operations only momentarily forestalled, as if the brief recoveries they brought about were mere missteps in the steady progression of his decline.
    There was some money from a lawsuit, and at the time Sheryl knew Rick, his father was working for a local medical lab. Two of Rick’s sisters had married strangers before they were twenty, and a third took care of things at home and worked part-time in a department store at the mall.
    I have never quite gotten straight what happened to Rick’s father’s medical career. My mother had visited him once, when I was young, as she had visited every doctor in the phone book in those days, wondering what had happened to her talent to conceive, but she only made the connection months after that night. His office had been in a part of our town that had somehow escaped new development if not rezoning and so still retained a battered and incongruous trace of the farm. There were two or three people who still kept chickens in that area, and here and there you could still find narrow wooden-frame houses, some of them abandoned, with old wells and useless water pumps in their tiny yards. Dr. Slater’s office was one of these. A green-shingled place with a grape arbor and a sloping porch caught, as touches of paint and threads of old carpeting might be