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What Happens After Midnight
Part 1
Before that night, I never knew terror.
I’d been afraid many times, most recently in my five years married to Scott, whose temper usually lurked just beneath the surface: chinks of red-gold coals just barely ashed over, a thin veneer not concealing the danger of actually putting your hand down and touching it.
I’d been afraid throughout my childhood in a similar way, when my white-blonde, white-trash father had gotten that light in his colorless eyes that showed he was drunk enough to charge at me and my sisters like a crazed bull. The obscene joy that accompanied the rage breakout rooted us in place, frozen by fear that our tiny bodies would break under his uncaged fury. I came to expect my mother’s languid voice, issuing from her perch on the sofa, “Harry, don’t hurt the girls,” her perfunctory protest in her finest not-giving-a-shit voice, as we screamed, “I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again,” without ever knowing what our offenses had been.
Still, not terror. Fear. Fear was a different ordeal. Highly unpleasant, but not like a bomb exploding inside your body, melting your mind and shredding everything in its path.
Terror was a full-body experience, bringing every neuron and synapse painfully alive, a kind of dark orgasm. Your soul swoons and disappears, your ego breaks and there is no you anymore, no character or self. Just a swelling black void inside, as vast and deep as that Siberian sinkhole said to reach down to hell, and you dissolve in it, you don’t exist anymore. The terror swallows everything.
It didn’t set in at once. First came alarm.
Past midnight, a knock on the door is unnatural. No good news will ever be delivered in the early hours of the morning. And this knock wasn’t gentle or timid. It sounded like the way cops knock to serve a warrant on a suspected drug den, conjuring a militarized swat team standing on our front porch, ready to batter down the door.
But there were no cop cars outside. I was standing near the window when the first knock resounded, and I could see through the slats that our driveway and the street outside were dark, empty. Our house was situated just outside the borough limits, in an area past the sidewalks. We weren’t exactly isolated, but we didn’t have a neighboring house right next door either. When the heart-jarringly loud knocking came, I froze.
And then silence.
No talk outside, not even whispers, no attempt to yell out to us. Just dead air.
Scott was in the kitchen, fixing his fourth or fifth highball when it all started. He wasn’t too drunk to react yet, and I saw him go still. In the ensuing silence, he turned to glare at me with raised eyebrows, a silent accusation more than a question.
Did he actually think I’d invited people to drop in at two in the morning? I quickly shook my head to dispel the storm I already saw brewing, his knee-jerk readiness to throw blame my way. He looked almost aggrieved at my immediate pantomime of denial.
After a protracted moment in which my anxiety mushroomed into something approaching dread, the pounding started again, and my heart seized up inside my chest. But with the dread came a spurt of the anger that had, in my recent experience, started to lurk beneath the surface of fear.
I was sick of creeping around like a ghost, trying to efface myself, shrinking when anyone with malice and a stronger will rose against me. Sick of never being able to placate Scott with my subservience, sick of feeding the monster of his rage. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw Scott flinch when the banging recommenced, and even in the middle of my alarm, there arose a small spark of satisfaction. I was close to the door; without waiting for permission I took three strides and wrenched it open, barely registering Scott’s protest behind me, what the fuck are you thinking, don’t —
Too late. I opened it wide, stepping out onto an empty porch, no sound or sight anywhere in the yard. How had they moved off so quickly?
But as my eyes focused across the street, at the plot with the vacant house, I briefly made out a figure standing beside a tree. I stared at the figure. It was hard to see clearly, but I caught a suggestion of strangeness, something odd about the face. Before I could see any more, though, Scott pushed up behind me.
His hand jarred me between my shoulder blades, his other hand grabbing the door’s edge and slamming it shut, giving a disgusted grunt as he did. He turned away and went back to the kitchen.
When the banging on the front door sounded again, I started violently. This time I didn’t go anywhere near it, intimidated by Scott’s capacity for escalation as well as whatever had returned outside.
Emboldened either by the liquor, or by a desire not to seem more cowardly than I was, he took a few strides to the entryway and twisted the doorknob open. Expecting another empty porch, we both jumped back when we saw a girl standing there. She was so close that she was almost inside the doorway. Scott was in front of me and he was taller, so I couldn’t make out her face, only long brownish hair and a slight build.
“Sorry to bother you,” she said, in a casual tone that seemed at odds with the hour and the circumstances. “Someone is following me. Can I come in?”
“No,” Scott said, and shut the door in her face.
“What if she’s running from that person we saw over there?” I demanded. “Maybe she’s in danger.” He shook his head. “You could have offered to lend her your phone, or made a call for her.”
“Didn’t ask me to.”
I kept an eye out, lurking near the windows, looking through the blinds for the person with the distorted face, or the girl in the porch light.
The knocking did not return, although I was stiff, my system on alert, awaiting it. Scott was drunk enough — half a heat on was how he’d describe this phase of his drinking — that he let it go and went back to doing whatever he’d been doing.
Since we were both awake still, I wanted to suggest cards or a board game. One of the things we liked to do, usually in the afternoons when Scott was relatively sober, was to play games at the kitchen table. Sometimes, though, when we’d been fighting, we used a game as a means of rapprochement.
He preferred card games, but I liked any kind of wordplay or word games best, anagrams, palindromes, crossword puzzles, semordnilaps, Scrabble. Scott should have been good at Scrabble because he had a surprisingly large vocabulary, before his nightly drinking turned him stupid, anyway. He would always start strong, conjuring unique words, but he couldn’t piggyback on anyone else’s words, so his game fell apart quickly.
I was trying to find some way to approach him that wouldn’t make him even more irritable than he was already. He’d already yelled at me earlier for playing Hell Awaits too loud. He couldn’t stand Slayer, and didn’t find back-masking as intriguing as I did, or at all. I still liked to play the old Beatles songs that had lyrics taped in reverse.
As a teenager, I spent hours trying to decipher all their hidden messages, even though my mother told me that talking backward was a sign of the devil. You’re the devil, I thought, but didn’t dare to say, not with my dad looming.
My favorite reverse-taped lines were Turn Me On Dead Man and I Buried Paul.
Music and fantasizing were always my escape, whenever shitty things were happening in my life.
Before I could suggest a game, though, Scott turned a sour face in my direction. “When’s the last time you cleaned this counter, Kristin?” he demanded.
“This morning.”
“Well, right now there’s sugar all over the counter.”
I went to look. “Crap.” I must have spilled sugar again when I made my evening coffee. My instinct was to ask him how the counter job ended up being mine alone, but since he was half-crocked, that wouldn’t have led anywhere good
I tried to be conciliatory instead. “Yeah, there’s about a million cotillion ants,” I admitted, then had a dark laugh at myself. As I started cleaning, I muttered, “What’s that, a debutante ball for ants?”
Scott stared at me with blank, flat eyes.
There had been a time when he enjoyed all the words I picked up in my voracious reading. Dun, salacious, lascivious, allopathic, introject, fortnight. Even now, sometimes when I’d come out with some unusual or archaic expression, he would think it was cute and there would be that admiring gleam in his eyes. I hoped this might be one of them.
“A cotillion,” I elaborated. “It’s a dance, a coming-out party. The old type of coming out. Not a number.”
“Just do it,” he said. Utterly un-charmed. On his way out of the kitchen, he muttered, “Useless.”
With my ridiculous efforts to lighten the mood hanging in the air, I felt a faint prick of tears trying to surge into my eyes. Useless had been one of my dad’s nicknames for me. Worthless was the other one. He thought if he said the words in what he considered a funny accent, he could get away with the meanness.
“Sorry,” I muttered. I knew better than to keep pushing it.
