Wait Until Twilight (20 page)

Then my mother begins to open the window…

T
HE NEXT DAY JIM WAKES ME UP EARLY
before his ride picks him up for work. He gives me the English literature paper he’s been working on and tells me to submit it when I get to class. “There’s going to be a special speaker, so just take notes,” he tells me. “If anyone gives you a problem, just tell them I’m sick and you’re there to help out. Don’t forget to hand that paper in.”

I leave early to make sure I can find the classroom. Jim’s directions are good, and I get there in plenty of time. There’s no ID check, and the classroom looks like a small conference room. There’s one big long table with students all around it. I get a seat and try to look like I’m supposed to be there. I take out Jim’s paper and pretend to read it. Everyone gets quiet when a lady in a charcoal gray suit and short blond hair finally shows up with another older lady. I hand in Jim’s paper with everyone else.

“Are you in the right class?” she asks me.

“I’m here for Jim Polk.”

“You look a little young to be in college,” she says.

“I’m his brother. I’m still in high school.”

“If only we all had little brothers like you. Now I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Only enrolled students are allowed in this class. Nothing personal.”

“Will you take the paper?”

“Yes, I’ll take the paper. Maybe I’ll see you in a few years, young man.”

I walk back to the parking deck and take Jim’s truck for a drive around town. I take out one of the cigarettes from the pack Jason had given me and manage to smoke it without coughing my lungs out. It makes me a little nauseous, but it also gives me a serious buzz that cheers me up. After my leisure drive I go back to the apartment. Carl and Naomi are sitting on the couch.

“Hey!” Naomi says, and gets up to give me a friendly but distant hug. “Long time no see!” She gives me a sly wink before letting go. I try not to smile too hard.

“Ah yes,” I say, “that wedding rehearsal.”

Jim comes out of the kitchen wearing an apron and oven mitts. “What happened?” he says. “Did you go to class?”

“Yeah, and I gave her the paper then she kicked me out.”

“Kicked you out of class?”

“She said no one’s allowed to sit in for students, but she wasn’t angry or anything. She invited me back when I’m older.”

“But she did take the paper?”

“Yeah, she said she was cool with that. What about you? I thought you had to work.”

“Oh, I went in and they said they didn’t need me. Sorry, bro, if I would have known…”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You know Naomi,” Jim says.

“Yeah, sure,” I say. “How’ve you been?”

“Good. And you?”

“Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Wassup, dude,” Carl says from the couch.

I nod.

“That’s Carl,” says Jim.

“Samuel’s the one who drove two hours—” says Naomi.

“I know I know. You’ve told me already about a thousand times.”

“I can’t believe you came up!” Naomi says, and gives me another hug.

“Me, neither.”

“How the hell did you get up here anyhow? Aren’t you too young to be driving this far on your own?” says Carl.

“He’s smarter than you,” says Jim, poking his head out of the kitchen. I can smell some cooking going on in there.

“Hardy har har! You must have saved a lot of milk money.”

“Carl, why are you doing this?” asks Naomi.

“I’m just kidding,” he says.

“I do have some money. Angie paid me to come to the rehearsal, and then I sold some old comic books a few weeks ago that gave me even more.”

“Comic books?” says Carl. His eyes light up. “How do you expect to get a woman reading comic books?”

“Shut up, Carl,” says Naomi.

“I’m serious. You’ll stay a virgin the rest of your life. At best you
might get an ugly heifer. A real woman wouldn’t take some weak comic-book faggot. Well, maybe a weak comic-book heifer.”

“Don’t listen to Carl. He can be a jerk sometimes.”

The thing is, I think he might be right. Suddenly I feel weak and cowardly. Like when I’m around Daryl. My face begins to get hot, and I’m sure it’s red. I hold back the urge to tell him about Naomi and me. “It’s okay,” I say. I get up and walk to the doorway. Jim might be in the kitchen, but I know he could hear everything. I feel like I should go somewhere else, somewhere far away and where maybe I can find my courage. But I don’t know where to go. This was the last place I knew.

Jim comes out with these burritos covered in some kind of peanut sauce that he’s heated up. He puts the plates on the table for him and Carl. The shame and cowardice I feel turns to rage. I want to punch Carl in the face, but I know I won’t do it. I go into the bathroom on the verge of tears. I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror, so I turn quickly to the window and punch it out. It shatters, and I hear a scream. Naomi comes running in. I look up at Naomi and then down at my bloody hand.

“Oh my God! Samuel, what’d you do?” She wraps a towel around my hand. While she’s doing that I see my face in the mirror. It’s the one I saw when I was with Naomi. The primal man. I feel better, stronger, and it’s like that strength is coming back to me. She pulls me out of the bathroom. Carl and my brother are standing behind the coffee table.

“Did he break something?” says Carl.

“What happened?” asks Jim.

“We’re going to the hospital,” says Naomi. Carl walks over and grabs Naomi.

“Why are you doing this?” he says.

“I’m not doing anything! Samuel needs to go to the hospital. So get your hands off of me!”

She jerks her arm away, but he won’t let loose. He stares at her like he wants to hit her. Naomi jerks her arm again, and he lets go this time. As I walk by, Carl says, “Go home to Momma, pussy,” and I swing my bloody hand, landing my forearm against the front of his throat just like Daryl did to me that night in the house. Carl’s face goes red and he starts choking. I swing a roundhouse left, missing him the first time, but I keep throwing that left until I hit him on his right temple and he crumples. I can feel the power. Not only the power of violence and action but the power of standing up to evil. Jim and Naomi just stare in shock as I take the plate of burritos and smash it on his head.

“Samuel, stop!” Naomi grabs a hold of me while Jim looks on, disbelievingly.

I stomp on his ribs a couple of times. Naomi tries to push me back. I look Jim square in the eye and point down at Carl, “Friend or no friend, you’re wrong. He doesn’t have a good heart.” Naomi drags me away, down the stairs to her car.

“Why’d you do that?” she asks.

“He had it coming to him,” I say. She turns out onto the road and starts speeding toward school. “Why are you even with him?” I say angrily. “He’s a dirtbag.”

After a long silence, she says, “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you deserve each other.”

She starts to cry, and I feel like a complete heel. I hope she kicks me out of the car or at least turns around, but she goes all the way to the emergency wing of the college hospital and even comes with me. I let her. In the waiting room is a lady with her kid and an old couple along with a random assortment of people. There’s lots of coughing going on. A chubby middle-aged nurse at the front desk asks, “So what happened to your hand, Rocky?”

“I punched out a window.” Right after I say it, I wonder if I should have lied. Maybe it’s illegal to punch out windows.

“A window?” she turns to Naomi. “What about you? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s him who’s hurt,” Naomi says, her eyes puffy and red.

“Well, punching a window’s original. Now why would you want to do that, honey?” asks the nurse.

“I got angry,” I say.

“Now what would your mother say about that?”

“My mother died a year ago,” I say. My hand had been feeling numb and tingly up till then, but a hot wave of pain starts to cover it. It makes me want to cry, but I hold back.

“Honey, I’m sorry to hear that,” says the nurse.

“I’m over it.” But I feel like a bastard for saying it.

“Let me take a look at that.” She peels open the towel. “Ooh, that is nasty. Just for that you get put at the top of the waiting list!” She folds the towel back up. “You’re lucky your girlfriend here was nice enough to bring you here. Come on. Follow me.”

“I was wondering if this could go under my name. He’s not a student here, but I am,” says Naomi.

The nurse looks at the form again. “Sixteen years old! Talk about cradle robbing! Ha!”

“I’m just a family friend,” says Naomi.

“I’ll talk to the doctor about it. Come on.”

We walk down a corridor full of gurneys when right in front of us three big male nurses dressed in white gang tackle some man who was trying to get away.

“Get off me, you apes!” he yells. “Get off me, ahhhh!”

“My, my, you chose a busy night to visit us,” says the nurse.

We follow her to a smaller room, where she pulls back some
drapes around a bed. “Wait here.” I sit down on the bed, and we wait without speaking to each other. The doctor shows up after a while. He’s a serious-looking young black man. “Says here you punched a window, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Whatever you punched and wherever you were, were police involved?”

“No sir, it was at my brother’s apartment. I just got angry.”

“It’s true, I was there,” attests Naomi. “It was kind of my fault. My boyfriend was being a jerk.”

“So you’re saying I don’t have to fill out a report on this, right?”

“Yes, he just punched out a window.”

“Good, because I hate filling out those reports.” He smiles. “Let me take a look,” he says. “Hmm…” He has a nurse clean the wound and then he puts in five stitches across my first three fingers. Then they wrap it up before leaving Naomi and me there.

“Does it hurt?” Naomi asks without looking at me.

“It’s okay, just throbbing a little,” I say. “I’m sorry about what I said.”

She continues looking away without a word. I lie back in the bed, and I’m reminded of my mom. She was lying in a bed just like this. Jim comes through the drapes and looks at me wide-eyed. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Why are you lying down like that?”

“Reminds you of Mom, doesn’t it?”

He just looks at me, kind of shocked. “I’m sorry, Samuel, I should’ve done something about that guy. I thought I owed him something, but I don’t owe him anything. That’s not friendship. You’re right. Everyone was right. He’s a complete asshole, and I’ll kick his ass for you one time myself. I promise.”

“What’d Mom say before she lost her mind?” I ask.

“What?”

“She had to have said something. You were the last one. You.”

Jim takes a deep breath and pinches his brow. “She wasn’t making any sense, Samuel. The tumor had metastasized all over by then. She was already deep in dementia.”

“I don’t care. What did she say?”

“She said, ‘The weather’s turning…don’t forget your coat…listen…listen…this darkness…it’s getting dark…’ See it doesn’t make any sense. ‘Don’t forget your coat’? It’s just random memories. It’s all random.”

“I don’t care if it’s random. What else? Tell me, Jim.”

“Uh, what else she said, ‘When I get to where I’m going, I’ll call to let you know I’m okay…I’ll give you a call…it’s getting dark…but it’s not yours…listen closely…I’ll call…it’s getting so dark, son, I better leave the light on…I’ll leave the light on for you, son.”

It makes me think of the dream I’d been having, the one on the oil rig and the evil masks. When my mom opens the window, she’s going to say, ‘I’ll leave the light on for you, son.’ That’s what she’d say when it was getting late. When it was twilight. I take out my wallet and in the folds behind my driver’s license I take out the picture of my mom. It’s not there. She’s gone.
That’s right. That’s right. I forgot that bastard took it
. “Goddamnit!”

“What is it?” asks Naomi.

In its place is a torn Polaroid picture of me, lying unconscious by the bed with those babies lying by my head. It wasn’t lightning. It was the flash of a camera. Daryl. He’d taken a picture of me when I was lying unconscious. “I’m gonna kill him,” I say.

“What?” Jim and Naomi ask in unison.

“Kill who?” asks Jim.

“Just a figure of speech,” I say, trying to appear calm. “I need to go home.”

“You mean now?” Jim asks.

“Yeah, right now.”

“Why?”

I’m up and moving. “Naomi, you think you could take me home.”

“I guess so,” she says.

“Samuel. Samuel. I’ll take you, okay?” says Jim. “If you want to go, we’ll go. Come on.”

“I gotta go,” I tell Naomi.

“Are you sure everything’s okay?”

“Yeah. I just need to get home.” I try to lighten the mood by saying, “I got issues.”

She chuckles at that. “Don’t we all. Carl really is a creep, isn’t he?”

“I hope you get the strength…no…the self-respect to dump him,” I say. She gives me a hug, and I’m reminded of all I’ve experienced the past few days, all that my body has experienced. And I keep thinking about it in the truck as Jim drives us back to Sugweepo: the dreams, the college classes, the girls at the pool, on the bus, Naomi, the marijuana, Jason telling me how to win a fight, to never stop fighting—all of it. So much in so little time. It now feels like I’m wearing new flesh, and I feel somehow more natural and stronger. Even the little things like the anime expo stand out. That movie about the vampires seems so vivid. To pass the time in the truck I tell Jim about that anime movie and how in order to defeat the vampires the hero had to become one.

“I’ll have to check that out,” he says. “If you can get that Tempo working, maybe you can come back and catch the last part of that expo.”

“That’s a good idea. I could bring Yoshi.”

“Who’s Yoshi?”

“A Japanese exchange student. He loves anime.”

“Thanks,” he says.

“For what?”

“For showing me something I couldn’t see. I can’t believe I was friends with that guy. What was I thinking?”

“Don’t worry. He was probably all sneaky about it.”

“Very sneaky.” He nods. “Jason’s going to officially become your best friend when he finds out what you did. All my buddies will.”