The Waking Moon

Chapter Nine

The two cops who came to the hospital to talk to me gave one thing away: I wasn’t the only person attacked that night. When I went into my halting description of what the red-haired guy did to me, certain they would think I was nuts, they exchanged a look that can only be described as freaked out familiarity.

Dad checked me out in the late afternoon, and we drove home in silence. This was always the way dad dealt with things. He retreated into his head. There he would live silently with his formulas and mathematical equations, everything safely quantifiable. As we pulled into the driveway I knew he would soon disappear into his home office and forget I existed.

“Are you okay, dad?” I asked, just as he was releasing his seatbelt.

He sat there staring at the steering wheel. If it hadn’t been for the nice ski jacket and the Honda Civic, he could’ve been mistaken for a homeless guy.

“Comme ci comme ca,” he said, quietly. It was always his way of saying, pretty lousy.

I wanted to tell him that I was sorry for sending Mom into one of her depressions, for not grabbing the car keys and insisting on driving. I wanted to tell him that the guilt was killing me, that I felt like I was starting to lose my mind, and that everything would’ve been fine if only I’d been the one to die instead of Judy. Instead, I sighed and looked down at my fingers, which nervously prodded the plastic bracelet still fastened around my wrist.  

“I’m sorry I snuck out,” I said.

Dad pushed out his lips a few times the way he does when he’s in deep thought. He stared through the windshield at the closed garage door, but his eyes shifted around as if he were watching TV.

“Let’s mosey on inside, shall we?” he said, and I knew there’d be no more conversation about it.

That night, I crept into Judy’s old room. Though mom and dad never said it wasn’t allowed, it was kind of understood. Nothing had been touched since the day she died. Her schoolbooks and papers were scattered all over her desk, and the blankets on the bed were still rumpled and unmade. Everyone had told us we needed to pack that stuff away. They said if we didn’t find another use for the room that we’d never be able to move on. And even though we never talked about it, I think we all felt the same. You just can’t move on when there’s nowhere to go.

I quietly closed the door, trying not to alert dad, who was in his study just down the hall. I sat down very carefully on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes. The air smelled musty. If it was true that people could come back from the dead, then where was my big sister when I needed her most?

“Judy?” I whispered.

I closed my eyes and focused hard, picturing her black bob and kind blue eyes. It was scary in that silent, dark room, so I tried to think of something funny. I remembered the time she sat on this very floor and laughed so hard she peed. I couldn’t remember what we were laughing about, but the image was so clear in my mind, I could almost hear her squealing and gasping for breath.

“Judy, it’s Paulie,” I said a little louder. “Can you hear me?”

I held my breath and listened, trying to convince myself that every little crack and groan of the house was some kind of signal from her. But in my heart, I knew it wasn’t. The truth was that I could feel her everywhere. In fact, it was overwhelming. But it wasn’t her presence I felt. It was her absence. 

I went back to my room and did the schoolwork I’d missed while I was in the hospital. My father, who was determined to keep the academics rigorous, even in the less-than-challenging Penrose, had called my teachers asking for the assignments.

In no time I was finished, so I decided to turn on my computer and do a little research. Dad had been on a self-imposed news blackout since mom’s arrest, even canceling his subscription to the Gazette Telegraph, which we’d been getting all my life. But I was ready to read what had been written about the accident, and to find out a little more about the boy who was killed. 

What I discovered first was that the story had been overshadowed by something else that happened. A dozen teenagers in Colorado Springs had killed themselves on the same night as mom’s accident, most of them from the rougher parts of town. There was talk of a suicide pact, but it appeared none of the kids knew each other at all.

I finally found a little blurb about our accident, and another about mom’s arraignment. It was weird to see her name alongside words like “manslaughter” and “intoxication” and “incarceration.” The boy’s name was Jack Welsh, a student at Victor High across town. I thought of his dark eyes and beautiful face. Then it hit me. Jack Welsh. JW + PJ. I stared at the screen, lost in thought, for a long time. The message. The glove. It was a prank. It had to be. The boy couldn’t come back from the dead. Someone was trying to scare me. Furious, I turned off the computer and went to bed.

It was a windy night, and the bare branches of the maple tree slapped the fence, making it impossible to sleep. I tried to read my book, but my eyes retraced the same sentence over and over until I closed it again. What kind of deranged person plays a prank like that? It had to be someone young, probably a group of Jack Welsh’s friends who were hell bent on making us pay for what had happened. But they didn’t know anything about us. They didn’t know that my mom had lost a child herself. They didn’t know that she was now on suicide watch. I sat up, suffocating with rage, groping around in the dark for anything that I could hurl at the wall.

That’s when I heard the raps on the window. They were stronger and more purposeful than before. I held my breath. They came again. Rap, rap, rap. I looked at the window. The blowing branches danced wildly before the neighbor’s porch light casting a puppet show of shadows. But there was another shadow, too, large and unmoving.

“Goddamn you,” I growled, jumping out of bed. I pulled on a sweatshirt and jeans, my pounding heart deafening inside my head. After tugging on my boots I started for the side entrance where the message had been, grabbing dad’s old softball bat from the closet on the way.

I unlocked the door and threw it open. The motion sensor light popped on as I stormed onto the porch, gripping the bat with both hands. The wind wailed, and the trees that lined the quiet street bucked and swayed, but I didn’t feel the cold. I walked to the end of the porch and scanned the darkness.

“Come on!” I yelled. “I’m right here! Come on!”

There was no sign of anyone, but I could sense them out there watching me, waiting. The fury swelled inside me until I didn’t even feel like myself anymore. I slammed the bat into the iron railing.

“Does it make you feel better?” I screamed. “Does it? Does it?”

A city truck lumbered along the road that intersected ours, spitting gravel onto the snow. When it turned left, the slow, white beam of its headlights cut an angle into the darkness, and briefly illuminated a figure standing on our lawn, not twenty feet away. I stepped back from the railing in surprise. He was just outside the arc of the porch light. I could make out enough of his shadow to see that he was tall, and his hands were shoved inside the pockets of his winter coat.

“Come and get me, if that’s what you want!” I yelled, wielding the bat like a maniac. “What are you waiting for, you bastard? Come on!”

The shadow just stood there looking at me. “Paulette,” he said, the voice husky but young. It was soft and very sad. And I recognized it immediately.

He stepped into the light. Thick waves of dark hair blew about in the wind, perfect skin rosy from the cold. It was Jack Welsh, the boy my mother had killed. His eyes were shining up at me, and he was almost unbearably beautiful. I heard myself gasp, and then my legs just collapsed and I sat down hard on the cold cement.

The boy kept his distance, but he pulled his hands from his pockets and took an instinctive step forward, as if he wanted to rush over and help me up. We looked at each other for a long time, and for some reason, he seemed to be in as much awe as I was. But then the timer on the porch light switched off and everything went dark. I pulled myself up and waved my arms around to trip the light again.

But when it finally did, he was gone.