Up Late

In the summer there were always a few nights when my family got a whole pot of lobsters and had friends over for dinner. One night Ella and Gillian came with their parents. Ella was Gillian’s younger sister. Earlier in the summer, when we were playing gin, Ella looked up from her cards and asked, “Who smells here?... I mean, apart from Gillian.” And I couldn’t help laughing, though Gillian shot me a sad, betrayed look. I’d been her friend first. Gillian was the prettier of the two, the easier to get along with, but Ella had a nagging insistence, in everything -- her jokes, her ferocity in games, from tennis to Clue, the gnawed-raw knob of her knuckle -- that demanded more attention.

We shared one of the lobsters. The sisters had to be coerced by their parents into trying it. They marveled at its matte and dented eyes. When I cracked open the shell it spit out its liquid, milky and gritty. “Foul,” Ella said, wiping the spray off her cheek, and turning her back to the lobster, as if she could make it disappear.

“Think of it this way,” I started, not knowing how I would explain the goodness of lobster. “It’s really just –”

“A bug,” Ella said.

“A bottom feeder,” Gillian concurred. They were seldom in agreement on anything, but then they would surprise me with their solidarity, the ease and sureness of it.

After dinner we cleared the table while both sets of parents moved to the living room to nurse the last of the wine. When all the chips of lobster shell were rinsed off, and the dishes neatly stacked, and we’d secured permission for Ella and Gillian to sleep over, we went outside to sit on the porch with popsicles.

“Nauseating,” Ella said. She nodded towards the parents inside. They had begun to dance. This happened sometimes but it always struck me with the same shock – to see their hands twirling, and hips rocking, these startling movements, not knowing themselves that they looked so strange. Abruptly Ella got up and walked down the steps to the beach and we followed her onto the cold sand. I stepped on something sharp, a beach rose thorn, and I stopped to pull it out of the pad of my heel. I could hear Ella and Gillian further down the beach.

“That’s so juvenile.”

“Oh, shut up, Gillian,” Ella said in her sing-song voice.

Halfway to the neighbor’s house, we sat down lazily in the sand. Gillian told a ghost story. She had a shy theatrical quality she liked to try out on us though we would often rib her for it. The story was about a boy and his friend exploring an abandoned house. Gillian built up suspense slowly, while the boy and his friend trudged through the forest, before they actually got to the house, looking over at us periodically to make sure we were attending. I had been letting the sand fall in a thin stream onto my thigh. I nodded to show I was following. Ella was looking out at the ocean. She gave no sign that she was listening. Gillian went on anyway. Once in the house they boys got separated, the one looked for the other, encountering, bugs and discarded objects, a steering wheel, a dirty handkerchief. He could not find the friend though he heard noises in the house that suggested he was still there. Gillian paused dramatically before the final moment when the boy opened a closet only to see his friend’s sneakers, and the friend himself, hanging from one of the rafters, dead.

Gillian looked at us solemnly. The air was still. Ella dug her finger into my ribs, making me laugh absurdly. I slapped her on the arm.

“Pretty creepy, huh...” Gillian said once we’d composed ourselves again.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Ella.

“It did kind of creep me out,” I said, “Where’d you hear it?”

“I made it up.”

“Liar,” Ella said softly.

“What would you know,” Gillian said indignantly.

Later, lying on the top bunk, I was wide awake. Gillian was on the bottom and somehow I couldn’t stop imagining the words of the story tumbling out of her mouth while she slept, her lips moving, her eyes closed.

“Are you sleeping?” Ella asked softly. She was in the trundle. I didn’t answer. “Come down,” she said.

I leaned over the railing. “Why?”

“I have to show you something.”

I climbed down and sat beside her on the bed.

She pointed to her sister. “Gillian…” She whispered. “She looks… weird.”

The room was dark except for the outside light that fell through the half-open curtains.

“Everything looks weird at night.”

“She looks like she’s dead or something.”

I looked again. Gillian was very still. I knelt down by the edge of the bunk. I could hear her deep breathing and feel the warmth of her body. The heat felt so alive coming from her. I thought of the words tumbling out of her mouth.

“I don’t know.” I edged towards Ella’s bed.

“It feels different,” Ella said. She spoke softly. It was so unlike the brash and careless voice she usually used, it kind of scared me. I put my hand on hers. She enclosed it with her other hand and squeezed. I felt a shudder run from her body to mine. I wasn’t sure what it was that caused the foreboding. Not Gillian’s story, I thought, but something else that I didn’t know how to penetrate. It had descended on Ella as she lay on the trundle bed and now it filled the room.

We dragged our blankets out to the living room and settled on the sofa there. We were facing three big bay windows, but outside there was nothing but a thin strip of porch and then blackness, that’s all you could see. The lights we turned on bounced off the glass and so did our washed out, distorted reflections.

We tucked our feet under and arranged the blankets in little nests around our bodies. To keep out the cold, to keep out the blackness outside.

“Are you tired?” Ella asked.

“No. Wide awake. You?’

“Me too.”

There was a pause. Quiet, quiet, everywhere. Where did everyone go when they slept?, I wondered.

“Want to go to town tomorrow?” I said in as regular a voice as possible.

“Yeah, let’s.”

“I want to get some flip-flops at the Fligor’s.”

“Before or after lunch?”

We talked as normally as we could, about all the regular things, the stores in town, what not to eat at the Yacht Club lunch counter, the kids on the tennis team, to ward off the silence.

“Abigail’s getting such big boobs.” Ella ventured

“I know... Well, so is Gillian.” I said.

“It’s true,” she acknowledged.

There was a pause, while we both looked down at our small chests. Then we burst into giggles, then fits of laughter. In the house where everyone was sleeping we couldn’t stop laughing.

“Wait,” Ella said. She left her little nest on the sofa and tiptoed down the hallway to the bedroom. Alone in the living room I didn’t want to look at any windows. I thought of the boys in Gillian’s story and how they ought not to have separated. I stared at the peaked ceiling. It was covered in shingles, like a roof turned inside out. To distract myself I thought about this, the shingler up on scaffolding, craning his neck backwards to line up each piece of wood, working his way up, his neck bent further and further. Then I saw Ella, nimble and alert. I smiled wide: she’d come back! I’d known she would, but still. Here eyes were big.

“Everything okay?” I said.

She smiled and nodded. “Yeah, but it’s better out here.” She laughed, shook herself out, as though she had braved great danger. “Look.” From the sleeve of her pyjamas she whipped out a pack of Camels.

“Where’d you get that?” I felt a thrill of recklessness.

“This woman dropped them in the paper store. I picked them up. I’ve been carrying them around all day.”

“Man,” I said, crinkling the cellophane with my fingers.

“Wanna try?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’ve had one before. We need something to drink.”

Ella went to look in the liquor cabinet. She reappeared with a little shimmy, “Whiskey?”

“Sure. But we can’t smoke in here.”

“Okay, outside.”

I went to the window and put my forehead against the glass. It was cold. Outside it was so black, it was like looking into nothing.

“Oh, it’s so dark.”

“We’ll just stay on the porch.”

We sat nervously on the porch, as far away as possible from my parents’ bedroom window, and lit our cigarettes. I swirled my drink around in my glass, and its smell rose up to me, strong and invading.

“Whoo,” I scrunched up my nose. I took a sip, “Hello!” I said, wiping my mouth with my blanket.

Ella coughed on her cigarette. She took a big swig of her drink.

“Uhhh,” she croaked, “it’s burning my throat.”

I sat next to her on the bench and patted her on the back, trying not to laugh while she coughed.

Eight years later, four years after we’d sold the house and stopped going to Chappaquiddick, I was talking to my mother on the phone in my dorm room. I heard her say odious things, that Ella had swallowed poison and stretched out on her bed and pulled the covers over her body and gone to sleep.

“Gone to sleep?” I said.

“Well, yes, and then the poison –”

“That’s what I thought you meant.”

“I’m so sorry, darling,” my mother said.

Eight years later this was the night I remembered, thinking, hadn’t we done it? Hadn’t we proved we could keep blackness at bay?

The next time I looked the sky was purple, and things were peeling themselves away from it -- the branches of the rose bushes, and the pine trees to the side of the house. You could see, really see now, not stare dumbly into the dark.

“Look,” I said to Ella.

“Wow.”

We were stunned.

It’d seemed as if the blanket of night would never lift, it was so dense, and now, the shine was coming through, faintly, but unmistakably. Every minute the sky lightened the tiniest fraction, and the world came a little more into focus. Every minute in the night together sealed more its specialness.

“Let’s take a walk,” Ella said.

I pulled the blanket under my armpits and wrapped it around my body. I stepped into the cold, wet sand. The blanket dragged behind me, hissing softly. We walked to the Big Rocks. When we first started coming to Chappaquiddick that seemed like a heroic trek, but really it wasn’t so far, and the rocks weren’t that big. When we got there it was still nowhere near day. But far from the thickness of an hour before. It was like looking through different layers of sheer fabric all the way back to the horizon. Ella and I sat for a while on the rocks just watching the world change in front of us. The ocean stretched out, broken up in little undulating patches. We took turns throwing pebbles into the water. First me, then Ella, back and forth, we got into a good rhythm.

We walked back, skirting the small waves crashing on the shore, the sand crunching under our feet. When the wind blew it flipped my hair against my mouth and made the beach grass rustle.

When we got to the beach in front of the house, the sun was just under the horizon, lighting it from beneath.

“It’s going to push the whole sky up,” Ella said.

I nodded, in awe of the sun.

We fell asleep side by side on our blankets. The sand was hard and still cold, but while we were sleeping the sun warmed our bodies. I drifted from heavy sleep to blissful half-consciousness, warm and resting, in and out. Ella was sleeping too, her pale hair spilled across her face.

When we woke it was still early but the world was its familiar self again. The colors were their proper brightness, it was all in focus. Nothing sinister, anymore, in the cheery outside. I stretched out and sand spilled off my arms into my lap. My eyes felt salty and bright. Ella and I went inside to drink juice and wait for everyone to wake up, for Gillian and my parents to come into the living room, rumpled and soft, and life to resume.

Laurence Dumortier is the editor and co-founder of Cloverfield Press. Her writing has appeared in Spork, Small Spiral Notebook, and Interview. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and young son.