Karen Walker - The Age of Miracles

At midnight we left Seth’s house. It was a radiant night. In my memory, that night was brighter than usual, but that can’t be true—the radiation was invisible to human eyes.

Three hundred miles to our north, Yosemite was burning. Dead trees make good kindling. The smoke had drifted south to us, thinning to a whitish haze that produced in our skies an unfamiliar sunshine, still brilliant but diffuse.

The streets were silent. Nothing moved. All the windows in all the houses were blacked out against the sun. We were the only ones out at that late hour. We didn’t bother with sidewalks that night; instead we walked right down the middle of the road. It was as if the time of cars had passed.

“We can do anything we want right now,” said Seth. He knelt in the middle of the street and then lay down flat on his back, face up to the midnight sun. I lay down beside him, my hair pooling around my head, the asphalt hot against my skin.

“Close your eyes,” he whispered, and I did.

We lay in the street for many minutes, blind and vulnerable. There was a certain romance to the acrid smell of the blacktop, a pleasant rush of danger. Finally, a noise made us jump. My eyes snapped open—it was only a cat running on the sidewalk.

We walked past the bus stop, dusty and deserted, and the shopping center, its stores shuttered for the night. We wandered across the parking lot, the quietest parking lot on earth—it was empty of cars—and we imagined we were visitors to this strange world: what purpose this vast open space, these rows of cross-hatched lines?

Then we ran down the hill to my street, our shadows long in the early light.

Soon we reached Sylvia’s house. My father was at work for the night, but my mother was home sleeping—or not sleeping—right across the street. I was afraid of getting caught, so we crouched low behind a parked car.

Up close, I could read the graffiti beneath the paint on Sylvia’s garage door, the sloppy letters still blaring: Get the fuck out . I wondered what the house now looked like inside and whether she’d had her piano removed or if it remained on the floor in broken pieces. I pictured everything in ruins—the floors sagging, shelves collapsed, the macramé long ago frayed to threads. The only sound was the faint buzzing of the electric lines that ran above the roof.

Sylvia’s side gate, we noticed, was standing open, revealing a thorny tangle of dead bushes in her backyard.

“Let’s go back there,” whispered Seth.

Before I could argue, he sprinted through the gate. I liked the way he looked in that bright light, rushing past the stucco and then squinting as he turned his head and motioned for me to follow, which, of course, I did. Leaning against the side of Sylvia’s house, we laughed as softly as we could, shoulders shaking, unable to breathe. We were kids, and it was summer. We were trespassing and half in love.

We tried to look through a window, but the curtains were closed. We saw no sign of Sylvia.

The natural days had stretched to sixty hours: almost two days of darkness, then two days of light. If Sylvia was still living there, she couldn’t possibly be sleeping through the length of every darkness or staying awake for the whole stretch of each daylight. But we didn’t know for sure. And we wanted to—we wanted to know everything there was to know.

We could have waited in that yard for hours and never spotted Sylvia, but instead, suddenly, the side door swung open, and there she was in the side yard, as thin as ever in an orange linen dress, no shoes. We hid behind a row of trash cans and watched her walk toward the driveway. She looked up and down the street, then up and down again. She sneaked out like a thief. She carried two cardboard boxes, taped shut. She set them down in the driveway and then went back inside.

“You were right,” I whispered. “Guess she’s been here all along.”

Seth nodded. He raised one finger to his lips.

Sylvia returned with two more boxes and headed again for the driveway. She slipped out of sight, but we heard the rattle of keys out front, the trunk of her car opening and closing.

Seth coughed a soft cough. He put his hand over his mouth, trying to muffle another one, but the cough burst out just as Sylvia returned to the side yard. She looked in our direction.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, her hand on her chest. “You scared me. What are you guys doing back here?”

We stood when she saw us, but we didn’t say anything. We’d been caught.

Sylvia glanced at the side door. The usual sweep of her gestures, formerly so graceful, had been replaced by the tight crossing of her arms, the anxious biting of her lower lip.

“Well?” she said.

We didn’t speak.

“I think you should both go home,” she said. “Right now.”

I’d never heard her talk this way. As a teacher, she was endlessly patient and calm.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, her voice rising.

We heard the side door creak open behind her. Sylvia closed her eyes.

And there he was: my father, carrying two brown suitcases, one on either side.

Maybe I should not have been surprised to see my father emerge from her house like that, but I was. He stopped when he saw us. I heard him take a sharp, quick breath. He set the suitcases down on the pavement.

“What are you doing here?” he said. He looked at Seth, then back at me. A pair of sunglasses dangled from his shirt.

I was too stunned to answer.

“I thought you were at Hanna’s,” said my father. He was about to say something else, but Seth cut him off.

“She thought you were at work,” said Seth. He looked wound up, ready for a fight.

“Don’t talk to me that way,” said my father. “I’m talking to Julia.”

My father suddenly noticed the open gate and looked alarmed. If my mother were to wake up and look out, she could easily see us in the side yard.

“Shit,” he said.

This was the first time I noticed it, the inevitable space between father and man. A frustrated man was standing there on that pavement. A stranger would have recognized the signs from a distance as my father rushed to close the gate. These were the sharp movements of a furious human being.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Nowhere,” said my father. But the suitcases glowed like hard evidence against him.

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

Sylvia began to move away from the scene. She was floating almost imperceptibly back toward the side door.

“I want you to go home right now,” my father said to me. He indicated our house, just visible over the top of the gate, and it looked so sad and lovely sitting there across the street, its simple white stucco almost shining in the sun: our home.

“No,” I said.

Sylvia was back inside now. I heard the door shut behind her.

“Now,” said my father.

But I stayed put. Maybe it was the effect of Seth standing next to me, or maybe it was the sunshine—we know the daylight makes us more impulsive than the dark.

“I’m not going home,” I said.

Seth grabbed my hand.

“He can’t make you,” said Seth. “You could go tell your mom about this right now.”

Anger flashed on my father’s face, anger and disbelief.

“Your mother and I have already talked about this,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. I started to cry. I felt Seth’s hand on my back.

“If you won’t go home, then go back to Seth’s house.” He was pleading. It was something I hadn’t seen him do before. “Please,” he said. “It’s not safe to be out so late, and you shouldn’t be in the sun.”

After some argument, we agreed, but we refused to let him drive us. He followed us in his car, moving at the slow pace of our strides. Seth held my hand the whole way. I had the feeling as we walked that I was glimpsing in tableau the world of someone older, the odd dramas that took place only in the middle of the night.