Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

“This ought to keep you warm,” she said as she walked back to the couch. “You just hold this end, now, and I’ll wrap you up in it. That’s warmer than just having it over the top of you. Here.”

He kicked off his shoes and then took the end of the quilt she handed him. Shelley walked around him in a circle, winding the blanket about him like a cocoon. When she was done she stood looking him over and then nodded to herself.

“You’ll be fine in that,” she said. “The lamp’s above your head, and if you need anything you just call. Good night, Ben Joe.”

“Good night.”

He stood there by the couch, wrapped tightly in his quilt, until she had smiled for the last time and climbed the stairs to her room. When her bare feet padded gently across the floor above his head he laboriously unwound himself again and tucked the quilt around the foot of the couch. Then he took one of the throw cushions and placed it at the head for a pillow. He did these things with the special businesslike air that he always adopted when he didn’t want to be bothered with thinking; if he let himself think tonight he would never get to sleep at all. So he sat on the couch and worked his feet down under the quilt methodically, concentrating solely upon the mechanical business of getting settled. And once he was in bed he made his mind into nothing but a blank, faceless blackboard, bare of everything that might remind him of the restless puzzling at the back of his mind.

It was not yet morning when Ben Joe passed through the gate in front of his house again. The night was at the stage when the air seemed to be made up of millions of teeming dust specks, and although he could see everything, the outlines were fuzzy and the objects were flat and dim, like a barely tinted photograph. Ahead of him his house loomed, blank-faced. If he were passing by in a car at this hour, he would look at the house for a second and envy the people inside it, picturing them gently asleep in silent darkness. Even now he envied them, in a way. His eyes were gritty from a bad night and he thought of his sisters in their clean white beds beneath neatly curtained windows, most probably sound asleep and dreamless. But because he was no mere stranger passing by, he paused at the gate, and stared harder at the house than any stranger would have. It was such a locked-looking house, and so importantly secretive. In the daylight, especially in summer daylight, the house passed off those secrets carelessly and took on an open, joyous look; the screen door banged innumerable times and the girls in pastel dresses passed out lemonade to the young men lounging on the porch railing, and bumblebees buzzed among the overgrown hollyhocks beside the steps. But now, with those voices stilled and the porch deserted and all the windows black and closed against the winter darkness, who knew how many secrets lay inside? Who knew, from that self-important, tightly shut front door, what had gone on tonight and what new decisions his sleeping sisters had arrived at? He hesitated with his hand upon the gate and found himself swinging between loving that house and hating it, between rushing into the sleepy darkness of it and turning away and shrugging off its claim on him forever. Then the gate squeaked a little, and he pushed harder against it and walked on up the sidewalk to the front steps.

His feet on the cement made a gritty, too-clear sound; except for a few aimless chirpings in the trees around the house it was the only sound he heard. When he began climbing the steps his footsteps seemed dogged and heavy, and he thought again of how unreasonably tired he was. He had awakened often during the night, always with a sense of having forgotten something or left something undone, and even his sleep had been restless and strewn with brightly colored fragments of dreams. Now his head swam with just the effort of climbing the porch steps. Instead of going directly into the house, he turned toward the porch glider and let himself sink slowly down on it, to rest a minute and look out across the yard.

The cold of the metal glider soaked sharply through his trousers. He shivered and hugged his arms across his chest, and after a while his body became used to the cold and relaxed once more. The glider whined back and forth, making a lonesome, sleepy sound that sank into him as clearly as the sound of his footsteps had. If he were asleep now, safe inside his house in a warm, deep bed, and it were someone else upon this glider, those slow, gentle creaks would lull him into a deeper and deeper sleep. He would turn a little on his pillow and pull the blankets up closer around his ears, and the sound of the glider penetrating into his dreams would gradually build pictures in his mind of warm summer evenings and soft radio music drifting across green lawns …

He stood up sharply, feeling his eyes begin to mist over with sleep. If he were found asleep here in the morning, wouldn’t they laugh then? Neighbors on their way to work would stop and look over the gate at him and smile. One sister would find him and would call the others delightedly, and they would all come out and laugh to see funny old Ben Joe torturing himself on a cold tin glider. Ben Joe the worrier. He would wake up to come in and have a sheepish breakfast among their little jokes, or he could sit huffishly out here and be even funnier. No, he didn’t want to take a chance on falling asleep in the glider.

He sighed and crossed the wooden floor toward the front door. The backs of his legs were cold and stiff, like metal themselves, and there was a sore place in his side where Phoebe’s favorite couch spring had poked him. As he was turning the key in the door he decided the only thing to do was go to his own bed. Tomorrow — or today — was going to be hectic enough and he might as well get rested up for it. The lock clicked open and he went through the complicated process of getting inside the house, ordinarily an automatic one but now, in his dreamlike state, as sharp in his mind as a slow-motion movie: press down the thumb latch, pull back hard on the door until it clicked, then abruptly press downward and inward upon the door until it gave and swung open, creaking a little and brushing across the hall carpet with a soft sssh . He stepped inside, pushing the front door shut behind him. There was a close, dusty smell in the hallway that rushed to meet him instantly, and for a minute he paused to adjust to the sudden darkness and warmth. He could see almost nothing. A pale flash on the wall identified the mirror; that was all. There was a deeper silence here than outdoors, but also there was the feeling that people were in the area. He no longer felt that he was by himself, even though there was no definite sound to prove it.

He headed blindly across the hall toward the stairs. As he passed the living room he looked through the wide archway of it and saw that the room was lighter, lit gray-white by the long bay windows. On the couch was a long, dark shape that stirred slightly as Ben Joe watched, and to satisfy his own curiosity, he changed direction and headed toward the couch. At his feet there was a sharp ping; a saucepan full of what looked like popcorn had been in his path. But the figure on the couch didn’t move again, and after holding his breath for a minute, Ben Joe went on. He stopped at the head of the couch and stooped over, squinting his eyes in the attempt to see through the dusty dimness. It looked like Gary. His expression was hard to see, but Ben Joe could make out his pale face emerging from the depths of two feather pillows. His mouth was open but he was not snoring, only breathing gently and regularly in little even sighs. And his hair, drained of all its flaming color by the night, stuck out in sharp spikes against his pillows. Ben Joe watched him for a minute, considering the blandness of people asleep. Not even dreams or fits of restlessness seemed to bother Gary; he was peaceful and relaxed. Ben Joe shook his head and then, after putting away the thought of waking Gary up and asking him what had happened that evening, he turned back toward the hallway again.