Because it’s Midnight

I hate to go to bed. You go to bed and you have to face finding that door into sleep, and that’s a hard journey sometimes these days. So I tend to hang with Chaz, messing around, putting it off when I know I’m probably just making myself over-tired, which, as I learned trying to get four babies to sleep through the night, is not the best strategy.  And then there are always the things that go bump in the night.

But we had stumbled on this TV biography of Judy Garland, who I have not much liked over the years, and it turned out to be way more interesting that I would’ve thought. It was eleven thirty at night, and we were just about to jump ship, when there was this noise. Not like anything I’ve ever heard in my life.

First, a gigantic impact, then this tremendous machine sound of screeching and straining metal. Computers flew everywhere. I lunged for the front door, jamming shoes on my feet, and flew out into the now silent dark, bellowing, “What’s going on out here?” (That’s just my cautious little way.)

I flew out the front gate, ran into the street where we had three cars parked on the curb: Chaz’s brand new ancient red Saturn, the replacement for the car that was destroyed when she was T-boned a couple of months ago, M’s beloved green Saturn (ours for over a decade), and Guy’s fishing truck.

Chaz came pounding down the drive after me, and we both slid to a halt in the middle of the street. There was a car embedded in the front of M’s car – which was not so much at the curb now as all over the sidewalk.

The door of the other car was open, and a kid in a dark Tshirt was walking heavily toward me saying, “I was asleep, ma’am. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I was sleeping.”

And I heard myself yelling at him, “What the devil were you doing driving if you were that tired?”

I realize now that I was keeping my distance from the whole thing. When I looked at M’s car, knowing that it was probably totaled, it was like some last bit of M had been taken away from me.

I sent Chaz for my phone, had her call 911. The rest was all, as is not unusual in these cases, kind of a nightmare. It was so dark, we could hardly see anything. Somehow, I had a heavy flashlight in my hand. My across the street neighbor, Nancy, had hot-footed it down the street and was sitting on the sidewalk with the kid, wondering if he was hurt. He hadn’t looked hurt – but sure enough, there was a head shaped dome of shattered glass in the windshield just above his steering wheel.

I was talking to dispatch. All of a sudden, there were all these people around the cars, these skinny boys in long T-shirts. They were opening the doors – and I said into the phone, “They’re getting the stuff out before it’s towed.” Dispatch yelled into my ear – “Don’t let them touch anything. Get them away from the car.” So the knee jerk school marm voice whipped out. “The police say get away from the car. Get out of there NOW.”

I had no idea who these kids were. Why they were there. And that’s, I think, when the shock began to clear. The kid had come right up to me with his insurance info. Chaz went in to photo copy. Six police cars were now in the street, lights flashing, and my neighbor, Reed, pulled me aside and said, “He wasn’t sleeping, like he said.”

I asked him to warn the police that there might be more going on here. But they already knew it.  The T-shirts were now all half a block down, sitting in the front yard of another neighbor’s house.

The police started going through the car carefully, and after a while, had a nice big pile of things on top of the car.  They had asked us to keep clear.  They were really nice about it, but we were not supposed to get in the way.  A conclave of neighbors now stood on the sidewalk with us.  I say neighbors.  I mean friends.

They finally took the kid who hit our car off in cuffs—he was wanted for other things. After a while, a cop put on his night vision gear, wanting to get the license of the car down where the kids in the T-shirts were sitting. Immediately, they leapt up, jumped into their car and took off out of the neighborhood.  The cop jumped in his car too and accelerated very smoothly and quickly, chasing them.

Two kids live down at that house.  It used to be a family, but that had splintered and the kids had been left to live with their grandfather, a very nice man whose health has not been kind to him.  At this point, with six black and whites still lit up in the street, there were two kids down in front of that house, skateboarding in the dark.  “Flipping us off,” on of the cops said cheerfully, “without actually doing it.”

The tow truck came.  He negotiated the chessboard of police cars, and we scooted out of his way.

They had found something else.  Something incriminating belonging to one of the kids down the street – later, it was said to be a wallet with illegal substance in it.  A police car slid down that way, and they took another kid off in cuffs.  This one belonged to the house, a kid I had really loved when he was little, an angel, sweetest boy ever.

The police couldn’t have been more pleasant. They didn’t even arrest me for talking too much, which I tend to do when I’ve been shocked. Chaz does it too. And the American Family insurance people I called about their client’s little outing were very helpful.

It was a lovely night really. Just cool enough. The neighbors out there all telling stories and, once we knew nobody was hurt, laughing together. The humor gets just a little dark at times like these. But it was companionable. Michelle and I talked about it today, how nice it had been to stand out in the street at midnight with all these guys, talking, how we’d like to do it more often – but under other circumstances.

The ruins of M’s car, we pushed off the sidewalk.

We lingered for a while after the last policeman had gone, just keeping watch, maybe. A little too strung up to go in, maybe. Now I’ve got a new problem to deal with in the daylight, in a heap out there by the curb.

And I’m really, really sad.