One Cold Night

Raising a teenager, you were supposed to strike a perfect balance between caution and release. Susan had discovered that it was easier said than done.
    Lisa was mostly polite and well behaved, but when her forceful personality reared up, you learned to step back and give her space. With negotiation, shifting limits on clothes and rules had inevitably righted themselves. There had been a stream of friendship dramas and unrequited crushes to assuage, but those were easy compared with power-related conflicts. “You’re not my parents!” had been a favorite refrain. And a true one, as far as Lisa knew, until tonight. The decision to tell Lisa the truth had been Susan’s struggle for years; countless times she had had to resist the temptation just to blurt it out. Concluding that it was time to tell Lisa had been an important, careful, even inevitable decision. One she was beginning to regret, deeply, as the clock ticked toward eleven.
    The wait was brutal but she had to give Lisa her allotted space. Then she began to wonder if the eleven o’clock rule applied to e-mail.
    If she had gone to Glory’s, they were probably huddled together over her computer, IMing their eighth-grade friends who had scattered to different high schools. Susan picked up her BlackBerry from where she’d left it on the coffee table and opened a new e-mail to Glory’s address, which she had saved the last time Lisa had sent a message from her friend’s house. Lisa are you there? If you’re reading this please just zap me back to tell me you’re okay. There’s so much to talk about but we don’t have to say it all now. I just love you so much. And I’m so so so sorry. And I want to know you’re okay.
    She sent the e-mail and plunked backward into the soft cushions of the couch, reminding herself that this was not the first time Lisa had been out past her curfew. There was the time she had stayed late at Glory’s, when they were new friends, testing the rules Susan and Dave had outlined upon Lisa’s arrival in their home. Then there was the time the girls and three other friends had gone to an agreed-upon movie, only to slip into the multiplex’s neighboring theater to catch another show for free. Their cell phones had all been turned off, and it was eleven thirty before any of the frantic parents heard from them. And then there was last June, the night of Lisa’s middle school graduation.
    After a day of ceremony and celebration, Lisa had gone out with friends and overlooked her ten-o’clock curfew by two hours. The ten-to-eleven buffer hour, as Susan thought of it, had passed slowly. The worry hour before midnight had been sheer hell. Even Dave had showed signs of concern, though in his work he was used to parents thinking their teens had gone missing when actually they were just ignoring therules. They had phoned everyone Lisa knew from school, and then some. Carole and Bill Bailey — Susan and Lisa’s parents; now, Lisa’s grandparents — who had come to town for the graduation, had been roused from sleep at their hotel and were about to call a car service to bring them to the loft. Within one hour, the particles of a full-fledged vigil had begun to gather shape — and then, like Cinderella resuming normality at the stroke of midnight, in walked Lisa, indignant at all the fuss.
    As Susan recalled those nights of worry, she began to relax a little bit. They had fought and Lisa was upset; she had every right to her strong reaction; she would be back any minute. It was now a matter of enduring the torturous passage of those minutes — one and then another and another still. Susan willed herself to wait until exactly eleven o’clock before she picked up the phone.
    She got up, walked over to the puzzle table and picked up a piece at random. But she quickly realized she was too restless to sit and concentrate, so instead went into the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher. She wiped the counters, though they were already clean. With window cleaner and paper towels she cleaned and polished the stainless-steel cooktop, oven door and cabinet handles. She worked slowly and carefully, feeling the minutes move through her. She checked her watch; it still wasn’t time. So she picked up the phone and speed-dialed Dave’s cell, knowing he would give her the courage to hold tight and wait. His voice mail answered and she left a message to call her.
    She walked through the loft and turned on all the lights. She didn’t like this, any