The Night Listener : A Novel

“Hateful old bitch!”
    “Well,” said Darlie, “his hearing’s good as ever.”
    “What was that?” hollered Pap.
    “Nothing, sweetums.”
    The old man flushed the toilet and came lumbering back with his pole. His skimpy striped hospital gown made his gruffness seem comical, like a polar bear who’d been rudely anthropomorphized by Disney. “You know it’s the truth,” he said. “She behaved atrociously after Bo’s death.”
    “Bo Edwards died?” There was so much I didn’t know about Charleston society these days.
    Josie nodded, giving me a look I couldn’t quite read. “About three years ago.”
    “He killed himself,” Darlie added quietly.
    I hesitated out of old habit, realizing how casually I’d led us into forbidden territory. I could feel my mother’s eyes boring into me from across the years, but I managed to ignore them. “Why did he do that?”
    Darlie replied with a single whispered word—”Prostate”—as if it explained everything. How thoroughly Southern that was: the assumption that an eighty-year-old who’d lost his “manhood” might naturally be driven to take his life.
    “How did she behave atrociously?” I asked.
    My father’s mind had ambled off. “Who?”
    “Libby Edwards.”
    “Oh, hell, she was just an angry bitch. Actin’ so pissed off all the time. You’d think she was the one who died.”
    “Pap.” Josie leveled those hazel eyes at the old man and spoke in a way that was both stern and gentle. “She had a perfect right to be pissed off.”
    “Well, she should’ve kept it to herself.”
    “Why? Why shouldn’t she say how she felt if—”
    “You don’t make a public spectacle of yourself. Drag the family name through all that crap. It’s common.” Josie sighed, then caught my eye, obviously worried that I was about to say what I was thinking: that the family name had been dragging us through crap for years. But we were saved by the arrival of a nurse—middle-aged and inarguably white—bearing a tray with my father’s sandwich.
    When the women were gone, I took a walk around the block to clear my head. I returned to find my father propped up in bed, staring out the window. There was a look in his eyes I couldn’t identify, but he blustered it away as soon as he saw me.
    “Hey, boy! What’s it like out there?”
    I told him something I knew he’d like to hear: that I’d missed these old sideways houses, and the true ocean smell of the Atlantic, and the way the oaks made shady tunnels out of the streets.
    “That’s right,” he said. “You ain’t got many big trees out there, except for…oh you know, what’s that damn place called? Oh, hell, what is it? Named after that naturalist fella. Up north, across the bridge.”
    “Muir Woods.”
    “That’s it! Muir Woods! Beautiful place.” Geography again. Hiding us from ourselves and each other.
    “Remember when we took your mama up there?”
    “Yeah, I do. That was nice.”
    “Duddn’ seem that long ago, does it?”
    I shook my head, smiling.
    “It goes awful fast, son.”
    I told him I knew that already.
    “But duddn’ it bother you?”
    I shrugged. “A lot of my friends died years ago. It seems like bad form to complain about getting older.”
    He paused a moment, assembling his words. “You know, I was mighty fucked up when your mama died. I didn’t know what I was gonna do with myself. I thought it was all over until that little gal came along.” He glanced toward the door as if he half expected to find Darlie hovering there, overhearing this endorsement. “Where the hell’d she go, anyway?”
    “Just to that funeral.”
    “What funeral?”
    “Libby Edwards.”
    “Oh, that awful old bitch. When she comin’ back?”
    “Libby? I seriously doubt she is.”
    It took him a moment to realize I was teasing. “I meant your mama, goddammit!”
    He meant Darlie, of course, but his confusion was understandable.
    One person can easily be mistaken for another when you require insurance against solitude at any cost. And I resented him for that more than ever, the nearly constant companionship that had allowed this wounded fledgling to impersonate an eagle all these years. He’d had it so easy, really.
    “She’ll be back,” I said. “You can do without her for an hour or so.”
    “I wanna tell her something.”
    “You can do that later.”
    He’s just as scared as I am, I thought. He hates the thought of being alone with me and what we would do with the