A Friend at Midnight by Caroline B. Cooney Page A

all pillowy on his back. Then he’d get a good grip on the remote and investigate every channel.
    â€œOh,” said Kells, presumably from his recliner.
    â€œWe have to get a lawyer,” said Mom. “We have to fight.”
    Lily had a vision of Michael, small and thin at the edge of a courtroom; of Dennis Rosetti telling a judge, He’s not worth anything to me.
    It wouldn’t be a fight, thought Lily. It would be an execution. It would kill Michael.
    â€œIt’s just money, Judith,” said Kells. “Why don’t we forget about it? You and I earn enough. Why even let the children know what Dennis said? Michael’s back because he loves you and that’s all the support you need.”
    But this was untrue.
    Michael was not back because he loved Mom. He was back because Dad did not love him.
    Mom was a whirlwind occupying some narrow music-filled space. A few minutes each day, the tornado that was Mom came to a stop. She flung herself around her children and fixed dinner and began spinning again, and you could not put your hand in her life any more than you could put your hand into the blades of a fan.
    What if Mom understood that Michael had been forced to come home? Would her whirlwind stop? Would she be a fan whose motor had burned out?
    â€œNext Saturday,” said Kells, “I thought I’d take Michael to a ball game.”
    I’m paying airfare, thought Lily. Kells is paying time. And Dad—he’s paying nothing whatsoever.

    She was having a nightmare every few nights.
    The dreams were full of wounded phones and angry people in uniform and passengers flinging luggage who would scream, Michael’s dead, he’s gone, you lost him, it’s your fault.
    It was never Dad’s fault.
    If anything happened to Michael, it was always Lily’s fault.
    Tonight, the police in the nightmare took Michael away for stealing the teddy bear, while Lily ran screaming alongside the police car, dragging Nathaniel by his pitching arm, bumping him against cement lane dividers until eventually he fell apart and she had only his arm.
    It was a more vivid dream than usual.
    When she woke up, it was sticking to her, like the phone, crawling on her skin.
    Lily got up, stumbling blindly to the bathroom. She filled an old-fashioned red rubber hot-water bottle and took it back to bed with her.
    What kind of nightmares did Michael have?

    Michael was astonished when Kells told him about the baseball plan. His stepfather loved sports, but only watching them on TV while lying in his recliner. Real-life sports were way out past Kells’s energy level.
    But as family trips went, this was a big improvement over the usual September stuff. Mom liked to drive north on the Taconic Parkway and Look at Leaves. Her other September trip was: Winter Coats—Do They Fit? Or: Mittens—Do We Need More?
    Since Michael had never pulled an actual mitten over his actual fingers, but zipped them up for the winter in a jacket pocket, the Mitten trip was lost on him.
    And here was Kells, offering minor-league baseball.
    Michael would certainly rather have gone to see the Yankees. But baseball was baseball.
    Nobody else went. Not Mom, not Lily, not even Nathaniel. Michael worried for a few miles of the drive that Kells wanted to talk. But he didn’t.
    They sat six rows above the visiting team’s dugout. Michael had not known there would be a sing-along, with the words on a huge digital board at the back of the field. He had not dreamed that the entire crowd would sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
    I’m at the ball game with the wrong father, thought Michael.

    Lily spent Saturday at Amanda’s. Amanda was an only child who led a leisurely life. She was always stretched out on something: a chaise by the pool, a sofa by the fire, a couch by the TV. And she did this in cleanliness and neatness, because a housekeeper did every chore that got skipped at Lily’s