Kissing Midnight (28 page)

“Stop!” I throw myself in front of him, waving my arms like I’m drowning. “Look up! There’s someone on the tower! You have to help her!” I try to grab his chin, try to lift his face to the tower. If he looked up now, he would see her!

But my hands pass right through his cold skin, and then he passes through mine, stepping right through me as he tromps on his way.

“Look!” I scream, directly in his ear, and for a second he pauses, like he thinks he might have heard something. But then he just keeps walking, a little faster now, eager to be out of the cold.

I have no more time to waste. I force myself to start running again, toward the door at the bottom of the clock tower, even though every part of me is screaming that I should run the other way.

The heavy door is closed, but the padlock hangs broken. The ghosts must have broken it, or made Saintly do it. I ignore it, melting through the thick metal and into the dark stairway on the other side.

The stone stairs haven’t changed—not in the past twenty years, and probably not in the past hundred. They are just as damp and narrow as they were when I climbed them two decades ago—except then I was stumbling up them drunk, my eyes half-blinded with tears. Now I feel sharp, jumping at every flickering shadow cast by the dim security lights, on edge for any little noise from Saintly up above me. There’s a cold draft whistling down the stairs, and when I reach the top I see why: The little maintenance hatch to the clock face is still hanging open. Beside it, the complex gears of the clock grind on, lit by the big bulb that illuminates the face. Beyond the glass, I can see Saintly’s shadow, like a ghost.

My heart is pounding. It beats in time with the ticking of the clock, which is loud up here—so loud it seems like a physical thing. You can feel it in your bones.

At the maintenance hatch, I stop. I tell myself it’s just because I don’t want to startle Saintly, that I have to do this right, but really it’s because I’ll collapse if I go further. My fear is a physical thing, too, like the ticking of the clock. It tugs me like a current, begging me to go back down the stairs.
Don’t make me go out on the ledge
, it says.
Not again
.

I crouch down and push the tiny maintenance door open as far as it will go. It’s only about three feet tall—probably just meant to pass equipment out to workers on scaffolding or something. I have to bend my body almost double just to stick my head out.

The cold wind hits me like a slap. It’s so much stronger up here, with nothing to get in its way. I feel like I’m going to be sucked sideways, right out of the doorway. I angle my body through the narrow opening until I’m standing on the ledge just beside the clock face.

Saintly is only a few feet away. How is she holding on? The wind tears her hair, claws at her shirt. She has no jacket, and her bare hands are raw and red from the cold. She is still plastered against the clock face, her fingers spread as if she’s trying to grip the frosty glass, her arms held out at three and nine o’clock, her feet at five and seven. Her feet are braced on the ice-coated ledge, but it isn’t even wide enough for them. Her toes go over the edge.

“Saintly!” The wind grabs the word as soon as it’s out of my mouth, ripping it away. I try again. “Mariana!”

I shouldn’t have worried about startling her: She looks like she’s in a trace, her face tense with an internal battle I can’t see.

“You can’t die,” I say. I’m talking to myself, trying to remind myself that it’s over for me, nothing worse can happen. Trying to talk myself down from my fear.

But I’m talking to Saintly, too. She can’t die. Not now that I’ve found her. I can’t let her. Carefully I creep along the ledge toward her, trying all the way to remind myself that the wind can’t take me, that it goes right through me. “Saintly,” I say, as clearly and firmly as I can, “I need you to climb back through the door.”

That’s what the police woman with the bullhorn kept saying,
“I need you to go back through the door!”
I can picture her now, standing in the courtyard below on a very different day. It was hot then, the high noon sun baking the flagstones below, glinting off the face of the clock, making the glass burn against my palms.
“Come down,”
she said,
“and we’ll work this out.”
The memory is so vivid, it’s as if there are two scenes happening at once: the slashing sleet of the here and now, Saintly pinned against the full-moon face of the clock, and the other day, the last day of school, 1993. The last day of everything.

But it wasn’t the last day for me. It wasn’t the end. “I’m right here,” I tell Saintly, “I’m still right here with you.” I force myself to focus on the here and now, to see the stark reality through the haze of memory, just like I can see the big black numbers of the clock through my own ghostly hand as I reach for Saintly. “Take my hand.”

She turns her head toward me, her expression blank and unseeing.

“It’s me,” I say, “It’s Jesse. Please, take my hand.”

Her voice is quiet, almost matter of fact. “I’m going to jump.”

“I’m going to jump!”
I shouted down to the cops below through my angry tears. I screamed it at the onlookers who had gathered, caught in the middle of moving out of the dorms, their arms full of laundry baskets and floor lamps and books. They were on their way home. I was on my way nowhere. I remember a girl buried her face in her hands, unable to watch. A boy curled his girlfriend tight against his chest, shielding her from the sight of me, and I thought
I will never have that with anyone. No one will ever try to shield me
.

But I have someone beside me now. “Please, Saintly.” I inch closer to her. “This isn’t you talking. I know it isn’t you.”

“It’s me,” she says. Her voice is still quiet, but resolve runs through it like a steel chord. “You just don’t want to hear it.”

She’s right, I don’t. The familiar despair in her voice is killing me. But I know I have to keep her talking. Every minute talking is a minute not jumping. “Tell me. Tell me how you feel.”

“I don’t feel. I
know
. We’re not going to win this. There’s no time! I can’t save Delia like…” Her voice trails off, taken by the wind.

“Say it.” We’re walking a thin ledge. Making her talk about this stuff—it might only drive her down deeper. But it might help. Maybe. “I think you should say it.”

“Like I couldn’t save him.”

Her brother. That’s what this is about. I stand silent, unsure what to say. “Saintly, let’s talk about this. Come back through the door and we’ll go downstairs.”

“No!” She shouts it. Well, good. Maybe someone will hear her. “I’m too tired for that, Jesse. Life just keeps coming at me like…like this wind.” She lifts her arms up, her hands suddenly at midnight, and a gust of wind catches her shirt, makes it ripple like a sail. My heart stops because I think she’s going to go over, but she puts her hands back down, raw red fingers on the frozen glass. “God, I’m tired.” She starts to cry, tears rolling down her already wet face, hot tears against cold skin. “I just want to be done, you know?”

Oh, do I know. But can I say that? Or will it push her over the edge?

I decide to risk it, because I have no other plan. “I felt like that. I had just come out to my parents. I was in love with this girl named Ellie, and I thought we were going to be together forever, so I came out to my folks all militant and joyful and they cut me off. They said they wouldn’t pay for college anymore—wouldn’t pay for anything, didn’t want anything to do with me unless I ‘came to my senses.’ My dad said he wasn’t giving money to some city school that had turned me into a lesbian.” I laugh bitterly. “Of course, it hadn’t turned me into anything. I was just free to be myself for the first time in my life.” I steal a glance at Saintly. She’s quiet, but I can’t tell if she’s listening.

I decide to just keep talking. “I was terrified, but I went to Ellie and said I thought we should move in together off campus. I’d get a job, help pay the bills, maybe go back to school eventually…” I stop, unsure if I should go on. Unsure if I even can. I’ve never told anyone this story out loud. There’s never been anyone to tell.

There’s a silence where all I can hear is the wind. Then Saintly says, “What did she say?”

“She broke up with me. She said she wasn’t sure she loved me, and she didn’t want to be with someone who was so…‘up in the air,’ she said. There was a guy who liked her, too, who kept asking her out. She said I was getting too serious, too fast, but it wasn’t me who was serious. It was life, you know?”

Saintly turns her tear-streaked face to me. She isn’t crying anymore. She’s quiet, but she’s listening. “What did you do?”

“I got angry. I smashed the side mirror of her car. I screamed at her because I hated her because she had the option of going back—back to pretending to be straight, back to her parents in Vermont—and I didn’t have any options. All the doors had closed behind me.”

“Go back down,”
the cop with the bullhorn had yelled, but there wasn’t any going back for me. There was nowhere to go back to.

“And I got drunk,” I admit. “I got trashed. And I got up here on the last day of school, when everyone was moving out of the dorms and on with their lives and I was about to be homeless, with no job and no cash. I had been at an AIDS protest that morning and we had done a die-in and when I lay down on the sidewalk to pretend to be dead, I thought to myself, ‘I wish this was real.’ I didn’t even have the energy to stand back up. It felt like everything in the world was bad and getting worse, and there was nothing I could do. I went home and drank a crapload of vodka and the next thing I knew I was up here.”

She peers down over the edge. “And you jumped.”

I’m afraid I’ve pushed her in the wrong direction. “I jumped,” I say quickly, “but I regretted it. The second my feet left the ledge, I regretted it, and I’ve regretted it every minute since. It was a mistake, Saintly. I couldn’t see anything in my future, and then the instant my feet left this ledge it was like I could see around that corner and I knew that if I had just held off a little longer…I think that’s why I really came up here that day. Not because I wanted to jump, but because something in me knew I needed perspective, to see a bigger picture, climb to higher ground, and if I could have gotten it, I would have seen the possibility of a solution. I would have seen that life goes on.”

“You would have seen yourself falling in love again?” Her eyes meet mine, and I see the real Saintly. She’s coming back to me, and I know what she’s trying to ask. She wants to know if I’m falling for her.

My face gets hot. I can’t bring myself to talk about that. I can’t take that risk—not up here, not now. “I went to my fifteen-year reunion,” I say instead. “I think I wished Ellie would be there. She wasn’t, but there was a guy there—a guy I had known from the queer group on campus. He had gotten married to some guy he met in grad school and they had a little girl they adopted from Cambodia and they looked happy. Like, really happy. I just followed them around all day, thinking maybe there was a time when he wanted to give up, too, but he pushed through and on the other side he found his happiness. Now, I have no idea what my happiness might have looked like, and I’ll be honest, Saintly, I have no idea how we’re going to win this thing with Dev, but jumping won’t solve it. That’s the ghosts talking, and you can’t listen to them. Dying won’t make things simpler. Only living through it can take you out on the other side. Trust me.”

“I don’t know who to trust.” She looks away again. I can see the wheels of her mind turning behind her eyes, like the clock gears behind the face, but she still isn’t sure what to think. “I’m crazy, remember? I’ve never known what’s real.”

“You’ve always known,” I say. “You’ve just never trusted yourself. But you’ve known—you know right now. Look at me. Am I real?” The wind has picked up again, and I have to shout. “I’m real! This right here, you and me, this is real. Look at me!”

Reluctantly, she tears her eyes off the ground below us and looks me in the face. I have to take the leap, I realize. I have to take the leap in my heart to keep her from leaping for real. “You wanted to know if I could fall in love again? Well I’ll tell you. I love you.” I don’t know if it will make a difference, but I say it anyway. “I love you, Saintly. I loved you the minute I saw you and you saw me back. Now please, take my hand.”

Something shifts in her expression. A light comes back to her eyes, and the slightest smile tugs at the corner of her lips. Cautiously, she reaches for my hand.

But just as our fingers touch, a sudden gust of wind hits us. Saintly’s foot slips on the frozen lip of the ledge.

It seems to happen in slow motion: Saintly’s eyes go wide with horror as her feet scramble on the ice. I make a mad grab for her hand as she drops over the edge. Saintly screams.

Snap.
My hand connects with her elbow and I hold on tight, falling to my knees on the ledge as she drops. Now she’s dangling, only my hand on her arm holding her in midair, three stories above the frozen ground. She pinwheels her legs crazily, desperate to find purchase on something, anything. “Hold still!” I yell. Her movement will pull me over the edge. I try to pull her back up, but my hand is fading fast, losing solidity. Every second it becomes more transparent.

“Jesse!” she screams as my grip slips. Her elbow slides out of my grasp, her forearm slipping through my fingers until I’m only holding her hand. I try to focus on the little heart tattooed on the inside of her wrist, the tiny black line that trails from it like a rescue rope. I concentrate on it with all my might. But I’m not going to last much longer. It’s taking everything I have to stay solid enough to hold on.

Saintly’s desperate gaze meets mine, eyes huge with fear. It’s over, I know. All I can hope for now is that Saintly becomes a ghost like me, that if we are going to be trapped, we will at least be together. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“I love you,” she whispers back.

I can’t hear the words above the howling of the wind, but I know what she said. I can feel it.