Tilt - Alan Cumyn [48]
As soon as they could contact her.
The door was locked. If he knocked — if he whispered loud enough — then Lily would probably wake up, too.
Where was Mr. Strawberry?
Feldon hadn’t been clutching him when Stan put him in bed just seconds ago. Feldon must have dropped him on the front porch. So Stan ought to go down and get Mr. Strawberry so that as soon as Lily woke up he’d have that to give her, to shut her up.
He descended the stairs again, walked out into the cold air. Mr. Strawberry was on the lawn where Stan and Feldon had been standing while the taxi drove away.
Stan picked up Mr. Strawberry, but instead of climbing the porch stairs again, he threw the doll onto the front bench.
Maybe . . . maybe he wasn’t supposed to go back inside right this moment and wake up his mother and probably Lily and Feldon, too. Maybe that could wait until morning.
Maybe he had something more important to do just this instant.
—
To get to Janine Igwash — the girl whose breast peeked above a blanket in the verse now tattooed on Stan’s brain — Stan headed back to the alley with the basketball hoop and the fence. Which Janine had slithered up so easily.
Stan did not slither. He was more a groaning, grasping beast pulling himself over rusted barbed wire. On the other side of the fence, in the little opening in the grubby hedge at the very back of the duplex’s shared yard, Stan clumped painfully and unheroically to the ground.
There was her window. How high? Fifteen feet? Stan approached the ordinary-looking brick wall. There was no trellis to climb, no downspout that would bear his weight. A real rock climber would be able to press fingertips into the slight indentations between the bricks and become buglike in defiance of gravity.
But he wasn’t a rock climber.
Stan looked around for a pebble to toss up against her window. If he moved the ladder by the carport . . .
It was quite a large one, and in his focus on looking for the stones he almost knocked it over. But he grabbed it in time and felt himself smiling, giddy. He propped it up against the wall.
Then he was just climbing up . . . a long aluminum ladder . . . in the middle of the night . . . closer to morning, maybe . . . to a point just below the window of a beautiful and fascinating girl who had kissed him.
A tilted girl. He was tilting toward her.
He was just climbing so that he would pause like this, princelike, his face about six inches from her shut and blinded window.
Was this her window?
What if Stan knocked on it now and Joe poked his big head out and punched him in the face like any father would if some guy showed up outside his daughter’s bedroom window balanced on a ladder in the middle of the night?
“Janine?” Stan’s voice died in the cold darkness. Tap, tap. “Janine, it’s Stan. I’m over here, at the window!”
A breath of cold wind blew through the empty night.
“Stan?”
“Shh! I’m just outside. If you’ll . . .”
She opened the window. She was in flannel pajamas.
“What are you doing here?”
The screen was still between them. Otherwise he might have just kissed her again. Probably he would have lost his footing and fallen to a spinal injury and a lifetime as an invalid.
“I’m standing on a ladder,” he said.
She was trying hard not to laugh.
“I can see that.”
He was freezing. The aluminum of the ladder was particularly cold. Maybe it was going to snow. The clouds had that look to them, even though it was early in the season for snow. Stan could just see some of them in the purplish night sky. Blurry cold blobs just above the lip of the roof. Dawn coming.The screen on the window, the shadows made it possible to imagine this was all a dream. In a moment Stan was going to step off the ladder and fall slowly down, only it would be like falling in water.
He’d wake up just before he hit the ground.
“I took my half-brother, Feldon, away from his dad tonight. Our dad. I just stood in the way and took him. And now Dad’s gone. I just changed Feldon’s life.” Stan wasn’t saying it to brag. He hoped, at least, there