Chapter 5

I went to bed before ten with the idea of reading one chapter of the book I'm supposed to do a report on for English, but I hardly got through one page. I didn't know if it's that I'm just not that interested in spear-fishing in Canada or if the long trip to Geraldine's school wore me out, but I could hardly stay awake long enough to reach over and switch off the light next to my bed.

When you're sleeping, time gets all mixed up, so I couldn't say whether I'd been lying there for hours or whether or whether I'd just fallen off to sleep, but do know that one minute I was sleeping and the next minute I was as wide awake as morning, as if my alarm had gone off. Only it hadn't gone off at all, and the digital dial, when I could get my eyes into the right focus, was glowing 1:08.

The funny thing is that I woke up scared, as if something was going to happen, or had already happened. It was dark as a cave in my room, probably because my mother had forgotten to leave on the bathroom light, and the digital numbers 1:09, 1:10, 1:11 threw just enough of a gold-green glow to remind me of the Night of the Living Dead.

Then! A sudden, hard thump–the sort of sound a fist would make striking a...well, a coffin–and again, the same, hard, scary knock, coming from very nearby.

I waited, not daring to move or to scream. The knock came again, then again, in a repeating hollow drum rhythm: BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. Was someone trying to break into the apartment, smash in the special dead-bolt locks my father had put on the front door after the neighbors were robbed last year?

Then I remembered Gerri. The room my parents had enclosed for her was next to mine. Was Gerri making these cemetery noises in the dead of night? What in the name of the avenging spirit was going on at 1:12, 1:13, 1:14 a.m. in her room?

I didn't bother with slippers. With my heart going in my chest like somebody had cranked it up. I tiptoed through the black hall to the kitchen. Now I discovered why my mother hadn't left a light in the bathroom; she'd left the small one over the stove on in the kitchen instead. It shone directly into Gerri's room, and was probably supposed to keep her from getting scared if she woke up in the middle of the night. I guess they didn't figure I might wake up and die of fright, but it now seemed like a good possibility.

I peered into Gerri's room until my eyes got used to the dim-dark, trying to get my bearings and preparing myself for who-know-what waiting in there for me.

Who-know-what turned out to be my sister, all alright. Gerri was kneeling on her bed, slamming her head into the wall–BLAM BRAM BLAM BRAM–like it was a normal, everyday thing everybody did in the middle of the night.

"Geraldine! Stop it!" I said. I admit I was really shook. What was she trying to do? Knock herself unconscious? Put holes in the plaster? No wonder the hair was worn thin on her head. No wonder she had that big, fat welty bump on her head.

"Stop it!" I said again. "Will you please cut it out!"

But it would have been easier reasoning with a ghost in a sheet. She just kept right on, BRAM BRAM BRAM, like she had a quota of crashes to fill and didn't want to be interrupted.

Was she determined to wake everybody in the world, let alone this building? Just when I was trying to decide whether this fell into the category of the same sort of emergency as overflowing bathtubs that justified waking my mother, she came running in.

"Gerri!" she said, "Oh, Gerri!"

She ran over to my sister and sat on the bed and threw her arms around her and held her head against her shoulder and started rocking her, rock-a-bye-baby style, and saying "Gerri, Gerri," and humming off-key. It was something to see, my mother holding someone Gerri's size practically on her lap, but it seemed to calm Gerri right down. Gerri started to hum too, but I guess it was a different tune from my mother's, because it sounded awful.

I think it was Gerri's humming that finally woke my father.

He came shuffling in, his eyelids looking pasted together, the belt from his robe trailing behind him on the floor. "Hey, what's going on here?" he said, but his voice sounded as if it were coming from another floor.

"Everything's all right now, Ted," my mother said, still rocking, interrupting her humming for a minute. "Problem's solved."

"What'd she do?" my father said, coming a little more awake, but not much.

"You know, the head-banging thing," my mother sort of whispered.

Why she was whispering I couldn't figure out since it was certainly no secret that my sister had practically put a hole in the pink wall and would have put her head right through the bricks if we hadn't come running in to save her and the apartment.

My father nodded as if it were the most natural thing for someone to wake up at one in the morning and work out against the plaster.

"Why does she do that?" I asked. I heard myself whispering too.

My mother gave me sort of a high sign over Gerri's head, like we wouldn't discuss it in her presence but she'd tell me later. Dad put his arm around my shoulder and walked back to my room with me. He put me under the covers, which he hasn't done since I had my tonsils and adenoids out, and sat on the edge of my blanket. A minute later my mother came in and sat next to him, and my dad said, "I hope your sister didn't upset you, doing that?" and my mother said that it was a little scary but not to be worried. I wasn't frightened, was I? And I said I wasn't, but why did she want to do that, hurt herself like that?

My mother sighed and looked at my father, and he was just playing with the cord of his pajamas and looking at nothing, and my mother said that it was just a way that Gerri had of trying to beat the frustrations out–like some people might kick a ball real hard or jog until they fell down exhausted.

"Gerri can't do what most children her age can do," my mother said. "It upsets her. And when she speaks and we don't understand her, it frustrates her terribly. And when she can't walk right or catch a ball or eat a piece of cake, and when people laugh at her–especially when people laugh at her, or run away from her–it's like there's a hard knot of unhappiness she can't untie–and believe it or not, banging her head, even when she feels the hurt, makes her feel better."

I understood, but I didn't really want to understand. Long after my parents left me alone in my room, long after everything was peaceful and still, I turned it over in my mind. I tried not to think about how it would be to be Geraldine, how it would feel to be spending your first night with your own family instead of being one person in a room filled with rows of beds and a guard, how it must have been to call for your mother at night at the top of your voice, even scream for her when everything was black and still, and know all the time she'd never come and that only the guard, who didn't care at all, would hear you.

I just lay there in bed and every now and then I looked at the glowy numbers of my digital clock 2:46, 2:47, 2:48. No kidding, I just couldn't seem to get my own knots untied.

Finally, though, I did fall asleep and I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed I found a diamond the size of a light bulb under my desk during old lady Bowring's English class. Wow, it weighed a ton and it had a shine like Christmas and in my dream it made me like the rajah of the school. Everybody wanted to be my friend.

What a letdown when I woke up. I was back to being just me, diamondless, no rajah, and pretty much alone as usual. But there was a surprise waiting for me, and believe it or not, it did happen in old lady Bowring's English class, fourth period.