Every Night At Midnight

The shingled house stood and weathered against the cloudless blue clearing of the crisp spring sky. It might have been the first house here, or the hundredth, but a curl of chimney smoke and  warm laughter seeping out of the house like the yellow light inside heralded a successful dinner with friends coming to its natural end.

Inside, remnants of societal comforts stood happily depleted: the crackling fire folding in on itself, the salvaged wood table covered in mostly wine glasses, the kitchen counter stacked  with smeared plates, the worn leather couches recovering in their centers.  

Alvin moved in the kitchen, a dish towel draped over his shoulder, happy to recharge his social  battery alone with a sponge.  

Sarah, confident Alvin would notice her absence and find his way to the exit soon, walked slowly toward the door, adjusting her sweater with one hand, smoothing short chignon flyaways in a haircase to nowhere with the other. She stretched her mouth into a smiling, performative yawn as she looked quickly over her shoulder for Alvin to confirm her narrative of polite exhaustion.  

The Grandfather clock in the hallway stood at the ready… 11:48...

David, nursing the same glass of Scotch he’d poured seven hours before, read none of Sarah’s  gentler cues as he walked her to the door. Sarah took a flier on collective departure ritual and  stopped David as he started ramping up about a piece he’d read in Harper’s with another yawn.  

“Well, that was fun, we better get going. It’s almost midnight!”

David’s face lit up. Oh no.  

“Ooh! Don’t want to get caught on Maple Point after midnight! Know why??”

No, no. Sarah terminated this new subject with a verbal shrug.

“Oh, Maple Point’s like fifteen minutes the other way, so we –“

“EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT the ghost of a woman in white appears and walks from Maple  Point to Rankin Road, vanishing at sunrise.”

Sarah blinked.

“We’ll probably just jump on Route Nine anyway. Goodnight, the stuffed peppers were —" “EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT ...”

Oh, dear. Sarah knew she should’ve asked about the Harper’s. She put her purse on the ground, an invisible negotiation, and said,

“Okay, I’ve got ten minutes, then Lauren’s gonna –”

David was quivering. Everything preceding this moment of ecstatic wonkiness suddenly felt like an unrehearsed opening act.

“EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT the Ghost of Adeline Eleanor Conway appears at the crest of  Maple Point! She walks through the dark till daybreak, in the wedding dress she wore the night  she died, drowned when her horse lost its footing and rolled two football fields down the hill  pulling them both into the river and under the current never to be seen again.”

“Oop, babysitter’s texting. Goodnight, stuffed peppers were--"

“EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT Adeline appears in the fog, seeking the lover she left behind! Orphaned heiress to the Conway Railroad Company, her uncle, Claflin Burnsbeard Conway, swore to her father, Cleveland Millman Conway, that he would take care that Adeline married well and be provided for when he passed.”

“When who passed, Claflin?” Sarah! No, why! She knew this was how sleep-inhibiting conversational fires were spread.

David 's gesticular incredulity landed his remaining Scotch on the coat rack behind him. Fine, fine,  they were mostly raincoats anyway.

“Cleveland, Cleveland Millman Conway, he was on his deathbed, crushed by a brass and walnut Fairgrounds Organ. Adeline’s mother Ethel Elizabeth Pendergibbs had died years prior, when Adeline was still an infant. Ethel was electrocuted by the town’s first telephone when she tried to call a restaurant in Boston in a thunderstorm to see if they were open--”

David sipped at his empty glass like a cat that had dropped a spider, then jogged to the bar in the  living room, for a refill. He returned, holding the full glass in both hands, sipping and walking  and talking and concentrating.

“Adeline grew up headstrong and loosely corseted, and fell in love with McGraw Powell, a ne’er  do well and disinherited foreman of the Crystal Coastal Woods Improvement Company. He took  her to a dance and said “Meet me at midnight in your whitest woolen bridal dress, and bring all  your money in a matrimonial satchel. As you can imagine, he was up to no good!”

Sarah heard the water in the kitchen turn off. She searched over David’s shoulder for Alvin.

“Our babysitter’s thirteen, she hasn’t experienced adults defaulting on their estimated times of return yet and I don’t want to be the one who –“

Alvin had left the kitchen and moved to the living room bookshelves, where he was busy  examining book titles with his pointer finger. Goddammit, Alvin.  

“So EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT Adeline appears in a nightgown and wanders the road  looking for McGraw, never knowing that he’s the one who spooked her horse and fled for  Oregon.”

Don’t ask, Sarah, don’t --

“You said it was a woolen bridal gown –“

“EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT can you imagine! Vengeance in her eyes! Mourning!  Confusion! Sexual longing! Fog allergies!”

“Fog allergies??”

“Yes, yes, the Conway Paper Mill filled the air with pulp particles causing widespread allergies heavily reported in the Green Mountain Tribune.”

“I thought her family owned a railway!”

David puppeteered the Scotch out of his glass again, landing it this time in a puddle on the floor.  

“EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT, sneezing, runny, itchy Adeline walks barefoot, her icy peds  never peppering the ground, her hair black and wild, her eyes dark pools of motor oil, her teeth  pointy like a wolf, her hands clawing the air like a groundhog scrambling from a flooded hole.”

Enough, enough. Sarah shook her head and exhaled.

“That’s not what happened –“

David painted the air with his newly empty glass.

“Her shoulders heaving with the rage of betrayal! Her screams, stifled, dropping at her feet like burnt marshmallows! Her phantom stomach full of ghost bread and jerky she ate real fast in the barn before she left and stuffed the wrappings in a leather racing helmet! The supple smoothness  of her twenty-seven year old skin human-preserved forever in its icy purgatorial hologram!”

“That’s not what happened!”

Sarah’s sudden authority washed over David, shifting the features on his face like pebbles on a seashore, his illusions of narrative control over local lore now in serious jeopardy.  

“What?”

Cards on the table, Sarah. She’d grown up here too.  

“That’s not what happened. Some of it is, but Adeline was murdered by McGraw. She was a  wild, headstrong woman who found out that he was a scoundrel, so he poisoned her thermos of travelling milk and pushed her out of his carriage, and now she looks for scoundrels to poison, every night at midnight.”

David’s eyes flickered with excitement.

“No, no, every night at midnight, there might be something to that, but I read in a book –“ A book?”

“TV. Online. Maybe at camp. Maybe from my cousin Jared at camp that EVERY NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT she walks the road looking for ears to cut from people’s bodies.”

“WHAT?”

Alvin placed a hand on Sarah’s back, sliding his glasses up his nose again with his other hand.  “Can’t soak a cast iron skillet; I took it out and seasoned it.”

David and Sarah both blinked at Alvin.

Alvin continued, with the unselfconscious conviviality of a man who calls animals “buddy” and says “oops” when he drops napkins.

“What’re you all doing in here? We have to get home and let the babysitter go before she eats all the cookies in the house and starts going in for raw granola and full handfuls of peanut butter.”

David turned the glass in his hand and leaned in.

“We’re talking about Adeline Conway and how every night at midnight she stalks the road til dawn looking for –“

“Kendra Hobbins, the woman who was killed jogging at 6:08 am in 2008? Her ghost can be seen jogging Mountainview Drive from 6:08 until midnight.”

Now Sarah and David looked at each other.

“WHAT??”

Alvin continued, as he picked Sarah’s purse up off the floor and held it.

“Oh yeah. Kendra was feeling some kind of way in her body since she’d started sitting so much  at her full time office job in Human Resources at the Green Mountain Tribune –“

David nearly levitated.

“A long running local newspaper, what a legacy!”

Alvin continued.

“So every morning at six Kendra had taken to waking up and sneaking out of bed for runs, you know, tapping out at two or three miles, no interest in marathons, maybe a half, for sure a five-K if she can get some girls together. But feeling her body do different things. Real exciting, keeping most of her old stuff, patchwork of accumulated athletic clothes, but going in on, like, one really nice new pair of shoes before worrying about all the upmarket run culture doo dads, leave that for later. Believes ardently in the premise that the best things in life should be  things everyone can enjoy, you know, so why worry about the extras now. But, so, anyway, gets clipped by a car, in late summer and early spring, head pops open like a crystal geode, inside outside, sparkling and purple. So now when 6:08am precedes sunrise, Adeline hoofs it every night at midnight to the top of Mountainview  Drive to stop and chat with Kendra before the sun comes up and Adeline disappears. Sometimes  it’s minutes, sometimes almost an hour, but they know they have to cherish every second of their  time together, because it could all vanish with the fluctuating pinpoint of dawn. So every night at midnight and every morning at 6:08 two ghosts have woven a friendship out of shared trauma and female experiences across generations, and of course out of the capricious cruelty of Daylight Savings Time.”

No one said anything for a very long time. Alvin looked at the clock. It was after midnight. They  must have missed the chime. The house itself shrugged, and the wood beams gently creaked. Then Alvin remembered something.

“Hey David, what was that piece from Harper’s you were…”

Sarah grabbed her purse. “We should go. Route Nine is closed, we gotta take Maple Point.”

They said their final goodbyes, as the warm yellow light from inside spilled out onto the lawn and into the road, where it passed through a figure walking briskly by, and cast no shadow behind her.

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