Page 13 of Middle of the Night

No, this ball belongs to someone else. Some neighbor kid playing catch who overthrew, lost the ball in my yard, then lost interest after that. That’s the only logical explanation. Yet I know of only one kid in the neighborhood, and I doubt he’s even old enough to play catch.

Still, I grab the ball, head outside, and cross the grass to the house on the right. With any other neighbor, I’d go up the sidewalk to the front door and ring the bell. Because this is Russ, I squeeze through the hedge separating our properties, emerging like Bigfoot into the Chens’ yard.

As I’d hoped, Russ is already outside, drinking coffee on the back patio. It’s a perfect morning for it, the July heat being kept at bay by asoft breeze bringing scents from Mrs. Chen’s garden. Rose and freesia and honeysuckle.

Russ waves when he sees me and lifts his mug. “Want some?”

“Just had a cup.”

“Cool,” Russ says, in that chill surfer-dude way of his. Something he acquired after I left for private school. Before that, he’d been angsty, agitated, always fidgeting.

Then again, nothing about Russell Chen bears any resemblance to his ten-year-old self. He’d been a scrawny boy. Awkwardly so. His noodle-thin limbs, coupled with his shortness, made him appear younger than he was. He still does, only now it’s in a way that inspires envy. Tall and muscular, he looks nowhere near his actual age of forty. His face is free of worry lines, and his thick chest strains against a polo shirt branded with the logo of his sporting goods store.

Russ and I were friends as kids, although not like Billy and me. He was the third wheel we’d sometimes grudgingly let tag along. Then Billy was gone, and it was only the two of us, pushed together by the fact that we were neighbors and our parents were suddenly terrified to let us out of their sight.

I’ll never forget the first time we hung out without Billy. He’d been missing for three weeks by then, and I tried to temporarily bury my sadness and fear by playing basketball at the hoop set up in the driveway. Russ popped through the hedge and asked if he could join me. I told him no, that I wanted to be on my own.

“I know you’d rather be with Billy,” he said. “But right now, I’m your only option.”

Even back then it struck me as unbearably sad for a boy to know he was no one’s first choice for a friend. But I also thought it was brave of Russ to acknowledge it.

“Sure, you can play,” I said.

We spent the rest of the summer shooting hoops in my driveway, and stayed in touch after I went off to private school. We remainedfriendly during college, although by then we had almost nothing in common. Whereas I shrank into myself, Russ expanded, both in size and social status. Star football player. Homecoming king. Even modeled for a bit after college. Yet I still made a point to hang out with him every time I returned home for holidays or summer breaks. Seeing Russ was a much-needed reminder that not every boy on Hemlock Circle left or disappeared.

The few times he did leave, he soon found himself back here, most recently after his father passed away and Russ and his wife, Jennifer, moved in to take care of his mother. That was five years ago, and they’ve had one child since with another on the way.

“Is that for Benji?” Russ says, gesturing to the baseball in my hand.

“It’s not his? The lawn guy found it in the backyard. I thought that maybe Benji tossed it there.”

“He’s four,” Russ says. “If he can pitch like that already, then Jen and I don’t need to worry about paying for college.”

Jennifer emerges onto the patio, holding a coffee mug in one hand and helping their son down the back steps with the other. “Worry about what?”

“Ethan found a baseball,” Russ says. “Thought it was Benji’s.”

I hold out the ball so Jennifer can have a look. She shakes her head. “Not his. Benji has a ball, but it’s, like, twice that big. Toddler-sized. Where’d you find it?”

“The backyard.”

Jennifer lowers herself into the chair next to Russ, cradling her growing stomach. “Maybe it’s from someone who came to look at the Barringer place.”

Billy’s old house has changed hands multiple times since his family moved away in the mid-nineties, with no one staying there for very long. All of them were couples without kids or families with teenagers. Apparently, no one with a child wanted to risk another disappearance. The last owners, Bob and his partner, Marcel, had lasted five yearsbefore putting it on the market six months ago. Afor salesign has been planted in the front yard ever since.

“I haven’t seen anyone go near the place,” I say.

Benji tugs on my arm, wanting to see the ball for himself. I kneel and hand it to him, nervous in that way I always get around anyone under a certain age. Kids strike me as being so helpless, so fragile, and Benji is no exception. Not for the first time, I wonder how Russ and Jennifer don’t appear racked with anxiety every second of the day. Once, during a visit shortly after Benji was born, I asked Russ why he didn’t seem nervous now that he was a father.

“Oh, I’m nervous as hell,” he told me. “I’ve just gotten really good at pretending I’m not.”

Right now, Russ is all smiles as he watches Benji try to throw the ball. It sails about a foot before plunking onto the flagstone patio, proving that it definitely wasn’t Benji Chen who tossed the ball into my yard.

Having exhausted his curiosity about the baseball, Benji ambles to his father and climbs onto his lap. “What’s in there?” he says, eyeing Russ’s mug.

“Coffee. Want a sip?”

Jennifer playfully swats his arm. “Don’t you dare!”

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