The Longest Night by Andria Williams Page A

pistol, a ring.
    When they reached the walkway in front of their house—which led pleasantly across a small lawn to three concrete steps and the front door—Nat’s anxiety gave way for a moment to the coziness of recognition. They had come from someone else’s place—unfamiliar, its objects and furnishings containing no memories—back to their own, and though this house was new it still felt more theirs than the one they’d just been in. So that was a start. But as Paul switched on the light and they found themselves standing in the entryway, her heart sank again. Their small living room was filled with the hulking shadows of cardboard boxes, here and there like grazing animals. Otherwise the house was mostly empty, the walls bare and showing off their occasional dents, paint scratches, light sockets, and mysterious dark streaks. They’d been in town a month and had still hardly unpacked. The whole place smacked of unsettled, continual limbo.
    Nat knew she should have gotten the place in order by now, but it seemed impossible with the girls. She’d tackled a box the other day and, in her absorption, lost track of Liddie for only a minute; Liddie had pushed open the back door, toppled down a step, chipped a tooth, and cut her lip. How, Nat wondered, did the other housewives do it? Was she not capable of handling two things at once?
    “It’s very late, girls,” she said, “so no stories tonight. Let’s go get your nightgowns on.” Her ankle wobbled for a minute as she crossed the living room, thanks to the two gin fizzes and glass of wine she’d drank over the course of the evening. She checked herself and made it without trouble to the girls’ bedroom.
    Sam’s pupils had the eerie dilation of a late-night sugar high. She clambered up through her nightgown and out the top. “I’m not tired, Mama,” she said. “I could stay up forever.”
    “I bet you could,” said Nat, tugging Sam’s arms through the sleeves, “but we need to try to sleep.”
    “Can we keep the light on?”
    “No,” Nat said. “Lie down next to Liddie.”
    “She took my airplane,” Sam said, scowling at her sister.
    “We’ll sort that out in the morning. Sam, keep your tongue in your mouth.”
    “When will we get our
beds
?” Sam cried.
    The movers had somehow lost Sam’s and Liddie’s beds on the way from Virginia to Idaho. Stupidly, Nat had signed the release before making sure the beds were among the dozens of brown boxes, and now they had to pay for replacements themselves. She and Paul didn’t have a bed yet, either; they’d planned to buy one—probably from the Goodwill because full-size beds were expensive—but he’d been working so much in the month since they moved that they hadn’t gotten around to it.
    Nat patted the floor and Sam finally toppled next to her. “We’ll go to the J.C. Penney’s on Monday and find you something,” she said. “I know you’re tired of sleeping on the floor.”
    Of course, as soon as Nat got Sam to lay down, Liddie began wandering in the tipsy, lurching circles of an exhausted toddler. She roamed confusedly, shuffling in an increasingly tighter spiral until she tripped over her own feet and sat down crying. “Sweetheart,” Nat began, but the child was up again. She wanted to enjoy a night on the town in the new house, sticking her finger into sockets, tasting a dead fly off the windowsill, scaling the bathroom sink.
    “Mama, I want you
in
my blankets,” Sam was saying. “In my blankets
with
me!”
    Liddie finally stood still and began to hiccup. She stared at Nat with huge, accusatory eyes.
    “Girls,” Nat cried, fighting her exasperation.
    “What’s going on in here?” asked Paul from the doorway, and they all went silent. He sounded irritated. They waited to see what he would say. But he sighed, and came in and settled next to Sam, tucking Liddie’s pink crocheted blanket around her body and rubbing her small, hiccupping back. The carpet, pressed to Nat’s