Not a Ghost Story

The last time Sonny picked someone up walking down Sheridan Road in the middle of the night, she turned out to be the ghost of a girl named Judy who had drowned on her prom night. The spirit directed him to a mansion in Evanston, right by the lake. Sonny left her sleeping in the passenger seat of his '71 Super Beetle and walked up the long front walk. He ascended three steps and stood on the darkened porch, hesitant, before finally ringing the doorbell. The bell sounded like an actual set of bells, like on a church or something, and resonated throughout the sleeping house. Sonny stood there waiting for about twenty seconds when the porch light cracked on and startled him. An ancient, blue-haired lady answered the door in her nightgown. It was just past two o'clock in the morning.

 "I'm real sorry to wake you, ma'am, but there's a young lady asleep in my car wearing a pink prom dress who says she lives here," Sonny told her.

"Oh! Not again," the old woman mumbled. Sonny just stood there on the porch waiting for more of a response. "That'd be Judy, my daughter," she continued.

 "I'm sorry ma'am, but this girl's like 16. There's no way-"

"I know, I know: I'm too old to be her mother," the old lady said. Sonny nodded and relaxed, pleased that she finally understood. "She died 39 years ago in a car crash: drown."

At that, Sonny started shaking his head. This lady was getting further and further from the point. He reached into the house, grabbed the woman's arm and pulled her towards his rusty red VW.

"Come on: I'll show you," he said, leading the way. "This girl is cold and wet and scared, but I touched her hand; I helped her get in the car." He brought the old woman out to the street, right up to his car. Sonny saw the passenger seat was empty before he yanked the door open, but he yanked the door open anyway, and stuck his head inside the vehicle, looking into the backseat, puzzled, in disbelief at the vacancy.

 "She's never there," the old lady said, standing on the sidewalk behind him. Sonny felt the seat where the girl had been: it was soaking wet.

"This used to happen a lot," she continued. "Maybe six times in the first ten years after she'd gone. Now, not so much. About four years ago, in the spring like this, another young man stood where you're standing now. Judy never quite makes it home, though."

Sonny turned around and faced the old woman. She shivered in the night air.

"Why don't you do something?" Sonny asked her.

"Like what, put a sign in the yard? Sorry to inconvenience you. Good night," she told him and walked away.

 Naturally, six weeks later, when Sonny saw Darla walking towards the city on Sheridan Road, he assumed she was a ghost, too. She certainly looked dead. She was stark white. Her skin shown blue in the full moonlight. Her dark hair was a mess. Instead of an evening gown, she wore a black Motorhead shirt and short cut-offs. Sonny rolled up next to her, the Beetle buzzing and shaking violently till he shifted into neutral. His windows were rolled down.

Sonny leaned over onto the passenger seat and Darla stopped and stared back at him. They were both silent for a few seconds.

"Are you gonna offer me a ride, or what?" Darla asked him, finally breaking the silence, almost sounding snotty. There was no dream-like state to this encounter: Darla was real, alive.

"Sure thing. Hop in." Sonny answered, opening the passenger door from the inside, and giving it a little shove. He leaned back over behind the wheel and watched her black Doc Martens and argyle socks step off the curb and approach the car casually. The Beetle sounded like a lawnmower underwater as he shifted into first gear and drove south.

"Where do you live?" Sonny asked.

 Darla's house could only be described as an estate. Her father owned a 180-person capacity dinner charter on Lake Michigan. His vessel was named "The Seahorse", and in a pretentious manner, and none too subtle, Darla's father commissioned two granite stallions, mirroring each other, with the lower torsos of whales and their front hooves contorted into a heavy gallop to be erected at the twelve-foot wrought iron gate of his house.

The hand-laid cobblestone drive is an eighth of a mile to the house, which is a monster with ten bedrooms, two dining rooms, three common dens and a twenty-five hundred volume classical library; the kind of place where turning left down the main hall means you just entered the east wing.  The servants' quarters, located out back, was a twelve hundred square foot, three-bedroom home.

Walking into the house, one first entered the massive foyer with vaulted ceilings, which was almost the size of Sonny's apartment. The fancy crystal chandelier was removed every November to make room for the arrival of the twenty-foot live Douglas fir that Darla's father has cut down and flown in from Canada every year for Christmas.

Every modern convenience and luxury accommodation is readily available, save love.

With that much success came "stuff", which managed to take all precedence. The stuff was more important than the relationship with his daughter. Darla's mom had vanished without a trace more than a decade ago, and her stepmother had never shown an interest in her. She was pushed aside to a far corner room of the estate and had more interaction with the cook and the maid than her parents. So, Darla decided to leave home.

She stood in the kitchen, ignoring the Brazilian cherry cabinetry, the fancy recessed lighting and the double-oven. She didn't take any food out of the three-hundred-foot capacity stainless steel refrigerator. She merely removed a yellow sheet of paper from a legal pad that was in a drawer by the telephone and a pen, laid them both on the marble countertop and contemplated what to say in her good-bye note. She could not find the words, but it only took a few minutes to find the message. She laid an old silver pacifier with her initials engraved on it on the sheet of paper, opened the shatterproof sliding glass door and walked out, leaving the door fully opened.

 "I don't live anywhere," she told Sonny. "I'm homeless." Sonny looked at her briefly. He had no way of knowing her circumstances, but he found it hard to believe that she was homeless.

"What do you mean, you're homeless? How old are you?" he asked.

"How old are you?" Darla rebutted, instead of answering.

"Nineteen," Sonny answered.

"I'm fifteen. I'm fifteen, and I'm homeless, OK?"

"Well, how long have you been homeless, Miss…?"

"Darla," she filled in, "and I've been homeless for about nine hours now," she added, glancing at her wristwatch. Sonny kept his eyes on the road, not sure what to do next. He'd picked up a stray, and he knew better than to feed her, because if you feed a stray, it'll never leave.

"Well, my name's Sonny. You hungry?"

"Yeah, I'm starving," she told him.

"I bet. The mean streets of Evanston can be pretty unforgiving." Darla glared at Sonny, who had his lips folded in tight, biting them between his teeth so he wouldn't laugh. He glanced at her and smiled. "Right?" he said, trying hard to hold back the laughter. Then Darla cracked a smile, too, and Sonny erupted. Darla knew he was teasing her, good-naturedly, and she started to giggle despite herself. It felt good to let go of the angst that had led her here.

"Yeah, Evanston's pretty hardcore," she joked, Sonny laughing harder and weaving as he drove with tears in his eyes.

"Let's go to IHOP," he told her.

 Even though there were only four customers in the entire restaurant, Darla asked to be seated in an area to the right of the front counter that was smaller than the main dining room. It was a relic: the former smoking section. The waitress, who had obviously already cleaned that area, and wished to keep it clean until the morning rush glanced back toward the larger, main section of the International House of Pancakes with apprehension.

"We promise not to make a mess," Sonny promised, attempting to alleviate the old waitress's reluctance.

"OK," she replied in a raspy voice. She grabbed two tall, laminated menus from somewhere hidden beneath the counter, and led them to a booth in the corner of the empty room. They were all but alone, which seemed to please Darla, and suited Sonny just fine.

 They both ordered coffee and began to look at the pictures of the featured breakfasts in the menu. The aged, obvious, career waitress returned promptly, before their menus were closed and laying on the table, which is the internationally recognized sign of a customer being ready to order, and she asked "You's ready?"

"Yeah, um," Darla started, "I'll have this," she announced, pointing to a picture of a pancake-laden platter in the center of the page.

"The Rooty-tooty? And for you?" the waitress directed to Sonny.

"OK, I'll have the," he drew out the word 'the', still scanning the menu until he found exactly what he was looking for: "the two by two," he paused and kept reading the words on the menu, "by two," he concluded.

"Sausage or bacon?" asked the waitress, sounding bored with the routine.

"Bacon. And can I have a side of hash browns, please?" Sonny asked, smiling like a child.

"Sure, hon. How you want your eggs?" 

"Sunny side up."

"Got it," said the waitress, scribbling on her pad. "I'll be back with your order." Sonny and Darla folded their menus back into their original forms and handed them to the waitress, who then turned and walked away, only to return in ten seconds with a fresh pot of coffee. She topped off their cups and left.

"Thank you," Sonny spoke to her back.

 Sonny watched Darla pick up the glass sugar shaker and tip it over her cup for a good four seconds, and it was a good four seconds more before the white crystals of sweetness all sank away from the top of the cup.

Sonny decided to dispense with the formalities: "So why'd you run away?" he asked her. Darla's black hair hung in her face, so Sonny had no idea how she had taken the question. "Unless you don't wanna tell me," he added.

She stirred the sugar with a faint cling-cling against the side of the cup, almost musically, and tapped the spoon on the edge of the mug before abandoning it on the saucer. Holding the coffee cup in her right hand, she pushed her wild hair out of her face with her left and slurped a hot sip. Sonny just sat and stared at her. That moment was really the first good look at Darla's face that he had gotten, and he thought to himself how lovely and sad she looked.

Her features were delicate. Her nose was small, pointed and pierced through the septum. Her mouth was also small, with almost colorless lips: just a slightly pinkish hue differentiated them from the rest of her white face. And Darla's eyes, surrounded by blackness, were sky blue like the eyes of a wolf. She looked through Sonny with those eyes and made him feel like a child sitting at the table with an older, wiser person.

"No, that's OK," she told him, lowering the cup back down to its resting place on the gray-specked, ceramic disk. Sonny squirmed on his side of the booth with a sudden, dreadful anticipation. He hoped to God that he wasn't about to hear tales of incestuous rape or molestation.

 "My parents suck," she told him, and though that could have included atrocities up to and including incestuous rape or molestation, Sonny took her tone to mean that it was something that sucked much less, and relief washed over him.

"Can you define 'suck'?" he asked.

"My parents are too busy for me. I honestly can't remember the last time either of them spoke to me- like really spoke to me. Occasionally I'll see my father or his wife in passing, and we'll each nod awkwardly or fake-smile, like former enemies stuck in the same jail cell. There's just no love there. I seriously doubt they'll even notice that I'm gone."

"I find that hard to believe," Sonny said.

"Which part?" she inquired.

"That they won't notice you're gone."

Darla looked Sonny in the eyes, "Wanna bet?"

"Bet?" Sonny asked her. "No I don't wanna bet. I want my freaking two by two by two already. What's taking so long?" Darla could hear Spanish gibberish coming from the kitchen. She wasn't fluent, but she could comprendo enough to know that the cooks at this particular International House of Pancakes were not in the least bit concerned with promptness at 3 o'clock in the morning.

"It should be coming pretty soon," she reassured him.

"OK, so you left home because you wanted attention, then?" he asked pointedly.

"No, I don't want attention. I want just the opposite. Kind of. I want to confirm that there is no attention because I really don't think my parents will notice I'm gone." Sonny started shaking his head. He found it difficult to imagine a home so devoid of affection. Even a year and a half after Sonny moved out, he still brought his dirty laundry to his parents' house so his mom could wash it for him every week or so.

"That's impossible."

"Wanna bet?" Darla asked again, this time even reaching out her bony right hand, ready to shake on it without even discussing the terms of her proposed wager.

 Right then the haggard waitress returned with a tray balanced on her left arm.

"OK, kids," she announced, grabbing at the nearest plate. She sat down Sonny's eggs, pancakes and bacon in front of him. The eggs were scrambled, and he had specifically asked for sunny side up. He noticed immediately that it was wrong, but figured if it took them half an hour to fuck up his order, God knows how long it might take to get it right. "And your Rooty-Tooty," she said, putting the tall stack of fruit splattered-pancakes in front of Darla's hungry face. "Do you's need anything else?"

Sonny and Darla looked at each other and half shook their heads. "No, I think we're good," Sonny answered. The waitress pressed the bill against the table nonchalantly, indicating pretty clearly that she was done serving them now. Her question apparently meaning 'anything else for the duration of your meal', and 'no' being taken as literally as possible.

 Darla immediately grabbed the glass jar of maple syrup from the little trio of syrups on the caddy and hovered it above her plate in an attempt to pour the sugary mess on top of her Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity. She put her thumb on the silver, steel lever and tried to depress it, but the sliding mechanism on top was sealed in maple goodness. Sonny watched Darla struggle with the syrup for a good ten seconds with amusement before he leaned back and stretched his arm to the neighboring table and borrowed the maple syrup.

"Try this one," he told her, presenting the replacement.

"Thanks," Darla said, grabbing the jar and having immediate success. The thick golden-brown goo slowly oozed out of the jar, strongly resisting gravity, but finally fell onto the upper layer of Darla's pancakes, and distributed itself across the surface, skirting around strawberries and bananas to follow the path of least resistance. Darla's face gleamed like a kid at Christmas, and she dug in.

 Halfway through, Darla was sick of eating. Sonny, who wasn't even hungry, cleaned his plate. The bill was just under 13 bucks. Sonny looked around aimlessly but didn't see a single IHOP employee anywhere. He decided to leave a 20 on the table. Part of him admired the cunningness of the waitress for putting him, an obviously decent man, in a position to greatly over-tip less than mediocre service rather than hunt down and bother a beyond-her-prime-years waitress for a few bucks' change. But some part of him resented her, also, and the thought of bolting out of the restaurant without leaving a dime on the table crossed his mind. Sonny left a smirking Andrew Jackson lying on the table that they had failed to keep clean.

 On the second try Sonny's bug fluttered to life. He exited the IHOP parking lot and looked at Darla.

"So where do you want to go?" Darla just blinked three times, as if she was surprised that she hadn't come across as being desperate enough for Sonny to volunteer some chivalry. "Home? Or a friend's house?" he suggested.

"How about your place?" she asked.

"Do you really think that's such a good idea?"

"I honestly don't have anywhere else to go, not even a friend's house." Sonny turned onto highway 14 heading east.

 They were yelling over the gushing of the wind blowing in through the rolled-down windows. The sounds of the VW's engine and the wet, stale smell of the Chicago streets drifted in. Sonny looked over at Darla. Her hair had a mind of its own. It swirled and flapped against her head, and Sonny wondered how difficult it would be to comb out the tangles of this night's drive, or if the girl would even bother.

Darla stared out the window, hypnotized. As they drove past a huge cemetery on their right Darla mumbled something. It sounded like, "I could stay there," but Sonny couldn't be sure. He tried to scan her face for any truth to that possible statement. Then Sonny looked past her, out the window at the tombstones and marble tombs of the dead.

 "Look out!" Darla screamed. Sonny looked up just in time to see a huge, hairy animal in the middle of the street. Its eyes reflected an eerie greenish glow back from the headlights. Sonny jerked the wheel hard to the left and then back to the right, narrowly missing the beast, which remained frozen in the middle of the street. Darla wasn't wearing her seat belt. She was pressed hard against the passenger side door and then immediately flung the opposite direction, almost onto Sonny's lap. Her butt wedged between the bucket seats and hit the gear shift, inadvertently knocking the bug into neutral. The engine wailed loudly with idle throttle. Sonny instinctively shoved his hand toward the gear shift, but first found Darla's inner thigh. She squirmed a little bit, losing the stick between her legs.

The commotion panicked Sonny. He swerved for no reason as he tried to find the stick shift only to continue fumbling between the girl's legs.

"Let me just move first," she shouted. Sonny finally took his foot off the gas and regained control of the vehicle. Darla slid back over into her seat, reached behind her for the seatbelt and pulled it across her chest to the receiving end of the metal clasp. Sonny grabbed the stick and put the car into third gear, then fourth. Sonny thought the creature in the road was probably just a big dog. Darla was sure it was a wolf, or at least a coyote. They both agreed it was probably a canine; definitely a mammal.

 "OK, look," he half-shouted to be heard plainly over the rushing wind and rattling engine, "you can stay with me, but just until your parents start looking for you, whether that's a day or a week."

"What if it's never?" she inquired.

"Then I guess you'll have to start chippin' in rent, huh?"

"Great," she replied. Sonny reflected for a moment on the teenage runaway with the upper torso of a heroin addict and the thighs of a soccer player: yeah great, he thought. This was probably a bad idea.

"Yeah, great," he said, trying to convince them both.

Sonny threw the Sun Times down on top of the Tribune. He opened a copy of the Evanston Review to the classifieds section: a last-ditch effort. He huffed loudly and turned the pages like he'd done most every day for the last 20 days.

"…Mya Jennings…" "…come on down," the T.V. echoed Darla. She had her bare feet on the coffee table dangerously close to tipping over a Red Bull can full of cigarette butts. The rainy-day, 10am morning light seeped in through the vertical blinds of Sonny's balcony. It made the polish on Darla's toenails look black, but Sonny knew it was maroon- still dark, even and smooth, though he'd never seen her paint them. Sonny kept shuffling through the paper in vain. He finally threw it down in disgust. Sonny had been positive that after a week Darla's parents would be worried sick, regardless of her claims to the contrary. He was sure, any day now, newspaper headlines would appear on every paper in the Mid-West: Millionaire's Daughter Kidnapped!? But that didn't happen. Not even a ten-word ad in the personals section: We miss you Jo Jo. Please come home. All is forgiven. He was even beginning to wonder if the headlines might read Millionaire's body found, daughter missing, one of these days, but still nothing, after more than three weeks of coming home from school or work to find Darla idle on the sofa, wasting her life away.

"Can I check your cell phone again? To see if anyone called?"

"Nobody called. I promise," she answered absentmindedly without looking away from the pricing game on the screen. He picked up her cell phone from the coffee table and sat down next to her. There were no missed calls. No incoming calls. No messages. Sonny couldn't understand it.

He sat the phone back down amongst the strewn cans and other junk on the table and looked around his apartment. The bland but once tidy one-bedroom apartment was starting to seem a little fuzzy around the edges. Darla wasn't exactly a slob, but she was not much for housekeeping. She'd obviously never had to lift a finger for such a thing as cleanliness' sake. She wasn't much for cooking either, but then again, she ate next to nothing, so it kinda evened out. Still, dishes that used to get done, maybe not right after every meal, but got done none the less, were starting to pile up. The air was musky, partly due to the new resident smoker. He even found himself missing his weekly laundry visits. Sonny was caught in a rift of wanting to take care of someone who really didn't need him to take care of her, and his inability to really take care of himself. And the longer it went on, the harder it became to change it.

 A few days later Sonny came home from school to something unexpected: As he climbed the steps in the dim stairwell of his aged, brick apartment building near Lincoln Park, he made out the unfamiliar sounds of laughter stiffly forcing its way through the door of apartment 3G. He stood outside his apartment staring at the brass number and letter tacked to his door hanging somewhere between wonder and disbelief. He slowly inserted his house key into the lock and turned it, but the bolt was already unlocked. He opened the door.

 The immediately recognizable smell of pot smoke slapped him in the face. He slammed the door shut behind him, paranoid. Darla had a pink Plexiglas bong pressed to her lips. No laughter came from her mouth. Beside her, sitting too close, was Todd, a guy Sonny knew from De Paul. Sonny considered Todd a pretty good friend but didn't feel that way now. At this moment Todd looked like the enemy. A testosterone-fueled jealousy, a bighorn ram bucking the head of a rival big-horn ram feeling filled his stomach.

 He stood in front of the closed door, keys in hand, backpack hanging from his left shoulder. To his left was the kitchen. Dishes filled the sink. A skillet used for Hamburger Helper a week ago still sat on the stovetop. A few graying Cheerios were scattered across the dusty hardwood floor that flowed seamlessly past the breakfast bar littered with junk mail into the nearly vacant living room in front of him. The room's solitary piece of seating, occupied by Darla and the intruding Todd, faced the T.V./entertainment center/ bookshelves. Sonny looked at them sort of diagonally.

On the shelves to Sonny's right sat his mostly ignored World Book Encyclopedia set, old textbooks he decided to keep rather than sell back to the bookstore for pennies on the dollar, and about a hundred paperbacks. Some stood on their ends. Others were stacked haphazardly on their sides, only broken up by different knick-knacks- an eleven-inch globe from Target, an old glass Dr. Pepper bottle he found in Kentucky a few years ago while camping with his father, and two little jade statues of Buddha- one holding his ears, and another his eyes. Speak-no-evil Buddha was lost, but Sonny remembered that it existed though and chose not to say the first thing that came to his mind -something about bighorn sheep- and instead settled on "What're you doin' here, Todd?" trying to sound pleasantly surprised.

"Your pet let me in," Todd croaked in a stoned-sounding voice, not unlike Auto the bus driver.

"My what?" Sonny asked. He understood the word and the meaning behind it, but he asked anyway, even though he shouldn't have.

"Your PET," he said again, emphasizing the word almost to the point of spitting while pointing his thumb like a hitchhiker in a double-pumping motion at Darla.

"Your," pump "PET" pump, he'd said. Darla coughed out a silver cloud and glared at Todd. Sonny could see her face plainly, but Todd was now facing away from him. Jeopardy was twinkling further to Sonny's right on the T.V. in the clutter.

"Don't call me that," Darla demanded.

"Why? What are you then?" Todd taunted. Darla just sat there. "You're not his roommate. You're not his cousin or something. You're obviously not the maid, or you'd be fired. You're not his girlfriend, are you?"

"No!" Darla and Sonny both answered simultaneously. The question brought the words 'statutory rape' to Sonny's mind, but he didn't know why Darla had been so quick to answer that way. Statutory rape was just a baseless false impression he did not wish to set in anyone's mind. Not that Sonny was John Q. Law. He'd thought about it. Pretty much every time Darla took a shower, he thought about it. When she'd borrow his white tank top undershirts and boxer shorts, like she was wearing right then, too. And it never, not one single time, failed to cross his mind every time he slid into his lonely queen-sized bed with Darla playing insomniac on the couch.

He told her she didn't have to sleep there. And she didn't, always. He came home from work or school a dozen times to find Darla resting peacefully in his bed without him. She just never went to bed when he did. It bothered him less and less, though.

"I didn't think so," Todd sniveled. "Then what are you, girl?"

 "Nothing. Nobody." Darla whispered.

"Well, actually, she's an invited guest, which is more than some can claim, Todd. Why'd you stop by again?"

Todd hesitated. "Just to see what you're up to," he said finally.

"It's Tuesday: I had school. Don't you go to class anymore?" Sonny asked. Sonny knew Todd did go to class, and he was pretty sure Todd knew he'd be in class, too. Sonny wondered if the S.O.B. wasn't coming over specifically to catch a glimpse of his 'pet'. Or more. What had he told Todd about her? He couldn't remember exactly. If he'd said anything and not used the words 'amazing', 'mystical', 'gorgeous', 'fascinating', and especially '15-year-old-girl' he'd said nothing at all. What else was there to say?

Sonny dropped his bag on the floor next to the front door and put his keys on the breakfast bar, right on top of a pile of miscellanea, where they would almost surely disappe

ar from by morning. He made his way past the loose pages of classified ads, Chinese takeout boxes, soda cans, beer cans, beer bottles, articles of clothing, and one mysterious, three-wheeled skateboard to his couch and looked down at his guests.

Todd's appearance was easily dismissible: blond-haired, blue-eyed, JC Penny catalog-looking prepster. Sure, Todd was a good-looking guy, in that All-American type of way, but Sonny thought surely a girl like Darla –a girl with Robert Smith-like, black, tangled hair and a silver horseshoe through the center of her nose- would prefer a guy like him to Todd. Sonny was a bike messenger; built like a marathon runner; had two tattoos –both variations of the Yin Yang- drove a classic, foreign, imported car; hated AC/DC; and was told by more than one person his large, pointed nose was attractive, and in his case, was almost certainly indicative of other aspects of his physique.

Darla looked skinnier than ever, which was saying something. She had on one of Sonny's 'wife-beaters' which would've clung tightly to his wiry frame but hung slightly loose on hers. Her shoulder blades were truly blade-like. Her collar bone was almost as pronounced as her cleavage. Barley-there traces of pencil-tip pink erasers of nipples peaked through the ribbed fabric of the tank top. Her curiously athletic legs were folded beneath her, hanging out of a pair of Sonny's plaid boxer shorts.

He stood in front of them and waited for a gap to appear. Todd slid to his right and leaned against the arm of the sofa. That left an equally small amount of space on either side of Darla. Sonny waited to see if she would choose to scoot over into the middle, to sit by him and Todd, or move all the way to the left and give Sonny the sole pleasure.  Darla picked the middle, and what sounded like hysterical laughter a few moments ago outside his door was reduced to a conversation-less television trance. Sonny, Darla and Todd sat and watched the rest of Jeopardy, then the news. After that, Todd got bored and decided to leave.

"It's been real," he said. "Later, dude. Adios, Sonny's pet."

"Fuck off, Todd," Darla replied. Todd half-nodded and winked at Darla.

"Lemme show you out, dude," Sonny said, rising from his spot on the couch next to his not maid, or cousin, or girlfriend and followed Todd across the disorderly living room to the door. Todd opened the front door and stepped out into the hall. Sonny followed. He pulled the door most of the way shut behind him, keeping his right hand on the knob.

"Hey, man," Sonny said. A lot of things crossed his mind. He didn't know how best to address Todd regarding Darla. He wanted to say something like, "Just so you know: she's off-limits." He wished he could've honestly claimed her that way. He thought about simply lying. And he thought that he should at least say that even though she wasn't his 'girlfriend' per se, she did in fact mean something to him. Maybe even a lot. He wanted to tell Todd that it was only a matter of time; just an awkward set of circumstances that separated him and Darla, but other than that- that hopeful half-truth –she was his.

"Yeah?" said Todd.

Sonny decided not to say anything. "Never mind. Take it easy," he said instead and held his right hand out in a 'gimme five'. Todd lightly slapped that hand and walked down the short hallway to the stairs.

 Sonny came back inside and sat down next to Darla on the hand-me-down couch, just the way they were before, but without Todd. They sat in virtual silence watching network television until the Tuesday evening movie came on. It was "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome."

"Tina Turner is awesome in this," Darla said, long before Tina actually graced the screen. But Sonny didn't think much of Tina's performance.

"Yeah. Two men enter…" he started, "…one man leave," they finished in stereo. Sonny started to laugh, and Darla kind of smiled. It almost made Sonny feel connected, at least a little, with her. Then something unprecedented happened: Darla leaned over and laid her head in Sonny's lap and stretched out on the couch without a word. Whether she was flirting or just making herself comfy was a mystery. Sonny couldn't focus on Mad Max one bit. He could only think of Darla. Her sweet and smoky smell. The softness of her skin. The tickling prickliness of her hair. After a long while and much inner contemplation, Sonny found the nerve to rest his right hand on Darla's right arm. Her skin was slightly cold. She didn't respond to his hand. Not a flinch or squirm. No relaxation or settling into him further. No sense of snuggling. Just a man's hand on a pale, frail girl's shoulder. But it was enough to please Sonny. She didn't lean up and kiss him, or even hold his hand, but she hadn't shrugged it off or brushed it away either. 

"I could really see myself falling for you," he told her.

"Why?" she asked.

 It was a couple weeks after Sonny had nearly let the "L" word slip that he decided to call Darla's house and see if he could get some actual information about her. Maybe. He'd still been reading several local newspapers a few times a week and checking milk cartons and telephone poles for MISSING posters when the whole trust factor really started to nag at him.

 "I wanna call your parents," he told her.

"For what?" Darla asked. 

Sonny shrugged his response: he didn't know exactly. "What's your phone number?" Sonny was reaching for his own cordless phone from the coffee table.

"8 6 7 5 3 0 9," she told him. He dialed the number. It was just past noon on a Sunday. The phone rang and rang. Darla glanced at Sonny, then she got up and stepped onto the balcony, parting the vertical blinds with her hand. She left the sliding glass door open, and the hanging strips of plastic swung back and forth slowly, fanning out to reveal Darla smoking a Camel light and letting the sun in, before coming back together and casting polygonal shadows. Faint sounds of Sunday drivers drifted up three stories while the phone continued to ring. Finally, a scratchy, deep voice answered, "Yea-llo?"

"Uh, yes sir. Is Darla, uh, there?" Sonny asked. There was a pause. A long pause. Was Sonny opening a wound? Was this phone call being traced by the kidnapping division of the Chicago Police Department? Was-

"Did you try her cell phone?" the bored voice asked, slicing through Sonny's wild ideas like a gimmick knife on an infomercial slices through an aluminum can.

"What?" was all Sonny could come up with as a reply. Another brief pause. Then the man, presumably Darla's father, sighed loudly.

"I said 'did you try her cell phone?' She normally answers her cell phone, OK?" Sonny didn't answer quickly enough, apparently, because her dad asked, "OK?" again, with more emphasis.

"No, but I will," Sonny told him.

 The phone on the other end of the line clicked, and electric silence filled Sonny's receiver. He hung up, too. Darla was still standing on the balcony, partially hidden behind the wiggling blinds.

"What'd he say?" she called out to him, turned halfway around. Sonny knew she probably knew, or at least she knew her dad wasn't crying and begging for any information that could lead to the return of his daughter.

"He asked if I had tried your cell phone."

Darla took a drag. "Did he give ya the number?" She had a sarcastic tone and exhaled as she spoke. She turned away again. Sonny really started to feel like crap. All those times he asked to check her voicemail, looked through the list of missed calls and all that nonsense, Darla was just humoring him. She knew he would never call.

 Sonny always enjoyed riding his bike. He had the same BMX-style, old school Dyno that he had had when he was 13. Now he used it for bike messaging. Sonny didn't do it just for the money- it was the freedom also. By the time he went to a downtown law firm after class on Monday to pick up his first of the day's deliveries, Sonny felt the anxiety of all the daily grind melting away, even though he was 'working'. All those mixed-up feelings of lonely confusion that had floated over his head like a storm cloud, and lived in his heart since he met Darla -all that was melting away. But that feeling ended as quickly as it began.

 At 12:32pm the phone in Sonny's apartment started ringing. It rang and rang and rang. Finally, the answering machine came on: "Hi, this is Sonny. Leave a message." Beep.

 "Darla," Sonny's voice said on his own answering machine. He sounded tired. "I don't think I'm gonna make it home tonight," he told the machine, hoping Darla would get the message. "I was hauling ass down that slope on Jackson Boulevard, by Union Station, before the River. I remember the light was green, for sure." He paused, took a deep, labored breath and continued: "There weren't many cars. But some dude in an Escalade decided to turn right. He didn't use his blinker. I went over…" he paused again, and strained to speak, like a wounded hero in a cartoon giving his farewell speech. "I flipped over the hood and came down pretty hard on the street. I'm bleeding pretty bad. Some lady called the ambulance. I think they're taking me to North Western Memorial." Sonny breathed in and out into the phone. He almost fell asleep. "There's a few bucks on my dresser. Get something to eat with it." He waited a few more seconds before speaking again. "And Darla, I meant what I said that night."

 Sonny lost consciousness. His mangled bike was left on the corner of Jackson and Wacker. His cell phone twinkled in the street in a sticky puddle of maroon. No bystanders got the plate number of the shiny black SUV that had fled the scene.

 Sonny opened his eyes. Tubes and electronic gizmos swung to and fro in the back of the ambulance. A young black man with a well-trimmed mustache and latex gloves was bent over him. His mouth was moving, but Sonny could only make out the faint sounds of the siren howling beyond an annoying gurgling in his ears like he was lying in a bathtub. Sonny closed his eyes.

 When he opened them again all he saw at first was white light. Fuzzy rectangular halos slowly focused to reveal large, fluorescent light panels in a paneled ceiling. The ceiling was mostly white. The randomly sprinkled black specks in the tiles seemed to Sonny like a film negative of the beginnings of the first snow of the season. He felt like he was floating, looking down on the world. When the silvery strip of metal surrounding the light panels caught Sonny's eye, and the stinging, sterile odor of iodine and the sweet smell of false cleanliness of some kind of air freshener hit his nose, the reality of the situation became clear to him. It had taken him a minute, but he figured out he was in a hospital, and he remembered bits and pieces of the accident –the fear/ 'oh shit' feeling of anticipation in his stomach when he knew he wouldn't be able to dodge the vehicle; the flash of pain followed by total numbness throughout his body upon impact with the unyielding cement; his phone call to Darla- he remembered those things.

 His eyes drifted around the room. All the images he saw swirled and blurred with the movement. When he focused his gaze on one object, it seemed to solidify. The effect was dizzying. His senses felt dull. Sonny looked down at his body. Thick black scabs covered the multiple scrapes and scratches that lined his arms as if he had lost a fight with a bobcat. Tubes penetrated his skin and ran up to machines and baggies hanging from stainless steel stands to his right. His groin was sore. Sonny reached down and found there was also a tube inserted into his dick hole.

Forgetting about their master, Sonny's eyes continued to scan the room, slowly, to avoid making the room spin. Directly in front of him, near the ceiling, was a silver television mounted to the wall with a swiveling bracket. To his right, beyond the beeping machines, was a small window. The gray light outside seemed to travel away from him, chased elsewhere by the fluorescent lights in the room. To his left was an empty hospital bed stripped of its sheets. The guardrails on the right side were lowered to accommodate a patient's easy access. Starry gleams of light reflected off of the glossy tile floor. All was quiet, except the steady beep, beep, beep of the machines.

 Sonny laid on the fully-reclined rubber mattress dreamily. The large wooden door on the far side of the empty bed opened into the room. A nurse walked in carrying a clipboard. She was probably younger than Sonny's mom; maybe in her mid-thirties. She had shoulder-length wavy brown hair, and a kind but tired face. She was quite pretty. The nurse crossed the room in a few quick strides, her thick-soled nurse's shoes shh-shhing across the tile floor. She stood at the foot of Sonny's bed and read a chart that hung there, then scribbled on her clipboard. Next she shh'd to the beeping machines tethered to Sonny, read the digital readout, squeezed a bag half-full of clear liquid that was slowly dripping into one of Sonny's tubes and wrote on her clipboard again. Lastly, the nurse leaned over to check her patient. Her eyes met his, staring space-ily up at her. The nurse nearly jumped out of her skin, alarming Sonny almost as much, and the beeping machines beeped faster.

 "Gracious! You scared me," the nurse said.

"Sorry," replied Sonny.

"No, it's fine. I just didn't expect you to be awake."

"Why? What time is it?" Sonny asked. The look on the nurse's face changed from smiling after a startle to one of concern.

"Well, it's 11 o'clock in the morning."

Sonny's eyes widened and he stirred slightly in the bed. "You mean I've been asleep since yesterday afternoon?" He couldn't believe it. Then the nurse's facial expression deepened. She hardly looked friendly anymore: just stone serious.

"OK, first you need to relax. Tell me how you're feeling."

Sonny laid back and quit wriggling in his stiff sheets. "Fine, I guess. A little out of it's all."

"That's to be expected when you take a bump on the head like you did. You should wear a helmet," she told him.

"I know. I know."

"Don't take it so lightly. You could have been killed."

Sonny snorted a scoff. "I just had the wind knocked out of me." The nurse pressed the clipboard to her breast and crossed her arms over her purple scrubs.

"You nearly had the life knocked out of you. You received a Basal skull fracture, and were in a minor coma for four days."

 "Four days?" Sonny wondered at it. The plethora of concerns that instantly intruded on his cloudy state of mind about typical life matters like bills, work or school all seemed trivial when he thought about Darla being alone in his apartment if she was even still there. "Four days: I can't believe it. And what, pray tell, is a minor coma?" 

"Without boring you with the biology textbook answer: you were in a very deep sleep, completely unresponsive to light, sound or pain. We couldn't wake you up."

 Sonny rolled his eyes in disbelief. His vision blurred and he felt the room start to spin. Sonny closed his eyes tight and grabbed onto the guardrails of the hospital bed to steady himself, but he still felt like a kid on the merry-go-round who just wanted to get off. The nurse rested a warm hand on his. He opened his eyes and looked up at her.

"Are you OK?" she asked.

"Actually, no," Sonny said, and may have elaborated, but the door to his room opened again, and both he and the nurse turned their heads.

 Sonny's mother entered the room. Her head was turned down and her hair was frizzled. When she looked towards Sonny's bed, he could see the black circles under her eyes as they widened at the sight of him sitting up and alert. A paper cup she was carrying immediately dropped from her hand. A white, tubular tracer was still hanging in the air beneath her hand when Sonny heard it hit. Brown steamy liquid erupted out of the cup and settled in a thousand tiny puddles on the shiny floor.

 "Sonny? Sonny!" she cried as tears welled up in her eyes. She trampled through the spilled coffee and moved quickly to her son's side. "Baby boy. My baby boy," she whispered as she bent over to hug him and kiss his face over and over again.

"Mom," Sonny muttered softly patting his mother on the back. Her kissing did not stop. "MOM!" Sonny exclaimed in defense. His mother finally rose up off of him and took the hand that the nurse wasn't holding.

"Oh Sonny, are you OK?" she asked him, and turned to the nurse straight away without waiting for his amateur opinion and asked, "Is he OK?" The nurse let go of Sonny's hand and held her clipboard to her side.

"We still have to run some tests. Make sure he doesn't have meningitis or anything. But other than that, I think we're doing good," she said, giving Sonny a little wink and trying to sound chipper. "I'll go ahead and leave you two alone a minute and we'll talk to the doctor to see what he thinks. OK?"

"OK. Thank you Sarah," Sonny's mom told the nurse as she left the room.

 "Sarah? You two good buddies already?" Sonny jested. His mother didn't smile at the joke.

"I've spent a lot of time here worrying about you. Sarah has been a real helper." Sonny just nodded a bit. He felt a little guilty for joking and didn't really know what to say. "I brought you some clothes, for whenever you check out. When you feel up to it, that is."

"I'm thinking I'm up to it," he told her. "Where'd you get clothes from?"

"Your apartment. Daddy has a key, and I let myself in. Your place is a pigsty!" she scolded him.

"Oh! Yeah. Other than the mess, was anyone…was everything…OK?" Sonny inquired subtly, not wanting to mention Darla.

"Well, not really. There wasn't anything but a mess. I had to scrape together some things and take them home and wash them. Why haven't you come home to do laundry, Sonny?" He breathed a sigh of relief. No mention of the female teenage runaway. That was good, but it made him worry, too. Was Darla gone for good? Or did she just step out, and now was she locked out, truly homeless, wandering the streets? His heart sank at either possibility.

"So you've been here the whole time, mom?" She shook her head.

"Not the whole time. I went home the first night. I didn't bring anything with me. When it looked like we could be here a while I thought I'd better go get some things, for both of us."

"Has anyone else," he hesitated to ask, "stopped by?"

"Nope. Just me and daddy, but he's still got work. We called your work and school, too. They're going to let you make up everything you missed."

"That's nice," Sonny said kind of sarcastically. "When can I go home?" His mother fidgeted with her hair. Sonny had never seen her so unkempt. She normally looked like a 1950's mom: vacuuming the carpet in a dress and pumps.

"I don't know," she told him, "but I thought you'd just come home, home, so I can take care of you. I don't like the idea of you going back to that filthy apartment alone."

 "Oh, mom. I don't really wanna do that. I'll be fine," he insisted. His mother was shaking her head. "Whatever. Let's just see what the doctor says."

 Later that day the doctor ran his tests. The doctor said Sonny should be fine. He could go home in 24 hours and come back the following week for a check-up. It took some persuasion, but Sonny's mom eventually agreed to let Sonny go back to his apartment; that the baby bird really had left the nest. The next day, Sonny went home. His mom dropped him off, at his insistence.

 He was stiff. He was sore. And he still had two black eyes, a byproduct of the basal skull fracture. But even as he climbed the concrete steps in the dingy stairwell to his apartment building, Sonny thought to himself "It's good to be home". He hurriedly unlocked his front door, eager to find out if Darla was still around. When he first walked in the door Sonny hardly recognized his apartment. It was spotless, for one thing. It didn't smell like smoke. It was quiet. The T.V. was off. Darla was gone.

 Sonny looked around: his books, the old Dr. Pepper bottle, the little Buddha statues- it all should have felt welcoming. Even the empty, dry sink in the cleanly swept kitchen seemed less like 'home' than he was anticipating, but now it was just a place to live; nothing more. At least it was a clean place, though. "Thanks, mom," he whispered to himself.

 Sonny hobbled across the tidy living room toward his bedroom. His door was closed. Sonny reached for the doorknob and then he heard a faint sound, like someone stirring a pot of macaroni and cheese. He stood suspended, with his scraped up right hand floating an inch before the knob. Sonny closed his eyes, grabbed the knob and opened the door softly.

 Sonny opened his eyes. There was Todd, standing beside Sonny's bed. Todd's shirt was off. His pants were around his ankles. Darla was totally naked on her hands and knees, getting fucked hard by Todd from behind. The stark contrast of their forms- one bony, weak, white, feminine; the other firm, muscular, tanned, masculine- compounded the shock of the sight of the painful scene. Nothing occurred to him immediately, but after a few seconds of watching the object of his desire being utilized to fulfill the desires of someone else, Sonny cleared his throat loudly, "Uh-huh-ha-hem."

Todd turned his head and screamed "Ahh!" in a high-pitched voice like a girl when he saw Sonny's ghoulish face glaring at him. He rapidly bent down, yanked his pants up to his waist and attempted to conceal his slippery wet erection. Darla let out a sigh of frustration and turned over onto her side on Sonny's bed, resting her head on her bent arm, like an unembarrassed muse posing for a portrait, making no motion to hide her body from anyone.

 "Whoa, dude, you scared me!" Todd claimed.

"Get out."

With one hand on his belt, Todd held the other hand up towards Sonny like a traffic cop directing someone to stop. "Wait. Wait a minute, dude. What's the big deal? You're not into her, are you?"

"Just get the fuck out, Todd," Sonny screamed. And without another word Todd scrambled to put on his shirt and inched his way past Sonny who still stood in the doorway. Two seconds later the front door slammed shut and Todd was gone. Sonny lingered in the doorway. Finally, he broke away and stepped toward his dresser to find something for Darla to throw on. He didn't want to see her like this, not now. He opened the second drawer down from the top on his dresser, and right there, right on top of a stack of t-shirts was a faded, black Motorhead shirt: the same shirt Darla had worn the day they met. He snatched it up and threw it at her without turning his head to look at her. The shirt landed right in front of Darla on the disheveled bed.  She slipped it on and pulled it down past her hips like a small nightgown.

 "What happened to you?" she asked Sonny, almost sounding interested. He turned to look at her. Her pale soccer player legs curved out of the t-shirt gracefully across his bed. He'd imagined her in such a position a million times, but under different circumstances.

"I was in a coma."

"Is that where you've been? I was wonderin'," she said.

"Yeah, I can tell you were real worried about me." Sonny thought about saying every single thing on his mind. He wanted to ask her why. He wanted to ask if she ever felt anything for him. He wanted to know if she got the message he'd left. He was pretty curious about where she was when his mom came over and cleaned the whole apartment. He wanted to tell her she was an unappreciative, depressing, little slut who could go watch T.V. somewhere else from now on. But he didn't.

 "You know what?" Sonny began, "You know, not that there's much of a difference when you are here, I just want to be alone. Why don't you just go home?" Darla sat up, forgetting to keep hold of the shirt and Sonny caught a glimpse of her.

"But…" she began, but Sonny wasn't going to listen. He turned away from her and went out to the living room and turned on the T.V.

 Josh McMahon had been working late almost every night for weeks. 'Working late' meant he was banging his secretary, Tracy, at least three nights a week, and no matter what on Fridays. He was driving north out of the city in his black Escalade, going home to his wife and baby girl without a care in the world. It was nice out. Dusk. The setting sun and the once warm day was transforming into a brisk but beautiful spring night. Josh was fumbling with the radio, trying to find a song that went with his mood- that of an early 40's, low six-figure salary earning stock trader who had just given a 23-year-old blonde a pearl necklace, and not in a box, either. And who had a loving, appreciative wife at home whom he'd yell at till his voice was hoarse if dinner wasn't ready when he got back to his Mc-mansion in the suburbs. He settled for 'Feel Like Makin' Love' by Bad Company: a song which missed the mark by about an hour, but oh well. After not even peeking at the road for a little too long, he finally looked up just in time to see a pale, skinny, but not unattractive young girl walking down Sheridan Road. He thought about giving her a lift, but the last time he picked someone up walking down Sheridan Road it turned out to be the ghost of a sixteen-year-old girl who'd drowned on her prom night.