That Night

Set on suburban Long Island in the early 1960s, the novel is narrated by an unnamed woman recalling events from her childhood, when she was ten years old. The narrative weaves between past and present, connecting a central love story with the neighborhood's collective memory and the narrator's reflections across decades.

The novel opens on a summer night when Rick, a teenager, arrives at the house of his girlfriend, Sheryl. He stands on the lawn and bellows her name with such passion that both his chain-carrying friends and the neighborhood fathers armed with baseball bats pause before the fighting begins. Three cars full of teenagers in black leather have been circling the block, and a neighbor, Mrs. Evers, voices the fear that they have something to do with Sheryl, whose family recently changed their phone number because Rick kept calling.

Sheryl lives with her mother and grandmother; her father died of a heart attack the previous spring. When Rick's cars leap the curb, he walks to the front door and knocks politely. When Sheryl's mother appears behind the screen, he pulls her through the door; she falls into the hedge. Rick yells for Sheryl, and the fathers charge from their garages into a clumsy brawl. The narrator's mother sends her to call the police. The boys retreat, and through a car window the narrator glimpses Rick with his hands over his bloodied face, his nose broken.

The novel spirals outward from this central event. In the days that follow, the fathers claim the sidewalks for the first time, comparing wounds and discussing Rick's fate. They inflate Sheryl's beauty in memory, but the narrator corrects the record: Sheryl was skinny, with taffy-colored hair, overlapping front teeth, heavy makeup, and the tight skirts of girls who dated hoods.

The narrative reconstructs the days before the fight. Rick called Sheryl repeatedly after she failed to appear at the supermarket where she worked, but each time her mother grew more definitive, finally telling him not to call again. His friends cast Sheryl's mother as a jealous queen, and Rick proposed going to the house to pull Sheryl out. His family deepens the portrait of his desperation: His mother has a mental health condition that periodically leads to suicide attempts or disappearances, and his father, Dr. Slater, once ran an unconventional medical practice but a botched operation left him on crutches.

The novel turns to Sheryl's mother, transformed by grief from someone sweet and soft-spoken into someone angry and bitter. When Sheryl kneels beside her bed and says she thinks she is pregnant, her mother rises immediately, arranges a doctor's appointment, and plans to send Sheryl to her sister in Ohio that night. At the time, it was well accepted that an unmarried pregnant girl must disappear and the boy never know. The narrator speculates that Sheryl tried to reach Rick, but his house was empty or his family did not answer the phone.

Months earlier, Sheryl had revealed her philosophy of love and death on the narrator's porch. Her father's death taught her that love does not end when someone dies. She extended this conviction to Rick, saying that before her, no one loved him enough to keep his memory alive, and dismissed marriage, houses, and children as things that "disappear." The narrator imagines their nights at a park across town, Sheryl naming all the things that did not matter to them, working outward from the trees to obliterate the entire world.

Woven through the central story are the lives of other families. The narrator's mother, struggling to conceive a third child, befriends Leela, the mother of Jake, a boy with a cognitive disability. Leela confides her terror of losing her only child, and the narrator realizes her own mother's longing for another baby is about insurance: Any living child would suffice. Meanwhile, the neighborhood children search for souvenirs of the fight and puzzle over how babies are made, trying words like "womb" and "seed" like keys in a lock.

In Ohio, Sheryl's cousin Pam takes charge, arranging medical care, sewing maternity clothes, and connecting Sheryl with a Catholic adoption agency. When Pam asks whether she wants a boy or a girl, Sheryl answers, "I'd like to have a miscarriage." Pam tries to comfort her, saying she too was once separated from someone she loved and got over it. The narrator notes that Pam is right. But Pam cannot know how Sheryl has linked her father and Rick, how for her the fading of love means admitting there will be no return of the dead.

Before dawn, Sheryl dresses in the dark, slips a framed family photograph into her bag, and walks to the highway. She hitchhikes east, sleeps on the back steps of a roadside restaurant, and in the gray morning admits for the first time that love could, like grief, grow forgetful and wear away. She forms a plan: She will choose a public place where only a stroke of luck would save her. At a gas station restroom, a woman finds Sheryl at the sink with her wrists held under running water, the cracked photograph and a shard of glass on the ledge. At the hospital, by sheer luck, Sheryl survives.

Rick sits in jail. His court-appointed lawyer asks what he would have done if Sheryl had been there. Rick says he just wanted to talk, then concedes, "So I overreacted." That night, he wakes and realizes his shame is no longer at his failure to reclaim Sheryl but at his attempt.

Years later, the narrator's marriage is ending. She moves into her parents' house while it is for sale. A prospective buyer tours the rooms, going to the windows in each one. In a bedroom overlooking the street, he asks, "You ever know Sheryl?" The narrator recognizes Rick, now in his mid-forties with a scar beside his nose. When asked if he knows why she moved, he shrugs: "Oh yeah. I remember." He does not buy the house. The narrator's father dies two months after the sale.

At the funeral of Billy Rossi, a neighborhood boy whose flag-draped coffin and uniformed photograph suggest a military death, the old neighbors reunite. Billy's mother, Mrs. Rossi, reports that Sheryl is married with two children and a house in Ohio. The women seem to want something more for her, but Mrs. Rossi holds out her hands: "I guess everything turned out fine for her after all."

The novel ends with Sheryl in the hospital after giving birth. Though she initially refused to see the child, Pam persuades a nurse to bring him. Sheryl unwraps the baby, presses her lips to his head, touches his eyelids and lips, then hands him back: the first and last time she will see him. In the car afterward, holding Pam's youngest child, she thinks not of Rick but of a summer evening on their old street, climbing the stairs to her vanity mirror, drawing black lines across her eyelids, wanting to love someone because the emptiness left by her father must be filled or it will be as though he never lived. The narrator concludes that the true miracle was not the rescue but that despite all Sheryl had lost, there remained the blind, insistent longing that the emptiness be filled again.