Stranded at Midnight

Silas Rogers was forty-four years old and he was crouched behind a vending machine in a half-empty airport terminal in the middle of nowhere, Australia, holding a carry-on bag against his chest like it was a baby.

The record was the whole plan. He and Felicity had been married nineteen years, and every year for her birthday he tried to top the year before. Year one was a necklace. Year ten was a trip to the coast. This year, after months of digging through secondhand shops and calling collectors he found on the internet, he had tracked down the original pressing of the song they danced to at their wedding. She was forty-two now and she still talked about that song. He had it in his bag, wrapped in a t-shirt, and the plan was simple. He would get to the airport before her shift ended, she would put the record on the air at midnight, right at the moment her birthday started, and she would say his name on the radio and he would be standing in the booth when she did it.

That was the plan. The plan did not survive contact with the timetable, because the last flight of the night, the one he was supposed to be on, had been sitting on the tarmac for two hours with a mechanical problem nobody could explain, and then it was cancelled, and then Silas was stuck.

The airport was small. One terminal, four gates, only two of them ever used, a cafe that closed at seven, and a radio booth. The radio booth was the strange part. Felicity worked the overnight shift at a community station that rented a room in the terminal, a little glass box on the second floor that looked out over the tarmac. She had done the overnight show for sixteen years. She liked it because nobody bothered her and she could play whatever she wanted between midnight and four in the morning.

Silas checked his watch. Ten forty. Through the glass wall of the terminal he could see a cargo plane taxiing past, its lights blinking, and beyond it the booth, lit up yellow, and if he squinted he could just make out Felicity's shape at the desk. She had her headphones on. She was probably doing the hand thing she did when a song was going well, tapping her fingers on the console in time.

He looked at the bag. The record was in there. He had also, in a moment of what he would later call optimism, smuggled a small portable record player into the terminal, on the theory that the booth's own turntable might be broken or might not exist. Felicity had mentioned once that the station's turntable was older than both of them and only worked if you said a prayer first. So he had bought a cheap portable one, the kind with a built-in speaker, and carried it through security, where a young woman had looked inside the bag, looked at him, and said, "Records, huh," in a tone he couldn't read. He was forty-four years old and being questioned about a record player had still made him feel like he was a kid caught with cigarettes.

The record player was now wedged behind the vending machine with the rest of his carry-on, because he had decided the surprise worked better if he didn't walk into the booth carrying it. The plan was to go up at ten to midnight. That left an hour and twenty minutes to kill in a terminal with maybe nine other people in it.

One of the nine was a woman about his age sitting three seats down from him, going through a bag of chips with real commitment. She had short gray-streaked hair and hiking boots and she had struck up a conversation with him twenty minutes ago that he had tried to end twice without success.

"So the flight's dead, then," she said now, not looking up from the chips. "They're not even pretending anymore."

"Looks that way," Silas said.

"Darla," she said, for the third time. "Darla Schmidt. I told you already but you look like someone who forgets names."

"Silas Rogers. And I do, sorry."

"Well, Silas Rogers, what's in the bag that you keep checking on it? You've looked at that vending machine four times like it owes you money."

Silas weighed his options. "It's a birthday present for my wife. She works here. The radio booth upstairs."

Darla stopped chewing. "The radio lady? Flick? I listen to her sometimes when I can't sleep. She plays weird stuff at three in the morning. Good weird."

"That's her. Felicity. The plan was I'd be on her last flight in, surprise her at midnight, she puts our wedding song on the air. But the flight's gone, so." He shrugged. "Delayed plan."

"That's a good plan," Darla said. "That's a better plan than most people have for anything." She crumpled the chip bag. "So do it anyway. You're here. The song's here. What's the problem?"

The problem, Silas explained, was that midnight was more than an hour off, and he hadn't figured out how to wait in a terminal that long without Felicity spotting him through the glass and coming down to ask why he was there, which would ruin everything.

Darla considered this the way some people consider a chess problem. "You need a signal," she said. "Something to tell her you're here without showing your face."

At eleven exactly, the terminal speakers, which were wired to the station, crackled. Felicity's voice came through, calm and a little amused, the voice of a woman who had talked to an empty district for a decade.

"All right, night owls, some housekeeping. The ten o'clock service into the city is cancelled, mechanical, they're saying the next one is not till after six. If you're stuck out here with me, there's a vending machine that still takes coins and I'll be playing extra long sets to keep you company. Also, happy early birthday to a listener who will remain nameless, because some people are shy."

Silas sat down hard on a plastic seat. She knew. Somehow she knew the flight was cancelled and she knew he was supposed to be on it, and she was telling the whole district she knew, and she was keeping his secret on the air like a professional. He felt something in his chest loosen for the first time in three hours.

Then it tightened again, because the record was still behind a vending machine and midnight was an hour off and he needed to tell her the plan had changed. He needed her to know he was here.

Darla was watching him. "The wall," she said.

"The wall?"

"The booth. It shares a wall with the stairs, right? There's that hallway outside the booth. I went up there for the toilet an hour ago. Thin wall. You could hear her talking to herself between songs."

Silas knew the wall. Everyone who had visited Felicity at work knew the wall. Early in their marriage, when she first took the overnight shift and he would come keep her company, they had developed a tap code through the wall of the stairwell, stupid and private, one tap for yes, two for no, three for I love you, a pattern for come here. They hadn't used it in years. He had assumed she'd forgotten it.

He went up the stairs. The hallway smelled like floor cleaner, and the booth's window threw a strip of yellow light across the concrete. He could hear her voice through the wall, low, mid-song intro. He put his knuckles against the concrete and tapped three times. Pause. Three times.

Nothing. He counted to ten. Then, through the wall, the song ended, and there was a shuffle of paper, a click, and a new song started. It took him four bars to place it. It was a song from their first year together, one she used to hum while he made dinner, one that had no business being in the overnight rotation unless it was a message. Three taps, then a song only he would recognize. She was saying it back. I love you, and I know you're there.

Silas leaned his forehead against the cool wall and grinned like an idiot.

He went back down and reported to Darla, who had produced a second bag of chips from somewhere. "It worked," he said. "She knows."

"Course it worked. Now what!"

"Now I wait for midnight, then I go up with the record and the player and I ask her to put it on."

Darla narrowed her eyes at him. "And the wall tapping, that's a whole thing you two have? A code? Because from the hallway, a man tapping three times on a wall at eleven at night reads a different way, let me tell you."

"It's not a come-on," Silas said. "It's our code. Nineteen years old."

"Sure," Darla said, in the tone of a woman filing something away. "Anyway. It's nearly half past. What's the song?"

He told her. She whistled. "That's not easy to find. The original pressing? You're serious about this woman."

"Married at twenty-five. Met her at twenty-one. She was the only person in the room who knew the words."

Darla nodded slowly and looked up toward the yellow window on the second floor. "Good weird, that one," she said. "Hold on to her."

Silas checked his watch, then checked the bag for the fourth time, then fifth. Forty minutes. He could wait forty minutes. Outside, the tarmac was empty and dark, and upstairs the yellow light was steady, and somewhere behind the vending machine his whole plan was wrapped in a t-shirt, waiting for midnight.

The next twenty minutes went slow. Silas sat with Darla on the row of plastic seats and they talked about nothing, her hiking trip, his workshop, the price of fuel out here. Darla had a way of filling silence without making it heavy, which he appreciated, because his nerves were doing enough on their own.

Around eleven twenty she stood up and stretched. "I'm going for a walk. If I sit still much longer I'll grow roots."

She headed toward the second floor. Silas assumed she meant the toilets again. He went back to watching the yellow window and rehearsing what he'd say at midnight. Something simple. He'd had nineteen years to learn that simple landed better with Felicity than clever.

What he didn't know was that Darla, on her walk, had stopped at the booth door.

The door to the stairwell hallway sat across from the booth's inner door, and there was a gap under it the width of a coin. Darla, being Darla, had noticed the gap on her first trip up. She had also noticed, from the hallway, the sound of Silas tapping on the wall, and the sound of Felicity laughing to herself between songs, and she had put her own completely wrong story together out of those pieces.

So while Silas sat downstairs believing everything was on track, Darla crouched by the booth door, tore a page out of the little notepad in her backpack, and wrote a note. Then she slid it under the door and walked off whistling.

Felicity found it ten minutes later when she got up to refill her tea. She nearly stepped on it. She picked it up, read it, and sat down hard in her chair.

The note said: You've got a secret admirer out here in the terminal. If you're free after your show, I'd be happy to keep you company. I'm the woman with the hiking boots. No pressure either way.

Felicity read it three times. Her first thought was that Silas had lost his mind. Her second thought was that Silas would never write "no pressure either way!" He'd write something dumb about the vending machine. Her third thought arrived cold and complete.

There was another person in this terminal who knew about the wall.

She looked at the clock. Eleven thirty-one. Twenty-nine minutes to midnight. Nineteen years of marriage and she could feel the whole thing tipping over like a glass about to go off a table. She laughed once, a short bark, alone in the booth, which was the kind of thing the overnight shift let you do.

She wrote a reply. Actually she wrote two. The first one she tore up. The second one said: Ma'am, whoever you are, the wall tapping was meant for my husband, who is somewhere in this building with a record I have been waiting all week for. Nothing personal. Happy to buy you a coffee from the machine as an apology. Please do not slide any more notes.

She was going to slide it back under the door when a better idea hit her. She went to the inner door, opened it, and looked down the stairwell hallway. Empty. She left the note under her own outer door instead, weighted with her mug, where anyone coming up the stairs would see it, and then she put a song on and picked up the microphone.

"All right, night owls, quick technical note. If you've been sending messages through walls tonight, please use the correct frequency. Repeat, correct frequency. The management thanks you." She paused. "And hang in there, whoever you are. Twenty-eight minutes."

Downstairs, Silas heard that and stood up so fast he banged his knee on the seat in front of him. "Correct frequency," he said out loud. "Oh no. Oh no, no, no!"

"What?" Darla had come back from her walk. She was holding a vending machine coffee and her face had gone a particular shade of pink that Silas would understand about two minutes later.

"The wall. You said the wall reads a different way."

"I said that, yeah."

"You didn't."

"I might have," Darla said, and took a long sip of coffee.

Silas grabbed the armrest. "You went up there. You went up there and you found the wall and you."

"I found the wall, and I heard tapping earlier that I now understand was yours, and I may have drawn a conclusion that at the time felt reasonable." She set the coffee down. "In my defense, a man taps three times on a wall outside a woman's booth at eleven at night, and then the woman plays a love song and laughs to herself. What would you conclude?"

"I'd conclude it was a code between married people, because it is."

"Well, I'm divorced, so that never entered my mind," Darla said. "I wrote her a note. It was polite. I said no pressure."

Silas put his head in his hands. Above them, Felicity put on a long instrumental, which Silas recognized as the thing she did when she needed four minutes to think.

The instrumental ended and she came back on. "Update from the management. The correct frequency has been located. Also, the terminal vending machine has been audited and found to contain one item that may be described as birthday cake, in the sense that it is small, round, and has been in a machine since roughly the previous administration of this terminal. It is being reserved. Do not touch the cake."

Darla winced. "That's me told."

"It's not," Silas said, because he was already grinning. "That's her being kind. That's her telling you it's fine. She does the dry thing when she's fine. When she's angry she goes quiet, and she is not quiet."

"You'd know."

"Nineteen years," he said. "I'd know."

The cake turned out to be Darla's doing anyway. She marched downstairs, fed coins into the machine with the face of a woman accepting a dare, and bought the little round package that the machine had held for who knew how long. Then she bought two more coffees and a packet of those dry biscuits that come with airline tea, and she carried the whole load up the stairs herself.

Silas watched her go and did not stop her, because it was eleven forty-one and his plan needed nineteen more minutes and a hostage to fortune was better than an empty hallway.

What happened up there, he learned afterward. Darla knocked on the booth door with her boot. Felicity opened it. The two of them looked at each other through the glass for a second, and then Felicity unlatched the door.