Hey everybody!

I missed this place. I missed writing.

This story will probably be a two or three shot. Through several different characters' points of view, one tragic night unfolds. We'll begin with Soda's son Grip and then Pony's wife Caroline...

THE CALL OF THE NIGHTBIRD

I was barely seventeen when it happened.

Or I was all alone on the edge of seventeen. That's how that old song goes right? The one Mom was always playing.

Sometimes we write the songs and maybe sometimes the songs write us. I was seventeen. Seventeen when everything exploded.

Looking back on that night, on everything that went down, I'm almost positive there was a restlessness that charged the air, in the kinda way a city can have an itch; a pluck of nerves, a pinch from what's about to happen. It's funny, but if you'd asked me to describe it then, I might've called it electric, like something different was coming for us.

"C'mon Grip, it's almost starting." Mom's in the kitchen wrestling the microwave popcorn open. The smell of it overpowers the sage she's been burning all night. "And baby slide that screen closed."

I've kept the lights off out here so I don't attract the bugs, but I close it like she asks. This door's been broken since the day we moved in, so there's no sliding it. You have to lift it a little, shimmy it across its useless track and rig it shut. Tonight though it glides with ease and I'm surprised it's been fixed. But I shouldn't be. I've caught Dad a couple times hanging around our place lately. I passed by once and spotted his pickup truck in our parking lot. With the 'Please Honk If Parts Fall Off' bumper sticker, there was no mistaking it was his. And a few weeks ago, I know I heard him whispering with Mom in the middle of the night. He came down our hallway and passed right outside my bedroom. I'd recognize that walk anywhere.

I look out to forever. The clouds keep flashing way low on the horizon, over someone else's town, too far to matter to us. Probably only heat lightning anyway. I'm glad we moved to the third floor. I lean over the railing to maybe catch some kind of breeze, stick my neck out from under the balcony above us and Cat Lady's below. It feels better to be looking down on the parking lot. Our old view was just the eye-level row of shitty cars that were lucky enough to snag the good spaces for the night.

Now we're high enough to see two whole streets, and one of them pretty busy. For some reason I like to be reminded that life's always going on somewhere. Dad's usually saying stuff like that. I look in the direction of his house, my house, my other family.

"Paging Grip Curtis..where the heck's the remote hon?" Mom can't stand to miss even a second of Miami Vice, and I can't stand to tell her I'm not that into it anymore. So I go inside and help her search under couch cushions and do what we always do at nine on Thursday nights. We settle into our usual spots, me stretched across the couch and her curled up on the Lazy Boy that Vic The Dick left behind. We watch the show that we'll always call ours.

But tonight, I can't keep my eyes off that lightning.

Was that a flash of lightning or headlights? Pony's beyond late and I hope it's him. I could use some adult conversation about now. I walk into a war torn living room to call out my final and favorite order of the day. "It's nine o'clock. All good little children should be in their beds."

Mac and Maggie whine their rebuttals that they're not tired, exactly because they are so very tired. I ask them to pick up their things, that I'll help get them started, but we know who'll end up doing it all.

The grinding gears of the garage door spark a quick, electric pulse of arousal in me, not unlike a Pavlov dog. But it's a Beagle mutt that scrambles and scars a hardwood path to greet his master, and then a tired, firm voice from down the long hall, "Down Banjo, get down." Maybe Banjo and I aren't so different. We're both in the mood to hump Pony. God Caroline, how fast did you drink that glass of wine?

He rounds the corner on a defeated walk, but once the shouts of "Daddy" erupt, his expression transforms into all that he is; a loving father, who also happens to be an exhausted doctor. And one sexy husband. Only I can recognize the weariness in his lean and still fit frame when Mac and Maggie swing on his arms and hang on his legs, and they've been spared from their nightly chores again once Daddy tells them to march on up and brush their teeth, that he'll come later for kisses. I smile because it saves me too.

I throw a broken doll's head into the trash and he tugs at the stethoscope that's draped around his neck, making his usual apologies as we walk to the kitchen together. "Sorry for missing family night again babe." He leans over to give me a side kiss but misses my cheek entirely. Thursdays we look forward to eating dinner together, but I'd never think of getting mad at him for sometimes coming home hours after he'd planned. I know what being late actually means in his job, and I don't even question him about his day. I never really do anymore.

"Yeah well all you really missed was Mac gagging on green beans and Maggie reading Amelia Bedilia out loud to us the whole time. Oh and then she got sent to her room for giving a pretty spot-on impression of Mac's stutter." I turn to Pony with a concern I can't shake. He's coming from the laundry room now, bare chest and wrangling on a fresh t-shirt, his face lighted golden by the fridge. "Pony, it's getting worse. Miss Connie says he's hardly talking, not at circle time, not at Lunch Bunch."

I feel bad for bringing up something negative to add on top of the guy who just came from the ER, but he shrugs it off. "He's four, Caroline. He'll grow out of it. If he doesn't we'll get the best speech therapist in town." He winks and playfully slaps my ass cause I'm toying with going back to school and finishing my masters in that very thing.

He switches on all the lights. There's something about the cheerful kitchen that always seems to brighten Pony's mood and brings him back to our world pretty quickly. I head over to heat up his plate while he stands at the sink and washes up for dinner, and he might as well be scrubbing up for an operation, his soap all the way up his forearms. He's long forgotten the normal ways of handwashing.

"Oh, and Soda called," I remember to add, and lick the little bit of sauce off my wedding ring.

Pony takes his seat just as a flurry of children descend the stairs and take over the kitchen with loud voices and pajamas and toothpaste foam clinging to their lips. "Oh yeah? What's ol'Uncle Sodapop up to?" His voice competes with his daughter's, but no man could ever win that battle as she sits in her chair on knobby knees and begins her reading again.

"Daddy, listen to what Amelia did this time." Maggie's guided across the sentences by the petite, pointed finger that holds her place, her polished nails a slaughtering of neon pink that she applied herself.

Pony pretends to listen, or hell, maybe he really does. And when Mac races by he swipes him up into his lap and kisses the top of a curly head.

I give my daughter's shoulder a gentle squeeze. "Maggie Bedilia, let's take it down a notch okay? Daddy's tired and you should be too."

An indignant Maggie walks off in a cloud of insult, and a part of me regrets that. We've both had a long afternoon. But now Pony and I can talk in a semblance of peace. "He just asked if you were working one of your overnights and I told him nope, no graveyard shift tonight."

"Did he need something? Everybody okay?" Pony will never stop worrying about his brother.

"Nah, I told him you'd call, but he said he didn't want anything. He seemed good. Normal." As normal as Soda Curtis is ever gonna be.

I set the plate in front of him and playfully tug at the hair that kicks out on the back of his neck before I land in Maggie's vacant seat. He immediately reaches behind to smooth it back down and with an embarrassed half smile he mumbles, "I know, I know, I need a haircut."

I'm only just now able to see his face up close, can make out the marks on the bridge of his nose and under his eyes, left there by his surgery goggles and it's clear he's been working hard on someone. I lean across the table and run my hand over his fingers of strength and grace and precision. My voice drops to seductive on its own. "No you don't. I like the way it curls when it gets a little longer." And I do. I feel my cheeks flush when he gives me that look.

I reach for Mac who's falling asleep, and Pony passes him over easily but carefully, the outer edges of ink peeking out when his t-shirt sleeve rides up, his one and only tattoo he got when he became a father; a Curtis Man tradition, started by their Daddy I never got to meet. I'm willing to bet Pony must be the only doctor in that hospital with a tattoo, a small one that he keeps hidden, but it lies beneath his clothes and marks his body with the interlocking symbols of both his babies.

I hold our son and wait for my husband to finish eating. And while he eats he finally opens up after coming off a long day. I listen to his stories and watch his green eyes, expressive, as changing as the sea and just as constant. And I wonder how sometimes, like right now, he can make me feel the jagged lightning strike of a more protective kind of love. Maybe it's because I sometimes glimpse those tragedies that built him, see the devastated orphaned boy still there inside the man. I felt it the moment I laid eyes on him. Pony's a million different wonderful things, and a few not so wonderful things, yet every part of him interesting. But there's always been something within him that seems...brokenhearted.

This aching and ancient, almost mournful love I feel for him now drowns out the fiery burn of arousal. As much as I want to take Pony right now across this kitchen table, I want to take care of him that much more. Because he's always taking care of everybody else. I'm glad he'll finally be able to get some sleep tonight.

Pony glances upward when the lights flicker. It's not long before a deep roll of thunder growls and groans, and I could swear it's shifting the entire Earth around.

A/N: Grip quotes The Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks. My title, "Call of the Nightbird" is pulled from deep inside that song, and when Caroline reflects on Ponyboy, she actually uses Stevie's words to describe Pony as having something about him that seems brokenhearted.

Thank you for reading! Stay safe and healthy :)