Brutal Youth (30 page)

When Stein’s eyes opened again, Lorelei was backing away, staring at him—hard—ready to absorb whatever hatred he could spew at her, but she exuded no pity, no remorse, and he was stilled by it. He opened his mouth to say her name, but couldn’t.

As he was pulled away, the stranger who looked like Lorelei grew small in the window, and Stein closed his eyes again, still trying to preserve the fleeting remnants of that girl from the first day of school, the one with the cockeyed bangs, crooked eyebrows, and big, busted-up heart, which he thought would fit so perfectly with what was left of his.

*   *   *

Father Mercedes’s mouth kept twisting as Sister Maria tried to explain what had happened—again. The priest raised a finger to her. “Enough,” he said. “I’ve heard enough.”

He opened the door to the chemistry lab and peered inside. Mullen sat at one corner of the room, and Simms sat at the other. Both boys looked scared, and Simms flashed his icky smile at the priest, who responded by closing the door again. Across the hall in the Spanish classroom, Stein sat at a desk with his head slumped in the nest of his folded arms. One eye, shot with red veins, opened when the priest cleared his throat.

Father Mercedes drew back into the hallway and closed the door, then stared expectantly at the nun. “So he’s a matricidal little firebug, eh? I’m sure the parish council will be thrilled.”

“What happened was an accident, but—the basics are true. I just spoke with his father,” Sister Maria said.

“I guess it was coincidence that these two characters decided to make a mockery out of that sad old story?” the priest said, waving an unlit cigarette like a magic wand toward the room with Mullen and Simms.

“They have a …
belligerent
history with the boy,” Sister Maria said. “We think the girl tipped them off. They’re her freshman mentors, and it’s possible they threatened her. Or perhaps she had a falling out with the boy.…”

“And
she
says…?”

“She hasn’t spoken a word.”

The priest scratched at his face. “You can’t make a fifteen-year-old girl answer your questions?” When the nun didn’t respond, he tucked the cigarette between his lips and lit it. “Another very nice mess, Sister … very nice. Now, how do you plan to handle this soap opera?”

“Detention all around. A week of suspension for the Stein boy. What they did was awful, but he turned violent.”

The priest snorted at her, smoke rising from his thin, disbelieving smile.

Sister Maria said defensively: “And they’re getting a D-minus for the theater project.”

Father Mercedes pinched the bridge of his nose as the cigarette ember glowed. “The St. Mike’s community will be glad to hear their punishment was the lowest possible passing grade. Another solid reason to keep this illustrious institution going.”

“Schools have fights, Father. There are a lot of decent kids in this school, and they had nothing to do w—”

“And they
suffer,
Sister,” the priest said, walking away from her. “While you make excuses for the worst of them.”

*   *   *

It was dark by the time Stein returned home. Picking him up at school, Larry Stein accepted apologies from the parents of the two other boys, who had been waiting for him to arrive. Stein had been told to apologize to Mullen and Simms in return, but refused, no matter how much threatening and coaxing his father and the principal directed at him.

Margie’s dinner was sitting out for them, cold, when they got to the house. Stein’s father didn’t yell or ask any questions. Margie did, at first hammering her little brother with the usual variations on “Why?” Then her dad took her out onto the porch and closed the door. Their muffled voices rose and fell as Stein sat silently at the kitchen table. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but wasn’t trying. Margie cried for a little while. When they came back inside, his sister reheated dinner, and they ate in silence.

“I’m sorry,” Noah Stein said in a small voice.

Margie set down her silverware but didn’t look up as she chewed. His father did the same, then asked: “For which part?”

“I don’t know,” the boy told him.

Margie stood from the table, carried her dish to the sink, then walked down the hallway to her room and closed the door.

Stein’s father was quiet again, searching for reassuring words, and found none. All he could think was his wife’s name:
Daphne … Daphne.

There was no desire for vengefulness in Larry Stein over the accident his son had caused. But in those years after, when his son was still just a little boy and the nightmares would come, followed by loud tears in the night, he often didn’t rush to comfort the boy. A part of him wanted his son to never entirely lose the pain he had caused. That little voice bit into Larry’s mind, buried deep, but still alive. He even had a name for that feeling, a line he’d heard in a song once—
the rabid child
. It felt like a part of him that was not adult, not rational.

Now their tragic family history had been rediscovered, six years later, and it brought forth that same old feeling. Unforgiving. Animal. Hateful.

Larry and Daphne had never spent more than four years in any one part of the country. They started their romance as nineteen-year-old dropouts in San Antonio, moved on to Seattle for a few years, then began zigzagging America: Tucson, Aspen, Galveston, Boston, Los Angeles …

Moving away was merely running away, a distraction from Daphne’s restless mind, which tended to spin out of control, ruminating on phantoms. The doctors had called it “the baby blues” after Margie was born, but the spells only deepened as the years passed. When Noah was born, it seemed to stabilize Daphne. Around her baby boy, she was often her old self, bright and passionate, quick-tempered and tough, and almost pathologically energized. But by the time they settled in Florida, her anxieties had returned, more ferocious than ever, the fears more acute and irrational. Larry seldom held a job with medical benefits, so doctors, hospitals, and medication were only last resorts. Her moods spiked and fell so rapidly that Larry was never sure which version of his wife he’d come home to. Often he tried not to come home at all.

That’s how it was the night she died. With the teenage Margie away at a friend’s house, neighbors had heard the nine-year-old boy screaming from the smoke-filled apartment. They broke in and dragged him free. But not his wife. They never even heard her, or knew she was there. Larry wasn’t surprised. Daphne’s mood had been bleak that morning, and he left her two sedatives on the kitchen counter (the others he kept with him). But those two pills were enough to knock her into a deep sleep. When the fire his son set while fucking around with model airplane glue finally overtook her, Daphne probably never knew it. That’s what her husband hoped, anyway.

The fire marshal and police had expressed pity over the child’s carelessness. It didn’t happen a lot, but it did happen—a child sets a fire and ends up accidentally killing a family member. Since he was so young, Noah was not detained in a jail, but the courts ordered psychological counseling and medication, which Larry couldn’t afford indefinitely. If that meant the boy’s emotions sometimes punished him, well … maybe that wasn’t the worst thing.

But that was the rabid child talking.

Late at night, Larry sometimes sat alone in his locked room, the brass lid of his wife’s urn by his side as he sifted the gray powder through his fingers. It was sand, really, not even dust.
Heavy.
He found out later that the remains from a cremation aren’t even ashes, but the pulverized bits of bone that were left over. It was, simply, the only thing the fire didn’t want.

Larry thought of that as he sat at the kitchen table, the boy’s apology for everything and nothing hanging in the silence. He stood and stacked his plate on Margie’s in the sink, then kissed his son on the head, brushing the burned side of his face with his thumb. “Sweet dreams, kiddo,” his father said, and tried to ignore the part of him that wished otherwise.

THIRTY

Lorelei’s body was facedown beneath the kitchen table. A chair was knocked over beside her, and beyond that was the dead socket of a shattered twelve-inch television set, lying upside down near the basement door with a small lightning storm flickering deep inside its electrical guts.

A tang of smoke had risen up to the ceiling, but no one was standing to breathe it. Soon it would trigger a brief squawk from the kitchen smoke detector, and the shrill digital siren would open Lorelei’s eyes.

A streak of spaghetti sauce bled down one wall. A dozen small bottles—paprika, thyme, coriander, cayenne—were scattered along the linoleum amid a battlefield of shattered balsawood from a now-obliterated spice rack Lorelei had made in summer camp four years ago. The remains of a flat, yellow telephone handset dangled over the back of one chair with a miniature speaker hanging out of its cracked mouthpiece like a detached eyeball.

The water faucet in the sink gushed a steady crystal stream down the drain, unattended.

Lorelei tried to stand, but something heavy on her back broadcast shriveling pain up her spine. She reached back and felt the spot, trying to knock the weight off, but the heaviness was beneath her skin—a thick rectangular welt. Three of them, actually—each in the shape of that flat telephone handset. It took her a long time to push herself up.

Lorelei hadn’t seen Stein after the International Day fiasco. He and Mullen and Simms were sequestered in other rooms, and she left without being part of the big, forced apology when no one could prove what her involvement was. “I don’t know,” was all she said when they asked her why. She wondered what she’d say if Stein ever asked her.

Her father jiggled his knee as he drove her home. He pressed a knuckle against his lips and shifted his eyes everywhere but at her—twitchy as a junkie missing his fix. “How could you do this, Lorelei?” he asked. “To yourself … to me … How could you be so stupid?”

Lorelei looked straight at her father, who kept his thin, unshaven face aimed at the road. “We don’t have to tell her, you know. You could ground me. Take away TV for a month. A year. Whatever. She doesn’t have to know anything. We don’t have to involve her.”

Her father’s defeated eyes sagged with pity, but he still wouldn’t look at her. “Who do you think answered the phone when they called the house?” he asked.

*   *   *

When they got home, Lorelei’s father hurried into the kitchen. It was already five thirty and he was late getting dinner started.

Lorelei dropped her bag into the corner by the front door. The back of her mother’s head was in the center of the couch, a nest of fading orange hair that had once come out of a box labeled
RED PENNY.
On the television, a silver-bearded attorney was wagging his finger and vowing that if you’re injured in an auto accident, he charges
NO FEE
unless he gets money for
you.
Miranda Paskal’s prosthetic hand rose from the couch with a smoldering cigarette in its chrome claw. She dragged in a cloud of smoke, then exhaled it as the clasp lowered again.

“How was school today?” her mother’s voice asked.

“Um, fine,” Lorelei said, and followed her father into the kitchen.

It took a few minutes, but her mother eventually rose from the couch and appeared in the kitchen after her, dragging one last time on her cigarette before releasing it from the clasp into the sink, where it died with a hiss. In her other hand, the flesh-and-blood one, she carried a giant, sweating
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
plastic cup from McDonald’s—full of ice and Captain Morgan. “Don’t give me that ‘fine’ bullshit,” her mother said, blocking out the kitchen light as she loomed over her daughter. “Explain the trouble you caused at that school today.”

Lorelei began to babble. She said the altercation was nothing, a misunderstanding, not her fault. A kid at school, some guy … he flipped out. He was mad at her.

When she finished, the water on the stove was boiling. Her father dropped in a fat clutch of spaghetti sticks.

“I spoke with a lovely woman from the school—Ms. Bromine, the guidance counselor there,” said Lorelei’s mother, scratching at her scalp. She set the Roger Rabbit cup on the kitchen table. “We figured out that this boy is the one you’ve been claiming is your ‘study partner.’” She made air quotes with both her fingers and the clasp. “Other students saw you and this boy sneaking away together. Even during school. Skipping class.” She clucked her tongue and turned to her husband. “Do you think they were sneaking away to
study,
Tom?”

Tom Paskal was tying the strings of an apron behind his back. “I’d toast some garlic bread, but we’re out of bread,” he said. Beside him, the untended spaghetti sauce was sputtering in its pan, polka-dotting the white stovetop around the pot.

Lorelei’s mother lumbered into her daughter’s face, inching her backwards. “Ms. Bromine raised some very good questions: Why am I paying
thousands
of dollars in tuition so my daughter can spend each day slutting around with
some delinquent little shit
in her class?”

“I wasn’t, Mom.… Jesus.”

“And why is my daughter sneaking around with two
other,
even
older
lowlifes at the same time? What exactly did my daughter
do
that made all three of these degenerates decide to go to war over her?”

“Mom, that’s not—”

Lorelei’s mother grabbed her by the front of her blouse. “Don’t
lie
to me. I’ve lost
everything
 … had so much
taken away
.… And you just
keep taking,
Lorelei.…” Tears began to trickle from her rheumy eyes as she jabbed her clasp in the flinching girl’s face to punctuate her words. “You are killing me …
killing
me, Lorelei. And it’s a
joke
to you.”

Lorelei pushed away from her mother. “Actually, it’s the chain-smoking and the Big Gulps full of booze that are killing you, Mom,” she said. “
I’m
just the one you take it out on.”