The Local News (13 page)

But of course he wasn’t back. Danny stayed gone. Through the freeze and the snow and the whitewashed weeks of winter, there was still no sign of him. In the first days after my dad tore his room apart, I went in and tried to put everything back together, though the room took on a strange, artificial quality after that. The bed was made too neatly, the papers and pencils centered too squarely on the desk. When I tried to mess them up, setting magazines and notepads at odd angles on top of each other, that too felt wrong. Even the garbage, placed piece by piece back into the receptacle next to his desk, seemed somehow showy and fake now.

His toothbrush still sat in the holder in the upstairs bathroom. Sometimes I pressed my fingers to the hardened bristles, sometimes my whole palm; one time I brushed with it, out of curiosity and antsiness, though it quickly felt like a betrayal and I stood whispering
Sorry, sorry
to no one as I rinsed out the paste and hurried it back to its metal rung. One of his tube socks ended up in a dryer full of my clothing. When I found it in my basket, the toes a dingy gray, the stripes along the cuff a faded green, I took it to be some sort of sign and spent the next couple days in high-alert mode, anxious each time the phone rang, hotly anticipating the arrival of the mail. It turned out not to be a sign, of course, just a stray sock that had been wedged in the deep recesses of the washing machine, pulled free finally by a zipper of my jeans or a collar of my shirt.

A new set of unspoken rules solidified around our household, like eating solitary dinners over our laps on the couch; or choosing
silence over the stilted chitchat about
how was your day, some weather we’re having, that’s quite a sandwich;
or building stack after stack of magazines in the front hall, the ones that kept coming in his name
—Sports Illustrated, Maxim, Hot Rod—as
if preparing the bounty that would greet him when he finally came back through the front door.

I still lay awake for hours most nights. I fell asleep and woke with the same dull stomachache. There were days I easily mixed up the republics of Malawi and Burundi, or forgot the name of the South African president before Mandela, or grew convinced that
Uruguay
was spelled with one less
u
and an additional
a.
There were other days, though, when the empty room next to mine felt just that, empty, rather than lacking someone, or when the ashtrays got dumped out and the air would smell of something temporary and new like the bananas on the kitchen counter or the pulpy pages of the newspaper, or when an offhand moment on television—a home video clip of a cat with its head inside a yogurt container, a newscaster flubbing the name of a nearby town (he twice called Farmington Heights Harmington Fights)—caused more than one of us to chuckle aloud together.

And those days were okay. Just fine, really.

I still saw Chuck. Our sessions had taken on the tinge of White House press briefings, his goal to goad me with questions, my goal to reveal as little as possible while giving the appearance I was saying something. We talked ploddingly about school, my parents, David Nelson, Danny.

“So you went to a basketball game?” he said during one session, an eyebrow raised. He liked to turn everything into something. “That doesn’t seem like something you would have done a few months ago. Do you see your interest in sports now as a way to stay connected to Danny?”

“I was never connected to Danny,” I said, which was an exaggeration, the sort I was prone to in here. Talking in absolutes seemed the best way to subvert the conversation into nothingness.

“Did you go with Lola?” Chuck had a way of elongating the
o
in Lola’s name, as if deriving sensual pleasure from the word. It was creepy.

“Lola’s on the flag team. She can’t go to games. She’s
performing.
” I thought of their elaborate turquoise-sequined costumes, which, without exception, clung to all of them in the least flattering of places, the girls looking wide-hipped and pregnant, Bay ard’s pantsuit version making him look like an iridescent string bean. I pictured the way they all tried to manipulate the unwieldy flags, and the horselike dance steps that one or more were always stomping slightly offbeat. Lola looked so proud when she was performing, her smile huge and toothy, her freckles glowing. And it made me love/hate her, the way she had no clue of what idiots they were making of themselves, her natural capacity for oblivious happiness.

“Then who did you go with?” Chuck said. The half-open venetian blinds showed white stripes of sky, the snow having long bleached out all the blue.

“Whom?” I said.

Chuck gave a little laugh. He always did that when I corrected him.

“Okay, with
whom
did you go?” he said, making a production out of the word.

“Tip and those guys,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“You don’t say?” Again with the raised eyebrow. “So Danny’s friends.” Chuck swiveled in his chair. It made a low, squealing sound like it needed to be oiled.
Wickee, wickee, wickee.

“They’re just guys,” I said.

“Do you see any significance to your association with these
particular
guys?”

Association
made it sound like we were some sort of crime syndicate. For someone who talked all day, Chuck often seemed careless with his words.

I told him no. I told him it was nice to get out of the house but didn’t mention that these
particular
guys had an ingenious system of smuggling in Pepsi bottles half filled with rum, which they passed around during the first half. Or that they talked of ridiculous things, like shoot-’em-up video games or hockey teams or race car drivers—topics that I had no entrée into, and therefore nothing was expected of me. I could just watch the monotony on the court that had everyone else so worked up, which I found almost meditatively lulling, the ball bouncing down the court and back, and down the court and back again, with the predictability of a metronome. These
particular
guys were so big, so physically big, sometimes I found them comical and clownish, like a completely different species. Tip’s arms were thicker than my thighs, Lyle Walker’s neck was like a fire hydrant, and I had a sense of such smallness, sitting amid them in the bleachers, especially after the rum started to seep in, a sense that was soothing rather than intimidating.

And yes, I saw significance in the fact that these were friends of my brother’s. But not in the nostalgic way Chuck hoped; I didn’t have a tender, soft-bellied story to tell about any remembrance or connection that these boys offered me. These were the same boys who six months earlier had snorted loudly when Danny said
Hot
as I walked past them in my kitchen, who might add,
Is that a stylish new pair of jeans?
for the easiest of laughs from my brother. Now these boys were apt to nod when I walked through the doors of the gym, to scoot aside to make a space for me as I climbed up the bleachers toward them, to pat me on the shoulder as I sat, calling me Pasternak,
the same name they used to—and still did, in absentia—call Danny. How quick they’d been to accept me after just a couple more parties with Lola and a feigned interest in winter varsity sports.

“I used to think you were boring,” Dale Myerson told me. It was a typical comment, delivered entirely without irony as I wordlessly drank from the spiked pop bottle and stared glassily at the sweaty, grunting basketball players, whose shoes squeaked loudly against the gym floor like a series of alarms.

It was not particularly edifying being with them. It was numbing and hazy and more than a little tedious. But still, I felt like wagging my finger at the Danny of my imagination, the Danny who hovered above these scenes, vaporous and smirky.
See there,
I wanted to say to him.
See me now?
It was as if I were suddenly ahead in the game, the one that’d been playing out between us for years, whose rules I’d never really understood, whose in-bounds and out-of-bounds had constantly shifted and blurred, the one that my brother had always been so handily, so effortlessly winning.

It seemed we could go on like that all winter, in more or less a holding pattern, until one day the doorbell rang and Melissa Anne appeared on our doorstep. I didn’t realize it was Melissa Anne immediately. In fact, she never formally introduced herself. But as soon as I opened the door—my father still at work, my mother asleep or otherwise spaced out in their room—I knew something was not right. The woman didn’t have a hat, and her jacket looked like a slicker you’d wear in the more mundane months of April or September. Now the late January snow swirled behind her in white mini-tornados. Her ears were such a bright red, they looked as if they might snap off the sides of her head, and her lips were deeply chapped. She had a bad dye job, her hair a strange bluish black hue. It was hard to tell how old she was; she had a round face, so round,
in fact, it gave her a babylike appearance, except for the deep lines beside her eyes and from her nose to her mouth.

“Oh!” she said when I opened the door, bringing her hand up to her chest as if I’d surprised her. Then: “The girl.” Her eyes, jumpy in their sockets, darted quickly past me to the rest of the house.

“Can I help you?” I said. The cold air whooshed in.

“Hell-o,” she said formally. “I’ve been meaning to see you for a while now. By you, I mean your family.” She had a slow, breathy way of talking, as if she’d recently been let off a respirator. Her eyes scanned the outside of the house, the hallway behind me, the book in my hand:
The Virgin Queen,
an Elizabeth I biography.

“Yes?” I said, without particular patience. She’d interrupted my reading.

“Did you get my letters?” she said. My skin prickled at the nape of my neck. I was wearing only a sweatshirt and pajama pants. I wanted to call for my mother.

“What letters?” I feigned ignorance.

“Your brother is buried,” she said, clasping her thin coat shut. Her hands were as red as her ears, the tips of her nails torn off unevenly, the edges ragged and violent-looking.

“Go away,” I said. My voice sounded silly and girlish. I was whining.

“There are horizons of soil,” Melissa Anne said. “Humus first and then topsoil and eluviation and subsoil and then, and then …” She stopped to think, chewing on her lip. She was staring at something at her feet, then something at mine, then something behind me. A flurry of ideas ran through my head—slam the door, slap her across the face, tell her she’s insane—but I just stood there, listening. “Regolith,” she finally said. “It is regolith before the bedrock.” She was nodding.

“I’m closing the door,” I said, even though I wasn’t.

“He’s in the topsoil. The good news is that he’s only as deep as the topsoil. You need to find him. He’s scared.”

“Fuck you.”

“Oh!” she said again, with the same surprised look that had greeted me. My words surprised us both. Tears sprang to my eyes from the cold. Her eyes settled fully on my face, as if just now seeing me. Something in her expression changed; it mellowed, as if the spark that had been igniting her were suddenly cooling.

“You thing,” she said, “you poor thing.” She held out a raggedy hand like she was going to touch me. I scooted back, my slippers shushing against the tiles, seeming suddenly very loud. She smiled at me then. Her front teeth were badly yellowed, her bottom ones overlapping, crowding messily on top of each other. Coupled with her round face, it gave her an ominous jack-o’-lantern look. “Such sadness,” she said. “It is not even to do with your brother, is it?” Then: “It’s just to do with you, isn’t it?”

“What?” I said, though I’d heard her. She was beaming now, as if she’d just been crowned Miss Fairfield 1996. Her body buckled forward, not so much a fluid movement as a hiccup, as if she were trying to lurch into the house. I pictured her hands on me, her rancid breath in my nose. With just inches of space between us, she said, “You will always be like this.” She said it simply, as if she were saying, “Winters will always be cold” or “Birds will always fly south.”

She still smiled her Halloweeny smile. Then she pursed her lips, like she could kiss me. “Find him,” she said, and I pushed the door into its jamb and screamed like a child: “Mom! Mommy!”

•  •  •

The police station workroom was numbingly antiseptic, a line of identical desks sitting in a neat row, large pale tiles lining the floor; the one chalkboard scribbled with
Perp
and
DWI
and
Drive-by
offered the only hint that this might be something other than a tax attorney’s or actuary’s office. The Fairfield cops didn’t have a whole lot to do. Aside from missing kids, the most action Fairfield saw was teenagers with open containers and false burglar alarms. Two of the Danny posters hung on a bulletin board, between an announcement about the annual police auction and a reward poster for a lost German shepherd. Bessie was the dog’s name, and it had watery brown eyes.

The chair I sat in reminded me of the chair in Chuck’s office, unforgiving and hard. An officer I didn’t recognize
—Reyes,
the coppery name tag over his badge said—hunted and pecked into his computer as I talked. My mom stood next to me, and I was embarrassed for the untucked back of her shirt, the funky smell of her breath.