The Local News (21 page)

“I have something,” I announced, bringing out one of my dad’s AAA maps of southeastern Michigan, having highlighted it with the likeliest routes to and away from River Rouge. “So I was thinking,” I said, “if they went to River Rouge right from Larkgrove, here’s the straight shot.” I pointed to the green line I’d traced along the South-field freeway. “I mean, it’s less than an hour away, and Tanda didn’t see him until a week after he went missing. So where were they for a week? If they were in River Rouge, someone else would’ve seen them, don’t you think?”

Denis nodded. My parents stared at me in the same way they did whenever I participated in these discussions, my father looking cloudy and confused, my mother’s mouth drawn in a faint scowl. Her tenor during the Denis meetings had changed ever since we’d
taken apart her cabinet. At first she’d grown even more frantic, filling out a stack of new index cards with stats on all of Danny’s friends: age, address, parents’ names, sports played, affiliation to Danny. She’d gone back through and highlighted odd sentences in all of the collected articles, then interrupted Denis to tell him reporters used the phrase “no evidence of wrongdoing” twenty-eight times, waving a stack in her fist, the pages bright with yellow. But a precipitous drop-off soon followed, where she grew oddly more subdued, seeming to watch him—and me—from a wary remove. She sat quietly, though I saw lingering jitters in the way she tapped the cigarette a little too hard on the lip of the ashtray, the way she smoothed her hair off her forehead a little too frequently.

I continued. “So they had to be somewhere big enough where it’s easy not to be noticed. That leaves”—I tapped on the map—“a week in maybe Dearborn or Detroit before they slipped out of town when they finally ran out of supplies.” Denis’s face was unreadable. “Just a theory,” I said, and then pointed to one of my yellow lines. “And then afterward, maybe they hopped on 75 and then 1 and went across the Ambassador Bridge and into Canada. There were those letters from Windsor. Or here.” I pointed to a different yellow line. “What if they got on 75 South to Toledo? After that, it’s a straight shot west on 80 to the Akron area.” Only the very northern tip of the western end of Ohio was visible on the Michigan map. I pointed to the eastern spot on the tabletop, an imagined Akron. “Lots of letters from Akron.”

“Interesting,” Denis said, “though we’re still at a purely speculative stage. There’s no corroboration of Danny in River Rouge. And no corroboration of a
they.
”

“Right,” I said quickly. “Of course. Just theories to think about.” I folded the map back up, the creases softened and pulpy from years of use. “You can use this if you want,” I said, handing it to Denis.

“Nice work as usual, Lydia,” he said, slapping the map against his palm.

My mother asked quietly, “What about
Unsolved Mysteries?”

“What about it?” Denis said.

“I’ve been thinking about writing them,” my mom said now, with a quavering forcefulness, as if already anticipating resistance.

My father rubbed his eyes with closed fists. When Denis looked my way, I rolled my eyes, but he didn’t so much as twitch. My mother had recently grown obsessed with
Unsolved Mysteries,
gathering up the dogs and huddling on the couch every Friday night, arms clasped around her stomach as if it ached while she listened to the throbbing synth music and the baritone-voiced, well-coiffed host, who I’d seen before in some movie I couldn’t place. She watched, rapt, as he narrated tales of UFO sightings and double murders and people who “simply disappeared” (dramatic pause) “out of thin” (second dramatic pause) “air.” The reenact-ments were hokey, the voiceovers oppressive, and the acting embarrassing, especially when the real people played themselves. But my mother watched until her eyes glistened, seeming mournful when it ended, the dogs scrambling into her lap and licking her face as she nodded to no one and stared at the far wall.

Denis’s face remained taut and earnest as he spoke now. “Ber-nice, I’m the first to entertain every avenue of investigation, no matter how outlandish. And I’ve only seen that show a few times. But my sense is that they dabble in the slightly more sensationalis-tic of crimes, like the serial-killer, alien-abduction end of the spectrum. Your story might not be quite sexy enough.”

“Sexy?” my father said, with his usual tone of annoyance. “I’d hardly want to call my son going missing as sexy.”

“Poor choice of words.” Denis held up both hands. “Your story
may not be quite provocative enough for the general viewing public of America. You need a hook of some sort.”

My mother chewed on her bottom lip, she and Denis sucking silently on their cigarettes for several beats until she said, “Our son is a sports star. A popular boy. All of a sudden he’s vanished.” She said the last word with a breathy hush. “They do stories like that.”

Denis shrugged. “Listen, if you’re hell-bent on the idea, then do it. But let’s say on the off-chance they want to run it—that’s sure to bring lots of phone calls and tips, but it’s also sure to put you at risk for a whole new slew of nutballs and unwanted admirers. You hate those smudgy little poems.”

The mention of Melissa Anne sent a flutter through me. Her letters still slithered regularly through our mail slot, now with my worry that there would be a mention of me. There never was, though. The creases in my mother’s forehead deepened. Her cigarette trembled slightly in her hand. My father rested a hand on her forearm.

“It can’t hurt,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard a word of what Denis had just said.

“You do what you need,” my father said. The presence of Denis often turned them into a united front in a way that not even Kirk Donovan’s hot TV cameras had been capable of. Denis seemed not all that much to care; now he simply smacked his lips and shrugged. He looked a little bored. I imagined the incisive comment he would make about us later to Kimberly.

“That show’s stupid,” I said. Everyone turned to me, but I was looking only at Denis.

“Lydia,” my father said, in a send-you-to-your-room voice, not that he’d ever sent me to my room.

“Denis is right,” I said. “It’s all Bigfoot sightings and ghosts and light patterns in the sky over the Arizona desert.” I added in a dramatic voice, “UFOs.”

My mother blinked at me.

“It seems like there are better uses of our energy,” I said, though honestly, I couldn’t think of any and hoped no one would ask for examples.

“It’s just a letter,” my mother said.

“The show’s bull,” I said. “A bunch of those stories are completely made up.”

My father said my name again. He told me, “Enough.” I didn’t care. My mother was teary yet again, though not actually crying; her eyes shone. I didn’t even really believe what I was saying. Sure, the ghost sightings and Loch Ness monster tales were fake. But I had, in spite of myself, sat with her on more than one of those Friday nights. Interspersed throughout the reenactments were the real-life interviews, and I recognized the haunted, half-dazed way people talked of kidnap plots or unsolved murders, disappearances or sudden deaths. Those people would feel right at home here. They could easily pull up a chair at this smoky table. But I was not going to admit that now. I was instead propelled forward by the same desperation that had gripped me in the abandoned factory with Lola months before, that had been trailing me ever since—the strangling need for someone to be mine.

“Why don’t you listen to Denis when he tells you it’s a bad idea?” I said. “That’s why you’re paying him for.” It came out wrong, a stupid sentence, but I waved my hands toward Denis anyway.

Quiet followed. My mother stubbed out her cigarette with a particular forcefulness. Everyone watched the stabbing, a naked and uncomfortable gesture, until the quiet unfolded into the sort that felt irrevocable. My father patted her arm. I moved my feet around the floor in a stumbling little dance, not sure what to do with myself.

Finally it was Denis who spoke, his voice calm. “Writing a letter
is certainly not going to kill anybody,” and then, “Bernice, I wish all of my clients displayed the same level of motivation.” He smiled at her.

“Uhhh,” I said, hoping for a clever comeback.

My mother told him “Thank you,” and the two grinned affably at each other, as if happy to be done with their silly little lovers’ quarrel.

My face heated. There was more talk between Denis and my parents, the three of them huddled together. I jammed my thumbnail, a moonlike knife, into the thin layer of skin beside my eye, pressing hard into my skull, until all focus seemed to pool to that one throbbing spot of headachy pain.

It was not until later, as Denis was about to leave and fishing his coat from the front closet, that he took my wrist. He didn’t clasp it so much as rest his fingers atop it, the sort of gesture you might see between two old people as they crossed the street together, on the cusp of a
Walk
signal turning to
Don’t Walk,
one trying to steer the other from danger.

“A valiant attempt,” he said softly, his head tipped toward mine, looking as if he might laugh.

“Have you ever been married?” I said, a question without forethought and one that seemed to surprise us both. Denis’s face rounded into a series of
o
’s, his wide eyes, his puckered mouth. He was not easy to rattle. I felt suddenly, briefly powerful.

“Why?” he said.

“This looks like it wore a ring,” I said, touching his ring finger lightly.

He laughed then, a cackling burst of noise. And then, in a moment so odd and unexpected, he tipped his face toward me and lightly tapped his forehead against mine. It was a gesture—when I
thought (and thought and thought) about it later—that I’d only seen parents make to very small babies or gorillas to each other in the zoo. He reeked of ashtray and coffee cup. I did not care.

When he pulled away, he said, “You got me, you cagey little bird.” It sounded a bit like an insult, except for his smile. “Once, not so long ago. Made it out with my skin, but barely.” Again, the laugh.

Before I could ask who, and why, and why not anymore, my mother came from the kitchen, paging through her checkbook, pen poised. “Sorry, sorry, we keep forgetting,” she said. I felt a quick jolt of guilt, as if I’d just been caught at something, though that quickly morphed to pleasure. I
wanted
her to appraise us suspiciously. I wanted us to be radiating the sort of chemistry that raised a mother’s hackles.

But instead she just created a shelf of her left hip, balanced the checkbook there, and filled out a check. Denis folded it in thirds and slipped it in a back pocket. “Keep up the good work,” he announced jovially enough to me, and with that, slipped his arms into his thick down coat and left. I could feel the spot on my forehead where he’d just been. Hours later I was still keenly aware of it—so much so, I searched myself in the mirror, convinced there must be a visible trace, like a small hickey or a bruise or the strange mark the Christian kids came to school with at Easter, foreheads dirty with smudges of Jesus.

Days later I ended up helping my mother with the letter, a result of both the lingering guilt of having given her a hard time and the arrogant sort of generosity that came from my covert little alliance with Denis. Thinking of the quiet understanding that was unfolding
between him and me, I would grow expansive and exceedingly proud.
Oh, these poor little people,
I was prone to thinking as I watched my parents skulk and mope.

My mother and I sat on the couch together, her reciting, me writing, Poppy licking her paws between us, Oliver nuzzling my arm with his wet nose. “Our son is a beacon of light,” she had me write. “He is an icon in the community.” I wrote about his state swim championship and his seven quarterback sacks in a single season. I wrote about the disappearance and the search. I wrote for three full pages, my mother showing no signs of tiring. It was not long before she rambled on about the paper boy who bore a striking resemblance to Danny (I knew the paper boy of whom she spoke and I did not agree, though I didn’t say anything) in both the jawline and the haircut and sometimes when he stopped at our front walk to throw a paper on our porch she wanted to say to him, “Come in.”

“Do you want me to write that?” I asked, and she looked at me like I was trying to start a fight. Of course she wanted me to.

There were times, she admitted, when she looked at the faces on the sides of milk cartons and judged the other missing children—impish, dirty, bad teeth, underfed—deeming none of them as worthy of return as her son. She made bargains, she said, so many bargains—her left arm (her writing hand, she told me) to have him back, both her legs, her tongue. The dogs, she said, while petting Poppy. Her husband, she said in a strange voice, and I could not tell if she was joking. I waited for her to say me, that she had bargained with me. The omission soon seemed glaring, seemed to point only to the truth of it.

None of this, of course, would go into the letter. I pretended to be taking down every word, drawing my pen across the page in intricate scribbles. The letter would be penned by me alone days later, a one-page plea, playing up both Danny’s popularity and the mystery
of his vanishing. I would use the word
mysterious
eight times in three paragraphs. I would end with a flourish: “You would do both your show and our family a service by airing this story of heartbreak and devastatingly unanswered questions.”

Sitting next to my mother, I could feel the heat coming off her, the dense, sweaty spice of feverish skin as she went on about his appendicitis scare in sixth grade or the way he resisted his “big boy bed” after the crib. I hoped for my father to walk into the room, for the dogs to begin a bout of their unprovoked howling, for the phone to ring. My father was no more pleasant to live with—he’d grown nearly impenetrable—but still, he was easier. He was at least self-contained.

My mother now leaned her head against my shoulder, her hair clumped in greasy strands. She talked about the smell of boys, the unmistakable odor of dirt and testosterone and awkwardness, her voice wistful and wet. I kept the pen moving nonsensically, my eyes fixed to my imaginary task, putting all my energy into appearing earnest and determined
—I am here to save him too—so
I would not have to look her in the face or give answer to her words.