The Local News (29 page)

In the days that followed, everything took on the tinge of a sick joke—the few frayed yellow ribbons that had survived the season, heavy with ice now, frozen stubbornly to tree trunks and mailboxes; the pep rally for the varsity athletes, Jerold slump-shouldered at one end of the gymnasium floor, Tip all puffed up at the other; the shiny pegs of the Lite-Brite that Lola and I stabbed through the black paper on our way to making an unintentionally ghoulish clown face or monstrous flower garden.

One morning I woke with a burst blood vessel in my left eye, a shocking cloud of red in the white of my sclera. Even my parents were alarmed by the sight. My father put his hand to his mouth at the breakfast table, my mother asked what on earth had happened to me. But the night before had been no different from any other, fitful and unrelenting. All day, and for days after, people asked what
had happened, and always I told them I didn’t know, though I found it satisfying, in the sick-joke sort of way, that the violent unrest of my nights had finally left a mark.

I stopped seeing Chuck. My parents believed me when I told them the sessions weren’t doing any good, and the insurance had maxed out after twenty-six anyway. I spent most evenings in front of the television with one or both of them. I’d never been a fan of TV but now came to understand its allure. There was something wholly consuming in its bright pictures and white noise.

We watched, of course, the alien abductions and haunted houses of
Unsolved Mysteries
and soon added
America’s Most Wanted
to the lineup. My mother discovered
Cops
and made derisive noises from the couch as poorly shaved, shirtless men were thrown against the hoods of police cars. With my father I watched the college basketball tournament. My father tried to muster the enthusiasm of years past, when the NCAA tournaments had been a time of great celebration in our household. He and Danny would stock up on beer and soda pop and pretzels and chips, camp out for entire weekends, eating meals on TV trays, scribbling wildly onto the sixty-four-tiered brackets they’d printed out from the computer. Now my father sometimes pounded his fist on his chair arm if he was unhappy or let out a hiss of approval at a good play, but mostly he just sat. Often when I looked he wasn’t even watching the television, focused instead on a dust clot dangling in the corner of the ceiling or Poppy’s tail as it thwapped against the carpet. Every once in a while he would try explaining things: “They’re just trying to run down the clock,” or “They’ll keep fouling him because he’s terrible at the free-throw line.” Late into one afternoon, as the TV glowed in the darkening family room, he even passed me the last few tepid sips of his beer. “Don’t tell your mother,” he warned. And “It’s going to taste bitter,” as if this were my first.

It was during one of the games—Princeton vs. Mississippi State, Princeton trailing by nearly 20, my father’s expression unreadable (other than Michigan, it was unclear who he was rooting for)—that my mother came into the room more energized than usual, almost bouncing on her tiptoes, both hands cupped in front of her as if ready to receive an offering. But the offering had already come. A slim envelope rested in her hands, the return address a black circle filled with the bubbly white lowercase letters of
abc.
It had been nearly eight weeks.
Unsolved Mysteries
was answering us.

“You open it,” she said to me, her voice insistent and suddenly girlish. “Mute it, mute it,” she told my father. My father moved slowly for the remote. Halftime had just begun, a well-choreographed herd of marching band members and cheerleaders descending on the court. I thought of Lola. My mother held the envelope out to me.

Even before I took it, before I slit open the flap with the side of my index finger and unfolded the thin paper to look at its generic paragraphs—the letter not even an original, copied instead many times over, gaps in the ink appearing from an aging Xerox machine—I sensed (and it was a strong sense, like the smell of rotten eggs or the taste of ipecac) the disappointment I was about to bring. And I thought, very clearly, do I really need to be the bearer of any more disappointment?

“Dear Viewer,” I began. “Thank you for your interest in
Unsolved Mysteries.
All of us at ABC are heartened by the success of this show and proud of the many viewer tips that have poured in in response to many of our segments. With your help we have been able to apprehend suspects in an untold number of cases, such as Robert Creeley of Huntsville, Alabama, currently awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend and her twin daughters, Hannah and Abigail.” These were inelegant, clunky sentences, I thought, probably written by some unpaid intern. “Men like Mr. Creeley,” I continued,
“would not be found without your vigilant viewership and phone calls. We wish we had time to answer each inquiry personally, but we appreciate your interest and hope you will continue to join us in solving America’s
Unsolved Mysteries.
”

There was a pause when I finished. My father studied his hands; my mother still looked at me, her eyes intent, her mouth opening a bit wider. She leaned toward the piece of paper, her whole body an unspoken
And? And?

“That’s it,” I said.

My father was suddenly rapt over the muted pageantry of half-time, watching the marching band as it patterned itself into an M, an S, and a U along the court. Someone in a bulldog costume did a long series of back flips. My mother said, “That doesn’t even say anything. They didn’t even read what we sent them.”

“I’m sure they read it,” my father said, but without feeling and without looking at her. “They’re busy.” I wondered what it was like for him all day at work. Was this how he spoke to all of his colleagues? Or did he fake it so well for them, this was all he had left for us?

My mom grabbed the paper out of my hand and studied it, moving it near to and far from her face, even flipping it over to examine the back. She cried quietly. Tears fell; her cheeks shone.

“It’s okay, Bernice,” my father said, and I wanted him to rise from his chair and go to her, though I knew that to be something he was constitutionally incapable of at that point. He did seem to falter at the remote for a moment—I’ll give him that—struggling with his decision to turn the volume back on, which he eventually did. The band bleated out its fight song, heavy, like all the fight songs we’d heard in the past weeks, on the downbeats and brass.

•  •  •

When Denis came over now—and he still did, with increasing frequency and always with Kimberly—I would not look at him. He rallied my parents around the kitchen table, and the ritualized nature of the talks—he gave updates, they asked questions, smoke swirled heavily between them—began to strike me as mostly artifice, Denis leading them down a path of half-clues and faint hopes in order to justify his continued fees. There had been a few more visits to Tanda, he told them. He presented a follow-up composite that looked as hazy and amorphous as the first Roy. There was a state prisoner named Elvin Tate who faced sentencing in an attempted murder case and was said to have information about Danny. Denis talked importantly about making the drive to Jackson to meet with the man, but I listened to such stories numbly, often perched on the stairs, a room and a half away.

The few times he and I ended up in the same room, he smiled or spoke my name, saying, “Well, hello there, Lydia,” giving no indication of our afternoon in the living room. “You get in a fight?” he said when he saw my eye, a note of genuine concern in his voice. I some-times felt crazy, as if maybe I had invented the whole thing, maybe I had entirely misinterpreted what had happened between us, coloring it with my own paranoid hues.

I would have urges to lurch toward him then, maybe press my face against the messy hairs of his cheek, maybe bury my nose in his neck. But then I thought I saw him narrowing his eyes at me, or smiling in a way that was not so much friendly as scheming, or licking his lips as if readying for a challenge, and I would wonder if Grandma was the wolf, and if I was the idiot with the death wish, wanting to still skip and skip along, swinging my basket of cookies at my side.

•  •  •

By the end of March, the weather turned erratic in the jarring way it always did near the end of winter. For a day temperatures would rocket into the sixties, the air smelling dewy, the remaining snow melting in dramatic fashion, sheets of water sluicing along the edges of the roads and pouring loudly into storm drains. By the next morning, though, the cold would return, the streets and sidewalks would be dangerously slick, and branches would snap from trees from the weight of new ice, making people even more downcast and irritable than usual, such weather now an affront. The cold, Lola said one day, was like a welshed bet. I was surprised at the cleverness of the sentiment, though I told her that expression was racist. She blinked at me blankly. When I explained about the inhabitants of Wales, she said, “Princess Diana?” and then put her hand to her mouth, like she couldn’t believe she’d insulted the princess.

It was on one of those recidivist cold days that I turned sixteen, an event marked by almost no one. I had told Lola my birthday was in July
(Cancer,
she’d said skeptically.
Weird)
to avoid the brownie-and-Rice-Krispies-treat tower, the
You look like a monkey and you smell like one too
that was a birthday at Lola’s lunch table. My dad had arranged to pick me up after school and take me to the DMV for my driver’s test. As I walked toward the line of waiting cars—strange to see my father’s silver Taurus there—loud footsteps approached from behind. It was the heavy noise of running, and when I turned around, David Nelson was almost upon me, skidding to a stop.

“I wanted to catch you,” he said, panting a little. “I looked for you at your locker. What are you doing out here?” By
here,
he meant the school’s west entrance, the domain of underclassmen with parents willing to play chauffeur or at the very least arrange carpools. I imagined these also to be the parents who peopled the PTA and volunteered to pass out the juice cups at the blood drives. Normally I left through the front entrance to a waiting bus.

I pointed to my dad’s car across the street, half a block down. David waved, though we were far enough away, I couldn’t see if my dad was waving back through the windshield or even looking in our direction.

David said, “I would be cool with going with you to look at the Fairfield police mug books sometime. I think that makes sense to do too. Covering all the bases.” He’d left me a message saying as much a few days earlier. He’d left an earlier one about a book he’d started reading on forensics, how elements of crime scenes can be inadvertently preserved for years, especially when cold is involved.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m done with that.”

“Done with what?”

“The investigation. It’s fucking stupid.”

He looked a little like I’d slapped him. “The investigation to find your brother is
stupid?”

I didn’t know how to explain. Not to him. “Listen, I gotta go.” I waved in the direction of my dad’s car.

David’s mouth hung a tiny bit open. A bustle of people filed past us on the sidewalk. Kids opened passenger doors. Parents started up cars, trying to ease backward and forward out of their tight spots. It was a bleak day, the sun shrouded behind clouds, the sky looking small and forbidding, as if it ended just above the treetops. David’s nostrils flared, his eyes widening. He looked unsatisfied, in need of something more. Him being in need of something more made me hate him a little. I shrugged, for lack of a better response. He busied himself rummaging through his backpack and I told him again that I had to go.

“Wait!” he said with unusual force. When he was finished rummaging, he handed me a card, not even looking at me anymore.
Bering,
it said along the envelope in his small, precise handwriting, a nickname from my straits period. It surprised me and made me
feel like a heel; a small, tight, blockish thing traveled up through my chest. David Nelson had always made me handmade birthday cards on his computer, with inappropriate quotes (one year, the front read:
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 2,0th century.”
—Alexander Solzhenitzyn) or with pictures of fractals or nebulae.

“Thanks,” I told him, training my voice to sound nicer. I thought of other things to say, about being sorry or taking things back or was there anything I needed to look out for on the driving test, but I didn’t want to keep my dad waiting, and I didn’t want David to watch me read the card. He was squinting at me now, his face a question. I squeezed his shoulder. It felt weird squeezing his bony shoulder through his coat, felt a little like I could snap him apart right there, like he might let me. I thanked him again and called things over my shoulder as I ran to my dad, about later, about good, about bye.

The woman who took me out for my road test snapped her gum and drummed the end of her pen against her clipboard. She gave out every direction as if my presence were an imposition:
Come to a full stop. Make a left turn. Merge with the center lane of traffic.
I scraped the back wheel against the curb while parallel parking, gunned the motor once when accelerating from a red light, turned on the brights when I’d meant just to use the left turn signal. I’d barely driven since being pulled over, and now the slick roads made me go slowly; my dad had warned ominously of black ice on the way over. But shortly into the test, some sort of autopilot seemed to kick in, a calmer, more competent part of me that knew how to steer the car
within a lane, how to scan the traffic around me, how to check my blind spot without even really having to think about it. I did not cross a yellow line. I did not exceed 25 on residential streets. I stopped at the pedestrian crosswalk.

The end came without flourish. Instead of congratulations, the woman handed me a pale yellow slip of paper to take to the counter, then ushered me back into the lobby, where I waited for my number to be called and my father paged through the Spanish-language version of the driver’s manual (he didn’t speak Spanish). We waited a long time. I watched the flashing red numbers of the
NEXT
sign. I watched a woman breastfeed a squawky baby. Eventually I pulled David’s card from my bag.