The Local News Page 13

  Denis shook his head, a Mona Lisa smile on his face.

  “I did the letters,” I announced, though only Denis knew what I was talking about.

  “Ahh,” Denis said slowly, then, “Right,” as if just remembering his request.

  “Excuse me,” I told my mother, who sat in her usual chair next to the cabinet. I scooted behind her, opened drawers, and pulled out folders. She made a reflexive Don’t noise, a corrective sort of hoot that suggested Put those down, though I began slapping folders on the table anyway. I explained about the Nices and Crazies and Wrongs, pulling letters from folders and pointing out the penciled notations on the flaps.

  “I’ve kept everything,” my mother said, and, when no one responded, “Saved everything.” As Denis and Kimberly began rifling through letters, she flapped her hands in a strange, airy gesture, as if she were trying to take flight. “Careful,” she said quietly, “no need to scrabble everything.” I assumed she meant scramble. She looked—typically—on the verge of tears. But instead of feeling sadness or even pity for her, I had an urge to squash her, to rub her nose in this, to burn her, as Danny would have said.

  “Hang on,” I said, a bit of game-show hostess to my voice. “There’s more.” I ran upstairs to get the Viables, all paper-clipped and sorted into their own fat folder now. When I came back down, the kitchen was quiet except for the sound of rustling papers. Already Denis and Kimberly had pools of letters in front of them. I watched as Denis flipped to the back of several envelopes to look at my penciled notation. His smile had flowered into something broader now, though it was still hard to read. Bemusement? Admiration? My father watched with arms crossed over his chest, as if waiting for Denis to flub a magic trick. My mother was red-faced, the color starting at her neck and then splattering her jawline before finally dotting her cheeks in an uneven pattern reminiscent of Lola’s freckles. Her expression, a mix of bewilderment and injury, suggested that instead of having helped in the investigation of her missing son, I had removed a vital organ in her sleep.

  I held up the folder and announced, “These are the Viables.” I detailed my system and gave examples—the I-95 grouping, the handful that had reported him hanging out on campus in East Lan sing, the pair that insisted he was working behind the counter of an ice cream shop in Traverse City. When I dropped the folder in the middle of the table, it made an important-sounding splat. Envelopes spilled out the sides. The gesture was dramatic and a little silly; I was getting a bit carried away.

  Denis nodded. “Good girl. Very, very nice. Above and beyond.” The last statement he made to Kimberly, and she made a cooing, affirmative noise. I grinned. For a while the two of them looked through the Viables, murmuring to each other while the rest of us watched. I tried not to be bothered by the particular way they had of quietly conferring that left the rest of us feeling like we were eavesdropping. I interjected when I could. “That stack,” I told them, “all came from Indiana,” as if they were incapable of discerning the postmark, and “Those couple of anonymous ones came from River Rouge,” again as if they’d grown suddenly illiterate.

  My father remained stony, but my mother grew more and more fidgety, picking up stray envelopes, stacking them into piles, taking some of the pages out and eyeing them closely, as if making sure I had not defaced anything. “When on earth—?” she finally said, by now smiling strangely, trying to affect a tone of gratitude or admiration. But the strain in her voice, the particular pitch and tremble, betrayed enough to make Denis and Kimberly stop what they were doing to stare.

  “Just when I had time,” I said in a fake, breezy tone. “After school and stuff.”

  She took a long drag from her cigarette.

  “You know, we’ve been talking of going to River Rouge,” Denis said, holding the letters in his fist. I’d never been to River Rouge—the forty-five minutes separating Fairfield from Detroit might as well have been a continent, given the rarity with which we neared the city limits—but I knew what downriver towns were like: scabby homes, faded local businesses, factories decades past their prime. “There were sightings in the early weeks,” Denis said. “Seems as good a starting point as any, in terms of canvassing beyond Fair-field.”

  Everyone murmured assent. Even my father nodded. “Reasonable,” he said.

  “Can I go?” I said, the words out of my mouth before I was even fully conscious of them, and with a breathy eagerness that left in its wake nakedness—me, a child begging for a new kitten or a trip to the ice cream store.

  “Why on earth?” my mother said. The smile was gone.

  My breathing came out loud. I feared the color of my cheeks.

  “Uh …” Denis looked at me and then at Kimberly. “We should be fine on our own. But thank you.”

  “I don’t really think we should be interfering,” my mother said.

  “I’m not trying to interfere,” I said. “Maybe I can help.” I waved my hand over the table, though already I could feel the initial surge of power fading.

  “You have school,” my father said.

  “I can miss one day of school,” I said. “One day. I haven’t missed all year. My brother is missing.” My voice caught when I said that. I wondered if I had ever actually said that sentence aloud. I had a panicky feeling, though I didn’t think it particularly had to do with Danny, but rather with the forcefulness of wanting something and being utterly powerless to get it. My want felt suddenly like the monster I’d once seen in a late-night movie who’d burst, bloody and uncoiling, from a victim’s writhing belly. Danny had laughed through that scene. I’d been sick with can’t-look, can’t-look-away terror, sitting next to him, burying my screams in his arm while he told me half seriously to quit it, to shut the fuck up already.

  “Please,” I said, and everyone was quiet. For months I’d been trapped in this house with the obsessers and mopers and blank-starers. It seemed suddenly clear to me: I was taking a stand, trying to align myself with the doers.

  “I don’t think so,” Denis said, and then, quickly patting the nearest envelope, “This is really good work, Lydia. Quite impressive.”

  “Um …” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “She could help me with the notes,” Kimberly said. “It’s sometimes good to have two sets of notes to compare.” There was something undeniably pitying in her voice, but I didn’t care; I loved her for it.

  I pleaded wordlessly with my parents. Don’t, I was trying to tell them with my eyes, pick this as the time to suddenly be interested in my well-being. Denis studied me in the way that I imagined he looked at a fresh crime scene, as if trying to unearth an elusive clue. I held his gaze.

  “All right,” he said, though his voice was unsure. “If no one else objects …” He glanced at my mother, who looked as if she needed very badly to shout or kick something. In a matter of days, she would come into my room and squeeze my arm and tell me how I’d done such a nice job for the detective. That’s what she called Denis, the detective. But now my violation of her sanctum was too fresh, its evisceration still littering the table. Finally, though, she nodded, and I felt as if I could leap across the room and kiss her.

  “You’re there purely as an observer,” Denis said quickly. “I don’t want you muddying things up by getting directly involved in questioning. Though it could work to have the sister there, could soften some people up who may be reluctant to talk. But I don’t want you running back here and spreading information we find around to all of your friends. Do you understand?” I could hear him talking himself into the idea, fighting against his better judgment.

  I thought of telling him how I no longer really had friends. Instead I said, “I promise. Not a word. Scout’s honor,” and held up my hand in the Scout salute. It was a guess; I’d never been a Girl Scout.

  Denis shrugged. Now that he’d made his decision, his face was impassive again, devoid of emotion. Kimberly, though, smiled at me in the way I imagined a big sister would, in a way that said both Good for you and Poor
little thing.

  The inside of Denis’s car had the salty, coagulated smell of fast food. Crumpled bags from Wendy’s and Burger King, several bright red-and-yellow french fry containers, a whole host of waxy cups and plastic lids lay littered along the floor of the backseat. Denis and Kimberly sat quietly on the bench seat up front, Denis driving with one hand on the steering wheel, the other draped along the seat back. Kimberly stared out the window or occasionally flipped down her visor to check her lipstick in the mirror, all with the quiet calm reserved for girls with manageable hair and necks that resembled (at least from the back) a swan’s.

  I held a pad open in my lap, having gone to the drugstore and searched for the same one they always used, hard-backed and narrow enough to be held in the span of one hand, college-ruled, a thin spiral across the top. I couldn’t find an exact match. Mine had a pearly pink cover, as if for a girl to list her favorite songs or practice her signature with the last name of the boy she liked. I’d flipped it open already to hide that part. Now I tested my pen, writing:

  Gray morning

  Pretty hair before crossing both out for sheer stupidity. Slowly I tried to rip the offending paper from the top of the pad soundlessly, crumple it in my hand, and let it drop to the floor with the rest of the garbage.

  The only noise came from the radio, an insistent, nasal-voiced man talking about Castro shooting down two planes over the northern coast of Cuba. I poked one of the fast-food bags with the tip of my shoe. An ossified, half-eaten hamburger bun slipped out, green with mold. I fiddled with the switches on my door until my window lowered a crack, letting in a loud rush of freezing air. Kimberly turned quickly around; Denis eyed me in the rearview mirror. I hurried to get it back up.

  In the days leading up to this, I’d been sure he’d call and cancel or my parents would insist that I go to school instead. Just below the surface had burbled an edgy, anticipatory disappointment. Now that the moment was here, the feeling had not entirely left. I was having a hard time sitting still. I wrote on my pad, Settle down, stupid, though instantly regretted it, scratching it out, until I was left with an inky black block at the top of the page, also regrettable.

  The radio host called Clinton a “ no-good patsy.” If Reagan were still in office, he shouted, Castro would be blasted to Haiti by now. Every once in a while Denis commented (Nothing like adding some ad hominem attacks to your polemic) and Kimberly said Um-hmmm or just nodded.

  “Radio Martí,” I said from the backseat, “was a good Reagan-era policy.”

  “Yeah?” Denis said, in a voice that wasn’t unfriendly but wasn’t particularly curious either. I told them about the U.S. radio station that broadcast anti-Communist propaganda from Florida into Cuba. It was a TV station now. He nodded. He had three moles along the back of his neck, just above the thick woolen collar of his coat. They looked soft, like the cloth buttons sewn down the front of one of my long-ago dolls.

  “Glad Reagan got something right,” he said into the rearview mirror and winked at me. The wink was a relief, as if I could let out my first breath since getting into his car.

  I tried to ease into the seat, to relax and let my spine settle into the cushion. I wanted Kimberly to tell me stories of what college was like (I was assuming she’d been; she had the air of someone who’d been). I wanted Denis to turn around, to dip his hand into the backseat, to squeeze my knee and tell me thanks for coming. I wanted him to run the rough skin of his fingertip along the fabric of my jeans to see if it drew the staticky sparks of winter contact.

  River Rouge was just as I imagined—bleak and sooty, reminding me of the dull black-and-white drawings in my history textbook. Long rows of factories lined the river, smoke wheezing out of anemic-looking smokestacks, often clustered in groups of three. The river had not even a hint of red, colored instead a brackish and forbidding gray-green.

  We parked near the downtown commercial strip, one spotty street dotted with liquor and tobacco shops, vacuum service centers and men’s wear stores displaying suits in chocolaty colors with bright stitching and broad collars easily two decades out of style. When we got out of the car, though, I was filled with something close to wonder. We might as well have been at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro or at the doors of the eighteenth-century Bastille.

  “So how do we find the people who wrote those letters?” I said. “They both mentioned Sonny’s Groceries. It seemed to me like they could have been written by the same person, except one was on a computer and one was handwritten, right? But so many details were similar. Right?”

  “Lydia,” Denis said, fishing his bag out of the trunk, “you are here purely as an observer. You’re the one who wanted to come along.” I looked for signs of his usual congeniality—the curled corner of his lip, the mischievous glint to his eyes—but there was nothing. Maybe he saw something in my face, some crestfallen quiver, because he followed with a slightly kinder “Yes, we’ll start at the grocery store.”

  Kimberly fell in step beside me as we walked to Sonny’s. The air was bracing, the cold the sort that snatched the breath from your mouth. She said in a low tone, “Don’t worry. He gets like this when he’s preparing for canvass. It takes a lot of focus.” Kimberly had the uncanny ability to make me feel both warmed and pathetic, like I was the mutt she was constantly rescuing from the pound. She offered a quick lesson in note-taking: “You write down everything that’s unusual. Or notable. Or interesting. You try to capture the general gist of what they’re saying, and especially capture any specifics. But you never know what will turn out to be relevant later. Try to capture everything.”

  They were terrible directions, really, the kind a substitute teacher who’s never actually studied chemistry or English literature would give (Class, now read chapters one through five and look for themes). But I thanked her anyway and tried to keep up with her long strides. Already the cold had given her face a healthy pinkish glow. I could feel my nose beginning to run, imagined the indecorous redness of my own face.

  Sonny’s turned out to be a wide-aisled, dusty store with large displays of stewed tomatoes and generic orange soda. Faded cardboard signs in the windows advertised sales on Winstons and Smoked Honey Ham. There were few customers inside, one rolling a squealing cart through the frozen foods, another buying lottery tickets. Neither of the cashiers or the bag boy recognized the picture of Danny. All three huddled around one cash register as Denis spread both letters on the rubbery conveyor belt. “He was seen here the second week of August. Do any of you recognize this writing?” They squinted closely, one by one shaking their heads.

  I stood poised with pen to pad, scribbling whenever Kimberly scribbled, which was often, nearly nonstop, though I was still unsure what to write. I noted the bag boy’s zitty chin, the light purple, almost white lipstick worn by one of the checkers. Didn’t see Danny, I wrote simply. I jotted about the low buzz of the fluorescents and the tabloid magazines hanging next to the checkout, one with an unflattering picture of Chelsea Clinton, another with the blond girl from Friends supposedly doing cocaine. I wondered, with a slightly sick feeling, if I was going to have to turn this in.

  After Sonny’s we canvassed the rest of Jefferson Ave., with its dry cleaners and auto parts stores and mothy-smelling hat shop. We went to the cramped Coney Island hot dog restaurant and the sparsely stocked drugstore, a machinery parts shop and a concrete company. Electric signs were intermittently burned out (P rty Supies, one liquor store proclaimed), and reader boards didn’t fare much better (Sp k pl g heck, announced one, Wheel of Fortune-like, in front of a mechanic’s). Several stores were closed for the day—or the duration—with heavy metal gates barricading the façades. Even the ones that were open had a cooped-up, slightly stale feel, like the back rooms of vacation homes that had sat dormant all winter.

  Everywhere it was the same. Denis flashed a picture of Danny at people, asking if they had any memories of seeing him or anyone who looked like him five or six months ago. The photo was Danny’s junior yearbook pictur
e. He was smiling strangely in it, his teeth clenched, as if he’d been forced to hold his pose a few beats too long. His hair was longer than usual, grown out enough that you could see the start of the cowlick that always split his front hairline into two defiant sprouts. He wore a navy oxford shirt; Coach Kinsborough always made the football players dress up for school pictures. The stiffness of the pose, the fake smile, the nice shirt, the blank blue backdrop—it all gave Danny the appearance of a benign stranger. This was the same picture the papers had run for weeks. It was starting to not even look like Danny, like a word you repeated over and over again until it lost its meaning. Ocean. Ocean. Ocean. Ocean.

  For the long hours of the morning, we were in and out of businesses, talking to old ladies with sunken faces, men behind store counters who addressed Denis with a slightly surly sir, teenagers on the sidewalks whose hair was slickly Jheri-curled and who, like me, should’ve been in school.

  I waited for Denis to thaw and warm, to turn to me and smile in recognition: Good to have you here, Lydia. I mentally prepared smart-sounding answers to his unasked questions (Denis: Where are the likeliest places your brother would have gone in this town? Me: Do they have a gym? Is there a pool hall? Denis: What would stand out in people’s minds about your brother? Me: He’s got a big Adam’s apple. And he says man at the end of lots of his sentences. And his legs are really, really hairy). But he was all work. When he looked at me, it was with the same blank appraisal he trained on strangers. And when he did speak, it was to Kimberly, in their clipped, codelike way, about front-end questioning and secondary contacts. A gray feeling of disappointment threatened to well up in me, though I kept it mostly at bay with a combination of smiling a lot, squeezing my toes tightly in my shoes, and refusing to wear my hat outside, so that my ears rang with a distracting freeze.