The Local News Page 15

  The rest of the ride back was quiet, not even the radio now. I picked at the lambskin seat cover, tapped my finger against the car window, hatching a pattern of dots and dashes. Images ran through my head—Sal’s goggle-rimmed eyes, the woman from Zephyr’s spit-tle, Danny’s knee busted open, a trickle of blood running down his leg, pooling at the mouth of his basketball shoe, turning the tongue and laces a dirty crimson as he limped through the aisles, his whole body shifting crookedly, one foot sliding lamely behind the other, his face strangely awry, his features lined up wrong, his mouth too slack, his eyes clouded and confused. The snow came down harder now. Denis’s wipers made an insistent scraping sound, and his headlights cast two long, hollow domes into a glinting white nowhere.

  • • •

  It was dusk by the time we arrived back. All the lights on the first floor were on, and a shadowy figure moved behind the living room drapes. I was relieved that Denis and Kimberly were coming in. It helped me avoid talking to my parents. My mother greeted us, wild-eyed and expectant, clearly having done nothing but wait for this moment since the second we’d left nearly eight hours ago. With her unbrushed, bathrobed appearance, she resembled no one so much as Tanda.

  I turned to say some final thing to Denis, something reassuring or grateful or insightful which would cause him to forget my faltering and to see me instead as capable, confident, unflappable, as if he’d found himself a second Kimberly. But the moment had passed; already he was focused on my parents, guiding them both into the kitchen. I was tempted to stay and listen to his version of our day, but I was spent in a way that was making my bones ache. I went to my room and lay in my bed and pretended to sleep. Their voices rose around me, the words blurring into an indistinguishable murmur, though I thought maybe I could hear my mother crying. It was possible it was just the sound of the dogs, whimpering excitedly about having strangers in the house. I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t go downstairs later, after footsteps marched back to the front vestibule and Denis’s loud car sputtered down our long street, to check.

  It was not difficult to keep my promise of staying tight-lipped about River Rouge. No one even knew I’d made the trip, my one-day absence rating barely a blip. I returned too to Lola’s single-minded determination to get Jerold Terry and me in the same room. At lunch she insisted we go watch Jerold play four-square with three of his stubby-necked wrestler friends. “Say something,” she whispered to me as he gruntingly shoved the ball into the square across from him. I didn’t have anything to say. The ends of Jerold’s hair were shiny with sweat at the back of his neck. “Pussy!” he yelled when one of the guys shoved the ball out of bounds.

  “Hi, Jerold!” Lola called, and I could see her future clearly then, the passel of children she would mortify at the shopping mall by bossing her way into their fitting rooms and talking too loudly about which boys they liked. Jerold turned to look at us quickly and distractedly, his mouth shining with silver as he smiled.

  In the coming days, it became clear I had turned into Lola’s project. In my room after school, she would make me try on her different color lipsticks, using tissue to rub my lips clean in between, until the friction turned them a bright, tender red. She brought over a bunch of her old tank tops and V-neck shirts. “Yeah, you should definitely do tighter,” she said after I slipped on a ribbed shirt that clung to my boobs. I looked boyish and skeletal, the sort of child who would appear in a brochure about giving to the needy. “Don’t be ridiculous!” Lola said, with what seemed like genuine ardor. “Do you know how many girls on flag would die to be as skinny as you?” She clipped my hair with a bunch of little plastic barrettes shaped strangely like apples or dragonflies. I thought, Kimberly would never wear these. But I let Lola do it, even though it seemed stupid and silly and the result made me appear—I was almost certain, despite her protests—clownish. The truth was, as loath as I may have been to admit it, Lola Pepper held an undeniable and seductive power. Her world was always so finely focused on a single thing—usually a boy like my brother or Tip, or a flag-team routine, or in this case the imagined future between Jerold Terry and me—that all else appeared to just fall away. She elevated myopia to an art form; it was almost a relief to get sucked in, or at least attempt to be.

  I found myself in endless discussions about the smallest minutiae related to Jerold. Did I see that girl he was talking to at lunch? Is she the junior who just transferred from Larchmont? Did I notice how he looked dressed up on Tuesday? Why was he wearing that button-down?

  There was a sense of trying to build a fort from blades of grass, piling tiny bits upon tiny bits in the hopes it would make something of substance. Sometimes it worked. I found myself lying in bed thinking Jerold Terry, Jerold Terry, without even really realizing it. More than one afternoon of Mrs. Bardazian’s English class passed with me trying to fix on a mental picture of his face, the tiny chin, the fleshy earlobes, the eyebrows that blurred a little into each other.

  But my hold on him, or his on me, was tenuous at best. If I heard Denis’s voice downstairs while Lola and I lay scheming on my bed, or if a random smell reminded me of the mossy odor of Tanda’s house, notions of Jerold fell quickly away.

  “Hey,” he said to me one time as I was hurrying to get my books from my locker for Fontana’s trig class. There was about to be a quiz on hyperbolic functions I’d barely studied for. When I turned around, there he stood, shoulders hunched slightly forward, a glossy expression like he had a slight cold. I felt the rippling heat of having been revealed along with almost simultaneous pangs of disappointment. His eyes were beady like a squirrel’s, his lips woefully chapped.

  “Hey,” I said back, clasping my books to my chest.

  “What’s up?” he said, and I told him I was on my way to trig.

  “Trig,” he said and chuckled, though I wasn’t sure what was funny. He stared past me at my locker. “I had a locker on this hall last year.” He scanned the hall, as if trying to locate it.

  “Cool,” I told him.

  “I got psych,” he said.

  “Psych’s interesting,” I said, lying. All the jocks took psych. In it they watched filmstrips of patients in mental hospitals with strange disorders, like the woman who tasted colors and the man who could not remember people twenty seconds after meeting them.

  He nodded and continued to scan the hallway. The strap of his backpack kept slipping off his shoulder and he kept pushing it back up. There was a Playboy bunny patch sewn onto it. I couldn’t help but wonder who had sewn it there. It seemed doubtful that Jerold knew how to sew, but I couldn’t imagine his mother taking part unless she wrongly understood the image to indicate her son’s interest in small game animals.

  “Well, take care,” I said after a while, though as soon as I did, I was embarrassed by how stilted the words sounded, as if I were never going to see him again.

  “Goodbye, Lydia,” he said, sounding equally stilted. I walked toward trig with a throbbing in my chest, the heat of failure upon me (of this upcoming quiz? of this unhatched thing between me and this strange boy?) while his name rang nonsensically through my head, Jer-old Ter-ry, Jer-old Ter-ry, the dull cadence of the words matching my footsteps.

  At home things were mostly the same. I had imagined that after River Rouge there’d be police and search dogs and renewed fervor from what we’d learned. But everything moved at a glacial pace. Denis (and often Kimberly) came over once or twice a week, he and my mother filling the kitchen with smoke, my father looking half spaced out, half ready to spring from the table, his palms braced against the edge, fingers splayed, me hovering nearby at the counter or against the fridge, the whole time with an anxious, amped-up feeling like I was trying to make up for something, trying to catch up.

  There were updates. Denis and Kimberly had canvassed a larger and larger circle around River Rouge, talking to people in Ecorse, Lincoln Park, and Melvindale. He reported that Tanda was getting more aggressive about reward money, adding that this “does not necessarily speak we
ll of the veracity of her tale,” though they’d had two follow-up visits to her and had even come up with a composite of the man she’d allegedly seen with Danny. Denis had run the composite unsuccessfully against a database of known sex offenders and child abusers.

  He slid a copy of the sketch across the table. My parents and I leaned in. It was an odd picture, a hollow-cheeked man with a ratty mustache and a cap that sat high on his head. The rest of his features looked ghostly, as if the details Tanda hadn’t been able to remember as clearly—his eyes, nose, shape of his lips—were sketched tentatively, in lighter pencil, leaving only the most glancing of impressions. He was expressionless to the point of being inert. My first thought was that this was vague and useless; could be one of a million blank-faced men. My father’s face turned a sallow shade of white. My mother gripped the corner of the paper in a palsied, clawlike way, carelessly crumpling it. Denis gave a standard speech about how it was important not to get emotionally worked up with each new piece of information. There was little indication they were listening.

  “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.