The Local News Read online

  On the radio they talked about three hundred dead or injured in an earthquake in Turkey. I thought about how Turkey had my favorite-named strait: Bosporus. When I’d first learned the word, it sounded like a swear. David Nelson and I went through a phase where when we stubbed our toe or got a bad grade, we’d say, “Oh, Bosporus!”

  That was what I was thinking about—Bosporus—when my rearview mirror lit up in a flash of reds and blues. For a second I thought dumbly, Pretty. The colors had a fireworks quality to them—sudden, startling—which disarmed me for the first beat or two. Then my brain pieced it together: cop car, cop car behind me, cop car behind me with its lights flashing at me. I grew suddenly aware of my flesh, my skin hot then cold. I pulled to the curb behind a double-cab pickup.

  When the officer leaned into my window, his face was smooth and pale, his eyebrows so blond they nearly blended into his skin. It gave him a plastic, alien appearance. “License and registration,” he said.

  “I’m only fifteen,” I blurted.

  He blinked slowly a couple of times, staring at me. “Then what are you doing operating a motor vehicle by yourself?” he said.

  “I—I … errands.” I thought of The Trial, Joseph K. being interrogated by the Magistrate.

  “Fifteen-year-olds aren’t allowed to do errands in motor vehicles by themselves,” he said.

  “No, I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  The officer called me young lady and asked to see my permit (I’m hoping you at least have a permit, he said, to which I nodded like a lap-dog) and registration. I pawed through everything crammed in the glove compartment: a pen light, a mini-screwdriver, contact lens solution, a tall stack of mismatched fast-food napkins.

  “I try to be careful,” I said stupidly as I handed him the slips of paper. “I had Mr. Grenwich for driver’s ed.” He nodded at me, not in a way that signaled empathy or understanding but in a clipped, expressionless way that meant shut up, and then walked wordlessly back to his car, where he stayed for a long time. I couldn’t right my internal thermostat. My body continued to cool, then heat, then cool, then heat; my armpits grew wet, the hollow of my back sticky against my shirt.

  Whenever I tried to see what the officer was doing, I couldn’t make out anything beyond a silhouette in the driver’s seat. The overhead lights were still flashing. I screwed my eyes shut, holding tight to the steering wheel, fighting the urge to scream. It was an awful feeling, being found out. Not just for being an underaged driver. I was held together in those days by the scattershot reassurances of random grown-ups—the piteous cooing of the shift clerk at the Farmer Jack’s, the Very good job from Mrs. Bardazian as she handed back my paper on the use of surrealism in Oliver Twist, the wave from a balding driver as I slowed to let him veer into my lane. In the absence of that, I felt split open, revealed: a shitty sister, a vacant hole of a daughter, a terrible person deficient in even the most basic emotions like sorrow or grief.

  Someone peeked out from behind the front curtains of the house next to us, an oval-shaped man or lady who stood very still. The porch light showed off a fall garland made of pinecones and spiny branches and red-orange leaves. I couldn’t stop staring at the meticulous arrangement of foliage. I wanted to live in a house with a fall garland at its door, with an oval-shaped sentry who had nothing more to worry about than a fifteen-year-old being pulled over out front.

  When the officer finally came back, he said, “Lydia Pasternak?” and flashed the permit at me.

  “Yes?” I said, his two words leaving me feeling vulnerable and exposed. It seemed like a terrible thing for him to say.

  He sighed and handed me back my permit and registration. His fingers smelled like my mom’s, ashy from cigarettes. “I’m sorry about your brother. Tough break.”

  “Huhr,” I said, more a noise than a word. It still surprised me, the spread of our local renown. “Okay,” I said, my voice throaty and hoarse. He turned on his flashlight and shined it on the posters in the passenger seat. It was a dramatic gesture, a floodlight passing over and back across Danny’s meaty face, highlighting over and over the thick hair gelled up around his head like a crown, the cheeks ruddy and speckled. Defensive end Danny. All-State swimmer Danny. Homecoming court Danny. Don’t fucking touch my Play Station Danny.

  “That’s what I was out doing,” I said. It was impossible to look at him without getting blinded. I shaded my eyes with my hand.

  He clicked off the flashlight. “You need not to be driving at your age.”

  I nodded, struck by the strange syntax of his sentence.

  “You see that stop sign back on Branson?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t sure which street was Branson. All the streets in Fairfield blended together.

  “Then maybe you can explain why you rolled right through it.” He had a congenial voice now, as if he were my helpful uncle.

  “Sorry,” I said. “No, I guess I didn’t see it.”

  “I’m going to let you off with a warning this time. But you need to promise me you won’t get in this car by yourself again.” I promised. “Why don’t you give me some of those for the station?” I handed him a bunch of posters, ten or so, more than he’d ever really use, but it was good to get rid of them. He patted the top of the car as he left—it made a loud noise—and I jumped a little in my seat. “Drive safe back home, Ms. Pasternak,” he said.

  I sat for a while after he turned off his flashing lights and drove away. The street was quiet and dark without him. My body buzzed with something different now—adrenaline maybe, the heady kick of having gotten away with something. My hands felt strong on the steering wheel, my smile momentarily cute in the rearview mirror. That feeling of power and rightness, of the world being on my side—this was what it was like, I thought, to be Danny.

  I looked like a sickly bird on the news, pale, my chin coming to a weird point as if the bones had been broken and reset. My hair stuck up in a cowlicky loop in the back. It was always demoralizing, having whatever tenuous notion that I looked halfway decent shattered by the image of myself on the television.

  They always arranged us the same way, me sitting between my parents on the couch. Kirk Donovan would sit in Dad’s chair, leaning toward the three of us sympathetically. Before we’d start filming, he’d ask Dad to put his arm around me, and Dad wouldn’t quite touch me but would wrap his arm around the back of the couch instead. I could smell his Ban Roll-On, spicy and dense. The camera crew would cram themselves in by the fireplace, and our beagles would get locked in my bedroom for being too yippy and unable to sit still. My mom adopted all our beagles from a rescue, and they always tended toward high-strung or unruly, making you wonder what strange or awful things may have preceded their lives with us.

  On TV now, Dad was saying that there hadn’t been any new news in the past week but that the police were working hard with little to go on. He thanked everyone for the donation drive, especially his colleagues at the Fidelity Bank and all the kind folks at Ford Hospital. He said everything loudly, flatly, like he was reporting baseball scores, but with a slight edge beneath it, as if he could at any minute start bawling someone out. On TV, Mom had a quivering lip. The camera panned to her, tears silently rolling down her face as she sorted through her index cards, while my dad talked about the new reward money. Always now she carried around her index cards. Kirk Donovan had tried to coax them from her, saying she’d look more natural if she just “spoke from her heart,” but she’d told him flatly no, as if he’d suggested she drop her baby in the gutter or kick one of the rescue beagles in the snout. She read from them that we’d hired a private investigator. “Howard,” she looked up and told Kirk Donovan, as if the reporter might know him. She read that we were thinking of renting a billboard along the highway. Her delivery reminded me of the stilted student presentations on “How to Pitch a Tent” and “Why the Constitution Is Important” we had to sit through during speech class.

  In real life she was crying again, making
a soft clucking noise that made me want to rip my ears from my head. She was the only one on the couch now. Poppy, one of the rescue beagles, lay draped on Mom’s lap, half asleep. My mom stroked Poppy’s head with such an intense neediness it made me feel bad for the dog, who just lay there and took it. I was on the floor, close enough to the TV that in other circumstances my parents might have told me to move back so as not to ruin my eyes. Dad sat in his chair, doing an imitation of a tired statue. Oliver and Olivia, the other two rescue beagles, pulled on opposite ends of a braided rope toy, dragging each other around the family room and making loud snorfling noises. It was like someone laughing during a funeral, and I found it a relief.

  Our house had an uncomfortable stillness now, without Danny barking into the phone to friends or bounding up the stairs with such force it seemed as if he could bring the house down around him or dribbling a basketball against the vestibule tiles as Dad told him halfheartedly to knock it off. And a smell. There was a smell now. It lingered, seemingly carried only on select air currents. For days it would appear to be gone, and then suddenly, when I sat down in the breakfast nook or stepped into the shower or wiped my feet on the doormat inside the sliding back doors, it would hit me just as strong, and I’d wonder if it’d been there all along and I’d just gotten used to it, like people who lived downwind of paper mills. It was not easily identifiable. It reminded me a little bit of my fishbowl, the murky tang of the algae if I waited too long to clean it. But there was a more pungent quality to it, one that went right to the back of your throat. I’d sniff around, trying to find the source, but it seemed to move as I moved, to suddenly permeate everything—couch pillows, coats in the front closet, tablecloths. Years later, when I was reminded of it while unearthing a Tupperware of forgotten food in the recesses of my fridge, I decided it was the impermeable smell of neglect.

  On TV, Kirk Donovan talked about some of the new leads the police had been following, like Danny sightings downriver in River Rouge. Then Kirk said to me, “Lydia, what is it you miss most about your brother?”

  I smiled like an imbecile, my teeth looking colossal. There was—and still is—a pervading ordinariness to my looks. But at certain angles I glimpsed a hint of grotesquerie, an asymmetrical freakishness to my features: one eye sat slightly higher than the other; a hump jutted from the bridge of my nose. It would be years before I could even vaguely appreciate the surprises of my face, when a college boyfriend admiringly called me androgynous, when a punky, mohawked friend said she’d give an eyetooth for my profile. On the news I squinted into the lights—even after all these times, I still wasn’t used to the lights—and said, “I don’t know. Just him.” Then I paused. Then I said, “How he’d sit at the table and eat his cereal in the morning.”

  They panned to Kirk Donovan nodding morosely, as if I’d said something that had actually meant something. Then the camera panned to my mom again, still crying, while Kirk said, “A Fairfield family, coping with uncertainty and loss, one day at a time.”

  A commercial came on for cold medicine.

  My mom pushed herself up from the couch. “We did good,” she said unconvincingly. The tears still streamed down her cheeks, her nostrils and upper lip shiny with snot. When she left the room, Poppy trailed after her, the dog’s tongue hanging partway out of her mouth.

  The phone rang. It always rang after we’d been on the news. We never answered it: too draining for my parents, too humiliating for me. It was David Nelson. He called to say I did a great job. He liked my orange shirt, he said into the answering machine. He’d left similar messages every time we were on the news. “Sayonara,” he said at the end. David Nelson’s parents had taken him to Japan the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and he’d been saying that ever since. Some people found it annoying.

  “Bash,” Dad said softly as he got up too. It was the nickname he’d had for me forever, long severed from its original meaning, if it’d ever had one. I nodded at him, and his unshaven face was so drawn and hollow, I felt compelled to add, “Sweet dreams.” He blinked wordlessly, as if I’d spoken Farsi.

  Soon I was alone in the living room except for Oliver and Olivia, still at it with the rope toy. Back from commercial, the next news story was about a kid two towns away who needed treatment for a rare bone cancer; he was bald and eyebrowless and nine. Next, a family’s section-eight housing had burned halfway down because of faulty electrical work; they were suing the city. It was a parade of local heartbreak, me with the front-row seat.

  Later I couldn’t sleep. This was something my new therapist, Chuck, wanted me to talk about. He’d lean forward in his chair, interested in a Kirk Donovan sort of way in my insomnia, but I never had anything to tell him. I couldn’t sleep now. That was it. I lay in bed, awake as noon, my eyes wide and wandering across the ceiling as I tried to come up with a foreign language for every letter of the alphabet (Arabic, Bengali, Croatian) or a backwards list of vice presidents (I always forgot Alben Barkley and then, later, George Dallas). The house creaked and moaned around me and trees rustled outside my window. Strangely enough, it was the time Danny seemed most absent. A long, flat silence came from the room beside mine. No bass thumping of his stereo or tinny resonance of his Discman turned up too high or raspy whispers into the phone well past when he was allowed to be on—all such maddening sounds at the time, so illustrative of the enormous amount of space he’d taken up. But in the middle of the night it was unsettling, the utter absence of them. It rattled me in some cavernous, wide-awake place.

  Out of so many memories, already he’d been distilled to an oft-repeated few, like a cheap card trick of the mind, the eight of clubs or the king of diamonds turning up with each uncanny shuffle. In one, Danny and I ran around the basement of our old house, back in the days when we still played together. He was building a bridge across the span of the floor. This was one of his favorite games, lining up all of our toys and furniture so we could walk from end to end without once touching the floor. He’d shout about crocodiles and poison eels in the carpet below. I was maybe six or seven, Danny nine or ten.

  “Hurry!” he’d yell as I dragged over one of our folding chairs, then his long-unused Big Wheels. “The dump truck! The dump truck!” he yelled and directed me to push it against the stack of books he’d laid on the carpet. We’d spanned nearly half the room, and Danny dragged over the beanbag chair and an old, crushed Tinker-Toys box. He nodded wildly at his design, clapping his hands together. It was a silly game, really. I never believed in the crocodiles or the eels; that wasn’t the way my imagination worked, even when I was little. It was always hard to suspend my disbelief. Already I was the sort of child who preferred thinking about parallelograms to princesses, fractals to fairy tales. Already I preferred reading the books to piling them on the floor.

  But still. There was something about playing with Danny—maybe his enveloping enthusiasm or his bossiness, which held none of his later cruelty, or his ardent belief in his venture—that made it so easy, so natural to fall into step beside him. Even then, when he’d been bony and slight, not all that much bigger than me, he had a charisma that pulled me along, he the bumbling boy dictator, I his servile assistant.

  It’d been years since I’d thought about the bridge game. Danny would later become such a force, such a brutish sort of fool really, his very presence eclipsed any thoughts of that boy—it was impossible to believe he had ever existed. But now he emerged from some banished place in my memory, meeting me at night and leaving a metallic taste in my mouth, a clamminess in my palms. I stared and stared into the dark. When I finally drifted off—after my body had gone rigid from hours of effort and my mind had twisted in on itself like a Möbius strip—it was while listening stupidly for sounds of bedsprings or footfalls on the other side of our thin wall.

  The day after the news broadcast, school was particularly frenzied, the new friends buzzing around like mosquitoes who’d been swarming too long in a fleshless jungle. Lola Pepper was on me before I’d even made it t
o the front entrance. She was in my grade and on the flag team, one significant and humiliating step down in the Franklin High hierarchy from the actual cheerleaders. The flag-team girls usually had a little too much fat or unmanageable hair or shiny braces. Lola Pepper, to her credit, was probably the most attractive of them. She was skinny, green-eyed, and short enough to seem cute without being dwarfish. Her only deficit seemed to be her nearly translucent skin, which was covered with freckles, and not the neatly speckled kind but fat dollops coloring her face with distracting ellipses and Rorschach blotches.

  She’d been one of the girls who’d followed Danny around incessantly, offering to walk his dog or do his homework or have his kids. Me, I don’t even think she’d known my name. We’d never had much opportunity to cross paths in Mr. Stark’s World History Club or the National Junior Honor Society dinners. Now, though, she grabbed my arm—Lola had an annoying habit of needing to hang on to you while she talked—her words coming out in a rush.

  “You guys did really great,” she said. “I was crying and my mom was crying too. My mom says Kirk Donovan is gay. She heard it from one of the ladies at her health club who knows one of his ex-boyfriends. She asked me to ask you what he was like in person.” She told a long story about the dream she’d had of Danny walking along a beach, throwing a baseball. “I don’t think he ever really played baseball that much, did he? That psychic lady was on Montel yesterday. If we could get on there, we could ask her questions. She seems nice.”