The Local News Page 6

  I stood in the grass, trying to think of what to do with my arms. A lady handed me one of the orange vests and a whistle. David Nelson was actually fairly annoying at the Saturday searches, reciting probability statistics and complaining about his loafers getting soaked and not really leaving a moment of quiet. But still, this was the time he and I would normally huddle together, making low jokes about everyone around us, him telling me distracting stories.

  The first drops of rain began to fall. One of the off-duty cops took the megaphone from Mom and started in on the standard announcements—not to travel in groups under four, to hold hands with arms outstretched to form the most comprehensive sweep, to look for anything notable or suspicious, to stay out of the abandoned factory a half-mile west of here. Blow your whistle if you find something and a search organizer will find you.

  People began moving more purposefully, forming their groups. I drifted away from my parents, not wanting to hold outstretched hands with them. My dad would ploddingly stop at every shrub, dirt pile, or garbage can to paw through its innards, while my mom would take sharp breaths whenever we happened upon something shiny—a gum wrapper, a soda can, the one hypodermic needle we found weeks earlier in the tall grasses next to the Wal-Mart.

  I soon found myself among a group of well-coiffed, middle-aged synagogue women who acted as if we all shared a close friendship from B’nai Israel. The synagogue ladies were much like everyone else in this sense, naturally eager and upon me, having in recent months embellished the most paltry of shared histories until it became something of significance. Now they touched my arm and spoke my name, even though I barely knew them. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d been to B’nai Israel. We were not a religious family. My mother hadn’t even been Jewish until she’d married my dad; before that she’d been Episcopalian. The conversion, though they never talked about it, seemed a decision that had little to do with any conviction aside from appeasing Dad’s parents. Some years they forgot entirely about the High Holidays. My mom still faked the words to the seder songs. In December we had both a Christmas tree and a menorah. All of our religious practices seemed to come from some patchwork of ambivalence and obligation. I sometimes called us Episcajews and Jewapalians, but really, we were nothing.

  Now, though, the synagogue ladies acted as if I were the mes-siah, arrived. They cooed at me and called me sweetheart and said the things strangers said now with surprising uniformity, Poor thing and I can’t imagine, which, instead of having their normal gratifying effect, gave me the feeling of being a few steps away from myself, impassively watching the whole scene play itself out. I imagined a lifetime of these scenes, where the only expression I encountered was a tearful one and all physical contact was limited to either the sympathetic arm squeeze or, if the person was bolder, one of my hands grasped in both of hers.

  The rain continued to fall more steadily, and a low wind moved easily through my coat and shirt. One of the ladies asked me about school, if I was doing okay in school. I nodded past her. Today we were searching in the abandoned stretch of land behind the Shore Acres Mall, several miles south of the basketball courts. We’d been here a couple times already; it was the spot where the police dogs had sniffed out scents of Danny forty-eight hours after he went missing. This was my least favorite search, with its deep alleyways and burned-out storefronts, dark corners and bottomless-seeming dumpsters.

  Another synagogue lady was telling me a long and awful story about her child who had died of lymphoma and how that had been almost more than she could bear, only to find that she could bear it. There was lipstick on one of her front teeth. When she finished, she stared expectantly, as if now it were my turn, though I could not think of a single thing to say. Quickly the day was growing tinged with the sense of things being odd, the waypoints askew. So when someone ran up behind me and grabbed my hand and I turned to see Lola Pepper’s familiar, smiling face nearly on top of me, what I felt was sudden, unabashed relief.

  I told the synagogue ladies good luck with their search and thanked them while Lola pulled me across the field toward her friends, words flowing from her as easily as they always did—How are you? Doesn’t the rain suck? What did you do last night? She’d gone over to Rochelle’s (I didn’t know who Rochelle was) and they watched Pulp Fiction. Had I seen it? It was good but so weird. Really violent. I should maybe see it if I like that kind of thing. How was I? Searches were strange. Did I feel okay about searches or did I think they’re strange too?

  “No, they’re strange,” I said. For a second Lola looked surprised that I’d actually said something back, staring at me for a long beat.

  “Why do you think they’re strange?” she said. The freckles on her left cheek resembled a sailboat.

  “I don’t know. I mean, you really want to find something but also you hope you don’t find anything at all.”

  “Yeah, right, exactly. You only want to find something like a note from Danny saying, Hey guys, everything’s cool. I’m fine.”

  I laughed a little. “That’s pretty much it.”

  The officer made his last few announcements—stay warm, stay with your group, watch out for cars—as Lola marched me up to her friends, her fingers still laced through mine. It was all the girls from the lunch table plus the only guy from flag team, an exchange student from France who brushed his curly hair into a lightly greased wave and had cheeks so bright he appeared to be wearing blush. He introduced himself to me formally, shaking my hand and doing a slight dip. His name was Bayard, which I already knew since there were only three exchange students at Franklin: Bayard, a Swedish junior named Maja, who all the guys wanted to date because of her blond hair and tiny waist, and a Brazilian freshman named Eduardo, who buoyed the entire JV soccer team. Usually being an exchange student meant easy popularity, but Bayard, with his proclivity for flag routines and shoes that appeared to have slight heels, was largely understood to be gay and friends mainly with Lola Pepper.

  “Nice to meet you, Lydia,” he said, his accent making it come out Nize tuh mitchu, LEED-yah.

  Lola took my hand on one side, Bayard on the other, the lunch-table girls forming the ends of our chain on either side. There were seven of us altogether, walking over the already trampled weeds, heading toward a vacant strip mall. The sense of low-level disorien-tation lingered; strange hands held mine, Lola’s grip tight and nearly crushing, Bayard’s loose and damp and fishlike. Lola was uncharacteristically hushed as we walked. Searches always did that to people. Even the lunch-table girls held their impenetrable, giggly conversations at a far lower volume than usual, barely a whisper. As we marched, my arms were pulled taut at my sides, as if we were little kids playing a game—ring-around-the-rosy, Red Rover, Red Rover. I needed almost no momentum of my own, the snaky line pulling me along. For that I felt a quiet, grateful surrender.

  Moving onto pavement, people hunched forward to examine bits of leaves and debris. I scanned the ground quickly. It was easy to let my attention drift to the chains of people around us, moving purposefully and slowly, speaking in hushed voices or not at all, giving the whole scene a choreographed yet alien feel. What, I wondered, would Danny think if he were watching this? I often imagined Danny lingering just above, somewhere in the tree line, not because I thought he was dead, but more because I thought he was somehow omniscient, in on some big joke that none of the rest of us understood. He’d be amused by this, I guessed, tickled by the spectacle. Look, he’d say, Tip’s holding hands with Dave Macaw. That would crack him up. Fudgepackers, he’d say.

  One of the lunch-table girls stopped to pick up a wet piece of paper. She turned it over meaningfully, even though from three people away I could see it was just an old movie ticket stub.

  “Nothing.” She looked at me apologetically. She wore a rain hat with two cat ears fashioned playfully on the top. I shrugged. She dropped the stub, but one of the other lunch-table girls with a hint of a double chin told her not to litter. The cat-eared girl said the stub was already there. Th
e double-chinned girl said that doesn’t make littering right. “Pick it back up,” she said. “Are you on the rag?” the cat-eared girl said.

  “Is strange,” Bayard said to me as we began walking again. Eez strinj, it came out, and I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the interaction between the girls or the whole idea of this search. Either way, I agreed.

  “What do you think of Chirac’s election?” I said a little too loudly as we all slipped into the alley behind the mall. The rain pooled in low puddles beside the buildings.

  Bayard shrugged. “Nothing, really.” Nuzzing, reelee.

  “You like him better than Mitterrand?”

  “I don’t follow politics,” he told me. I didn’t know what to say. Pas-de-Calais was the strait separating France from Great Britain, connecting the English Channel to the North Sea.

  “I bet Paris is beautiful,” Lola Pepper said.

  “Is beautiful for tourists,” Bayard said. “Like Las Vegas. Like Disneyland.”

  “I love Disneyland,” Lola Pepper said agreeably.

  “Then you love Paris,” he said.

  “I know,” Lola Pepper said, oblivious to the derision in Bayard’s voice. “I can’t wait to go there one day. There and Venice. Gondolas.”

  A chain of older men was stopped ahead of us, already fishing through the alley’s one dumpster. We scooted quickly past them be-fore they could ask for help. Lola Pepper picked up a fingerless glove, dense and waterlogged. One of the other girls found what appeared to be an antenna broken off a radio. Neither, of course, meant anything. Sometimes during searches I suspected people just picked things up so as not to feel as useless as we surely were. By the time we came out the other side of the alley, the abandoned factory stood in the distance. Some of the girls were already complaining of being cold. One bitched about how wet her socks were. We’d been out twenty minutes, maybe a half-hour.

  Lola was getting frustrated with her friends. Each time one complained during our slow march toward the factory, she sighed or shook her head. Finally, after one girl nearly started crying because her shoe had been sucked half off her foot by the mud, Lola said, “Listen, you guys. Would you be complaining about a dirty sock if it was your brother we were looking for?”

  I made a weird sound then, a kind of coughing laugh, and looked at my shoes. It was sweet of her—at least now I can see that it was sweet of her, the way she naturally came to champion me, the way she wanted so badly, so determinedly, to right things. It was humane and kindhearted in a way I could scarcely comprehend at the time, when it just felt humiliating. I remember wanting to tell her to shut up, wanting to tell the grousing girls that it was okay, I wanted to turn around too. I was cold and my feet were soggy and one shoulder of my raincoat was coming loose at the seam, the rain seeping all the way to my skin.

  “Sorry,” the girl with the sucked-off shoe mumbled in my general direction, momentarily chastened. We continued toward the factory, where orange-vested groups already circled the perimeter. I had no idea what the factory used to manufacture. It was five stories tall, spanning most of a block, the whole building a dingy gray, a good number of its windows knocked out. The feeling of futility only increased as we neared. What could we possibly find, traipsing around in the same circle that all these groups were already traipsing in? I thought I saw my mom on the end of one of the human chains, her back curving, her neck stretched forward, long strands of hair escaping her hood and hanging down wet in front of her.

  When we finally reached the sidewalk in front of the building, Bayard said, “Let’s go in,” so simply, as if that were our obvious next step. Lez guh een.

  The police had searched the factory more than once. They’d found nothing. Civilian searchers weren’t allowed inside. The double-chinned girl said quickly, “We can’t,” and a girl with bub-blegum pink nails said, “No way I’m going in there.” Cat Ears said, “That place is nasty,” drawing out the final word.

  Bayard smiled at us. Not exactly a boastful smile, but closed-mouthed and sly, like he knew something the rest of us had no inkling of. He seemed briefly arrogant, in spite of being bright-cheeked and spindly and wearing high-heeled shoes. His hand sat in mine still, loose and impassive. I stared at the dirty brick of the building; this close, random patches looked blackened, as if they’d been charred by fire. Yellow caution tape fluttered in one doorway, flapping in the air like a party streamer.

  The longer we stood there, the more feverish the lunch-table girls grew in their objections (“We’re not allowed to separate,” “You’re going to be trespassing”). The rain was fully upon us now, sure and constant. A few groups of searchers passed by on the sidewalk, nodding wordlessly. One man looked at the ground near our feet and asked, “Did you find something?” and shook his head sadly when we told him no. Bayard still had that smile, and the feeling of surrender rose again within me. I would let him lead me inside. This awful building seemed suddenly to fit perfectly with the general strangeness of the morning.

  “I’ll go,” I said, and Lola looked between me and her friends, her freckles brightening on her face. I thought she might burst into tears. Inside meant respite from this rain and this search, from these squirrelly girls, from my mother and the inevitable circle she was making back toward us now.

  I squeezed Lola’s hand. “Come with us,” I said, the first generous thing I ever said to her, really. And she did.

  There was a musty, charred smell to the place, not smoky, more like the bitter sharpness of crossed wires. It reminded me of the smell that wafted from the voc hall at school as students patched together busted radios in electronics. Glass and debris littered the floor; our steps were noisy and crunching. It was hard to see, as the inside was cavernous and most windows were clouded over with a dirty film. The broken ones let in jagged streams of light and a steady patter of rain. You could hear a few voices from outside, but just barely. Lola kept making mewling noises behind me, gasping as she walked into cobwebs. There was a constant film of them, shocking at first, the intimate way they clung to your face.

  “You guys,” Lola kept saying. “You guys, is this a good idea?”

  Bayard marched ahead of us like a drum major. “Don’t be scared,” he called. Dun be skeered.

  We moved past hulking, unidentifiable machines. In the dark, one looked like a loom, another a gross imitation of a grand piano.

  “What’d they used to do in here?” I called, my voice loud and echoy. Neither answered, but Lola let out an unusually high-pitched squeal followed by a loud, skittering noise. When I turned around, she was down on all fours, splayed like an animal.

  “I tripped!” she said, her tone as if she were accusing us of something. “I tripped!”

  When I got to her, she was breathing heavily, examining her wrists for scrapes. I helped her up by the elbow. She had an expression I hadn’t seen before, far more intent and fiery than normal. She looked like she was working hard to bite back something. The sight of it made me like her more than usual. It made me give her more credit. I helped brush the dirt off her pants.

  “I’m cut,” she said. She held her palm to my face. There was a thin trail of blood on the fleshy pad beneath her thumb. “I think there’s some glass in there.”

  I felt around her hand impotently, imitating something my mother must have done a long time ago. I couldn’t feel anything.

  When Bayard got to us, he proclaimed, “Come on. This will be fun.” The hood of his rain jacket was pulled back now; several curls had broken free of his gel and popped from his head like loose bedsprings. His ears were huge. I felt like laughing.

  “Zis weel be fan,” I said to Lola. That made her smile a little.

  Bayard found a dark stairwell that smelled rancid, as if someone had long ago left meat to defrost there. Lola cupped both hands over her nose and mouth as Bayard bounded up the stairs ahead of us. The darkness was so dense I held my arms out in front of me protectively. The smell was potent; it went right to my throat and I started cough
ing. For a quick moment I thought, Danny. I felt, briefly, a fleshy, sweaty sureness. An image popped into my head—some long-ago Halloween, him swaddled in toilet paper, his face paled with white powder, red grease-pencil blood dripping from the side of his mouth.

  Soon Lola’s hand was on my back. “You okay?” she said.

  I’d stopped on the stairs, was hanging on to the railing now. “Sure,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Sure.”

  “Just don’t look,” she said, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I made out a faint, feathery carcass in the corner of the stairwell. It was huge, certainly bigger than a pigeon, and dark, with its wings splayed at strange angles. A dense shadow fanned out beneath it. Blood.

  “Poor crow,” Lola said.

  “Crow,” I said, as if I’d never heard the word before. Lola was patting my back.

  I couldn’t stop staring. There was a bit of movement near the beak, and for a second I thought it might still be alive until I realized maggots were slithering around in the eye sockets. I tried not to gag and hurried up the rest of the steps two at a time, listening to Lola’s footsteps behind me.

  As I came out of the stairwell, my blood pounded in my ears, my face felt weighty with a rush of blood. The second floor looked just like the first except even darker, with fewer broken windows. Bayard sat waiting for us, cross-legged beside a huge machine with a conveyer belt. His jacket was spread out beneath him, as if he were on a picnic.

  “What took you so long?” he said. I wondered if the smug un-flappability was a French thing. It was starting to bug me. “Have a seat,” he called, fanning his arm in front of him.

  I tried to slow my breathing. Lola performed a long, meticulous ritual of sweeping away the debris with the sides of her shoes before laying her coat down. She made worried, chirpy noises at what she thought were spiders but were only dusty clots of dirt carried along by the low wind currents. I sat too, feeling uncomfortably small in the shadow of the machine. The air was cool and musky. There was a steady patter of rain against the windows. My one shoulder was freezing.