The Local News (2 page)

“What company policy?” I asked, pointing to the poster for
Once Upon a Mattress
at Jefferson Middle School and one for the Red Cross:
Give Blood. Save a Life.
He repeated his line about manager approval in his thick, mumbling accent. His dark face was drawn, with wiry bits of hair growing in uneven patches across his chin. He was yellow around the eyes, which made him look sick.

His name tag said
Kito.
East Asian? African? Middle Eastern? I couldn’t tell from his bland, bored features. It seemed like he could be anything. I assumed his bad attitude came from all the Franklin High jerkoffs who’d come in here before me, making
What up, Apu?
jokes or calling him Mohammed. But I was capable of talking to Kito like a normal person. I was capable of discussing the Oslo Accords or the Indian-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, and not just because I could regurgitate facts from Mr. Hollingham’s AP history class—which I could—but because I took a particular pride in actually reading newspapers and listening to the radio.

The fluorescent lights buzzed loudly above me. “Can’t you take this now and get manager approval later?” I asked, sliding the poster across the rubbery mat on the counter. Danny was posed in his football uniform, down on one knee, a football socked in one armpit, his face broad and unobjectionable as a meatloaf, smiling as if Santa Claus himself had snapped the picture.

Beneath the photograph in bold, blocky letters it said,
LAST SEEN 8/2/1995.
There were other details scattered in a bunch of contrasting, discordant fonts and sizes and colors, because my mom, its designer, was a leaky container for panic. In italicized blue Courier, it listed what Danny had been wearing (Reebok gym shoes, shorts, gray T-shirt, Tigers ball cap); in huge red Times New Roman, how much my parents would reward someone for information leading to his whereabouts ($25,000; up another $10,000 from the last poster); in bolded Arial, where he was last seen (two miles from our house, leaving the basketball courts at the Larkgrove Elementary School playground, where he’d just finished a game with his musclehead friends, Tip and Kent). It didn’t say
musclehead
on the poster, didn’t even mention Tip and Kent.

Kito
(Kite-o,
I wondered, or
Kee-toh?)
told me no. No manager tonight, he said.

“Can’t you hold it somewhere in the back until a manager arrives? Leave it on the manager’s desk? Maybe put a note on it?” I was trying to stay reasonable, but I could hear my voice getting loud. A couple of guys had come into the Mini-Mart, one opening and closing the cooler doors, the other standing right behind me. I could smell the faint odor of gasoline coming off him, but I didn’t turn around. “Please,” I said.

Kito looked at me, yellow and expressionless. I was sure he had not the highest opinion of Americans, as most probably came in here for a six-pack of Bud or Marlboro menthols or a whole strip of lottery tickets with their Slurpee. Still, I wasn’t used to strangers unmoved by tragedy.

“Listen,” I said, speaking slowly and evenly. “I am not asking you to hang this poster immediately. I will leave it here to get whatever approval you need.”

He called me
ma’am
again, even though he was old enough to be
my father, and told me
Sorry.
“Sir, I can help you?” he said to the person behind me.

I curled my fingers around the rickety wire rack that held local maps, not quite sure what to do with myself. I wanted to tell Kito to go screw himself, but adults, even adults manning a gas station counter, still held relatively unassailable sway with me, so I chickened out and instead flicked my hand in his general direction, an insane motion, as if I were sprinkling fairy dust on him. For a second he opened his sick eyes a bit wider and I thought maybe I was starting to get through, but then, still, nothing. I left the poster on the counter, just to make a point, though I pictured Kito almost immediately throwing it into the metal wastebasket beside him, already overfilled with Snickers wrappers and Doritos bags.

The man behind me called over my head, “Pump eight.” Kito started pressing the keys of his cash register. I opened the door hard on my way out, the bells on top clinking loudly and also, I hoped, angrily and indignantly and ultimately pityingly, for Kito and his sad little life there inside the Mini-Mart.

I dropped off posters at Wendy’s, Arby’s, Valu-Rite, and the Chev ron. The car wash, the dry cleaners, and the Comerica branch were all already closed—it was nearly nine on a Tuesday. I scanned the radio for news. An AM host talked fuzzily about fallout from the O. J. Simpson verdict with a lady who yelled about how it was open season on battered women. On another station there was a story about riots in Lyons that broke out after the police killed a local bombing suspect. Bad news was soothing, as if at least it was the whole world that was screwed.

The lights of the A&W were still bright, the booths half full. Inside,
there was a flash of purple-and-yellow letter jackets, which gave me a quick, instinctual stutter, a chill up the back of my neck. My new therapist, Chuck, would’ve told me the feeling was a grief response. Chuck thought everything was a grief response. And sure, you could have interpreted the jackets as a reminder of Danny, who likely would’ve been in there with the rest of them, eating burgers and slurping root beers and burping words. He’d be play-punching his friends on the arms, except his play punches would be hard, and soon two or three of the guys would end up in a dramatic little scuffle, Danny in a headlock, Tip or Kent with an arm around Danny’s neck, tousling Danny’s hair and saying, “What you want, pretty boy? You want to throw down?” and everyone would be laughing, even Danny, and maybe he’d spit burger out of his mouth or root beer would come flying through his nose. The whole crowd of them would make a huge racket, disturbing all the other A&W customers without even noticing or, if they noticed, without giving a crap.

But the queasy feeling I had now as I slowed past the bright windows was no different from the feelings I’d had before Danny disappeared. The noisy, forceful presence of Franklin athletes had always made me feel small, always elicited an instinctual response to run and hide. I pulled into the parking lot anyway, thinking briefly about going in. Because things were different now. Kirk Donovan, the reporter at Channel 7, knew me on a first-name basis; when he came to our house for interviews, as he had again just that afternoon, he’d wave and say, “Hey, Lydia,” like he’d come over just to hang out. And I’d accumulated new friends, all kinds of new friends (except for the sincere kind, or the actually-liked-me-or-cared-about-me kind), who’d materialized suddenly out of the dank, sweaty hallways of Franklin High in the first weeks of my sophomore year. Mrs. Rabinowitz, the school librarian, had arranged it so that everyone in study hall had to sign a wall-sized
card wishing me well, and they all did, except for the few boys who scrawled nearly undetectable messages in the corners about my small boobs and beaver teeth.
Get braces,
one wrote,
for your beaver teeth.

I watched through the windshield now as Michael Chemanski and Lyle Walker—both seniors, both on the football team—sat perched on a booth back, laughing so hard it looked like maybe they were sobbing, their eyes screwed shut, their mouths huge as caves. Four others were crammed into the opposite side, their backs to me, their bodies swaying and jostling as if sitting on the deck of a boat, riding out a storm. They had such an air of careless happiness—they always did, it was their specialty—it gave me a numb, worn-out feeling. Even then, even only sixty-three days into it, I was acutely aware of the weightlessness of other people’s lives, of the willowy way everyone else moved through the world. If I’d ever had such ease (maybe in flashes, in particularly unguarded moments just after waking), certainly it was lost to me now.

I hated them anew.

I didn’t go in. I turned back onto the main four-lane road and then made a left onto one of Fairfield’s residential streets. Away from the strip malls and gas stations, the roads were mostly empty, parents socked away in dens or living rooms, kids studying or messing around. We’d moved to Fairfield three years before, from another suburb that had done a better job at faking being a real town. At least in Abernathy they’d had some local shops: a little diner with corned beef sandwiches and eggs over easy, a used bookstore that smelled wormy and moist, a market run by an old guy named Ed who’d swat kids playfully on the wrist if they opened the beef jerky container that sat on the counter. Abernathy had black people. Abernathy had parks where kids actually played. And block parties with traffic cones lining the ends of the streets, picnic tables
piled with food in the middle of the road. Fairfield, on the other hand, was just one big square, three miles deep in each direction, houses inside of it, crappy businesses lining the perimeter on all four sides, as if the city planners had hoped to build a fortress against outside evils through a few well-placed Jiffy Lubes and Radio Shacks.

I wasn’t really driving in any direction, just drifting past aluminum-sided houses and buzz-cut grass, signs for DEEVEY FOR MAYOR and
VOTE NO ON
38. Porch lights made lawns look pale and shadowy. Yellow ribbons hung limply in the night air, glowing in my headlights. I slowed for two squirrels who stood in the street, fat and unafraid of cars. I wasn’t ready to go back home. Being on the eleven o’clock news would unite and distract us for a few minutes, but until then there were nearly two hours and Mom would ask desperate questions
(Anyone recognize him? Any new information?)
and Dad would sit in his chair, clicking between channels, acting as if he wasn’t listening or maybe really not hearing.

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.