The Local News (20 page)

Denis asked her what the man with Danny looked like. She described a medium-sized man with a gray mustache. He was white. He wore a John Deere cap. He was average height, a little taller than Danny. No, she did not know his eye color; no, she couldn’t remember anything else he wore
(regular clothes,
she said); no, she didn’t see his car. It starts to make you feel crazy, she said, when no one believes you.

“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “They didn’t look like they fit together, the kid and the man. They could have been father and son, I guess, but there was something off, you know? Something wrong. Something not right. I’m trying to think of a better word for it, so you get it.” She stared at me then as if it were up to me to think of the word. I looked away.

“You didn’t mention any man with him in the letter,” I said.

“The letter?” She twitched a bit. “What letter?”

Denis was looking my way, not happily, his brow furrowed, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was filled with an urge to pick a fight with this woman.

“We read the letters you wrote to us. That’s how we found you. But you didn’t say anything about the man.” There was a childish quake to my last words.

Tanda reached across the couch, her upper body lurching wob-blingly toward me, and put a hand on my hand. She squeezed with a vicelike grip. It was a startling gesture in its sudden, unexpected aggressiveness. “I didn’t want to upset you people,” she said. “I needed you to know he was here, but the police already knew all the details. I just wanted you to know he was alive and that he’d been here. I’d want to know that if it was my boy.”

She held on so tightly I could feel the tips of my fingers going numb. “Uhh,” I said, my inchoate plea for her to let go. She, of course, did not understand. The roller-coaster emotion of the day, with all its anticipation, nervousness, excitement—I could feel it all coming to a head here, right in the middle of Tanda’s couch, my breath burbling in my throat. It came out in a strange, wheezy sigh, like I’d been gut-punched. Everyone looked at me. Tanda let go of my hand. My fingers were bright red. I tried just to breathe like a normal person, in, out, in, out, but the longer Denis stared, the less I remembered how to do this. It smelled like something burnt in there.

“Is something burning?” I said. My voice was thin in my ears.

Denis and Kimberly exchanged looks. “Kim,” he said, “why don’t you go get some air with Lydia?”

“Sure, sure thing,” Kimberly said, but it sounded an octave too high.

“Sorry, hon,” Tanda said. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, no,” I said. “It’s fine. I’m fine,” though my voice was still strained, laboring for breath.

Kimberly and I stood on the porch for a long time. She said nice, evenly modulated things like “Every piece of news can turn into something good,” “You never know how something like this will turn out,” “I’m always surprised where things lead.” Two houses away, a kid stomped around in the snow of his yard. I wondered what his excuse was for hooky. The longer we were out there, the more ashamed I grew for having exiled us, the baby and the babysitter.

“I’m okay,” I kept telling Kimberly, but she resisted my suggestions to go back inside.

“Let’s let Denis do his job,” she said, and I wondered if there was an accusation in there.

When Denis finally came out, he said. “You okay, kiddo?”

“Sure,” I told him. “I’m cool. The smell—” I pointed inside.

“I think we’ll call it a day,” he said.

“
I’
m fine,”
I said, and he told me we’d tapped out this town for now. He’d come back. “You have to know when to fold ’em.” He was smiling, but I felt a clear defeat, a feeling that would trail me for the rest of the day and well into the next few.

In the car Denis spoke in a low voice to Kimberly, apparently to signal that this was a private conversation, though I could hear every word. There was the list of reasons not to believe Tanda (drunk, lonely, wanting reward money, differing written and oral recollections) and to believe her (the timing was right, details were plausible without being overprepared). “It’s easy,” he said full-voice into the rearview, “to think the worst from whatever you hear. What she told us could mean a million things. A million and a half. Don’t let your imagination carry you away to some dark place. It doesn’t do anyone any good. Okay?” He kept repeating “Okay?” until I nodded.

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 well 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.