The Local News (26 page)

Our walk back was mostly silent. He mentioned something about the game, about it being too bad about Callas and the free throw, and I gave some mumbled assent, not trusting myself to talk, as I could feel, with a dawning horror, a simpering, needy thing hatching within me, one that wanted to yowl or start clawing at him or make him at least hold my hand.
Drunk,
I kept telling myself by way of explanation.
Drunk, drunk, drunk.

The more we walked, the more unbound from the situation I felt, with a sensation of floating away, of watching from a distance as Tip asked me how my classes were going. I hovered in the spot usually reserved for Danny, where I often imagined him lingering. But
he was not here now. I was floating alone, wondering what he would make of this, Tip at my side, our feet crunching through the snow in noisy tandem, the ring of skin around our lips a bright, raw, matching red.

As we neared the trailhead and heard the first sounds of other people’s voices, Tip leaned down and kissed the side of my head quickly, his mouth landing half on my temple, half on my eye, coming down hard, more of a shove than a peck, leaving a damp, cold spot when he pulled away. A quick, whiny noise escaped my throat, part surprise, part frustration, part unasked question. I coughed, pretending that’s what it’d been all along. In a matter of seconds we would be back in the clearing, greeted by Lola and Jerold and a smattering of flag girls. Tip would hold up two fat gloved fingers in a peace sign before wandering off and getting reabsorbed into the party. I would drink and drink and tell rambling stories about nothing to whoever would listen and bounce violently on a teeter-totter with Lola and pretend not to see Tip out of my peripheral vision, even though he loomed large as a bear, an ox, a modestly formidable continent. My sense of a hazy, nearby Danny would linger. I would glance for him in the treetops as the night wound on and on and on (it seemed like we would never go home) and wonder what he made of this scene—my soggy pant cuffs, my late-night shrieking laugh, my numbed fingers gripping the neck of another bottle. I wondered if he would look upon me with a certain surprise, some strange pride, or a small, stuttering hiccup of shame.

All day at school on Monday, I propelled myself mindlessly forward (Tip who? Lola who? Jerold who?) in anticipation of my conversation with Denis. I’d left him a detailed message on Sunday about Blanchard, the mug shots, Overton. When I got home, there was no message in return and I flapped around the house, occupying myself with unlikely tasks—alphabetizing the long-unused jars in the spice rack, cleaning up months of plastic grocery bags that had mushroomed in the cupboard beneath the sink, wiping away mold from the corners of windowsills. My mother came up behind me as I leaned into the living room’s bay windows, the blackening spread both disgusting and fascinating. Up close, you could see pale fingerprints on the glass, streaky trails from the last time someone did a rush Windex job.

“You okay?” she asked.

Her voice startled me. I wasn’t used to her sneaking up or inquiring as to my well-being.

“Sure,” I said, a little too quick and loud. I held up the blackened rag. “Gross. Maybe we should think about a maid.”

Her mouth puckered its usual hurt pucker. When I finished with the windows, I chiseled away the thick layers of frosty ice from the freezer.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do it like that,” my father said as he passed through the kitchen, pointing to the bread knife I held like a spear. Ice cube trays and bags of frozen peas perspired on the counter. I shrugged and he shrugged back and the freezer hummed a loud, strained hum.

The call didn’t come until well past dusk, nearly seven. Denis told me,
Real good job.
He told me,
Nice legwork.
He told me he’d left a message for Blanchard and he hoped the guy would call him back ASAP. He pronounced it
Ay-sap.
He sounded different on the phone, like he was in the middle of nine things. I could hear him moving stuff around, and pictured the phone crooked between his ear and his shoulder, his hands shuffling through a stack of papers. I told him about Overton, about facial symmetry, about the six heavy books.

“You better watch it,” he said. “You’re going to run me out of business.”

I laughed. It was a corny comment, but I was happy to play along. I told him there were four possible matches.

“Yep,” he said. “I got your message. I’m on it, I promise.” Another voice said something in the background; it sounded like a woman. A low, scratchy sound came from his end, him muffling the receiver. He said things I couldn’t hear. I wondered if he was at the office or home. When he came back, he said, “You did great, Lydia.” He had to go. He’d be in touch soon.

I hung up, even more restless than before. I’d expected to feel sated; instead, I imagined him scratching my name from the bottom of a messy to-do list and leaning toward Kimberly in his cramped, gumshoey office, conferring with her in the impenetrable way they had of conferring. Or perhaps he was at home, and the voice hadn’t been Kimberly at all, a prospect that was even worse. I sat alone in my room, feeling particularly young and stupid, with a familiar feeling of the world rushing along without me, not even wise enough to know to miss me.

The next call was a little better—later in the week, after the first two mug shots had been ruled out. One was a born-again Christian in Frankfurt, Kentucky, who’d not set foot in Michigan in years; another had been verifiably away at a hunting cabin with three buddies for nearly all of August. “Chin up,” Denis said, reminding me that nine out of ten leads come to nothing. “It’s the tenth that matters.”

I told him I’d been researching models of cars that might match the rusty sedan seen the night Danny went missing. I told him about the Chevy Caprice Classic and the Pontiac 6000 and the Mercury Marquis and the Ford Crown Vic.

“Thorough as usual,” he said. But he said it weirdly. There was something about not seeing his face that made our communication a little sideways. I couldn’t tell when he was smiling. I wanted him to be standing in front of me, tipping his forehead to mine.

The third call, I didn’t even get to talk to him. When I got home from school, my mother called me into the kitchen, looking more frayed than usual. She’d missed a button on her shirt. Her pants had a quarter-sized stain on the left thigh. She was at the table, rifling through a pile of papers. On top, an old permission slip. Beneath, Roy’s left ear poking out.

“I spoke to Denis Jimenez,” she said. “He wanted you to know the final two men did not pan out. One’s dead. The other has a
parole officer who can account for his whereabouts.” She delivered the news like she was tasting something foul on her tongue.

I told her thanks, asked if we had any juice in the fridge. I knew we didn’t have any juice. We never had any juice.

“What’s going on?” she said, her voice rising on the last word. And then, in answer to her own question, “He was surprised I had no idea what he was talking about. He told me about your trip to the police.”

“Okay.” I shrugged and gave her the vaguest sketch about Lark-grove, making it sound like a brief, spontaneous jaunt. “I wanted to help,” I said. “I mean, you heard him. I found some new leads.”

She looked unconvinced, perched between further interrogation and meltdown. “Why,” she said, “all the secrecy?”

I shrugged again. “I didn’t want to bug you.”

She stared at me. “I have a lot of information here,” she finally said quietly, waving a hand over her pile. It was a halfhearted wave.

“I know you do,” I said, expecting to feel more satisfaction in this moment, in such easy victory. My mother—she had to know then how impotent and silly she was. But the moment turned out to be just smoky and empty and depressing, my standing there in her kitchen. A draft moved through the room. The windows were old. They needed replacing. I listened to them now, the low rattle against the wooden sills.

I told her I was hungry. That I was going to make a sandwich or some soup. That I would be happy to make her some too. She said no thank you. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen her eat an actual meal. I told her she should eat something and she ignored me. I heated soup and sat with her at the table. I couldn’t remember, either, the last time the two of us had sat at this table alone together.

She pretended to read a report card, an eighth-grade graduation
program, a dog-eared police report, her face taut, though I could see her eyes weren’t scanning anything, were fixed in a stare.

“What’s that you have there?” I asked.

Without looking at me, she handed me one of his long-ago full-class photos. Fourth grade. Mrs. Lathem. The kids stood on bleachers, all gap-toothed and goofy. Danny was near the end of the second row, his hair several shades lighter than the deep brown it would eventually become, his eyes heavy-lidded, just shy of a blink. I studied it, nodding, making low affirmative noises, pretending it meant something.

And then came a period of unprecedented silence. Denis’s calls stopped. He and Kimberly didn’t schedule their normal update meeting with my parents; one week passed without them coming by, and then another and even a third—an unprecedented hiatus for Denis and one that filled me with dread and foreboding. What if something had happened to him? What if he had decided he was sick of our hopeless case? What if he and Kimberly had run off to Vegas or some South American country for a quickie marriage? What if his ex-wife returned from whatever it was that had turned her into his ex-wife?

Without Denis and Kimberly’s visits to break up our days, edgi-ness and temper burbled up from below the surface. When my dad’s most recent issue of
Car and Driver
went missing, he tore apart the living room, flinging area rugs, tossing cushions from the couches. When a sparrow flew blindly into the glass of our kitchen window, my mother went into a fit of tears even more gasping and prolonged than usual. She used her bright yellow garden gloves to retrieve the
bird from our icy driveway and asked me to help dig a hole in the backyard. Dad came out as I struggled with the shovel and started yelling about the stupidity of sparrows for not flying south like the rest. I could barely chisel a dent in the frozen ground, so we ended up just wrapping the carcass in a blue plastic newspaper bag and stuffing it between the garbage bags in the can beside the garage.

And school didn’t help—if anything, it was a worse fit than usual. When I passed Tip in the hall, he seemed overemotive and strange, starting in again with the whole Bluebird thing—“Morning, Bluebird!” “What up, Bluebird?”—and pretending to clock me in the chin with his fist. He spoke to me as if I were very young or very stupid, his eyes wide, his tone cheery as he explained to me that he’d just had Taco Bell for lunch or was about to boff a test in chem. He was apish and used words like
boff.
I felt embarrassed for myself and for him, Croft’s already seeming implausible or imagined except for remnants of a terrible throbby feeling in my chest that I couldn’t entirely quash as I stood next to him. Ridiculous ideas ran through my head, like touching his face or sniffing his shirt collar. I told him, “I’m busy,” and “I gotta go now,” which evoked nothing but his same toothy grin, as if he were continually poised on the cusp of patting me on the head.

As for Lola, she remained stuck on the notion of Jerold and me, which made my interactions with her even more contrived and shopworn than usual. I told her nothing about Tip. One, what was there to tell? Two, however little there was, I didn’t think it could hold up to the microscopic scrutiny that was very much Lola’s wont. Three, I didn’t know if she’d be jealous. And I didn’t know how to tell her I found Jerold slightly repulsive. So we remained in a holding pattern, one where she peppered me with questions about him (Had he tried to kiss me? Had he told me he liked me? Why wouldn’t
I call him? Maybe she should give him my number?) and I feigned alertness.

Add to this that the trip to Larkgrove seemed to have reopened a vein of familiarity between me and David Nelson. He was newly emboldened, approaching me at lunch and whispering in an overly stealthy way, “Can I speak with you, Lydia?” Lola’s face always took on a schoolmarmish disapproval when he was around. The already iffy social capital of a flag-girl lunch table was diminished considerably by David Nelson hovering nearby. He regarded her with similar disdain, wearing a deliberately bored, I-couldn’t-care-less expression as he scanned the inhabitants of the table. If he wore glasses, he would be peering over the top of them, shaking his head.

Whenever I stood from the table, David Nelson took me by the elbow and led me to a less noisy corner of the cafeteria to whisper his newest ideas about Roy. “We should do a local door-to-door canvass,” he said one day. Another: “If we can gain access to DMV photos, imagine the possibilities.” He was pink-cheeked with earnestness. Spit gathered in the corners of his lips. I knew to be grateful—they weren’t bad ideas—but I found myself irritated by his bent toward co-ownership. I was also distracted by the way the flag girls gaped and tittered from the table. I knew it was stupid to be embarrassed—what did I have to be embarrassed about? I was standing in the cafeteria with David Nelson, something I had done for years without the slightest thought. Now, though, it felt a little like holding up my underpants for all to see. I told him each time, “Good, good” and that I would call him to plan things out, knowing I probably wouldn’t.