The Local News (27 page)

I left Denis trailing phone messages about nothing. “I was thinking too,” I said after the beep, “about the Oldsmobile 88 or
Volvo 240 DL,” or “I wondered if you guys had gone to Windsor yet.” But day after day I came home to the light on our answering machine glowing a solid, unblinking red, the easy winner of a stare-down.

“What’s wrong with you?” Chuck said when I showed up for our session.

I imagined what other, better therapists said instead of this.

“What happened there?” He pointed to my arms, the series of long red welts running from wrist to elbow.

“I’ve been itchy,” I told him, which was true. Along with the insomnia came a recent bout of itchiness. I had tried calamine lotion and ice cubes, to no avail. The itchiness rang below my skin, a further defense against sleep. Talking about it now awakened it—it didn’t take much—and I raked my nails over my skin.

“I don’t think that’s good for you,” Chuck said. He winced a little. “Maybe you should try to sit still.” I felt sorry for Chuck. That was one of my prevailing feelings in here. “What’s been going on?” he said, still looking at my arms.

“Nothing,” I said. Chuck was the third least likely person I’d tell anything to, right after my parents. He didn’t know about Denis, Roy, Larkgrove, Croft’s, anything. I’d stopped telling him stuff in early winter.

“You look not so great,” he said. This from the man who had recently replaced his wire-rimmed glasses with oddly thick-framed rectangular ones and grown his sideburns out till they were dis-tractingly close to muttonchops. I imagined saying to him, “You’re one to talk.”

I scraped my forearms against the sharp corners of the chair arms, a momentary relief. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Danny,” I said. It was so easy to figure out how to get just the right rise from him.

“You don’t say? What about?”

“The bad stuff.” Chuck loved the bad stuff. “He used to try to strangle me.” I told a story of how I woke up one time and Danny had his hands around my neck. Like most of my stories in here, it was loosely based on something that had actually happened, Danny trying to wrestle me once, jamming an arm across my larynx, blocking my air for a few seconds, long enough for my lungs to go into spasm, for my vision to begin to spot. After I flailed and kicked wildly enough, he got off me and said
Sorry, sorry, sorry
as I coughed and spit and rubbed my neck and threatened to tell our parents. He said it was an accident, which it maybe, probably, at least partially was.

But I made it Technicolor for Chuck, made it me waking up in the middle of the night to a homicidal brother. Because sometimes I wanted someone just to feel sorry for me. Sometimes it was a relief to have a person look at me the way Chuck looked at me now, in the moment before the onslaught of predictable questions
(How did you feel when it happened? Why do you think he did that? Did you tell your parents? How did they respond?).
Chuck was pitched forward in his chair, lips moist and in the slightest of frowns, fingers braided tightly together, eyes bouncing from side to side as they scanned my face—the look of someone readying the plan for my imminent rescue.

At home I decided to redouble my investigatory efforts, going back through the piles of ruled-out letters, rereading all of the Nices and Crazies and Wrongs, quickly recognizing all the familiar quirks and idiosyncrasies: the kid who’d adorned the margins of his Nice letter with humpback whale stickers, the Crazy who believed Gore Vidal
was somehow involved. There was a lulling comfort in combing back through. I culled a paltry few. One insisted a blond Danny was scooping ice cream at a Stucchi’s in Ann Arbor, but the date was a week too early, though perhaps, I reasoned now, simply an error in memory. Another was unduly fixated on the transmission of vital information through fiber-optic cables but nonetheless reported a Danny sighting outside Trenton, a town not all that far from River Rouge.

I left Denis a long update message, trying to sound chirpy and informative, bright and needless. I had grown intimately familiar with the particulars of his answering machine: his unexpected use of
y’all
(
… and I’ll get back to y’all at my soonest available opportunity),
the way the long beep warbled unevenly if several messages had already been left on the tape, the unforgiving tendency it had to cut you off if you spoke too softly or paused, resulting in most of my messages being half shouted in a long slur of unpunctuated sentences.

I rinsed dog dishes, checked the dial tone, picked lint from the dryer lint catcher, counted water stains on my ceiling, sorted the mail.
Sports Illustrated
sent an expiration notice.
Publisher’s Clearing House
wanted Danny to know he may have already won a million dollars. Whenever the phone trilled, I ran for it. The sound of my dad’s colleague asking me to remind him about the Friday food drive or of Lola Pepper wanting to make plans to shop for hair bands or handbags or blouses came to seem like the punch line of a bad joke. When David Nelson called with an idea he’d gotten from watching
Law & Order
about hiring an artist to go back to Tanda and carve a 3-D version of Roy’s head, “to get a better sense of his overall dimensions,” I felt impatience rising up in me like heartburn.

One night, refrigerator cleaned, cobwebs cleared from corners
of ceilings, I heard my parents in the living room, my dad saying to my mom, “We’re paying him enough. I’d expect more than a phone call.”

“Who called?” I said.

My father was slouched in his chair. I saw his startle at my entrance—a slight stiffening, hands grasping into quick fists—as if he’d forgotten someone else lived here. He looked at me for a long while, as if weighing whether or not to answer. “Your good friend Denis Jimenez.” My dad wasn’t normally sarcastic.

“When did he call?” All the dread fantasies—him and Kimberly pretzeled languidly in a tropical hammock; him caught up in a dangerous government conspiracy case; him finally repelled by my parents’ animus—were better than the fact of him simply not returning my calls. The fact that he’d called my parents galled me. I couldn’t think of more useless people for him to call.

My father blinked from the chair. He’d begun to look more jaundiced lately with a permanently yellow cast to his skin. He couldn’t remember exactly when Denis had called. Sometime in the last few days.

“What was the news?” I was trying to sound normal, though I felt like I could scream. I saw the way he and my mom both looked at me, as if I were a small animal behind glass. I tried to stop rolling back and forth on my heels.

There was no news, my dad said. Denis had nothing to report. They’d hit a dead end. My dad nearly spat the sentences.

“Did he leave any message for me?” I knew how I sounded, a little frayed, just shy of screechy, past the point of trying to appear reasonable or composed even though it was a pointless question. I knew the answer before my father responded, before he shook his head, before my mom cocked her chin at me (what was that, a challenge?), before they looked between them in some meaningful,
coded exchange, and one said in an unfamiliar tone, both syrupy and grating, “Perhaps more of your focus should be on school, dear,” and the other quickly agreed, as if they’d grown momentarily confused, mistaking me for their remedial child, their halfwit prince.

And then, after nearly a month of silence, Denis returned. It was late afternoon, a random Wednesday, one of my rare times home alone, my father still at work, my mother having ventured uncharacteristically into the world to buy tampons, dish soap, and dog food, a tri-fecta of scarcity that even she could not ignore. I was sprawled on the couch, drifting on the brink of a nap (how much easier sleep came in the daytime), reading about feudalism for Hollingham’s class, soldiering slowly through textbook sections on Roman
pa
i
rici
m
um
and German
mundium,
when I heard the familiar wheezing strain of Den is’s car. By then I had invented the noise so many times, scrambling to the window only to find a neighbor’s sedan creeping down the street or a snowblower being pushed a couple of driveways away, I no longer trusted my own ears. I didn’t even run to the window to look, so convinced I was by then of my own folly.

But then came the loud knock against the front door. No one but our postman came to this door, and he rang the bell. Only Denis used the heavy brass knocker. I jumped off the couch, suddenly alert. “Okay. Okay okay okay,” I whispered to myself. Making my way to the door, I worried about my face, whether it was patterned with the velvety imprints of the couch cushions, and my hair, a tangled mess on the side I’d been lying on. I patted it down with one hand, running my fingers through it while unlocking the deadbolt.

“Lydia,” Denis said to me as I opened the door. The word came out warmly, and he was smiling at me as if it had been only a couple days since we had last spoken.

Instead of the rush of questions—“Where have you been?” and “Didn’t you get my messages?” and “Why didn’t you return my calls?”—I simply said, “My parents aren’t home.”

“Well, good,” he said. “I was hoping to see you anyway.”

I smiled then, a swollen, naked smile. The dogs skittered into the vestibule and circled wildly at Denis’s feet. They jumped at his calves and nipped playfully at his hand as he leaned down to pat them. I told them to stop, but they didn’t listen, and I apologized to Denis for it, to which he kept saying, “It’s fine, it’s fine.” Poppy left a trail of drool on the tiles, she was so excited.

“How’ve you been?” he said.

“Good,” I lied. “I’ve been good. How have you been?”

“Sorry I’ve been away so long. Real busy,” he said. “Way too busy.” He clapped a hand on my upper arm and smiled his broad smile. The mix of cigarette and slight perspiration that was Denis Jimenez wafted through the air. It was like he’d never been gone.

“Good to see you,” he said. He was inches from me.

“Good to see you too,” I said, imagining the color dotting my cheeks.

As I led him to the living room, it struck me as intimate and almost
provocative to be moving away from the stiff chairs and hard tabletops of the kitchen, which had been, up to that point, Denis’s sole domain. Now he eased into one of our overstuffed chairs, sinking down like someone with nowhere else to be. Poppy and Oliver snorfled at his feet, rubbing their heads on the carpet and making mournful baying sounds. Olivia circled my legs. I scratched her behind the ears, her fur oily and slightly gritty. The dogs needed bathing. I hoped Denis wouldn’t touch them too closely.

When he saw my history book, he asked what I’d been reading. I told him about William the Bastard. He made some passing comments about feudalism. “Not a bad system if you were the top one percent. Not so different from today.” He clasped his hands over his stomach, atop a shirt tucked sloppily into his waistband. His belt had small nicks all along the leather, as if he didn’t keep his belts hung neatly on hooks inside his closet like my father, but rather in a tangled pile next to his bed. Maybe he stepped on them in the night, I thought, when he got up to pee. I loved the nicks. They seemed so Denis, so wizened and who gives a crap.

“What have you been up to?” I said, my voice upbeat and cheerfully curious. This, the closest I would come to interrogation.

“You know,” he said, “quite a lot. We’d hit a bunch of dead ends in your case.” I liked that it was
my
case, not my family’s case or my brother’s case. “So we decided to start over, go back and piece together everything we knew, look at it freshly, see what we may have missed.”

“And?”

“We’re cogitating.” He rested his head against the back of the chair, as if to display what it looked like to cogitate. “So, listen, I thought you could help again. You’ve been so helpful in the past.”

I nodded, told him yes, anything. If I had spent every day for a year with Chuck, if we had paid him thousands of dollars, I doubted
we would ever have found even an iota of this natural rapport. Chuck, I thought with uncharacteristic tenderness, was a tragic failure. He was the stuff of Greek myths. He was Sisyphus, I the rock. I was filled with grandiosity, sitting across from Denis. I felt a little like shouting or jumping up and down.

“Tell me more about your brother,” he said.

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. What was it like living with him?” Denis sat forward in his chair.

I talked about Danny’s loud voice, some of the less humiliating teasing (hiding in the front bushes and trying to scare me when I got home from school; picking up the phone extension while I was talking to David Nelson and making sex noises). I described his girlfriends, like Hindy Newman and Dawnelle Ryan. Denis wasn’t taking notes as he usually did. Instead he was just sitting and nodding, staring at me. I said how Danny would eat all the eggs and peanut butter and cookies and cereal as soon as my mom came back from grocery shopping, how a couple days after she’d filled up the fridge, it’d be cleared out, the rest of us having barely gotten anything.

“What a pain in the ass,” Denis said. If there was a singular thing I loved about Denis, it was his steadfast indifference toward Danny. I had feared that even though he knew my brother only by lore, Denis would one day surrender to the tales of charisma and popularity and charm and be taken in like the rest of them. “Do you miss him?” he said.