The Local News (28 page)

I leaned forward on the couch and imagined describing this scene later to Lola, the way I would try to coax her from her feelings of derision toward Denis, explaining the hum of conspiracy that had finally returned between him and me.

“Miss him?” I said. “Sure. I mean, of course.” Denis nodded, stretching his neck in such a way it made a series of hollow popping sounds. “Old man bones,” he said. Then: “Not sure if I’d miss him.”

“I mean, of course I miss him, because it’s sort of miserable here now.” I waved my hand in the air, as if he needed help in figuring out what I meant by
here.
Olivia started barking, thinking I had a treat for her. I shushed her. Denis nodded at me slowly in his knowing way with the half-smile, and I recognized that he was giving me silent permission, giving me an out. And it was titillating, his tendency to tread where so few others dared. Who else, I thought, was so willing to concede that Danny might be hard to miss?

“He was difficult.” I said. “I mean, he was intense.” He nodded. “Sure. He sounds like he can be a piece of work.” I talked quickly then—it came out in a rush—about the oppressive, nearly suffocating quiet of the house now, but at least we were free of the ever-present vigilance of the tracking and cataloguing of Danny Pasternak’s every move. I described the countless evenings of waiting for him to get home from swim or football practice as the spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove and my parents busied themselves with tasks, my mother wiping down the dinner table, my father sorting through the mail, but really, all of us just waiting to see if he would come bursting through the door after a missed pass or a butterfly stroke that clocked nineteen seconds slower than usual, full of venom and glowering. Those were dinners spent gingerly passing the rolls, the three of us making polite conversation, trying to avoid the vitriol that could roll so easily off his tongue
(Why you have to chew like a cow, Lydia? Who overcooked this pasta? Do we have to eat
this
again?)
as my parents impotently chided him.

And then there were those days he came home after a winning scrimmage and he would swing me like a potato sack over his shoulder, or kiss my mom on the cheek, or ask my dad if he wanted to toss the ball around in the backyard, all with a buzzy air of courtship. Most of the time I thought he was too obtuse to really recognize his singular influence on the mood of the house. Other times, as he stalked into the vestibule, his brow knit in familiar anger, I just thought he was careless in his power.

Denis was making
Um-hmm
sounds as I described this. The amazing thing about his face was that he was able to look at you intently, though with an expression free of judgment. That’s not to say he was expressionless; his lips were slightly pursed, his forehead creased in a look of almost devout interest. The stubble and untrimmed mustache made him seem rough and nearly sad-looking. He had a grizzled vulnerability. I resisted asking if he wanted to come sit on the couch with me. This, I thought, in a tranquil, bright moment of clarity, this was all I wanted. Right here. I didn’t need to be greedy or voracious. This was enough.

“Give me a typical fight you two had,” he said.

I remembered him asking me something similar months earlier. I tried to think of something good. I told him about the time when Danny jammed my bedroom door closed with his desk chair so I was trapped inside for hours until my parents got home from work. I told him about when Danny ripped my National Junior Honor Society certificate off the fridge and then denied it when my dad found it torn to bits in the garbage.

“Jesus,” Denis said, shaking his head.

I told him then about the whole titless wonder thing, about Danny one time kicking me in the shin and leaving a flowery bruise, about splattering bleach on one of my favorite shirts. I was no longer worried about humiliating myself, instead feeling like this
was my chance to shift things permanently, to ensure that Denis would never be lulled by the gravitational pull of all things Danny. The light filtered through the blinds with the grayish tinge of evening, and I talked faster, worried that my mom would come back and wilt in the doorway, bags in hand, trembling and tearful from the myriad offenses of the world, like the harsh fluorescent lights of the grocery store or the rush-hour traffic on Penfield Ave.

When I stopped, Denis just smiled at me. He was nodding a little, staring directly in my eyes. I tried holding his stare but felt a tickle rising in me and couldn’t quite do it. For a while he didn’t say anything, and I tried to think of small talk, something about “How’s Kimberly?” or “What other cases are you working on?” but then he said, “So what got you interested in the investigation?”

“Muh—” I said, a quick sound before I could stop myself. Then I laughed a little. Denis shifted farther forward in his seat, tugging at his belt loops as if to adjust himself. The question unnerved me. So did the way he kept staring, as if he already knew the answer and was just waiting for me to say it. There was no way to tell him I got interested because I liked him. The very idea sent a queasy shiver through me. Finally I said, “I want him to come home.” But my voice was loud and unconvincing, Miss America.

“I mean,” Denis said, “did you even like him?”

I shrugged. “Sure,” I said.

“Really?”

“I mean, more when we were younger.” Again, I remembered having told Denis a lot of this before.

“But now?”

“Now, you know, now is now. He could be a piece of work, like you said.”

“So why work so hard to get him back?” he said.

I wasn’t sure what he wanted. “He’s still my brother.”

“But you were resentful of him?”

“Sometimes.”

“Jealous?” There was a new way he was looking at me, the slightest of changes, almost imperceptible really, his eyes a bit more squinty, his smile slightly plastic, the sort a clown would flash at a birthday girl only because he was getting paid.

“Sure. A little. I mean, he’s not that smart, but he gets a lot of stuff.”

“Stuff like your parents’ attention?”

“And friends and girlfriends and popularity.”

“And you didn’t like that?”

“I mean, I didn’t really care,” I said, the tenor of the interaction going I knew slightly cockeyed. The way he was asking questions, different now from just a minute ago. But I couldn’t stop. I was driven by momentum, a need to explain myself till we got right side up again. “Except it seemed like he never had to earn anything. And it wasn’t like I ever wanted to be popular. I’m more popular now and it’s just kind of stupid.”

“So you’re popular now that he’s gone?” Denis said, leaning so far forward in his chair now, he seemed balanced on the cushion by just the tip of his tailbone.

“It’s not like that,” I said.

“What’s it like?”

I wasn’t sure exactly what he was asking. “It’s like nothing. I’m not really popular. I just know his friends now.”

“And you like it better this way?”

“What way?” I said.

“With your brother gone?”

I worried about the chill moving through me, the way my nipples were hardening beneath my shirt. Would he see that? I was
ashamed of not wearing a bra. I never wore a bra. What a horrible fact that now seemed.

“No,” I said. I was trying to keep my voice even. “I wouldn’t put it that simply.”

“How would you put it?”

“I wouldn’t put it.”

He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. Aside from Poppy pawing at the carpet, the room was quiet. Denis watched me, his face unreadable. I acted like I was fascinated by what Poppy was doing.

“You know,” he finally said, another tone change, now back to folksy and conversational, “early in my career, I had a client whose wife of twenty years had left him. Disappeared without a trace one day. He was desperate, the poor fellow. He’d been a crappy husband, cheated on her, lost his job. But he was ready to turn it around. And when he came to me, he was going out of his mind with worry. He was probably the most helpful client I think I ever had.” The half-smile was back, the head cocked to one side, though his eyes still searched mine, and his hands picked intently at the wrinkled pleats in his pants.

“The guy would dig up her old high school yearbooks for me or give me her journals—I mean, some of these were twenty years old. He’d track down the phone numbers of the guys she’d dated when she was nineteen. He was thorough. He was like my unpaid assistant. And I couldn’t have been happier for his help. I mean, I was green back then. Real green. Had maybe closed a handful of cases.”

He chuckled at this. I chuckled back.

“But it got to a point where he was feeding me so much information that led me in so many different directions. His old lady had a big grudge against her boss, and also she had a cousin who lived in
Oaxaca and she’d always talked of wanting to retire there, and also she’d spent a couple months in the locked mental ward of the state hospital in the late seventies. I just started going in circles. Chasing my proverbial tail. And at some point you have to ask, is the guy trying to be helpful or is he trying to obfuscate? Does
he
have something to hide?”

Denis had stopped picking at his pants. His elbows were perched now on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. He stared at me in a way I’d never seen before, almost predatory, the way he was not blinking, the way his mouth was sealed so tightly shut.

“What?” I said. And “Wait.” I could feel the churn of my belly, the acidic rise of food, hours old, through my esophagus: milk and stale cornflakes, a too-brown banana. I thought I might be sick. I had read of Raskolnikov, of Perry Smith, of Claudius; I should have known what it was to be tested for a crime. I should have easily discerned it far earlier, as anyone surely could’ve, from his first grinning strides into my living room, from the eager way he had let the dogs lick his hands. But I was dumb; Denis had made me so. Dumb as dirt, dumb as a meaty-faced boy who got himself one day disappeared.

“Now I’m not saying …” He held up his hands, shaking his head. He let his voice trail off and his face softened a little, though he still stared at me, unblinking. I wondered if he’d staked out our house for hours or maybe days, waiting and waiting until I was the only one home.

“He used to be nice,” I said, and “I liked him.” Denis didn’t so much as twitch. It was too late. So far past too late. The things I thought to shout now—about the two of us sharing an inflatable raft when we vacationed in Maine years before, paddling past the breaker waves to the spot where we rescued water bugs and tried to touch our toes to the seaweed below; building a fort during our final
fall in Abernathy with all the branches that’d been knocked off our maple in a giant windstorm; dragging beanbag chairs or Easy-Bake ovens into the long line of toys for the bridge game—seemed like the last-minute pleadings of a convict, the ridiculous denials of a shoplifter caught already with the clothes in her purse. My brother was a complete asshole; I’d just willfully, enthusiastically annihilated everything else. I’d reveled in it.

Denis stared and stared. I thought I might scream or flail wildly about, anything to get him to stop. “Listen—” I said, though nothing followed. What was he to listen to? That he’d gotten it all wrong? That I’d only said what I’d said and done what I’d done to get him to like me? That I was an opportunistic and black-hearted girl? “What happened to the guy’s wife?” I finally said. I was squeaking.

“You’re a smart girl,” he said, though he said it in a terrible way. It made me actually catch my breath, an audible intake of air. A long pause opened between us, the silence even more terrible than the noise. My eyes welled and I sank into the cushions behind me. The back of my throat grew slick and salty, and the sudden effort required in trying not to cry, gargantuan. I thought, with some disgust, of my mother. There I sat, like her, trembling and helpless. My chest heaved. I tried to steady my breath. I even tried, ridiculously, to smile. Anything.

Denis made a noise, a snort or a sigh. Something breathy and from the nose. Later I would wonder if it’d been a laugh. “No stone unturned,” he told me, and once again his voice was different, softer, his face returned to nearly normal. The way he was looking at me, he was just looking; he wasn’t boring in. But he still sat perched on the edge of the chair, and I was so tired from trying to keep up with him, I had no idea where we were now. He held his hands in the air, both palms turned up to the ceiling. He was, it seemed, shrugging, and I had no idea what he meant by it.
Sorry, Charley?
Whoops? All in a day’s work?
“Gotta look at everything,” he said, “no matter how …” But he didn’t finish, and I wondered desperately, as I would for days, what the missing word was, if it offered apology or further accusation. No matter how outlandish? Hurtful? Horrific? Unlikely? Painful? Ugly? Stupid?

Soon enough my mother returned. Denis was by then reclining again in his chair, his hands resting affably on his belly, the questions between us having returned to a more benign, though no less surreal, volley. He was back on something about Danny’s temper or his friends—it hardly mattered—when she stumbled into the living room. Her cheeks were flushed. The plastic bag handles strained against her freezing hands, her fingers red and chapped. She should have worn gloves, I thought, but without my usual derision. I watched, out of my peripheral vision, the careful way Denis watched her and me. I suddenly wanted her to pat my shoulder or run her fingers through my hair, like when I was little and flu-ish and she would huddle next to my bed, her palm to my forehead, her breath on my face, making me believe I would be okay.