The Local News (32 page)

Outside, TV vans parked up and down the street and camera crews tromped across our lawn, forcing us to close all the blinds, lending a siegelike feel to the whole venture. My father had taped a handwritten note to the front door, an inelegant Sharpie missive about leaving us to our family and friends, thank you very much. I watched through the slats of the blinds as cameramen came up our steps and filmed closeups of the note. Kirk Donovan and the lady from Channel 4 staked out competing territory on the sidewalk, both fiddling with their microphones and their hair. The lady from Channel 4 looked smaller and more deflated in person, as if the hand had been removed from her sock puppet. Min Mathers stopped and cried for her on the way in, the camera brightening her face.

Inside, each side of the family quickly self-segregated, the loud, dark Pasternaks taking over the living room, eating constantly and
telling unembarrassed stories of rheumatoid arthritis and hemor-rhoidal sitz baths. The Davidsons scattered themselves throughout the kitchen and den, balancing plates awkwardly on their knees and looking bewildered, as if waiting for someone to please tell them what to do. My mother sat at the kitchen table or in the corner of the couch, a cloud of well-meaning cousins trailing her, bringing her plates of food, kneading her thigh, holding her hand and cooing words I did not get close enough to hear. My father, having sat for all those months and months, now paced, stopping to speak with people if they spoke to him first. Harry, his family called him. I wasn’t used to people calling him Harry. My mother called him Harris or nothing at all. Harry reminded me of the dog in one of my long-ago children’s books.

Lola Pepper’s mom brought an elaborate cold cut tray, carrots and radishes carved into roses, rolls of meat speared with ribboned toothpicks, sawtoothed slices of pickles decorating the edges. She told me it was kosher and I thanked her without informing her we’d never kept kosher. Lola gurgled and wailed in a way that made me want to punch her in the face.

David Nelson showed up in the same tie I’d seen him wear for the National Junior Honor Society dinner, green with gold polka dots. I wondered if it was his only tie. It looked like it was choking him. He said things like what a good funeral it’d been and how Danny had been a good guy. He kept repeating
good.
I told him you don’t have to wear a tie to shiva. It wasn’t, I told him, a job interview.

Tip Reynolds shared the couch with an uncle and assorted cousins. At one point Dawnelle Ryan went and sat next to him and I watched the way their thighs pressed together. One of my uncles stared obviously at Dawnelle’s huge boobs; they were packed tightly into her fuzzy black sweater. For a while she rested a hand on Tip’s forearm, twiddling very softly his thick arm hair. I saw him touch
the back of her neck. I tried not to keep looking. I told myself,
Dead brother dead brother dead brother.

But I was a terrible mourner. I tried to make myself cry, going into the half bath and pinching the tender skin on the inside of my arm until a clot of tears built up in my throat, but performance anxiety always stifled me, even behind a closed door, perched alone and fully dressed on the edge of the toilet seat. One night, when the rabbi asked me to help set up rows of folding chairs in the living room for his interminable nightly service, I burst into sudden laughter. I recognized the look he gave me then, the prurient curiosity, part gaping, part pitying. It was the same way I looked at the special ed kids as they were wheeled through the halls with their palsied limbs and protective helmets. I was a remedial griever.

When shiva finally ended and the house cleared of relatives and neighbors and classmates, the three of us got really sick—vomiting, swollen glands, cheekbones sensitive to the touch. It was not a fleeting illness; it was entrenched and lingering. The moment it seemed one of us might be getting better, the symptoms morphed into something new. For three days my throat burned so hotly I couldn’t swallow and had to carry a spit cup for my yellow-green phlegm. My father got long rows of blisters in his armpits. My mother’s tongue grew white and almost furry. We were deeply, undeniably miserable, though being sick was almost a relief for me, the way it finally made me properly wet-faced, broken down, funereal.

We spent the following days listless on the couch, wrapped in blankets, full of sweaty chills even though the cold outside had finally broken and the spring thaw had set in in earnest. Melted snow collected in wide puddles across our patchy lawn, turning quickly to mud from the footprints of the most stubborn of camera crews and lingering reporters. We ignored the knocks on our door, the phone
calls from newspapers or television stations or members of the state senate who talked about crime bill sponsorship. We ignored Denis, who wondered how we were holding up. We ignored the strangers, some who talked about heaven, others about vengeance, a few whose cries into the answering machine sounded like loud, angry squirrels.

Mostly we just sat, wordless, foodless, in and out of a dissatisfying half-sleep. It was easy to get confused about day versus night, about other stuff too. After a particularly violent burst of nausea or in the midst of a headache that made me see purplish red starbursts inside my eyelids, I found myself wondering:

Elvin Tate killed my brother?

Elvin Tate?

My brother?

I might lie curled in the dark, my feet pressed gingerly against my mother’s leg as she huddled at the other end of the couch, my mind hiccuping, then sputtering until I eventually came to think of the recent turn of events as nonsensical and unreal. Of course Elvin Tate had not killed my brother. Don’t be silly. I grew convinced that all we were doing here was waiting, still waiting. I could feel it on a cellular level, the wide-open freefall of possibility still before us. I tried, in those moments, to tell my parents something reassuring, mumbling about Denis or Roy or Melissa Anne, my father maybe mumbling back at me, my mother pressing her leg weakly into my foot.

But there were too many concrete items, too much morbid memorabilia now littering our house. Whenever I was well enough to venture from the living room, I found things like the Ziploc bag that sat in the freezer, of all places, containing his few belongings returned by the police, covered with flaky, graying mud and crystallized
now with frost—his slim nylon wallet, the braided string cut from his wrist, the four poker chips plucked from his pocket: three blue, one red.

In the vestibule sat a stack of unread newspapers, many with Elvin Tate’s bug-eyed face peering from above the fold.

Atop the file cabinet was the lone crime scene photo. I would spend coming weeks digging through drawers, searching for others—surely there were more—to no avail. This seemed the only one in our possession: a forest floor covered in a crusty layer of snow, shoeprint trails, yellow tape strung around four tree trunks in a flimsy, diamond-shaped barricade, a deep hole in the center, tall piles of dirt lining the lip, the hole itself an empty mouth, nothing but black, either before they got to him or after he was already gone. I wondered how he had been placed down there, whether Elvin Tate had rested him gently at the bottom in a fetal position or pushed him unceremoniously over the side, limbs sprawled, his face jam med into the dirt. I thought of the dissected pig from eighth-grade bio class, the tiny snapping sounds of its legs as they were pulled unforgivingly back from its body, the bones not even sounding like bones, sounding like something else entirely. Tinker Toys. Pick-up sticks. My mouth tasted of bile as I studied the picture. My mouth had tasted of bile for days. Maybe weeks. I thought,
Gar.

This circuit of the house usually ended at the kitchen table and the stack of extra funeral programs, the photo on the cover a rare unfamiliar one, its potency not yet drained from overuse on posters or in newspaper articles. In it, Danny was sitting on the hood of someone’s car, his feet on the front bumper, his elbow on his knee, chin resting in an upturned hand, a bastardized
Thinker,
though the picture did not look staged. His hair fluttered in the wind and he was looking off to the side. The uncharacteristic softness of his
features—his mouth open just a bit, a slight tinge of a smile, his eyes looking almost wistful and without a hint of his usual swagger-made it seem like he’d had no idea the picture was being taken.

It was a really good picture. He looked gentle and almost girlish in his beauty. I sat for long daytime hours in a kitchen chair staring at it, as the soles of my feet and the small of my back ached. I tried to think of times he’d looked like this in real life, so placidly thoughtful. It was there that I would eventually cry, from the exhaustion of a body rigid with constant, thrumming pain and from the guilt that lay beneath my sick. How little I had missed him, and how wrongly (the first dread inklings already beginning to stir) I had envisioned the place we now inhabited. I’d thought we’d be fine here—swift and gutting pain, yes, but with a wound, at least, to seal—in the dark, fleeting, and many moments I had dared to hope for this.

It was nearly a month before I returned to school, to the last six weeks of my sophomore year and the classes I’d lost track of and the mountain of assignments I’d missed and the shrieking noise of classmates who came at me collectively and without apology under the auspices of sympathy, though sympathy seemed far too soft a word, like
heather
or
tissue.
People grabbed me by the arm or followed me into the girls’ room to ask, “Are you okay? Really? Are you?” through the closed stall door. They tried to ingratiate themselves with me through the use of urgent irrelevancies: “I used to sit next to him in chem.” “I almost rear-ended him one time on Coolidge.” It all felt violent as an avalanche, the force with which the whole student body, it seemed, exerted its attentions upon me.

Mrs. Bardazian announced loudly “You’ve been missed” as I found my seat, and a strange smattering of applause followed. David
Nelson was one of the applauders, which felt like betrayal. Mrs. Bardazian stood at her desk and read Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud”: “And soonest our best men with thee doe goe/Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.” Kids turned in their seats to look at my face, which I tried to hold as still as possible, though I could feel a faint flutter at the corner of my right eye, the start of a tremble in my clenched jaw.

My locker was wrapped in much the same way football players’ lockers were wrapped on game days, the front covered with butcher paper, the perimeter decorated with construction paper daisies, giving it a disturbingly festive feel. Classmates had written crowded notes, drawn frowny faces with cartoon tears, and scribbled countless
Sorrys.
I wondered at the etiquette of this, the number of days that had to pass before I was allowed to tear it down.

Danny’s shrine too had been reborn. It was more sprawling this time, a longer stretch of wall filled with notes, team photos, a football jersey, swim goggles, newspaper coverage of the funeral. Old bouquets sat piled against the wall, their green cellophane wrappers still intact though the flowers had shriveled. Had they been dying in this hallway for close to a month now?

After a few days back in Fontana’s trig class, David passed me a note about not knowing how to talk to me anymore and being sad about that and being sorry for everything that had happened to me. It was in more careful handwriting than normal, and I wondered how long he’d spent on it. It went on for several paragraphs, and I couldn’t bring myself to finish. I felt him watching me from across the room, so I sat with the piece of paper open in front of me for a long time, affecting a posture of concentration and then avoiding him when the bell rang.

In the middle of my first week back, Tip offered to smuggle me off-campus for lunch. “Who’s going to stop
you?”
he said at my
locker after second period. He’d come up behind me and wrapped both his arms around my neck. He wore a black armband around his biceps. All the jocks had started wearing them. He was talking to me while draped like that, his mouth right up to my ear. Since I’d been back, he had taken to touching me a lot: resting a hand on my shoulder, even once tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. Shivers moved through me when he did things like that, and I contemplated, semiseriously, letting my legs turn to jelly and falling entirely into him as he held me from behind. It seemed he would catch me.

“Let’s,” he said into my ear, “meet up in the parking lot and take off.” I told him yes. I wondered what the inside of his truck would be like. I wondered what we would talk about for an hour.

But when I got to the parking lot, it turned out to be him and Dawnelle Ryan waiting. They were holding hands. It was a relaxed hold, their fingers twiddling loosely together as if they’d been doing things like holding hands for such a long time now, they barely had to think about it. My feet felt like bricks as I walked toward them, my arms pendulous at my sides. They both had funny smiles, the
awww, how cute
sort.