The Local News (35 page)

“You love swing sets,” Bayard said, with a derisiveness so typical of him, it just became white noise after a while. I kept pumping, sweat beginning to sprout beneath my shirt. A TV blared from the house next door. A German shepherd nosed at his food dish on the
other side of a Cyclone fence. The mundane details of other people’s lives, in turn, reassured me and filled me with the impulse to let go of the swing and flail wildly through the air.

“Are you excited to see your family?” I shouted. My questions to Bayard were often the obvious sort you’d find on the back of a postcard.

“Sure,” he said.
Sure, stupid.

“Tell me something funny about them.”

He stayed quiet for so long it seemed it would be one of my unanswered queries. I tried to propel myself higher, tried to calculate exactly the point in the downward arc to begin kicking for maximum momentum. Finally he said, “My brother, Lucien, has a limp. He was borned with one leg too short than the other.”

“That’s not funny,” I said.

He shrugged. “It was what I could think of.”

“Danny once convinced me he’d had six toes on each foot,” I said, flying past Bayard, starting to breathe harder from the exertion, “and that my parents had made him amputate the extra ones.”

“That’s a joke?”

“Kind of,” I said, though I remembered having been uneasily obsessed for days. I’d been seven or eight and had made Danny take off his socks over and over again to show me the bony red spots at the outside edges of his pinkie toes, until finally I asked my parents about it. I had an urge to share all this with Bayard, then an equally strong urge not to. Of everyone in Fairfield, he was the one person with absolutely no dogs in this fight. Best, I thought, to keep it that way. How I liked his apathy; it was possibly what I liked most about him, preferring it to the chafing closeness of my friendship with David Nelson, or the fake jollity with Lola, or especially the ugly, unrequited mess of Denis and me. This suited me best, the final
bowl of porridge for my finicky Goldilocks. I was capable of this much: another beating heart beside me, relievedly free of any curious poking.

I swung and I swung, ignoring Bayard’s sideways glances, his low, irritated calls for me to slow down, to stop. I liked the sting of night air on my cheeks, the steady pounding in my chest. At some point Fick and Fack came running through the sliding back door, a last burst of energy before bed. “You want to play Museum?” Fack yelled to us, his nostrils stuffed with dried boogers.

“We’re busy,” Bayard said.

“You going to do an around-the-world?” Fack yelled to me.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I called. It didn’t seem like a bad idea, propelling myself over the top bar. I wondered if it would bring weightlessness or a blinding rush of blood to the head.

Bayard told them to shoo. Fack grabbed at one chain of Bayard’s swing and shook it hard. Fick grabbed at the back of Bayard’s shirt, trying to unseat him, looking like she just might succeed.

“I’ll play,” I announced. I’d never said yes before, falling easily in line with Bayard’s rebuffs. But as I watched Fick and Fack squirming and giggling and bouncing around, their restless energy seemed so familiar, so naturally akin to mine. Of course I would play with them. I jumped off my swing and they squealed, grabbing my fingers and my jeans, leading me across the lawn and telling me the rules to Museum, an overly complicated cackle of commands that revealed the simple, nonsensical game. They would be frozen statues. I would be the museum owner who had to leave at the end of the day, turning off the light and closing the door, which unfroze them for the night.

They ran quickly into place—it was clear they’d played many times before—contorting themselves into strange positions. Fack twisted his arms around his torso and wobbled on one foot; Fick
tried to maintain a backbend with her ankles crossed. I could hear Bayard creaking slowly on his swing. I turned off the pretend light and walked out the pretend door.

Instantly the kids went wild, dancing, shouting, flailing about. They made such loud howling noises, I called, “Shh, shh,” but they paid me no attention, clapping their hands and stomping their feet and shaking their whole bodies in rhythm to some unheard music. Fack grasped both of Fick’s hands in his and they twirled and twirled in a circle, leaning far back from each other, screaming and laughing. I remembered—or was I just imagining?—doing the same thing, the centrifugal force pulling us as we went round and round, the willful, happy dizziness, the feeling that I would go flying backward if he let go. Even then, so simply and naturally at his mercy.

Fick and Fack fell to the ground, giggling and squirming in the grass, not yet vented of their endless energy. Their limbs, erratic, spastic, flailing, hardly seemed like their own. They looked possessed. I watched them with some of that flying-backward feeling; I always seemed to have some of that feeling now. Their legs tangled sloppily together, her foot poking his thigh, and their arms flopped about. At one point one of his hands sat wedged in the crook of her neck. They hardly seemed to notice, laughing and laughing, calling my name, wanting to start over again.

At home, during the few waking hours I spent there, I watched my mother’s frenetic energy reawaken, this time by the computer. She discovered the Internet and its support groups for grieving parents, and the long squeal of a modem quickly became the birdsong of our household. She had barely used a computer before but with single-minded determination rooted out Internet Relay Chat rooms and
usenet groups. Soon she’d migrated from the kitchen chair next to her cabinet to the household’s only unused computer, conveniently located in Danny’s room. She became friends with people named Sheela_Bird and DoctorREYREY and would talk about them frothily.

“Sheela Bird’s daughter was killed by a thresher,” she said, trapping me in my bedroom or at the kitchen table. “I didn’t even know that kind of thing happened anymore. It sounds so 1850s. Death by thresher. She went to a friend’s farm after school one day and got caught up in the arms of it, or whatever it is a thresher has, and bled out right there in her friend’s field. Never even made it to the hospital.”

I never knew what to say to these stories. It was usually just the two of us in the house, since my dad was working later and later. Whenever he finally arrived, he was sweaty and bedraggled, as if he’d ridden home in a sauna. His hair had turned a bright and sudden white in patches near his temples, giving him a distinctly Bride of Frankenstein appearance.

“How was your day?” he would sometimes ask me, a banality so rare I would stumble for words, trying to think of something that set this day apart from others. “We had a quiz in trig,” I told him, and “The French word for mud puddle is
flaque de boue,”
and “I saw a deer on the way home,” a lie born of my panic for material.

Our only family outings were trips to the cemetery. In the beginning all three of us went every Saturday morning, but soon the schedule grew loose. The trips splintered to just me and my mom or me and my dad, a pattern I would look back on as an obvious sign of things to come. One of them would stick his or her head into my room on a Tuesday evening or a Sunday at five and ask if I wanted to go. I hated the cemetery and chafed at the idea of the long trip there and back, but I was seduced by the inclusion, surprised each time
that they thought to ask me along. It was unusual for them, the inclination toward doing something consistently and together, and I found an unexpected pleasure in being asked, a little like being picked not-last for softball.

I had no idea what to do with myself there. I found myself wishing we were Catholic so I could at least have a rosary to move meaningfully through my hands. My parents each had their own ritual, my father’s to do with pacing and a low, indistinct mutter, though occasionally I could catch a terrible few words.
Dearheart,
I could’ve sworn he’d said once,
baby
another time. My mother knelt in the dirt, crying and unafraid of dirtying her pants or pantyhose.

I gnawed on hangnails, dug my heels into the soft ground, slapped my thighs. If I closed my eyes and forced a vision—the pine box eroded beneath us with worm holes, Danny’s eight broken fingers, the crushed phalanges, the ripped flexor and extensor muscles, the cracked fingernails—I could sometimes build a heat in my throat or get a slick feeling behind my eyelids. But mostly I went blank. Grief on demand, the sort expected at my brother’s fresh, grassless grave, required a flattening of all complication of which I was not capable.

“Girl. Tragically. Loses. Brother,” I could hear the narrator from
Unsolved Mysteries
saying, and it made me incapable of standing still. I marched around to other gravestones. Annabelle Grier died when she was twenty-four, in 1976. I imagined her feathered hair, her knobby knees and spindly arms. Lamont Eyers when he was forty-three. He was the son of Lucille, the father of Laura and Leonard, the alliteration both admirable and annoying.

“Ready?” my dad said one time when he found me at Griselda Jenkins’s gravestone, and I heard the note of consternation in his voice. I made an apologetic noise, a swallowed murmur.

“Her name’s Griselda,” I said by way of explanation. My hand flew from my side, pointing. He looked at the gravestone, then at me, his face pale to the point of being spectral, his eyes bleary and swollen. When he shook his head, it barely moved, and I felt a regret so deep it seemed to swim up from my toes.

“You like your job?” I asked him in the car, a couple minutes from the cemetery, Fairfield still nearly a half-hour away. My voice was crazy-sounding, unmodulated and loud. I had already pressed all of the preset buttons on his radio but found only country or classical. The look he’d given me told me to stop fiddling.

“You like it?” I repeated. It had been nearly two months since the funeral, and I could count the total words spoken between my father and me on my fingers and toes.

He looked at me, made a long
Uhhhh
sound, and then, “Sure,” and then, “Most days.”

“What do you do exactly?” I said, because I’d never really understood. Or cared.

“Manage the mortgage lending,” he said, though in a thin, tired voice.

“Is it hard?” I wished I could stop shouting. I tried to remember how normal people talked.

“Some days,” he said.

“I wonder what I’ll be,” I said. I wanted us to have a real conversation. The thought of our house, miles away but growing closer by the minute, made me want to bash my head against the passenger window.

“President,” he said, and the word came out strangely, as if he were accusing me of something.

“No, really,” I said.

“You can be anything you want,” he said, though he was looking blankly at the windshield and his voice lacked conviction. It
sounded like a line out of a parenting manual or a Dr. Seuss book. I watched the yellow lines in the road, the empty words on the passing signs. Two-for-one sale on preowned videos at the Blockbuster.
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY RITA AND MARTY
at the Holiday Inn.

“Hhhh,” I said, a noisy stream. He didn’t ask what in the world. He didn’t ask anything. My chest tightened, disappointment welling up. Through everything, it seemed, I still harbored visions of a reconstituted family. Some part of me remained stubbornly convinced there had to
something
beyond this precarious place, someplace we three would find together, and in it a smaller table, low conversations, newfound rhythms. There—what?—my mother and I would stand hip to hip in front of the stove, she beating a whisk against a metal stirring bowl, I fingering the rows of spice jars? And my father would take me on the day trips he used to take Danny on: fishing on Lake Erie, snowshoeing outside Saline?

But as I watched his drooping profile beside me now (what had happened to his chin? When had it shrunk so fully into his neck?), it was clear what a child I was. And not a child as in mirthful innocent or even as in precocious cherub, but rather as in someone who, in the face of all contrary evidence, was still full of witless hope. What we were doing now was not a forward march together. It was something else entirely: biding our time, counting the days, silently gnashing and moaning beside each other.

Soon we would be home and my father would absent himself to the television. My mother would say hello from the computer, maybe turning her head to look, maybe not, the last lingering smell of dirty teenage boy replaced with the oniony odor of a grown woman who’d long forsaken bathing. That we had come fully apart was abundantly clear, though I grew more and more doubtful that we’d ever been anything but. Maybe all Danny had
done was mask our very basic incapabilities as a family. He had always been the loudest, meanest, strongest, funniest, dumbest one in the room. How easy it had been to fix our collective gaze on him, how reflexive and lazy and natural. So how effortless—inevitable, really—to just keep forgetting and forgetting each other without him.

School ended without my failing any classes, primarily a result of my teachers’ collective sympathy. Papers had been left undone and more than one final exam flunked, but still, my final report card read all
A
’s except for Ms. Villara’s still generous
B+.
Looking at the grades left me with an uneasy feeling of erasure, as if the past however many months had simply not occurred.