The Local News (38 page)

I shook myself out, dancing wildly on the sidewalk, wondering if this was all I’d find, if she’d abandoned the bike and taken off for parts unknown, a thought that both terrified and relieved me. But then I heard loud, clattering noises up a driveway past the nearest house, beyond where I could see. It sounded like she was messing through garbage cans, and soon she emerged, grasping in her arms like a baby three beer bottles, a crumpled windbreaker spotted with what appeared to be coffee grounds, and a half-moldy orange. She gripped a broken mug in one hand.

Her face—it was that same terrible face: toothy and round, sweaty wisps of the gray hair sticking to her temples and cheeks, her skin scabrous-looking, mottled red and brown.

I had no idea what I was doing here. I had the thought to run.

“Get!” she screamed as soon as she saw me at the bike. “You get!” just as I’d last screamed at her. She wore the same gym shorts, but her shirt was a sleeveless smock, exposing her shoulders and back, sunburned and peeling in spots, dotted with moles in others. It made me a little sick, looking at so much of Melissa Anne.

What was I to say now?
Leave me alone? Leave Fick and Fack alone?
None of that, of course, made any sense. It was a ridiculous feeling: here, finally arrived, and to nothing. To only myself, standing stupidly before her, wordless. She was coming fast toward the bike, toward me, her eyes bouncing from lawn to sidewalk to something in the sky, her face pinched in a growl. She clutched her new
possessions so tightly her muscles grew taut and ropy along her arms. They looked like strong arms. I thought again of running.

“I’m Lydia Pasternak!” I shouted. “My brother was Danny Pasternak!” This was the last time I would ever speak that sentence. No need. For years, I would be still surrounded by people who already knew, and then by people who didn’t, and the relief of that change, so strong, so strong.

But Melissa Anne heard me. She stopped a few feet away, her gaze briefly settling on my shoulder or my chin. I watched her swallow deeply. I watched her grasp the windbreaker more closely to her chest. She straightened, her chin lifting, an unmistakable swell to her chest. And then the smile: huge, crooked teeth, wolflike and carnivorous.

She was beaming, Melissa Anne, beaming at the mention of my brother’s name, and I felt the spit pool in my mouth and heat creep up the back of my throat. She was staking a claim on him, the same way countless people—Min Mathers, Kirk Donovan, Tip Reynolds, Principal Garver, and on and on—had laid claim to him, as if he were so simply, so uncontestedly theirs. The muscles from my head to my neck, from my neck to my shoulders, from my shoulders to my ass, from my ass to my thighs, clenched as if ready to seize or spring. I thought a million thoughts, of holes and sedans and bridges and cherries and posters and dark, but none more clearly than how much misery this woman had heaped upon my family.

“Danny,” she said, and it was so infuriating, his name from her mouth. I kicked at her rusty trailer. She made a little yelp, the smile fading. I liked the sound of the yelp. I liked it very much.

“Yeah!” I called, kicking the trailer harder. It buckled some, pulling the bike with it, both seeming like they would fall over. “You don’t like that, do you?”

Her smile was entirely gone now, her face crunching into a little
fist. I kicked at the bike, the rubber of the wheel, the rusty frame, the spokes, slicing one of my toes as I went. The blood came quickly and without pain, my toe not even seeming like my toe. I kept kicking and the bike toppled with the most satisfying of rackets, a jangling noise of metal and cement. Melissa Anne let out a series of shrieking whoops; a wonder that no one came running from their home. How easily—had I ever truly realized?—someone could meet their terrible fate in these quiet streets.

There was something coursing through me now—adrenaline? bravery? rage?—that brought everything into such bright relief. The startling blue of the sky. The wavy air off the hot street. The alarming stink of this woman: abscess and outhouse and rot, all so warm and festering, it made me want to do horrible things. I let out a loud, throaty growl and ran at her, prepared for a chase. But she did not run, instead cowering in her spot. The mug shook in her fist, and the sound she was making was a whine. I was so close, right on top of her. I tried not to breathe.

“Look at me,” I yelled. My toe began to throb, a pulsing, nearly comforting feeling. Here I was. “Fucking look at me,” I said. How great it suddenly was to swear. How had I not always done it? How had I gotten by? “Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck.” I could see she was trying to focus, her eyes skittering across my face and back, looking to my neck, to my chest as it heaved. I grabbed her wrist, her skin loose and thick beneath my fingers, with a texture like half-healed scabs. It was so gross to touch her, but I did not let go. Her whimpers rose and she tried to pull away, but I only squeezed tighter. “Fucking. Look. At. Me,” I said.

I needed her to focus. I needed her to look into my eyes and tell me what she saw now. I needed to know if anything had changed.

“Come on,” I said. I took the heel of my sandal and ground it into one of her crumbling, laceless tennis shoes, feeling her foot
under mine, muscles and tendon, bone. But she offered nothing, her face turning crimson, her eyes alternately squeezing shut and blinking quickly, filling with tears. I clamped down as hard as I could on her arm, twisting her rough skin in my hand
(Indian burn,
Danny said in my ear). She dropped the mug and it shattered easily. An errant piece sliced my leg. From the noise she made, one sliced hers too. Still I did not let go, my hand beginning to cramp from gripping for so long, my arm starting to shake.

“Did you,” I whispered, my voice suddenly hot and hoarse, “really see him?” She said nothing, the only noise her breathing. This, all at once, was why I had come. Why I had marched and marched and marched.

And then she looked, she finally looked. Her eyes on mine. One clear, unwavering moment. “Yes,” she said, and even though her gaze so quickly fluttered away—to the ground, the house behind us, my left ear—I had seen it. And for the first time, with unexpected clarity and vigor, I believed her. She had. She had she had she had.

My body grew so loud: my pulse thumping, my breath coming in a wheeze, the sound in my head a screeching squeal. Like my skull was going to split open. Like I might burst at my seams. Quickly I was upon her, pulling her to me. The smell was woozy-making so close, but I pressed myself into the windbreaker anyway, let the necks of the bottles stab my ribs. I put my mouth to her ear.

“What,” I whispered, “was it like for him?” She did not answer, but the questions flew from me anyway, a hot rush of words. “How much did he suffer? Did he know what was happening? Had he prayed? Had he called out for us?”

She was crying against me. I could feel it, the quake of her body, so small-seeming all of a sudden. She felt like a child, a dirty, pungent, rotten child. “Had he,” I hissed in her ear, “thought we were coming for him?”

She buried her face against me, her forehead grinding roughly into my shoulder. I thought she would bite, but she didn’t. I could hear only a muffled panting. Her muscles were slack now, past the point of resisting; it was like holding a puddle. “Please,” I said. I could not imagine a time when we would not be clasped together like this on the sidewalk. I could not imagine what would follow from here. I could not imagine that anything would. “Please,” I repeated, though I knew nothing would come.

“I did everything I could,” I told her, which was a lie, but she did not know that. She had no fucking idea. It seemed like it meant something, at least, to have a need to confess.

I waited for Danny to say something more, to tell me to crush her or beat her down or wrestle her to the ground. But there was no voice. Of course there was no voice. My brother was dead. I was a smart girl. I knew that dead people did not really whisper in my ear. I knew they did not linger in nearby treetops. I tried to remember the last time I’d imagined him up there, floating in the branches, smirking down at us. Months before, when everything was still fantastic and far away, none of this anything more than a story. Now it was just the air up there, hot and fetid, damp. Nobody was watching. We were alone. At once a dreadful thought and a relief, a startling relief.

When I let go, Melissa Anne would not look at me, only at her feet and the sidewalk between us. I was covered in coffee grounds, dark swaths smeared across my shirt, along one arm. Blood ran down one leg, the other foot. Melissa Anne’s right ankle was scraped, bleeding freely. Even her blood looked dirty, a browning pool on the cement. Her crying was quiet, surprisingly contained. You would not have even known except for the quivering crown of her head, where thinning hair revealed an alarming amount of bright red scalp. I wondered for the first time what sort of life
turned a person into Melissa Anne, what terrible blight she must have endured. I did not even let myself imagine. Already I was left to too much imagining.

“Okay,” I said, zapped of all energy. Even the word was effortful to say: “Okay, okay, okay.” I was wrung dry, bloodless, baking in the sun.

I cleared the pieces of the mug from the sidewalk, the shards large enough to cup in my hands without injury. When I handed them to her, she just shrugged without reaching for them. She did not want them. Why would she possibly want them? “Okay,” I told her, and “Sorry.” I felt bad about the mug. I felt bad about nearly everything.

“You should,” I said of her ankle, “get that cleaned up.” I went next to the bike. “Come on,” I called when she did not follow. “Just come on.” I had bent one of the wheels and tried briefly and unsuccessfully to bend it back. “And,” I said preposterously, “you should get this fixed.” She was still staring at the ground, but nearer to me and nodding, likely afraid of what I would do if she did not simply agree.

After coaxing from her the windbreaker and the bottles and the orange, which had split open and begun drooling a bitter citrus drool, I placed them all in the trailer and dragged the bike to her, offering it by the handlebars. “Take it,” I said, and she did, still without looking up. She pulled it slowly, roughly down the sidewalk. Even after I stopped watching, I could still hear the terrible noise of it, a squealing, grinding, broken sound.

I took the mug home with me and lined the pieces along my win-dowsill. That night, when I couldn’t sleep, I stood at the window,
running my fingers along the shards, watching our dark street, the low pools of lamplight, the leafy canopies, figuring out where the smooth grooves of ceramic gave way to the sharper breaks so I could take my hand away in time. Sometimes I pressed down for the small bite of pain instead. It came as a surprise, a reassurance, reminding me of my skin, of my blood coursing beneath, so stubborn and insistent, the way it pumped through me, filling my heart and releasing, filling my heart and releasing, over and over again.

One of my parents shifted in their bed. One of the dogs lapped at its water bowl. The house hummed its usual hum—refrigerator, fan, dripping faucet. For once, none of it felt ominous or empty or fraught with particular meaning; it was just a house, just the noises of a house in the nighttime. I pressed and pressed into the cut of the mug, until the pain turned to something else: a loosening of muscles, a slowing of breath. But I didn’t move from the window. Even as my legs started to ache and the base of my neck grew sore with tiredness, I wouldn’t let myself be fooled into thinking sleep was coming. I had been fooled so many times, far more than I could count. The darkness was not even dense yet, just the thin gray of midnight. I was not the kind of girl who fell asleep at midnight anymore. I would easily be up for hours still. Getting back into bed, I knew all I was doing was readying for the next round of battle, now just from a prone position. Even as I crawled beneath the covers, I knew. Even as I closed my eyes. I knew and I knew. Except for this—next came brightness and the noise of birds, like a magician pulling the dove from his hat in a fluttery blink. Morning.