The Local News (42 page)

Ben rushed the dance floor when the song changed, him and a whole bunch of other people, all whooping and doing a step dance full of hand claps, turns, sliding feet. I didn’t know it but swayed a little where I stood, my fingers and toes feeling pleasurably airy and far removed.

“Lydia Nikolayevich Pasternak,” David Nelson said, coming at me from the side, saluting me. It was an old joke, Boris Yeltsin’s middle name.

“David Nikolayevich Nelson,” I said, saluting back, quitting the swaying.

“It’s good to see you,” he said, though quickly he stopped looking at me and instead watched the crowd.

“Same here,” I said, watching the crowd too. I scanned it for his wife and the Deseletses, though I didn’t see them.

“Pretty crazy,” he said, nodding toward everyone.

“Indeed.”

He told me a story about a woman named Lydia who’d been in his grad program at Michigan and how he’d always expected that she’d be cooler and smarter than she was. But she asked inane questions in seminars about material they’d already covered and had an annoying tendency to talk about herself in the third person. “She disappointed constantly,” he said. “Couldn’t live up to her namesake.”

It was a nice thing to say, though a wisp of melancholy moved through me. Standing next to David Nelson felt both deeply fa miliar and deeply foreign. We talked of our jobs, Iowa, D.C. He told me about snowdrifts that came up to his neck. I told him the Appropriations-chair-at-happy-hour story. He told me he’d Googled me before the trip—I was impressed by his frankness-then asked questions about wastewater treatment and habitat conservation. The song changed from the step dance to the terrible,
warbling theme from
Titanic.
Couples draped arms around each other and moved in slow rotations, spinning on their own axes. I kept waiting for David to have to go, but we talked about Gene and Amy (that was his wife’s name, and I was disappointed for a second by how pedestrian it sounded; I’d expected a more substantive Georgette or Bernadine) and the coming baby.

“Fatherhood,” I said. “Fa-ther-hood.” I was making my voice low and dramatic. “Wow.”

“I know,” he told me. “Sometimes I wonder what I’ll do if he turns out to be utterly regressive, you know? I mean, what if he wants to toss the baseball around? Or vote Republican?” He laughed. His laugh had changed, deeper now, more of a wry chuckle.

“It’s a boy?”

It was. They’d found out at the latest sonogram. Something about this news sent another low wave through me.

“That’s so great,” I said, though my voice sounded affected and Lola Pepper–esque.

Eventually the dancing devolved into a ragged bunny hop, the dancers snaking through far tables and letting out all sorts of whoops and cheers.

“How are you doing?” David finally said. “Are you well? Happy?” The sraightforward tone, the simple interest, absent the night’s undertone of voyeurism and
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours
competition, caught me off-guard and made me not know the answer. Gone was the old bristling feeling I used to have with him. I couldn’t remember now, even as I strained to, why such attentive-ness, such familiarity, had once seemed so repellent. The whole side of me that faced him grew warm. Not from embarrassment. It was something else. I was struck then by a bodily memory of having been like this with him, side by side for all those years, that runup of time before everything that happened happened, a period that
slipped so easily from memory, that seemed almost sickeningly precious or just plain unreal in the face of everything that came after, when he and I lolled together on our carpets or beds, thinking nothing of using each other’s backs as pillows, of wearing each other’s sweatshirts and woolly socks when we got cold.

I told him I was. Well. Happy. I asked him the same. He was, he was. As he told me about meeting Amy while they’d both volunteered at a Thanksgiving soup kitchen and about the addition they were currently building for the baby and about his research in mass political behavior, I had a flash of what it had so long ago been like to find him, the certain sense of no longer being alone. It was, it seemed to me now, the last time such a thing had happened.

For a stretch of time I sat at an empty table near the bar, dropping all pretense and simply drinking. There was something so appealingly juvenile and wrongheaded about this. I reveled for a while in the heat of the liquor just beneath my skin. There was an echoing sensation in my ears, and I felt entirely absorbed in and removed from the dwindling crowd. At one point the DJ shouted, “You’ve been great, class of ’98!” and started packing his equipment. The room seemed briefly cavernous and white-noisy without him.

A woman sat down on the other side of the table. Name tag,
Jen-ine.
Her face, shiny at the nose and the chin, the foundation rubbed off, yielded no recognition, like so many other faces of the night. We talked the talk—what you do, where you live, what you have or don’t: house, husband, kids, pets.

“How’s your family?” she said. “Your parents?” “You know, I barely ever even think of him,” I said, and her face did the slightest of twitches. “Like,” I said, “maybe when I see
someone with his Adam’s apple. Or meet some Danny. They’re all mostly Dans or Daniels once you’re grown up, you know?” I laughed at the idea of us being grown-ups. “Or there was this one receptionist I had, she always said
irregardless
and
supposably.
But other than that, I don’t really think about him.”

Jenine was nodding, squinting a little. “Okay,” she said, though she said it slowly: “ Ohhh-kay.”

I tried to explain to this woman—didn’t I have Bardazian with her? I asked, though I didn’t wait for an answer—that it was not that Danny had disappeared entirely from me. It was that he had both receded and embedded himself. He was the watery, oval vaccination mark on my left bicep, the chicken pox scar on my lower back, the penchant for cataloguing world leaders, the fear of wide-open roadways and of dark middle-of-the-nights. All of these, the remnants of childhood that, rather than transforming themselves—as I had long imagined would happen through some nameless yet magical process—into a divergent, distinct adulthood, simply became who I was.

I didn’t say it like that, though. I said it in blips and blaps. Jen ine played with the snap on her pocketbook, fiddled some with her watch. I had the sense that I should probably stop, but also the sense that I maybe couldn’t. I went on about all these men in this ballroom with their slumped shoulders and wire-rimmed glasses and mustaches and how you had to at least wonder how he would’ve fit in, if he would’ve mellowed or plumped or thinned or grown slouched. Would he have grown lines on his face or a slight shuffle to his step? Would he have had to become more careful or more kind? Or would he have simply turned into one of those brash adults who chucked you on the shoulder as he said nasty things?

“You know?” I said.

“Sure,” Jenine said. Her mouth was drawn, and there were little
creases at the bridge of her nose. “I always thought that you were a sweetheart.” It seemed like such a strange thing for her to say, so apropos of nothing.

“Really?” I asked, and she nodded. We looked for a while at each other. I wasn’t sure what had gotten me started. “What did you ask?” I said, but before she answered, a goateed man, tie unloosened, faint sweat rings at his armpits, came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. She stood quickly and introduced us, but in a way that I knew meant goodbye.

“Listen,” she said. “Do you have a ride home?”

I told her about the cab. I told her about Gene and the money. She came over to my side of the table and squeezed my shoulder the way her husband had just squeezed hers. Her nail polish was impeccable, a deep, flawless red. I told her so and said I always chipped my manicures. She smiled and told me again I was a sweetheart. I told her she was too. I still wasn’t sure who she was. She told me it had been really good to see me. Her husband said it was nice to meet me, even though I hadn’t said a word to him.

“Hang on,” I said as they were leaving, because I hadn’t finished my point, though when they turned around, I knew from their expressions to shut up. I waved goodbye and the man slung his arm easily around Jenine’s waist and I didn’t call out to them that the real question was not who Danny would be now. The real question was who he and I would have become to each other. I didn’t say that truly, the single most horrific thing about his death—far more than the grisly circumstances—was that he and I had never been able to right ourselves, had never been able to be okay in the simple way we had once been okay.

Jenine and her husband were gone. I got up from the table, knowing it was time for me to go too, probably well past.

•  •  •

At the coat rack, Lola was upon me, her eyes bright and wet, saying how they were heading out—Lacey was ridiculously tired and up way past her bedtime—but she didn’t want to leave without at least telling me how for a long time she didn’t believe in God because of what had happened to Danny but now, now since Lacey, she knew there was a God because otherwise how could things like giving birth happen, if there was no God, where did these innocent little creatures come from, so if there is a God, which she knows 100 percent there is now, then Danny has to be someplace good and safe, she knew that for sure, now, 100 percent sure, and she was so happy to finally see me again because she’d wanted for a long time to tell me this but it didn’t feel right in a letter or over the phone. She was grasping my hands in hers, all the words a breathless rush, classic Lola.

I did not believe her. But as she leaned over to kiss me, I also did not hate her. When I was in high school with all of these people, I hated them for the way their collective anguish seemed to distill grief into an even more potent form. They had made an unbearable situation that much more unbearable. Now, though, as I stood in this room full of people who had known my brother, who still, ten years later, knew me almost exclusively as the girl who had lost him, I was capable of a different sort of alchemy. Grief shared was grief diffused. It was nice now to hold hands and look plainly in the face of a girl who loved him too.

I stood in the parking lot waiting for the cab, dampness sprouting in the hollow of my collarbone and beneath my arms after only minutes
in the humidity. I leaned against the bumper of a car, watching as others left the lot. A silver car passed but stopped a few feet ahead of me, the driver’s window rolling down.

“Lydia?” It was David Nelson, craning his head out his window. “Do you need a ride?”

“No, no,” I said, waving my arms, my hands feeling slightly mit-teny. “I got a cab. Coming.”

“I’m happy to drive you. You staying at your parents’?”

“My mom’s,” I corrected. He, of course, had no idea my parents had divorced. How strange that he had no idea. “My dad,” I said, “has twins. Fucking twins. In Georgia.” I laughed a little. “ Hot-lanta.”

David Nelson reversed the car until he was flush with me. He was the only one inside. When I approached his window, the cool of his AC streamed onto my face. I think I made a noise, an
Mmmm
sound.

“Lydia?” he said.

“Where are your people?” I asked.

“My people?” He was looking at me strangely. “They all went back already. Amy gets tired now,” he said, putting a hand to his belly. “Listen, we’re staying at the Deselets’. You’re on the way.” He named the northern suburb that Adam lived in, sprawling homes with circular drives and multiacre lawns. I was a little incredulous that Adam Deselets had ended up in such a place.

“The cab.” I pointed to my phone. “It’s coming.”

He shrugged. “Who cares?” This surprised me. David Nelson had never been one to flout convention so easily. I was briefly disarmed, unable to think of a reason to keep resisting.

The car was plush and almost unfathomably leathery inside. It was easy to sink into the seat. There was a bright pine smell, and the interior was pristine.

“I never imagined you’d have a car like this,” I said.

He told me it was a rental. He said I had to clip my seatbelt. “That’s why it’s making that noise.” He pointed to the dashboard’s bleating alarm. This struck me as very funny. I laughed and told him he’d make a good dad. He looked hard at my face. It was maybe the first time all night he had looked at me so straightforwardly.

“What?” I said.

He shook his head. “I’ve never seen you drunk before.”

“I’m not drunk,” I said, and when I saw his expression, “I’m not.”

We drove through bright intersections, and I asked him as soberly as possible about the straw poll, the only thing I knew about Ames. And that easily, we were here in this car together, him going on and on about the odd ritual of it, the live bands and food booths and pointless vote counts, the uniquely American pull toward intentionally injecting artifice into the electoral process, and it could’ve been a day as easily as ten years. I imagined him delivering these words to a lecture hall full of students. I imagined them calling him Professor Nelson.

I thought of saying that I was proud of him or that I was sorry or that it was so strange sitting in his passenger seat. Wasn’t it strange? I wanted to ask him. Wasn’t this weird? If only for how unweird it was? I studied his profile, the thin sideburns, the tiniest hints of age lines beside his eyes, the spot where the wrinkles would set in in earnest a few years from now. All the rigid self-consciousness of adolescence was gone. Now his jaw was relaxed. One hand rested on top of the steering wheel; he navigated turns with only the fleshy heel of his palm. I wondered how much I would remember of him ten years from now, at our next reunion, likely the next time I would see him. The thought made being an adult seem like such a Swiss-cheesy proposition, full of so many holes.

“What’s marriage like?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know. He
talked about what a good mom Amy would be. He talked about her research in the history of women’s suffrage in Asian nations. He wasn’t really answering the question. I listened for a note of uncertainty, any hint of ambivalence.