When I got to the kitchen table, Andre had the Arts section of the Times, Gramps took the Amsterdam News, and all I had left was either the Travel section or the front page. There was so much snow in the city, they were putting it on flat train cars and sending it south until it melted.
“Lesser-known journalist who worked with Frederick Douglass?” Gramps said. “Seven letters.” He was doing the crossword while he made hot milk with ginger and nutmeg in it.
A guy out fishing had called in a body in a burned car near JFK Airport—Gramps still called it Idlewild. It was an “unidentifiable male.” In case you didn’t grow up in the Tri-State area, “unidentifiable” means they took the fingertips off and smashed the teeth. The body had been dumped in a yellow Charger and burned out in the marsh.
“Fortune,” Gramps said. “How about, island made by a sunken volcano? Four letters.”
“Atol.”
“Extra pancake for you, young lady!” He was in a good mood. I was about to ruin it.
After pancakes, we went out the back door and rested our cups on the railing. Me and Gramps liked to stand out there in the morning, even when it was cold.
“Gramps?”
“Yes, honey?”
“You don’t believe in God, do you?”
He swept his arm out toward Carter’s Bay. “Don’t need to. Look.”
I looked out at bare trees, at the pink sky and the disappearing mist on the water. I looked at the floating dock and the shadow it threw over toward the Narragansett parking lot.
“Yeah, I get what you’re saying, but seriously, you don’t think there’s somebody sitting up there giving a shit what you do, right?”
“There’s no need to say it like that, Joan.”
I wasn’t looking at him. I didn’t see what that question did to his face at the time, but I can picture it now.
“Why take me to the church hall, then? Why make me listen to Mrs. Morris and them all day long? You don’t even believe it. Don’t you feel like a hypocrite?”
“Why, you think it’s wrong what those ladies do for people?”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“So you just think it’s beneath you?”
He was calm, but he was giving me the look. I thought maybe he’d found something out. Maybe he knew everything I’d been doing, everything I’d seen.
“No, Gramps. You’re twisting it.”
“Am I? Maybe I’m just saying it back so you can hear it.”
There was so much space around I felt like there was nowhere I could hide from Gramps. All the things I’d seen and done lately had taken the shell off me. I felt there was nothing about me he couldn’t see.
“If they’re doing good, Joan, what difference does it make how they get there? Goodness comes out of people, and badness, too. I’m not too concerned with who put it there.”
“No, I get that. I do. I just wish people would be honest sometimes. Just say what they actually think instead of everybody going through the motions and helping each other keep their delusions. I’m so sick of it lately.”
“Careful what you wish for, child.”
He turned around and opened the storm door, then turned back to take my cup out of my hand.
“Do you miss Grams?”
This time I was looking right in his eyes when my question hit him. Whatever was behind there had nothing to do with me at all. He didn’t even answer me.
As the door was swinging shut, he said, “As for the other thing, no one up there cares what I do. I found that out all at once and thirty years ago.”
It happened to him, too. It happens to everyone. The violent surprises, the split seconds that turn the world inside out. I just thought, Why? How did they all just keep going, keep pretending? I just wanted to shout at him: How can you not feel it?! There is so much silence and pain collected up in the corners of our house, people were choking on it and he was just handing out pancakes like Sunday-school prizes. I guess it was what my mother hated about home, but at least she could get away from it.
Sometimes I go to church with Gramps, even though Mom doesn’t like it. Those ladies are so desperate to feel righteous and helpful, like there’s a reason for God. I’m making them seem pathetic, but Gramps is right. They mean well. But believe me, if there was any kind of salvation there, I would have caught it by now. I looked hard, straight into their longing. All I saw was emptiness so big it made my throat close up and my eyes sting.
I hid my face back in the paper and read those words again: unidentifiable male, yellow Charger, but I was just distracting myself. I didn’t do the math. How could I? The last time I saw Robbie he’d left his car behind. It was behind the chapel; those guys hadn’t even seen it. Then it was gone, so it had to be Robbie who came back for it. How could him and his car both wind up in the middle of nowhere in Queens?
Anyway, I was thinking about how I needed to see my mother again. I wanted to put her back to the wall and make her tell me everything. Okay, maybe I thought if I told her everything she’d come home for a while.
I wasn’t going to bring Daisy this time.
I could have cut school the very next day. Ridden the train through the tangled mess outside Jamaica Station and looked out the subway window at that underground graffiti palace on the CC line. I wouldn’t have been there when the Suffolk County cops showed up at school. I wouldn’t have had to know what they found.
The first thing I thought about when they searched our lockers was my mother’s notebook. As if it was some kind of contraband. Ridiculous, but I was glad I’d left it under my bed that day.
The rumor started when I was in English listening to people talk about Of Mice and Men. It was the kind of conversation my mother would have loved. I was just thinking, Who cares? None of this is real or true; somebody made it up.
Notes and whispers started going around. You could feel the background noise get weighty and serious.
We weren’t warned or asked before they searched our lockers, so of course some of the white parents flipped out and started shouting about the Bill of Rights. That kind of thing never happened to their kids, so it came as a shock. They kept us an extra twenty minutes in fourth period while the sound of metal doors moved closer, then farther away through the corridors. An extra twenty minutes of Steinbeck and “universal truth.” I tuned out and tried to draw a diagram of everything I could remember about the inside of an eel.
By the time they let us out, there was no point going to gym class. I found Daisy behind our television in the commons.
“Shit. Thank God!” he said. “You didn’t leave anything in your locker, did you?”
“Like what? Those nuclear launch codes we stole last week? My Russian dictionary? A pound of smack?”
Actually, I was just as relieved as he was.
“Fuck off, Joan. I was worried about you. What have you heard?”
“Mostly a bunch of bullshit about undermining the pastoral and the failure of the American dream. What have you heard?”
“They found something in Kieran Johnson’s locker. They arrested him.”
“Found what?”
“Nobody knows.”
While we were talking, the cops were taking Kieran away in cuffs. We didn’t get to the front doors until he was already in the back of the cop car. The whole world gathered into whispering circles of people with haunted eyes, standing in the bus circle watching the cops pull away.
Here’s the thing: some of them knew. Right then, that day when they took Kieran away, some of them already knew where Ray Velker was and what had happened to him. What was still happening to him. It would be slowing down, out there in the cold under the leaves, but what was happening to Ray was unstoppable.
For the rest of us, the truth didn’t sink in until much later. Truth is what they print in the papers, right? Right. So here’s some.
They were bones. Human bones. It turned out Kieran Johnson and his friends were into getting wasted and digging up the gra
veyard. They’d take away parts of rotten people and sit around them smoking angel dust and building bonfires. I guess then they’d have creepy rituals or something. But they weren’t Ray’s bones, anyway. They were pieces of old forgotten people, so they charged Kieran with something pretty minor and let him go. Probably sent him to a shrink.
Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you. Kids keep human femurs and finger bones in their lockers at my high school, and it isn’t anywhere near the worst thing they do.
That’s what you find when you lift up the surface of Highbone and look underneath. Follow anything in that town far enough, and you’re going to find things you can’t unlearn. Stuff you’ll never be able to not see. It happened to Daisy, and it happened to me, and it happened to every kid who already knew where Ray was.
That Saturday I woke Daisy up and we took the bus to the mall. We got there at ten after twelve, and Teresa was standing by the south entrance in her floppy hat, wearing actual bell-bottoms like she just stepped out of the summer of love. Like Cambodia and punk had never happened and people still thought you could change the world by sticking flowers in the ends of rifles.
“This is Daisy,” I said, waving a hand between them. “Teresa.”
“Oh my GOD!” she walked all the way around Daisy in a circle, looking him up and down. She reached out and ran her fingers down his arm like he was a new coat and she wanted to see how he would feel on her skin. “I get it!” she said.
“Hi,” Daisy said. He looked away at the parking lot while the blood flushed to the surface all over him.
“Joan says you’re having an affair with a glamorous Italian on the phone.”
Daisy glared at me. “Joan should talk.”
“Do you get beat up? I mean, I think you look amazing, but I guess you don’t exactly blend in at school.”
“I don’t get beat up. Joan exaggerates.”
“I didn’t say anything!” I wondered if it had been a good idea, putting them together.
Daisy swallowed, and I watched his Adam’s apple go up and down. “Do you blend in?”
“Oh, yeah,” Teresa said. “I’m a regular chameleon.”
“Right,” I said. “We going in or what? Daisy wants some copper wire.”
The mall was full of milky light. There were two pigeons trapped in one of the hallways, cooing up under the glass ceiling. The escalator stretched up out of the big marble space with nothing on either side of it, so you could feel like you were being carried up to consumer heaven.
“Come on.”
Teresa made for the down escalator, but when she put her foot out, Daisy grabbed her arm.
“That’s the wrong one.” He looked embarrassed and pulled his hand away.
“I know,” Teresa said.
She jumped and started running up. Every few steps she let go and put her arms out while the escalator carried her back down for a minute. Then she ran again.
I looked at Daisy. “Well?”
Teresa got to the top and leaned over panting with her hands on her knees. Her floppy hat fell onto the shining floor.
Daisy looked up, shading his eyes from the scattered light. “She looks like an angel,” he said. “I don’t mean all sweet and floaty. I mean like an actual angel. The biblical kind.”
“Well, she does kind of trumpet out the truth a lot. Do you like her?”
He stared some more and then turned to give me an unfocused look. “I don’t know. I feel like she’s from another planet. One where people don’t keep bones in their lockers.”
For a minute we understood each other again. We had a shorthand language that nobody but us would understand. It was all about body parts and crazy death, but it was ours. Maybe Daisy was right. He added poetry to the world, and sometimes we both needed it. We looked up together at that Long Island version of heaven, imagined angels, and tried to rise above the bones.
I waved at Teresa, leaning on the railing and singing some weird song about home down at us so loud everyone was looking at her.
“Can’t you see why I don’t want Robbie to mess with her?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want Robbie to mess with you either, Joan.”
I swear it didn’t register. Now that I’m playing it over in my head, though, I’m sure he used the past tense right then.
Daisy
I WAS IN Port Jefferson when I heard the cops telling each other the story of Robbie’s death. I’d taken the train there for a phone booth, and gotten onto what AT&T calls a verify trunk line. From there I could listen in. I had three numbers I’d gotten from listening to a tip line and I’d been trying them all week. All I wanted was a name. A name that was either Robbie’s or it wasn’t.
I stood there, leaning on the folding door and feeling like a point on a map, like someone somewhere was sticking a pin into me at that very moment. The phone cops would catch me soon. I shook and smoked and realized I’d forgotten to eat again. It was sunny, and the surface of the ice was melting. Water was running past the phone booth along the curb and into a sewer.
Even though I was scared, using the phones made me feel like me again, like I was in control of something. Standing in a phone booth outside a gas station in Port Jefferson, I was part of one connected circuit that went all the way down the length of Long Island. I was the human switch. I imagined my voice like the electric fire that came off Green Lantern, my magic power leaking through the telephone wires, flipping switches and opening circuits. My veins were just more wires, or maybe the other way around. My blood circulating like an incantation through the veins in the telephone network, making things happen.
I’d given up on the first number after a week. That day in Port Jefferson, I came onto the second line in the middle of a conversation. I was hungry and my feet hurt, so I wasn’t concentrating at first.
“. . . but it isn’t. The kid was supplying angel dust. Small-time shit.”
“The car might belong to John McNamara’s kid, but they took the VIN. Can’t prove it.”
I put my hand over the mouthpiece and retched into the corner of the phone booth. There was nothing inside me, so nothing came out. When I listened again, they’d moved on.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Connecticut busted a lab. They were bringing it across the Sound. I’m telling you, it’s nothing. The McNamara kid was just a pain in the ass. It’s a local fix. Close the case.”
I didn’t even hang up the receiver. I just leaned my forehead against the glass and stood there inhaling the smell of piss and metal. I felt like one of Joan’s jellyfish, like the inside of me was just an empty space for swallowing air, trying to use it to push myself away.
When I leaned onto the glass and lit a cigarette I could feel the nicotine burn down through the veins in my arms. I filled that little space with smoke, hoping it would blot out the world outside the glass. When it didn’t, I called Beatrice.
“She left, Beatrice.”
“Daisy? Why are you not at school?”
“My mother left. She didn’t want hope. She didn’t want anything.”
“I don’t know what to say. But you are kind and so intelligent. Make yourself a life now. It’s your turn.”
“Beatrice, I don’t think I can call you anymore. I might get in trouble about the phone calls.”
“I’ve been happy to know you.”
“I’m worried about you, though. Can’t you leave there? Do you have any money?”
“Silly boy!” she said. “I am an advocate, a lawyer. I’m what you call rolling in money. Not to worry about me.”
“You seemed so sad.”
“Sometimes, strangers let you be free. You can say whatever you need to. You did a good thing for me.”
“My brother’s gone, too. I feel like it’s my fault.”
“But it isn’t. I’m sorry to say it, but you’re still very young. Go and be happy. Let go of them.”
Maybe Joan will never believe me about Beatrice. It doesn’t matter. She was either a mi
racle or a mirage. Either way, she was part of last year and last year is over.
Across the street from the phone booth was a playground. I looked at the puddle of icy mud at the bottom of the slide and the swing someone had wound up onto the bar. It was frozen there now, sparkling and dripping water in the sun. The whole world had flipped over and gotten tangled up into the sky.
Daisy
“COME ON, ARTHUR. I just need to find out what happened to him. You get that, right?”
Me and Arthur were sitting on the Harrises’ back steps looking out at the patchy ice. It was freezing, but we wanted to smoke. The quiet lady was sitting on the floating dock with her coat open and her hat on the planks next to her. We’d waved and then all three went back to staring at the ice reflecting the orange-and-purple sunset.
“I get it, but I’m saying maybe you just can’t, Daisy. How are you gonna find out?”
“I just want to talk to a couple people. He was dealing with some kids at school.”
Arthur blew out a breath and shook his head.
“They might know something.”
“Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds, kid?”
“They killed my brother, Arthur.”
“First of all, you don’t know that for sure. Second, if anybody kills you, it’ll ruin my sister’s life. So that isn’t gonna happen. You hear me?”
“They’re gonna come to the house, Arthur. Why didn’t they come already?”
“Because they didn’t, and that’s a good thing. Think about it. What are you gonna get from asking questions?”
He was quiet for a long time then. The sun sank and the ice turned blue.
“What do you want me to do, little McNamara?”
“I don’t know. Who else can I tell? Could you come with me?”
“It’s dangerous, Daisy. You shouldn’t do it, with or without me.”
“What if it was Andre? Wouldn’t you want to know?”
“Of course. But I wouldn’t go stirring some hornet’s nest, because that could come back on people I care about, right?”
How We Learned to Lie Page 18