Absolute Brightness

by James Lecesne

  So who else?

  There was my father, but of course after what I’d discovered about him, he was definitely out of the running—not only as a possible ride, but also as a father. As far as I was concerned, I wanted nothing more to do with him for as long as I lived.

  Electra was also out. In the old days I might have called her and convinced her to convince her brother to become our designated driver. But ever since the incident at the Fourth of July picnic, we hadn’t spoken on the telephone and I saw her only in passing. And that was weird, because I really thought she and I would be best friends for life. I just assumed that we would graduate high school and go to college together. Afterward we would move to the same city (probably New York), live in the same apartment building; we would meet our boyfriends at the same art opening and refuse to marry them. With the success of her artwork and my novels there would be plenty of money; we would buy some land. We would take up with wilder boyfriends who rode motorcycles and weren’t afraid to cook. We would bake bread, and our children would be homeschooled. It was a good story.

  But the moment Electra began championing the war in Iraq, every time she explained how we had to support our troops even if we thought the whole thing was wrong, the fantasy of our combined future chipped a bit and lost its shine, our present grew thin, and our shared past seemed to dwindle and disappear. If I saw her coming toward me on the street, I looked right through her. Once I even turned away. Eventually we settled into a routine that involved ignoring each other, not exactly enemies, but not exactly friends anymore either. When I mentioned this to Mom, she sighed and repeated her latest mantra: “Honey, things change.”

  And then there was Travis Lembeck. He lived on the far side of Route 33, and because he owned a car and things had certainly changed between us in the past few weeks, I figured he was worth a try. The houses in that part of town were different from ours; they were smaller, less colorful, and many were surrounded not by shrubs and flowers but by stuff that you wouldn’t find on the front lawns of any of my neighbors. Broken toys, rusted car parts, damaged furniture, discarded exercise bicycles, abandoned refrigerators, and busted-up televisions were a few of the items that doubled as lawn ornaments up and down Travis’s street. Over there, it was as if the boundaries between the insides and the outsides of the houses were not so fixed, and life seemed to spill out of them and into the yards in an alarming and violent manner.

  The house where Travis lived was in a state of severe neglect; it had been painted so long ago that the pale minty green was more a memory of the original color than an actual color. The front steps were crumbling, and the pavement leading up to the door was cracked as badly as the devil’s back. One of the slabs was missing, like a tooth that had been yanked out just for spite. The gutters at the edges of the roof had long since given up. The mailbox was a milk crate nailed to a wooden post. A single sheet of plywood, which had been nailed up at a haphazard angle over one of the living-room windows, gave the impression that the house itself was half blind.

  When I pressed my finger to the doorbell, there was no indication that it worked. I knocked hard on the screen door and waited. Nothing. Just dead morning air.

  After a few minutes, Travis appeared at the door, looking all sleepy eyed. He had obviously just woken up.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I replied.

  Neither of us knew what to say, so I decided to get to the point.

  “Look,” I began, “I’m not here for a make-out session or anything like that. That’s not why I came. So don’t … I just need a ride and I didn’t know who else to ask. If you can’t do it, if this isn’t a good time, it’s totally fine.”

  He looked out the door, squinting into the daylight, and then said, “I can do it. Hold on a minute.”

  After he disappeared into the darkness of the house, I leaned in and pressed my face against the screen. All I could see was the hulking presence of a big plaid sofa pushed against the far wall and some stacked boxes. The place didn’t look very neat, and the lingering smell of cigarette smoke, beer, and burned popcorn was a total turnoff. I went and waited in his car.

  “Where to?” he asked as he slid into the driver’s seat and started up the engine.

  “Shark River.”

  He gave me a look.

  “Shark River?”

  “Yeah.” And I said it again, “Shark River.”

  “What’s goin’ on there?”

  As we drove, I told him what I knew about the sneaker, about Peggy Brinkerhoff; and because I thought he could handle it, I told him about the web of brightness that needed to be strengthened. He lit a cigarette and got quiet for about a mile. Then he said, “You’re a good person, Phoebe.” This, I figured, was his way of telling me that I had a nice personality and he wasn’t going to kiss me anymore. He exhaled a big cloud of smoke, and when he was finished he said, “People probably think I’m shit, huh?”

  “People?” I said, stalling for time. Then added, “Well, yeah. But me, too. I mean, they think that of me, too.”

  Meanwhile, strip malls, car lots, fast-food joints, and office complexes whizzed by us in a blur of uninterrupted dullness. All of a sudden Travis suggested that we skip Shark River and go to the beach instead.

  “Ocean’s better any day of the week. Wanna?”

  “Can’t,” I told him without looking at him. “I’ve got to do this thing. We can go after maybe.”

  We didn’t have any trouble finding Peggy’s house. It was a real fixer-upper that had been fixed way up in a cutesy, cottage-by-the-sea sort of way. The shutters had little sailboats cut out of them, and there was a lot of nautical-inspired filigree around the edges of the house. Six sock ducks were planted on the lawn, but because there wasn’t a hint of a breeze, they just hung there looking like dishrags on sticks. The same with the American flag, which drooped unpatriotically from a pole. Above the door there was a wooden sign with THE BRINKERHOFFS spelled out cursively in rope.

  “Yup,” I said to Travis. “This is the place.”

  I could see the lake out beyond the house, but so much light was skittering across its surface and the glare was so strong, I had to shield my eyes and then finally turn away. I was just about to hop out of the car when something happened to me. My stomach dropped and I felt that something wasn’t right. Maybe the reality of Leonard being gone for good was suddenly impossible to ignore. Of course, no one had said it, not yet, but Leonard had drowned in that lake. It was what everyone had been thinking ever since the sneaker washed up. I knew it. Chuck knew it. Everyone knew it. But what if that Peggy woman didn’t understand the rules? What if she didn’t know that I am a Hertle, and Hertles have always been the kind of people who aren’t ready to discuss the obvious until it’s staring them straight in the face? I didn’t know a thing about Peggy Brinkerhoff other than her name, her address, and the fact that she’d found Leonard’s sneaker. She could’ve been the murderer for all I knew. But then I took another quick look at the sock ducks and the sailboat cutouts and I realized that she was probably not the type of person who was capable of talking about anything too real right off the bat. About her being a cold-blooded killer I was less certain.

  “Will you come in with me?” I asked Travis. From the way he turned his head to face forward, I could tell he wasn’t expecting to do anything other than just drive me.

  “Um,” he muttered.

  “You don’t have to.” It was a bold request, but I couldn’t think of any other way to get myself out of the car and up to the front door. A full five minutes had gone by, and I was still sitting in the front seat unable to move any part of my body. I needed help.

  “I dunno. What would I do?” he asked, turning his face even farther from me and looking out toward the brightness of the lake.

  “Basic handholding,” I said, and then I quickly added, “not literally. I mean … you know, like support or whatever.”

  He flicked his cigarette into the street, and we both watch
ed it sit there until the cherry went dead. Then he reached over and took my hand. Literally.

  “Sure,” he said. “C’mon.”

  * * *

  Peggy Brinkerhoff was a sweet-faced woman with a gray perm and piercing pale-blue eyes. She wasn’t the type to wear high heels, but she was a convincing argument for their invention. In her stocking feet she was barely five feet tall. If it hadn’t been for her voice—a voice that seemed to crack and whine and cut through glass—people might not have paid much attention to her. Now retired, Peggy used to work at Hackensack Hospital in Bergen County as an electroencephalogram technician, recording the brain waves of patients who had suffered blows to the head, migraines, dizzy spells, and grand mal epileptic seizures. She wasn’t trained to read the wavy lines and sharp peaks that appeared on the computer screen and then spurted from her printer. That was the business of the doctors who were her superiors. But she did get to wear hospital whites and a name tag and was allowed to use the staff cafeteria on Wednesdays and Thursdays. She liked the work. It was easy, steady, and she was promised a good pension. All she had to do was to fix the electrodes to the patients’ heads, tell them to relax, turn on the machine, and then sit there for the thirty minutes it took to make a record of their cerebral activity. Sometimes, while the machine was busy recording, she read crime novels. Reading crime novels was Peggy’s hobby. When she retired from the hospital, reading crime novels became her full-time job. She couldn’t get enough of them. Not only did she read the trashy whodunits in paperback form, she was also a big fan of the better writers who wrote the hardbacks, like Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell.

  Unlike the reluctant spies, granny detectives, and hard-boiled sleuths of novels, Peggy had never come in contact with evil: She herself was a no-crime zone. She had never been mugged or raped or shot at. No one had ever stolen anything from her, hijacked her car, hit her on the head with a lead pipe, or left her for dead. In fact, she’d never been a victim of any kind, and neither had anyone in her family. She found this amazing, and she often thought that her husband, Dick, her two grown sons, Frank and Ted, and she herself would seem like very dull characters if they ever showed up in one of her books.

  Then one afternoon in the summer of 2001 when Dick was standing next to a boiler (he had a business repairing them), the thing exploded. Technically it was an accident, but because Dick was dead, Peggy felt that finally she had been touched by something bad.

  “These things happen,” her friends told her.

  But Peggy wasn’t satisfied with that kind of talk. And so she began questioning Dick’s coworkers, going through his files, combing the evidence for clues and getting on everyone’s nerves. People rolled their eyes behind her back and said, “Grief,” as if that one word could explain all that Peggy was up to. But despite her best efforts, she never found out anything to prove that Dick’s death was more than a plain old accident, just one of those things that happen.

  Without Dick around, the little house on the edge of Shark River suddenly seemed enormous. Briefly, Peggy considered moving; but really, where would she go? Her sons lived nearby. The lake was a kind of comfort. And she was already familiar with the names of all the streets and neighboring townships. Every morning when she sat down with the local newspaper, she scanned it page by page for headlines of crimes and misdeeds. Usually in the first paragraph the location of the crime was mentioned, and usually Peggy was able to picture the scene exactly. Incidents involving drunk driving, petty thievery, carjackings, hit-and-runs, B and Es (breaking and enterings), and muggings became her new hobby. She also followed stories about corporate embezzlement, child molestation, drug busts, domestic violence, stolen cars, and her favorite, missing children.

  Peggy knew that identifying criminals was not such an easy business. Even if one were able to examine pages and pages of a person’s brain waves, there was nothing there to indicate that that person was evil or capable of performing deeds that would later show up in the newspaper under headlines like CAR THIEF DRAGS VICTIM 1 MILE. Dr. Seligman, the man who had trained Peggy in her job, had explained all this to her during one of her training sessions. He pointed out the various lines on the printout and explained to the class that an EEG was a snapshot of the brain’s activities, not a blueprint of its content or hidden intent. Aha, she thought at the time, so that’s it—evil could be riding those waves and no one would ever be the wiser. She decided that it was the same in everyday life—you just couldn’t spot the criminals in the crowd until they actually did something to identify themselves. What was needed was a clue. A clue, Peggy felt, was like a spiky peak of agitation on the computer printout of human behavior, an indication that there might be trouble up ahead. When Peggy mentioned her theory to Dr. Seligman after class, he looked at her blankly, blinked, and said, “Well, perhaps. I really don’t know.” And then he disappeared down the hallway.

  Naturally, when the article featuring Leonard appeared in the Asbury Park Press, Peggy paid close attention, imagined the locale of the incident, and made notes. She memorized all the details or, as she liked to call them, “clues.” The fact that Leonard was a townie heightened her excitement and allowed her to feel more involved than if Leonard had hailed from, say, Wildwood, New Jersey. So imagine her thrill when she spotted the platform sneaker bobbing on the inky blackness of Shark River right outside her cottage. She fished it out with a long pole and then sat with it for several hours before dialing 911, savoring her good fortune.

  Peggy was totally stoked to have company. She served us doughnuts and soda, and when she found out that Travis hadn’t had a proper breakfast, she made him sit down to a meal of eggs and bacon and toast and juice. While she cooked, she told us her whole life story, a story that included the bit about brain waves and evil. Travis didn’t say a word throughout; he ate whatever was put in front of him and watched Peggy like she was a TV show. I asked questions just to be polite. As Peggy zipped around the kitchen riding what looked like a pretty impressive caffeine buzz, I couldn’t help but notice that she would have made a fine candidate for one of Leonard’s makeovers, because the woman definitely needed something. Her floral smock-like top and pink polyester slacks were hopelessly last century. Her dust-colored hair was permed within an inch of its natural life. And the heavy glasses that kept slipping down her nose, so far down that her nostrils were often completely closed, were a disaster. After about an hour, I began to wonder how she could muster so much talking breath while her brain received so little oxygen.

  When she started to discuss the big search party that was scheduled for the following day and then yabber on about how experienced the divers were and what they might discover, Travis said that it was getting late and we ought to get going. Peggy insisted that I take some of her homemade blueberry cheesecake to Mom and Deirdre. She didn’t even wait for me to say yes or no, just wrapped it up for me. Travis went outside to wait by the car.

  “Nice boy,” Peggy said. “Quiet, though. Known him long?”

  “Kinda,” I told her, which was true. I had known him all through grammar school. He had been in Deirdre’s grade, so I got to watch him grow up alongside her and graduate with her. And, of course, I’d kissed him. But I didn’t feel like getting into the particulars, so I left it at that.

  By the time I made my escape, Travis wasn’t in the car or anywhere near it. I called his name, but there was no answer. I walked around to the side of the house, swinging my little to-go bag and trying to remember why I’d thought visiting Peggy was a good idea.

  Travis was standing at the edge of the lake, gazing out, his balled-up hands pushed deep into his back pockets, his elbows jutting out to either side of him.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” he answered without turning around. “Just thinking, that’s all.”

  “’Bout?”

  “I dunno. Getting out, leaving town.”

  “For good?”

  “And maybe about my mom. I was thinking how she
woulda been ’bout Peggy’s age. It’d all be different if my mom was still around to make breakfast, cakes, and shit like that. Maybe.”

  Everyone in this town had heard the story of how Travis’s first house burned to the ground with his mother trapped inside it. They never found out what caused it. There were rumors about how the boy liked to play with matches, about how he used to light them and throw them against the house; but nothing could be proven. Most people pitied him, especially when he and his dad became homeless. Afterward, he went to live with a neighbor because there was nowhere else for him to go. There were like a million bake sales that year for his family, which now consisted of just him and his father. Eventually his father scraped enough money together to buy the house over on Stanhope.

  “How old were you when she … she died?” I asked him.

  “Eight.”

  I wanted to say something that I had learned since Leonard had gone missing. I wanted to explain to Travis how sometimes it’s only when a person leaves that you begin to feel just how much space they occupied in your life. But I was afraid that it would come out sounding wrong, especially to someone who was busy missing his dead mother. Instead, I just moved in close beside him and took his hand in mine, and we stood there looking out at the lake together for a good long while.

  As he drove me back home, I sat so close to him I could feel the heat of his body moving into mine. The fact that I could feel my body at all was a big improvement over the day-to-day numbness that I had come to expect as normal. I was alive at that moment and full of wonder because I’d suddenly become the kind of girl who sat up close to a boy in the front seat of his Nissan while he was feeling sad about his mother. When he took his right hand off the steering wheel and reached over to take my hand in his, I experienced the same giddy surge of happy hormones that overtook me at the mall when I stole something. Everything in the world around me, and Travis in particular, became instantly transformed by this gesture. The very atoms of the air were seemingly turned inside out, revealing possibilities that had been lying dormant and just waiting for their cue to appear.