Absolute Brightness

by James Lecesne

  Sharing the contents of the letter with my mother would have been just as complicated, but for different reasons. She was at least on the premises, but she did not approve of any discussion involving Travis Lembeck. After the trial was over, Travis’s had become just one of the names we didn’t mention in her house, along with Dad’s. Once, when Father Jimbo suggested that we all pay a visit to Travis in jail, Mom responded by sighing, grabbing hold of the countertop, and saying, “No way are we going anywhere near that boy. We’ve had enough in that department.” She then walked Father Jimbo to the front door, and that was the last I ever heard about the possibility. Just as well. As recent as a few months ago, I wasn’t yet ready for face time with the person everyone in Neptune had characterized as pure evil, even if that face happened to be on the other side of bulletproof glass.

  I thought about going downstairs to open Travis’s letter in private, but six months earlier, a flood had ruined everything down there and we’d had to trash most of the stuff. Waterlogged books and clothes got crammed into big black bags and then dragged out to the curb on trash night. The last of Nana Hertle’s belongings, the Sierra Club posters, and the locomotive garbage can, all became things of the past, literally overnight. The boxes were gone and every trace of Leonard was removed. We were moving on, and my mother sent everything into an unsuspecting world by way of various charities that specialized in junk with no questions asked. She wanted a new look downstairs, one that involved a freshly painted concrete floor and plenty of wide-open space. After it was all gone, we listened as she verbally decorated the place over and over. A game room would be nice, or maybe a family entertainment center, or how about an exercise area. We offered no suggestions. For me, whatever it ended up looking like, the place would always belong to Nana and Leonard. But without their actual stuff, the basement no longer seemed like a viable location to me; it became just one of the many spaces on this earth that I would pass through on my way to somewhere else.

  Alone, I sat on the front stoop of our house and opened Travis’s letter. Like the handwriting itself, the message was simple and straightforward.

  Dear Phoebe,

  How are you doing? I hope you’re enjoying school and everybody in your family is doing good. I’m adjusting to life in prison here as best I can. I wake up way too early, the food is crap, and the noise drives me fucking nuts, but other than that prison life is not so bad as I thought it would be. Don’t get me wrong. It totally sucks. But I can’t complain. I mean, considering. I know I got no right to ask, but I’m wondering if maybe you’d think about coming to visit me sometime. No big deal, if you’re not into it. I wouldn’t blame anyone for wanting to stay as far away from this place as they can get. Even the lighting in here is a buzz kill. But if you’d come, I could see you and that would be nice. Whatever happens, take care of yourself.

  Sincerely,

  Travis Lembeck

  P.S. A special hello to my girl Deirdre.

  I folded up the letter and tried to imagine myself sitting in a maximum-security-prison visiting area. I just couldn’t do it. What would I wear? was the first question that occurred to me. And then there was a series of many other questions that were more serious, like what would Travis and I actually talk about, how would I be able to look him in the eye, and finally who would drive me to Trenton?

  I did have a driver’s license by that time, but without a car, a license wouldn’t have done me much good. Public transportation was always an option; but considering the situation, I thought it would be best if I had someone with me. Deirdre was out of the question. Like I said, she was busy with her new life.

  My mother remained dead set against the idea of me going to Trenton. She said it was wrong and possibly dangerous. I reminded her that as an aspiring writer, I needed life experience. Think of it as research, I told her. I could write an article for the school paper and get extra credit. She shot me one of her killer sideways glances, the kind that seemed to say, “Don’t start in with me.” Then I asked her if she thought the mothers of writers like Norman Mailer and Truman Capote ever prevented their children from doing what had to be done, because both of them spent time with hardened criminals so they could write books. She replied by saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if the mothers of those writers let their kids hobnob with killers, they oughta be ashamed of themselves.”

  “Is it because I’m a girl?” I suggested with more than a little attitude. “Is that it?”

  She looked at me straight in the face and said, “Yeah. Call it that. And if you’da stuck with the ballet classes like I told you, this never woulda happened.”

  My father was, under the circumstances, no longer in the running. He’d moved away to Las Vegas so Chrissie could pursue her dream of becoming a croupier. Not long after he moved, he sent us a picture postcard of a fake Eiffel Tower with his new address scribbled on the back. I felt sad whenever I allowed myself to think about him.

  I decided that the best person to give me a ride was Officer DeSantis. I knew for a fact that Chuck and his life partner, Craig, went to Trenton a lot on Saturday mornings to make the rounds of the local thrift shops, poke through old stuff, have lunch at their favorite diner, and treat themselves to a pedicure before going home. They had even asked me if I’d like to tag along sometime.

  The fact is that after all the hoopla about the trial had blown over, I began spending time with Chuck and Craig. I liked them. They were such a funny couple, especially when they started to bicker. It wasn’t like they were serious about their disagreements, and it wasn’t as if they disagreed about anything earth-shattering. Usually, their arguments were about stupid stuff like whether a piece of fabric was plaid or madras or who said what to whom and why. But no matter how heated they got, I never had the feeling that anything bad was about to happen or that one of them was going to haul off and hit the other. And that was probably a good thing, because they were both pretty large.

  At first, I was confused. I had never (to my knowledge) met such big gays. Craig told me that he and Chuck were considered to be “bear” types.

  “By who?” I wanted to know.

  “By whom?” he said, correcting me without bothering to turn around in his seat.

  Craig was a freshman-year English teacher over at Manasquan High, but even when he was off duty, he remained a stickler for grammar. He was not as big as Chuck, but he seemed to make up for this slight disadvantage by upping his volume whenever he spoke and by taking up more space wherever he went. I wouldn’t say that he was exactly handsome; his features were a bit too spread out across his face and his ears were tiny, giving him a look that was more otter than bear.

  Just in case you don’t know, bears are a subset of the homosexual experience, a group of men who can be easily identified by their burly frames, facial hair, and beer bellies. Once the whole thing was explained to me, I had to agree that Chuck and Craig pretty much fit the profile. But I was still unclear about how to distinguish a bear from an average big guy on the street.

  “I mean, how do you know?”

  “I can just tell,” Craig said, turning to me and giving his beard a smoothing.

  “Signals,” Chuck added.

  “Like…?”

  “Like, I don’t know, clues. Clothes,” Craig said. And then he added, “Well, not the clothes exactly, but the way we wear them.”

  This conversation took place last Sunday while they were driving me to visit Mrs. Kurtz. Mrs. K had been having a hard time taking care of herself, and people were saying that something ought to be done before there was an accident. Then there was an accident. First her space heater caught fire, and then her dog, Joey. The dog didn’t make it, and though her house suffered only some minor smoke damage, a meeting was called and a decision was made to move Mrs. K into assisted-living quarters in Sea Crest. Everyone agreed that it was the best course of action. Everyone except Mrs. K; she thought it was the worst idea she’d ever heard of and she adamantly refused to g
o.

  Before she’d even set foot onto the property of the Bonnie Dunes Assisted Living Center, there had been a lot of crying, some hysterical carrying-on, and a broken figurine. But once she was settled in, Mrs. K came around to the idea of making a new life for herself in a minimum-security holding environment. To help with the transition, many of her friends and neighbors agreed to visit her, at least until she got familiar with the place. Somehow I got roped into sleeping over once a week and reading aloud to her.

  The minute Chuck and Craig dropped me off and I was waving good-bye to the taillights of their car, I realized that I’d forgotten to ask them for a ride to Trenton. Oh, well, I told myself, it’s not like Travis is going anywhere. Life without parole is a very long time. And maybe I just wasn’t ready; it would take a while.

  Mrs. K and I were still in the middle of reading Great Expectations, a novel by Charles Dickens about this guy named Pip and his trials and tribulations as he grows up and, of course, ends up with the girl he loves. My rule is, if Mrs. K starts snoring loudly, I stop reading. I’m not about to compete with her. I figure at the rate we’re going, poor Pip might never make it to adulthood.

  But this particular evening, Mrs. K had been unusually alert. We’d just finished reading the final few paragraphs of chapter 47 when her hand with the rag reached over and touched me. She said, “Oh, by the by. I almost forgot. I got something for you.” She pulled herself up from her chair and hobbled into her bedroom. I heard her rattling around in there and then the sound of something like boxes or papers toppling over.

  “You all right?” I called out from where I was sitting.

  I was just about to press the panic button, which would alert the facilities manager and automatically contact the paramedics, when she came back carrying a spiral notebook and brushing some dust off her housecoat; the book had a green, dog-eared cover. I’d seen the thing before. It had belonged to Leonard once upon a time. She handed it to me and said, “I’ve been meaning to give this to you. He left it at my other place, back then, y’know, before … before the fire and everything. I packed it up and took it with me, but, well, I don’t have room for an extra toothpick in this place, so you have it.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and took the notebook from her and tucked it in my backpack. Mrs. K turned on the TV. I closed Great Expectations and placed it on the end table, where it lives when it’s not being read. We were clearly finished for the evening.

  After a while, Mrs. K called it a day and went into her bedroom. She was supposed to be asleep, but I knew she was probably just lying there, because she told me once that sleep doesn’t come as easily to her as it once did and sometimes she has to wait many hours before it takes her. She said she gets afraid at night. She can’t tell me what scares her, but she claims it’s there, the terror, waiting. She can feel it sometimes hovering at the foot of her bed, sometimes under it. Personally, I think she scares herself. But just so she doesn’t wake up screaming and frightening the other Bonnie Duners to death, I stay overnight with her and sleep on a pullout sofa that smells of dog and hot soup. I stayed up way later than I should have that night watching TV, reading, writing, doing whatever.

  Later I remembered Leonard’s notebook. I pulled the old thing from my backpack. I was surprised to discover that I was afraid to open it, afraid that I would turn the pages and suddenly come across an original poem by Leonard Pelkey or a short story that he’d written or an unfinished letter. I knew that if anything like that happened, my heart would break. At the same time, I was scared that I might find only unsolved math problems, mindless doodlings in the margins, and an unfinished composition on the subject of the history of the tomato or a brief biography of Cotton Mather. That too would break my heart, but for an altogether different reason.

  An envelope slipped out and fell into my lap. It was an ordinary business envelope, a white one with a flag stamp in the corner and Leonard’s name and our address written in a shaky hand that I instantly recognized. There was no return address. I opened it and pulled out the single sheet of ruled paper that had been torn from a spiral notebook.

  Leo,

  Just wanted to thank you for the money clip. It was stupid giving it to me. I lose shit like that all the time. And I know how much it means to you since it belonged to your mother and all. So I’m going to try and take care of it. Anyway, thanks.

  Your friend,

  Travis

  In the morning I woke up and made breakfast in Mrs. K’s cramped kitchenette. Over frozen waffles and coffee, she and I discussed the night and the state of her hair. As usual, I reminded her to take her pills, and as she downed them one by one, she told me for the umpteenth time that when she was my age, she didn’t have the opportunities I have now. She told me not to waste my time and to make the best of everything. She told me about the boys she had crushes on back in the Bronx where she grew up. She said their names and then discussed their looks and habits as if they still lived next door and she would see them later at a karaoke sing-along.

  The letter was in my pocket the whole time. I would have to wait until I got home in order to compare it with the other letter, the one Travis had sent to me. Just to be sure. But eyeballing it was enough to convince me that Travis had written the note. And that sent things spinning: the fact that Travis and Leonard had enjoyed some kind of friendship, the fact that their friendship had never made it onto anyone’s radar, the fact that Travis had been telling the truth about how he came to own the money clip. All these facts seemed to vie for my attention, as if they were trying to outshout the single unchangeable fact that Leonard Pelkey had been brutally murdered by Travis Lembeck.

  A car horn honked. I quickly gathered up my belongings, kissed Mrs. K on the forehead, and rushed out of her unit. Once on the street, I was ashamed at how thrilled I was to be out of there, free of that tiny, shrinking world, and with my day stretched out before me.

  Electra was sitting behind the wheel of her used gunmetal Geo Prizm. She didn’t have her license yet and technically she wasn’t supposed to drive without a licensed driver, but she did anyway and her parents were unable to stop her.

  “Hurry it up,” she yelled at me. “We’re late!”

  As I slid into the passenger seat, she explained that she was in no mood. She’d had to drive her brother to physical therapy, which meant she’d been up since the crack of Jesus and was tired as hell. She didn’t want to be late for school and spend the morning in detention.

  “Calm down,” I said to her. “We’re seniors. What can they do to us? We’re gods.”

  “Goddesses,” she reminded me. And then she launched into a debate about college life, and should we be submitting ourselves to four more years of mental slavery or should we just chuck everything and head for Europe.

  I wasn’t listening. Not really. I’d heard it all before. Every day, in fact. And besides, I was thinking about the letter.

  “I got a letter from Travis.”

  She gave me a sidelong glance and sucked air between her teeth as a way of signaling her disapproval. I was about to ask her if she would consider driving me to Trenton some Saturday, but she interrupted.

  “What’d I tell you? Didn’t I tell you?”

  “He wants me to visit him,” I said.

  “No,” she replied, point-blank.

  “It’s just that he’s got no one.”

  “No.”

  “He needs someone to talk to. Someone on the outside.”

  “Someone?” she said, as if I had just insulted her and her whole family. “Someone?”

  The car came to a dead stop at the intersection. She leaned over and spoke directly into my face. “Tell me right now, Phoebe Hertle, that you are not, not, not seriously considering this. That boy is pure evil through and through, and I am not moving from this spot till you give me your honest-to-God word of honor that you will totally steer clear of him.”

  I looked at her and I remembered a time when everything was different, a time when every
thing was pure and it was easy to steer clear. My world made sense and everything was absolutely bright. Trenton was just a dot on a map and we weren’t connected to it at all, except through the occasional news story. We knew no one who lived there, and certainly no one in a maximum-security prison. Mom and Dad were still together. My older sister was perfect and so was Winona Ryder. My best friend didn’t have opinions that were the opposite of mine.

  In those days, if evil had a face, it was just some girl I hardly knew who was saying mean things behind my back, or it was someone I didn’t know at all living in some other town or in a far-off country. Evildoers might be sitting right outside my house in a parked car, but back then I didn’t know their names or where they lived or what they had in mind.

  “Pheebs?” Electra said, as we idled at the corner waiting for the light to change. “You aren’t saying anything. You have to promise. You have to say it.”

  But what could I say? I couldn’t promise Electra anything, because I knew that steering clear was no solution. She didn’t understand, not yet, that Deirdre was right—every day you have to stand up to evil. You might even have to risk getting in a car and driving all the way to Trenton. You might have to sit with it in an airless room and look it in the eye until you can see its all-too-human face. And then someday, if you should ever find yourself in the grip of evil, tied up and sinking down to the bottom of a lake, you can remember that, once, you saw a glint of goodness in that same evil eye, and without you, it never would have been there.

  The car behind us gave us a toot, urging us forward.

  “Just go,” I told Electra, nodding in the direction up ahead. “Just go.”

  THANK YOU FOR READING THIS FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK.

  The friends who made