The Local News

by Miriam Gershow

  It was not until later, as Denis was about to leave and fishing his coat from the front closet, that he took my wrist. He didn’t clasp it so much as rest his fingers atop it, the sort of gesture you might see between two old people as they crossed the street together, on the cusp of a Walk signal turning to Don’t Walk, one trying to steer the other from danger.

  “A valiant attempt,” he said softly, his head tipped toward mine, looking as if he might laugh.

  “Have you ever been married?” I said, a question without forethought and one that seemed to surprise us both. Denis’s face rounded into a series of o’s, his wide eyes, his puckered mouth. He was not easy to rattle. I felt suddenly, briefly powerful.

  “Why?” he said.

  “This looks like it wore a ring,” I said, touching his ring finger lightly.

  He laughed then, a cackling burst of noise. And then, in a moment so odd and unexpected, he tipped his face toward me and lightly tapped his forehead against mine. It was a gesture—when I thought (and thought and thought) about it later—that I’d only seen parents make to very small babies or gorillas to each other in the zoo. He reeked of ashtray and coffee cup. I did not care.

  When he pulled away, he said, “You got me, you cagey little bird.” It sounded a bit like an insult, except for his smile. “Once, not so long ago. Made it out with my skin, but barely.” Again, the laugh.

  Before I could ask who, and why, and why not anymore, my mother came from the kitchen, paging through her checkbook, pen poised. “Sorry, sorry, we keep forgetting,” she said. I felt a quick jolt of guilt, as if I’d just been caught at something, though that quickly morphed to pleasure. I wanted her to appraise us suspiciously. I wanted us to be radiating the sort of chemistry that raised a mother’s hackles.

  But instead she just created a shelf of her left hip, balanced the checkbook there, and filled out a check. Denis folded it in thirds and slipped it in a back pocket. “Keep up the good work,” he announced jovially enough to me, and with that, slipped his arms into his thick down coat and left. I could feel the spot on my forehead where he’d just been. Hours later I was still keenly aware of it—so much so, I searched myself in the mirror, convinced there must be a visible trace, like a small hickey or a bruise or the strange mark the Christian kids came to school with at Easter, foreheads dirty with smudges of Jesus.

  Days later I ended up helping my mother with the letter, a result of both the lingering guilt of having given her a hard time and the arrogant sort of generosity that came from my covert little alliance with Denis. Thinking of the quiet understanding that was unfolding between him and me, I would grow expansive and exceedingly proud. Oh, these poor little people, I was prone to thinking as I watched my parents skulk and mope.

  My mother and I sat on the couch together, her reciting, me writing, Poppy licking her paws between us, Oliver nuzzling my arm with his wet nose. “Our son is a beacon of light,” she had me write. “He is an icon in the community.” I wrote about his state swim championship and his seven quarterback sacks in a single season. I wrote about the disappearance and the search. I wrote for three full pages, my mother showing no signs of tiring. It was not long before she rambled on about the paper boy who bore a striking resemblance to Danny (I knew the paper boy of whom she spoke and I did not agree, though I didn’t say anything) in both the jawline and the haircut and sometimes when he stopped at our front walk to throw a paper on our porch she wanted to say to him, “Come in.”

  “Do you want me to write that?” I asked, and she looked at me like I was trying to start a fight. Of course she wanted me to.

  There were times, she admitted, when she looked at the faces on the sides of milk cartons and judged the other missing children—impish, dirty, bad teeth, underfed—deeming none of them as worthy of return as her son. She made bargains, she said, so many bargains—her left arm (her writing hand, she told me) to have him back, both her legs, her tongue. The dogs, she said, while petting Poppy. Her husband, she said in a strange voice, and I could not tell if she was joking. I waited for her to say me, that she had bargained with me. The omission soon seemed glaring, seemed to point only to the truth of it.

  None of this, of course, would go into the letter. I pretended to be taking down every word, drawing my pen across the page in intricate scribbles. The letter would be penned by me alone days later, a one-page plea, playing up both Danny’s popularity and the mystery of his vanishing. I would use the word mysterious eight times in three paragraphs. I would end with a flourish: “You would do both your show and our family a service by airing this story of heartbreak and devastatingly unanswered questions.”

  Sitting next to my mother, I could feel the heat coming off her, the dense, sweaty spice of feverish skin as she went on about his appendicitis scare in sixth grade or the way he resisted his “big boy bed” after the crib. I hoped for my father to walk into the room, for the dogs to begin a bout of their unprovoked howling, for the phone to ring. My father was no more pleasant to live with—he’d grown nearly impenetrable—but still, he was easier. He was at least self-contained.

  My mother now leaned her head against my shoulder, her hair clumped in greasy strands. She talked about the smell of boys, the unmistakable odor of dirt and testosterone and awkwardness, her voice wistful and wet. I kept the pen moving nonsensically, my eyes fixed to my imaginary task, putting all my energy into appearing earnest and determined—I am here to save him too—so I would not have to look her in the face or give answer to her words.

  The composite took up residence atop the file cabinet. Long the repository for Danny-related detritus not yet “filed” inside, the top of the cabinet always housed a messy pile of papers. Normally, any new addition was quickly buried beneath even newer additions, though the composite proved the exception. Newer press clippings or letters or scribbled index cards were stuffed beneath it, creating a swell. Like a flag after battle, the ghostly face remained at permanent apex.

  Whenever I came into the kitchen, there he was. It was impossible to be in close proximity without feeling at least a tug on my peripheral vision. It was, after all, a clue, and one so much more tangible, so much more palpably cluelike, than all the letters combined. In that sense, what began as a simple pencil drawing soon became a thumping pulse in the middle of the room. I found myself stealing glances as I got a glass of milk before bed or toasted bread in the morning. The more I looked, the more clearly he came into focus. I discovered wrinkles sketched around the eyes and mouth, making him look older—fifties, maybe even early sixties—and the flurry of thick eyelashes that seemed so girlishly incongruent, I wondered if they were a product more of artistic license than of Tanda’s recollection. The picture grew both absorbing and repellent, with a magnetic quality that drew me to it but then left me with a gritty, sullied feeling after I looked for too long, which I often did.

  In time the face lingered without the aid of the sketch, flitting through my consciousness, disembodied, as I lay in bed, as I sat at my desk to study, as I dialed the phone. Several mornings I woke with the sense that I’d dreamed of him, the cap, the ratty whiskers, the old eyes; it was an insistent feeling as I lay tangled in my blankets, like if I just cleared away the sleepiness, I could piece something important together. Hard as I tried, I never remembered any specifics.

  Roy, I decided one night as I heated soup in the microwave and eyed him from across the room. That was his name. He seemed like a Roy. Roi. The king. The king of what? I wondered. Of the castle? Of my brother? A few times my mother came in as I stood next to the cabinet peering at him. I did a strange, embarrassed dance as she stared, brushing nonexistent crumbs off the front of my shirt, jumping into the middle of a conversation we hadn’t yet started: “The history report is almost done,” or “I’ll call Lola in a few minutes.” I grew red-cheeked and stammery, feeling like she’d caught me hitting on her boyfriend. It was amazing how much this one additional piece of information tilted me off-kilter.

  I made mys
elf slightly queasy with the idea of what I would tell Denis about this. Guess what? I have named him Roy. It quickly became clear I needed a plan, though one didn’t come to me until I lay awake in bed one night, watching the shadowy pockmarks in my ceiling. I realized I could take the sketch to the Larkgrove Police Department and look through the mug-shot books to see if Roy matched any local offenders. Perhaps Roy had been a neighborhood cat burglar or exhibitionist before ascending to snatching kids from basketball courts. Having a plan softened my spine into the mattress, quelled the rising simmer within me, setting me right in the same way that reading the first question of a dreaded exam or the first page of a new book set me right, those moments when wide-open uncertainty was, if not resolved, at least whittled into something more tangible and concrete.

  There were only a couple of variables to work out. One, when to go. The following Saturday seemed logical, the whole day open until an evening basketball game I’d promised Lola I’d go to as part of her grand scheme. Jerold would be in attendance; ergo, I should be too.

  Two, how to get to Larkgrove. While Danny could easily jog between there and home, I was not Danny, and it was wintertime. I needed a ride. My parents were not an option for obvious reasons. Illegally driving myself, particularly to a police station, was also not an option, for equally obvious reasons. I could not stomach the frothy, movie-of-the-week excitement Lola would bring to an investigation of anything to do with Danny. I pictured her packing an oversized magnifying glass and accessorizing herself with a Sher-lockian cape coat and double-billed cap. This left me with one option. I called the next morning, as soon as I was out of bed, waking from a short, thick sleep I couldn’t remember having fallen into.

  “Hi, hi,” David Nelson said quickly when he heard my voice, two hurried bursts of air, as if a call from me at 6:45 a.m. on a Thursday was just what he’d been expecting. Then, slightly more casually, “Konnichiwa.”

  “Konnichiwa,” I said. It’d been months since we’d talked on the phone. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, mostly southwesterly.” I could hear rasps of sleep in his voice. If I asked, though, I knew he’d tell me that I hadn’t woken him, that he’d been up, that it was fine.

  “Really?” I said. “I thought it was more a nor’easter day.”

  “That’s because you’re thinking all upside-down, like some bloody Australian.” He said the last part with a bad Australian accent. BLUE-dee Awz-STRAY-yin.

  I made a noise like a laugh. It was a valiant attempt at silliness, if not actually funny.

  “What are you doing on Saturday?” I said, feeling unexpectedly nervous. David Nelson’s birthday had been in December (the Ides of December, he liked to call it), during our silent period. He was sixteen now. I’d seen him driving to school a few times in his mother’s boxy white Chevrolet, bumper stickers on the back about wishing the military had to have bake sales and keep your laws off my ovaries.

  “Going with Adam to the Cape.” The Cape was Cape Comics, a cramped, atticlike store a few towns over that smelled of boy sweat and mildew.

  “Okay, cool,” I said. “That’s cool. How are you guys? I mean, are you still gaming and stuff?”

  “What’s up with Saturday?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I mean, nothing. It’s stupid. I’m doing some investigating stuff. I thought you might want to come.”

  He asked me what kind of investigating. I told him about Roy (though I didn’t call him Roy) and a little about Tanda, though not enough to violate Denis’s rule about not blabbing, and finally my idea about the Larkgrove police.

  “Sure,” he said as soon as I finished. “That could be fun. I mean, I don’t mean fun. I mean like I could help. I could help you with it.”

  “What about the Cape?”

  “Screw it,” he said. “I can reschedule. Adam’s never doing anything anyway. We can go Sunday.”

  A slither of satisfaction moved through me, a surprising flush of victory.

  He showed up fifteen minutes early. I was still up in my room getting ready when I heard the screechy, dramatic greeting from my mother and the heavy footsteps of my father rising from his chair, his low “Long time, Dave,” and the dense slaps to David’s back. My father had never hugged David Nelson before. He was now playacting, perhaps, the prodigal son returns, though David’s narrow shoulders and permanent slouch must have disappointed. My parents thought we were going somewhere to study; they hadn’t quibbled over details, though I’d prepared an elaborate story about research at the library.

  When David came into my room, he hung back by the door, not even unbuttoning his coat. Part of me wanted to tell him to relax, make himself at home, though I didn’t really want him sitting on the bed or coming in a whole lot closer to watch me doing my hair the way Lola had shown me, trying to spray out the sides just a tiny bit to give them some body. I was wearing one of her hand-me-downs, a scoop-neck T-shirt with a gold silkscreen of a hummingbird across the front. I liked the hummingbird; it was cute without being altogether cutesy, a rarity among her castoffs. But glancing behind me in the mirror, I saw how David stared from across the room with a slightly stern look, and I felt suddenly self-conscious and stupid about both the hummingbird and the hair.

  “It’s cool,” I said, apropos of nothing.

  He picked up a couple books from my nightstand—one on Nixon and the media, the other Othello—and riffled through the pages absently. Then he nudged my water glass with a couple of his knuckles and drummed his fingers on my headboard. He didn’t know, it seemed, what to do with his hands. Finally, in a deep radio announcer voice, he said, “Returning. To the scene. Of the crime.”

  I wished he hadn’t. He laughed a laugh that was too loud and too hearty by several degrees, suggesting to me that he too wished he hadn’t.

  Then in the car it was weird. I watched him rest one palm on the center of the steering wheel, raise and lower the blinker stem, take sips from the pop bottle nested in the cup holder beside him, and fiddle with the radio station dial, all with the mindless efficiency of someone long used to this. He was driving and talking to me and leaning forward to scratch a spot in the middle of his back all at the same time. It made David Nelson seem older and more advanced, and I was struck with an unexpected, warm-throated feeling of having been left behind. As he fiddled with the electronic controls that adjusted his side mirror, I had the urge to poke his leg or call out Scotland Barge, the malapropism a substitute teacher once said for Scotland Yard, which resulted in such gaping incredulity by the two of us—Did he just say Scotland Barge?—we repeated it for months.

  “Quit it,” I said instead with unnecessary harshness.

  He looked at me, surprised.

  “That’s bugging me,” I said, slightly more nicely. “All the messing with the mirror. That whirring noise.”

  “Uhhh,” he said, looking at me the way I’d seen him looking at myriad morons and simpletons. “I need to see behind me.”

  I had a brief flash of regret for having invited him, the way we made things more difficult for each other now. But soon he started to talk about the runoff elections in Benin, which I hadn’t really been following. Even so, it was nice listening to him go on about President Soglo and former president Kérékou. I said something about Kérékou being too much of an autocrat to beat Soglo, though with a brief flash of worry that I was mixing my guys up. David, though, nodded, adding, “Don’t underestimate the learned helplessness of a fledgling democracy.”

  When we got to the Larkgrove police station, only a few parking spaces were filled and the majority of those with black-and-white police cruisers. The air was frigid as usual, but with a rare cloudless sky. The sun provided, in lieu of warmth, a bright glare off the windshields and the ossified mounds of snow, which at least made me feel more awake and alert than usual. Before we went in, I showed David the picture of Roy. It felt deeply personal. I fiddled with my coat zipper as he studied it. He held the paper in his gloved hands—his cheeks and the
tip of his nose were already pinking from the cold—and finally said, “He looks like the Taskmaster.”

  “Who’s the Taskmaster?”

  “The Avengers. Skull-faced bad guy.”

  All the comics stuff was new; I tried not to be irritated by it. “Thanks,” I said dumbly, taking the picture back.

  Inside, the station opened to a narrow waiting area filled with mismatched chairs and brochures about how to prevent car theft and break-ins while on vacation. An officer stood behind a long counter, listening to a woman who was fishing money out of a snakeskin purse and arguing loudly that her meter hadn’t expired. The officer was expressionless.

  “You’d need to contest it in court if the ticket was in error,” he said, though the woman was already slapping a twenty on the counter. She called it robbery. She called him a robber. He nodded, seeming to indicate path of least resistance rather than agreement.

  “Hello,” I said when David and I took the woman’s place. “I’m Lydia Pasternak.”

  “How can I help you?” he said. He had a thick, dense face, though it was just beginning to sag in the jowls and beneath the eyes, losing the elasticity of youth. This could be Tip or Kent in ten years. This could be Danny.

  I’d expected him to recognize my face or my name or both. “My brother went missing from here last summer.” David leaned up against me, in his habit of standing right on top of me, his arm pressing into mine, the nylon fabrics of our coats making a low, rustling sound. It was both comforting and annoying. “Not here here,” I said. “Larkgrove Elementary.”

  For the first time, the officer’s face animated. His name badge said Overton. “The kid from the basketball courts?”

  I nodded, wondering how many possible kids could go missing from Larkgrove, a town even smaller than Fairfield, with only an elementary school, a bunch of suburban homes, and a couple anemic strip malls filled with awkward businesses like medical supply stores and Christian bookshops.