The Local News

by Miriam Gershow

  When I stopped, Denis just smiled at me. He was nodding a little, staring directly in my eyes. I tried holding his stare but felt a tickle rising in me and couldn’t quite do it. For a while he didn’t say anything, and I tried to think of small talk, something about “How’s Kimberly?” or “What other cases are you working on?” but then he said, “So what got you interested in the investigation?”

  “Muh—” I said, a quick sound before I could stop myself. Then I laughed a little. Denis shifted farther forward in his seat, tugging at his belt loops as if to adjust himself. The question unnerved me. So did the way he kept staring, as if he already knew the answer and was just waiting for me to say it. There was no way to tell him I got interested because I liked him. The very idea sent a queasy shiver through me. Finally I said, “I want him to come home.” But my voice was loud and unconvincing, Miss America.

  “I mean,” Denis said, “did you even like him?”

  I shrugged. “Sure,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “I mean, more when we were younger.” Again, I remembered having told Denis a lot of this before.

  “But now?”

  “Now, you know, now is now. He could be a piece of work, like you said.”

  “So why work so hard to get him back?” he said.

  I wasn’t sure what he wanted. “He’s still my brother.”

  “But you were resentful of him?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Jealous?” There was a new way he was looking at me, the slightest of changes, almost imperceptible really, his eyes a bit more squinty, his smile slightly plastic, the sort a clown would flash at a birthday girl only because he was getting paid.

  “Sure. A little. I mean, he’s not that smart, but he gets a lot of stuff.”

  “Stuff like your parents’ attention?”

  “And friends and girlfriends and popularity.”

  “And you didn’t like that?”

  “I mean, I didn’t really care,” I said, the tenor of the interaction going I knew slightly cockeyed. The way he was asking questions, different now from just a minute ago. But I couldn’t stop. I was driven by momentum, a need to explain myself till we got right side up again. “Except it seemed like he never had to earn anything. And it wasn’t like I ever wanted to be popular. I’m more popular now and it’s just kind of stupid.”

  “So you’re popular now that he’s gone?” Denis said, leaning so far forward in his chair now, he seemed balanced on the cushion by just the tip of his tailbone.

  “It’s not like that,” I said.

  “What’s it like?”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what he was asking. “It’s like nothing. I’m not really popular. I just know his friends now.”

  “And you like it better this way?”

  “What way?” I said.

  “With your brother gone?”

  I worried about the chill moving through me, the way my nipples were hardening beneath my shirt. Would he see that? I was ashamed of not wearing a bra. I never wore a bra. What a horrible fact that now seemed.

  “No,” I said. I was trying to keep my voice even. “I wouldn’t put it that simply.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “I wouldn’t put it.”

  He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. Aside from Poppy pawing at the carpet, the room was quiet. Denis watched me, his face unreadable. I acted like I was fascinated by what Poppy was doing.

  “You know,” he finally said, another tone change, now back to folksy and conversational, “early in my career, I had a client whose wife of twenty years had left him. Disappeared without a trace one day. He was desperate, the poor fellow. He’d been a crappy husband, cheated on her, lost his job. But he was ready to turn it around. And when he came to me, he was going out of his mind with worry. He was probably the most helpful client I think I ever had.” The half-smile was back, the head cocked to one side, though his eyes still searched mine, and his hands picked intently at the wrinkled pleats in his pants.

  “The guy would dig up her old high school yearbooks for me or give me her journals—I mean, some of these were twenty years old. He’d track down the phone numbers of the guys she’d dated when she was nineteen. He was thorough. He was like my unpaid assistant. And I couldn’t have been happier for his help. I mean, I was green back then. Real green. Had maybe closed a handful of cases.”

  He chuckled at this. I chuckled back.

  “But it got to a point where he was feeding me so much information that led me in so many different directions. His old lady had a big grudge against her boss, and also she had a cousin who lived in Oaxaca and she’d always talked of wanting to retire there, and also she’d spent a couple months in the locked mental ward of the state hospital in the late seventies. I just started going in circles. Chasing my proverbial tail. And at some point you have to ask, is the guy trying to be helpful or is he trying to obfuscate? Does he have something to hide?”

  Denis had stopped picking at his pants. His elbows were perched now on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. He stared at me in a way I’d never seen before, almost predatory, the way he was not blinking, the way his mouth was sealed so tightly shut.

  “What?” I said. And “Wait.” I could feel the churn of my belly, the acidic rise of food, hours old, through my esophagus: milk and stale cornflakes, a too-brown banana. I thought I might be sick. I had read of Raskolnikov, of Perry Smith, of Claudius; I should have known what it was to be tested for a crime. I should have easily discerned it far earlier, as anyone surely could’ve, from his first grinning strides into my living room, from the eager way he had let the dogs lick his hands. But I was dumb; Denis had made me so. Dumb as dirt, dumb as a meaty-faced boy who got himself one day disappeared.

  “Now I’m not saying …” He held up his hands, shaking his head. He let his voice trail off and his face softened a little, though he still stared at me, unblinking. I wondered if he’d staked out our house for hours or maybe days, waiting and waiting until I was the only one home.

  “He used to be nice,” I said, and “I liked him.” Denis didn’t so much as twitch. It was too late. So far past too late. The things I thought to shout now—about the two of us sharing an inflatable raft when we vacationed in Maine years before, paddling past the breaker waves to the spot where we rescued water bugs and tried to touch our toes to the seaweed below; building a fort during our final fall in Abernathy with all the branches that’d been knocked off our maple in a giant windstorm; dragging beanbag chairs or Easy-Bake ovens into the long line of toys for the bridge game—seemed like the last-minute pleadings of a convict, the ridiculous denials of a shoplifter caught already with the clothes in her purse. My brother was a complete asshole; I’d just willfully, enthusiastically annihilated everything else. I’d reveled in it.

  Denis stared and stared. I thought I might scream or flail wildly about, anything to get him to stop. “Listen—” I said, though nothing followed. What was he to listen to? That he’d gotten it all wrong? That I’d only said what I’d said and done what I’d done to get him to like me? That I was an opportunistic and black-hearted girl? “What happened to the guy’s wife?” I finally said. I was squeaking.

  “You’re a smart girl,” he said, though he said it in a terrible way. It made me actually catch my breath, an audible intake of air. A long pause opened between us, the silence even more terrible than the noise. My eyes welled and I sank into the cushions behind me. The back of my throat grew slick and salty, and the sudden effort required in trying not to cry, gargantuan. I thought, with some disgust, of my mother. There I sat, like her, trembling and helpless. My chest heaved. I tried to steady my breath. I even tried, ridiculously, to smile. Anything.

  Denis made a noise, a snort or a sigh. Something breathy and from the nose. Later I would wonder if it’d been a laugh. “No stone unturned,” he told me, and once again his voice was different, softer, his face returned to nearly normal. The way he was loo
king at me, he was just looking; he wasn’t boring in. But he still sat perched on the edge of the chair, and I was so tired from trying to keep up with him, I had no idea where we were now. He held his hands in the air, both palms turned up to the ceiling. He was, it seemed, shrugging, and I had no idea what he meant by it. Sorry, Charley? Whoops? All in a day’s work? “Gotta look at everything,” he said, “no matter how …” But he didn’t finish, and I wondered desperately, as I would for days, what the missing word was, if it offered apology or further accusation. No matter how outlandish? Hurtful? Horrific? Unlikely? Painful? Ugly? Stupid?

  Soon enough my mother returned. Denis was by then reclining again in his chair, his hands resting affably on his belly, the questions between us having returned to a more benign, though no less surreal, volley. He was back on something about Danny’s temper or his friends—it hardly mattered—when she stumbled into the living room. Her cheeks were flushed. The plastic bag handles strained against her freezing hands, her fingers red and chapped. She should have worn gloves, I thought, but without my usual derision. I watched, out of my peripheral vision, the careful way Denis watched her and me. I suddenly wanted her to pat my shoulder or run her fingers through my hair, like when I was little and flu-ish and she would huddle next to my bed, her palm to my forehead, her breath on my face, making me believe I would be okay.

  In the days that followed, everything took on the tinge of a sick joke—the few frayed yellow ribbons that had survived the season, heavy with ice now, frozen stubbornly to tree trunks and mailboxes; the pep rally for the varsity athletes, Jerold slump-shouldered at one end of the gymnasium floor, Tip all puffed up at the other; the shiny pegs of the Lite-Brite that Lola and I stabbed through the black paper on our way to making an unintentionally ghoulish clown face or monstrous flower garden.

  One morning I woke with a burst blood vessel in my left eye, a shocking cloud of red in the white of my sclera. Even my parents were alarmed by the sight. My father put his hand to his mouth at the breakfast table, my mother asked what on earth had happened to me. But the night before had been no different from any other, fitful and unrelenting. All day, and for days after, people asked what had happened, and always I told them I didn’t know, though I found it satisfying, in the sick-joke sort of way, that the violent unrest of my nights had finally left a mark.

  I stopped seeing Chuck. My parents believed me when I told them the sessions weren’t doing any good, and the insurance had maxed out after twenty-six anyway. I spent most evenings in front of the television with one or both of them. I’d never been a fan of TV but now came to understand its allure. There was something wholly consuming in its bright pictures and white noise.

  We watched, of course, the alien abductions and haunted houses of Unsolved Mysteries and soon added America’s Most Wanted to the lineup. My mother discovered Cops and made derisive noises from the couch as poorly shaved, shirtless men were thrown against the hoods of police cars. With my father I watched the college basketball tournament. My father tried to muster the enthusiasm of years past, when the NCAA tournaments had been a time of great celebration in our household. He and Danny would stock up on beer and soda pop and pretzels and chips, camp out for entire weekends, eating meals on TV trays, scribbling wildly onto the sixty-four-tiered brackets they’d printed out from the computer. Now my father sometimes pounded his fist on his chair arm if he was unhappy or let out a hiss of approval at a good play, but mostly he just sat. Often when I looked he wasn’t even watching the television, focused instead on a dust clot dangling in the corner of the ceiling or Poppy’s tail as it thwapped against the carpet. Every once in a while he would try explaining things: “They’re just trying to run down the clock,” or “They’ll keep fouling him because he’s terrible at the free-throw line.” Late into one afternoon, as the TV glowed in the darkening family room, he even passed me the last few tepid sips of his beer. “Don’t tell your mother,” he warned. And “It’s going to taste bitter,” as if this were my first.

  It was during one of the games—Princeton vs. Mississippi State, Princeton trailing by nearly 20, my father’s expression unreadable (other than Michigan, it was unclear who he was rooting for)—that my mother came into the room more energized than usual, almost bouncing on her tiptoes, both hands cupped in front of her as if ready to receive an offering. But the offering had already come. A slim envelope rested in her hands, the return address a black circle filled with the bubbly white lowercase letters of abc. It had been nearly eight weeks. Unsolved Mysteries was answering us.

  “You open it,” she said to me, her voice insistent and suddenly girlish. “Mute it, mute it,” she told my father. My father moved slowly for the remote. Halftime had just begun, a well-choreographed herd of marching band members and cheerleaders descending on the court. I thought of Lola. My mother held the envelope out to me.

  Even before I took it, before I slit open the flap with the side of my index finger and unfolded the thin paper to look at its generic paragraphs—the letter not even an original, copied instead many times over, gaps in the ink appearing from an aging Xerox machine—I sensed (and it was a strong sense, like the smell of rotten eggs or the taste of ipecac) the disappointment I was about to bring. And I thought, very clearly, do I really need to be the bearer of any more disappointment?

  “Dear Viewer,” I began. “Thank you for your interest in Unsolved Mysteries. All of us at ABC are heartened by the success of this show and proud of the many viewer tips that have poured in in response to many of our segments. With your help we have been able to apprehend suspects in an untold number of cases, such as Robert Creeley of Huntsville, Alabama, currently awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend and her twin daughters, Hannah and Abigail.” These were inelegant, clunky sentences, I thought, probably written by some unpaid intern. “Men like Mr. Creeley,” I continued, “would not be found without your vigilant viewership and phone calls. We wish we had time to answer each inquiry personally, but we appreciate your interest and hope you will continue to join us in solving America’s Unsolved Mysteries.”

  There was a pause when I finished. My father studied his hands; my mother still looked at me, her eyes intent, her mouth opening a bit wider. She leaned toward the piece of paper, her whole body an unspoken And? And?

  “That’s it,” I said.

  My father was suddenly rapt over the muted pageantry of half-time, watching the marching band as it patterned itself into an M, an S, and a U along the court. Someone in a bulldog costume did a long series of back flips. My mother said, “That doesn’t even say anything. They didn’t even read what we sent them.”

  “I’m sure they read it,” my father said, but without feeling and without looking at her. “They’re busy.” I wondered what it was like for him all day at work. Was this how he spoke to all of his colleagues? Or did he fake it so well for them, this was all he had left for us?

  My mom grabbed the paper out of my hand and studied it, moving it near to and far from her face, even flipping it over to examine the back. She cried quietly. Tears fell; her cheeks shone.

  “It’s okay, Bernice,” my father said, and I wanted him to rise from his chair and go to her, though I knew that to be something he was constitutionally incapable of at that point. He did seem to falter at the remote for a moment—I’ll give him that—struggling with his decision to turn the volume back on, which he eventually did. The band bleated out its fight song, heavy, like all the fight songs we’d heard in the past weeks, on the downbeats and brass.

  • • •

  When Denis came over now—and he still did, with increasing frequency and always with Kimberly—I would not look at him. He rallied my parents around the kitchen table, and the ritualized nature of the talks—he gave updates, they asked questions, smoke swirled heavily between them—began to strike me as mostly artifice, Denis leading them down a path of half-clues and faint hopes in order to justify his continued fees. There had been a few more visits to Tanda, he told th
em. He presented a follow-up composite that looked as hazy and amorphous as the first Roy. There was a state prisoner named Elvin Tate who faced sentencing in an attempted murder case and was said to have information about Danny. Denis talked importantly about making the drive to Jackson to meet with the man, but I listened to such stories numbly, often perched on the stairs, a room and a half away.

  The few times he and I ended up in the same room, he smiled or spoke my name, saying, “Well, hello there, Lydia,” giving no indication of our afternoon in the living room. “You get in a fight?” he said when he saw my eye, a note of genuine concern in his voice. I some-times felt crazy, as if maybe I had invented the whole thing, maybe I had entirely misinterpreted what had happened between us, coloring it with my own paranoid hues.

  I would have urges to lurch toward him then, maybe press my face against the messy hairs of his cheek, maybe bury my nose in his neck. But then I thought I saw him narrowing his eyes at me, or smiling in a way that was not so much friendly as scheming, or licking his lips as if readying for a challenge, and I would wonder if Grandma was the wolf, and if I was the idiot with the death wish, wanting to still skip and skip along, swinging my basket of cookies at my side.

  • • •

  By the end of March, the weather turned erratic in the jarring way it always did near the end of winter. For a day temperatures would rocket into the sixties, the air smelling dewy, the remaining snow melting in dramatic fashion, sheets of water sluicing along the edges of the roads and pouring loudly into storm drains. By the next morning, though, the cold would return, the streets and sidewalks would be dangerously slick, and branches would snap from trees from the weight of new ice, making people even more downcast and irritable than usual, such weather now an affront. The cold, Lola said one day, was like a welshed bet. I was surprised at the cleverness of the sentiment, though I told her that expression was racist. She blinked at me blankly. When I explained about the inhabitants of Wales, she said, “Princess Diana?” and then put her hand to her mouth, like she couldn’t believe she’d insulted the princess.