I heard Denis tell me simply, Oh, like the wind was being knocked out of him, and then the officer with the mustache tell me something found and something gon-e. It was Kimberly, of all people, who extended a hand in my direction, though I did not go toward it. The dogs yipped loudly at my ankles, one of them scratching at my pant leg. Everyone’s mouths kept moving, my mother emitting moans, my father maybe saying my name, Kimberly cooing something, the other officer talking a quick, slurring stream of clothing remains northeast jail search. I thought of breadsticks and tablecloths. I thought of salad forks.
The words from my living room, they were a cacophony of discordant sound, washing over me rather than penetrating, the meaning elusive, a puzzle that would be pieced slowly together in the days to come. “What?” I remember saying, the sole word I spoke. “What? What?” My breath was so sweet from the grenadine. I could taste it on my lips.
People answered me—I saw my father’s mouth moving, maybe Denis’s too—but it was just more noise. Had a linguist stood beside me in the front hallway, I was convinced he’d have discovered a new language that night, a guttural, frayed derivative of English, a tongue just barely comprehensible, inflected as heavily as it was by paroxysms of bewilderment and grief.
Elvin Tate killed my brother.
Elvin Tate. Killed my brother.
Elvin. Tate. Killed. My. Brother.
If ever there was a sentence more quickly imprinted in my consciousness, more oft repeated, one that stood as more of an arbiter against which to judge all else (I do not understand inverse functions; Elvin Tate killed my brother. I am unloved; Elvin Tate killed my brother), I do not know it. In the beginning, the repetition was the numb sort, the words impenetrable. Only occasionally did they have the power to stop me midstep as I walked upstairs. Or seize my stomach as I ate. Or clear my head as I attempted to speak. And … and … and … I heard myself saying over and over again, knowing no cogent thought waited at the end of my stammer. And was just a delay tactic, and not a very sophisticated one at that, a noise to make until I figured out a way to remove myself from whatever conversation I’d found myself trapped in.
Mostly, though, the sentence served as staticky background noise, ever-present, fading in and out of meaning, the stubborn line of a forgotten poem. As the mob of mourners descended and our phone shrieked with continual noise and flowers piled on our doorstep, I shaped my mouth silently around the seven syllables, fixated on the sound of them: the oddly aristocratic tinge to Elvin Tate, the aspirated start of killed, the light, feathery sound at the end of my brother.
People tried to talk to me. My mom’s sister, Aunt Pat, asked how I was holding up and I was distracted by her yellow teeth; they looked almost fluorescent. It’d been years since I’d seen Aunt Pat. The teeth seemed like something I’d remember.
I told her, “Like an ill-fitting sweater.” She got tiny creases between her eyes. I smiled to try to make her feel better. Her creases deepened.
When Denis called to check on us, I didn’t know what to tell him. He called me his usual kiddo, which made me want to scream, though the impulse came from some remote place, like a director sitting far offstage whispering, Lydia, think now about screaming. The conversation turned to mad cow. I’d been reading about it, I told him. It seemed like people were being hysterical. There was a pause. He asked if I’d considered any kind of medication. “For mad cow?” I asked, giggling, that sound too coming from the same remote place. The director was giggling.
For shock, he told me.
I didn’t feel like I was in shock. I felt like I hadn’t slept in eight months. I felt like my brother was dead. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to feel like, though I was pretty well convinced that the muddle of exhaustion, incredulity, and confusion was a fair approximation. Days swam by. How, I wondered, did people manage to differentiate a Tuesday from a Wednesday? News arrived jigsaw puzzle-like, strange bits next to incongruent pieces. I had an insatiable need to know details, though details were scarce. The police told us some, Denis more. We read about ourselves in the news paper.
This much we knew: Elvin Tate had been in jail awaiting trial for bashing in his girlfriend’s skull with the face of an iron, leaving her alive but brain-damaged. During his pretrial period, he unsuccessfully attempted to implicate his cellmate in Danny’s death. He’d been trying to gain leverage with the DA, but within days his story fell apart. His cellmate had an alibi, and Elvin knew far too many details not released to the press—the birthmark on Danny’s lower back, the card he carried as a joke in his wallet with a hammer and sickle, his membership in the Communist Party.
Eventually Elvin confessed to picking up Danny blocks from the basketball courts on the night of August 2nd. He’d been driving a 1990 Dodge Dynasty. They’d taken a meandering route up north and east for three and a half days. On the fourth day he strangled my brother and buried the body in the woods beyond a cherry farm just below the Upper Peninsula. Again: He strangled my brother. And buried him in the woods. Behind a cherry farm.
I thought a lot about the cherry farmers. Who in the world became northern Michigan cherry farmers? I pictured them as an old, grizzled couple, skin permanently rough and dried out from the harsh winters. I imagined them tight-lipped, hardy, and not prone to displays of emotion. Certainly they’d endured dry seasons and poor crops. They had to be intimately familiar with heartache, acclimated to the vagaries of nature and fate. But I wondered what this did to them, the unearthing of this boy from their ground. I wondered if the familiar creaks of their old house now felt ominous and forbidding. Or the spring wind a wolf huffing and puffing. I wondered if they spoke quietly to each other about their terrible luck, each privately cataloguing past transgressions that would account for such a thing happening to them. I wondered if they found themselves achy and tender at the end of the day, rolling toward each other before sleep for the first time in years, trying to quell their growing sense of smallness, a sense they hadn’t had since they were very young, since before they ever met, when their current life was some far-off dream, or maybe not even a far-off dream yet.
Elvin’s mug shot was flashed continually on the local news—that and an old, oft-repeated grainy photo of him standing on a browning front lawn in a sleeveless T-shirt and cut-off shorts. He was slight, with a narrow chest and knobby elbows, the cowering posture of someone who’d been punched one too many times in the gut. How could someone like that, I wanted to know, have overpowered an eighteen-year-old defensive end? How had he managed to lure Danny into his car? Why would Danny ever agree to go with him anywhere? Why had no one seen them? And what exactly had happened for those three and a half days?
The police revealed additional details only sparsely. When a paunchy officer came to the door one day—this one familiar, though the names never stuck; he the one who looped his thumbs through his belt loops in an Old West sheriff stance—he wore the grim, familiar expression of bad news. As we all gathered in the kitchen, waiting, he said to my parents, “Your daughter?” He wouldn’t even look at me. Quickly my mother nodded. “Lydia,” she said, “why don’t you wait in the other room?”
I filled with a heady sort of rage that pressed against the insides of my eardrums and made my cheekbones quiver. Now would not be the time for them to turn protective. I was not leaving this room. My father must have sensed something, because he simply put a hand to my arm and squeezed my elbow lightly. The officer looked between my father and me, and it seemed that he’d continue to object. But then he began speaking with exquisite tenderness, his apparent attempt to diffuse the potency of the words, though it achieved just the opposite effect. There was something particularly horrific about this man kindly whispering to us the stuff of nightmares.
The body—how instantaneously it had gone from Danny to the body—was decomposed after all these months, he told us. However, there were detectable signs of postmortem sexual abuse. Eight of the fingers were broken, telltale signs of defensive wounds. The face—not hi
s face, the body’s face—had been beaten; that, combined with corpse degradation, meant he’d had to be identified through dental records. My father was swaying; he reached for the back of a kitchen chair. My mother slumped against the wall. The details, rather than bringing the situation into clearer relief, just made it so outrageous, so exaggerated and disproportionate, the whole thing slipped easily into the realm of joke or tall tale.
“Do you know the farmers?” I asked.
Everyone looked at me. The officer said, “What farmers?”
“The cherry farmers,” I said. “Where they found him. I was thinking of writing them a letter.” My voice had a weird sound to it, a queer lightness. I sounded like a quiz-show contestant.
The police officer looked at my parents. My dad pressed a hand to my elbow again, this time squeezing harder. My mom was biting determinedly at her lips, searching my face. No one answered. The police officer talked more to us, about medical examiner and autopsy and skull fractures.
It turned out Tanda had been a liar or a drunk. Or both. There was no Roy. Elvin looked nothing like the composite—he had buck-teeth and eyes that bulged from their sockets. His chin jutted forward like a hook. And the route he’d taken had passed nowhere even close to River Rouge. His Dodge Dynasty, though, had been brown, the front panel indeed rusted above both wheel wells. This one piece of information brought me outsized solace. Something, at least, had borne out from the investigation, though when I tore back through my notes, I’d not listed the Dynasty among the cars for Den is to look into. The omission gutted me; I felt like I had to lie down. As soon as I did, though, I had to get right back up. It was hard to be stationary. Lying in my bed now as I had for all those months—it seemed sometimes like the only thing I’d done was lie prone on my mattress from the day he left to the day we found out-brought a vertiginous sort of nausea, a dizzying stomachache.
I took small comfort in the fact that Melissa Anne had been wrong too. Yes, he’d been buried, but not inches below the surface as she’d prophesied. The grave had not been shallow. There’d been, it turned out, nearly four feet of dirt to dig through before Danny’s remains had been unearthed. He was almost at the clayey subsoil.
The funeral had to be moved from B’nai Israel to a Masonic hall due to anticipated attendance. More than nine hundred showed up, according to the TV news, which flashed pictures of the overflow crowd swelling into the street, all listening through auxiliary speakers set up just for this occasion. At the time I didn’t once turn around from the front row, feeling like the pulsing, hungry throngs could pull me apart limb by limb. I just stared at the plain pine box, wondering what was inside. Only my father had seen the remains. I had asked him what he’d seen when he came back from the medical examiner’s, I’d asked him what it looked like, I wanted to know, but he made only a noise, something like Gar.
The rabbi spoke senseless, droning Hebrew, which filled me with fury. I wanted, at least, to understand what he was saying. I watched him up on the stage, the shawl wrapped around his shoulders, the beanie perched high on his head, and sang the sentence to myself—Elvin Tate killed my brother—the words having morphed into the most ghoulish of nursery rhymes, like singsong tales of Humpty Dumpty’s broken body or Old Mother Hubbard’s starving children.
An infestation of people arrived for shiva, the aunts pinning torn pieces of black fabric to our shirts, relatives I barely knew asking strange questions about school and if I was still playing the clarinet. I hadn’t played clarinet since fifth grade. People touched my face, cupping my chin in their palm or brushing the backs of fingers to my cheek. They served me plate after plate of gummy food like egg salad and noodle kugel.
Outside, TV vans parked up and down the street and camera crews tromped across our lawn, forcing us to close all the blinds, lending a siegelike feel to the whole venture. My father had taped a handwritten note to the front door, an inelegant Sharpie missive about leaving us to our family and friends, thank you very much. I watched through the slats of the blinds as cameramen came up our steps and filmed closeups of the note. Kirk Donovan and the lady from Channel 4 staked out competing territory on the sidewalk, both fiddling with their microphones and their hair. The lady from Channel 4 looked smaller and more deflated in person, as if the hand had been removed from her sock puppet. Min Mathers stopped and cried for her on the way in, the camera brightening her face.
Inside, each side of the family quickly self-segregated, the loud, dark Pasternaks taking over the living room, eating constantly and telling unembarrassed stories of rheumatoid arthritis and hemor-rhoidal sitz baths. The Davidsons scattered themselves throughout the kitchen and den, balancing plates awkwardly on their knees and looking bewildered, as if waiting for someone to please tell them what to do. My mother sat at the kitchen table or in the corner of the couch, a cloud of well-meaning cousins trailing her, bringing her plates of food, kneading her thigh, holding her hand and cooing words I did not get close enough to hear. My father, having sat for all those months and months, now paced, stopping to speak with people if they spoke to him first. Harry, his family called him. I wasn’t used to people calling him Harry. My mother called him Harris or nothing at all. Harry reminded me of the dog in one of my long-ago children’s books.
Lola Pepper’s mom brought an elaborate cold cut tray, carrots and radishes carved into roses, rolls of meat speared with ribboned toothpicks, sawtoothed slices of pickles decorating the edges. She told me it was kosher and I thanked her without informing her we’d never kept kosher. Lola gurgled and wailed in a way that made me want to punch her in the face.
David Nelson showed up in the same tie I’d seen him wear for the National Junior Honor Society dinner, green with gold polka dots. I wondered if it was his only tie. It looked like it was choking him. He said things like what a good funeral it’d been and how Danny had been a good guy. He kept repeating good. I told him you don’t have to wear a tie to shiva. It wasn’t, I told him, a job interview.
Tip Reynolds shared the couch with an uncle and assorted cousins. At one point Dawnelle Ryan went and sat next to him and I watched the way their thighs pressed together. One of my uncles stared obviously at Dawnelle’s huge boobs; they were packed tightly into her fuzzy black sweater. For a while she rested a hand on Tip’s forearm, twiddling very softly his thick arm hair. I saw him touch the back of her neck. I tried not to keep looking. I told myself, Dead brother dead brother dead brother.
But I was a terrible mourner. I tried to make myself cry, going into the half bath and pinching the tender skin on the inside of my arm until a clot of tears built up in my throat, but performance anxiety always stifled me, even behind a closed door, perched alone and fully dressed on the edge of the toilet seat. One night, when the rabbi asked me to help set up rows of folding chairs in the living room for his interminable nightly service, I burst into sudden laughter. I recognized the look he gave me then, the prurient curiosity, part gaping, part pitying. It was the same way I looked at the special ed kids as they were wheeled through the halls with their palsied limbs and protective helmets. I was a remedial griever.
When shiva finally ended and the house cleared of relatives and neighbors and classmates, the three of us got really sick—vomiting, swollen glands, cheekbones sensitive to the touch. It was not a fleeting illness; it was entrenched and lingering. The moment it seemed one of us might be getting better, the symptoms morphed into something new. For three days my throat burned so hotly I couldn’t swallow and had to carry a spit cup for my yellow-green phlegm. My father got long rows of blisters in his armpits. My mother’s tongue grew white and almost furry. We were deeply, undeniably miserable, though being sick was almost a relief for me, the way it finally made me properly wet-faced, broken down, funereal.
We spent the following days listless on the couch, wrapped in blankets, full of sweaty chills even though the cold outside had finally broken and the spring thaw had set in in earnest. Melted snow collected in wide puddles across our patchy lawn,
turning quickly to mud from the footprints of the most stubborn of camera crews and lingering reporters. We ignored the knocks on our door, the phone calls from newspapers or television stations or members of the state senate who talked about crime bill sponsorship. We ignored Denis, who wondered how we were holding up. We ignored the strangers, some who talked about heaven, others about vengeance, a few whose cries into the answering machine sounded like loud, angry squirrels.
Mostly we just sat, wordless, foodless, in and out of a dissatisfying half-sleep. It was easy to get confused about day versus night, about other stuff too. After a particularly violent burst of nausea or in the midst of a headache that made me see purplish red starbursts inside my eyelids, I found myself wondering:
Elvin Tate killed my brother?
Elvin Tate?
My brother?
I might lie curled in the dark, my feet pressed gingerly against my mother’s leg as she huddled at the other end of the couch, my mind hiccuping, then sputtering until I eventually came to think of the recent turn of events as nonsensical and unreal. Of course Elvin Tate had not killed my brother. Don’t be silly. I grew convinced that all we were doing here was waiting, still waiting. I could feel it on a cellular level, the wide-open freefall of possibility still before us. I tried, in those moments, to tell my parents something reassuring, mumbling about Denis or Roy or Melissa Anne, my father maybe mumbling back at me, my mother pressing her leg weakly into my foot.
But there were too many concrete items, too much morbid memorabilia now littering our house. Whenever I was well enough to venture from the living room, I found things like the Ziploc bag that sat in the freezer, of all places, containing his few belongings returned by the police, covered with flaky, graying mud and crystallized now with frost—his slim nylon wallet, the braided string cut from his wrist, the four poker chips plucked from his pocket: three blue, one red.
The Local News Page 23