The Local News

by Miriam Gershow

  In the vestibule sat a stack of unread newspapers, many with Elvin Tate’s bug-eyed face peering from above the fold.

  Atop the file cabinet was the lone crime scene photo. I would spend coming weeks digging through drawers, searching for others—surely there were more—to no avail. This seemed the only one in our possession: a forest floor covered in a crusty layer of snow, shoeprint trails, yellow tape strung around four tree trunks in a flimsy, diamond-shaped barricade, a deep hole in the center, tall piles of dirt lining the lip, the hole itself an empty mouth, nothing but black, either before they got to him or after he was already gone. I wondered how he had been placed down there, whether Elvin Tate had rested him gently at the bottom in a fetal position or pushed him unceremoniously over the side, limbs sprawled, his face jam med into the dirt. I thought of the dissected pig from eighth-grade bio class, the tiny snapping sounds of its legs as they were pulled unforgivingly back from its body, the bones not even sounding like bones, sounding like something else entirely. Tinker Toys. Pick-up sticks. My mouth tasted of bile as I studied the picture. My mouth had tasted of bile for days. Maybe weeks. I thought, Gar.

  This circuit of the house usually ended at the kitchen table and the stack of extra funeral programs, the photo on the cover a rare unfamiliar one, its potency not yet drained from overuse on posters or in newspaper articles. In it, Danny was sitting on the hood of someone’s car, his feet on the front bumper, his elbow on his knee, chin resting in an upturned hand, a bastardized Thinker, though the picture did not look staged. His hair fluttered in the wind and he was looking off to the side. The uncharacteristic softness of his features—his mouth open just a bit, a slight tinge of a smile, his eyes looking almost wistful and without a hint of his usual swagger-made it seem like he’d had no idea the picture was being taken.

  It was a really good picture. He looked gentle and almost girlish in his beauty. I sat for long daytime hours in a kitchen chair staring at it, as the soles of my feet and the small of my back ached. I tried to think of times he’d looked like this in real life, so placidly thoughtful. It was there that I would eventually cry, from the exhaustion of a body rigid with constant, thrumming pain and from the guilt that lay beneath my sick. How little I had missed him, and how wrongly (the first dread inklings already beginning to stir) I had envisioned the place we now inhabited. I’d thought we’d be fine here—swift and gutting pain, yes, but with a wound, at least, to seal—in the dark, fleeting, and many moments I had dared to hope for this.

  It was nearly a month before I returned to school, to the last six weeks of my sophomore year and the classes I’d lost track of and the mountain of assignments I’d missed and the shrieking noise of classmates who came at me collectively and without apology under the auspices of sympathy, though sympathy seemed far too soft a word, like heather or tissue. People grabbed me by the arm or followed me into the girls’ room to ask, “Are you okay? Really? Are you?” through the closed stall door. They tried to ingratiate themselves with me through the use of urgent irrelevancies: “I used to sit next to him in chem.” “I almost rear-ended him one time on Coolidge.” It all felt violent as an avalanche, the force with which the whole student body, it seemed, exerted its attentions upon me.

  Mrs. Bardazian announced loudly “You’ve been missed” as I found my seat, and a strange smattering of applause followed. David Nelson was one of the applauders, which felt like betrayal. Mrs. Bardazian stood at her desk and read Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud”: “And soonest our best men with thee doe goe/Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.” Kids turned in their seats to look at my face, which I tried to hold as still as possible, though I could feel a faint flutter at the corner of my right eye, the start of a tremble in my clenched jaw.

  My locker was wrapped in much the same way football players’ lockers were wrapped on game days, the front covered with butcher paper, the perimeter decorated with construction paper daisies, giving it a disturbingly festive feel. Classmates had written crowded notes, drawn frowny faces with cartoon tears, and scribbled countless Sorrys. I wondered at the etiquette of this, the number of days that had to pass before I was allowed to tear it down.

  Danny’s shrine too had been reborn. It was more sprawling this time, a longer stretch of wall filled with notes, team photos, a football jersey, swim goggles, newspaper coverage of the funeral. Old bouquets sat piled against the wall, their green cellophane wrappers still intact though the flowers had shriveled. Had they been dying in this hallway for close to a month now?

  After a few days back in Fontana’s trig class, David passed me a note about not knowing how to talk to me anymore and being sad about that and being sorry for everything that had happened to me. It was in more careful handwriting than normal, and I wondered how long he’d spent on it. It went on for several paragraphs, and I couldn’t bring myself to finish. I felt him watching me from across the room, so I sat with the piece of paper open in front of me for a long time, affecting a posture of concentration and then avoiding him when the bell rang.

  In the middle of my first week back, Tip offered to smuggle me off-campus for lunch. “Who’s going to stop you?” he said at my locker after second period. He’d come up behind me and wrapped both his arms around my neck. He wore a black armband around his biceps. All the jocks had started wearing them. He was talking to me while draped like that, his mouth right up to my ear. Since I’d been back, he had taken to touching me a lot: resting a hand on my shoulder, even once tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. Shivers moved through me when he did things like that, and I contemplated, semiseriously, letting my legs turn to jelly and falling entirely into him as he held me from behind. It seemed he would catch me.

  “Let’s,” he said into my ear, “meet up in the parking lot and take off.” I told him yes. I wondered what the inside of his truck would be like. I wondered what we would talk about for an hour.

  But when I got to the parking lot, it turned out to be him and Dawnelle Ryan waiting. They were holding hands. It was a relaxed hold, their fingers twiddling loosely together as if they’d been doing things like holding hands for such a long time now, they barely had to think about it. My feet felt like bricks as I walked toward them, my arms pendulous at my sides. They both had funny smiles, the awww, how cute sort.

  “You can sit in the middle, puss,” Dawnelle said to me as we got into the truck. I remembered her habit of using improbable pet names from when she’d dated my brother. Punky, she’d called him, and Giggles. She made no effort to brace herself in the truck cab and let her body loll heavily against mine as we rounded corners. She took one of my hands in both of hers and kneaded my fingers. “How terrible terrible must be,” she said nonsensically but with feeling. She smelled rosy with perfume, and as we idled at each red light, I thought of all the steps required for escape: leaping over her lap and jimmying open the passenger door and flinging myself out onto the street.

  At the Arby’s, they sat across from me in the booth. They shared french fries. Tip talked of wanting to kill that cocksucking faggot monster Elvin Tate. Dawnelle patted his arm. She called him Bear. I watched her hand as it moved up and down his arm, her long fingers, the clear polish on her nails. A ringing began in my ears, a common precursor to the headaches that still lingered. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. When I looked in the mirror, I was surprised by how pale my skin had become. Blue veins were visible along my cheeks and the sides of my nose, and the circles beneath my eyes were dark enough to look like bruises. My hands shook with a slight tremor and I gripped the lip of the sink to try to still it. A girl came out from one of the stalls. She was from Franklin too—this Arby’s was sick with Franklin kids at lunchtime—and she gaped at me in the mirror as she washed her hands, staring so hard she missed the soap as it came out the dispenser. It landed in a pearly pink blob on the floor.

  “Your soap fell,” I told her in a way that I hoped sounded in sulting.

  I sat in a stall until Dawnelle came looking and t
hen told her a half lie about food and my stomach. On the ride back I let them sit next to each other and pressed my head to the cool of the passenger window, telling them okay, okay, okay each time they asked how I was.

  And then at the end of that first week, we had Friday afternoon assembly. I’d never liked assembly for the buzzing, hivelike way the various groups arranged themselves in the bleachers—the jocks in the back rows, the gum-cracking student council girls filling a wide swath in the middle, the Goths and burnouts huddled in the corners, the smart kids sprinkled where we could find seats. Assemblies always seemed like powder kegs, just one tense misstep away from some sort of violence, the way everyone was forced into unnaturally close proximity.

  This one, though, without the normal loud excitement, was even worse. There was a collective hush as class after class filed in quietly and found their seats. Lola sat with her arm draped heavily around my shoulder, upset that we were not in the first row (I’d pressed us back to the fifth). She was already proactively sniffling, with a ready supply of tissues wadded in her fist. Everyone looked at me as they settled in. Some stared openmouthed and without expression, as if I couldn’t see them. Others offered smiles or earnest frowns, to which I imagined the caption Boo-hoo-hoo. More than once during the week Lola had reported that the student council and the administration had unanimously agreed to delay this until my return.

  Soon after everyone arrived, the lights went down. Music swelled from the speakers, a pop song about I believe that love will find a way, and a slide show began. Memorial, the first slide said, for Danny Pasternak. Then there he was, grinning from a cafeteria table, carrying Cindy Kahlen piggyback around the baseball diamond, wearing a hula skirt and lei with his cheeks rouged red at some dance. Next his team picture, down on one knee, smiling in his uniform, the same one we used on the old Missing posters. Someone shouted, “Pasternak!” You could hear the crying. It went on like this for a long time.

  When the lights came up, girls’ faces were wet and pink, some guys’ too. Principal Garver was at the microphone making pronouncements about strength and perseverance and the legacy of life left behind by Danny. It was full of all the fiery emptiness of a campaign stump speech. Then came Mrs. Douglas, the grief counselor for hire, who’d set up temporary shop in the guidance offices. She talked of the rarity of a student like Danny who comes along every so often and unites the school. Do you mean now or when he was alive? I wondered.

  The crowd vibrated around me. I could feel it. There was a smell in the air, a feral, sweaty funk, a mix of deodorant, BO, and hot breath, but something else too. If there was a pheromone excreted for barely suppressed hysteria, this was it, this cloud of spicy, bitter tang. Years later, when I watched horrific news from halfway around the world of gunmen trapping hundreds of hostages in an elementary school gym, I remembered that smell, tasting it in the back of my throat, acrid as crushed aspirin or swallowed perfume.

  I grew sweaty and easily claustrophobic in the bleachers. The wooden bench was unforgiving beneath me, and all of the nearby bodies—not just Lola leaning all of her weight into me—swelled into a crush. The person behind me sniffled loudly from what sounded like just behind my left ear; the guy in the row ahead leaned so far back his shoulder blades nearly rested on my knees. I could not get my breathing to normalize—the steady in, out, in, out had quickened to a pant, which Lola apparently mistook for crying from the way she pressed her head against mine and ran her hand up and down my back in hot circles. Her own crying was a gurgle in my ear, and I felt more clearly than ever (and I had always felt it, but on a low, murmuring level) the imminent end to our friendship.

  Coach Kinsborough was up next, wearing his incongruous baseball cap and suit. Danny, he said, was a champion, a brave soldier, a warrior. The crowd murmured assent. I made a noise like a cough, a strange, gurgling yelp. The boy in front of me turned to look, and I wished I were Medusa.

  This grandiose treatment, the stuff of only the most ambitious and hopeful of suicide ideations, only elevated the situation to the realm of surreal. My brother had already been snatched off the street one night well before dark, killed, raped, beaten, and buried in a deep, wormy hole. The situation wasn’t in need of any more surrealism.

  I searched the crowd for disaffected faces. Two Goth girls with blue mohawks a row in front of me who rolled their eyes at each other. A boy several rows back who was reading a book in his lap. And Bayard, of all people, down the row from us, past Rochelle and a half-dozen other flag girls, an ear cocked toward the counselor, his expression one of complete bafflement. I wondered how much was the language barrier and how much general incredulity. Either way, I found such bewilderment a relief.

  Next came Min Mathers and Mike Chemanski, representatives of the student council and the football team. Min wore a short black shirt and a bodice-hugging gray tank top. Her hair was pulled sternly into a bun, though her makeup was bright. She looked like what a mourner would look like in a music video. Mike Chemanski said he imagined that Pasternak fought like an Apache until the end. He pumped his fist into the air, his armband tight around his muscles. A pressure pulsed at my temples and the bridge of my nose, bringing with it the ripples of warm heat that often signaled a bout of nausea. I rubbed the palms of my hands into my eyes until gray snowflakes appeared behind my lids.

  The final speaker was the head of the PTA. She talked of the memorial they’d already raised $3000 for (people hooted), which would be displayed either in front of the school or along the sidelines of the football field (more hooting). She held up a plaque. “A small token,” she announced, “for the Pasternak family to hang on to until the project is completed.” When she called my name, I did not move. It was not until Lola shook my arm that it occurred to me that this was indeed happening and inescapably so.

  People clapped as I maneuvered between the four rows of bodies. Someone shouted my name. My shoes squeaked against the gym floor. The PTA woman grinned, holding the plaque in one hand, her other arm outstretched. It became clear only after it was too late to do anything about it that she intended to hug me. As she did, the applause from the bleachers seemed to rise into a roar.

  She smelled strongly of hairspray and talc. I was caught in her grip, my arms pinned at my sides. The heat of the gym and the noise of the crowd swirled around us. I swallowed hard, trying to keep my bearings, but my face broke out in a sweat and I felt myself stumbling. I attempted to say Let go, though it came out funny and she seemed to grip only more tightly. My vision went spotty. The last thing I remembered was the roar from the bleachers turning to a messy, broken noise, no less loud but disordered now—many voices speaking all at once.

  Only later, in the nurse’s room, as a cool washcloth lay across my forehead and a pale-faced nurse whispered to my unkempt mother about loss of consciousness and stress and Keep an eye on her, did I begin to imagine the way my body must have buckled, falling into the PTA lady as if I were a Shakespearean lover. And I thought too of how the whole spectacle must have delighted the crowd—such a pitch-perfect closing act to assembly, such fuel for their insatiable, morbid glee.

  Denis made a final visit to us, returning pictures he still had, handing us the fat stacks of notes he’d compiled over the months. “People sometimes find these useful,” he told my parents, “just for further information. And to see work product.”

  “Thank you,” my father said, with unusual softness. We were all standing in the front hall. No one made any move to invite Denis farther inside. “Thanks for your efforts.”

  “We included a final report,” Denis said, tapping a manila folder on the top of the notes. His eyes were red, his cheeks especially ruddy. The stubble trailed farther down his neck than usual. “We managed a couple of visits to Elvin Tate this month, got some information from him that you might find useful … for closure.” He shrugged as he said this, as if he were apologizing. “It’s gratis,” he added. “The report. Not part of the fee. Just something we wanted to do.”

&nb
sp; My father nodded. My mother did nothing to signal she was listening. There was something crusted—dry skin? food?—at the corner of her mouth.

  “Kimberly and I,” Denis said, and with such ease and intimacy, it struck me for the millionth time that they were probably doing it, though I found I did not really care, “are really, really sorry. We wish we could’ve done more. You never want to see an end like this.”

  “Nothing more you could’ve done,” my father said. He sounded mainly tired. I wished for some of his old vitriol, for one final riot act read to Denis.

  Denis turned to me. “You’re a remarkable girl. So smart. Interested in everything. I haven’t met a lot of kids like you. Okay?”

  “Um,” I said. While there was a small flutter of surprise from the direct address, when I tried to elicit any of my old feeling for him, there was nothing but a low pulsing in the tips of my fingers. I felt like baring my teeth and growling, like saying something wildly inappropriate. I understood why girls made up terrible stories that brought police to innocent men’s homes.

  But I just stood there. Denis seemed like an artifact now, an evocation of a lost, naive era. He looked like a grungy old guy. In the days after the news of Elvin Tate, I had waited almost breathlessly for apology, vindication, turnabout. But nothing came, and soon, as everything else unfurled around us with head-spinning grisliness, something inside closed up and sealed over, that part of me full of girlish hope. “Okay,” I said now, and then, “Good luck.”

  It seemed remarkable how quickly and easily the goodbyes came. First Denis to my parents, then my parents to him. Then him to me. Me to him. Devoid of sentiment. Or tragedy. Or particular meaning. They were just words. I was becoming, it seemed, expert at them. Sayonara, as David Nelson used to say.