Pleasantville

by Attica Locke

  CHAPTER 6

  The polished halls of Lamar High School are empty when Jay arrives, somewhere in the middle of third period. He’s spent surprisingly little time inside the school. In two years, Ellie hasn’t yet found her way into any clubs, sports teams, or school plays, spending most of her time with Lori King. Besides a couple of parent-teacher conferences, he’s mostly viewed his daughter’s high school years from a distance. Bernie worked a few fund-raising events early last year, even chaperoning the freshman fall dance, which Ellie didn’t attend. Jay was always working. He’s never met the principal, Ms. Hilliard, and feels somewhat embarrassed by his surprise at seeing a woman nearly a decade younger than he is. Somewhere in his mind he must have been carrying an image of his own principal, Mr. Cleveland Simms, at the colored high school in Lufkin, a thirty-minute bus ride from his boyhood home in Nigton. Debra Hilliard is in her late thirties, soft-spoken and no taller than her students. From behind her desk, she smiles at Jay. Ellie is sitting in the chair to his right. She looked at him once when he walked in and gave a small shrug.

  He’s made himself a promise not to get upset until he hears her side of the story, whatever this is about. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that. He’s been in a hot seat before and believes his daughter deserves no less than what he got. This isn’t a courtroom, of course; Ellie is certainly not up against the kinds of serious charges he was in 1970, when he was, hard to believe, only four years older than she is now. Still, he feels a strict allegiance to his kid. He has very nearly tired of the pity thrown on his family, every tough conversation couched in professed understanding of the Porters’ difficult situation, the pain they must be in, all of it just a run-up to whatever criticism they were going to lob anyway.

  Ms. Hilliard, as far as Jay is concerned, can skip the big speech.

  “What’d she do?”

  “I like Ellie,” she says.

  “I do too.”

  “She’s smart, incredibly conscientious with her peers, and dedicated, I would have said a week ago, to her schoolwork.” She shoots a glance at Ellie. “And I know it’s been a hell of a year for your family, excuse my language.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Okay, Mr. Porter,” she says drily. She’s a black woman with shoulder-length hair, dangly silver earrings peeking from behind the strands. She’s wearing a cotton button-down, rolled up at the sleeves, and blue slacks. She clasps her hands on the desktop. “I guess it’s more what she didn’t do.” She looks at Ellie again, giving her a chance to come clean. Ellie, her black Starter jacket across her lap, fiddles with the zipper.

  “I skipped class,” she says softly.

  “Classes. She’s skipped classes.”

  “Elena?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  She has her head down, but Jay thinks he sees tears, actual tears, in her eyes. The skin on the back of her neck is flushed, her cheeks plum with shame. “Once last week, and two times this week,” Ms. Hilliard says. “The girls left the campus without permission. I’m afraid I’m going to have to put her on suspension. I’ll be speaking with Lori King’s mother as well.”

  “You’re going to punish her for missing school by having her miss more school?” Jay says, squirming a little in his chair, angry, but not sure with which one of them. Debra Hilliard smiles tightly. She opens a top drawer, pulling out a blue pad of suspension slips. She scribbles a few words across the top, sliding the paper across the desk for Jay to sign. “I think the hope is that this gives the two of you a chance to talk. And you, as her parent, to find out what’s going on with Ellie.” Jay reaches across the desk and signs the principal’s order. “It should be two days,” she says, “but we’ll count today as a full one and leave it at that. She can come back on Tuesday.” She looks over at Ellie. “I’m rooting for you, Elena. It might not seem that way now, but I’m on your side.”

  Jay stands. “You too, Mr. Porter,” the principal says.

  “Let’s go, Ellie.”

  He grabs her backpack from the floor, nodding once to the principal before escorting his daughter into the hall and down the main stairs. Outside, in the parking lot, Jay, on an impulse, holds out the car keys for Ellie. She stares at them, her eyes still damp. “Really?” She looks at her dad, incredulous at first, then breaking into something resembling a smile. She’s had a learner’s permit since she turned fifteen in September, and they’d made a deal to get on the road together at least once a week, which is not that easy with just the three of them in the house; Jay is not comfortable having Ben in the backseat while his sister learns to drive. But it’s a few hours before Ben’s out of school, and they might as well take the opportunity at hand. “Why not?” he says, letting her know he still trusts her, hoping she shows him the same in kind. He walks around to the passenger door, climbing into the Land Cruiser, and waits for her to get behind the wheel.

  “You hungry?”

  Ellie is busy adjusting the side mirrors, and doesn’t answer. She’s focused on getting the car started, so nervous that Jay has to remind her to put her foot on the brake. When the engine finally turns over, he tells her to pull out of the parking lot and make a right on Westheimer. Neither of them has had any lunch, and he offers to buy her a late breakfast at the 59 Diner, pancakes and eggs.

  Ellie nods, her hands gripped at “ten and two” on the steering wheel.

  “You’re doing fine,” Jay says. He leans forward, checking the side-view mirror. A pickup truck pulls up close to them, almost kissing the Land Cruiser’s bumper. Ellie hardly notices, stopping short at a yellow light. Jay braces himself against the dash. “What’s going on, El?” he says. “Why’d you skip school?”

  “It was just a few times.”

  “That’s not really going to help you.”

  When the light changes to green, the car behind them honks twice.

  Ellie jerks the car forward, laying hard on the gas. “I don’t know what to say, Dad. It was wrong. I knew you’d think it was wrong. I messed up, and I’m sorry.” She tries to turn to say this directly to him. But he tells her to keep her eyes on the road.

  “Why were you crying back there?”

  “It’s embarrassing,” she says. “All that talk about being on my side.” She rolls her eyes, and for whatever reason, this makes Jay smile. “So where’d you go?” he says, pointing for her to make a right turn on Shepherd. “You guys taking off from school. Hope it was something good,” he says. “This was Lori’s idea?” He looks at his daughter behind the wheel. She’s biting her lip, silent.

  “Okay,” he says, leaving it for now. “You’re out for the rest of the day, and you’re grounded until next weekend. We can talk about the rest when you’re ready.” He squirms in the passenger seat, unused to the view from this side of the car. He’s screwing this up, he’s sure of it, sending the wrong message, that he’s weak and uncertain. But he just can’t work up the outrage right now.

  “She asked me to go with her,” Ellie says finally.

  Jay turns to his daughter, surprised to hear her speak. “Lori?”

  Ellie nods.

  “Go where?”

  “To the clinic, the place on Main, by the Astrodome,” she says, speaking of the old football stadium, which has sat empty since the Oilers left for Nashville. The neighborhood has dulled since then, which isn’t saying much. The Astrodome had been the crown jewel of an area of town otherwise filled with pawnshops and taquerías and one aging, midrange hotel. Jay can’t understand why Lori would go all the way the hell out there to see a doctor.

  “She’s sick?”

  “Dad,” she says, exasperated by his dimness. “She’s pregnant.”

  “Lori?” She might as well have told him the girl had joined the circus.

  Lori is only fifteen. Fifteen. Just a few months older than Ellie. He turns to look at his daughter, seeing a body closer to its first bike ride than motherhood. He doesn’t even know if she’s kissed a boy. He feels a sudden panic at the thought
of her behind the wheel, a child steering two steel tons.

  “But you can’t tell her mom.”

  “Elena, I can’t promise something like that.”

  “You can’t, Dad,” she says, taking her eyes off the road, swerving a little into the next lane. He reaches for the wheel. “I swore I wouldn’t tell. I wouldn’t have told you at all except I promised Mom.” Her voice catches on the last word.

  “What?”

  “I promised Mom I would never lie to you,” she says. “She said it wouldn’t be fair, that you were going to have a hard enough time as it is, but it’s not fair to me either.” This, Jay soon discovers, is where the tears are coming from. Ellie wipes at them with the back of her hand. They’re still a few blocks from the diner, but Jay tells her to pull over. She yanks the wheel and turns the car into the parking lot of a Kwik Kopy. Jay pulls up the hand brake. He reaches for his daughter, who is shaking now. She collapses in an awkward heap across the armrest. Jay holds her up. He can feel the dampness of her tears on his neck.

  “I got you,” he says. I got you.

  For one furious moment, he actually hates his wife for putting this on Ellie, hates her, in fact, for every day that’s passed since she went out like a light one warm November afternoon, not even a word to him when he left the room for five minutes, just long enough to show Ben, again, how to switch the TV signal to VCR. Those last few days at home, Jay had sent Eddie Mae to Blockbuster with a hundred dollars, told her to bring back anything PG and under, just lots of it, something a nine-year-old boy could watch while his mother died in the next room, all those long hours in the house while they waited, times neither Ben nor Bernie could stand another good-bye. “No more,” she told Jay. Ben watched movies, and Evelyn, god bless her, kept the food coming. That last morning, Bernie asked for a cheese sandwich, of all things, and a cup of tea, and then she slept for hours. It must have been close to five when Jay stepped out of their bedroom. The sun was setting, he remembers. The nurse, the only one in the room, said Bernie spoke only once. “It’s okay,” she said, just before she went.

  They have a quiet dinner at home, the three of them, spaghetti for Ben, chicken and dirty rice for Jay and Ellie. Ben, who likes to sit at the table with his legs crossed under him in the chair, talks football, making guesses about the playoffs, still two months away; much to his father’s chagrin, Ben favors the Cowboys. But what can you do? Jay thinks. Nobody sticks around for nothing anymore, and a boy’s got to have a team to pull for. Ellie jumps the second the phone rings, two seconds after taking her last bite. “Can I, Dad?” she says.

  He nods, letting her go.

  It’s technically Ben’s night with the dishes, but Jay offers him a hand, and the two of them knock it out in no time, and then Jay pretends to watch Family Matters with his son. Really, he’s thinking of his daughter, and whatever is going on behind her closed bedroom door. He thinks of Mrs. King, likewise locked out of the details of her daughter’s life. If it were him, he’d want to know. It ought to be criminal, actually, for one parent to keep something like this from another.

  At about a quarter to nine, the doorbell rings.

  It’s Lonnie at the door, a surprise.

  She comes into the house carrying a cardboard box. “I caught up with that reporter, Bartolomo,” she says. “Wasn’t much there, either because he doesn’t have it or he still somehow thinks I’m playing for the other side. One paper, I reminded him. There are no more sides.” She holds out the box, which is strangely damp on the bottom. Jay takes it from her hands. She’s wearing a Mizzou sweatshirt and black jeans. She smells like nicotine and root beer, a bittersweet scent that suits her. “But I thought we might want to look at some of my old notes from the first two girls.” And then, as if it’s just now occurred to her that she hasn’t laid eyes on him in nearly a year, hasn’t been inside his house in as long, she goes in for an awkward pat on Jay’s back. “Where are the kids?”

  Jay nods toward the den, a wide room with exposed ceiling beams, just past the formal living room and the kitchen. He follows Lonnie, the sagging cardboard box pressed against his chest, setting it down beside the leather sectional, where Ben is lying, flat on his stomach. “Lonnie!” he says when he sees her. She opens her arms as he jumps toward them. There used to be a time–after the Cole story broke, Lonnie getting her byline on the front page of her old employer, the Houston Chronicle–when she spent a great deal of time with Jay’s family, coming over to dinner at least a couple of times a month. Ben grew up around her, in fact. She left the Chronicle in ’92, met a girl she liked and bought a little house in the Heights, and waited for her star to rise at the Post, careful to keep her private life private this time, convinced it had caused her problems at the Chronicle. And then from out of nowhere the shit all fell apart. First the Post went, then the girl, then the house. The losses hit Lonnie hard, and depression made her scarce. And then Bernie got sick, and they kind of lost the thread of their unlikely friendship. Jay and the kids, they haven’t seen her in months. She gives the little one a hug, asks him how his gin rummy game is going. She taught him to play when he was six. Jay offers her a beer, leftovers from the fridge. She shakes her head, peeling off her sweatshirt and reaching into her back pocket for a pack of Parliaments. “Not in the house,” he says. She nods, remembering, and slides the sweatshirt right back on. “Let’s take this party outside then,” she says. She hefts the cardboard box against her hip, heading for the patio. Jay opens the sliding glass door for her. “Where’s El?” she says, as they settle on opposite sides of a wrought-iron table, the weight of the cardboard box listing it to one side. The house is a one-story ranch, more wide than deep. The rest of the lot is all yard, a cool, green expanse stretching a quarter of an acre to a wooden fence.

  “ ’Preciate you doing this,” he says, nodding toward the box.

  “Please,” she says. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been doing for the past two months?” She pulls the cigarettes from her pocket again, fishing out a book of matches too. “You ever heard of something called ‘online dating’?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she says, lighting a Parliament. “That’s part of my pitch. Old shits like you who read magazines to keep up with what the young folks are doing, even if just to shake your heads at their foolishness. AOL, that Internet company, they’ve got these chat rooms. And there’s something called Match.com. Apparently, it’s a thing, meeting people on your computer,” she says, shaking her head at the sheer absurdity of it. “You tell people what you like, what you’re into, and see if they’ll write you back. The same personals shit that paid half our salaries at the Post, only now you can lie about your height in the privacy of your own home.” She blows a line of smoke into the dark, and Jay smiles. He’s missed her, he realizes. “In the past six weeks, I’ve put on my best ‘straight girl’ jeans, and been on a dozen of these blind dates, each guy a bigger asshole than the last. Actually, the assholes I prefer. It’s the ones that look like they’re going to take my purse when I go to the bathroom that scare the shit out of me. The last one ate his fingernails at the table. He actually called me ‘Ma’ twice.” The amber-colored deck lights are on a timer, and they went out a few moments ago. Jay waves a hand, and they snap back on. He wishes he’d grabbed a beer for himself. “Anyway, I’m thinking of writing a feature about it, hoping it’s something a major monthly might be interested in.”

  “How’s your money?”

  “It ain’t great.”

  “You need a little something, I can–”

  She waves him off at first. But then, thinking it over, she says, “Yeah, maybe.” She sucks the Parliament to the filter. “It might come to that.”

  She stubs out the cigarette with the heel of her leather boot.

  “Where’s El?” she asks again.

  “On the phone,” he sighs. “She’s always on the phone.”

  “Fifteen,” Lonnie says. “I remember.”

  She lifts the flap of the box
, revealing a mound of loose paper. “This is it, by the way. Everything I walked out with last year. I pulled some of my notes on Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells this afternoon. No news on the search, huh?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  From the box, Lonnie pulls out a crinkled batch of notebook paper. “I’m thinking about going out there tomorrow, see what’s what.” Jay can see his inquiry this morning has stirred something in her, stoking a reporter’s curiosity.

  “What did Bartolomo say?”

  “Well, the girl was definitely working on a campaign, the search is on for which one.”

  “Neal Hathorne was adamant. She wasn’t working for them.”

  Lon shrugs. “The information is sketchy, all of it coming from her boyfriend, this kid out in Beaumont. I personally don’t understand why they’re taking his word on every goddamned thing. But that’s all I got out of Bartolomo. I don’t know if that’s the Chronicle’s angle, or the cops’. But that’s the current line of pursuit. It’s a hot story, right in the middle of a runoff campaign. The boyfriend, they were in high school together, at Jones. He says the school had a candidate forum in the spring, for their government classes. Acton was the only one who came in person. The others sent reps from their campaigns. But there was definitely some amount of recruiting going on, you know, ‘Come work for us, see the process from the inside,’ that sort of thing. The boyfriend, he says Alicia really was into it, taking a couple of business cards.” She exhales slowly.

  Jay can hear the TV inside, a Coca-Cola commercial.

  “What about the other girls?”

  “That’s the thing that’s weird,” she says. “I mentioned the names Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells to Gregg Bartolomo, and I got nothing. Here he is reporting on a missing person case, in the same neighborhood where two other girls went missing, and he acts like he’s never heard their names before. Either he’s fucking with me, still playing keep-away, or he honestly is as shitty a reporter as I remember. It’s like it’s not even a thing for them. The Chronicle isn’t putting it all together, not on paper, at least.”