Absolute Brightness (11 page)

I couldn't believe my ears. Mom looked equally dumbfounded. Perhaps Leonard thought we were having trouble believing him, because at this point he extended his left leg, leaned over, and peeled down his tube sock. There was a slim blue canvas pack that weighed two and a half pounds secured to his ankle.

“Go on,” Mom said for the second time. “What happened with the boy?”

Since Leonard suspected that the boy's intention was to beat him up and leave him for dead, he felt that running not only would be futile but would also be a bit like showing red to a bull. So he decided instead to stand his ground, not because he was brave, but because he knew he was going to need all his strength and breath to fight back. He waited as the boy caught up. They stood there on the sidewalk and talked.

“What's up?”

“Nothing.”

“Where you off to?”

“Home.”

“Why don't you come behind this house with me?”

“Huh?”

“I won't hurt you. Honest. It'll be fun.”

“No. I mean, I have to go home. I'm late.”

“Two minutes.”

“I can't.”

“Come on. Please?”

“Um … okay.”

Leonard waited for the boy to turn toward the house and lead the way around to the side where it was dark. He couldn't see anyone, but he was sure there was a gang waiting to jump him and pummel him to death. He listened to the sound of his own feet crushing the just-mowed grass. He smelled the musty sweetness of the daffodils. Where was everyone? he wondered. Why were all the nearby houses dark? Who was going to save him?

Right then, he dropped his backpack on the sidewalk and ran like bloody murder. He ran and ran and ran and never looked back. He was only half a block from home, but it felt like forever to the front steps. The door was locked, so he sprinted around to the back of the house. His leg muscles burned, his lungs stung him from the inside out, and his heart pumped harder than it should have. By the time he made it to the back door, he knew he was in the clear.

But there was Mom to deal with.

“And you say you never saw this boy before?” Mom wanted to know. She had stopped eating her sloppy joe a long time ago; it sat there on the plate, getting cold as she went from exasperation to concern. She was no longer mad at Leonard; now all her anger was focused on the mystery boy.

“No. He's definitely not from around here, or from our school. I would've remembered him.”

“Did he … did he touch you at all? Anything? Any kind of—”

“No. I told you, he was going to beat me up. I got out of there.”

*   *   *

After Leonard had eaten his dinner, Mom made him get in the car and drive around town looking for the boy. They never found him. They did manage to retrieve Leonard's backpack, which was still sitting beside the darkened house with the daffodils, exactly where he had dropped it. Mom wanted to file a complaint with the police, but Leonard pleaded with her not to make a big deal over it. In the end, she felt he'd been through enough, so she let it go.

My job, while they were out being vigilantes, was to do the dishes and clean up the kitchen. I had just finished scrubbing the stove, mopping up the sloppy part of the sloppy joes, when Deirdre appeared in the doorway.

“Where's Mom?” she asked. She placed her dirty dish in the sink and ran the water over it.

“Out with Leonard,” I told her. “He got jumped by some kid and they've gone looking for him.”

“Jumped?”

“I don't know. He cried. Mom's all up in his business now. She says that if he's going to do the Drama Camp thing, from now on he's got to get a ride home.”

Deirdre sat at the table in her seat. It was just like the old days, me doing the dishes and her fiddling with stuff on the table, us talking. Except now with her hair so short, she looked like an imposter of her former self and we didn't have as much to say to each other. Over the past several months, she hadn't really taken an interest in Leonard at all. She had demonstrated that she couldn't care less about his comings and goings, his outfits, his ideas, and how he was influencing Mom and the women of the salon. She had other things on her mind, though what those things were, I couldn't tell.

She pulled a stack of scrap paper from the plastic holder that I had made for Mom at sleepaway camp about a gazillion years ago. She laid one of the pieces of paper out flat and then quickly and expertly folded it origami style into a tiny crane. Then she made a duck, an elephant, a camel, and a pig. In a matter of minutes, the table was littered with a small paper menagerie. I'd forgotten that she could do this. Years ago she checked a book out of the local library; it was written in Japanese, but by carefully following the diagrams, she had been able to teach herself how to make things.

“Well, I hope she's not planning to make him ride in a car alone with Buddy Howard. That would be a mistake. I mean, considering.”

She held up a paper bird, and by gently manipulating its tail, she made its wings flap up and down. We both smiled, and then, as a kind of peace offering, she handed it to me. My hand was wet, which caused the head of the thing to instantly bloat and go limp. I'd ruined it. Deirdre laughed, grabbed it back, and bunched it into a ball. She shot it across the room and, like an ace player, landed the wad bingo in the garbage pail.

“Considering what?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? Mr. Buddy and Leonard? Alone? Think about it, Pheeb. No. Never mind. Don't. It's too lurid.”

As she made the last of her origami animals (a rabbit), Deirdre could tell I didn't have a clue.

“Sex, Phoebe. Leonard is like walking bait for a perv like Buddy Howard. And don't look so shocked.”

I have to admit it had never occurred to me that Mr. Buddy had designs on any of the boys who took part in Drama Camp. The idea that he was after sex—and sex with a minor at that—was, well, it
was
lurid.

“But you don't think…,” I began weakly.

“Please, Pheebs. Where have you been living?”

She crumpled up her collection of paper napkins and tossed them one by one into the garbage. She hit her mark every time. Then she got up and checked out her reflection in the side of our old-fashioned chrome toaster. She gave what little hair she had a few quick brushes forward with her fingers, but it didn't really respond, so she moved in close to inspect her eyes.

“I'm thinking of doing kind of a Goth thing,” she announced without pulling back. She assumed I was still watching her and listening to her every word. And she was right; I was. “Not the outfits. I mean the outfits are a big don't. But the eye treatment could work. Y'know, dark lids and some underliner. Whaddaya have in the way of shadow? Anything?”

We went upstairs and I gave her what I had. She experimented while I watched her and waited for her to ask my opinion. I told her what she wanted to hear and she rolled her eyes at me. I didn't care if she knew how desperate I was to be her friend. I didn't care if I appeared to be a suck-up. I was just grateful to be standing in front of the mirror together like we used to, talking, and I didn't want it to end.

But then I heard Mom and Leonard enter the house.

“
Phoebe
 …
Deirdre?
” Mom called out from downstairs.

Deirdre and I just looked at each other. She gave me a sad smile and then gently touched my cheek with the blush brush.

“Don't listen to me, Pheebs.” She whispered the words just loud enough for me to hear her, but soft enough that Mom wouldn't. “I don't know Buddy Howard's story. I just know that there are bad people in the world. And bad things happen to people. You just gotta wake up, is all I'm saying.”

“
Phoebe!
” Mom called again; this time she expected a response.

“
We're up here
,” Deirdre called out. “
We'll be right down.
”

She wiped her eyes clean with a pad, removing any trace of her new look. I guess she wasn't ready to unveil it yet. She plopped a J.Crew bucket hat on her head, and together we clomped down the stairs into the living room. Mom and Leonard were sitting sad-sack on the sofa. Deirdre announced that she and I would be serving ice cream parfaits in a matter of minutes. We went into the kitchen, whipped up the parfaits, and served them in beer glasses, and then we all sat together in the living room. Instead of turning on the TV and tuning in to news about the bad things that bad people were up to that day, Deirdre and I entertained everyone with scandalous stories about Mom's customers. Sometimes we even got up from our seats to act out the dramatic parts. We were hilarious.

“Stop!” Mom cried, practically choking on her parfait. “You girls are so bad.”

“No, no, Aunt Ellen. Please?” Leonard begged. “Don't make them stop.”

At that moment it was hard not to at least
like
Leonard; he was, after all, trying so hard. Perched on the edge of his seat, clapping at our antics and egging us on, he was making it plain that all he really wanted in this world was to be included. This, he seemed to be saying, is all I need to be happy. But unlike the rest of us, he didn't care that his need showed; he wasn't embarrassed by his ridiculous desire to be liked.

That was a good night for us. For all of us. And I'm glad that I have it as a memory to look back on, because a week later everything changed.

 

eight

OFFICER DESANTIS HAD
a red face and a big neck that pressed against his shirt collar. His chest was huge. As he jotted down the information about Leonard into a logbook, I watched the buttons of his shirt strain against the fabric and thought for sure that one of them was due to pop at any minute. He told us that if experience had taught him anything, it was that when a kid like Leonard disappears, he usually turns up several days later with a long story about how he just needed some space so he went and spent a night or two with some friend.

“Leonard doesn't really have friends,” my mother pointed out. “Just the kids from Drama Camp. Other than that, he doesn't know anyone.”

Officer DeSantis looked up at her and said, “That's what I'm saying. Every kid knows someone.”

When I pointed out that Leonard had also become pretty chummy with plenty of Mom's customers, Mom cut her eyes at me and then sighed as if I didn't know what I was talking about.

“He's very tight with some of them,” I explained. I felt it was best if the authorities had all the facts to work with. “Leonard even convinced Mrs. Cafiero to let her hair go natural. Stuff like that. Oh, and there's also Mr. Buddy. Buddy Howard.”

“Who's he?” asked Officer DeSantis, jotting down the name.

“He's the guy who sort of runs Drama Camp. We telephoned him last night when Leonard didn't come home. Usually Mr. Buddy gives Leonard a ride, so naturally … But Mr. Buddy said that Leonard didn't want a ride last night after rehearsal. Said he was going to meet a friend.”

“A friend,” said the policeman as if to prove his point. “See what I mean?”

None of us was convinced. Deirdre, who had been standing patiently behind me, sighed heavily and said, “Could you just, y'know, look for him?”

Officer DeSantis took all our information and assured us that he'd check out every lead. Then he suggested the idea of making a poster. He said it had worked for cats and dogs and once for the unhappy owner of an escaped parakeet. People see the missing whatever on the poster and it jogs their memory. They call. We'd be surprised, he said; and then he suggested that we might try posting the information on the Internet as well. The plan sounded pretty desperate to me. But clearly it appealed to my mother, because there she was, within the hour, sitting at our kitchen table, affixing Leonard's picture to a piece of paper.

It was a Polaroid photograph that I had taken myself almost a month ago at my mother's picnic for her regulars. Every Memorial Day she throws a picnic, and every year she swears that it's going to be the last time. After it's all over, she collapses onto her bed and does a monologue about how it's all just gotten to be too much trouble, deviling eggs, cutting crusts off sandwiches, lugging coolers, buying paper tablecloths, plastic dinnerware, party favors, setting everything up just to show some appreciation. “Next year,” she says when it's over, “I'm giving out free rain bonnets and that'll be the end of it.” But then by the following May, she's forgotten all about her promise and we are stuck dragging stuff to the same old picnic area.

This past year was a little different because Leonard had decided to set up a booth and offer Mom's customers before-and-after Polaroid portraits. He said that for some of the women it would be their “before” photos and for others it would be “after.” His marketing ploy was to let each woman decide for herself where she fell on the time line. For those who felt that the best part of their lives was still in the future, he labeled their photos “before”; for those who held to the idea that they were living the best of their lives today, he labeled their photos “after.” Five bucks a pop.

At the time, we all thought the scheme was pretty lame. But even Deirdre, who said she wouldn't be caught dead at one of Mom's picnics, admitted that the booth was a stroke of genius. At the end of the day, Leonard had pulled in real money—$225—and no one was about to argue with a fistful of dollars.

After the shindig was over and everyone had left the fairground, Leonard plopped himself down on the milk crate in front of his crudely painted backdrop (a tropical beach motif) and demanded that I take his picture. I told him I'd do it only if he paid me. He handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and we went to work.

Snap. Grrr. Snap. Grrr. Snap. Grrr.

“So, wait,” I said as we watched the three perfect squares develop in the palm of my hand. “Is this your ‘before' or ‘after'?”