The Local News (6 page)

My parents, as they cleaned his uniforms and bandaged his injuries and listened raptly to stories of scrimmages, win/loss records, and tackles, fell easily into the role of devoted fans. I, on the other hand, didn’t know what to do with myself. Now when he made fun of me at the kitchen table with a screeching imitation of my voice, a pointed
Enough already
in the middle of one of my stories, it did not strike me as jocular, it did not seem like I was in on the joke. The shift felt seismic to me, the pitch of sudden anger directed my way, as though I were somehow responsible for all those years of teasing, as if retaliation upon me were the thing that would right those past wrongs.

And even though his neck grew thick as a stump and he was trailed by a dusty cloud of new friends, I was onto him. Even then, I was onto him. I had some sense of the particular combination of chance, timing, and circumstance that had rescued Danny from himself. Had we not moved from Abernathy exactly when we had, had he not grown exactly when he did, had he not been given long summer months to prepare, he never would have completed his transformation so fully and dramatically. It wasn’t the diet or the exercise or even the determination that had changed Danny. It was
the precise alignment of events falling exactly in his lap at exactly the right time that had turned his life into a fairy tale.

Dumb luck,
I used to sing to myself, over and over again, as he breezed past me or as he said smirkingly, “New hairdo?”
Dumb luck. Dumb luck. Dumb luck.
It soothed me.

But now here was this note, full of
paingwim
and
Im.
He was still that stupid little kid, and as I sat in Chuck’s stifling office, it brought me no solace. Danny had spelled
Chemanski
wrong, one of his best friends, who’d played football alongside him for three years.
She-manskee,
Danny had written. And it made me wonder where he was now. Not in the daydreamy way I usually wondered, picturing him stretched out on some nice lady’s lawn chair in a warm-weather state or on a surfboard along a coastline. I wondered now if his luck had changed back, if midnight had come and gone, if someone or something had come to prey on this dumb, pretty jock and set terrible things loose upon him.

When I got home, Dad was sitting at the kitchen table, his face clenched and red, his fist balled around a dirty envelope and an equally dirty scrap of paper. It looked like a page torn from a phonebook. Melissa Anne. Melissa Anne wrote us every few weeks, sometimes more, sometimes less, always on random pages—a corner torn from a newspaper, the back of an advertising circular—though the block-print penmanship was so neat, so precise and perfectly proportioned, it may as well have been sent on the triple-lined paper of grade school. There was never a return address, aside from the two words of her name. The postmark sometimes read Fairfield, sometimes a neighboring suburb.

Dad was still in his suit, his tie tightened around his neck. He had his coat on. His briefcase sat at his feet. When he saw me, he just shook his head. His eyes glittered. Melissa Anne’s letters were
always the same, her words printed neatly in the margins of the page or on top of existing text, spaced like a couplet:

I had a vision of your son.

He is buried in the ground.

The first line never varied. The second did:
His mouth is filled with dirt. He is encircled by worms. He is smothered by silt.

That was it. Every letter, only two lines long.

My father’s eyes searched the table now, his chest rising and falling. Melissa Anne had become a flashpoint for my parents, getting under their skin in a particularly powerful way. Other letters, inappropriately evangelical ones about what Jesus could do for us in times of crisis if only we’d accept him into our hearts or long, rambling ones about the importance of strict discipline in the home to prevent this sort of tragedy, left them unmoved. But Melissa Anne got to them. Maybe it was the childlike writing or the simplicity of the message or my parents’ impotence in the face of it or the way it pointed clearly to a larger, systemic impotence. The police had been unable to identify the sender and eventually told my parents her letters were meaningless—if they were a legit lead, they’d contain more information, and if they were threats, they’d contain a demand of some sort, ransom or otherwise. There are a lot of kooks out there, the police reminded my parents, which was supposed to be reassuring.

“Can’t you dust for prints or something?” my father had yelled at one squinty-eyed officer who’d stood in our kitchen the day we’d received Melissa Anne’s seventh or eighth letter. The officer just looked at my father with a pitying smile, my dad another poor schmuck who’d watched too many cop shows. “You can’t,” he said with the stern sympathy police seemed so well trained in, “get worked up about every nut job out there. Ignore it. Throw them out as soon as they arrive. Don’t even open them.”

But my parents were incapable. My father seemed to tear into Melissa Anne’s grimy but meticulously addressed envelopes with a vigor rarely seen otherwise. He shook the torn page now. “What are we paying Howard for?”

Our private investigator hadn’t been able to find the sender either, or do much of anything else. Aside from coming over and rapping his knuckles on our countertop while wearing a suit a size too small, and reciting obvious facts everyone already knew, Howard seemed largely to specialize in sending my parents expensive invoices for amorphous things like “casework” and “background analysis.”

My dad was staring past me with a steely, tight-jawed look, as if he could punch something. I’d never seen my dad punch anything, never even really seen him yell before all of this started. He’d once been the sort of guy who just flopped easily into his chair at the end of the day, amusing himself with corny jokes.
What do you get when you cross a parrot and a shark?
A bird that talks your ear off.
A hula dancer and a boxer?
Hawaiian Punch. He grasped the phonebook page so hard now his arm was shaking, as if by will alone he could discern or destroy it.

David Nelson came over later and sat at my desk while I sat propped against my headboard with a bunch of pillows. We were trying to finish
Richard III
for Mrs. Bardazian’s English class. David loved crazy Queen Margaret and he kept reading her lines out loud: “Hie thee to hell for shame, and leave this world, thou cacodemon!”

“Cacodemon’s
a good one,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. Oliver sat at the foot of my bed, licking his front paws incessantly,
the sound wet and distracting. I told him to knock it off, but the dog eyeballed me sideways and kept going.

“Is it better than … hang on,” David said, paging through the play. “Better than
elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog?”

“Cacodemon
’
s
better.”

“Even though it’s redundant?
Caco
means bad. Cacophony.” He said the last word slowly, as if I were being an idiot. “So she’s calling him a bad demon. What other kind is there?” He looked smirky and very proud of himself. Twisting himself around in my desk chair, he cracked his back.

“Well, what’s an abortive hog?” I said. “A premature pig? It’s a more powerful insult to call someone a terrible demon than a piglet.”

“Abortive
also means deformed,” David Nelson said. “And
elvish-marked
means possessed by elves. Who are supposed to be spiteful little creatures. That’s far more creative than just calling someone demonic.” He had a zit the size of a mosquito bite on the side of his nose.

“Whatever,” I said. “Margaret’s insane anyway.”

“Not as insane as Richard,” he said.

“Richard’s not insane,” I said, just to fight. At times things went off-kilter between David Nelson and me, our normal interactions becoming suddenly grating. It could be exhausting, always trying to prove who was smarter. “He’s just a megalomaniac.”

“He kills his brother and his nephews and tries to marry his niece. That’s not insane?”

“Knock it off,” I yelled at Oliver, who quit the licking for a second. I patted his head with my foot to make up for yelling. “It’s too simple to just call him insane,” I said, not even believing what I was saying. “He’s got a clear political agenda. All his actions are in ser vice to that.”

“His madness is inextricably linked to his megalomania. He used his madness to become king and then being king only turned him into more of a lunatic. You’re being intentionally obtuse if you’re just reading this as the story of a political schemer.”

“Jesus. Stop lecturing me.” It came out more harshly than I’d intended.

David Nelson’s face went slack, his mouth pulling down at the corners. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I said, but not convincingly. Oliver had already gone back to the licking.

We read for a while, David hunched over his book at my desk. I could see the gray-striped elastic of his underpants coming out the back of his pants.
“Hell-hound,”
he said, but tentatively now. “That’s a pretty good one.”

I ignored him.

There was a knock at my door, and my mom came in holding a mug in each hand. Oliver stood on the bed, wagging his tail like crazy.

“I made you floats,” she said, practically shouting, though her voice was frayed, as if she were at the tail end of a bout of laryngitis. There was something both familiar and creepy in this, the sort of oddly placed and invasive gesture she used to be more temperamentally prone to but that had disappeared entirely of late. She was smiling now, though she looked like she’d been crying recently, her eyes red-rimmed and mongoloidal, the tiny veins around her nose bluer and more spidery than usual. Her hair was unbrushed, the back matted down and clumpy.

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Pasternak,” David said in the kiss-ass voice he always used with my parents. “Delightful,” he said as we both took our mugs. I wondered where she’d gotten the ice cream and the pop. These were not items we kept around these days. Had
she made a trip to the store? Unlikely. The whole thing made me uneasy.

“How are you kids doing?” she said. She was still practically shouting, though staring at something on my bookshelf, my old
Encyclopedia Britannica,
it looked like.

David Nelson slurped his float, nodding.

“Fine,” I said. “Trying to read.” I held up my book.

“How are you doing, Mrs. Pasternak?” David Nelson said. I wanted to tell him she wasn’t a hall monitor; he didn’t need to use her name in every single sentence.

“Melissa Anne wrote again,” Mom said, patting the back of her head, like maybe she’d just realized it was tangled back there. She recited the couplet, talked about wanting to call the police but knowing they would do nothing. Her words came out quickly. She was wearing the same sweatsuit that she’d worn the day before. David Nelson had a smile pasted on his face that was starting to look painful. My mom was on leave from her vet tech job. In the first days she’d said it was because she was needed by the police and the search-and-rescue teams and reporters camped out on our street, which was more or less true. Now, though, she filled her days scribbling notes, calling the Red Cross and Goodwill for food donations for the searchers, calling the police for updates, organizing and reorganizing the impromptu filing system that was taking over our kitchen, a tall rusting filing cabinet dragged from the garage and placed next to the table. It was filled with letters and area maps and newspaper coverage and less explicable items too: pictures of other missing kids ripped from milk cartons or junk mail flyers, handwritten lists of Danny’s favorite foods, a whole page of his nicknames—Nack, Danny-O, D-Man. I’d never heard anyone call him Danny-O or D-Man. Those, it seemed, my mother made up in some fanciful, self-soothing abandon.

“Dad told me,” I said, reminding her of all the things that the police told us: harmless, nut case, best to just ignore it. She nodded at me, in a way that did not mean yes as much as
Go on, go on.

I didn’t know what to say. I never knew what she wanted, really. I held up my book again, reminding her of her interruption. This sort of dropping in and chatting, this wasn’t something she and I had ever done particularly well. It always seemed a strange, pale imitation of the way she stood in Danny’s doorway as he curled his free weights, the two of them talking lightly about nothing. How was his practice? What was that bruise on the back of his thigh? Was he getting enough sleep? Had she told him the story of the three-legged dog who came in for shots and nearly licked her to death? I would half listen to them through my door, derisive, curious, jealous, relieved.

“I still need to call the Kiwanis for Saturday,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I’ve left two messages already and nobody has called back.” We were on to the searches. This is how conversations worked with my mom now. “And I don’t think the phone tree worked this week. I know there are still a whole lot of people who don’t know where we’re starting from.”

“I’ll be there,” David said quickly. “Near Shore Acres Mall, yeah?” Mom nodded at David. It looked like she was going to say something, but Oliver started barking at her. She picked him up and cooed at him about being a good boy. He nuzzled his wet nose into her chin. “Good boy, good boy,” she kept repeating.