Brutal Youth (41 page)

“What do you mean, ‘where he is’?” Davidek asked. “Isn’t he here?”

No one answered him. “Is he
here
?” Davidek said, louder this time. He thought of his mother,
Do I need to repeat it for you?
“I swear I won’t tell. I just want to
know
…,” the boy pleaded.

The front door swung open, and Stein’s father stood there. Gray scruff covered his face, and his red eyes rested in big swollen pods of skin. Davidek drew close, believing this to be an invitation, but Stein’s father didn’t budge. Facing each other, they both struggled to recognize something in the other from long ago. “You…,” the older man said finally. “The St. Valentine’s Day dance…”

Davidek nodded. Stein’s father did the same, then grabbed Davidek by the shirt and yanked him forward. “So where were you when my son
needed
a friend?”

Davidek raised his hands in surrender. “Please—I’ve been calling and nobody answers—”

Stein’s father shoved the boy backwards on the porch. “We keep the phone off the hook,” he muttered. “We get enough prank calls from you kids.”

Margie squeezed in beside her father. “You think it’s funny hearing somebody make those damn sizzle noises?… They wanted to terrorize my brother—fine. Maybe he deserved it. But she was my
mother
.” She covered her mouth, and her drunken father put his arms around her.

“I’ve been calling here because I’m
worried
about him,” Davidek insisted, getting sick of explaining himself. “He’s my friend.…”

In the hallway behind Stein’s father, Davidek spotted a row of cardboard boxes on the floor. Two were filled with Stein’s clothes, washed and folded. Another had some stuffed animals, rolled-up posters, and other junk cleared from Stein’s bedroom—ready for shipment … or to be given away.

Davidek looked to the white garbage bag Margie had dropped on the floor. Some spiral-bound notebooks had spilled out of the lip of the bag, among some other crumpled drawings, candy wrappers, and miscellaneous garbage. As Davidek rose from the porch floor, he could see Stein’s
RELIGION
notebook in the pile. A mad-eyed cartoon of Ms. Bromine with devil horns and a pitchfork adorned the cover, and the frayed edges of old quizzes stuck out. Davidek pointed at them. “What are you doing? We saved our quizzes as proof in case Ms. Bromine tries to screw us on the quarterly grades like last time!… Stein
needs
these!”

Margie and her father exchanged an uncertain glance, and Davidek’s words suddenly felt like foolishness. There was some glaringly obvious truth he was missing.
“Where is he?”
Davidek demanded, and Margie’s face wrinkled, trying to gauge whether the boy’s naïveté was real or only an effort to bait them.

She walked back to the kitchen and picked up the phone again.

“I said no police!” her father hollered over his shoulder.

“I know,” she told him boastfully, like a self-satisfied child showing off a newfound ability to count to ten or tie a shoe. “I’m calling the nun.”

*   *   *

By the time Sister Antonia relayed the message, and Sister Maria made arrangements at the dance to have Zimmer race across three towns to get there, almost another hour had passed.

Davidek continued peppering Stein’s father and sister with questions, becoming frantic as they ignored him from inside their locked home. A panic had hit him. If Stein were able, he would have mentioned Davidek to his family. He would’ve told his dad and sister about the friend who helped rescue him when he was hurt.…
Or maybe he doesn’t trust them,
the boy thought. Or maybe Stein now blamed Davidek just as much as he did the others.

He went around to the side yard and climbed higher into the dogwood tree this time, getting a view straight into Stein’s room, with its bare bed and open, empty dresser drawers. “You can’t just throw his stuff out because he’s sick!” Davidek screamed. He went back to the porch and pounded on the door some more. “Stein!… Stein, it’s Davidek! If you’re here, come out!”

Stein’s father scratched his head and peered at him through the living room window. “You’re talking to nobody,” he said.

“I want to see my friend!” the boy said.

The old man just stared at him with his big stewed-tomato eyes and let the curtain fall back.

Eventually, the headlights of Zimmer’s rumbling hatchback bathed the Stein house in light as he pulled into the gravel driveway and parked. “Peter … Peter, would you come down here, please?” he called from beside the road. “Sister Maria sent me, Peter. I just want to talk to you.”

“You come up here,” Davidek said.

Zimmer didn’t move. “What do you want with these people, Peter?”

Davidek’s eyes glinted. “I just want to see if my friend can come out and play.”

The tall shadow walked up into the yard and stood at the foot of the porch steps. Margie peeked through the window at the stranger. “We called the
sister,
” she said. “You’re
not
the sister.”

“I’d like you to come with me, Peter,” Zimmer said calmly. “I know you have a lot you’d like explained, but go down to my car and wait there. Let me talk with them, and I’ll come back to talk to you.”

The front door opened and Margie stuck her face out. “Where’s the nun?” she asked.

“Where’s Stein?” Davidek shot back.

Zimmer walked up to the porch, the wooden steps creaking beneath him. “Sister Maria will be along. The school had its prom tonight. She’s delayed there, I’m afraid. She asked me to come in her place.”

“Well, she knows us. She’s
assured
us,” Margie said. “She said the best thing is for everybody to just to
leave my brother alone.
No phone calls, no visitors…”

Zimmer raised his palms to her—as though trying to get her to lower a gun. “I’m Andrew Zimmer,” he said. “I teach Computer Science and Phys Ed at the school. Is it all right if I come up?”

Margie nodded, then pointed at Davidek. “He can’t.”

Zimmer agreed and they went inside.

*   *   *

Davidek tried to eavesdrop through the windows, but they didn’t talk for long. Zimmer emerged from the front door and put a firm arm around him, steering him toward the steps. “Let’s go home, Peter.”

“I want to know about Stein.”

Zimmer sighed. “I explained to the Steins that, yes, you were a friend of Noah’s, and that, yes, you had tried to help, and that Sister Maria trusts you. But your behavior tonight … well … let’s just go now, and we’ll talk about it later.”

Davidek said, “I’m not leaving unless you tell me
now.
”

Zimmer looked up at Margie, whose face registered disgust, then back to Davidek. “His body is recovering, Peter. Doctors have been taking good care of him. They healed the cuts, they stabilized him, but he’s not strong yet. He lost quite a lot of blood—and some of the things that are broken in people can’t be fixed with just medicine. Do you understand?”

“Don’t talk to me like that, like I’m stupid,” Davidek said.

Zimmer nodded, and his next words were a slap across the face. “You’re not stupid. You’re just an idiot. Coming here and screaming at these people? That doesn’t help anything. Your friend is gravely ill. He’s not altogether there even when he
is
awake—which isn’t often. But he’s with people who are caring for him. Far from here. And you can’t keep bothering his father and sister.… You can’t keep asking for more.…”

Davidek felt the edges of his vision bending away, growing distant. Nausea overtook him. “
Where
is he?” the boy asked.

“At a hospital, and it’s out of state. That’s all you need to know. You can’t see him. Even his family aren’t going to be with him, not for a while. They’re sending his clothes and some of his things. If he recovers well, and you apologize to them for tonight, maybe in the future, maybe someday they’ll…” He didn’t finish. There was no promise he could make.

As they walked down to the car, the boy looked back up to the porch, where Stein’s sister had emerged and was glaring down at him. “You didn’t have to clean out his room. Like he never was.” He thought of his own brother—the AWOL A-hole, whose many stupid choices had resulted in him being erased from the world.

Margie crossed her arms. Her face was hard. “My little brother is a long list of bad memories that we’d just like to put away for a while.… Don’t tell me that’s wrong.”

“It
is
wrong,” Davidek said, starting back toward the house. “It’s his stuff, and Stein was a good person. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as you, but I know that much for
sure.
”

“My brother is a volatile, dangerous
burden,
” she said. “He is very unstable, very sad—and he has a lot to be sad about. And thanks to what Noah did to
himself,
the care he needs now … the
cost
 …
I’m
the one who doesn’t have nursing school money anymore. We can’t pay for both.” She shook her head, tears pouring down her cheeks. “So I’m an official
dropout
these days. And maybe I’d have been a
good
nurse.… Maybe I’d have
helped
people—”

Her father shuffled forward and put his arm around her, pulling her back to him. Margie made a watery sniff. “He took my
mother
away. He takes
everything
away,” she said. “And he just keeps taking.…”

Davidek thought of what Stein had told him, lying with his bleeding arms stuffed into his jacket, the secret he didn’t want to die with him: a confession.… Davidek knew how devoted Margie was to the last religion her mother had clung to, hoping to set her mind right. He wondered if she still believed suicides wouldn’t get into heaven.

Zimmer started to pull Davidek away, but Davidek wouldn’t go. He wanted to tell them more. Needed to tell them how wrong they were about Stein.

He wanted to tell Margie and her father that the fire had been a frightened little boy’s desperate effort to protect his family, to stay in line with their roller-coaster religious bullshit, to protect his mother from sorrow he thought might follow her into another life. Even now, all these years later, Stein had let his sister and father believe the worst in him rather than know the truth.

Davidek pictured his friend on that first afternoon when they were still just visitors at St. Mike’s. Stein planting that crazy kiss on the lips of Ms. Bromine, paralyzing her, while Davidek bolted toward the unconscious LeRose …

When the seniors had pushed in, jackal-like as they heaped new torment on Davidek, the Clip-On Boy, Stein had loosened his collar, pulled off his own tie, and said,
Take this, and give me yours.

Stein stepped in front of other people’s bullets. He let himself absorb the worst the world threw at the people he cared about. Maybe that did make him strange or crazy; Davidek didn’t know anyone else like that.

But what would that matter to his sister now?

Stein had intended to keep the secret about his mother for as long as he lived. Since he still did, Davidek would do the same.

“When you talk to him,” Davidek said, “just tell him I’m wearing his clip-on, okay? Tell him that.…”

He couldn’t read their faces, which was just as well. He didn’t need them to understand anymore.

*   *   *

Zimmer led him away, and Davidek slumped in the passenger seat of the teacher’s little car. The stolen minivan receded in the darkness. There was still plenty of trouble ahead for him tonight.

Zimmer asked him for directions to his house, and Davidek told him. “Do you feel like you got what you were looking for?” the teacher asked. Davidek mumbled yes, like it was the most tiresome question imaginable.

Zimmer used the long drive to lecture him:
Sister Maria is taking a great risk in trusting you.
Blah blah blah …
There are a lot of people who would use this to hurt St. Mike’s
.
You’ve disappointed us.

Davidek said “yeah” a lot, and looked out the window.

Back at his house, the boy had made it in through the front door and almost to his bedroom when his mother grabbed him in the upstairs hallway screaming for her husband, “Bill! Bill! Bill!” like an agitated seagull. Davidek’s father bounded out of his bedroom, cornering his son.

Davidek’s mother slapped him across the face. When he looked up again, she slapped him a second time. “How dare you?” she said. “How
dare
you?”

They didn’t ask Davidek where had gone, or why he had stolen the minivan, or where it was now. That would come later, and Davidek made up as many lies as he needed—he had been trying to run away, got scared, left the car on some random road, and hitchhiked back. It didn’t matter if they believed him. That was all they would get.

Davidek didn’t need his parents to understand anymore either.

FORTY-ONE

The night whispered around Hannah Kraut.

Hannah sat alone on a ridge of rock jutting over the edge, hidden in the darkness behind the restaurant, away from the buzzing parking-lot lights and the noise of the prom cleanup inside. Her fluffy dress bunched around her. She was a pink spot amid dark blue shadows.

The only light here was the occasional flash from workers going in and out of the back kitchen entrance. She could hear the other prom-goers leaving the premises, tearing away in their cars and sending trails of dust into the air to float over the river valley like a little procession of spirits.

From the kitchen, two sophomore student volunteers came out carrying a clattering stack of dirty dinner plates, which they hauled over to the rocks and began hurling one by one over the cliff, cackling with each distant shatter. They each gave Hannah a cursory “What’s up?”—unashamed of their activities. One guy pretended to shoot the flying dishes like skeet while the other explained to Hannah that the restaurant’s big dishwasher was full, so the plates had to disappear or else they’d have to wait around for the current load to finish.

Hannah had listened, nodding, smiling thinly. Then the skeet shooter said, “You’re not going to tell, are you? You’re not going to write this in that … uh, book thing, right? And read it at the Hazing Picnic?”