Silent Alarm (14 page)

We stand there as the first bell rings, signaling that the day has officially begun, listening to the shuffling of feet as people make their way inside the building, the creaking of the front door of the school as it opens and shuts, my eyes focused on the clouds beginning to break up and dissipate on the horizon. Ben and I stand together, side by side, so close we could reach out and touch each other easily—so easily. An uncharted vista of barren tundra stands between us, patiently waiting, our hearts stranded miles apart.

Somehow,
I make it through the first two tracks of the day, ducking into the girls' bathroom between classes to hide in the stalls, leaning my forehead against the blessedly cool metal wall, Ben's anguished face filling my mind each time I shut my eyes, his hands pushing me away roughly. I can still feel his touch on my skin, and I rub my arms distractedly, pretending they are his hands, his fingers curled around my bones.

At lunch, I stand awkwardly in the cafeteria, balancing a Coke and a bag of pretzels on an orange tray, unsure of where to go or who to sit with. It feels strange not to be sitting with Delilah on the steps outside in the quad, tilting our faces up to the sunlight, talking so fast that we run out of air, inhaling in deep gasps between sentences. Practicing in the music room, deserted at lunchtime, the violin warm in my hands, almost alive, breathing in time with the notes that fall from my fingers. Sneaking off campus with Ben, popping French fries into his open mouth in between kisses. My stomach hurts, remembering these things, and the air in the cafeteria smells of the slightly rancid stink of hot dogs and baked beans. People stare at me as I stand there, and I try to act like I don't care, my face impassive. Finally, I ditch the stupid tray and just carry the soda and pretzels in my hands and walk out of the cafeteria, stopping at the stairwell next to the gym, sitting down on the cold steps. Even though I'm thirsty, I don't open the can. I just sit there in the quiet of the stairwell, listening to the clatter of the cafeteria just beyond, my stomach gnawing and churning in a way that is anything but gentle. I know I need to eat, but I cannot bring myself to tear open the bag, imagining the pretzels turning to dust on my tongue, sticking to my molars like a strange, bready adhesive.

“Hey.”

A voice reverberates from somewhere behind me, and I twist around, craning my neck. A boy stands at the top of the stairs, looming over me, his hair outlined in a golden glow from the light coming through the window behind him, a backpack slung over one shoulder. He makes his way down, his long legs moving quickly.

“What's up?” Riley sits next to me, folding his lanky body like an accordion.

“Oh, you know,” I say, reaching over and finally opening my Coke. “The usual: math and history—followed by lunch and total social annihilation.”

Riley laughs, reaching into his backpack and pulling out a sandwich. I picture his mother in the kitchen early this morning, carefully mitigating the thick spread with rivers of deep grape jelly, the sky still shimmering with the last flicker of stars.

“Yeah,” he says, pulling the plastic wrap aside and taking a huge bite. “Things haven't been that great on my end either.”

“Like how?” I pick up the bag of pretzels and think for a minute about opening it, then put it down again.

“Either people won't talk to me at all, or if they do—”

“They just want to know if you knew anything, right?” I finish the thought before the words can leave his lips. “If you saw it coming.”

Riley nods, his mouth full and sticky. He reaches over and grabs my Coke, swigging a mouthful of fizzy liquid. He wipes his lips on the back of his hand, and I can see that his sandwich is already almost a memory. Guess all the drama isn't hurting
his
appetite any.

“And Janelle broke up with me last night, in a fucking
text,
so there's that.”

Janelle and Riley have been dating since the middle of their junior year. All I know about Janelle is that she's some kind of insanely talented gymnast. Whenever I see her, the word
severe
comes to mind—she walks through the halls with extreme concentration, as if she's perched high up on a balance beam competing for the gold. I want to ask what happened, but something in his face tells me not to. He crumples up the plastic wrap and shoves it into his bag, removing a small package of cookies.

“Whatever,” he says, shrugging and pulling the cookies open. “We're graduating soon anyway.”

Whatever that means. In boy-speak it probably works out to a combination of
I'm hungry
and
I'm going to pretend I don't give a crap.

“What about college?” I ask, changing the subject.

“What about it?” he answers with a snort, slightly defensive. He reaches in and grabs a cookie, looking at it for a minute, turning it over in his hand before taking a bite.

“Are you excited?” Riley doesn't answer, just chews as if he wants to pulverize the cookie completely, the muscles in his jaw tensed beneath his skin.

Riley won a basketball scholarship to Penn State in November, full ride all four years. I remember the day he found out, how I'd opened the front door to find him standing there, waving the acceptance e-mail he'd printed out like a flag. I can still hear the whoop Luke let out as he bounded down the stairs, pushing me out of the way, the hard slapping sounds of their hands against each other's backs.

“It all just seems like such bullshit now—after everything that's happened. I mean, what's the point?” Riley swallows the cookie, having inhaled it in two bites. “So I go to college, play ball, get a good job when I get out so I can move up in the world?” His tone is full of mocking condescension. “Marry some chick I can't stand the sight of after a few years, and watch as she pops out a couple of kids I never see 'cause I'm working all the time—just like my dad. Then, after about twenty years, they'll give me a gold watch and I'll retire, drop dead of a heart attack as I'm dragging the trash to the curb one morning.” He stops, looking me in the face. “What's the fucking point of it all, anyway?”

I've never seen Riley this angry. Riley is always, if nothing else, easygoing. If I had to use one phrase to describe him, it would probably be
laid-back
.

“I mean, Luke got into MIT,” he continues, the plastic bag crinkling in his hands loudly, echoing in the stairwell, “and where did it get him?” He looks at me almost accusingly, waiting for some kind of answer.

“You're not Luke, Riley,” I say quietly, dropping my eyes to the floor.

There is silence as I try to think of what to say next, coming up as empty as the white wall behind me.

“You doing okay?” He keeps his eyes forward as he asks the question, his tone nonchalant—deliberately so. “You never texted me back.”

“I guess,” I say as he holds out the bag of cookies to me. I reach in and take one. “Not really. Not at all, actually. Melissa Anderson cornered me in the parking lot earlier, demanding some kind of answer. Like I have one.”

The cookie is chocolate chip. It lies, small, dry, and crunchy, in the palm of my hand. Its brownness is reassuring somehow, the chips studding the surface like tiny moles. It smells of comfort, of family, of Luke and I fighting over cookie dough on late Sunday afternoons when we were little, a yellow ceramic bowl between us, sugar crystals spilled over the counter.

“Seriously?” Riley shoots me a look of incredulity laced with irritation.

I nod, biting into the cookie, which breaks apart like sawdust on my tongue.

“Well, that was pretty screwed up,” he muses, licking the crumbs from his lips.

“I don't know,” I say slowly. “I'm not so sure.”

(—Kitty Ellison sprawled on the asphalt, the back of her blond head a star shot out—)

Riley swallows hard, his Adam's apple moving fluidly.

“I'm not even gonna dignify that with a response,” he says finally, pushing the bag over to me, the plastic rustling like fire. “You should eat something.” I ignore it and we sit there mutely for a while, his body so close to mine that I can smell soap mixed with the sharp tang of sweat.

“I miss him,” he says quietly, staring straight ahead, unblinking.

“I do too,” I say. And I do. I miss Luke's presence in the house, the sound of him moving around in his room, just one wall away. I miss his smile, on the rare occasions it made an appearance, the way it would light up his whole face so that you could see, just for a moment, how good-looking he was, how alive. “But I feel like I'm not allowed to. After what he's done.”

“Yeah,” Riley answers, his voice husky with emotion. He turns to face me, searching for a connection, some kind of understanding. “That's it. That's exactly how it is.”

I hold very still, trying not to breathe.

The bell rings once, shrilly, breaking the moment. Riley gathers up his backpack and the cookies, tossing the bag at me before I can protest. I catch it one-handed, and he grins, his face opening up like sudden sunlight after a hard rain. “So you have something for later,” he says. “All you girls are getting too damn skinny.”

I blush, stuffing them in my bag, where I know they'll remain for the rest of the day, my chemistry book grinding them to fine powder. I think of Luke nestled in the sanctuary of his coffin, his dried bones separating from the husk of his body, disintegrating further with each day the sun rises in the sky, each passing hour that ticks away, how we will never be able to put him back together again.

When
I get home, the house is quiet, and I am greeted by the aroma of pot roast, the one dish of my mother's that I love unreservedly. A mix of onions, tomatoes, and the caramelized smell of browning meat rise from the stockpot on the stove, and a plate of brownies dusted in powdered sugar waits patiently on the kitchen counter. I pick one up and hold the fudgy heft of it in my palm before setting it back down again. More baked goods. All the carbs in the world won't fix what's happened, and I wonder why my mother, who before now engaged in this activity maybe twice a year—if we were lucky—is suddenly so compelled toward the kitchen, buying butter in bulk at Costco, hoisting economy-sized bags of flour and brown sugar into a metal cart. If she's trying for mother of the year, it's too late. Luke's gone, and I'm the only one left. All the pastries in the world won't change what he's done, or make me forget.

I hear noise coming from the basement, the sound of something dropped on the cement floor, a trail of music, and I follow it downstairs, the steps creaking as I descend, a piano melody growing louder, a minor key gaining momentum, clawing at my chest. My mother sits at her potter's wheel, which spins frantically, molding a lump of clay with her fingers, the long, vertical shape rising triumphantly out of the muck. She is deep in concentration, her head bent over her work. She's wearing what I like to think of as her artist uniform—clay-stained jeans and a white dress shirt that used to belong to my father a million years ago, the sleeves rolled up and splattered with red clay and the various shades of glaze she's experimented with over the years. Slate gray. China blue. Bloodred. Pale gold. Joni Mitchell plays on the stereo in the corner, her reedy voice needling my skin.

Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on . . .

My mother takes her foot off the pedal, and the wheel stops, her hand coming down to smash the tower of clay, ruining it, a long sigh escaping her throat. She stares at the mess she's created, reaching out to stroke the flattened clay with one finger.

I made my baby say good-bye . . .

“Mom?”

She looks up, startled, her eyes blinking steadily behind the black-framed glasses she always wears when she's working. She needs bifocals but, vain to the core, struggles along with the same glasses she's had for four years. “Bifocals,” she tells me often, “are for grandmas, which, in case you haven't noticed, I most certainly am
not.
”

“Alys! Did you just get home?” She looks worried, as if by not waiting by the door with a glass of milk she's somehow failed some complicated maternal test. She wipes her hands on a white towel, and stands up, wavering, uncertain if she should hug me or let me be. She points one finger at the ceiling. “I made you some brownies—they're upstairs on the kitchen counter.” The piano sprinkles its notes through the room, the vocals fading out as the track ends, the quiet suddenly oppressive. I haven't heard my mother listen to Joni Mitchell in years. Luke made fun of her so mercilessly over the last few years for her “hippie music” that she mostly relegated the CDs to a drawer—at least whenever he was home.

“I saw them,” I say, and walk over to the bookshelf lining the back of the room before she can hug me, the shelves crammed with pots and vases. “I'm not really hungry right now.”

“Well, maybe later.” I hear the soft slapping sound of her moccasins on the floor, and then her hand is on my back, the scent of flour and sugar rising from her skin. I move away from her touch, picking up a small shallow bowl, the glaze green as the moss at the bottom of a swamp, swirling into blackness. “Where's Dad?” The house feels eerily quiet. I listen hard but hear nothing overhead. For the last week or so he's insisted each night at dinner that he'll go back to work soon, but each morning I find him at the kitchen table, an empty glass at his elbow, ice melting at the bottom.

She avoids my eyes. “I don't know. He must've left while I was cooking. I'm sure he'll be back soon.” Her words wobble unsteadily on her tongue, and she doesn't sound sure of anything, much less my father's eventual return.

“When are you going back to the gallery?” I ask, watching her expression shift to slight annoyance at my question.

“I don't know, Alys.” Her hands are in her hair now, pulling the bulk of it over one shoulder, her fingers twisting the strands tightly together until they resemble a length of coarse rope. “I'm not sure if I'll ever go back, to tell you the truth.”

“Why?” I ask, although I already know the answer.

“Elena feels my presence might be a bit . . . distracting right now, and I tend to agree with her.”

Elena is my mom's boss. They bicker incessantly, but only because they are so totally similar—opinionated, artistic, driven. They even dress kind of alike, favoring the same long strands of colored beads wound round their wrists and necks. “You do?” I raise one eyebrow, broadcasting my skepticism.

“I do,” she says without hesitation, and I wonder if she really believes what she's saying, or if she's trying to convince not only me, but herself too. “Besides,” she continues wryly, “I think we all know that selling paintings of sunsets and constipated-looking dogs wasn't exactly my life's work.”

She turns away so that only her profile is visible. But I don't have to see her face to know that she's lying. Even though she grumbles about her job nearly all of the time, I know, despite her frustrations, she loves going to work every day. It was in the way she strode around the house in the mornings, her heels clicking purposefully against the floors, the look of vindication in her eyes when she sold a painting or acquired a piece she actually admired. And when she was feeling especially gracious, she admitted that just to have a job around art was a respite in a town she always considered too small, too quaint. Not edgy enough. Now edgy is
all
we are.

“So, how was school?” She seems almost chipper as she changes the subject, and I wonder if it is as exhausting to her as it is to me, this endless playacting.

“How do you
think
it was?” I turn the bowl over in my hands, one finger tracing my mother's signature etched into the bottom, the hardened clay rough against my skin.

I hear her sigh, and I close my eyes briefly, her footsteps reverberating against the cement floor as she walks to her desk, tucked into the corner. I hear the chair creak as she sits down and the sound of a match being struck, the smell of sulfur. When I turn around, she's sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, smoking a cigarette. In that pose, she looks younger somehow, like a girl again, her limbs folded neatly as paper.

“You're
smoking
now?” I ask, incredulous. My mother has been lecturing us on the perils of smoking for years, and has even said on occasion that she'd rather that we grew up to become Republicans than smokers, which probably tells you everything you need to know about her.

I watch as she tilts her head, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “I smoked before you were born. I have one every once in a while, when I feel like it. So get that look off your face.”

I have never, even once, come home and smelled cigarette smoke in our house, or on my mother's clothes. I feel dizzy, the world suddenly unfamiliar again. There is a strange woman smoking in my basement who claims to be my mother, though at this moment I'm pretty sure all bets are off.

“Besides,” she says, taking a drag and blowing the smoke toward the ceiling in a perfect ring, “I'm an adult.”

“Oh, so that will make it okay when you keel over from cancer?”

She shoots me an annoyed look through all the smoke, and promptly changes the subject.

“Did you see Ben today at school? Or Delilah?”

At the mention of Ben's name, something shuts down inside me, some vital mechanism, and all of a sudden I'm exhausted. I flop down into the chair behind her potter's wheel, one foot toying with the pedal.

“Yeah,” I whisper, clearing my throat to make room for the words. “D just acted like I didn't exist, and Ben . . .” My voice trails off, and I step forcefully on the pedal, making the wheel spin in circles for a few seconds with a loud hum. “Well, he doesn't want anything to do with me either. Not really. And who could blame him?” I look at the ruined lump of clay so I don't have to meet my mother's eyes, fully aware that if I see any sympathy or emotion reflected there, I will start to cry.

“That . . . is very disappointing,” my mother says, her breath coming out in a long hiss, the smoke circling her slender frame.

“Tell me about it.”

“Alys,” she begins gingerly, as if walking into enemy territory, “are you sure you want to finish up at Plainewood after everything that's happened? You could go stay with Grandma for a while, and finish the school year there if you want. I could call her tonight.”

I have thought of this myself many times since the night I heard my parents arguing down here, turning the idea over in my mind like a shiny silver coin.

“I don't want to go anywhere.

(I don't?)

“I'd have to come back here sooner or later, and then what? Besides, my audition is at the end of May. And if I went to Grandma's, I wouldn't be able to rehearse with Grace beforehand. It doesn't make any sense.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth, I regret them almost immediately. I would never admit it to my mother, but it would be a relief to start over someplace fresh, no history, no one staring when I walk down the street, no insults lashing my back in the locker room. And despite the fact that I haven't played since the

(shooting)

I don't want to give up hope entirely that I might be able to stand on the stage in a month's time and play, face the row of judges seated out in the darkness. But it's not just the audition—I'm not ready to relegate everything to the past—Ben, Delilah, Luke—my whole stupid, pointless life up until now. It's small and broken, but it's what I have left.

“Maybe the audition can wait, Alys,” my mother says in a voice that's soft, reasonable, the tone she uses when she's trying to cajole, to pull me in. “There's always next year. And even if you came back a few months from now, after the summer's over, maybe that would be enough time to . . . let things die down.”

My forehead wrinkles as the words leave her lips. Enough time. As if the passing of time itself would be enough to negate what has happened, the damage Luke has left in his wake. My mother has always been the one to push me when it comes to my playing, applying for programs, competitions. This is the first time I've ever heard her insinuate that music might not be the most important thing in my life, some kind of ticket out.

“Die down?” My own blatant disbelief bounces off the walls of the basement, reverberating in a way that strikes me as harsh, unkind even. “Do you really think this will
ever
die down? After what he did?”

My mother crushes out her cigarette in the top of a jar of glaze with a series of sharp jagged movements, her expression both steely and far away. She won't look at me.

I wish I had a river I could skate away on . . .

My phone buzzes with a text, and when I pull it from my pocket, my heart jumps at the sight of Delilah's name and the words that follow it:
Meet me at First Presbyterian. 8 p.m.
A smile pulses at the corners of my mouth. The image of Delilah stepping foot in a church is just about as incongruous as that of a six-year-old dressed as a prostitute. Delilah's only concession to religion is basically Christmas, where the only thing she worships are the presents piled under the tree. As I reread her message, a blanket of confusion falls over me. Why a
church
? Suddenly, I'm nervous, my senses on high alert. When I raise my head, I'm almost surprised to see my mother still there, the acrid smell of tobacco permeating the room. The remnants of a white veil drift between us, and I cannot see my mother's face clearly, her angular features softened by the smoke.

Luke, what have you done to us?

I say the words in my head, but Luke refuses to appear, stays quiet, as stubborn and willful as ever.

Isn't that just like him.