The Local News (37 page)

I let go. I sputtered that I was sorry, though I didn’t know if I was. Fick and Fack rubbed their wrists. I wanted really badly to hug them or slap them. I felt like I might do something terrible, like I might already be in the midst of it. “I got to go,” I said, because suddenly
I did. For several steps it seemed I was going to give chase, follow Melissa Anne’s trail of stink. But at the corner I turned left to her right, feet slapping on sidewalk, my body on autopilot. A car honked at me. I stopped, flailing my arm around my head, my heart thwapping in my chest. The driver yelled at me about
head in the clouds
and I yelled back about
watch where you’re going.
I did not care that he was a man, I a girl. Then I took off past him.

I was going home.

I never went home in the daytime. But now I was hurtling myself, the long blocks past the McAllisters’ seeming endless. Sweat dotted my shirt. “Gah,” I heard myself saying. “Bah. Ha.” The noise was propulsive.

In the last block and a half I broke into a sprint, the humidity like gulping a warm blanket. I had not sprinted in years, since the days of the fifty-yard dash, and even then halfheartedly. Quarter-heartedly. Eighth-heartedly. By the time I scaled the steps of my porch, I felt like I was going to vomit.

Inside, the air conditioning stung my skin. I pressed my back against one wall of the vestibule. Waiting. And then, nothing. Nothing.

The house stewed in its usual quiet. If I listened carefully, I could hear my mother upstairs, clacking, one of the dogs barking in the backyard. But aside from that, it was just like always. Of course. What had I expected? I ran between rooms looking for something familiar, something even vaguely reassuring that might calm me down. I opened kitchen cabinets and junk drawers, upended couch cushions and ottomans. Surely my mother heard my noise, my heavy footsteps, the commotion of my breath still trying to catch up with itself.

In the living room I went for the stereo, which had sat so long untouched. Danny, insisting on his constant din, was the only one
who’d ever used it. I wheeled the dial to what I guessed to be one of his stations—thumping bass, arrhythmic syncopation, voices shouting—and turned the volume up and up and up, till it would turn no more. The walls shook and the speakers let out an alarming, rasping crackle. My head pounded. My ears seemed as if they might burst. The noise. Ah, the noise.

My mother finally appeared, bounding down the steps, her familiar bathrobe fluttering behind her like a cape, her face a mess, her hair a mess, her a mess.

“What in the world?” she shrieked at me. “What in the world?” though the music drowned her out and I could only read her lips and I pretended the alarm on her face was rapture, the words from her mouth:

“What a good girl. What a good girl.”

When I returned to the McAllisters’ the next day, everyone regarded me more warily. Bayard, never one to start conversations, attempted tentative ones about “You like the gymnast girls in the Olympics?” and “What kind of car you want one day?” He didn’t mention anything about the day before. Neither did the kids. They played on the lawn and looked embarrassed when I tried talking to them about needing to be more careful, quickly squirming away and going back to their games without inviting me to join.

It was no matter, though. I had a plan. I would stake out a spot near the sidewalk and wait for Melissa Anne’s return. I would, I’d decided the previous night, make sure she never got close again. I’d be on the lookout for her bike, her creaky little trailer, her oozing bottles and cans, and the next time I would ward her off sooner and
more threateningly, make myself huge and whoop and growl like you were supposed to with mountain lions. Maybe clang something. I took Fack’s tom-tom and one of his toy mallets and rooted myself at the front of the lawn, my attention focused on either corner, listening for the far-off squeals of her trailer wheels, watching and waiting.

But the McAllisters’ street remained as quiet and uneventful as usual, people driving to work and back home, teenagers passing by on scooters and skateboards, an occasional ice cream truck sending kids into frenzy. I watched the mailman doing his paces up one side of the block, back the other. One afternoon a leashless, ownerless dog ran along the street. The next, a new refrigerator was delivered to the house across the road. Soon enough Fick and Fack were back to entreating me to set up the Slip ’N Slide for them, to play teacher to their pretend schoolchildren, nurse to their pretend ailments. But I couldn’t ease back into things. By the time it was clear she wasn’t returning, the days of anticipation and waiting had already done their damage. I couldn’t stop thinking about the round face, the stringy hair, the smell. She became the itchy thing beneath my skin. Just as I had once culled and culled through the details of Roy (oh, how indulgent those days seemed now, how
Mr. Mustard in the study with the candlestick),
now it was Melissa Anne. I thought of all the months she’d done this same thing to my parents, wormed her way so easily in.

I went eventually in pursuit, telling myself it was just our normal walks, mine and Bayard’s, though now I was always on guard, scanning for signs of her wet, drizzling trail, her clanking noise, her skittering eyes. I made us walk in longer and wider circles around the neighborhood, never letting on what I was doing. I couldn’t have explained myself to Bayard even if I’d wanted to. Something to do
with warning her away, with scaring her. Something. Blisters started to form on the backs of my heels. My nose and cheeks grew pink and tender and sunburned.

Bayard complained that we were going too fast, too far, that this was no fun, that he was getting moist. I did not know anyone else who would use the word
moist
so easily and I tried to be amused, tried to let him serve as the distraction he had so easily, so recently become, though already I could feel that slipping away. I could barely catch my breath beside him. I could not stop looking: down driveways, up alleys, around corners.

He insisted regularly that we stop, that he needed to rest. I wanted to punch him or just to leave him there when he did such things—we needed to go, to keep going; that much I clearly knew—but I had little sense of what I would do by myself. Already the long, hot hours were interminable with someone beside me. It was impossible to imagine them solo. So I found myself circling and circling in the street as he lounged beneath a leafy oak or a dying birch.

“Come on,” I told him. “Come on.”

“No, no,” he said. “Two more minutes.”

I groaned. I pulled at the peeling bark of the birch, which was shedding itself in fat curls, but all the while I was watchful, as if she might come moseying out the front door of a nearby home or be found kicking her feet on the wooden swing two porches down.

“I am going to fly apart into a trillion pieces,” I said, half shouting. Bayard tapped his feet on the street and looked at me the same way he always looked at me: blankly neutral or neutrally blank. He was so unmoved by me. And there was something in his dull, forgetful stare, something in his unseeing eyes, that made it seem, if only for one quick moment, like all the terrible things that had come to pass, all the blights on my home, all the bodies dug up and reburied, all the bloody, broken grotesquerie, amounted to nothing
at all. And for that I loved him. I loved him, briefly and deeply and inexorably, as much as I had ever loved anybody.

I stumbled to him, my limbs uncooperative. When I tried to lean, I fell instead into his lap. It was not pretty or graceful, the way I was upon him, pressing my lips to his, the way I grabbed at his shoulders, trying to steady myself. But I did not care—I was so far past the point of caring. His lips were rough and chapped, and even though I felt his immediate recoil, his undeniable hiccup backward, I did not stop, so convinced I was of a promise of oblivion.

He made a noise, a closed-mouth cluck, and still I didn’t stop but pulled at his arms and tried to bring him to me. He began moving his face, making it seem like he would at least give this a try, maybe open his lips, slip his tongue in my mouth, until I realized that all he was doing was shaking his head back and forth:
no.
Still I kept going. I kissed until I couldn’t any longer. Until it became inescapable, the sick, sober state of things.

When I pulled back, his face was wide-eyed and pale, his lips moving now but wordlessly, his expression one of surprise and something else—a curdle, maybe disgust—not so dissimilar, I imagined, from what David Nelson had seen so many months before.

“Merde,”
he was saying.
“Putain,”
and I was on my knees, kneeling before him, saying, “Stop, stop, stop. It’s fine.” It was hard to look at him, his face so nakedly emotive now, hardly even his own. I wanted to explain that it was nothing, I had gotten carried away. I thought of shouting that I had never really stopped thinking he was gay. But he was up already, brushing off his shorts and his shirt as if I had splattered him with something.

He must go, he told me.
Muz goo.

And I told him no, even though I knew it was useless. “Stop!” I called, blood rushing into my face, my ears ringing. He did no such thing, prancing down the sidewalk in his sandals the same way he
had always pranced in those high-heeled shoes. I had never asked him about those high-heeled shoes. “Why,” I shouted, “did you wear those shoes?” but he did not turn around. If anything, he sped up, as if fearful I was gaining on him, though I still had not moved, was kneeling in the same spot, teeming with the knowledge that I had just destroyed the last of the good and okay things offered to me that year. “Those shoes!” I called, my voice shredding. A sound: a laugh like a cry. Was I making that sound?

I had no place to spend my days. Home, not an option; the McAllisters’, of course not. I walked. I drank rusty water from sprinklers. I poked at my blisters with my fingernails. I kneaded my calves as they ached. A stitch began in my left side, radiating from my abdomen, growing so insistent I pressed the heel of my palm to it and said to no one, “Ow. Owowow,” Squirrels stared at me. I stared back.

I thought of trying to bargain with Bayard, trying to work out joint custody of the McAllister house: he could have Monday/ Wednesday/Friday, I’d get the rest. Sometimes I walked as far as the corner of their block and peered at the lawn, watching the kids play, looking for Bayard on the porch. I didn’t go any closer.

And so. The search. It became everything, even when I no longer remembered why I’d begun. I marched and marched, on constant alert. I had no idea what I would do if I found her. There was no plan. No half-plan. There was only compulsion, one far deeper than with the letters or the straits. This from some gaping, growling chasm where nearly a year of sleeplessness stirred, where Danny said to me things like
Rydia
and
Burn on you
and
Jesus Mary Jehosephat.
Some days I was so certain of his voice I would turn around to see who was messing with me. It was easy to mistake the
smell of my own sweat for his, that dewy spice of continual motion. I could not stop.

For so long there was nothing, just trees and homes and cars speeding by. I began to wonder if it’d really been she who passed by, and even if it had been, if that suggested a regular route in this area. There were days I contemplated stopping. Thought about sitting down. But one afternoon I found her stinking drizzle along a whole strip of sidewalk. It was already starting to dry, baking away, though still with the lingering ferment coming off it. And too a remnant of her dense sweat. She had to be close, the way she still clotted the air, and I ran around nearby blocks, panting, once even shouting her strange name. But she was nowhere. Again, nowhere. Though I hardly cared, buzzing from having come so close. This. Close.

I lost count of days, though I was hazily aware of Bayard’s departure date, hazily aware of August. Aw-gust, I thought as I stared at a calendar page in a gas station where I stopped for water. What a strange and weird and screwed-up idea. Aw-gust.

It turned out to be an afternoon like all the other afternoons (humid, unforgiving, a dense hum of crickets) on a block like all the other blocks (stout houses, deep lawns, leafy trees) when I finally saw her bike blocking the sidewalk, tipping drunkenly on its kick-stand at nearly a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, the rusty little trailer still hooked behind it. At first it shocked me, the same way it had shocked me when we’d found Tanda Moore, the same way it had shocked me when Denis, Kimberly, and the police had converged in our living room. How quickly the search became the thing itself. A nervous shiver rose in me, though it was more violent than a shiver. I thought I might spit, might yelp. My pulse rang painfully in my throat.

Melissa Anne was nowhere in sight. I examined the ripped bike seat and dirty yellow stuffing poking through, the nearly empty
trailer. The cans were gone, replaced by a crumpled blanket and a moldering pile of newspaper. I tore through the paper, with no idea what I was looking for. The pages were smeared and stuck together, that same fermented stink rising off them, along with a thick, dense mold. I gagged. It was a loud, nasty noise, the noise itself making me gag again. Things crawled around the blanket, raced across my hand, up my arm.