The Local News (40 page)

My mother narrated as she turned the pages. “This is the first local story after he went missing.” “This is the article
from Newsweek. Newsweek!
Can you imagine?”

“I can’t,” Gene said simply. I found myself watching his expression, waiting for something more. I had worried in the days leading up to the trip about his reaction to this place: shock? repulsion? Now, though, there was only his normal placidity. How thrilled I usually was about this very quality—his incapacity for needless drama. It seemed so clear-eyed and revelatory, even. But as he sat beside my mother, nodding and nodding, I had the urge to kick him in the calf, to leave a welting charley horse.

“This is about the arraignment.” My mother soldiered on, pointing to articles. “This is the groundbreaking for the memorial.” When she finally finished, he placed a hand on the back of hers. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Pasternak.” She told him to call her Bernice. I had the urge to give her a charley horse too.

After a few minutes, Gene asked if there was someplace he could lie down and my mother sputtered quickly about being sorry for upsetting him and he reassured her, no, no, it wasn’t that, and explained about the pretzels and she patted him on the arm and said good, good, and that I’d show him upstairs.

•  •  •

My old room had a skeletal feel to it, with the bare bookshelves and desktop, the nearly blank walls. All of my old furniture was still here, but any mementos, any indication that someone had inhabited this place for eighteen years, were gone. There was something comforting in the austerity. Aside from my framed diploma hanging in one corner, we could have been anywhere.

Quickly Gene was down to his boxers and under the comforter. He looked huge in my bed, his feet trailing off the end. “Do you want to lie down with me?” he said, but we both knew the answer. I hadn’t had insomnia in years, but I still treated bedrooms with a ritualistic reverence, replete with eye pillows, blackout shades, and white noise machines. I’d never turned into the kind of person who could laze around casually in a bed, willfully awake.

“That is tremendously sad about your brother,” he said. I nodded and kissed his eyelids. He liked to be kissed on his eyelids. “You okay?” he said. I nodded again, though I wasn’t sure if he meant in this moment or in life. It was clear from his expression that he expected something more, a conversation, and suddenly he looked so sad, his whole face drawn. Here was the opening I had moments be-fore hoped for
—Yeah, it is sad, isn’t it?—
though now I found myself empty in the face of it, with nothing to say. I was terrible at this topic.

I asked about his stomach, and he studied me below a knit brow that gave way to a half-smile, his familiar expression of being confounded but deciding not to push it. He said it was okay. I told him he still looked pale. We talked for a bit about little nothings, if he’d left enough food for his cat, what time we needed to leave for the re-union. I studied his face, his slightly stubbled chin, the tiny scar that bisected his left eyebrow. He looked funny here, out of context,
bordering suddenly on stranger.
Gene, Gene, Gene,
I told myself, touching the tip of his nose. I kissed him, the familiar taste of his waxy lip balm, his breath slightly sour from a morning of travel and a stomachache. But he didn’t taste bad, really, just like a person, another person. When I pulled away, he smiled, his eyes already closed.

I found my mother in Danny’s room, at the computer—such a familiar pose, though the computer was new, with a large, flat monitor. Danny’s room had become a strange amalgamation of preservation and reinvention, my mother having entirely taken over the desk area. Next to the new computer sat a wiry, stacking file organizer with a cascading column of manila folders:
Maynard; Smith, T.; D’Agostino.
Already the Washington Monument sat atop a pile of yearbook stills and newspaper articles. The old file cabinet had been moved from the kitchen, joined by a pair of newer ones. A giant bulletin board hung overhead, crowded with photos of her small army of missing kids. Some had Post-it notes attached, indicating
Found,
others with dates: 12/30/87–3/9/01.

But all of Danny’s old things were still here too: the bed, the dresser, the wall-spanning single bookshelf lined with trophies and old, yellowing comic books. A lone, improbable beer poster still hung above his bed, the corners curled from age, a rip snaking through the scantily clad, big-haired woman. Inside his closet, I suspected, his clothes still hung.

The room unsettled me, making it seem like my mother spent her days in a tomb. Though, admittedly, it wasn’t all that much worse than my father’s bright, antiseptic house, with its matching leather furniture and Berber rugs that pulled easily and often, leaving
Dolly on her hands and knees with cuticle scissors, clipping the errant threads. There you’d find well-placed photos of me and Danny on a back table in the den or on one end of a mantel filled mostly with more recent shots of Dolly, Dad, and their towheaded girls. There was something creepy about the pictures of me and Danny, something eerily undifferentiated. It didn’t matter that one of us was dead and the other alive; we were both just the kids he used to have.

My mother clacked away at the keyboard.

“Hey,” I said.

She spun in her chair. “Oh,” she said, a hand to her chest. “You startled me.” A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray next to the keyboard.

“Still smoking,” I said. It came out sharply.

She looked at me and then into her lap. She shrugged. Gone, all the girlish excitement she’d had around Gene. I tried to think of something nicer. “Working?” I said.

She told me yes, her hand moving automatically toward her cigarette, then stopping.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care.” I’d meant that, at least, to sound nicer. “You’re working on the Western Michigan girl stuff?”

“Oh, no, no,” she said. “I have about four other kids right now. I’m e-mailing a father in Wisconsin. His ex-wife, looks like, ran off with their son during a custody weekend.” She paged through the folders in the wire rack. “Here,” she said, pulling out a picture from one of the files. The boy was little, six or seven, with wheaty hair, his lips a shiny, shiny red.

“Evan,” she said, with feeling. “His name is Evan.” She was insatiable when it came to this stuff.

“Evan,” I repeated, trying to affect a little bit of the airy countenance Gene seemed to come by so naturally.

She smoked. I picked at my torn cuticles. Eventually she said, “I like Gene.”

“I like Gene too.” If you listened carefully, you could hear the low, slurring noise of his breathing from the next room. He would sleep for hours. He could nap like an infant, Gene.

My mother stared at me, as if waiting for my next thought. I didn’t have a next thought, except maybe that the new roundness of her face made her look soft, almost babyish, which made eye contact difficult, and I found myself glancing instead at her shoulder or the bright tip of her cigarette. Or that the bulletin board was even worse than the daguerreotypes.

“Don’t let me stop you from what you’re doing,” I said. She looked at me strangely. I tried to smile. If I were of sound mind, I would have simply gone downstairs and sat by myself on the couch and patted Olivia in relative peace. But something rooted me in the doorway, the same occasional impulse that guided me through record stores, looking for the old serpent-tongue-and-red-rose-dotted Chili Peppers album that had been Danny’s favorite, or sent me on an Internet search of Elvin Tate (pages and pages of results, unsettlingly), the impulse toward prurient surrender, the want to look. Leaning against the doorjamb and peering at the geometric sheets of his childhood bed, the figurines on the trophies, worn now of their gold paint, revealing a pale plastic beneath, the framed photo—that once ubiquitous yearbook shot of the blue background and the cowlick—I felt an unmistakable if infinitesimal slackening, something approximating an exhalation. This, perhaps, was the singular distinction between home and everyplace else. The reason I stayed away. The reason I came back. Here I could do this, look and look.

My mother asked if I wanted to help. She had some pamphlets that needed to be prepped for mailing. I said no. She said something
else about Gene and nice. I didn’t have a response. I just wanted to stand there, left alone if possible.

When it became clear I was neither coming nor going, she said an uncertain “Okay” and went back to what she was doing, finishing her e-mail and printing something out, stuffing, stamping, and sealing an envelope. Occasionally she turned to look at me, and I continued to try smiling. “Honey—” she said once, but did not finish.

Her phone rang a couple times. The first call was from a man named Douglas. She asked him if he’d gotten in touch with the Du-luth police yet. She read aloud through a list of drop-in centers and homeless shelters she’d found in northeast Minnesota, all with a note of calm efficiency I wasn’t used to. Our own calls were more of a collective stammer.

The second call was from a woman, Franny. Even from where I stood, I could hear the sobbing, a sound that never failed to make me want to rip my ears from my head. My mother appeared unfazed. She slowly repeated Franny’s name, then said, “Listen to me. We are going to get through this. I am here.” And then for a very long time she simply sat and listened to the woman’s howls, nodding slowly as if Franny could see her. As the crying faded, my mother began with low questions: “What’s happened today? Any new news?” She took notes as Franny talked.
Six mo anniv,
she wrote.
Frank @ hotel.
I found myself wondering who Frank was and why he was at a hotel.

“This,” my mother told her, “would be a good time for more media. When was the last time you were on the news?” Again with the same low tone of authority, shades of, amazingly, Denis Jimenez. It had never occurred to me that she might have grown good at this by now. I shifted my weight against the doorframe, suddenly feeling like a voyeur, telling myself to stop lurking, to go read the data from work I’d brought with me, to go curl up next to Gene.

My mom and Franny made plans to check in the next day. Afterward, my mom did an Internet search for Columbus television and radio stations. She printed some pages. She scribbled long notes into a file. She kept telling me how it would just be a few more minutes, soon we would visit.

“It’s okay,” I told her. I didn’t particularly want to visit, and I could see it wouldn’t be just a few more minutes. There was something I recognized in the piecing together, the sorting and arranging, the absorption in the task at hand. I stared at the oldest of the file cabinets, where large orange starbursts of rust were corroding the paint. I wondered what the inside looked like now. I thought of saying something to her, something about having never lost the investigatory impulse either—my job, a daily mining of meaning from chaos—about me too still making up for how wrong we’d gotten it the first time. I watched the back of her head, smoke unfurling around her. My mom was getting old. Her hair was thinning, a dime-sized bald spot now revealed at the crown of her head. I’d never seen that before.

“You’re doing good,” I said, and when she turned to me, the furrow to her brow, the deep crinkle at the bridge of her nose, made me think she’d misheard me. For a moment she stared at me with such a familiar expression of disorientation
—(And
who
exactly are
you
?
)—I thought I might shake her by the shoulders and scream. But then her mouth quivered slightly and she gave the most sheepish of smiles, as if it had bloomed in spite of itself. Her eyes glistened with a sheen of the wetness that used to be ever-present, used to spill so easily down her face.

But she wasn’t crying now. She was nodding at me, smiling, and there was something shameful in realizing how little it took to make her happy. My mother, the original rescue beagle. I could not recall the last time I had paid her a compliment, genuine or otherwise.
The last time I had said a kind word to her. For years I’d thought of it as me waiting for her, me the one who had given up on the waiting. What, I wondered, if I had gotten it backward?

“It’s good work,” I said again, and I meant it. It made some sense, her choice to spend her days in this room, to remake a life from exactly the point where our previous one had imploded. What else had we—me, my dad too—offered?

“I like it,” she said. “I really do. It makes me feel like I’m doing something.” She sounded girlish, hopeful and excited. She patted the foot of the bed. “You can help.”

It’d been years since I’d stepped across the threshold of this doorway. There had always been something repellent about it. When I paused, my mother added quickly, “Only if you want. You don’t have to,” and already the familiar sound of defeat had returned. What must it have been like for her, I wondered, to have been left with me, only me, the child who’d had so little feeling for her, so little propensity toward consolation or sympathy? Two blights on her house, my poor mother.

I went in.

The mattress sagged easily beneath me. I was imagining it, I knew, the way I thought I might be able to detect a whiff of him beneath the smoke and the oily musk of my mother. A hint of sweat or dirt or Tonka Truck or baseball glove. It was a complete impossibility, particulate-wise. I was aware of that.

“I can smell him,” I said. It wasn’t more than a whisper.

Again her look of surprise. Again her smile.

“I know,” she said, searching and searching my face. I worried that this would turn into something big, something grasping and tearful and too much. But she just handed me the flat stack of pamphlets that needed folding.
What to Do in the First Days,
it said on top of the far right column, and I was grateful for the task. It was good
to have something to do with my hands. She gave me directions—I didn’t need them, but I let her tell me anyway, her chair scooted close, her knees pressed into mine. I creased the pages carefully, one fold, then the next, lining up the corners exactly, piling neat stacks next to me on the bed until just before they toppled. When I handed her fistfuls, she said, “Very good” and “Excellent,” and even though I knew it was work anyone could do—a small child, a trained monkey—I didn’t protest. I let her say nice things, imagining us to be the kind of women who were always like this, ones who sat in quiet tandem, murmuring sweetly.