December Park

by Ronald Malfi

It occurred to me that I’d never seen him riding a bike. For the past couple of weeks, we had just happened to walk everywhere—to and from school, down to the Quickman, even to Scott’s house on the days we all went over to watch horror movies. It had never crossed my mind that Adrian didn’t own a bike. What kid didn’t own a bike?

  “Well,” I said, “you can ride on my handlebars.”

  He eyed my bike warily. “How does that work?”

  “You just get on and ride while I pedal and steer.”

  “Get on,” Adrian repeated, his voice low and laced with uncertainty. Again he adjusted his glasses, then ran his tongue over his upper lip.

  “Yeah, man. It’s no sweat. Really.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Listen,” I said. “I promised to meet you out here and follow you to wherever without knowing a single thing. I think you can at least trust me to hop on the goddamn handlebars, chickenshit.”

  I thought the chickenshit was overkill and he might react to it the way he had reacted to Michael laughing at him. However, I was surprised to see an awkward grin crack one corner of Adrian’s mouth—a grin I couldn’t help but return.

  “Yeah, okay, but if you drop me, I’m going to kick your butt.”

  “You couldn’t kick my butt if you had a tractor trailer for a foot,” I said, and we both started giggling.

  I wheeled my bike across the yard. It was a green and white Kent with worn handgrips and Garbage Pail Kids stickers stuck to the frame. It paled in comparison to Michael’s stellar Mongoose, but it was mine, and I couldn’t imagine not having it. Out on the street, I straddled the bike and held the handlebars steady.

  “What do I do?” Adrian said.

  “Just hop on.”

  “Like . . .”

  “With your butt. Climb on backward.”

  “I don’t know if . . .”

  Jesus Christ, I thought.

  “You won’t go fast, will you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Promise?”

  “Holy shit, Adrian!”

  It took him three attempts to hoist himself up. Once he had situated himself, I proceeded to pedal up Worth Street. His grip on the handlebars tightened. Since Adrian weighed less than my other friends he should have been easier to transport, but he possessed no sense of balance, so it was like transporting an unwieldy sack of potatoes on my handlebars. The backpack strapped to his shoulders didn’t make it any easier.

  Afraid of getting his feet caught in the spokes of the front wheel, he kept his legs straight out ahead of the front tire. I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long, and I waited for his legs to give out. Yet he managed to keep those scarecrow legs out ahead of us all the way down Worth Street and halfway down Haven Street. By the time we reached Governor Highway, he was perched perfectly on my handlebars, his legs tucked up beneath him, like a chimp on a swing.

  The streets were eerily quiet, which was not unusual for a Sunday evening. Even the highway was fairly calm. The shops in this part of town were shutting down for the night, their lights winking out one at a time.

  I pedaled harder, running parallel to the highway, the cool early-evening air drawing tears from the corners of my eyes. On the handlebars, Adrian unleashed a strangled cry. He’s going to have a heart attack, I thought, yet the notion did not cause me to slow down. In fact, I pushed us harder, and, accompanied by a second sheep-like bleat of fear from Adrian, I hooked a sharp right, hopped the shallow curb, and drove us straight through a copse of trees.

  I’ll have to explain to his mother, that creepy old witch, how I killed her son, I thought, pedaling faster. Around me, the world was a colorless blur. She’ll put a curse on me and turn me into a toadstool or a talking frog.

  Like a maniac, I threw my head back and laughed. No doubt little Adrian Gardiner was soiling his drawers right about now. Less than a second before we hit one of the highway intersections, the traffic lights changed. We bulleted through the intersection, and someone blasted their car horn at us.

  Adrian groaned, and his feet shot out ahead of him again.

  “Hold on!”

  We crested a hill, and then it was nothing but a gradual downslope. I took the hill faster than necessary, the streetlamps smearing to runny blots of light in my peripheral vision. Of course, with Adrian hunkered down on my handlebars, I couldn’t see directly ahead of me. But I had ridden this stretch of roadway since my early adolescence, and I knew every bump, groove, and pothole like I knew the contours of my own mattress or which floorboards outside my father’s bedroom to avoid at night when sneaking out of the house.

  I burned through the intersection of Point and Counterpoint and squeezed the hand brakes just as my rear tire fishtailed halfway around. We came to a stop mere feet from the guardrail that separated the roadway from the wooded embankment. The silence that filled my ears an instant later was like a sonic boom.

  Almost wetly, Adrian dripped off my handlebars to the pavement. I eased my bike down on the ground and went over to where Adrian crouched in a ball. His shoulders hitched, and I thought, Great. I made him cry. All of a sudden I felt like a world-class asshole.

  “Hey, man,” I said, putting one hand on his shoulder. “Hey . . .”

  Adrian sprung up, startling me. His face was red and wind chapped, and there were tears leaking from behind his glasses. The kid was laughing. “That was awesome!”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “I can’t believe it,” he cried. “That was great. That was . . . fucking great.”

  “Jeez,” I muttered, though I was smiling now right along with him. “You kiss your mom with that mouth?”

  “Fuck,” he said again, his laughter subsiding, his respiration heavy. “Fuck it, Angie. Fuck it.”

  I suddenly felt very sad for him. Had he had even a single friend in Chicago?

  Once he got his laughter under control, we wheeled my bike through the break in the guardrail and then down the sloping embankment until the trees grew thicker and the ground leveled out. Broken bits of glass and shards of metal sparkled from a particular patch of dark ground, remnants of Audrey MacMillan’s car accident in October. The scattered detritus would probably be here until the next ice age.

  I let my bike fall into a nest of brambles, then swiped the hair out of my eyes. Even in the midst of winter and with the branches bare, the woods were still thick and insulated from the rest of the world. The ground was hard, and the tallest trees seemed to reach up with their skeletal branches to poke holes in the gray fabric of the evening sky.

  “Okay,” I said. “So we’re here. You gonna tell me what’s going on?”

  Adrian kicked around in the dead leaves, turning over large stones with his shoes and bending down to examine the random whatnot that captivated his attention for a few seconds here and there. For all I knew, he was deliberately trying to ignore me. I didn’t understand any of it, and I wondered what the hell I was doing out here with this strange kid, humoring his obsession about a murdered girl.

  “Before I tell you,” he said after I’d expelled a pent-up breath and dropped onto a moss-covered deadfall, “can you tell me something? Something personal, like a secret?”

  “What?”

  Adrian peeled off his giant backpack and tossed it on the ground beside a craggy-looking oak tree. “If I’m gonna tell you a secret, I want you to tell me something, too,” he said, sitting down beside me on the fallen tree. “This way, we’re even.”

  I had no idea what he was going on about. Every fiber of my being beckoned me to stand up, dig my dirt bike out of the bushes, and climb back up the embankment, yet it seemed like some outside force kept me plastered to my seat on the dead tree. Even down here in the woods, the wind was strong and biting, and I felt my cheeks growing numb and the moisture around my eyes freezing to solid crystals.

  For one insane moment I thought about the time I’d nearly drowned in the Chesapeake Bay after falling over the side of a johnboat when I was seven or
eight—how the black water had wasted no time swallowing me up and dragging me down, down.

  It had just been Charles and me on the boat that day. We had puttered in and out of coves and eventually found our way into the open bay where the waves were great and angry beasts. Charles had pointed out the face of the immense cliff that was the ass end of Harting Farms. The cliff’s face was pocked by countless bores in the rock, reminding me of photographs I’d seen in National Geographic of holes in the rock face where cave-dwelling Indians lived.

  I’d gone overboard. My entire body suddenly went heavy, and then the cold attacked me and burrowed its way straight through my flesh and into the channels of my ears and the marrow of my bones. Ice water filled my lungs. I was rendered blind. Charles had fished me out and dragged me back onto the boat where I coughed and sputtered and vomited brackish water onto my sneakers.

  And while I sat there gasping for air with Charles thumping a heavy fist against my back, I couldn’t shake the sheer terrifying helplessness I had felt when I’d gone under that black and brine-tasting water. I could swim, but I could have just as easily drowned. The panic had set in as quickly as a pistol shot, and it consumed everything else. Everything.

  I shivered at the memory. Glancing over at Adrian, I said, “Do you know the reason I’m in your English class?”

  “I heard you shoved some teacher and they moved you.”

  “Mr. Naczalnik.”

  “They call him Nozzle Neck.”

  “Yeah, I know what they call him,” I said. Even after all these months, I still hadn’t told this to anyone. Not even Peter. I didn’t know how I felt about telling it to Adrian, but it seemed like the right time, the right thing to do.

  “Anyway, that’s not what happened. See, we had to write an essay in class about something that had had a profound effect on us. I couldn’t write anything at first. I kept staring at the clock and looking around the room. Then I thought of something and I began to write. But when Naczalnik asked to turn the papers in, I refused. He came to the desk and grabbed the pages from me. I pulled them back. I told him I didn’t want to turn in the paper and to just give me an F. But he kept pulling the papers from me. The papers ripped and he fell backward over a desk. I didn’t push him.”

  Adrian was silent for a moment. “What did you write about that you didn’t want him to see?” he said eventually.

  “I wrote about my brother, Charles, and the day he saved me from drowning in the Chesapeake Bay.”

  “Oh.” His voice was so small it was nearly nonexistent. I could have been talking to myself in the woods. “I didn’t know you have a brother.”

  “I don’t anymore. He died in Iraq in ’91, during an invasion. In Desert Storm.”

  “The war invasion?”

  “Yes. He was . . .” My mind was suddenly filled with the image of Courtney Cole’s caved-in skull. “He was killed there. It was a roadside bomb, so it must have been . . . uh, it’s . . .” I cleared my throat. “We buried an empty coffin,” I finished, hoping that would explain it all.

  Across from me, Adrian said nothing.

  “I wrote about the day I fell into the bay and almost died. I wondered if maybe I was the one who was supposed to die in our family and not Charles. If I had died, maybe Charles wouldn’t have left home, wouldn’t have left my dad, and would have never gone to war.” My voice cracked. I felt like a helpless child.

  Attempting to regain some control, I paused before continuing. “Anyway, it’s stupid but that’s what I wrote about. I don’t know why I wrote it but I did. And I didn’t want Naczalnik or anyone else reading it. It was for me to write and no one else to know.”

  Adrian turned away from me and stared at the ground, which was covered in dead leaves, pine needles, and a latticework of moonlight issuing through the canopy of naked tree limbs overhead. “That’s a good secret. Did you ever tell anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry about Charles.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Was he a good older brother?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’ve always wanted a brother,” Adrian said.

  I just nodded, chewing my lower lip. My face burned.

  When something rustled among the underbrush several yards to our left, we both spun our heads in that direction in unison, collectively holding our breath. The rustling fell silent.

  We waited, listening for the sound to repeat. Of course, it was probably some forest critter—a deer or a skunk or something—but it still set me on edge. Suddenly, it was Mischief Night all over again, and I was hiding in the trees from Nathan Keener and the rest of those delinquents, when from nowhere I thought I’d heard a rustling noise directly behind me. I’d been certain that someone was right there in the trees with me, and I still hadn’t forgotten that disquieting sense of violation.

  “Probably just a big bird,” I said, hoping to convince myself more than anything.

  Adrian stared at his feet. “I know your dad’s a cop. Please don’t tell him, okay?”

  “Tell him about what?”

  “About this.” He pulled one hand out of the pocket of his ski parka and extended it to me, his palm open. Something small and metallic glinted in the center of his palm.

  I leaned over and peered at it. “What is it?”

  “It’s a locket. Here. Open your hand.”

  I reached out and opened one hand, and Adrian let the item fall into it. It was a locket, all right—a silver heart with a small loop at the top where presumably it had once been affixed to a chain. It was nearly weightless in my hand. I brought it up to my face and examined it more closely. “Does it open?”

  “Yeah.”

  I stuck my thumbnail between the two halves, and the heart-shaped locket unclasped. I was careful opening it, expecting to find a small photograph inside—my grandmother owned a similar locket, and she kept a tiny photo of me on one side, Charles on the other—but it was empty.

  “I found it when I first moved to town.” Adrian pointed up the wooded embankment and in the approximate direction of Counterpoint Lane. “A car had crashed in the woods, and I watched the tow truck pull it out. When I looked down, it was right there in the ditch.”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure why this was such a big deal to him.

  “It’s hers,” he said.

  “Whose?”

  “The dead girl’s,” Adrian said. “Courtney Cole’s.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know. Who else could it belong to?”

  “Anyone could have lost it.”

  Adrian stared at me. His respiration whistled through the stovepipe of his throat. “Yeah, but it’s hers. I didn’t think anything of it until you told me about what happened to her. Before I knew, I thought it was just another piece of . . . well, something someone had lost.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s hers.”

  Adrian took the heart-shaped locket back from me. He turned it over and over in his small, white fingers. There were black crescents of dirt beneath his fingernails. “It’s hers. I discovered it right across the street from where her body was found. And here, look at the clasp,” he said, holding it out. “See? It’s broken.”

  I saw that the little silver hoop had been broken in two. “So what?”

  “So maybe it happened when someone pulled it off her.” His eyes were locked on mine. “Maybe it broke during a struggle.”

  “I guess it’s possible,” I conceded.

  “No.” There was a sharp finality to his voice. “It’s not just possible. It’s hers. I can feel it. I can tell.”

  I returned my gaze to the shimmering locket pinched between Adrian’s thumb and forefinger. “Well, if you really think it’s hers, we should take it to the police. We can give it to my dad, if you want.”

  “No,” he practically snapped, clutching the locket against his chest. “No, Angie.”

  “If you’re right and that did belong to her, it’s evidence.
We have to let the cops know you found it. It might have fingerprints on it or—”

  “I wiped it down and cleaned it when I found it. There aren’t any fingerprints anymore, if there ever were.”

  “There still could be—”

  “There aren’t.”

  A cold wind rustled the trees. I was suddenly aware of my exposed skin prickling in the chill air. My teeth had started to chatter at some point, though I wasn’t entirely sure that was due to the temperature. “You didn’t have to bring me down here tonight to show me that locket. So why are we here?”

  “I want you to show me where the body was found,” he said. “There might be other things like this locket down here, too. We could find them. I’m a good scavenger hunter.”

  “But what do you think we’d find?”

  Adrian shrugged and suddenly looked as innocent as a newborn. “I have no idea. It could be anything.”

  “And why would we bother finding it? Because you like to collect junk?”

  “No. Because we might find clues that tell us who the killer is.”

  The image of us traipsing around the underbrush looking for clues like the goddamn Hardy Boys nearly caused me to laugh. Not to mention how absurd it was that we might be able to uncover something the police had missed. “The police have already been through the whole area. They even had dogs down here. What makes you think we’ll find something they missed?”

  “They missed the locket, didn’t they?” he retorted.

  “The only reason you found it before the cops did was because they weren’t looking for anything. Courtney Cole’s body hadn’t been found yet. If that’s even her locket in the first place.”

  Adrian slowly closed his fingers around the locket. “I’m telling you, it’s hers,” he repeated, and I knew then that I was wasting my breath trying to convince him otherwise.

  “So this is why you wanted to know about Courtney Cole,” I said.

  “Yeah. I mean, I didn’t make the connection with the locket until you told me about her and said she had been killed here.”

  “I didn’t say she was killed here,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if there was a difference. “Just found here.”