Absolute Brightness

by James Lecesne

  That was a good night for us. For all of us. And I’m glad that I have it as a memory to look back on, because a week later everything changed.

  eight

  OFFICER DESANTIS HAD a red face and a big neck that pressed against his shirt collar. His chest was huge. As he jotted down the information about Leonard into a logbook, I watched the buttons of his shirt strain against the fabric and thought for sure that one of them was due to pop at any minute. He told us that if experience had taught him anything, it was that when a kid like Leonard disappears, he usually turns up several days later with a long story about how he just needed some space so he went and spent a night or two with some friend.

  “Leonard doesn’t really have friends,” my mother pointed out. “Just the kids from Drama Camp. Other than that, he doesn’t know anyone.”

  Officer DeSantis looked up at her and said, “That’s what I’m saying. Every kid knows someone.”

  When I pointed out that Leonard had also become pretty chummy with plenty of Mom’s customers, Mom cut her eyes at me and then sighed as if I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “He’s very tight with some of them,” I explained. I felt it was best if the authorities had all the facts to work with. “Leonard even convinced Mrs. Cafiero to let her hair go natural. Stuff like that. Oh, and there’s also Mr. Buddy. Buddy Howard.”

  “Who’s he?” asked Officer DeSantis, jotting down the name.

  “He’s the guy who sort of runs Drama Camp. We telephoned him last night when Leonard didn’t come home. Usually Mr. Buddy gives Leonard a ride, so naturally … But Mr. Buddy said that Leonard didn’t want a ride last night after rehearsal. Said he was going to meet a friend.”

  “A friend,” said the policeman as if to prove his point. “See what I mean?”

  None of us was convinced. Deirdre, who had been standing patiently behind me, sighed heavily and said, “Could you just, y’know, look for him?”

  Officer DeSantis took all our information and assured us that he’d check out every lead. Then he suggested the idea of making a poster. He said it had worked for cats and dogs and once for the unhappy owner of an escaped parakeet. People see the missing whatever on the poster and it jogs their memory. They call. We’d be surprised, he said; and then he suggested that we might try posting the information on the Internet as well. The plan sounded pretty desperate to me. But clearly it appealed to my mother, because there she was, within the hour, sitting at our kitchen table, affixing Leonard’s picture to a piece of paper.

  It was a Polaroid photograph that I had taken myself almost a month ago at my mother’s picnic for her regulars. Every Memorial Day she throws a picnic, and every year she swears that it’s going to be the last time. After it’s all over, she collapses onto her bed and does a monologue about how it’s all just gotten to be too much trouble, deviling eggs, cutting crusts off sandwiches, lugging coolers, buying paper tablecloths, plastic dinnerware, party favors, setting everything up just to show some appreciation. “Next year,” she says when it’s over, “I’m giving out free rain bonnets and that’ll be the end of it.” But then by the following May, she’s forgotten all about her promise and we are stuck dragging stuff to the same old picnic area.

  This past year was a little different because Leonard had decided to set up a booth and offer Mom’s customers before-and-after Polaroid portraits. He said that for some of the women it would be their “before” photos and for others it would be “after.” His marketing ploy was to let each woman decide for herself where she fell on the time line. For those who felt that the best part of their lives was still in the future, he labeled their photos “before”; for those who held to the idea that they were living the best of their lives today, he labeled their photos “after.” Five bucks a pop.

  At the time, we all thought the scheme was pretty lame. But even Deirdre, who said she wouldn’t be caught dead at one of Mom’s picnics, admitted that the booth was a stroke of genius. At the end of the day, Leonard had pulled in real money—$225—and no one was about to argue with a fistful of dollars.

  After the shindig was over and everyone had left the fairground, Leonard plopped himself down on the milk crate in front of his crudely painted backdrop (a tropical beach motif) and demanded that I take his picture. I told him I’d do it only if he paid me. He handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and we went to work.

  Snap. Grrr. Snap. Grrr. Snap. Grrr.

  “So, wait,” I said as we watched the three perfect squares develop in the palm of my hand. “Is this your ‘before’ or ‘after’?”

  “Both,” he said. “I’m right in the middle.”

  The picture showed him wearing a striped T-shirt, his hair going every which way, and one eye looking a little bigger than the other. Almost all of his teeth were exposed, demonstrating his eagerness to please just about anyone who cared to look at him. Except for the hint of a macramé choker that was peeking out from under the collar of his T-shirt, he looked like the kind of kid you might just walk right by in a bus terminal somewhere in the Midwest. There was nothing in the picture that made him seem as different and unusual as he was in real life. Nothing crazy like those insane platform sneakers, which he insisted on risking his life to wear. I mentioned this to my mother when she showed me the MISSING poster, but she simply moved her hands as if she were fanning gnats away.

  “We have to do something!” she said. “We can’t just sit around not doing anything!”

  The finished poster read:

  MISSING

  14-year-old boy

  LEONARD

  Light Brown HAIR

  HAZEL EYES

  4’ 11”

  LAST SEEN WEARING WHITE T-SHIRT, BLUE JEANS, BLUE NYLON JACKET

  My first reaction was to imagine Leonard’s horror at being described so drably. His hair, as he often reminded us, was not light brown but dark blond. His eye color of choice had always been green. (“What the hell is hazel?” he used to say. “Hazel’s not even a color. It’s an old lady name.”) As for his outfit, not a word was said about the embroidered sunburst, which he had painstakingly stitched onto the white T-shirt just over his heart, using every available color in my mother’s sewing basket. He was so proud of his handiwork and the fact that he had taught himself how to thread a needle, I knew if he found out, he’d be mad as hell we hadn’t mentioned it. And, excuse me, a blue nylon jacket? I don’t think so. Leonard was more likely to refer to that article of clothing as “an aqua-colored Windbreaker” or “a turquoise sailing jacket.”

  Not a word about his platform sneakers.

  After making five hundred copies on bright yellow paper at the copy place, Deirdre and I were mobilized. We were given a stack and sent forth to cover a grid of streets, even cul-de-sacs, which had been meticulously mapped out and sectioned off by my mother. Mrs. Landis, Mrs. Manotti, and Mrs. Kavanaugh pitched in, and they were given handbills and areas as well. We taped copies of the poster on telephone poles all over our assigned neighborhoods and pasted them in some of the store windows, and whenever we passed someone on the street, we forced a flyer into their hands and explained the situation. Within hours, Leonard had become a local celebrity.

  It wasn’t just our regular customers, however, who called on the phone at all hours to register their concern, their worry, their predictions and escalating hysteria; we also heard from crank callers who pretended to know something about Leonard’s whereabouts and then asked for ridiculous amounts of ransom money (anywhere from five dollars to a cool million). These calls usually ended in a fit of adolescent giggling and then a click. We didn’t even bother to *69 them. We were too tired.

  Some of our customers felt it was their duty to stop by and weigh in with their opinions and their stories, which inevitably involved missing children, dead babies, and student nurses who had been tortured and then dumped in shallow graves by maniacs. They talked as if they had known the Lindbergh baby and little JonBenét personally. They were experts at the unsolved
mysteries of this world, and thanks to TV, each of them had an encyclopedic knowledge of murderous motives and evil deeds. To be honest, I wasn’t in the mood to hear these stories; they caused me to question just how good or evil human beings were at heart and how important a part God played in their dastardly acts.

  If I had been a big believer in God, I would have chosen a moment like that to strike a deal with Him or Her. The deal would have certainly involved a solemn promise to be a big sister to Leonard when he was returned to us. In other words, I would have promised to be good, to introduce Leonard to my gang (as soon as I belonged to one), and to stand up for him when someone called him a sissy in the school parking lot. In return, God would have been expected to deliver Leonard back into our midst safe and sound.

  But the thing I’ve learned about God is that He/She doesn’t really respond that well to vows, threats, bargaining, or promises because He/She either

  1. is above it all;

  2. really doesn’t exist;

  3. has a plan that involves heartbreak and misery for everyone.

  If it is 1 or 2, there is no point making promises and swearing to do things. It’s all just praying into the wind.

  But if it turns out to be 3, then I have to suppose there is some hidden value in the heartbreak and misery, and my job as a human is to figure out what it all means before it’s too late.

  We returned to the police station the following day, and Mom cried right after she signed her name to the missing persons document. Deirdre didn’t come. It was just me sitting with Mom in the waiting area of the police station as she wiped her tears and reapplied her makeup. When she raised her lip-gloss applicator to her face and realized that this was the last item that Leonard had bought for her, there was a rush of fresh tears.

  “Leonard told me that my Avon frosted pink had outlived its shelf life. Then he goes out and buys me this—Glossimer with high-beam gleam by Chanel.”

  More tears, and then, “What am I going to do without him?”

  At first, I thought she meant what was she going to do without Leonard to advise her on her choice of makeup. But when she sighed and said, “Oh, Phoebe, why does everything always go wrong for us?” I realized that this went much deeper than just blush powder and lip color. Later, when we got home, she was to put the official “missing” document in her brown purse-size accordion-file folder along with her divorce papers, the yellowing newspaper obituaries of her favorite customers, and several bad reports from our school. In the future, whenever her thoughts darkly turned toward depression, whenever she was convinced that things never worked out for the Hertle family, she could just take down that accordion-file folder from the shelf in her closet, thumb through the evidence, and come to the same sad conclusion: Everything always goes wrong for us.

  But at the moment we were still in the police station. And the next thing I knew, my arms were wrapped around my mother. Her White Diamonds perfume by Elizabeth Taylor was mixed together with the familiar odors of the salon and my entire childhood. I pressed myself into her. I could hear the actual beating of her heart loud and clear through her rayon blouse.

  “You’re crushing the air outta me,” she said, pausing in mid-sob to clutch my shoulders. “Ease up.”

  Finally we broke apart, but only because the contents of her purse had crashed onto the just-mopped linoleum floor and everything went sliding every which way. I reached under the chair for her mascara and heard myself saying things like “Don’t worry.” I felt around for her little mirror and repeated, “Everything will be all right.” I said, “It’ll all work out, you’ll see,” like I really meant it. I was suddenly spouting a stream of comforting expressions that my mother had used on me in the past when things were not all right, not working out, and the situation remained just plain awful.

  “I know,” Mom said, sniffing back her tears and forcing one of her smiles. “I know, I know.”

  We were, the two of us, like amateur actors in a bad play, forced to recite lines and affect emotions that were way beyond our abilities to convey convincingly. In other words, we were a mess.

  A drunk was seated in one of the plastic chairs opposite us. Our audience. Not yet ten a.m. and the guy was already hammered. He wore a Duke University T-shirt and satiny purple running shorts, an outfit that clashed stylistically with his black nylon socks and leather-soled loafers. His face was the color of a dirty gym sock and not that attractive to begin with. As he came to life, he pointed his scruffy chin and tequila-soaked eyeballs up toward the ceiling and said in a voice way too loud to be ignored, “In touch or indifferent! Get it? In touch! Or in different!”

  I looked away. Another bad actor, I said to myself.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said to my mother.

  When we got back to the house, the last of the sunlight was draining from the kitchen curtains and Mom announced that she was going to call Uncle Mike in Mexico. Mom had a crazy hunch (or maybe it was just a crazy hope) that Uncle Mike might know something of Leonard’s whereabouts. When she got him on the phone, Uncle Mike said, no, he hadn’t heard from Leonard, not at all, not since getting a postcard of a bikini-clad blonde holding a beach ball over her head and standing on what is supposed to be one of Neptune’s fun-filled recreation areas. That card had been in the racks at the drugstore since before I was old enough to read the lazy hot-pink inscription: HAVING A BALL! As if such a thing had ever been possible in this town. According to Uncle Mike, Leonard wrote to him saying that he loved his new home in Neptune, the salon, the people, Aunt Ellen, Deirdre, and especially me.

  I practically screamed into the receiver.

  “What!”

  All three of us were on various extensions around the house. I had the old wall phone down in the basement, Mom was in her room, and Deirdre was listening in on the kitchen phone.

  “Yup,” Uncle Mike continued long distance. “Says you and him was as close to best friends as he was liable to get.”

  There was a pause as everyone let this lie soak in and take hold. No one offered a contradictory statement. I hated myself.

  Finally Uncle Mike told us not to worry, because Leonard had spunk. And then he added, “That kid can smell shit in the wind from forty friggin’ miles away.” I assumed this was an expression he had picked up from his new life in Mexico, spoken by his new cronies, who probably had a lot of experience with both shit and wind.

  Uncle Mike also told us about his cattle and said that he probably had two more seasons before he went to slaughter. I gagged. As a vegetarian, I am opposed to the slaughter of cattle. Right then and there I canceled out Uncle Mike’s ranch as one of Leonard’s possible runaway destinations. A home on the range where cows are routinely slaughtered and where the smell of shit is always in the wind didn’t sound like much of a refuge for him. Leonard was more the type to be heading toward a place like Oz, as in The Wizard of. In any case, as far as I was concerned, Uncle Mike was a dead end.

  After that, Mom announced that the time had come for us to go rifling through Leonard’s things. We needed a clue, she said. Though reluctant at first, Deirdre joined us downstairs and together we pulled and jostled stuff from various hiding places around Leonard’s makeshift room. I felt like the Gestapo on a suburban house tour. We unrolled socks, shook change loose from pants pockets, found a collection of men’s muscle magazines and ogled the pictures of overly cheerful guy-guys in teeny-tiny bathing suits and flexed biceps, tried to decipher the doodles that appeared in the margins of schoolbooks. We found a list of names of all Mom’s customers with sketches of their hairdos penciled in beside them. There were no real surprises; everything was just as we expected. But when we came across several packages of condoms stuffed in a crevice between Grandma Hertle’s boxes, Mom grabbed her hair and let a little shout escape from her.

  “Ew, ew, ew,” Deirdre exclaimed, as she chucked the packets clear across the room.

  “Everyone get a grip,” I said, and then suggested that maybe Leonard’s c
ondoms were evidence of wishful thinking. “I mean, they haven’t been opened.”

  “Still,” said Deirdre, and then she shuddered theatrically just to let us know that she couldn’t bear to think of anything sexual connected to Leonard. “It’s totally gross.”

  My own surprise came later, when I pulled a floor plan of the American Museum of Natural History from beneath Leonard’s mattress. Who knew that Leonard had an interest in natural history—or in anything natural, for that matter? He was more the type who went in for artificial everything—sweetener, hair color, flavors. The idea that he might have been interested in dinosaurs, moon rocks, or semiprecious minerals made me pause and reevaluate the person I thought I knew as Leonard Pelkey. Were there other aspects to him that I had failed to notice? Had he actually been to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City? And if so, with whom?

  From the moment Leonard came to live with us, I did everything I could to not pay attention to him, his interests, his whereabouts, his history. As far as I was concerned, he was an unwelcome stranger in our midst, white noise, dead air. Other people fell for him left and right, they felt sorry for him, they wanted to know what he was up to, what he was thinking about, and how he was getting on. But I had no intention of signing up for The Leonard Pelkey Show, and nothing he did or said, no bribe offered or prize promised, could change my mind.

  Leonard occupied about 2.5 cubic feet of space, but once he was gone, he became a much bigger deal. By the time we finished putting up the posters (as far east as Long Branch and as far west as the Turnpike), he was covering vast distances. Everywhere I went during that first week, I saw him smiling back at me. He was hanging from telephone poles and grinning at me from store windows. You just couldn’t get away from him and his crazy like-me-like-me-please-like-me smile. Even if I had wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to forget him for more than a block in any direction. Once he had disappeared, he was everywhere.