Silent Alarm

by Jennifer Banash

  “Not that I know of,” I say, and it’s true. No one really picked on Luke, but they didn’t exactly seek him out either. He was just . . . there.

  “Just a few final questions, Alys, and then we’ll be on our way,” Marino says, leaning forward. “Did you see your brother in the library during the attack?”

  (—Luke’s eyes, there but not there, unseeing, the muscles in his forearms working as he lifted the gun to eye level—)

  I nod, unable to find words.

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  I close my eyes and the tears begin to fall down my cheeks, hot, my skin on fire.

  “He said . . .”

  “Yes? We’re listening, Alys,” Rogers says with an edge of impatience, or maybe even excitement.

  “He said, ‘Hey.’”

  “He said, ‘Hey,’” Marino repeats without inflection. “Was that it?” He raises one dark eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” I say, wiping my face with the backs of my hands, looking away, my body weak with the effort. “That was it.”

  Rogers lets out a sigh, one made up of varying degrees of exasperation and contempt. Leave, leave, I think, the words buzzing through my brain. If they don’t get up and head toward the door soon, I will be completely undone. I will lose it, and I will not come back, my sanity dissolving in a puddle of tears and unanswered questions.

  “One more question, Alys, and then we’re done, okay?” Before I can answer or shake my head, Marino pushes on. “Did you have any prior knowledge that your brother was planning to conduct a mass murder at Plainewood High School yesterday?”

  Mass murder.

  I remember Luke at ten, playing in a teepee in the backyard our dad had gotten him that summer, the canvas rustling in the soft breeze. “Members only,” he’d belt out if anyone came too close—our parents; our nanny, Elizabeth, whom he loved. “You can come in,” he’d say to me, pulling back the flaps so that I could crawl inside, “but only because you’re my sister.” His impish face, that lopsided grin. The force and heat with which he threw his arms around my neck back then, hugging me close, his wiry body smelling of grass and dirt and little-boy flesh, sweaty and sweet.

  I shake my head no, afraid to speak, afraid that I might start crying again. Instead, I look down at my lap, not wanting to meet their gaze, to see the pity that I know is there, written all over their faces like Braille.

  THREE

  After the detectives leave, I turn my phone back on for the first time since I left school yesterday. The minute I press the power button, it begins to buzz incessantly. A text from a number I don’t know pops up on-screen, written in all caps, searing my eyes with its vitriol.

  I HOPE YOUR BROTHER BURNS IN HELL!!!!!!!!

  My thumb reflexively hits the power button, turning the screen to black. As I walk upstairs I’m shaking, sobs shuddering in my throat. I stop in the bathroom to wet a washcloth and rub it over the darkened display. The cloth comes back streaked with rust and I avert my eyes, throwing the damp rag into the hamper, where it lands heavily with a wet thud.

  In front of Luke’s closed bedroom door, I pause for a moment, one hand reaching out for the metal knob, cold beneath my fingers. I lean my forehead against the smooth wood, listening for what, I don’t know, before I let go and move toward my room. Please, I am thinking again. Please, please. But I don’t know to whom, exactly, I am praying, or why. Maybe myself. Maybe no one. Even with the reporters waiting on the front steps, the echo of car doors slamming, the click and whir of cameras, the house feels too quiet without the trill of my violin, the monotony of scales, the jostle and hum of Luke’s music seeping from beneath his door. I can almost feel the walls sigh as they settle around me.

  I scroll through my contacts and dial Ben’s number. That goofy pic of him with the dumb sunglasses and baseball hat I took a few months ago fills the screen as the phone rings and rings in my ear. I sit on my bed, hugging a pillow to my chest as I wait for him to answer. Ben and I basically grew up together—our parents have been inseparable ever since we moved here just before I was born. There are a bunch of pictures of us in diapers somewhere, seated next to each other in a grimy, Cheerio-littered playpen, grinning our heads off, baby drool running from my mouth in a long, translucent string onto his bare leg. The caption above the photo reads Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, a reference to The Flintstones, and the nicknames our parents had for us for as long as we could remember. There is not one memory, one event from my life that I can recall that does not, in some way, include him. Watching him race across the soccer field as he kicked the ball expertly into the net. His hands stirring a large vat of spaghetti sauce, the smooth skin of one cheek dotted with a constellation of red. His long fingers petting the keyboard of the grand piano hulking in the corner of their living room, as if it might be tamed by his touch alone. Music filling the halls of their sprawling Victorian, drifting up to touch the high ceilings like smoke. His head bent over the keys, brow furrowed in concentration. So last summer, when he kissed me, it changed everything—and nothing—all at once.

  It was August, the still dead of summer, and there was nothing much to do. Even the humid air seemed wrung out and exhausted, the stars dipping low in the sky as if they too wanted some kind of relief. It was late. Ben had come over earlier to watch some stupid horror flick Luke had told us about. I was wearing cutoffs and a tank top the color of jade, my hair pulled into a knot, feet bare against the rug. Ben had on a pair of faded jeans, and had lost his T-shirt the minute the movie began, as was his style whenever the temperature rose anywhere above sixty degrees. He was tanned all over from two months of swimming at the community pool, his skin dusky and satiny as an old cello. For the first time I thought about reaching out and touching it, running my fingers over his arms, his chest. Luke and I always turned bright pink long before we’d ever brown, but Ben just got darker and darker, shaking off his winter pallor like slipping out of a heavy coat.

  We lay on the floor of the living room, shoulder to shoulder, and I was sucking on a piece of ice, rolling the cube around in the heat of my mouth, feeling it evaporate, my eyes fixed on the screen, when he turned toward me, slowly pressing his lips against mine. I could hear the dim rustling of my parents as they turned heavily in their bed, drawing thin sheets over their shoulders. You, I thought, the word exploding in my brain as I wrapped my arms tentatively around his neck, his pulse beneath my fingers steady as a bass drum. It was you all along.

  When he pulled away, his eyes held mine for a long, worried moment before his face relaxed into a smile, his teeth shining blue in the light from the TV. On screen, a dark-clad figure holding an axe walked through a deserted summer camp, a series of sharp, spooky notes on a piano tracing his path.

  “This isn’t . . . you know . . .” he said, propping himself up on one arm and looking at me intently, “weird or anything?”

  My head was spinning, one thought after another racing through the suddenly cramped confines of my brain. The strange thing wasn’t the kiss—not exactly—but how, for the first time ever, I couldn’t think of what to say back, how to answer him. Until that moment, Ben and I had never needed full sentences in order to understand each other—in fact, we routinely finished each other’s thoughts more often than not. And it was a little weird, but not in a way that made me want to run for the door or push him away. Weird in the way that all new, exciting things are strange and mysterious and ever-so-slightly uncomfortable. We knew everything about each other, and the sheer familiarity should have been enough to stop us. But it wasn’t. Even then, staring at him, his lips parted and gleaming, I wanted to lean in closer, to press my mouth against his, my heart tripping over its own clumsy feet, clicking away in my chest like a metronome.

  “No. It’s fine,” I said quickly—too quickly, almost stammering. “Fine.” The word tossed like a boulder, heavy and careless. As usual, when it was time to open my mouth about something rea
lly important, I blew it. Getting a B on a history test was “fine.” But kissing? Not so much. “I mean, no—it’s great.” I put one hand on his arm, feeling the heat rising from his tanned skin. “It’s perfect.” That smile again as he pulled me even closer, his lips finding mine in that same shock of recognition, that feeling that had maybe always been there, but that I’d never noticed. Maybe I’d been afraid to. His tongue explored the inside of my mouth, tentatively at first, insistently, hot then impossibly cool as the ice melted away. My arms wrapped around his back, pulling him down on top of me, blotting out the thoughts that told me to slow down, to think, to wait, the words drowned out by the friction of our own bodies, the heat of his kiss.

  “Alys?” The low thrill of Ben’s voice coming through the tiny speaker makes me believe, just for a moment, that everything is going to be all right, and I feel a weight lifting off of my shoulders before I remember that it isn’t, that it won’t be, that nothing could ever be all right again.

  “Yeah. I’m here.” My voice sounds small and tinny traveling through the air. Not like myself at all. An imposter.

  There is silence on his end. Then an intake of breath. I can almost see him there in his room, the white walls and dark wood, his laptop glowing softly on his desk. I knew he was sitting on his bed, one hand absentmindedly pulling at his thick, dark hair, twisting pieces of it between his fingers the way he always did whenever he was sad or upset, his face tense.

  “Jesus Christ, Alys. I’ve been going out of my fucking mind. Things are crazy over here.” His voice is clipped, impatient. “I called you all last night. I didn’t know . . . I mean, I hoped, but I wasn’t sure if . . .” His voice trails off, and I knew—I knew without him having to say a word.

  If you’d made it out.

  “I’m sorry.” I look down at the floor, at the navy- and sky-blue polka-dot rug my mother bought me at Target last year. We stopped for ice cream on the way home, mint chocolate chip, my tongue numbed from the cold. “I should’ve called. I just . . . there are reporters sneaking into my backyard, camped out on our doorstep, and my parents are basically losing it.” My eyes fill with tears that splash down the end of my nose. “I saw him, Ben. In the library. Luke. I was there.”

  I could hear the sound of his breathing, the way it caught in his chest.

  “Alys.”

  Never had my name sounded so ominous. A feeling of dread sweeps through me, and I grab the quilt on my bed in one hand, balling it in my fist until my knuckles turn white and numb.

  “Katie’s gone. She didn’t come home from school yesterday, so we went to the hospital and waited there, but no one would tell us anything at first. We didn’t know if she was hurt or . . .”

  His voice broke, and a tearing sound came from his throat, echoing through the phone. “She’s gone, Alys.”

  Katie. Oh, Katie.

  Katie is Ben’s younger sister. She has gobs of long dark hair that she ties back with colored ribbons (a different shade for each day of the week) and cheeks that are perpetually flushed. She’s all pinks and whites, a walking strawberry sundae. Her life’s goal is basically to make the varsity cheer team by next year. She wears TOMS shoes exclusively in bright red and blue, collects rocks, and still believes in fairies. She follows Ben everywhere as if he’s her own personal god. She’s also a freshman, and is thus highly annoying, and I love her unreservedly.

  Was a freshman. Was.

  My heart falters in my chest, a sharp, searing pain, and for the first time I wonder if it were to actually stop, give out, if it wouldn’t be a relief, if it wouldn’t be better for everyone.

  “Are they . . . Are they sure? I mean, Ben, there were a lot of people there yesterday, and she looks a lot like Sarah Boyd, a lot like her, and—”

  I hear myself and I am babbling. I know I am, but I can’t stop. If I stop, something worse might happen, something might—

  Oh, Katie, please don’t be

  (dead)

  I can’t say it aloud. I can’t even think it.

  “It was her, Alys.” Ben’s voice is resigned. I can hear the exhaustion in it, the grief. “They saw her. Late yesterday afternoon.”

  What’s left of my hope surfaces for a moment, stretching its wings. “So she’s okay? She’s going to be all right?”

  There is a pause, a long beat where I can hear the clock he always kept on his bedside table ticking. I can hear my own blood pumping, the thump of my own heart. Then that tone again as he says my name and the world falls away entirely.

  “They had to go to the morgue. To ID her.”

  I close my eyes, tears running from the corners, snot dripping from the end of my nose. Ben and me and Katie running through the sprinklers in the summertime, the smell of freshly cut grass in the humid air. Luke blasting the hose and shooting it toward the sun, the prism of color trapped inside the wet diamond droplets. Katie’s small, elfin face widening into a smile, her hands clapping at the magic of rainbows and light. Katie helping Luke pour brownie batter into a buttered pan; fighting over the bowl, elbows jostling; the sweet, dense taste of the chocolate, dark and bitter as secrets.

  My eyes snap open and I sit up, gripping the phone tighter.

  “But he loved Katie! Ben, he loved her! He would never hurt her. I know he wouldn’t.”

  “But he DID, Alys. He did. He—”

  (killed her)

  “Well, then it must’ve been an accident! She must’ve gotten in the way somehow! Luke would never—”

  I am hyperventilating, the air in the room sucked out through an enormous hole in my head, my heart, a void of my brother’s making.

  “Yes, yes he fucking would and he did, Aronson. He did.”

  Ben has never ever called me anything except Alys for as long as I can remember. All of those syllables hit me in the chest like so much dead weight. Like a corpse.

  “No. It’s not true.” I whisper these words even though I know they are lies, and that there is nothing, nothing I can do or say that will make the jagged pieces of Ben, or of any of us, for that matter, whole again.

  Before I can say anything else, there is a rustling noise on his end of the phone, and I hear the creak of a door opening, murmured conversation, voices rising higher in pitch, a crescendo. Sweat breaks out beneath my underarms, cold and sour, and I am shaking uncontrollably. I feel like I’ve just drunk a hundred double espressos, my entire body vibrating at a frenzied pitch, a whine I can almost hear.

  “Who are you . . . Her? Dammit, Ben, give me the goddamn phone!”

  “Who is this?”

  Arianne, Ben’s mom, is suddenly on the line. At the sound of her voice, something inside me unfurls a tiny bit, relaxing, even though I know it shouldn’t. I can’t help it—Arianne has read me bedtime stories when my parents were out of town (I was always partial to Goodnight Moon), fed me innumerable dinners and lunches (tuna salad on toast was a real winner for a while), taught Luke how to drive and let him spin their old station wagon around the cul-de-sac at the end of our street until he got the hang of it, blasting AC/DC on the stereo, all the windows rolled down. She’s listened to me practice for hours on end, a smile falling over her soft features as she watched the bow fly through my hand as if it had wings. If anyone will understand, it is Arianne.

  But Luke killed her daughter. Shot her. How could anyone possibly understand that?

  “It’s Alys, Arianne. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry, I don’t know how to—”

  “Alys, you need to stay away from our family. Just stay away. From all of us.”

  The voice coming through the phone is alien and clipped. This is not the Arianne of the makeshift s’mores assembled over the kitchen stove, melted chocolate coating our fingers like wax, the woman who taught me to shave my legs the summer I turned twelve, guiding my hand so that the blade slid over my limbs effortlessly.

  “Arianne
, I didn’t—”

  “Haven’t you people done enough? Haven’t you done enough already?” Arianne’s voice grows shrill, then collapses into sobs that are so deep that it sounds as if she is drowning in a bottomless black pool, water reducing her lungs to gray, spent balloons.

  “I didn’t,” I whisper, pleading now. “It wasn’t—”

  (me)

  There is a wailing that shudders through the phone, jarring me to my core, Ben’s voice in the background, a low mumbling, ripped and gravelly. Then the line goes dead.

  FOUR

  When we first get into the car, my mother reaches over and snaps the radio off the minute the engine sparks up. Still, there are seconds where I hear the announcer’s voice booming through the cramped space, my eyes straining in the darkened garage filled with old, rusty bikes and my father’s workbench, the tools that he cleans and organizes incessantly but rarely uses. Organization and order are more important to my father now than creativity. The neater things are, the happier he is. For most of my childhood, he spent hours here, sanding wood into supple softness, building first a chest of drawers, then a kitchen table for some friends of theirs as a wedding present. But lately it seems that the only reason he steps foot in the garage is to make sure that things are in their rightful place, tucked safely away. Sometimes, if I look at his hands and concentrate really hard, I can almost see his fingers splayed against the grain of wood, a piece of sandpaper clutched in his grasp, the tinge of wood stain tracing his skin like a henna tattoo.

  “Lucas Aronson, eighteen, shot and killed a total of fifteen students in one of the largest mass murders in Wisconsin history yesterday . . .”

  With every mention of my brother’s name, I am shrinking down smaller and smaller. Soon there will be nothing left. A dot, a slick, greasy smear where I once stood. My mother, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, nervously adjusts her mirrors, her hair pulled back into a messy bun. Her hand hovers over the garage door opener, and she turns and looks at me for a moment, her face an empty canvas. The car smells of the sickly sweet vanilla air freshener my mother likes to spray, the one Luke always said made the car smell like a fucking bakery. Sometimes, but not often, she would let Luke drive it instead of the twelve-year-old, hand-me-down Volvo my dad gave to Luke on his sixteenth birthday, and I wonder if his prints are still on the steering wheel, the whorls of his fingers imbedded onto the worn leather, if I will become one of those crazy, grief-stricken people I’ve seen in movies, crawling on the floor looking for a scrap of hair, looking for something, anything, left behind. My head is swimming with images: me, Katie, Ben, Luke. It’s like the sadness in my body is so large that I don’t know which part to acknowledge first. It all blurs together in an uncontainable heap, trash spilling out of a Dumpster. Yesterday, I was a girl on her way to school, her brother beeping the horn once, twice, before she slid inside the car, the door barely closed before his foot stepped firmly on the gas. Luke’s car always smelled of sweaty gym clothes, motor oil, and inexplicably of popcorn, though he always said he hated it.