Silent Alarm

by Jennifer Banash

  (—Luke’s face as he backed out of the driveway, one hand draped over the back of my seat, his ebony-colored jacket and heavy boots sucking the air from the interior. A black hole. “Going to a funeral?” I quipped, pulling down the visor and checking my face in the mirror, my lips twisted in a sarcastic grin. He stared straight ahead at the road, turning up his iPod so that music blasted through the car’s speakers, buzzing through the seats. I closed my eyes, lulled into safety by the trees whipping past the windows, the sound of my brother’s breathing, the heat coming through the vents. “Alys,” he said as we pulled into the school parking lot and the car came to a stop, his hands tightening on the wheel. “Yeah?” I answered, rummaging through my backpack distractedly. There was a long pause, and I stopped digging and looked up at him, blinking in the morning light. I was tired, worried about my history project, anxious about being late, as usual. “Have a good day,” he said finally, pulling his keys from the ignition and shoving them in the pocket of his jacket, his face empty—)

  The minute the garage door opens with a rumble, the reporters run up to the car, tapping their silver microphones against the windows, cameras rolling. I look into the eye of the lens, hypnotized, until my mother steps on the gas, throwing a hand in front of my face to shield me.

  “Get down!” she yells. “Head down, Alys. Now.”

  I lean forward, place my head between my knees, trying to breathe normally, but there’s not enough air, not enough air in the whole world, it seems, to satisfy me, and I gulp it down greedily as if it might run out at any second.

  “Mrs. Aronson, do you have a statement you’d like to make?”

  “Alys! What was Luke really like?”

  The tires squeal as my mother pulls out of the driveway. I can hear her gasping so hard it sounds as if she’s hiccupping. Tears flow out from beneath the glasses and down her cheeks. She’s not wearing any makeup, and her face looks vulnerable and exposed without it. I reach over and put my hand on hers, almost pulling away when I feel how cold she is, how stiff.

  (—don’t think about Miranda under the table, how her screams got louder and louder, then stopped altogether. The blood that seeped over the pages of fallen books that rained down, pages fluttering. Don’t think about Ms. Parsons splayed on the floor, a starfish pinned to a board, her mouth opening and closing—)

  Don’t think.

  I turn to look out the window, taking in our street, a place I have always loved, with its rows of even lawns, garden gnomes, Victorian houses with long porches set back from the road, tall oak trees lining the streets. White picket fences, the paint flaking in some places. The lilacs blooming in the spring, filling the night with their impossibly heady, purple scent, the synchronicity of countless sprinklers the unwritten soundtrack to our lives. I sink down into my jacket, wishing I could disappear inside it entirely.

  “Have you talked to anyone? What about Delilah?” My mother pulls off the sunglasses and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. As always, there is clay lodged under her short nails from her nightly work in her basement studio, pots springing from her hands like alchemy.

  Delilah and I have been best friends since we were in the fourth grade. Like Ben, she lives only a few streets away, and there has hardly been a day in the past ten years that I haven’t seen or talked to her at least twenty times. I don’t even have to close my eyes to conjure her image—I know it as well as my own. Waves of dark hair swarming around her face. Blue, almost violet, eyes that change color in the light—especially when she’s thinking about breaking some kind of rule, which is most of the time. Her small, compact body that barely fills out her dance leotard, muscles as tightly strung as the strings on my violin, her legs corded and strong, her feet flitting across the floor, more glide than walk, toes pointed out. Duck walk. I remember the time she tried to teach Luke to dance, the only time I’d ever seen him flustered, his face reddening as she pulled his arms around her waist, smiling up at him. Luke’s big feet tripping through the steps until they gave up, falling over in a heap, their laughter uncontrollable. That was two winters ago. Before my brother started spending all of his time in his room, away from us. Before he started speaking in monosyllables, then stopped talking altogether, his eyes growing flatter, deader as the months passed.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Delilah asked last Christmas. “Is he okay?” Her eyes, violet now, reflected against the white lights of the tree, fragrant and tall. I brushed it off, nodding my head yes with a snort as if to say, Duh, how could you be so stupid? Of COURSE he’s fine.

  But you weren’t, Luke. Not really. I just didn’t want to see it.

  “When I checked my phone earlier, her number came up a few times from yesterday, but she hasn’t called back. I talked to Ben this morning, though.”

  Tears blur my vision, and I concentrate on the street signs that flash by as we creep toward the edge of town. Ben’s face appears, his wide smile superimposed on the translucent glass, and something in me shatters further, and so I look away, reaching over to flip on the heat.

  My mother lets out a long sigh and pulls the car over on the side of the road.

  “He told you about . . . about Katie?” My mother’s tone is halting but matter-of-fact, and I wonder how she knew, who told her, and then I remember the paper crumpled in her hands this morning. Was Katie’s name there, in stark black and white for everyone to see?

  Katie Marie Horton. Fifteen years old.

  “We have to go. To the service,” I manage to say through a wave of tears. I have cried so much in the last twenty-four hours that my face feels abused, stinging with salt, my eyes swollen. I’ve blown my nose so repeatedly that there are actual scabs forming on the raw skin.

  “Alys.” She sounds so much like Ben when she says my name like that, so resigned that I want to clap my hands over my ears, open the car door and run as far away as I can. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, do you?”

  Arianne’s words float back to me, and I take in a breath so deep that my chest aches.

  Haven’t you people done enough?

  The engine hums quietly. Heat pours from the vents, but my fingers are icy branches shaking in the wind.

  “Dad ran into Arianne this morning at the hospital, and . . .” She stops, exhaling loudly and turning away. “It didn’t go well, Alys.”

  A small, dry laugh escapes from my throat, although nothing is even remotely funny about any of this. All at once I am angry with Luke, furious about what he’s done to us, the rage bubbling up from deep inside me, my chest hot and tight with all I haven’t said, everything I can’t say. “Well, how could it? How could it when Katie’s dead?” My mother flinches, her face blanched of color, but I can’t stop. I am shouting now, the space between us constricting more tightly with every word that leaves my lips. “She’s dead! And whether he meant to or not, he shot her!” I feel dizzy, dislocated, my face hot and sweating, my hands ice-cold.

  My mother reaches out, palm open, and slaps me once, hard, across the face. I raise my hand to my cheek and it burns beneath my fingers. My mother has never hit me before. Not even when I was five and flushed all of her good jewelry down the toilet because I wanted to see what would happen.

  I drop my hand to my lap and begin ripping off my cuticles. The pain feels good, right somehow. My nose is running and I reach up and wipe it on the back of my sleeve. My mother exhales loudly, cursing under her breath, and I cannot look at her.

  “Honey, I’m sorry,” she says, her voice breaking. “But you’ve got to understand something.” She reaches over and cups my face in her hand, gently turning it toward her. Her eyes are bloodshot and so very tired that I can barely look at her. “Luke’s not around anymore for people to

  (hate)

  blame. So they’re going to blame us.”

  “But we didn’t do anything,” I whisper.

  Did we?

 
; Or maybe that was the problem. Was that it, Luke? Did you want more attention? Well, you certainly got it, didn’t you?

  Luke’s face appears before my eyes, swaying there blurrily. I don’t know how to reconcile it, that face that’s more familiar to me than my own, with what he’s done.

  “That doesn’t matter, Alys.” She says this slowly and with infinite patience, like I’m four. “It doesn’t matter one bit.”

  The sadness in my mother’s voice is stronger than the waves of heat filling the car, and even though I don’t want to accept it, I know she’s right, that people will hate us simply because we’re the ones left behind to blame, simply because, unlike Luke or the fifteen other people he killed yesterday, we still exist.

  FIVE

  Later that night, I hang the dress on a hook behind my closet door. The best thing I can say about it is that it covers my knees, which I’ve hated ever since the fourth grade, when rat-faced John Mulligan called them knobby. The reporters finally left an hour ago, walking back to their vans and slamming the doors in exasperation, their breath hovering in front of their faces in dense white clouds. At the mall I stood in the dressing room facing my reflection, a pile of shapeless black dresses at my feet. My hair, the color of a wet graham cracker, pulled back in a ponytail, a scratch on my right arm that I don’t remember getting. It’s deep and red and throbs like a constant reminder. You’re burying your brother tomorrow, I informed the girl in the mirror, but she just stared back at me with swollen, empty eyes. Somehow it still doesn’t seem real. Like if I walked down the hall to Luke’s bedroom and opened the door, he’d still be inside, surfing the Web or playing video games, yelling at me to get the hell out of his room without even turning around in his chair, his feet propped up on his desk, one boot tapping restlessly against the other.

  Time feels interminable, the numbers on the clock barely moving although the day has somehow passed into twilight, then evening, a dark oblivion. I’m so tired, my legs and arms throbbing in unison, but I’m afraid to get into bed, to turn on the TV, to close my eyes. Luke on every channel, that same picture from last year’s yearbook filling the screen, the one where he stares right into the lens, almost glowering, the face he always wore in the past few years whenever he was forced to have his picture taken. This went over screamingly well on family vacations, let me tell you. My mother would spend most of her time pleading with him in front of every rest stop or scenic vista to smile, to pose with his arm around me, to hold up a fish that he and my dad had caught. Luke would roll his eyes, cross his arms over his chest, and look off into the distance, as if he’d suddenly gone spontaneously deaf, as if he weren’t there at all while my mother snapped away, determined to capture him on film. Finally, he’d turn toward the camera lens, his lips drawn over his teeth, his expression almost feral. The look in his eyes made me turn away each and every time. It was as if something had been taken from him.

  “Why do you hate it so much?” I’d asked him last year on a road trip through New England, after our parents had finally gone to their room for the night, the door clicking shut with a sharp finality that gave way to a low mumble of voices, the rising crescendo of another argument. A sound we tried more and more to ignore as it became more frequent. “He’s fine,” my father would shout over my mother’s many attempts to shush him, to make him lower his voice. “He’s just finding his way, that’s all. When he goes to college he’ll snap out of it. I’m surprised you notice him at all considering how focused on Alys you are.”

  I felt my face turning red, my father’s words echoing in the air between Luke and me.

  How focused on Alys you are.

  Was it true? I didn’t know. My mother had high expectations for my future as a musician, but I’d always thought that my father shared them, wanted the same for me—glowing stage lights, gilded ceilings, the rustling of programs. All I did know was that my father’s words made me feel exposed and uncomfortable. Guilty.

  “Why do you hate it so much?” I asked again, trying to detract his attention away from our parents’ closed motel room door.

  “It makes me feel like I’m not real,” he said, shrugging. “Like she’s searching for evidence of . . . I don’t know what. It’s so fake. It’s like she wants proof that we’re all so fucking happy all the time, that we’ve had such a nice family vacation.” When he said the word “nice,” his voice rose to a falsetto, such a keen, cloying imitation of my mother that it made me flinch slightly.

  “Well, haven’t we? Aren’t we?” I stuffed a handful of SunChips into my mouth, chewing distractedly. We had just raided the vending machines in the motel lobby, and I was looking forward to a night of eating junk food and drinking Cokes in front of the TV. Luke didn’t answer, just opened a package of peanut butter crackers, cramming two squares in his mouth. In the past two years, I’d grown accustomed to my brother’s cryptic silences, his mood swings, how one moment he could be thrilled to see me, and the next he’d be just as likely to slam his bedroom door in my face, shutting me out completely. It never stopped hurting my feelings, but I had accepted it as just One of Those Things. “He’ll grow out of it,” my mother said consolingly in a voice that wanted to seem confident, but instead wavered slightly, unsure. So I tried to ignore those intermittent snubs, pretending they didn’t matter, when in reality, every unkind word my brother hurled toward me burned its way into my brain, lodging there indelibly.

  “So why don’t you just say no, then? Why do it at all if it just makes you nuts?”

  He reached over and grabbed my chips, popping them into his mouth one after the other.

  “I don’t know,” he said after a long moment. “I guess it’s too much hassle to say no, to make a fuss. And I don’t care enough to bother. So I just give in and go along with it. The way I do with everything else—school, Mom and Dad, applying to college, whatever.”

  I wrinkled my brow in confusion, trying to understand.

  “But I thought you wanted to go to college? Right?”

  His face closed off the way it always did when he didn’t want to talk about something, and he turned away from me, switching on the TV, his eyes flickering across the images on the screen. I knew enough not to ask any more questions. Even though in the past few years I’d seen these moods get stronger, occupying Luke’s attention for longer periods of time, there were moments of grace, long stretches when the darkness would lighten and he’d be the brother I knew so well, the guy who pushed me on the tire swing in our yard until his arms were sore, who sat with me at the kitchen table working through a problem in algebra, his unfailing belief in the power of numbers, the logic of them somehow soothing, marching across a pristine white page. But once Luke was in a mood, there was no busting him out of it until he was good and ready. You left him alone until it broke, like a fever. Until he snapped out of it. And sooner or later, he always did.

  Except for the one time he didn’t.

  I want to talk to Ben, to hear his voice telling me everything will be all right. It occurs to me that he probably needs the same thing right now, and that as much as I want to, I can’t be the one to say it to him, can’t wrap my arms around him and hold on tight. The thought makes my chest seize up like a car out of gas, the needle falling into the red. I picture us in our separate houses, grief pinning us to our beds. I wonder what he’s doing right now, if he’s thinking about me or if he just can’t think about anything at all, if he’s pecking out notes at the piano, finding solace there in the music the way we always did, or if he’s gone as mute as I am right now. Beethoven deaf at the keyboard.

  Restless, I get up and walk down the hall, the muffled noises of my parents moving around in their bedroom echoing in the hallway, my father’s voice and my mother’s sobs, a sound that tears at my heart. I picture the tattered muscle in my chest unraveling further with every heartbeat. Hopelessly frayed.

  Luke’s door is ajar, moonlight peeking from inside in
a strip of silver that falls across my feet when I push it all the way open. The room is eerily quiet. Clothes strewn across the floor, the pictures from the summer we spent at the lake with my grandparents in frames on top of his dresser. Maps of the universe on the ceiling, along with the glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck there when I was nine. A periodic table of the elements hanging over his desk, the earth broken into molecules. I switch on the desk lamp, sit down on the bed, pick up his favorite blue sweatshirt, hold it to my nose, and close my eyes. Dirt, shampoo, sweat, and that maple-syrup smell that seemed to seep from his pores when it had been a few days between showers. I hold the sweatshirt in my lap, petting it distractedly, hugging the soft, worn fabric to my stomach, aching all the time now.