Silent Alarm

by Jennifer Banash

  “You did.” Marino’s voice is without inflection. “What point was that?”

  “Our rooms were down the hall from each other.” My words are deliberate, the careful building of a wall, one brick placed against the next. “We went to school together—drove there in the morning and home at night together. It’s not like we never saw each other.”

  (—but I didn’t see; I didn’t. He was right there in front of me the whole time and I didn’t see him, the real him, who he really was. Someone who wanted to hurt people, people we loved, who plotted it, fantasized about it, wrote stupid notes on—)

  “What Alys is trying to say,” my father interjects, “is that she and her brother considered their relationship to be close enough without monitoring each other’s actions online. They simply didn’t feel it was necessary.”

  I squirm uncomfortably on my chair. My father is wrong. I wish, more than anything, that his words were true. But they’re not. Luke and I weren’t close—not anymore. The Luke I remember is trapped behind glass, suspended in time and made up of fragments from my past. That Luke is twelve, ten, fourteen, and gone forever, living on only in my brain as a series of faded memories. Luke tickling me after my bath when I was six until I peed my pants and he had to help me into dry pajamas. Luke guiding my fingers around a fat yellow pencil, his touch impossibly light. Luke’s arms wrapped firmly around my waist as I set off on my first bike, moving carefully down the driveway, the turquoise paint sparkling. Don’t worry, he said authoritatively, leaning over my shoulder. I won’t let you fall.

  “You mean Luke didn’t think it was necessary,” Detective Marino says, correcting my father, who glowers at him, a slow seething.

  “I will not have my daughter cross-examined, goddammit.” My father bangs his fist on the table, and I jump visibly in my chair. “You said you had new information to share with us, so either hurry up and share it or get out.”

  There is silence. My mother gets up and pours my father a cup of coffee, gently placing it in front of him before pouring herself a mug, the wedding ring on her hand spinning loosely on her finger.

  My temples throb, and I press my fingers into the sides of my head, pushing in against pain. I want things to go back to the way they were, the way we were: Luke refusing to eat his cereal, my mother flying around the kitchen searching for her car keys. A family. Not these broken puzzle pieces, the picture gaping and unfinished.

  Luke.

  “Yes, there is,” Marino says after a pause. He places the paper back in the folder and closes it. “We found plans for a bomb on your son’s computer.”

  The light in the kitchen is bright, too bright, burning through everything. An X-ray exposing every lie, every secret. A bomb. Luke was the bomb, armed and waiting. Biding his time. Tick, tick, ticking.

  “We don’t think he ever built it, but we’re going to do a thorough sweep of your home, and the school, just to be safe.”

  My mother knocks over her cup, letting out a sharp cry, coffee spreading across the table. She rubs her hand where some of the hot liquid has splashed, and goes to the sink, sticking her hand underneath the cold water, biting her lower lip. I sit there in the house I grew up in, the kitchen growing warmer by the minute, and I can faintly remember being an average seventeen-year-old girl, studying for SATs, my pencil bitten down to a nub, the taste of wood shavings sprinkled on my tongue. Thinking about prom, what I’d wear, worrying about Ben’s horrifying penchant for pastel tuxedos. My audition. Summer unfolding like a humid fever dream, classrooms and theaters pulsing with Brahms, Debussy, and Chopin. But it seems like it was someone else’s life, borrowed, nothing that belonged to me permanently. Just a few days ago, I was impatient for the future, wanting things to change, to hurry up, to be different—for my real life to begin.

  I got what I wanted, didn’t I, Luke?

  But not in the way I expected.

  TWO

  “There is a crack in everything

  That’s how the light gets in.”

  —LEONARD COHEN, “ANTHEM”

  ONE

  The first day back at school dawns with a clap of thunder, an arc of rain pelting the sides of the house, a bright siege of lightning intermittently flashing across the sky.

  (—the gun going off, obliterating everything, the world gone deaf—)

  Yesterday was Easter, Luke’s favorite holiday. Gray sky outside the windows, a light drizzle coating the glass. When we were small, there were egg hunts in the backyard, candy-colored dresses swishing against my legs. And always, the spring leg of lamb, new potatoes, shelled peas. “You just like it because you get to eat tons of lamb,” I’d say, watching Luke pile it on, the meat perfectly pink at the center. Last night we ordered Chinese, and sat at the kitchen table without speaking, the intermittent whine of cutlery, the scrape of my father’s fork, setting my teeth on edge. After almost a month off, you’d think I’d be rested, but I’m as tired as ever. Sluggish spring rain for days on end. Along the front walk, the crocus flowers my mother planted last year have begun to rise up, pushing through the soil in a profusion of white and violet petals, arms outstretched, the hedges that surround the house suddenly covered with green leaves, as if they’ve been waiting all this time to show their small, upturned faces. The clouds gathering damply overhead in the sky telegraph a warning.

  Stay inside.

  For the past few weeks I’ve watched as the police swept the house with metal detectors, as men in hazmat suits searched our garage for volatile chemicals, my thoughts floating up and resting on the ceiling so that I wouldn’t care, so I could pretend it didn’t hurt to see them rummaging through our things as though we weren’t right in front of them. Pawing through Luke’s room, another violation, where even the stupid porno magazines he kept at the bottom of his closet were taken away to be studied, categorized, analyzed. Luke’s sexual preferences reduced to investigational fodder, reduced to . . . what? Volatile chemicals and a thing for big tits. “Rare to see a kid with actual magazines these days,” one cop said, fingering Luke’s copy of Hustler. “Usually they just download it.”

  Spring break has come and gone, and I should be tanned right now, my cheeks pink, a stripe of sunburn running down the length of my nose. I should be on the phone with Delilah, planning what I’m going to wear in order to maximize my newly bronzed skin, lips rough and reddened from last night’s make-out session with Ben, eyes glittering with lust and sleep deprivation. I look at the clothes I laid out on the chair last night—the plaid skirt from Anthropologie, the dark tights and black sweater—and now it looks all wrong. A stupid costume. If I wear black, every time they look at me they will see the loss, the devastation—a walking reminder. I might as well be carrying all of the dead on my back, my spine twisting under their weight.

  “They’ll be reminded anyway, stupid,” Luke whispers. He sits on the edge of my bed, picking at his nails, furiously ripping at the cuticles as is the family way—we all do it. Worrywarts that we are. But Luke’s fingers look disgusting, caked with dried blood around the nail beds. Raw meat.

  When I think of walking through the front doors of the school, sliding into my familiar seat during first period, I am filled with a sense of dread, my mouth dry. But the thought of staying home another minute, walking through the minefield separating my parents each day, time punctuated only by the arrival of the mail at three, the lights clicking on in the streets at dusk, is enough to make me crave the monotony of a rotating schedule, the banality of pep rallies and student council elections.

  I grab a white cardigan from the closet, along with my favorite pair of black jeans, slide a pair of leopard ballet flats onto my feet, and stare at myself in the mirror. Everything is wrong. My skin is sallow from a lack of sleep, purple moons beneath my eyes that are so dark now, they almost look like they’ve been colored in. No matter how hungry I am lately, I can’t seem to choke down more than a few mouthfuls. I look
longer and thinner than ever, my hipbones protruding from my jeans, my chest almost concave beneath my sweater. The only thing that I can seem to manage is coffee with lots of cream and sugar, and dry salty crackers. Last night when I opened the refrigerator, the smell of rotting food wafted out in a blast of cold air—leftover pork chops lying in a sauce of their own pink juice, eggs rolling placidly in a bowl, hard-boiled, waiting on fingers to strip the shell away. The globs of mayonnaise in the glass jar with the bright yellow label, half-empty bottles of ketchup, a red that called to me with the sweet stink of violence. I clapped one hand against my mouth and ran for the bathroom, retching over the sink.

  My violin waits in the corner, propped against the wall, abandoned. I haven’t played at all over break, and I am drawn to it like a drug. I pull the instrument from its case, fitting its curved contours to mine, my cheek pressed to the cold wood. I wrap my arms around the mahogany frame, willing it to warm, and tentatively run my fingers over the strings at the neck. I pluck them once, hard, and a burst of sound fills the room, startling me into the moment. “Play something, Alys,” Luke pleads, his breath hot on the back of my neck. “Play something for me.”

  “I can’t.” My mouth forms the words, but no sound comes out. I blink rapidly, surfacing from the deep, then shove the violin back into the soft velvet lining, out of sight, before I can be tempted, before my hands reach for the bow and I am lost in a lull of quiet and peace that I don’t deserve. When I turn around, the room is empty but for the faint scent of flowers and the reek of burned paper.

  I pull my hair back into a ponytail, lean into the glass, and peer at my face, think about popping the zit on my chin that looks like it’s finally reaching its full potential, but manage to restrain myself. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what I wear, what I look like, whether or not there’s a bright red bump on my face drawing everyone’s attention. I am the sister of a mass murderer, and that is what people see when they look at me. Luke’s face superimposed over mine, our features melting into one another like chocolate and strawberry mingling inexorably at the bottom of a bowl.

  “This was my prom dress,” Miranda says from the half-open closet, a sea of unfamiliar fabric sticking out of the door, splashes of silver glitter woven into a black skirt. “But now I’ll never get to wear it. Will I.” Her voice, an icy whisper, goes right through me and I shiver, shutting the door tight so I can’t see her face, the blood matting the ropes of her hair. “Why don’t you come in here with me,” she pleads through the wood, her voice waterlogged and thick, the sound of something dragging, belly down, along the bottom of the river.

  Keep me company.

  • • •

  In the kitchen, my mother stands at the counter drinking a cup of coffee. She’s wearing the beige skirt suit that she pulls out whenever she has to do something “official” like go down to the courthouse to pay her parking tickets. A gold link bracelet jangles noisily as she raises the cup to her lips. My father sits at the kitchen table, staring out the window and into the yard. I don’t even need to go near him to know that the smell of stale scotch lingers in his wake, an invisible cloud partly covered up with cologne he slapped onto his cheeks and throat. I also know that he can’t meet his own eyes in the mirror, that he stays up late at night and paces around the basement, a glass in one hand, while my mother lies in their bed, sleepless, waiting for some kind of release.

  My father has gotten quieter and quieter over the past few weeks, while my mother has grown more animated, throwing herself into household projects with the zeal and focus of the newly converted. She’s planted daffodil bulbs in a patch of soil at the far end of the yard, hauled years’ worth of broken toys and junk out of the attic, cleaning the floorboards with Murphy’s Oil Soap, her hair tied back with an old blue bandanna my father sometimes uses on the rare occasions he goes jogging. She bakes banana bread and chocolate chip cookies, flat and bland as communion wafers, stirs endless pots of chili, and bastes rump roasts. At dinner, I push my food around the circumference of my plate while a torrent falls from my mother’s lips, the words rushing out to fill the empty spaces in the room where Luke hides. And the more she talks, the quieter my father and I become, the more distant.

  “We have to leave in five minutes.” My mother addresses this remark to my father, her tone vaguely annoyed. “You know we’ve got to be there by seven-thirty at the latest.”

  My father nods, his eyes clearing as he notices, maybe for the first time, that I’ve wandered into the room.

  “I still don’t understand why we have to do this.” There’s an edge to his voice. “Hasn’t she been through enough?” He tilts his head in my direction, chin raised. She. I am a she now.

  I have a name. My name is Alys Anne Aronson. My name is Alys. My name is AlysLukePsychoKillerAronson. This is my name.

  “They want to make sure she’s . . . integrated back into the school properly,” my mother says, looking slightly frazzled as she shoves the milk back into the refrigerator, searching the countertop for her keys, moving stacks of newspapers and mail. Our housekeeper, Isobel, hasn’t been here in almost a month, and the house is slowly groaning beneath the stacks of unruly papers, the thick layer of white dust coating the furniture. I heard somewhere that dust is composed of 99 percent skin, tiny flakes left in our wake. I wonder how much of Luke is left in these rooms, his skin abandoned in every corner. A sloughing.

  “They just want to meet with us before she goes back to classes today. Under the circumstances,” my mother says distractedly, “I think it’s more than reasonable.”

  “Under the circumstances?” my father repeats slowly, swiveling to glare at her. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  My mother looks up, frozen.

  He stands, pushing his chair back. The air in the kitchen is heavy as a lungful of smoke. Words are dangerous now.

  “What circumstances?”

  In a moment, anything might happen. And now I know that anything could.

  Anything.

  “We have to go,” I say, stepping in between them, the air charged and electric. I pull my mother’s car keys from the deep recesses of a plant on the edge of the counter, the tinkling sound of metal on metal breaking the spell, dirt lodging its way under my nails. My father blinks as if he doesn’t quite know where he is, doesn’t recognize his surroundings, the yellow kitchen, my mother’s pottery lining the cabinets. “We’re going to be late.”

  • • •

  Driving into the parking lot, my body begins to shake, shutting down. Just the sight of that redbrick building in the daylight makes me feel like everything’s sliding away, fast, my breathing shallow and forced. When we step out of the car, I hold on to the hood for a moment, trying to take slow, deep breaths. My mother’s voice is insistent and meaningless, her hand on my arm. News vans are already parked just outside the gates, setting up, ready to document and exploit our reentry.

  The show must go on . . .

  As I move toward the building, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it—walk in there again—and my footsteps trail off until I am barely moving, the ground warped and uneven. I imagine I can smell blood and powdery gunshots just outside the entrance, a residue. But the pavement is clean and unmarked, the red doors of the school shining with a fresh coat of paint, a cluster of raindrops clinging wetly to the metal.

  Gunshots, Keith Rappaport said. Somebody has a gun out there. For real.

  I heard later that Keith died in the hospital, shot in the chest right outside

  (—did his glasses fall off, his head thrown back, body twisted on the floor, chest blown open in the blast?—)

  the bio lab, where my brother had gone in order to kill himself, gun pressed against his forehead. The last stop.

  Were you happy to go, Luke? To finally be rid of us all? Did you welcome that sharp blast, then nothingness, sinking into it like a dark pool, your head slowly
slipping under?

  I make it inside. I make it. The hallway is empty and reeks of an astringent mix of ammonia, floor wax, and new paint. The walls glisten ghostly white, the paint glossy and fresh. I reach out and touch it as I pass, slick beneath my hands, grounding me. Everything looks the same—the girls’ bathroom at the end of the hall, the green linoleum underfoot—but there is a layer, a memory of what happened that rises up to the surface, distorting everything, a field of blurring images, the past and the present shifting before my eyes.

  The principal, Mr. Clarke, ushers us into his office, and I sit down tentatively on an orange vinyl chair between my parents. He’s wearing a pin-striped dress shirt and a black blazer, a tie knotted at his throat in a muted blue. Mr. Clarke has always had the build of a high school quarterback. But his face is drawn and thinner now, his cheekbones sharply etched above his ginger-colored beard. I picture the wound on his upper arm where fragments of bullets lodged, hiding beneath the crisp cotton, the bandage dotted with minute specks of blood. He takes a sip of coffee and smiles, his face tight. Uneasy. Because that’s what we do now—we make people uncomfortable.

  “How are you all doing?” He pushes the coffee cup to the side and leans his elbows on his desk, the look in his eyes sympathetic if a bit removed.

  My father glances away. The quiet in the room is overwhelming, and I don’t know what to say. Somehow, “fine,” the usual answer to stupid questions like these, seems ridiculous. We’re not fine. Not even close.

  Well, since you asked, Mr. Clarke, basically I stay up all night staring at the walls in my bedroom. I don’t eat. I don’t touch my violin, except to remove it then put it back in the case like a zombie. Sometimes I don’t shower for days, because really, what’s the point? Luke will still be dead even if I’m clean. And my father? He spends his nights emptying a liquor cabinet it took my parents twenty years to build. My mother copes by keeping herself as busy as possible, gardening, fussing, baking—basically pretending she’s Martha Stewart. Oh, and did I mention that I’ve been seeing my dead brother everywhere? The bodies of the newly dead springing back to life? Yeah, I think that just about covers it . . .