“I miss him,” he says quietly, staring straight ahead, unblinking.
“I do too,” I say. And I do. I miss Luke’s presence in the house, the sound of him moving around in his room, just one wall away. I miss his smile, on the rare occasions it made an appearance, the way it would light up his whole face so that you could see, just for a moment, how good-looking he was, how alive. “But I feel like I’m not allowed to. After what he’s done.”
“Yeah,” Riley answers, his voice husky with emotion. He turns to face me, searching for a connection, some kind of understanding. “That’s it. That’s exactly how it is.”
I hold very still, trying not to breathe.
The bell rings once, shrilly, breaking the moment. Riley gathers up his backpack and the cookies, tossing the bag at me before I can protest. I catch it one-handed, and he grins, his face opening up like sudden sunlight after a hard rain. “So you have something for later,” he says. “All you girls are getting too damn skinny.”
I blush, stuffing them in my bag, where I know they’ll remain for the rest of the day, my chemistry book grinding them to fine powder. I think of Luke nestled in the sanctuary of his coffin, his dried bones separating from the husk of his body, disintegrating further with each day the sun rises in the sky, each passing hour that ticks away, how we will never be able to put him back together again.
FIVE
When I get home, the house is quiet, and I am greeted by the aroma of pot roast, the one dish of my mother’s that I love unreservedly. A mix of onions, tomatoes, and the caramelized smell of browning meat rise from the stockpot on the stove, and a plate of brownies dusted in powdered sugar waits patiently on the kitchen counter. I pick one up and hold the fudgy heft of it in my palm before setting it back down again. More baked goods. All the carbs in the world won’t fix what’s happened, and I wonder why my mother, who before now engaged in this activity maybe twice a year—if we were lucky—is suddenly so compelled toward the kitchen, buying butter in bulk at Costco, hoisting economy-sized bags of flour and brown sugar into a metal cart. If she’s trying for mother of the year, it’s too late. Luke’s gone, and I’m the only one left. All the pastries in the world won’t change what he’s done, or make me forget.
I hear noise coming from the basement, the sound of something dropped on the cement floor, a trail of music, and I follow it downstairs, the steps creaking as I descend, a piano melody growing louder, a minor key gaining momentum, clawing at my chest. My mother sits at her potter’s wheel, which spins frantically, molding a lump of clay with her fingers, the long, vertical shape rising triumphantly out of the muck. She is deep in concentration, her head bent over her work. She’s wearing what I like to think of as her artist uniform—clay-stained jeans and a white dress shirt that used to belong to my father a million years ago, the sleeves rolled up and splattered with red clay and the various shades of glaze she’s experimented with over the years. Slate gray. China blue. Bloodred. Pale gold. Joni Mitchell plays on the stereo in the corner, her reedy voice needling my skin.
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on . . .
My mother takes her foot off the pedal, and the wheel stops, her hand coming down to smash the tower of clay, ruining it, a long sigh escaping her throat. She stares at the mess she’s created, reaching out to stroke the flattened clay with one finger.
I made my baby say good-bye . . .
“Mom?”
She looks up, startled, her eyes blinking steadily behind the black-framed glasses she always wears when she’s working. She needs bifocals but, vain to the core, struggles along with the same glasses she’s had for four years. “Bifocals,” she tells me often, “are for grandmas, which, in case you haven’t noticed, I most certainly am not.”
“Alys! Did you just get home?” She looks worried, as if by not waiting by the door with a glass of milk she’s somehow failed some complicated maternal test. She wipes her hands on a white towel, and stands up, wavering, uncertain if she should hug me or let me be. She points one finger at the ceiling. “I made you some brownies—they’re upstairs on the kitchen counter.” The piano sprinkles its notes through the room, the vocals fading out as the track ends, the quiet suddenly oppressive. I haven’t heard my mother listen to Joni Mitchell in years. Luke made fun of her so mercilessly over the last few years for her “hippie music” that she mostly relegated the CDs to a drawer—at least whenever he was home.
“I saw them,” I say, and walk over to the bookshelf lining the back of the room before she can hug me, the shelves crammed with pots and vases. “I’m not really hungry right now.”
“Well, maybe later.” I hear the soft slapping sound of her moccasins on the floor, and then her hand is on my back, the scent of flour and sugar rising from her skin. I move away from her touch, picking up a small shallow bowl, the glaze green as the moss at the bottom of a swamp, swirling into blackness. “Where’s Dad?” The house feels eerily quiet. I listen hard but hear nothing overhead. For the last week or so he’s insisted each night at dinner that he’ll go back to work soon, but each morning I find him at the kitchen table, an empty glass at his elbow, ice melting at the bottom.
She avoids my eyes. “I don’t know. He must’ve left while I was cooking. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.” Her words wobble unsteadily on her tongue, and she doesn’t sound sure of anything, much less my father’s eventual return.
“When are you going back to the gallery?” I ask, watching her expression shift to slight annoyance at my question.
“I don’t know, Alys.” Her hands are in her hair now, pulling the bulk of it over one shoulder, her fingers twisting the strands tightly together until they resemble a length of coarse rope. “I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back, to tell you the truth.”
“Why?” I ask, although I already know the answer.
“Elena feels my presence might be a bit . . . distracting right now, and I tend to agree with her.”
Elena is my mom’s boss. They bicker incessantly, but only because they are so totally similar—opinionated, artistic, driven. They even dress kind of alike, favoring the same long strands of colored beads wound round their wrists and necks. “You do?” I raise one eyebrow, broadcasting my skepticism.
“I do,” she says without hesitation, and I wonder if she really believes what she’s saying, or if she’s trying to convince not only me, but herself too. “Besides,” she continues wryly, “I think we all know that selling paintings of sunsets and constipated-looking dogs wasn’t exactly my life’s work.”
She turns away so that only her profile is visible. But I don’t have to see her face to know that she’s lying. Even though she grumbles about her job nearly all of the time, I know, despite her frustrations, she loves going to work every day. It was in the way she strode around the house in the mornings, her heels clicking purposefully against the floors, the look of vindication in her eyes when she sold a painting or acquired a piece she actually admired. And when she was feeling especially gracious, she admitted that just to have a job around art was a respite in a town she always considered too small, too quaint. Not edgy enough. Now edgy is all we are.
“So, how was school?” She seems almost chipper as she changes the subject, and I wonder if it is as exhausting to her as it is to me, this endless playacting.
“How do you think it was?” I turn the bowl over in my hands, one finger tracing my mother’s signature etched into the bottom, the hardened clay rough against my skin.
I hear her sigh, and I close my eyes briefly, her footsteps reverberating against the cement floor as she walks to her desk, tucked into the corner. I hear the chair creak as she sits down and the sound of a match being struck, the smell of sulfur. When I turn around, she’s sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, smoking a cigarette. In that pose, she looks younger somehow, like a girl again, her limbs folded neatly as paper.
“You’re smoking n
ow?” I ask, incredulous. My mother has been lecturing us on the perils of smoking for years, and has even said on occasion that she’d rather that we grew up to become Republicans than smokers, which probably tells you everything you need to know about her.
I watch as she tilts her head, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “I smoked before you were born. I have one every once in a while, when I feel like it. So get that look off your face.”
I have never, even once, come home and smelled cigarette smoke in our house, or on my mother’s clothes. I feel dizzy, the world suddenly unfamiliar again. There is a strange woman smoking in my basement who claims to be my mother, though at this moment I’m pretty sure all bets are off.
“Besides,” she says, taking a drag and blowing the smoke toward the ceiling in a perfect ring, “I’m an adult.”
“Oh, so that will make it okay when you keel over from cancer?”
She shoots me an annoyed look through all the smoke, and promptly changes the subject.
“Did you see Ben today at school? Or Delilah?”
At the mention of Ben’s name, something shuts down inside me, some vital mechanism, and all of a sudden I’m exhausted. I flop down into the chair behind her potter’s wheel, one foot toying with the pedal.
“Yeah,” I whisper, clearing my throat to make room for the words. “D just acted like I didn’t exist, and Ben . . .” My voice trails off, and I step forcefully on the pedal, making the wheel spin in circles for a few seconds with a loud hum. “Well, he doesn’t want anything to do with me either. Not really. And who could blame him?” I look at the ruined lump of clay so I don’t have to meet my mother’s eyes, fully aware that if I see any sympathy or emotion reflected there, I will start to cry.
“That . . . is very disappointing,” my mother says, her breath coming out in a long hiss, the smoke circling her slender frame.
“Tell me about it.”
“Alys,” she begins gingerly, as if walking into enemy territory, “are you sure you want to finish up at Plainewood after everything that’s happened? You could go stay with Grandma for a while, and finish the school year there if you want. I could call her tonight.”
I have thought of this myself many times since the night I heard my parents arguing down here, turning the idea over in my mind like a shiny silver coin.
“I don’t want to go anywhere.
(I don’t?)
“I’d have to come back here sooner or later, and then what? Besides, my audition is at the end of May. And if I went to Grandma’s, I wouldn’t be able to rehearse with Grace beforehand. It doesn’t make any sense.”
As soon as the words leave my mouth, I regret them almost immediately. I would never admit it to my mother, but it would be a relief to start over someplace fresh, no history, no one staring when I walk down the street, no insults lashing my back in the locker room. And despite the fact that I haven’t played since the
(shooting)
I don’t want to give up hope entirely that I might be able to stand on the stage in a month’s time and play, face the row of judges seated out in the darkness. But it’s not just the audition—I’m not ready to relegate everything to the past—Ben, Delilah, Luke—my whole stupid, pointless life up until now. It’s small and broken, but it’s what I have left.
“Maybe the audition can wait, Alys,” my mother says in a voice that’s soft, reasonable, the tone she uses when she’s trying to cajole, to pull me in. “There’s always next year. And even if you came back a few months from now, after the summer’s over, maybe that would be enough time to . . . let things die down.”
My forehead wrinkles as the words leave her lips. Enough time. As if the passing of time itself would be enough to negate what has happened, the damage Luke has left in his wake. My mother has always been the one to push me when it comes to my playing, applying for programs, competitions. This is the first time I’ve ever heard her insinuate that music might not be the most important thing in my life, some kind of ticket out.
“Die down?” My own blatant disbelief bounces off the walls of the basement, reverberating in a way that strikes me as harsh, unkind even. “Do you really think this will ever die down? After what he did?”
My mother crushes out her cigarette in the top of a jar of glaze with a series of sharp jagged movements, her expression both steely and far away. She won’t look at me.
I wish I had a river I could skate away on . . .
My phone buzzes with a text, and when I pull it from my pocket, my heart jumps at the sight of Delilah’s name and the words that follow it: Meet me at First Presbyterian. 8 p.m. A smile pulses at the corners of my mouth. The image of Delilah stepping foot in a church is just about as incongruous as that of a six-year-old dressed as a prostitute. Delilah’s only concession to religion is basically Christmas, where the only thing she worships are the presents piled under the tree. As I reread her message, a blanket of confusion falls over me. Why a church? Suddenly, I’m nervous, my senses on high alert. When I raise my head, I’m almost surprised to see my mother still there, the acrid smell of tobacco permeating the room. The remnants of a white veil drift between us, and I cannot see my mother’s face clearly, her angular features softened by the smoke.
Luke, what have you done to us?
I say the words in my head, but Luke refuses to appear, stays quiet, as stubborn and willful as ever.
Isn’t that just like him.
SIX
The night has suddenly turned warmer, almost balmy, and as I lock the car door and cross the church parking lot I look up, craning my neck to search for a hint of stars, but they’re hidden behind the darkened, impenetrable sky. I am sweating inside the sweatshirt I’m wearing, the hood pulled up in an attempt to hide my face. The silky air smells of damp earth, the cloying haze of white flowers touched by rain. It reminds me of Luke’s funeral, the pulpit thick with candles and lilies, their petals framing the long wooden box, the smell of melting wax and incense clinging to my clothes. I think of him in the cemetery, fresh black dirt smoothed over his grave, and my knees buckle momentarily beneath my weight.
The front door is propped open, yellow light shining from within, and there are people huddled on the stone steps, drawn together in groups, some crying, arms tightly wound around one another, some smoking cigarettes, staring off into the night. My blood crawls to a stop in my veins as I realize that this is a vigil. Nobody mentioned anything about it at school, but then again, no one really talks to me. The scent of incense drifting through the open wooden door mixes with clove cigarettes, the sharp slap of cologne that hovers, cloud-like, over the boys’ heads. Alex Simmons, a senior, looks up as I approach, but his face registers nothing. He could be gazing at a wall, a shoe left lying inexplicably in the middle of the road. My heart turns somersaults in my chest. I shouldn’t be here.
Delilah sits on the steps off to the side, almost entirely out of sight, arms wrapped around her knees as if she’s giving herself a much-needed hug. As I approach, I’m aware of the nerves jumping beneath my skin. Her face is so familiar, so much a part of my life that I can’t imagine going on without her. Her black hair is pulled back, her brows framing hollowed eyes. When she sees me coming toward her, she exhales deeply, offering up a weak smile. Her heart, I can tell, is not really in it, though. It’s in the way she glances quickly away. I sit down on the steps beside her, the coldness of the stone radiating through my jeans.
“Hey,” she says without turning to look at me. “I’m glad you came.”
There is a beat, a moment of quiet where she pulls absentmindedly on the end of her ponytail the way she always does when she’s nervous, and that one gesture pierces the core of me. Delilah and I have been many things around each other, but nervous has not been one of them.
“Are you?”
She finally looks at me, hurt written all over her face.
“Of course I am, Alys. O
f course I am.”
“You didn’t seem too glad to see me today at assembly,” I say, watching as a group of freshmen climb the steps to the front door, the heels of their shoes clicking against the stone. Their eyes flit over me, widening, and I hold their gaze defiantly. Say it, I think as they pass in a wave of flowers and fruit, gum and hairspray. Just go ahead and say something. My fingers curl into fists, and all of a sudden I’m vibrating as if I’ve become some kind of conduit, a mess of copper wires, exposed and fraying. I will myself to unclench my hands, and play with the string of my hoodie instead, wrapping the cord tightly around one finger before releasing it.
Delilah looks out into the park that faces the church. I remember playing on the jungle gym there when we were small, hanging from the yellow bars like a pair of wiry monkeys. Burying Luke in the sandbox, the grit and scour of sand up to his chin, his arms and legs gradually disappearing as we dumped another red pail full over him.
“I didn’t know what to do. I mean, everyone was looking.” She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, pulling on the end of her ponytail again, her teeth worrying her bottom lip. She says this as though it matters. She says this as though it’s important. That people were looking at her and, by extension, looking at me. As if the last hundred years of our friendship won’t hold up under scrutiny. And maybe it won’t. The thought is like an icy hand on my neck, a pair of dead fingers reaching out and squeezing. Hard.
“Since when do you care what people think?” I say, and in my tone I hear Luke, his voice in the note he left on Facebook, rage inflecting every syllable.
Now you’re all going to die . . .
“Don’t act like this is so easy,” she snaps, out of patience now. “Okay?”
“Oh, you mean easy for you?” This comes out louder than I wanted it to, with a force that surprises even me. People stop talking and turn to look at us, so I drop my voice, willing myself to stay calm. “What about me, Delilah? Do you have any idea how hard this has been for me? No, you wouldn’t, would you? Because you haven’t been here. Because your brother didn’t walk into our school a month ago and gun down our teachers, our friends. But mine did. So every time you stop and think about just how hard it’s been for you, why don’t you think about that?”
Silent Alarm Page 14
