by James Dekker
Chapter Four
Danny’s funeral is held on Monday morning at a funeral home instead of at our church. The service is led by someone I’ve never seen before instead of by our church minister. When I ask my father why, he says, “It’s what your mother wanted.” The guy who does the service calls me Margaret instead of Megan. He says things about Danny that I haven’t heard anyone say since I was a little kid, like how Danny loved dogs and how he liked to ski. The last time Danny talked about getting a dog was when he was twelve years old. The last time he went skiing was when he was in high school. This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I glance at my mother to see how she’s reacting, but her face is like a mask. I can’t tell what she’s thinking.
After the service, we all go to another room in the funeral home, where there are tables and chairs set up and sandwiches and cakes for people to eat. My mother and father move from table to table to thank everyone for coming. Everyone says the same thing: “I’m so sorry.” No one asks any questions about what happened. As far as I can tell, nobody even says anything privately about it. No one wants to hurt my parents.
After the funeral, we go home—my mother and my father and I. One of my mother’s friends offers to come over, but my mother tells her, no, it’s okay, she’s tired and she wants to try to get some sleep. But when we get home, my mother doesn’t go up to her room to lie down. Instead she goes down to the basement. My father goes down maybe two hours later, when she still hasn’t come up again.
“What’s she doing?” I ask him when he comes back upstairs.
“Looking at things,” my father says. He doesn’t say what things. He doesn’t have to. I know. When Danny moved out, he left behind everything but his clothes and his music. He even left most of his sketchbooks and art supplies at home. My mother packed everything into boxes and put it downstairs. She changed his room into an upstairs den. She is down in the basement, going through Danny’s things. She doesn’t come up for hours.
I go back to school the day after the funeral. I feel like everyone knows what happened to Danny. I walk down the hall and kids turn to look at me, even kids I barely know, kids in lower grades than me, kids who aren’t in any of my classes, kids who are new to my school, kids who never even met Danny. They all turn to look at me. Now I am the girl whose brother was shot dead in a bar. I hear them talking in low voices. I can guess what they’re saying about Danny and about my family. I act like I don’t care. What else can I do?
My mother doesn’t go back to work. She doesn’t even get out of bed. My dad stays home too. He keeps making her cups of tea and mugs of soup. He makes her toast. He makes sandwiches. He takes these things up to her on a tray and eventually carries them back down again untouched. I hear him talking to her sometimes. I hear him say the word doctor. He says Shannon’s father’s name. My mother stays in bed for days, but Shannon’s father never appears.
My father looks at the newspaper every day, but there is nothing about Danny. He is never mentioned on the tv news, either. It’s as if it never happened.
Every day my dad calls Detective Rossetti. Every day he asks Detective Rossetti if there’s been any progress. Every day he gets the same answer: there is nothing new to report. Then one day I am in the kitchen making myself a cup of tea, and I see Detective Rossetti’s business card stuck to the fridge door. My father isn’t home. He has finally gone back to work. My mother is upstairs in bed. The bed is piled high with photograph albums and school yearbooks and drawings and paintings and sketchbooks from when Danny was serious about wanting to be an artist. My mother looks at them when she is awake. Right now it’s quiet up there.
I look at Detective Rossetti’s business card. I pick up the phone and punch in his number. I carry the phone with me into the family room at the back of the house so that if my mother is awake upstairs, she won’t be able to hear me. To my surprise, Detective Rossetti answers, his tone brisk, efficient: “Detective Rossetti, Homicide.”
When I tell him who I am, his voice changes. He asks me how I am. He asks about my parents too. I ask him why no one in the bar saw anything.
“It was a rough crowd in there,” he says. “You know what I mean, Megan?” Then he tells me what he usually tells my father—he says he’s sorry, but there has been no progress in the case.
On a Wednesday night nearly two weeks after Danny was shot, I hear my father leave the spare bedroom, where he has been sleeping since the funeral, and go downstairs. I get up and go downstairs after him. I find him in the front hall, pulling on a jacket and fishing his car keys out of the brass bowl on the front hall table.
“Where are you going?” I say.
“Out,” he says, sounding in that instant just like Danny used to sound, when he still lived at home and when he used to leave the house when everyone else was getting ready to go to bed.
“Out where?” I say.
He doesn’t answer my question. Instead he says, “Stay here. Keep your mother company.”
My mother has barely said a word to me since it happened. If I go into her room, she doesn’t always look at me. When she does, she looks right through me, as though I’m a window and if she looks hard enough, she can see Danny through me.
“She doesn’t want company,” I say. That’s why my father is sleeping in the spare room now. “Where are you going?” I say again.
“Downtown.”
“Downtown where? It’s late.”
He finally tells me.
I understand what he is doing. He thinks that if he can find out who killed Danny, my mother will get out of bed again. She will eat again. She may even smile again, although I don’t think he expects that to happen any time soon.
I think about what Detective Rossetti said, but that only helps me make up my mind.
“I’m going with you,” I say. “And you can’t stop me.”
He doesn’t even try. If you ask me, he wants me to go with him. Unlike my mother, he wants company.
Chapter Five
I have never before driven downtown so late on a weeknight. There are bright lights everywhere, even in the office towers, even though they are empty except for the cleaning staff. But the streets are much quieter than they are during the day, and my father has no trouble finding a place to park. We get out of the car. My father draws in a deep breath before he starts across the street. I have to scramble to catch up to him.
I’ve never been in the bar where my brother was killed, and I almost don’t get in now. A heavyset man is standing just inside the door. He stops us and demands to know how old I am. He demands to see ID.
“Please,” my father says. “The boy who was shot here—he was my son. He was her brother.”
The heavyset man looks at me. There is no sympathy in his small eyes. No pity. No emotion at all.
“Were you here that night?” my father asks him.
“I didn’t see nothing,” the man says right away, without my father having to ask him.
I think about my English teacher, who is crazy about grammar, and what he would say if he were here: If you didn’t see nothing, then you must have seen something. But even if that’s what the heavyset man means, I don’t think he’ll tell my father. His eyes are too small, too cold, too uncaring.
My father looks into the man’s eyes. I can see he is disappointed. He tries to move past the man, but the man steps in front of my father again.
“She can’t go in there,” he says. “She’s too young.”
My father looks back over his shoulder at the street and at our car, which is parked on the other side. It’s late and the street is empty.
“I can’t leave her outside,” my father says. “It’s not safe.”
The heavyset man crosses his arms over his chest. He is settling in now, a permanent roadblock.
“Please,” my father says. “We just want to go inside for a few minutes. We just want to talk to some people.”
I peek past the man into the gloomy interior of the bar. I se
e a cavernous room. There is a bar along one side. A man stands behind it, pouring drinks and putting them on a tray for a server, a young woman in tight pants and a tight T-shirt. I look at the rest of the room. At first I have trouble seeing if there is anyone else in there, it’s that dark. Then I begin to make out shapes—people huddled around tables. Men, mostly, but with a scattering of women. I wonder if Danny was a regular in this dismal place. I wonder if he came here for business or for pleasure.
The bartender looks over at me. He sets one last drink onto the server’s tray. As the server walks away from the bar, the bartender comes toward us. He is almost as tall as the bouncer. He is wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. A giant snake tattoo coils around his left arm all the way from his wrist and disappears under the sleeve of his T-shirt. He glances at my father and me. Then he says to the bouncer, “Problem?”
“They want to come in,” the bouncer says. “She’s underage.”
The bartender looks at my father and shakes his head.
“I let a kid in here who’s underage, I can lose my licence,” he says to my father. He sounds more reasonable than the bouncer.
“You’re the owner?” my father says.
The bartender nods.
My father looks relieved. Finally, someone he can talk to, someone who will understand.
“The young man who was killed here, that was my son,” my father says.
The bartender looks surprised. My father is tall, but he’s thin and balding. He wears glasses. He doesn’t look anything like Danny, who is...was...strong and tough and confident—overconfident. He doesn’t look anything like the father of a guy who would get himself shot in a bar at three in the morning.
“I just want to talk to your customers,” my father says. “Please. My wife won’t even get out of bed. I just want to talk to your customers and see if anyone can help us.”
I can’t tell what the bartender is thinking. I can’t tell if he feels sorry for my father or if he thinks my father is pathetic. But he finally nods. The bouncer steps aside. As I start to follow my father into the gloomy cavern, the bartender says, “I don’t think anybody saw anything.” My father turns to him, and the bartender says, “I was here myself that night, and I didn’t see anything.”
I look at the bartender’s face. I peer into his eyes. I am sure he’s lying to my father. I’m also sure he knows what I’m thinking but he doesn’t care.
I follow my father around the place. He is polite to everyone. At every table he approaches, he begins by saying, “I’m sorry to disturb you.” Then he introduces himself. If he notices that nobody seems to care who he is, he doesn’t let it show. He asks everyone at every table if they were in the bar when Danny was shot. Everybody says the same thing: No. Not only did nobody see anything, but nobody was there. Some of them barely glance at my father. Some of them don’t look at him at all. They are all rough people. They’re not like the people who live in my neighborhood.
Again I wonder what Danny was doing in this place and how often he came here. No one expresses any sympathy for my father. But my father doesn’t stop until he has spoken to every single person at every single table.
When he has finished, he goes to the bar, where there are several men sitting on stools, drinking in silence. A couple of them watch the tv, which has the sound turned down low. I hang back. The truth: I am embarrassed for my father. He is talking so politely to everyone. He is practically begging for their help. But no one will help him.
The bartender listens to my father ask his questions. I see him shake his head. He knows my father will get nowhere. He knew it when he let my father into the bar.
I step forward now. I think if I stay close to my father, I can protect him somehow. I can stop him from noticing how everyone in the bar sees him.
That’s when I notice that there is someone besides the bartender behind the bar. A kid. He doesn’t look much older than me. He is wearing an apron, and he is stacking dirty glasses and plates in a big plastic tub. He glances at me as he hoists the tub and starts to carry it toward the back of the huge room. He glances at me, and I see something in his eyes that I haven’t seen in any other eyes in this place.
I tug my father’s arm. I point at the kid.
Chapter Six
My father calls out, “Excuse me.” He starts to move toward the kid, who is still walking toward the back of the bar. At first I think that he hasn’t heard my father. Then I realize: He doesn’t know that my father’s polite excuse me is directed at him.
The bartender comes out from behind the bar and grabs my father’s arm, forcing him to a halt.
“But I just want to ask—” my father begins.
“He wasn’t here that night,” the bartender says.
The kid glances back over his shoulder, and I see something else in his eyes. He starts to shake his head.
“You’ve got a job to do,” the bartender says sharply to the kid. “Or maybe you don’t need a job anymore.”
The kid hurries to the kitchen, carrying the tub full of dirty glasses and plates.
“He wasn’t here that night,” the bartender says again. “You’ve talked to everyone. You should go home.”
My father looks around the gloomy bar. A few people look back at him. He says, “Come on, Meggie. It’s late, and you have school tomorrow.”
We drive home in silence. Later, when I am in bed, I hear my father in the spare room beside my room. He is weeping.Another week goes by. Now it is three weeks since Danny died. I come home from school to a big surprise. For once, my mother isn’t in her room. She’s in the kitchen. She is cooking. She doesn’t exactly smile at me, but she does look at me. She says, “I called work today. I’m going back on Monday.”
I say the only thing I can think of: “That’s great, Mom.”
My father gets home at his regular time. I am on my way upstairs when he comes through the front door. He pauses and sniffs the air. He looks at me, a puzzled expression on his face.
“Are you making supper tonight?” he says. “It smells good.”
“It’s Mom,” I say. “She’s cooking. She’s in the kitchen.”
My father looks surprised. He smiles. I realize it’s the first time I’ve seen him smile since the police came to the door three weeks ago.
My mother calls me to set the table. My father follows me through to the kitchen. He kisses my mother on the cheek. She doesn’t exactly smile at him, but she doesn’t pull away, either. She says, “Supper is almost ready.”
“I have to make a call,” my father says. He picks up the phone and carries it through to the family room. I know who he’s calling. He calls the same person every night—Detective Rossetti. I hear him apologize for phoning again. I imagine Detective Rossetti’s voice the way it was that time I called.
My mother looks through to the family room. She watches my father as he listens to whatever Detective Rossetti is saying. She hears him say, “Well, thank you for your time.”
When he carries the phone back into the kitchen, she says, “Who was that?”
“That detective,” my father says.
A shadow crosses my mother’s face.
“And?” she says.
My father sighs. “And nothing,” he says. “There’s still been no progress.”
I am afraid my mother will fall apart. I am afraid she will start to cry again. I am afraid she will go back upstairs to her room. But she doesn’t do any of these things. Instead she nods, and she says, “Dinner is on the table.”
When I wake up on Monday morning, it’s like everything has gone back to the way it used to be. My mother is dressed in a business suit and is bustling out the door with her briefcase when I come down the stairs. She tosses a good-bye over her shoulder at me.
My father is stuffing papers into his briefcase when I go into the kitchen. Without looking up from what he is doing, he tells me he has an important meeting this afternoon and that he will be home late. He also tells me that my mother
has a lot of catching up to do and that she will probably be late too. He asks me if I’ll be okay on my own.
When I don’t answer right away, he pauses to look at me. “Meggie?” he says. “You’ll be okay, right?”
I tell him, “Sure.” I even smile at him when he kisses me on the cheek before dashing out the door.
When he is gone, I think, Did the last three weeks happen or did I dream them? I think, How can a person die, and three weeks later, everything seems like it’s back to normal? It takes me most of the day before I realize that I am wrong. Nothing is back to normal.
That afternoon, English class. We’re reading a play. Shakespeare. Hamlet. And Hamlet, the lead guy, is talking to a gravedigger.
Which makes me, just like that, think about Danny’s funeral and the guy who called me Margaret instead of Megan, and no one corrected him. Then he said all those things about Danny that maybe once upon a time were true, but they weren’t true recently. And the next thing you know, I’m crying.
Caitlin notices it first. She sits right beside me. Then, I can’t help it, I sniffle, and another girl looks at me. Then that girl pokes the girl in front of her, and she turns around. Pretty soon there are enough people looking at me that it makes the teacher stop what she’s saying. She peers at me. She says, “Megan, are you all right?”
I start to nod because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? You’re supposed to say, yeah, you’re fine. But I don’t feel fine. I feel sad. So I stop nodding, and I shake my head instead. I can’t stand all those people looking at me. I can’t stand what they’re probably thinking. Poor Megan, did you hear what happened to her brother? Do you know what her brother was into? And that’s it. I get up and I run out of the classroom. I don’t stop running until I am down the stairs and out of the school, even though Mr. Tesco sees me fly past and he calls my name. I don’t care.
