Chapter One
Drifters
1.
After my brother went missing, my parents let me use their car whenever I
wanted, even though I only had a learner’s permit. They didn’t enforce my
curfew. I didn’t have to ask to be excused from the dinner table. The dinner
table, in fact, had all but disappeared, covered with posters of Danny, a box of
the yellow ribbons that our whole neighborhood had tied around trees and
mailboxes and car antennas, and piles of the letters we’d gotten from people
praying for Danny’s safe return or who thought they saw him hitchhiking along a
highway a couple states away. I didn’t have to do any more chores.
Years later, I joined a support group for siblings of missing or exploited kids.
It was amazing how a group of like-minded individuals could make the most
singular and self-defining of circumstances feel simply mundane. I suppose for
some, such a thing would be normalizing, since everyone in the circle of couches
and folding chairs had experienced equivalent tragedy. For me, it was deeply
disconcerting. I had no idea how to compete with other people’s misery. It was
in that group that I heard about the two types of parents: clingers and
drifters. The clingers became micromanagers and wildly overprotective,
tightening the reins, imposing new rules, smothering their kids with unwanted
attention, buying gifts like a canopy bed or a new stereo system. The drifters,
on the other hand, lost themselves to some mysterious netherworld, existing on
coffee and crackers and minutes of sleep per night. They forgot to take the
garbage out. They let the kitchen floor grow sticky. They looked like they were
listening when you spoke (they became expert at empathetic nodding), but really
they were staring just past you, glassy-eyed. The concerns of the corporeal
world became inconsequential to them, except for the fine, red-hot point of
finding their child (not you; their other child). Aside from that, they, well,
drifted.
My parents were drifters.
We couldn’t keep the refrigerator stocked; its contents dwindled to bread heels
and condiments in a matter of days. My mom started smoking again, years after
having quit. Her energy was both frenetic and focused: she designed posters,
concocted overly elaborate phone trees to recruit people for the area sweep
searches, and added to her steadily growing stack of index cards, each one
scribbled with a “clue” to help the police. Allergic to penicillin, she scrawled
on one. Capricorn, she wrote on another. Born on night of a full moon. My father
became quietly obsessed with the TV news-local, national, international, as if
he couldn’t rule out any possibility. Maybe Danny was part of the throngs of
Bosnian Serb refugees; maybe he’d been victim to the floods in the Philippines.
Dad could go days without speaking. He could sit for hours (six and a quarter, I
counted one day) in his sunken chair without once getting up. And we kept
running out of toilet paper. Over and over again we had to use tissues instead,
until those ran out too and we moved to paper towels, which quickly clogged the
pipes. I’d never before had to think about the supply of toilet paper in our
household. It had always simply been there. I was fifteen. Up to that point, I’d
believed that the world more or less worked-toilet paper sat on its roll,
dinner was served hot at the table, everyone came home at the end of a
day-simply because it was supposed to and it always had.
“There’s no proper or improper way to grieve,” the woman who ran the support
group would say. I did not return after that first visit; the impulse, it
quickly became clear, had been a mistake. The woman’s face was chalky with
powder, her cheeks too bright with rouge, her eyelashes clumped with mascara.
The collar of her blouse rose up around her neck, tied into an improbably
flouncy bow. The look of her offended me. She was all wrong; how was I supposed
to take her as an authority? Other participants hunkered down low in their
chairs, weeping appropriately into soggy tissues. Or nodding appreciatively. Or
wringing their hands. They had the raccoon-eyed, red-veined look of the haunted.
Finding myself backed into the overly familiar terrain of heartache and
desperation brought out the worst in me. I was cornered, wanting to scream or
kick my chair over or run my nails along the chalkboard where the woman had made
us brainstorm a list of feeling words about our siblings (love, confusion, fear,
sadness, the list began, predictably). I wanted to reel off my own list of
shitty things Danny had done to me when we were teenagers (calling me the
titless wonder, mashing my face in a pillow once until I couldn’t breathe,
ignoring me in front of his friends). I wanted to be irreverent and
inappropriate. I wanted to shake up the righteous anguish. Going missing, I
wanted to yell from some deep, dark pit in the middle of me, was the only
interesting thing my brother had ever done.
2.
In the first weeks after Danny’s disappearance, I drove. I would spend long
minutes in the garage before starting the car, adjusting the rearview and side
mirrors, moving my dad’s seat up and down and backward and forward until I had
just the perfect view of the world behind me. I’d practice looking over my left
shoulder to see past my blind spot, imagining that the bushy maple in our yard
was a semi trying to barrel past me. Finally I’d back down our long driveway, my
head out the window, the warm summer air making my cheeks feel blushed.
The whole act was fraught with a particular anxiety. Aside from being not
strictly legal, I could never forget the smallness of me compared to the bigness
of the car and the gaping margin for error created by the contrast. One wrong
move and I could easily swerve into the oncoming lane or plow through a red
light into a bustling intersection. The very act of driving-the successful
negotiation of feet on pedals and hands on steering wheel and eyes in
mirror-felt death-defying.
But I kept going back to it, night after night, and not just because it was a
way to get out of the house and away from my parents and whichever well-meaning,
wet-eyed neighbors or family friends were visiting. Even with the nervous thrum
in my belly, driving managed to calm me down, focusing my attention on
palatable, bite-sized fragments of data-two yellow lines, a green arrow, a
bright red taillight. I had just finished the summer-school offering of driver’s
ed the month before and my stops were still jerky; I often overestimated how
much gas I needed and regularly peeled out from stops; I scraped the curb on the
few occasions I tried to parallel park. I was drawn to it in the same nagging
way I was drawn to anything I wasn’t yet good at, like when I’d spent the summer
before eighth-grade algebra learning polynomial and quadratic equations, or when
I’d spent weeks memorizing every strait in the world after losing the
middle-school geography bee (Joshua Belson had beaten me, knowing that the
Naruto Strait connected Awaji Island and Shikoku in Japan).
So each night, after my parents absently nodded in my direction and the
raspy-voiced neighbor or family friend leaned in to hug me or place a
sympathetic hand on my shoulder, I slipped out to the garage and into Dad’s car.
But I didn’t have anyplace to go. I’d spent the bulk of my life up to that point
either in school or in my room studying or in my best friend David Nelson’s den
paging through books and listening to music and generally lolling around. Most
nights now, I’d deliver stacks of Missing Person posters to the ring of
businesses surrounding our city. In the beginning, the sympathetic attention of
strangers was still intoxicating.
The lady in the Kroger made an ohhh noise as she promised to hang it on the
community bulletin board at the front of the store. The manager at the
Blockbuster called me sweetheart and offered me a coupon: rent two, get one
free. The kid who scooped ice cream at Baskin-Robbins said he’d take two because
he worked another shift at the store in Belvedere. He looked, honestly, like he
could cry. It was months-sixty-three days, actually-before anyone told me no.
The guy behind the counter at the Texaco Mini-Mart just shook his head and said,
“Sorry, ma’am.” He couldn’t post it in the window. Company policy.
“What company policy?” I asked, pointing to the poster for Once Upon a Mattress
at Jefferson Middle School and one for the Red Cross: Give Blood. Save a Life.
He repeated his line about manager approval in his thick, mumbling accent. His
dark face was drawn, with wiry bits of hair growing in uneven patches across his
chin. He was yellow around the eyes, which made him look sick. His name tag said
Kito. East Asian? African? Middle Eastern? I couldn’t tell from his bland, bored
features. It seemed like he could be anything. I assumed his bad attitude came
from all the Franklin High jerkoffs who’d come in here before me, making What
up, Apu? jokes or calling him Mohammed. But I was capable of talking to Kito
like a normal person. I was capable of discussing the Oslo Accords or the
Indian-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir, and not just because I could regurgitate
facts from Mr. Hollingham’s AP history class-which I could-but because I took
a particular pride in actually reading newspapers and listening to the radio.
The fluorescent lights buzzed loudly above me. “Can’t you take this now and get
manager approval later?” I asked, sliding the poster across the rubbery mat on
the counter. Danny was posed in his football uniform, down on one knee, a
football socked in one armpit, his face broad and unobjectionable as a meatloaf,
smiling as if Santa Claus himself had snapped the picture. Beneath the
photograph in bold, blocky letters it said, LAST SEEN 8/2/1995. There were other
details scattered in a bunch of contrasting, discordant fonts and sizes and
colors, because my mom, its designer, was a leaky container for panic. In
italicized blue Courier, it listed what Danny had been wearing (Reebok
gym shoes, shorts, gray T-shirt, Tigers ball cap); in huge red Times New Roman,
how much my parents would reward someone for information leading to his
whereabouts ($25,000; up another $10,000 from the last poster); in bolded Arial,
where he was last seen (two miles from our house, leaving the basketball courts
at the Larkgrove Elementary School playground, where he’d just finished a game
with his musclehead friends, Tip and Kent). It didn’t say musclehead on the
poster, didn’t even mention Tip and Kent.
Kito (Kite-o, I wondered, or Kee-toh?) told me no. No manager tonight, he said.
“Can’t you hold it somewhere in the back until a manager arrives? Leave it on
the manager’s desk? Maybe put a note on it?” I was trying to stay reasonable,
but I could hear my voice getting loud. A couple of guys had come into the
Mini-Mart, one opening and closing the cooler doors, the other standing right
behind me. I could smell the faint odor of gasoline coming off him, but I didn’t
turn around. “Please,” I said.
Kito looked at me, yellow and expressionless. I was sure he had not the highest
opinion of Americans, as most probably came in here for a six-pack of Bud or
Marlboro menthols or a whole strip of lottery tickets with their Slurpee. Still,
I wasn’t used to strangers unmoved by tragedy. “Listen,” I said, speaking slowly
and evenly. “I am not asking you to hang this poster immediately. I will leave
it here to get whatever approval you need.”
He called me ma’am again, even though he was old enough to be my father, and
told me Sorry. “Sir, I can help you?” he said to the person behind me.
I curled my fingers around the rickety wire rack that held local maps, not quite
sure what to do with myself. I wanted to tell Kito to go screw himself, but
adults, even adults manning a gas station counter, still held relatively
unassailable sway with me, so I chickened out and instead flicked my hand in his
general direction, an insane motion, as if I were sprinkling fairy dust on him.
For a second he opened his sick eyes a bit wider and I thought maybe I was
starting to get through, but then, still, nothing. I left the poster on the
counter, just to make a point, though I pictured Kito almost immediately
throwing it into the metal wastebasket beside him, already overfilled with
Snickers wrappers and Doritos bags.
The man behind me called over my head, “Pump eight.” Kito started pressing the
keys of his cash register. I opened the door hard on my way out, the bells on
top clinking loudly and also, I hoped, angrily and indignantly and ultimately
pityingly, for Kito and his sad little life there inside the Mini-Mart.
I dropped off posters at Wendy’s, Arby’s, Valu-Rite, and the Chevron. The car
wash, the dry cleaners, and the Comerica branch were all already closed-it was
nearly nine on a Tuesday. I scanned the radio for news. An AM host talked
fuzzily about fallout from the O. J. Simpson verdict with a lady who yelled
about how it was open season on battered women. On another station there was a
story about riots in Lyons that broke out after the police killed a local
bombing suspect. Bad news was soothing, as if at least it was the whole world
that was screwed.
The lights of the A&W were still bright, the booths half full. Inside, there
was a flash of purple-and-yellow letter jackets, which gave me a quick,
instinctual stutter, a chill up the back of my neck. My new therapist, Chuck,
would’ve told me the feeling was a grief response. Chuck thought everything was
a grief response. And sure, you could have interpreted the jackets as a reminder
of Danny, who likely would’ve been in there with the rest of them, eating
burgers and slurping root beers and burping words. He’d be play-punching his
friends on the arms, except his play punches would be hard, and soon two or
three of the guys would end up in a dramatic little scuffle, Danny in a
headlock, Tip or Kent with an arm around Danny’s neck, tousling Danny’s hair and
saying, “What you want, pretty boy? You want to throw down?” and everyone would
be laughing, even Danny, and maybe he’d spit burger out of his mouth or root
beer would come flying through his nose. The whole crowd of them would make a
huge racket, disturbing all the other A&W customers without even noticing or, if
they noticed, without giving a crap.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Local News
by Miriam Gershow
Copyright © 2009 by Miriam Gershow.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Spiegel & Grau
Copyright © 2009
Miriam Gershow
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-385-52761-3
