Evening News

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1999 by Marly Swick

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, USA, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017, 1999

  First eBook edition: November 2000

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2066-0

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  An Outpouring of Praise for Marly Swick and EVENING NEWS

  “A book that lingers in the mind and heart.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “A beautifully written, haunting novel [that] illuminates the fallout and aftermath of senseless—and avoidable—tragedy. . . . Swick has an astonishing ability to see the picture from multiple points of view.

  —Newark Star-Ledger

  “A finely crafted and starkly contemporary novel. . . . What gives the novel real power is Swick’s brilliant characterization of Teddy. . . . His voice gives the novel a sustaining resonance.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “An exquisite and powerful novel . . . a vivid journey through the hell of survival, a journey of impossible and heart-wrenching choices . . . EVENING NEWS is about how tragedy strips you down, questions your dearest values, pushes you to the edge. And when you finally come out the other end, you are a richer, wiser soul. . . . I loved this book.”

  —Lincoln Journal Star

  “What’s startling . . . is the precision with which Ms. Swick’s clear and unobtrusive prose defines an intricate emotional landscape, a precision that in itself produces a kind of thrill.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Swick tackles the ambiguous ties within stepfamilies. . . . She imparts Giselle’s struggle to hold things together with unflagging precision and unsentimental compassion.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “An engrossing domestic melodrama carved from the same vein mined so successfully by writers like Sue Miller and Jane Hamilton. . . . Best is Swick’s characterization of Teddy: a brave, bright, sentient kid who painstakingly learns to accept responsibility for his act, grow beyond it, and shape his future accordingly. . . . The voice and spirit of that little boy will stay with you.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Engrossing. . . . EVENING NEWS opens with a heart-shattering moment . . . which Swick masterfully uses to dissect the fault lines that can run through a family.”

  —Elle

  “Has . . . the flavor of Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World, a kind of heart-of-the-country honesty, a deep respect for domestic life and ordinary people.”

  —Portland Oregonian

  “Swick will make you feel as if you know this couple; when they grieve, so will you.”

  —Glamour

  “Both a lapel-grabber and a heart-tugger. . . . EVENING NEWS assaults the reader with an emotional jackhammer, seating him center stage in a slowly unfolding tragedy.”

  —Indianapolis Star

  “An emotional powerhouse with a satisfying ending. . . . Swick is a gifted writer, making this difficult journey through parental love, guilt, and forgiveness worth the effort.”

  —Library Journal

  “An heir to the emotional territory of Grace Paley and Alice Munro.”

  —New York Times

  “A novel of rare power and profound importance. . . . It’s one thing to have the artist’s gifts of language and insight, which Marly Swick has in abundance. It’s another to have the guts to use those gifts to approach some of the most difficult questions of modern society. . . . Not only is Marly Swick a prodigiously talented artist, she also has remarkable courage.”

  —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Mr. Spaceman

  “Swick is keenly attuned to the persistence of sorrow and the snarl of emotions underlying everyday lives.”

  —Booklist

  “Nothing less than original.”

  —Newsday

  ALSO BY MARLY SWICK

  Paper Wings

  The Summer Before the Summer of Love

  Monogamy

  Little, Brown and Company

  BOSTON | NEW YORK | LONDON

  ONE

  His sister, Trina, is sitting in her plastic wading pool, bright blue with purple whales stamped on it. She looks like a butterball turkey, splashing around in her diapers and pink rubber pants, banging her plastic shovel, trying to get his mom’s attention. His mom, as usual, is reading a book, furiously underlining with a yellow Magic Marker. After she graduates from college, she wants to go on to law school. She wants to go right away, but his stepdad — Teddy calls him Dan to distinguish him from his real dad — wants her to wait until Trina starts kindergarten, which won’t be for three more years. Trina can walk, sort of, and babble enough to get what she wants — juice, chicken noodle soup, pick me up, put me down, that sort of thing. His mother sits with her lawn chair facing the pool to make sure Trina doesn’t drown. Every so often she gets up and slathers more suntan lotion on the baby’s pudgy skin or picks up the bright plastic toys that Trina keeps throwing out of the pool onto the weedy grass. She is a good-natured baby; everyone says so. Always smiling and clapping her hands like an appreciative audience at any dumb thing you do — funny faces, tickling, peekaboo. For some reason, she thinks he is especially hilarious. Even during her rare temper tantrums, he can always get her to forget she’s angry and start to laugh.

  It is the end of April. Back in Nebraska, where his dad still lives, there is two feet of snow on the ground, his dad told him on the phone the day before. His dad always tells him how lucky he is to live in year-round sunshine. But Teddy misses the snow, even though he barely remembers it. He was only four when they moved away, he and his mom.

  It is a Sunday afternoon. He is standing in the Beemers’ master bedroom, looking out the window at his own backyard while Eric stands on a hassock and rummages through the top drawer of his father’s bureau. Eric’s mother is down in the rec room, riding her Excercycle and listening to loud rock music. Eric’s father is a pilot for United, and his mother worries about his being around all those pretty stewardesses all the time. Teddy overheard Mrs. Beemer telling his mother this and vowing to lose five pounds by their tenth anniversary, which they are going to spend on some beach in Mexico. Eric pulls a pair of balled white gym socks from the back of the drawer and extracts a small key. “Voilà!” he says, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

  Teddy watches nervously out the open window, the ruffled curtains fluttering in the breeze, as Eric walks over and unlocks the nightstand drawer next to his mother’s side of the bed. Teddy’s own mother has her back to them, busy underlining something in her book. The Beemers’ dog, Ninja, is busy digging a hole by the chain-link fence, panting, as if trying to make a mad dash for the water in the wading pool. Eric’s father got the dog at the pound a few weeks ago after the house across the street was burglarized while the couple was at home asleep. He was worried because he was away from home a lot of nights. In addition to the dog, who hasn’t really turned out to be such a hot watchdog, Mr. Beemer bought his wife a handgun. Even though she said she didn’t want one.

  “It’s a .38 caliber,” Eric announces as he slides the gun from the back of the drawer, where his mot
her hid it in a Kleenex box. The gun is silver and black, smaller even than a squirt gun. Eric whirls around, squatting and squinting, taking aim at various targets the way cops do on TV: the china figurine on the vanity table, his parents’ wedding photograph on the wall, the dog digging in the yard. Teddy keeps glancing anxiously in his mother’s direction. He knows she’d kill him if she saw him anywhere near a gun. He sees his sister toss her juice box onto the lawn. She points and grunts, but his mother doesn’t pay any attention to her. Trina stands up and takes a wobbly step toward the side of the pool, toward her Juicy Juice box lying on the dead grass.

  “Here.” Eric hands him the gun just as the loud music from downstairs stops. They both freeze guiltily for an instant, and then it starts up again, a different tape.

  Teddy’s real dad in Nebraska is a hunter. Teddy likes to hear the stories about when his dad was a kid, like him, and would go hunting every fall with his father and older brothers. One of whom is dead (a car accident) and the other, Teddy’s uncle Brice, doesn’t like to hunt anymore. His dad keeps saying he will take Teddy hunting someday, but his mother says over her dead body. Teddy takes aim at a row of scraggly trees at the back of their yard, pretending there is a big buck rustling in the leaves. He holds his breath; everything seems perfectly still. It is as if he can hear the deer’s heart beating. Then suddenly the phone on the nightstand explodes, loud and shrill, startling him, and at the same time Eric grabs for the gun, panicked that his mother will come upstairs.

  His sister splashes onto her butt in the water. At first Teddy thinks she has just lost her balance as usual. Then his mother screams. The dog starts barking. “Holy shit!” Eric whispers, touching a ragged hole in the window screen. Teddy’s mom is standing in the pool, lifting his sister out of the shallow water. She looks around frantically, spots them standing frozen at the open window, and shouts to call 911. Her book is floating in the water. Eric runs downstairs to the rec room. The gun is lying on the thick beige carpet. Teddy picks it up and places it back inside the Kleenex box and slides the nightstand drawer shut, but he can’t find the key. He hears Eric’s mother on the telephone in the kitchen, giving the address, spelling out the name of their street, B-U-E-N-A V-I-S-T-A, as if the person on the other end is deaf or retarded.

  Later, when he thinks about it, he can’t remember what he was thinking. It was as if he were watching himself on television. He tosses Mr. Beemer’s white gym socks under the bed. The china shepherdess on the vanity table has somehow fallen onto the floor. He picks it up and checks to make sure it isn’t broken. Miraculously, the shepherdess’s staff and little lamb are still intact. Relieved, he sets the figurine back on the mirrored tabletop, catching a glimpse of his reflection. From this weird angle he is all nostrils and teeth. Like a monster. He looks out the window. His mother is kneeling in the water, with her back toward him. He can’t see Trina. He races downstairs and out the back door, across the yard. As soon as she sees him, his mother starts shouting, “What happened? Did you see what happened, Teddy?”

  He shakes his head.

  His mother is sitting in the wading pool, cradling his little sister, saying her name over and over. The water is turning pink, like Easter egg dye. Eric’s mother runs out onto the back porch and hollers that the paramedics are on their way. His sister’s eyes are open, the eyelids trembling. He squats in the soggy grass next to the pool and starts making all the funny faces in his repertoire, sticking out his tongue and rolling his eyes into his head and stretching his lips, trying to make her laugh. Even though it is hot and bright out, he is shivering. His mother has the wadded-up beach towel pressed against Trina’s chest, but you can still see the blood. The towel is white with red chili peppers. It is big enough to wrap around her two or three times. His stepdad calls Trina his “little burrito.” When he hears the siren in the distance, Teddy tries even harder — wiggling his fingers in his ears, leaping and chattering like a chimpanzee, shouting “Mookie, Mookie!” the name of his sister’s favorite stuffed animal. He must look like some kind of lunatic. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Eric standing beside his mother at the edge of their lawn. Mrs. Beemer is sweating and panting in her black leotard and white sneakers. Eric, his best friend, is staring at him as if he were a total stranger, someone he has never seen before, an alien from another planet.

  On the mostly silent, stunned drive home from the hospital, the accident was all that Dan wanted to talk about, the logistics of it. Why? How? Who? Giselle kept shaking her head and mumbling, “I don’t know.” Already she sensed an ominous difference between them: he wanted to know everything, and she didn’t want to know anything. Hadn’t they lost enough already? She kept glancing in the rearview mirror at the empty car seat, half expecting to see Trina slumped like a sack of flour, thumb stuck in her mouth, sleeping. She could not shake the feeling that they had forgotten something. You hear these stories, she thought, of big families stopping at a gas station on vacation and accidentally driving off, leaving one of the kids behind in the rest room, and no one notices for maybe ten miles. Bobby’s not here! We must have left him at the Texaco station! And they turn the car around and speed back and there he is, sipping a Dr Pepper and eating M&M’s in the office with the manager. Whenever they tell the story for years to come, it’s a big joke. Everyone, including Bobby, laughs.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Dan shook his head in frustration, as if she were a particularly dense student. “I thought you were right there.”

  “I was, but . . .” She shrugged and rolled down her window. Her head pounded. She felt sick to her stomach. At the hospital a police officer had shown up while she was pacing in the corridor waiting for Dan to get there. A baby-faced rookie with a cowlick and a stammer. It was hard to imagine him writing up a speeding ticket, let alone conducting an investigation. He must have seen what a state she was in. He didn’t push it much after she said she hadn’t seen anything, she didn’t know anything, all she knew was that her daughter had a hole in her chest and no one was offering any assurance that she was going to be all right. She had seen the look the paramedics exchanged as they lifted Trina’s little body onto the stretcher to carry her to the ambulance. The grim blizzard of activity when they had screamed into the emergency entrance. When the two doctors finally came out of the operating room to deliver the bad news, one of them — the sympathetic blond woman doctor — took her aside while the other one — an Omar Sharif look-alike with an Oxford accent — spoke with the cop. Out of the corner of her eye Giselle had seen him jotting down notes. Then he must have taken off. By the time Dan arrived, sweaty from tennis, pale with anxiety underneath his sporty tan, Trina was already dead and the cop was mercifully gone. The cop’s tone had been less suspicious than Dan’s. But then, to be fair, it wasn’t his child.

  Just as Teddy wasn’t really Dan’s child. He hadn’t even asked about Teddy. Her son. He was only concerned about their daughter. And who could blame him?

  ***

  On what they now referred to as their first date — a hamburger in the student union after class — Dan had told her that he never got involved with women who had children. Rather than being annoyed, she had felt crushed. For weeks she had been fantasizing about being alone with him — and now this. After she got back home to her ugly little apartment and paid the baby-sitter, she crawled into bed beside her sleeping son and cried herself to sleep.

  Ever since she had enrolled in the composition course at Cal State–Northridge, Tuesday evenings had become the high point of her week, the one thing she had to look forward to. She was belatedly finishing her B.A., which had been sidetracked by her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent marriage to Teddy’s father, Ed, back in Lincoln, Nebraska. Most of the other students in the class couldn’t get into the literature Dan assigned; they were there to learn about punctuation so that they could get better-paying jobs. They were frustrated that Dan seemed to be more concerned with their souls than with semicolons.

  Their assignments
had been aimed at exploring their own personal experiences in order to see how they had arrived at their opinions and values. All semester, in his nearly illegible scrawl, Dan had praised and encouraged Giselle’s writing. Having just moved across the country and being in the final stages of her divorce from Ed, she’d had a lot on her mind to write about. She hadn’t known anyone in California apart from her antisocial brother, a special effects nerd at Disney, and as a single mother of a four-year-old, she didn’t get out much. So after Teddy was in bed, Giselle had looked forward to writing and rewriting each week’s essay. She wrote about her Catholic parents’ un-Christian reaction to the news of her pregnancy, about her gay sister, the culture shock of moving from Nebraska to California, the ups and downs of motherhood. Before they ever touched each other, Dan had known more about her thoughts and feelings than her ex-husband would or could know in a million years, even though she and Ed had practically grown up together.

  ***

  “I can’t believe this,” he said as they slowed to a halt in a sudden snarl of traffic. Up ahead an old pickup truck was stalled, smoke streaming out from under the open hood. Cars honked impatiently. At first she thought he meant the traffic, but then she looked at his face and knew he meant Trina. Unlike Ed, Dan cried easily. A movie, a book, a story on the news. Giselle had never before known a man so unembarrassed by his emotions. She thought it must be because he was half Mexican. At the hospital he had taken one look at her face and before she could even get the sentence out, he’d brushed past her into the room where Trina was and let out a howl — that was the only word for it — that seemed to go on and on.

  Once, in class, Dan had choked up and tears had welled in his eyes as he read aloud the final paragraph to a short story. Some guy in the class had said he thought the ending sucked. The story was “Rock Springs” by Richard Ford; at the end this car thief, whose girlfriend has just declared her intention to leave him, is standing in the parking lot of a motel, looking for another car to steal and thinking about the sort of life he might have had if things had turned out differently. As Dan read the part about Earl staring into a station wagon with toys scattered in the backseat, his voice started to wobble. You could have heard a pin drop in the room even though the boy who had criticized the ending sat there rolling his eyes. Afterward, Dan pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose and said, “It’s like music. You’ve just got to listen.” And then he’d looked over at her, his kindred soul, and smiled when she nodded.