Evening News Page 2

  “I know.” She had to raise her voice over the chorus of indignant honking as the drivers’ collective temper tantrum escalated. “I can’t believe it either.” She broke into a fresh spasm of sobs. He shut his eyes and lowered his forehead to the steering wheel and banged his head against the hard plastic over and over, as if trying to knock himself unconscious. She reached over and grabbed hold of his hair to stop him. The car behind them blasted its horn. The traffic was moving again.

  ***

  It was the last class of the fall semester, and she had been feeling like it was a lost cause, this terrible stupid schoolgirl crush of hers, when Dan had suddenly turned to her as the students were filing out of the classroom and he was packing up his book bag. “Would you like to get a bite to eat?” he’d asked. “I’d like to talk to you about your work this term.”

  She had been too nervous to eat her hamburger. She just sat there nodding as he praised her work and encouraged her to take some more advanced English classes. She could feel the chemistry between them doing its thing, and then out of the blue he’d made that pronouncement about not getting involved with women who had kids. When she’d asked why, he’d shrugged boyishly and said, “Conflict of interest.” And smiled. And that, she thought, was that — until he’d called her up a couple of weeks later and said he had an extra ticket to a Hollywood Bowl concert. Would she like to go?

  At first she had kept Teddy out of sight as much as possible, spending more than she could afford on babysitters. But Dan had never brought up the issue again. And after they’d been seeing each other for a couple of months, he was the one who suggested that the three of them spend some time together. And then once Trina was born, the issue ceased to exist; she was no longer a woman with a kid. They were a family. Or so she’d thought.

  ***

  When they pulled into their driveway, the neighborhood seemed unusually quiet. Hushed. She suspected that the neighbors who had witnessed all the commotion with the paramedics, the wailing ambulance, were hiding behind their miniblinds, peering out at them. Bill Beemer’s red Corvette was parked in the driveway next door, and Giselle wondered whether Lois had had him contacted up in the friendly skies and summoned home or whether it was just a coincidence that he happened to come back when he did.

  “I see the asshole’s back,” Dan muttered. “Probably on the phone with his attorney.”

  The two men had never hit it off, although she and Lois liked each other well enough — mostly, Giselle supposed, because their sons were practically inseparable. Bill Beemer was a real man’s man, beer and football on the weekends. He had invited Dan over to a Super Bowl party when they’d first moved in and seemed unnerved when Dan let it slip that he didn’t know which teams were playing.

  In the past she had sometimes stuck up for Bill, trying to encourage neighborly goodwill. “You don’t have to be soul mates,” she’d tell Dan, “to eat hamburgers and drink a couple of beers.” When he was at home, Bill liked to entertain, to preside over his state-of-the-art gas grill, and Lois was always inviting them over for barbecues. It was awkward to beg off when they lived right next door — the usual white lies about having a previous engagement wouldn’t work. “He’s not that bad,” Giselle would tell Dan. “He means well.” But she wouldn’t defend him anymore. In fact, she wouldn’t have protested if Dan had announced his intention to bash the guy’s face in.

  They walked inside the house and just stood there for a moment in the small foyer, not knowing where to go, afraid to step in either direction, as if the house were full of land mines. She saw Dan staring out the sliding glass door through the living room to the backyard, the empty wading pool. She reached for his hand, but he chose that moment to walk across the carpet and open the sliding door. She couldn’t stand to watch.

  Standing alone in the empty room, she felt unreal, as if she were standing on a stage. The director had told her what her part was — the grieving mother — but had neglected to give her the script. My daughter is dead, she thought. Your daughter is dead, she told herself. What do you do now? This was a subject that none of the parenting books addressed. She turned and looked at herself in the hallway mirror, surprised to see her reflection there. The glass was still smeared from Trina’s lips. Dan would hold her in his arms in front of the mirror, point to her reflection, and say, “Who’s that pretty little girl?” And Trina would point to herself and then kiss herself in the mirror, laughing.

  From the end of the hall she could hear the computer beeping in Teddy’s room and the low rumble of her brother’s voice. She knew that she had to go in there and tell them, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to go lock herself in her room, shut her eyes, and be alone. Not move a muscle. Not even breathe. Through the window she could see Dan lugging the wading pool farther away from the house to drain the water. She could hear him struggling and cursing and crying as he struggled to drag it across the grass. She leaned forward and pressed her own lips against the smudgy imprint of Trina’s mouth. When she licked her lips, she tasted apple juice. Or maybe it was just her imagination.

  She wanted to go to sleep. She wanted not to be awake.

  She walked down the hall to Teddy’s room. He had begged to come to the hospital with them, but the paramedics said it was against procedures. Giselle had told him he could come and visit his sister in the morning, first thing. She hadn’t wanted to leave him there with Lois and Eric, but there wasn’t really any choice. And no time to ponder alternatives. She rode in the back of the ambulance with Trina, holding her hand and praying, trying not to think about how the accident had happened, as if Trina had been struck by lightning. From the hospital she had called her brother at his office and begged him to drive over and stay with Teddy until she got home. Her desperation must have communicated itself even to Todd, who seemed to live in a high-tech world of his own making; he’d agreed to drop whatever it was he was doing without any argument. That and the fact that his nephew was probably the only human being whom Todd seemed genuinely attached to in real life, as opposed to virtual reality.

  Her brother and son were seated in front of the computer Todd had given Teddy last year, for his ninth birthday. They were playing a game on the brilliantly colored monitor. Todd seemed absorbed, pressing keys and muttering to himself, but Teddy was hunched in his chair, staring vacantly into space, literally — a poster of the planets taped over his bed. They both turned to look at her. When Todd saw her face, he shut off the computer screen. The brilliant colors dimmed to gray. They waited for her to say something. She opened her mouth, the words lined up in her mind at the ready, but nothing came out.

  “She’s dead,” Teddy said. “I knew it.”

  Giselle sank down onto the edge of his bunk bed and held her arms open. He let her hug him. She patted his back to soothe him, the way she used to do when he was a colicky baby, and waited for him to dissolve into tears. But his body was stiff; he didn’t seem to be there. After a couple of seconds he broke free of her embrace and ran down the hall, out the front door. The screen door banged shut behind him. She sat numbly for a moment until her brother’s laserlike gaze prompted her into action. Then she ran to the door and called Teddy’s name, called for him to come back. There was no answer. He was nowhere in sight. Already gone. She knew she should run after him, but she was too exhausted to move.

  Dan was still in the backyard, kneeling in the crushed grass beside the wading pool, tipping it so that the remaining puddle of bloody water could drain faster. Her soggy book, The Scarlet Letter, was lying in a muddy puddle. She had an exam in American Lit to 1860 on Monday. A few hours ago that had been the most pressing source of anxiety in her life. Dan was poking his finger through the bullet hole in the side of the vinyl pool. A look of disbelief on his face. The bullet might as well have been a UFO. She flashed on Teddy standing there as she had climbed into the ambulance, crying and shouting, “It was Eric! It wasn’t me!”

  Even though it was eighty degrees out, she felt bone cold. She couldn�
��t think what to do. The bathroom seemed like the only safe room in the house. She didn’t want to see Trina’s room. Not now, not yet. She needed to get out of her bloody clothes. She couldn’t wait another minute, even though she heard Dan call out her name as she walked through the living room. Her brother, the coward, was hiding in Teddy’s room. Even as a child, Todd had hated emotional scenes. Well, it didn’t get more emotional than this. Giselle hurried into the bathroom, tore off her sundress, and blasted the water in the tub. She wished she could lock the door behind her, but Dan had removed the locks as a safety precaution, so the kids couldn’t lock themselves in. As soon as Trina had learned to crawl, he had spent the better part of a Saturday kid-proofing the whole house.

  Giselle let herself go, moaning as she lowered herself into the scalding water. She stuffed a washcloth in her mouth and bit down hard to muffle the groans, and berated herself for studying, for ignoring Trina, when she should have been playing with her, paying attention to her. They had this new fishing game Dan had bought for Trina — the object was to hook bright plastic fish with a rod as they floated in the water. It was supposed to develop hand–eye coordination. Maybe if they’d been playing Go Fish, the bullet would have missed them both. Or maybe it would have hit Giselle instead. Anything, anyone but Trina. Giselle was a selfish mother who cared more about her own career goals, her own future, than about her child sitting there, large as life, needing her mother. She slid down and held her head under the water, not breathing, wishing she were dead. But then Teddy’s face surfaced like a cork in her mind, the dread in his eyes when she’d walked into the room, the dead tone of his voice, his shallow breathing as she tried to pull him closer. And she realized that she was still being selfish; she should have gone after him no matter how tired she was. It was his loss as much as hers.

  ***

  Friends of theirs had always marveled at how much attention Teddy paid to his little sister. Their sons, they complained, had no use for their baby siblings. But even when Trina first came home from the hospital, Teddy wanted to hold her, to help change her diapers, to tickle her and make silly faces. When she got old enough to sit up, he’d set her in a big spaghetti pot and tie a rope to the handle and drag her all around the house. He called it a magic carpet ride. Trina loved it. She would laugh and squeal and bang the side of the metal pot with a spoon until Giselle ordered them to stop making such a godawful racket.

  Dan had been touched and delighted by Teddy’s obvious affection for his little sister. Giselle had worried about the effect of a new baby on Teddy, a new baby whose real father lived in the same house, not halfway across the country. But from the moment Trina was born, they were all more of a family. Dan and Teddy had seemed to feel closer to each other. They were the men of the house; Trina and she were the “chicks.” “Chicks,” Dan would say, shaking his head and winking at Teddy when Giselle or Trina did something silly, and Teddy would nod and grin. She shut off the faucet and grabbed a towel. She might have lost one child, but she wasn’t going to lose another. She was still a mother.

  While she was drying herself, she heard Dan say something to her brother, and then he flung open the bathroom door. “Where’s Teddy?” he asked. His voice echoed off the bathroom walls, loud and harsh, and the look on his face was cold and distant. She held the bath towel in front of herself, as if he were some stranger who had just barged in.

  “I don’t know,” she said, reaching for her underwear. “I was just going to look for him.”

  “What do you mean, look for him?” Dan glanced down at her bloody dress lying on the tile floor and kicked it across the room. “Where the fuck is he?”

  Her heart pounded. Dan rarely lost his temper. When they argued, which wasn’t all that often, his voice remained low and reasonable. Almost as if they were having a classroom discussion.

  “He ran outside when I told him about . . .” Her voice choked up.

  “Trina,” he enunciated precisely. “Catrina.”

  “Do you mind?” He was blocking the doorway; she brushed past him into the hallway. “I’m getting dressed.”

  He followed her into their bedroom. She glanced into Teddy’s room, which was empty. “Where’s my brother?”

  “He left. Said to call if we needed him.” Dan sat on the edge of the bed and watched as she pulled on her jeans. The expression on his face looked critical, as if he were staring at a picture hanging crookedly. Then he sighed and lowered his head into his hands. Giselle walked over and wrapped her arms around him, pillowing his head against her breasts. She hadn’t bothered to put on a bra. He lifted up her T-shirt and pressed his face into her bare breasts and started to cry. She held him tighter. His sweat had dried now and smelled sour, the sweat of fear rather than of vigorous exercise. She wanted to lie down beside him; she wanted them to cry together. He was mumbling how he couldn’t believe it, how it couldn’t be true, and she was brushing her lips against his hair, whispering, “I know, I know,” but part of her mind was worrying about Teddy, and as if reading her thoughts, he suddenly pushed her away and sat up straight.

  “It was Teddy,” he said. “He was the one who fired the gun.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was Eric.” She tucked her T-shirt firmly into the waistband of her jeans. “He had his father’s gun.”

  Dan just shook his head slowly. “I talked to Bill. He says Teddy was holding the gun.”

  “He’s lying,” she said. “Teddy knows better. He wouldn’t play with a gun. I know he wouldn’t.”

  “Teddy admitted it to the police.”

  “Admitted what?” She glared at him.

  “That he was holding the gun and doesn’t know what happened. The phone rang, Eric bumped his arm, he was startled or some damn thing, and the gun went off. He said he was aiming at the trees in the back.”

  Giselle pressed her hands over her ears. “I’m not going to listen to this shit.” She grabbed her sandals from underneath the bed. “I’m going to find Teddy.”

  “Stupid fucking kids!” Dan pounded his fist on the night table. “How many times do you have to tell them something?” The cheap ginger jar lamp jumped with each blow, sliding closer to the edge until it flew off and shattered on the wooden floor.

  “What about Bill?” she shouted. “What sort of idiot keeps a loaded gun where kids can get at it?”

  Dan shook his head. “He claims it was in a locked drawer and the key was hidden. The asshole really did call his lawyer. Already. He’s scared stiff I’m going to sue him.” Dan gave a snort of contempt, then covered his face with his hands. “For what? What’s he got that I want? His fucking Corvette?”

  She buckled her sandals and stood up. “I’ve got to find Teddy.” She hesitated in the doorway. “Are you coming with me?”

  He crushed one of the larger lamp shards underneath the heel of his tennis shoes. “I don’t want to see him right now. Not yet.” When he saw the look on her face, he added, “I’m sorry. Just not right now.”

  “However it happened, it was an accident,” she said. “He’s nine years old, for chrissakes!”

  “I know,” he mumbled, not looking at her. “Bill doesn’t think they’re going to file any charges. He talked to the police.”

  “Charges?” she repeated blankly. “What kind of charges?”

  “Manslaughter, I guess.” He let out a deep sigh and slipped into his teacher tone of voice: “Unintentionally causing the death of another without malice.”

  “It was an accident!” she shouted. “They’re in the fourth grade, for chrissakes. Are you crazy?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not a lawyer.”

  She felt cold again. Somewhere she had read some statistic: 70 percent of marriages did not survive the death of a child. Or maybe it was higher. Eighty percent. Ninety percent. At that moment it might as well have been 100 percent.

  “Just give me a little while,” he called after her as she slammed the door.

  ***

  The clouds had moved in. It looked like
rain. Suppertime. She could smell the charcoal grills fired up in some of the neighbors’ backyards, everyone hurrying to cook their burgers and steaks before the rain let loose. As she walked to the end of their driveway, she thought of the chicken marinating in the refrigerator, ready for Dan to barbecue, the bowl of potato salad she had made that morning. A potato-sized lump lodged itself in her throat, and she almost turned and went back inside, unable to face the normal world going about its normal business. Or the thought of running into someone. Either way. If they’d heard or hadn’t heard yet. The stilted offer of sympathy — what could you ever say? — or some oblivious bit of chitchat about the weather or whatever. What would she do? Hold up her end of the small talk? Blurt out, I can’t talk to you right now. Our daughter died today and I’m looking for my son, who accidentally shot her. Ciao. She remembered how guiltily inadequate she’d felt when her cousin Ruth’s younger daughter was run over a couple of years ago, how she’d actually picked up the phone to call her and then set it down again, and how she’d labored, instead, over her stilted condolences on a sympathy card.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t a particularly friendly neighborhood — just a diverse assortment of people, mostly renters like themselves, who pretty much kept to themselves — except for the kids. There were a couple of boys — one black, one white, both older than Teddy — shooting baskets in the driveway of a house on the corner. Across from the run-down stucco ranch with the burned-out lawn, the curtains always drawn shut, and lots of cars coming and going at odd hours. Drug dealers, they suspected. They had warned Teddy to stay away from there, to walk on the other side of the street when he went to the playground. Just as they had warned him (repeatedly) never to talk to strangers, never to ride his bike without his helmet, never to play with matches or guns.