Evening News Page 4

  His mother nodded as if she understood what his stepfather was talking about, and Teddy said, “What’s metal fiction?” And Dan said, “Meta-fiction, not metal. The writer plays with your sense of what’s reality and what’s artifice.” And Teddy looked at his mom, who whispered, “I’ll explain later.” And she did. She said that most of the time the writer wants you to forget you’re reading a story and to believe it’s actually happening, it’s really true. But some writers like to play tricks on the reader, sort of pull the rug out from under you, so that you’re always aware that it’s just some story that someone is making up and the writer making it up could make it go this way or that way because none of it is really real. None of it is real life.

  The pharmacist calls out, “Mr. Salazar,” and the old man sitting next to Teddy kind of trembles his way slowly to the counter to pick up his pills. The druggist, a pretty Asian lady who reminds him of Connie Chung, looks over and smiles at Teddy. “Are you waiting for a prescription?” she asks. He shakes his head and looks back down at his book. She has to repeat everything to the old man in a loud voice before he understands where to sign and why the pills cost more than they did the last time.

  Teddy can’t concentrate on his book. He keeps thinking. He wishes that real life were like how the book was written: If you want to pick up the gun, turn to page 13. If you want to tell Eric you have to go home, turn to page 7. And there he’d be, walking across the yard to the wading pool, complaining that he’s hungry and wants a snack. And he would go inside the house and bring out three Oreos, two for himself and one for Trina.

  But this is real life. There is no flipping backward, not even in his mind, at least not for long. All he can think of is how he killed his sister. But even though he is thinking about it all the time, it is also like he isn’t thinking about it, because every time, over and over, it seems to strike him fresh, catch him by surprise, like a fist slamming into his stomach. He sees his sister plop down on her butt in the water, a look of pure surprise on her face, the way she always looks when she falls down. He hears his mother screaming. He feels the panic he felt when the policewoman took him into the bedroom to talk to him alone. Her partner, a bald-headed black man, took Eric into the kitchen to talk to him. Teddy knew from the movies that the police wanted to hear their stories separately so that they could compare them later, catch them in lies. Teddy was crying and shaking so hard, he could hardly talk. His officer was nice, though. She reminded him of Mrs. Honey, his third-grade teacher. She told him just to tell the truth and not be scared, because everyone knew it was an accident, and they just needed to know how the accident happened for their records. Police procedure. She made it sound as if these things happened every day. As if he’d accidentally pitched a baseball through someone’s window and smashed the glass. “Just tell me what happened,” she said nicely. “Take a deep breath.” She handed him a Kleenex to blow his nose. “By the way, I’m Sergeant Lacey.” Under other circumstances he would have been thrilled to talk to an actual police sergeant.

  Teddy had wanted to lie and say that Eric was holding the gun, but he knew from movies and the OJ trial — which his mom had watched on CNN whenever she was home, saying it was better than law school — that they had a million scientists who could figure out exactly what had happened. Fingerprints and powder burns and bullet angles. He knew they’d figure it all out scientifically — plus Eric would tell them it was him anyway — and Teddy would just be in even bigger trouble if he lied.

  “Did you know the gun was loaded?” the policewoman asked him.

  The question caught him by surprise. It was an obvious question, but somehow he didn’t remember thinking about it. He didn’t remember Eric’s saying anything or asking anything himself about whether or not the gun was loaded. It was hard to remember what he’d been thinking. He guessed he wasn’t really thinking. He couldn’t have been.

  Teddy shook his head. “I didn’t know there were any bullets.” Which wasn’t really a lie. He didn’t know there were and he didn’t know there weren’t.

  “Did Eric tell you it was unloaded?”

  He shook his head again. “I don’t remember. I think I just, um, you know, assumed.”

  She snapped off the tape recorder and patted him on the shoulder. “I think that’s enough for now, Teddy.”

  The “for now” scared him. What about later? He wanted to ask her but he was afraid to know. He followed her silently downstairs to the kitchen. The black officer was talking to Eric’s father. Teddy couldn’t see Eric or his mother anywhere. The black cop was really tall, like Michael Jordan. He knelt down in front of Teddy and looked him straight in the eye. Teddy flinched, thinking maybe the officer was going to arrest him. Take him away in a squad car. Maybe even handcuff him. But all the officer said was “Your uncle’s next door, son. You can go on home now.” His voice was soft and he looked sad, as if maybe he had a boy about Teddy’s age and was thinking about him.

  “Are you waiting for someone?” the Asian lady pharmacist asks Teddy. He knows she is trying to figure out what he is doing sitting there all alone on a Sunday evening. It is almost dark outside.

  “My mother,” he lies. She isn’t the police; Teddy figures he can tell her anything he feels like. “She must have forgot or she’s late or something.” The woman still looks worried, so he adds, “Do you have a pay phone?”

  The pharmacist smiles encouragingly and points to a corner on the other side of the store. “Behind the cosmetics.”

  Teddy walks over to the phone and turns around to see if the pharmacist is watching him. She is. So he has no choice. He picks up the receiver and drops in a quarter.

  “I want to make a call,” he tells the operator when her voice comes on the line. And suddenly he does. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t thought of it sooner. “A collect call. To Edward Bedford. Four oh two, four three five, four three three three.”

  “And whom should I say is calling?” she asks, sounding bored, as if she could care less.

  “Teddy,” he says. “His son.”

  “What the hell’s going on out there?” Ed demanded to know before she even got out a hello, before she even had the receiver all the way to her ear.

  If he’d started off with an offer of sympathy, she probably would have dissolved into tears, but his brusque accusatory tone immediately put her on the defensive. She felt her spine stiffen, her jaw clench. Luisa must have sensed the fur bristling; she tiptoed into the living room with her cup of tea and turned on the television.

  “You tell me,” Giselle said. “I take it Teddy called you?” She poured herself another shot of bourbon. She wanted to know where her son was, but she didn’t want to come right out and admit that she didn’t know.

  “He was crying, not making much sense. He says he killed his sister.”

  Giselle stopped breathing. She could hear the tone Ed’s voice took on when he was scared shitless but trying to pretend as though he wasn’t. She wanted to hang up, to slam down the receiver as if it were an obscene call.

  “You still there?” Ed said.

  “He said he killed her?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. “Those were his exact words?”

  “I didn’t have a tape recorder, but, yeah, that’s what he said. Something about hunting deer. He sounded crazy. I thought maybe he was on drugs.” Ed believed that everyone in California was crazy or on drugs or both. He believed the Midwest was the last bastion of sanity.

  “There was an accident,” she said. “Teddy didn’t kill her.”

  “You mean she’s not dead?”

  “No, I mean —” Her vocal cords went dead. She took a sip of bourbon and cleared her throat.

  “She’s dead,” he said flatly.

  Giselle let out a sob. She bit down hard on her lip and tasted blood mixed with bourbon. She thought maybe she was going to faint, and sat down hard in one of the kitchen chairs.

  “Oh, Jesus.” He groaned. “Jesus Christ almighty.”

 
Dan appeared in the kitchen doorway and poured himself another stiff drink. His eyes were red, but he seemed calmer. He gave her a questioning look and she mouthed, “Ed.” He sighed and retreated into the living room.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Ed said finally, as if he’d run through every possible response in his repertoire and found them all to be inappropriate.

  For the first time she appreciated his inarticulateness. Even in the best of times, verbal communication was not Ed’s strong point. She had never enjoyed talking to him on the telephone, not even when they were first dating and in love. Giselle would wait around the house for him to call, but then when he did, she’d have to struggle to keep the conversation afloat.

  “Where’s Teddy?” she asked him. She blew her nose in a paper napkin lying on the counter.

  “He was calling from a pay phone at Drug Fair. He says he can’t go home. He wants to come here. To Lincoln.” He hesitated for a second. “Maybe it’s not a bad idea.”

  “Over my dead body!” Giselle snapped. Suddenly all the anger that she hadn’t been able to direct at any target — not at Teddy, not at the doctors, not at the cop, not at Dan — took off like a Scud missile aimed right at Ed. “I just lost one child, and now you want to take the other one. I can’t believe you.”

  “Listen,” he shouted back, “I was just thinking about Teddy. What’s best for him right now. After all —”

  “He needs to be here,” she cut in. “We need to get through this together, as a family.” At the word family she felt this band of pain squeezing her chest. She pictured the three of them sitting silently at the supper table, Trina’s high chair sitting out in the garage.

  “I don’t know,” she sighed. “I don’t know. I just think if we send him away now, he’ll think it’s because we blame him. Like a punishment. That we don’t love him anymore.”

  “Yeah,” Ed conceded glumly. “Maybe.” He was silent for a moment, stymied.

  Suddenly it occurred to her that if Teddy really did shoot Trina — and why would he say he did if he didn’t? — maybe, legally, he wasn’t even allowed to leave the state. The thought took her breath away. She didn’t know anything about the law in these cases. She’d read about these things happening in the newspaper — kids accidentally shooting one another — and thought, How terrible, but never stopped to think about the law.

  “How did it happen? Where’d he get the gun?”

  She had been waiting for him to ask, surprised it had taken him this long to get around to the details. The five Ws of journalism. Or was it four? In another lifetime she’d been assistant editor of their high school newspaper.

  “I asked where he got the gun,” Ed repeated accusatorily. As if she were the one — and not he — who had a stupid redneck NRA bumper sticker on the back of his pickup.

  “I don’t really want to get into it,” she snapped. She figured what he was really asking was, How could it happen? Where were you? “I understand you’ve got questions and you’ve got a right to know — I’m not trying to be evasive — I’m just too fucking tired right now. Okay?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I’m sorry,” she amended, softening her tone. She didn’t want to antagonize him. She wasn’t exactly coming from a position of strength here. She could just imagine what his family and friends in Lincoln were going to say.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he said, so low that she could barely hear him. “About your little girl.”

  His mumbled apology caught her by surprise. She’d been waiting for him to say, I told you so, to blame her for leaving him and moving to California. For taking their son off to the killing fields — gangs, drive-by shootings, earthquakes, fires.

  “I’m going to go get Teddy now,” she told him. “I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Good.” She was about to hang up when he said her name, or rather the nickname she had left behind.

  “Gigi?”

  “What?” She picked up her car keys off the counter and jangled them, impatient to be off.

  “Do you want me to come out there? I can, you know. I can be there tomorrow.”

  His voice sounded awkward, as if he were asking her out on a first date. Back in high school her best friend, Laura, used to say that Ed reminded her of Lennie in Of Mice and Men. Strong and gentle and a little slow. Laura hadn’t really meant it as an insult, and somehow Giselle hadn’t taken it as one. She was touched by his offer. She knew how much he hated to fly, his white-knuckled terror.

  “I don’t think so, Ed,” she said gently. “But thanks.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Let’s wait and see.” She hung up before he could say anything or hear her crying again.

  In the living room Dan and Luisa were sitting on the couch holding hands. Giselle had never seen a son and mother so affectionate with each other. At first it had worried her, made her wonder if Dan wasn’t too close to his mother for comfort, but she had come to the conclusion that it was just cultural. His brother was the same way. Angela Lansbury — Murder, She Wrote — was on the TV. Dan had already muted the volume, as if they had just been sitting there waiting for Giselle to hang up.

  “He’s at Drug Fair,” she said, not meeting Dan’s eyes. Now that she knew he was right — it was Teddy — she couldn’t bear to look at him. “I’ll be back in five minutes.” She hesitated for a second, not sure whether she wanted Dan to volunteer to come with her or not. But he didn’t. Any other evening she might have asked, “Do you want anything?” And he might have answered, “Some Rum Raisin” or “The new Esquire” or “We’re almost out of toothpaste.” He might have added, “Be careful, honey,” as she walked out to the garage. But tonight she didn’t ask if he wanted anything and he didn’t say anything.

  ***

  During the short ride to the mini-mall, Giselle rehearsed what she was going to say to Teddy. It felt sad and strange to be worrying about what she would say to her own son, as if years had elapsed since they last saw each other, some awkward gulf of time during which he might have changed beyond recognition. At a stop sign the car across from her honked and flashed its lights. She had neglected to turn on her headlights. She sat up straighter and clutched the wheel firmly. Just concentrate on your driving, she told herself. All we need now is a car accident. She turned the radio dial to an easy-listening station and focused on breathing deeply, a relaxation technique she had taught herself during those sleepless nights after she’d left Ed and moved to California, wondering if she’d done the right thing. Sometimes she’d wake up gasping for breath. She went to a doctor and said she thought she had asthma or some kind of new allergy, but he’d said they were panic attacks. She asked for some Valium, but he was one of those young bearded New Age–type doctors. He wrote down the name of a bookstore — the Bo Tree — and recommended a couple of relaxation tapes. So Giselle would lie in bed and listen to the rustle of waves or a deep, distant gong from some Tibetan mountaintop, feeling foolish. She felt that already she was turning into the sort of flaky California type that Midwesterners made fun of. But Teddy loved the tapes. He’d drift right off to sleep with an otherworldly smile on his lips. He even stopped grinding his teeth at night.

  It was raining heavily as she turned into the empty parking lot, headed toward the brightly lit Drug Fair, and parked the car. As she sprinted to the store, sandals splashing through the puddles on the asphalt, she thought how if it had only been raining this afternoon, Trina wouldn’t have been in the wading pool, and . . . so on. You can’t think of that right now, she told herself. You have to concentrate on Teddy.

  At the doorway Giselle almost collided with someone coming out, holding a white prescription bag. She couldn’t think of his name. He and his wife had been in their Lamaze class a couple of years ago. He held up the small white bag. “Ear infection. Again,” he sighed, “poor kid.” Giselle mumbled something sympathetic and brushed past him.

  The store was so brightl
y lit, it blinded Giselle for a moment. Then she walked briskly from one aisle to the next — greeting cards, cosmetics, shampoo and hair dye, toys. She walked up the toy aisle just to make certain, then went on to feminine hygiene, vitamins, cold remedies, canned foods, and summer promotional items — hibachis, folding chaise longues, and tiki torches. When she got to the last aisle, she felt panic mounting. What if he’d left the store after talking to his father and run off somewhere? She should have checked to see if his bike — a shiny black monstrosity that looked like a miniature Harley-Davidson (a Christmas present from Uncle Todd), Teddy’s pride and joy — was in the bike rack out front. She was about to walk back outside and look for it when her eyes caught a flash of bright red: Teddy’s Cornhuskers T-shirt (a Christmas gift from his paternal grandparents). She looked more closely, and there he was, huddled up, wedged into a narrow alcove between the cash machine and a postcard rack. He was folded up like a little lawn chair, his face pressed against his knees. She felt an urge to crawl in there with him, huddle together, but the space was too small. She thought maybe he was asleep, but when she said his name softly, just once, his head whipped up. When he saw her standing there, he cringed like a beaten dog.

  And suddenly his hangdog expression triggered something inside her. Giselle wanted to yank him out of there, shake him, and shout at him, What were you thinking? How could you have been so stupid? Don’t you know what you’ve done? Even though it was obvious that he did know. His eyes squeezed shut and he began to cry silently, his narrow shoulders shuddering, the vulnerable stem of his neck exposed as he blotted his tears against his bluejeaned knees. There was a skinny little snake of a braid at the nape of his neck — a current fad among the kids in his class — that seemed to tremble like an exposed nerve ending. Trina used to delight in pulling on it until he yelped, “Ouch!” Dan had told them that in the olden days, courtiers used to wear them and they were called lovelocks. The word sounded like some sort of wrestling term.