Absolute Brightness (14 page)

After he left, I could have kicked myself. This is so my life, I thought. I seem to be forever hanging out with old farts with bad hair instead of making out in a parked car with an actual boy. Added to this, Mrs. Rivera, who was in charge of the festivities, had refused to allow me to hang the posters. She felt that it would put a damper on the atmosphere. But she assured me that it was a free country with First Amendment rights, so I was free to discuss anything with anyone as much as I wanted. Nobody would stop me.

The party, once it got under way, was a real blowout. Since the idea was to combine the occasion of Larry's heroism in Iraq with the Fourth of July, everyone's spirits were very high. Folks chugged beer, downed soda, and got food all over themselves. They carried their children on their shoulders, yelled at one another to be heard above the piped-in music, waved American flags, and wore costumes with a stars-and-stripes motif.

Larry arrived in a wheelchair. He was dressed in regular clothes—shorts, sandals, a Mets baseball cap, and sunglasses. His lower left leg was missing, and in its place there was a shiny, new prosthetic device with a hinge. Everyone cheered loudly, and they waved their flags as he was wheeled up the ramp to the building's porch. As soon as he was positioned beneath an arch of red, white, and blue balloons, he was rushed by a bunch of freaks with video cameras. The whole event took on shades of MTV's
Real World
.

Electra was right there in the center of everything, beaming and wearing an
OUR HERO
T
-
shirt that featured the same picture of Larry that we had been staring at all week. Her brother saluted and then waved to the crowd; he smiled and said things into the microphone that no one could hear over the racket.

Just because I had nothing better to do, I waited in line to say hey to Larry. It took forever, and I was stuck behind old Mrs. Kurtz. She smelled like sweat and was blind as a bat. One of her bra straps was showing, and she carried a blot rag with her.

“He'll turn up,” she said to me as she touched my arm with the hand that held the rag. “You watch. God looks after us in Neptune.”

“Leonard's been gone for almost ten days,” I reminded her, shifting my weight to my other hip and taking another baby step forward in line.

“Look at Larry,” she said, which I considered hilarious since she was pointing a little too far to the left of where Larry was actually seated. “He came back to us. What're the chances? And he came back a
hero
.”

“Right,” I said. “And without a leg.”

We were almost up to Larry at this point, except I could see that the guy who had Larry's ear was going to bend it for a good long while. He was going on and on about how when
he
came back from Vietnam, nobody threw
him
a party, nosiree, and
he
could have rotted in a gutter for all anyone cared, and also stuff about war being hell, actual hell. He even spelled it out. H-E-L-L. He was following up with details when old Mrs. Kurtz wiped her face one last time with her trusty rag and said to me, “Oh, by the by, I've got one of Leonard's notebooks and his copy of
Great Expectations
. Maybe you could stop by sometime. He'll want them when he gets back.”

Then as an afterthought she added, “And maybe you'll read to me when you come over. Leonard had such a nice voice. I could listen to him all day.”

“Has,” I said to Mrs. K very pointedly. “He
has
a nice voice. And I'm not a great public speaker. I throw up if I have to read aloud.”

“Oh,” she said, and then turned to greet Larry.

How Leonard ever managed to sit in Mrs. Kurtz's musty old house every Friday afternoon reading aloud while she blotted herself and sighed because Pip or whoever was in a Dickensian bind I'll never know. Maybe
our hero
was, after all, Leonard Pelkey and no one ever really knew it.

Except for a wisecrack that Larry made about my former obsession with Winona Ryder, my interview with him was pretty dull. I lied and told him that Winona and I had struck up a very lively correspondence, which I hoped to publish someday in book form. He shook his head and laughed. Then I said stupid stuff I didn't really mean about how proud we all were of him. I tried to look at his fake leg without being obvious about it, but he caught me looking and told me I could touch it if I wanted to.

“I'm what they call ‘baloney' now,” he informed me.

“What?”

“Baloney. That's what we're called. Those of us without a leg
b'low the knee
. Get it? Below knee.”

I couldn't laugh. I just stood there, slightly stunned while he laughed hard enough for both of us.

“Does it hurt?” I asked him.

“Like hell. But tell ya the truth, I got pills. Pills for everything. Pills t' dull the pain. Pills t' keep me from getting too bummed. Pills t' do something for my kidneys. Pills t' help me sleep. Sleep is tough, man. Sleep's the worst.”

Suddenly I remembered the old days right after Dad ran off with Chrissie Bettinger. I slept over at Electra's house, ate dinner there, watched movies on their big-screen TV; and sometimes Electra and I would make brownies and drink milk out of martini glasses. We painted our nails in matching colors, wrote letters to Winona Ryder, gave each other peanut butter facials. And eventually I would forget I had a home of my own. At the time, I loved that old house and Electra's whole nutty family. They were always yelling at one another from separate rooms. They'd have whole conversations, calling from floor to floor, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Sometimes they'd laugh at me because my voice didn't carry as well as theirs did and they always had to say, “
What?
” in a way that made everyone laugh out loud. Especially Larry. That guy could really laugh. Sometimes when Electra and I horsed around with him, he called us “crackheads.”

“You two are a coupla crackheads,” he'd say. “Yup, that's what you are.”

That was our cue to crack our heads together, which made Larry lose it every time. Never failed. We could always make him laugh. Once we snuck into his room in the middle of the night and watched him sleeping. We sat there snapping our fingers louder, then louder, trying to see if he would wake up. He never did. We could have lit a fire in the room and it wouldn't have disturbed him. He could really sleep, that guy.

“I've got to go.”

I wandered over to the food table, where I ate too many pickles. Then I happened to notice Carol Silva-Hernandez, the reporter from NEWS 5. You couldn't miss her, with her shiny, dark-brown bob. She was carrying a microphone with a NEWS 5 logo on it and being followed around by a big burly guy and his camera. Together they were trying to interview random people about Larry, but from the looks of it, they kept striking out. Not one of the folks who were approached knew Larry for real. I mean from before he was a hero. They just stared with their mouths full of chips and shook their heads whenever Carol asked a question.

Finally she snagged Electra, who instantly lit up at the prospect of appearing on TV. Carol couldn't believe her luck. As she fussed with her hairdo and straightened the synthetic fabric of her shell top, she practically screamed at her cameraman to “Roll tape! Roll tape!” And he did.

Carol didn't look like much—just a short-waisted woman in her mid-whatevers with a tiny nose, big eyes, and better-than-average diction; but once that camera got rolling, she really came to life. Suddenly everything about her seemed broadcast quality—eyes, nose, teeth—and even her chintzy red, white, and blue pantsuit fell into place.

“I'm here in Neptune, New Jersey, talking with the proud sister of war hero Larry Wheeler. Electro … Shoot. Can we take that again, Gary? I'm here in Neptune, New Jersey, talking with Electra Wheeler, sister of recently returned roar hero. Shoot. One more time.”

She got it right eventually. She was a very determined lady, a professional all the way. But Electra wisely used the extra time to get her dreads under control, and I could see her trying to adopt a suitably humble expression for the camera. That's when I got my big idea.

I strolled up to them, very cool, very self-assured, and politely said, “Excuse me. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Electra woke up from her humble little dream and stared at me—hard.

“I'm busy right now,” Electra said to me.

“Not you,” I replied, a little too coolly. “I want to talk to your reporter friend here.”

The silence was momentarily broken by the sound of an exploding firecracker out in the parking lot, which caused several neighborhood dogs to start yapping their heads off. Time seemed to stand still as Electra just turned away, leaving me standing there.

“So I'm wondering if you can do a story on my cousin, Leonard Pelkey,” I said to the reporter from NEWS 5. “Maybe you heard of him. He's famous around here. Or was. He's been missing for—”

“
Phoebe!
” Electra said, biting into the air in front of her. “This is so
not
the right moment, okay?”

That's the exact thing about Electra that really bugs me the most. She thinks she knows just what sort of thing should happen and when. It's as if she had received a manual in the mail that explains what is appropriate and what is not. Then she acts surprised as hell because apparently I didn't get the manual or I got it and didn't bother to read it. Of course, Rule Numero Uno in this manual is
Now is not the right moment
. Manual or no manual, I made up my mind that right then was the exact right moment, because when, I reasoned to myself, would I ever again be near a TV reporter? And besides, as Mrs. Rivera had said, it's a free country.

“You have to do a story about my cousin. You
have
to.”

Carol smiled at me like I was a suicide bomber with a strong will to live. Maybe reporters for NEWS 5 are forced to attend classes in conflict resolution, because our gal-on-the-go took a deep breath and said, “Phoebe? May I call you Phoebe?”

I nodded noncommittally.

“How about you let us finish up here and then you and me, we can have a talk about your cousin. How's that?”

She was smooth and, like I said, professional, but she didn't fool me for a second. This was just a more professional way of saying, “This is not the right moment.”

The next thing that happened shocked me. I carpe diemed the moment and began screaming something like, “
You people! You're all proud of ol' Larry here because he was off fighting evil in Iraq. But do any of you
know
what evil looks like? Evil is here—right here in Neptune, New Jersey!
”

By this time, just about everyone within earshot was staring at me. I'm sure they thought I had flipped out. Maybe they thought I was premenstrual.

“I dunno what's wrong with you, Phoebe,” Electra shouted, interrupting me. “Leonard's just missing, that's all. Nothing bad's happened.”

I suddenly remembered Deirdre throwing lettuce at my father at the Fin & Claw, I remembered how Aunt Bet told her customers that our family problems amounted to basically nothing. And then it occurred to me that people like Electra and Aunt Bet just
want
things to add up to nothing, so they say it over and over and thereby make it nothing, when in fact it is definitely
something.

I grabbed the pile of Leonard's posters from my shoulder bag and threw them. The air exploded in a burst of yellow. It was a beautiful sight. To tell you the truth, after a day filled with so much red, white, and blue, all that yellow came as an enormous relief. But once the pages settled to the ground and Leonard's face was staring up at us from all over the pavement, there was really nothing left to say. I had made my point. So I ran into the parking lot and as far away from everyone as I could get.

I tried to call Deirdre on my cell, but the illuminated readout informed me that I was out of range. This made me so mad, I screamed and threw my brand-new phone into the bushes with all my might. I was disgusted with myself, because then I had to go traipsing into the bug-infested underbrush and crawl on my hands and knees to find the stupid thing.

“Is it later yet?”

I heard the voice before I recognized where it was coming from. His car was parked haphazardly, and waves of heat were rising from the hood. There he was—Travis—lying across the front end of his very dented, burgundy-colored Nissan Sentra, like a perfect desert mirage.

“What?” I said, making my way out of the woods. “Sorry. What'd you say?”

“The ride. You said maybe later. Is it later yet?”

“No,” I told him. “It's now.”

“Get in,” he said.

 

ten

OVER BREAKFAST MOM
informed me that our pal Chuck would be stopping by at two thirty, and she wanted me to be present. She actually said the word “present.”

“Present?” I said, repeating her.

I made my eyebrows rise as high as they would go, but she didn't see them because she was busy dumping the last of her morning coffee down the drain.

“Yes,” she replied. “I want you here. Two thirty.”

Even though it was Monday, her day off, she acted as though she had a schedule.

“Deirdre, too?” I asked.

“No. Just you. And me.”

“Why not Deirdre?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because she doesn't need to be here.”

Mom started going through her purse, doing her ritual inventory—keys, lip gloss, mascara, blush, shopping list, money, Advil. It was what she did when she got nervous.

“Who decided that?” I asked her.

“Who decided what?”

“Who decided me and not Deirdre?”