Absolute Brightness (19 page)

Peggy knew that identifying criminals was not such an easy business. Even if one were able to examine pages and pages of a person's brain waves, there was nothing there to indicate that that person was evil or capable of performing deeds that would later show up in the newspaper under headlines like
CAR THIEF DRAGS VICTIM 1 MILE
. Dr. Seligman, the man who had trained Peggy in her job, had explained all this to her during one of her training sessions. He pointed out the various lines on the printout and explained to the class that an EEG was a snapshot of the brain's activities, not a blueprint of its content or hidden intent. Aha, she thought at the time, so that's it—evil could be riding those waves and no one would ever be the wiser. She decided that it was the same in everyday life—you just couldn't spot the criminals in the crowd until they actually
did
something to identify themselves. What was needed was a clue. A clue, Peggy felt, was like a spiky peak of agitation on the computer printout of human behavior, an indication that there might be trouble up ahead. When Peggy mentioned her theory to Dr. Seligman after class, he looked at her blankly, blinked, and said, “Well, perhaps. I really don't know.” And then he disappeared down the hallway.

Naturally, when the article featuring Leonard appeared in the
Asbury Park Press
, Peggy paid close attention, imagined the locale of the incident, and made notes. She memorized all the details or, as she liked to call them, “clues.” The fact that Leonard was a townie heightened her excitement and allowed her to feel more involved than if Leonard had hailed from, say, Wildwood, New Jersey. So imagine her thrill when she spotted the platform sneaker bobbing on the inky blackness of Shark River right outside her cottage. She fished it out with a long pole and then sat with it for several hours before dialing 911, savoring her good fortune.

Peggy was totally stoked to have company. She served us doughnuts and soda, and when she found out that Travis hadn't had a proper breakfast, she made him sit down to a meal of eggs and bacon and toast and juice. While she cooked, she told us her whole life story, a story that included the bit about brain waves and evil. Travis didn't say a word throughout; he ate whatever was put in front of him and watched Peggy like she was a TV show. I asked questions just to be polite. As Peggy zipped around the kitchen riding what looked like a pretty impressive caffeine buzz, I couldn't help but notice that she would have made a fine candidate for one of Leonard's makeovers, because the woman definitely needed something. Her floral smock-like top and pink polyester slacks were hopelessly last century. Her dust-colored hair was permed within an inch of its natural life. And the heavy glasses that kept slipping down her nose, so far down that her nostrils were often completely closed, were a disaster. After about an hour, I began to wonder how she could muster so much talking breath while her brain received so little oxygen.

When she started to discuss the big search party that was scheduled for the following day and then yabber on about how experienced the divers were and what they might discover, Travis said that it was getting late and we ought to get going. Peggy insisted that I take some of her homemade blueberry cheesecake to Mom and Deirdre. She didn't even wait for me to say yes or no, just wrapped it up for me. Travis went outside to wait by the car.

“Nice boy,” Peggy said. “Quiet, though. Known him long?”

“Kinda,” I told her, which was true. I had known him all through grammar school. He had been in Deirdre's grade, so I got to watch him grow up alongside her and graduate with her. And, of course, I'd kissed him. But I didn't feel like getting into the particulars, so I left it at that.

By the time I made my escape, Travis wasn't in the car or anywhere near it. I called his name, but there was no answer. I walked around to the side of the house, swinging my little to-go bag and trying to remember why I'd thought visiting Peggy was a good idea.

Travis was standing at the edge of the lake, gazing out, his balled-up hands pushed deep into his back pockets, his elbows jutting out to either side of him.

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” he answered without turning around. “Just thinking, that's all.”

“'Bout?”

“I dunno. Getting out, leaving town.”

“For good?”

“And maybe about my mom. I was thinking how she woulda been 'bout Peggy's age. It'd all be different if my mom was still around to make breakfast, cakes, and shit like that. Maybe.”

Everyone in this town had heard the story of how Travis's first house burned to the ground with his mother trapped inside it. They never found out what caused it. There were rumors about how the boy liked to play with matches, about how he used to light them and throw them against the house; but nothing could be proven. Most people pitied him, especially when he and his dad became homeless. Afterward, he went to live with a neighbor because there was nowhere else for him to go. There were like a million bake sales that year for his family, which now consisted of just him and his father. Eventually his father scraped enough money together to buy the house over on Stanhope.

“How old were you when she … she died?” I asked him.

“Eight.”

I wanted to say something that I had learned since Leonard had gone missing. I wanted to explain to Travis how sometimes it's only when a person leaves that you begin to feel just how much space they occupied in your life. But I was afraid that it would come out sounding wrong, especially to someone who was busy missing his dead mother. Instead, I just moved in close beside him and took his hand in mine, and we stood there looking out at the lake together for a good long while.

As he drove me back home, I sat so close to him I could feel the heat of his body moving into mine. The fact that I could feel my body at all was a big improvement over the day-to-day numbness that I had come to expect as normal. I was alive at that moment and full of wonder because I'd suddenly become the kind of girl who sat up close to a boy in the front seat of his Nissan while he was feeling sad about his mother. When he took his right hand off the steering wheel and reached over to take my hand in his, I experienced the same giddy surge of happy hormones that overtook me at the mall when I stole something. Everything in the world around me, and Travis in particular, became instantly transformed by this gesture. The very atoms of the air were seemingly turned inside out, revealing possibilities that had been lying dormant and just waiting for their cue to appear.

But more than anything, it was me who seemed most affected, most visibly turned inside out. My hair just seemed to fall right. My legs, rather than being the two twin pegs holding up this huddled bundle of self, looked to me like the means a beautiful girl might use to get where she wanted to go. Every one of my fingers, entwined in his, looked like it could handle a ring. And though I did my best to hide the exquisite pain of this awakening, I'm sure that something different was showing in my eyes when I looked over at him. How strange, I said to myself, that it was Leonard who brought Travis and me together. So typical of him. He had found a way to give me a makeover after all, working from the inside out.

 

thirteen

MOM DIDN'T INTEND
to close up the shop. Her original plan was to wake up early, get busy with appointments, and hopefully forget that people were searching the lake for Leonard's body. But when her first customer of the day, Mrs. Artman, jokingly accused Mom of rolling her curlers too tight as a way of giving her a natural face-lift, Mom threw down the tools of her trade and stomped upstairs to her room.

I finished up Mrs. Artman and then called the rest of Mom's customers to reschedule. Everyone was very understanding. I spent the rest of the day trying to distract myself by reading
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. Every time the phone rang, I held my breath; even Lady Chatterley's orgasm, which is described by D. H. Lawrence as a kind of rippling brilliance with flapping feathers, couldn't hold my attention. I listened with all my senses until I heard Mom's voice reassuring the person on the other end of the line that nothing had happened—nothing yet. No word. And then I went back to the shuddering convulsions of Lady Chatterley's molten insides.

At about five o'clock, Chuck's car pulled up in front of our house. Through the living-room window, I watched him get out and walk toward the house looking like bad news in shorts and hiking boots.

Of course he would come by in person. Chuck wasn't the type to make you cry over the phone, then hang up and leave you so that you could wander around the room, trying to figure out what to do next.

“
Mom!
” I called upstairs, trying to sound as normal as any kid in a TV sitcom. I opened the front door for Chuck before he even had a chance to ring the bell. He just stood there looking at me. That's when I knew. His blue eyes were brimming with the lake and everything that he'd seen down there. The corners of his mouth were turned down in what I would call an expression of grim determination. He didn't need to say a word.

Mom came down the stairs slowly, carefully, like a blind person feeling her way along the banister. When she reached the bottom step, she looked up at Chuck and her legs just gave way and folded underneath her. She fell onto the first step and sat there, looking horribly helpless and small. When she finally let out a loud, unruly wail, the hairs on my neck and arms stood up like the tiny antennae of a bug trying to figure out the best direction forward.

Chuck tried to speak, but every time he opened his mouth, Mom said, “No.” She said it a lot. She said it so many times that Chuck finally gave up trying to offer his condolences or to explain anything.

Deirdre, who had rushed downstairs when she heard Mom's first anguished cry, tried to take control of the situation.

“Pheebs! Get Mom some water. Hurry!”

By the time I came back from the kitchen, sloshing the water over the rim of the glass and onto the carpet, Deirdre was already helping Mom up the stairs and back into her bedroom.

“No,” she kept saying. “No.”

Chuck and I stood there at the bottom of the stairs, watching until they were out of sight. I had no idea what to do next. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Not even close. When Nana Hertle had died, we had been expecting it for months. After her cancer progressed and she slipped into a month-long coma, death was the logical next step. Barring a miracle, we knew what was coming. But this was different.

I stared at Chuck, but to be perfectly honest, he looked about as clueless as I felt, so I adopted the tone and gestures more appropriate to a daytime TV drama than to my usual self. I was on automatic, using remote control.

“Shall we sit down?”

As Chuck described the scene down by the lake—the divers, the boats, the netting, the walkie-talkies—I began to imagine that he was just someone on TV and any minute they would break for a commercial so I would be able to leave the room and get a snack. But the commercial never came. And when he finally got to the part I'd been dreading, the part where they found Leonard, I was stuck in my seat.

“One of the divers came up,” Chuck said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand and then continuing with the story. “They'd been up and down all afternoon. Good guys. Really good guys from over in Atlantic City. Total pros. But they didn't find anything. Not till this one time when he comes up. Brian's his name. Brian came up and shouted over to us. All the boats headed to where he was. I was in one of the boats. We gave a signal to cut the motors. It was quiet. Both divers, Brian and this Russian guy, Vlad, went down again. After a while we lowered a towline with a gurney type thing from one of the boats. The boat had a winch, and once we got a signal from below, we brought it up … brought
him
up … Leonard.”

Chuck paused here. He spotted the water glass that had been sitting on the coffee table; he picked it up and took a long gulp.
This is what people do in movies or novels,
I thought,
when they want a dramatic pause
.

“You sure you want to hear all this?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

Chuck had come all the way to our house, and I figured he needed to tell
someone.
Besides, this was just a TV show I was watching. None of it was real. Dad didn't live with Chrissie Bettinger; he still lived with us and was due home from work any minute. Deirdre was upstairs, her old self, listening to music on her computer, talking on the phone, combing her long, luxurious chestnut-colored hair. Mom was in the kitchen making microwave meat loaf and julienne vegetables. Leonard was downstairs wrapped in tulle and covered in glitter, inventing a look that would quietly appall us when he finally made an entrance at dinner. Meanwhile, I was watching public television in the living room, no commercials.

“We're considering it a homicide,” Chuck said. “We still have to do an autopsy, but there's enough evidence to suggest foul play.”

Homicide. Autopsy. Evidence. Foul play. This, I said to myself, was not your usual Wednesday. Peggy Brinkerhoff must be having a field day.

In an effort to keep my voice from trembling out of control, I pretended that I was Sam Waterston in an episode of
Law & Order
.

“What kind of evidence?” I asked Chuck. I thought I sounded pretty convincing.

“The body was tied up,” he said. “Tied up with rope and weighted down with an anchor.”

This was the first time anyone had referred to the “body”—as though Leonard himself had been separated from it, as if they had become two separate things.

We sat there together letting the news sink in. Leonard was gone. Someone had killed him. And though the question remained unspoken, it was enormous. Why would anyone do such a thing to Leonard? I've watched enough TV in my life to know that sometimes a motive can lead you to the person responsible for the crime. But, as Chuck explained it to me, “We're up the river without a clue.” In other words, we didn't have a motive or a suspect.