Silent Alarm Page 9

  “Oh,” he answers, his voice wavering a little. “I guess . . . I guess after all this time, I kind of thought I was family or something.” He won’t make eye contact, so I turn around and stare at the school. I imagine a dark stain on the sidewalk just shy of the entrance, even though I know there’s not enough light to make out much of anything at all. I shiver, holding on to the fence, and he turns so that we are now standing shoulder to shoulder. The candles are burning down lower, the flames shifting in the wind.

  “Don’t take it personally,” I say lightly. “We’ve been hounded by reporters too, so I think she just wanted to make sure they couldn’t get in.”

  He snorts, leaning on the fence, his fingers scratching against the metal links.

  “By the way, I really hate when people say, Don’t take it personally.” He mimics my voice, but not meanly or out of spite, his tone a gentle chiding. “It’s such a bunch of bullshit. It’s like when people say, It’s not you, it’s me.” He lets out a dry laugh. “That’s when you know it’s really you.”

  I laugh, turning to look at him, his profile sharp against the night sky, clouds hiding the stars above. Usually I’m anxious when I talk to anyone, especially guys, but I don’t feel nervous around Riley. Maybe it’s because he’s always been there, standing in the background of my life. Strangely enough, in all the years I’ve known him, this is the longest conversation we’ve ever had. Riley is kind of like furniture—it’s nice and comfortable and everything, but after a while you stop noticing it’s there.

  “You still getting ready for that competition?”

  I must look as confused as I feel, because Riley stares at me helplessly.

  “Competition? You mean my audition? Did Luke tell you about that?”

  “Yeah, the audition. Madison, right?”

  I nod, wordlessly, my neck stiff and wooden.

  “When is it?”

  “The end of May. Not that it matters now.”

  Doesn’t it? I can almost hear Luke’s whisper cutting through the rustling of the trees. Isn’t that what’s always mattered to you most?

  I twine my fingers around the metal links of the fence, half hoping that one of them will come loose, the sharp spikes cutting into my hands so that I never have to play again. Right now I can’t imagine making something so beautiful and timeless as music flow from my fingers, releasing it into a world so full of sorrow, regret, and pain—a world my brother helped create. It feels wrong, dirty somehow, to contemplate that kind of happiness, the notes leaping over the walls of my bedroom in a swollen cascade, floating out my window and mixing with the smell of spring rain and early lilacs, purple and dripping, coming from our neighbor’s yard. I don’t know if I deserve that kind of salvation, that kind of release.

  “Why doesn’t it matter? You’re really good, Alys. I mean really good.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Oh, so I’m just a dumb jock, right?” He stares straight ahead. “Some stupid athlete who can’t tell Prokofiev from punting. Is that what you think?”

  I raise an eyebrow, unable to hide the fact that I’m momentarily stunned, not to mention slightly impressed, that he knows who Prokofiev is.

  “I didn’t say that!”

  I hate when people put words into my mouth. It never fails to unnerve me.

  “Look,” he begins again, taking a deep breath, “I’ve heard you play for years. I may not know much about music, Alys, but I know talent when I hear it. I’m not a moron, you know.”

  With those last few words, his voice cracks, and we stare at one another until I smile tentatively.

  “It’s true—you’re not a moron,” I say, my face stiff, unused to smiling. “But you are a pain in the ass.”

  He cracks a grin—that same one that makes it possible for him to get away with doing so very little, at school and in life so far—then effectively changes the subject.

  “So how was it? The funeral, I mean.”

  I look at him in amazement, my expression broadcasting my thoughts—Seriously? What kind of question is that?

  “Sorry.” He laughs, sounding a bit like he’s choking. “I guess you’re right—I really am a pain in the ass.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I say, surrendering to the pull of social graces, even though the funeral is the last thing I want to talk about right now. “It was surreal. The minister was going on and on about forgiveness, that sometimes good people do bad things, and that everyone’s a mystery, blah, blah, blah—as if he really cared.”

  I look down at the Virgin Mary again, her face as serene and blissful as ever, her blue robe flickering with light.

  “He didn’t know Luke—we barely ever went to church. He doesn’t know anything about us. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke inside that stupid box, just lying there forever.” Tears well up in my eyes, and I blink them away angrily, drops of salt water falling to the pavement. I imagine them hissing as they fall, boring holes in the rough cement and extinguishing the candles once and for all.

  Riley nods in agreement, shoving his hands more deeply into his pockets.

  “I just can’t believe I’ll never see him again,” I say.

  Except for those, well, let’s just call them hallucinations you’ve been having, a nasty little voice inside me pipes up. And while we’re on the subject, don’t forget to mention the fact that you’re currently in the process of losing what’s left of your fucking mind . . . That’s pertinent information, right?

  I drop my head, the tears falling fast now. For some reason I’m embarrassed, cringing inside as if I’ve just been caught naked. I don’t want anyone, not even Riley, to see me like this.

  “Hey,” he says, but I don’t look at him, just keep focusing on my ankle boots, how worn and scuffed they are at the toes. If I just stare at my feet long enough, if I think about how I should’ve replaced these boots six months ago, maybe I won’t break down completely. Images of Riley and Luke flash before my eyes: all those nights Riley stayed over our house, plaid sleeping bags nestled in the tree house, the endless games of Grand Theft Auto and Doom they played late into the night. If anyone knows what happened to Luke, it would be Riley.

  “Did you know?” I ask. “Did he say anything to you?”

  The woman who was on her knees, praying in front of the fence, walks by us, her shoulders hunched and heaving. As she passes us, she glances up, and in her face I see so much sadness and heartache that I want to reach out to her, place a hand on her shoulder, but I don’t know what to say. What could I say? There are no words.

  Riley looks straight at me, and I can see that his eyes are wet too, and for some reason, this makes me want to put my arms around him and hold on tight, rest my head on his shoulder and let the tears flow until we’re both spent and exhausted. But if I put my arms around him right now, it might decimate whatever remains of my composure. It’s like the crying I’ve done since all this began—when it starts, it feels like I will never be able to stop, the hysteria rising in me like a car alarm that won’t shut off, growing louder and shriller with each passing second.

  “I didn’t know anything. He was my best friend, Alys, and I didn’t know anything at all. He never said a word. About any of it.” He shrugs his shoulders, defeated. “Did you . . . notice anything?” he asks as we start walking down the sidewalk along the fence. “I mean, before.”

  I kick a rock out of the way. It hits the trunk of a tree with a hard, satisfying thwack.

  “He was, you know, depressed,” I answer, shuffling my feet against the pavement. “But you know Luke—he was always in some sort of a mood. One day he’d be locked away in his room surfing the Web for hours, and the next he’d be throwing peas at me across the dinner table, trying to make me laugh, you know?”

  Riley dips his head in agreement. “Up until the past few months, he talked a lot about college, going to Boston. Sai
d he couldn’t wait to get out of here and start over someplace else, where no one knew him, which I thought was a little weird, if you want to know the fucking truth, but I didn’t say anything about it to him, really. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed like he never mentioned school much anymore. Just stopped talking about it, like it wasn’t really happening. Even when I’d bring it up, he’d just change the subject. I think that was around December.” Riley sighs, his face contorted in pain. “Even in the last few months—hell, the last few days, he still seemed like . . . himself. Well—mostly. I mean, he didn’t act like someone who was going to—” Riley breaks off. “If he was planning something, Alys, I didn’t know. I didn’t see it. Maybe I should have.”

  I didn’t see it.

  “And I just can’t believe he could . . . pull off something like this with us all so close.” He pauses, taking a deep breath as if he’s starved for air. “I keep feeling like it’s my fault. Like I should’ve known somehow. He was my best friend.”

  “That’s stupid,” I say softly. “I mean, if I didn’t know, then how were you supposed to? I lived with him every day for the past seventeen years, Riley, and I didn’t know anything was wrong either.

  (Did I?)

  “I never thought he’d do something like this in a million years. The Luke I thought I knew wasn’t

  (a killer)

  “Crazy. Or violent. He couldn’t have killed all those people. People he knew. People he . . . loved.” I shake my head in disbelief.

  “I read about Katie in the paper,” Riley says as we turn the corner and begin walking toward the park across the street, a set of swings and a red-and-blue jungle gym standing out in the blackness of the night. I want to go back to the time when everything was so carefree, when all we had to worry about was making it home from the playground before dinner, before the streetlights turned on one by one. “I hear Ben’s pretty broken up.”

  In this town, news travels fast, and gossip even more quickly. Ben and Riley aren’t really friendly, so I know that Riley must have heard this bit of information second- or thirdhand, at least. The weird thing about Riley is that as popular as he is, he mostly keeps to himself, something Luke loves

  (loved)

  about him. A shiver runs through me, and I rub my hands together for warmth. Even though he’s in the ground now, I’m not ready to consign Luke to the past tense. Not yet.

  (—in the dark where he can’t get out, can’t see or hear, can’t feel—)

  We walk over to the swings and, as if by mutual agreement, sit down, our feet dragging on the ground as we sway aimlessly back and forth.

  “They’re tearing out the library—the carpet, the floors, everything. They say we may have to finish the year at Holbrook. But I doubt it.”

  Holbrook is a high school in the next town over.

  Riley pauses for a minute, choosing his words. “You were in there when it happened, right?” He holds on to the metal chains of the swing with each hand, gripping them tightly.

  Suddenly I am on red alert. The library. Luke. Miranda. I cannot talk about it. I can’t. My eyes narrow. “Are you asking because you really want to know? Or so you can tell the papers?”

  I am nasty, full of bitterness. My words surprise even me. I picture myself in a bubble, separated from the rest of humanity with no one to trust. He stops moving and his face cracks wide-open, fractured, and something inside me stops entirely, like the hands of a clock halting midsweep.

  “I told you that I didn’t talk to them!” His voice rises in pitch, and he looks away from me. All at once I’m ashamed—ashamed of myself, ashamed of Luke, the feeling spreading over me like hot sauce, searing my skin. “Jesus, Alys—you really think I’d do that?” For the first time since the conversation began, his voice is cold, removed.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and even as soft as it is, my voice sounds deafening in the square, the enormity of the words filling the park, the town—the whole world with a sense of impermanence. The instability of everything I thought was solid and immovable. “I don’t know what to think about anything anymore,” I say. “Or anyone. I’m not even sure who I’m supposed to be—now that he’s gone.” It feels weird saying this out loud, and to Riley, but I can’t deny the truth of it, and something about being with Riley makes lying impossible. He’s known me for too long.

  Riley nods in assent, and we sit there in silence, swinging sometimes but mostly just hanging there, the bottoms of our shoes trampling the green shoots springing from the earth despite the rough cold that still wraps its tentacles around the town, despite there being no sign, no evidence at all, that things will eventually thaw.

  TEN

  When I get home, the downstairs lights are blazing, illuminating it like a jack-o’-lantern. The minute I walk in the front door, I hear yelling, muffled shouts coming from the basement, a room that functions as both my mom’s potting studio and my dad’s makeshift office, though he’s constantly complaining that she leaves it too messy to actually work in. I creep down the carpeted stairs slowly, soundless, greedy for their secrets. They haven’t had any kind of a substantial conversation for days, as far as I can tell, and the sound of their raised voices strangely fills me with comfort. At least they’re still fighting. At least one thing in my life is exactly the same as it was before.

  “You should’ve let him go to that space camp when he was twelve!” my father shouts. “But it was always about Alys, wasn’t it?” I sink down on the stairs, one hand in my mouth, biting at what’s left of my nails. I feel dizzy, almost like I’m dreaming. “If it wasn’t ‘creative,’ then you just weren’t interested.”

  “Well, at least I was here.” My mother’s voice is raw, hoarse. “You were always at the office, on the phone, more worried about your clients than your own son!”

  I’ve never heard my mother criticize my father’s job this pointedly, out for blood, her words digging in with iron claws. Usually her complaints come off as a joke, dark humor, a needling under the skin. But until this moment, I’ve never taken her jabs seriously. And from his reaction, neither has my dad.

  “Somebody had to grow up and pay the bills around here!” my father yells back. I watch their shadows moving back and forth as they pace around the basement, their arms thrown up at each other in long black arcs. I put my head in my hands, leaning my face against my knees. “Because you sure as hell weren’t going to sacrifice your ridiculous principles!”

  My mother is silenced. I raise my head. Even I can see that was a low blow.

  “I thought they were our principles,” she finally says, her voice laden with hurt and disappointment. My father has always supported my mother’s artistic aspirations, attending all of her gallery shows, bragging to friends about how talented, how creative she was, until she’d bury her face in his shoulder, laughing in embarrassment and begging him to stop.

  “I have a good job at the gallery,” she says, her voice shaking with newfound anger. “You were the one who told me I should go part-time so I’d be able to focus on my own work more. I may not make much money, but at least I was here all of these years. With our children. Raising them the best I could.” I hear her sigh through the exasperation, the anger, and I can tell from the frustration in her voice that right now she’s more exasperated than angry. “Jesus, Paul, how the hell could you let this happen to him?”

  “Goddammit, I didn’t let this happen to him! I calculate damage for a living, Dani—that’s what I do.” My father’s voice is tight and resigned. “But I couldn’t have calculated this. That thing that walked into that school and—” I hear heaving sobs, a sound like choking. “That thing was not my son. He couldn’t have . . . hurt all of those people, using them for some kind of sick target practice. He couldn’t have done that. Not Luke.”

  The house shudders in the wind. I hear the sound of my father sitting down in a chair, the wood groaning beneath him.

/>   “Yes. Yes, he could,” my mother says quietly. “Yes, he could, Paul, and he did. He did it.”

  My father cries, and his sobbing, the particular cadence of it, triggers an automatic response; my face screws up, but my eyes remain dry, as if I’ve somehow used up my yearly allotment of tears. I imagine that my mother puts her arms around him, their bodies fitting together in the kind of familiarity that many years foster between two people. Two people who are still in love, despite all the pain they have inflicted on each other. The fighting. The disappointments. The compromises neither side wanted to make.

  “What about Alys?” my mother says after a long moment. I can hear my father sniffling, trying to compose himself, then the loud foghorn blast of him blowing his nose, and the loudness of the gesture almost makes me pitch forward and fall down the stairs, clattering to the bottom in a noisy heap. I grip on to the wall, my fingernails scraping against the plaster.

  “What about her?”

  “Do you think we should . . . get her some help? Send her to another school? Maybe she could stay with my parents for a little while.”

  My grandparents live in Iowa, on a farm out in the middle of nowhere. If I had to stay there, I’d go completely nuts.

  “Alys doesn’t need help. She’s not the problem here. She’s not responsible for any of this.”

  I want so badly for that last sentence to be even just a little true, so badly I would give my life to make it so.

  “That’s what you said about Luke.” My mother almost whispers, as if she’s afraid to say the words aloud. “That he didn’t need help.”