The Local News Read Free Page B

left—it made a loud noise—and I jumped a little in my seat. “Drive safe back home, Ms. Pasternak,” he said.
    I sat for a while after he turned off his flashing lights and drove away. The street was quiet and dark without him. My body buzzed with something different now—adrenaline maybe, the heady kick of having gotten away with something. My hands felt strong on the steering wheel, my smile momentarily cute in the rearview mirror. That feeling of power and rightness, of the world being on my side—this was what it was like, I thought, to be Danny.

I looked like a sickly bird on the news, pale, my chin coming to a weird point as if the bones had been broken and reset. My hair stuck up in a cowlicky loop in the back. It was always demoralizing, having whatever tenuous notion that I looked halfway decent shattered by the image of myself on the television.
    They always arranged us the same way, me sitting between my parents on the couch. Kirk Donovan would sit in Dad’s chair, leaning toward the three of us sympathetically. Before we’d start filming, he’d ask Dad to put his arm around me, and Dad wouldn’t quite touch me but would wrap his arm around the back of the couch instead. I could smell his Ban Roll-On, spicy and dense. The camera crew would cram themselves in by the fireplace, and our beagles would get locked in my bedroom for being too yippy and unable to sit still. My mom adopted all our beagles from a rescue, and they alwaystended toward high-strung or unruly, making you wonder what strange or awful things may have preceded their lives with us.
    On TV now, Dad was saying that there hadn’t been any new news in the past week but that the police were working hard with little to go on. He thanked everyone for the donation drive, especially his colleagues at the Fidelity Bank and all the kind folks at Ford Hospital. He said everything loudly, flatly, like he was reporting baseball scores, but with a slight edge beneath it, as if he could at any minute start bawling someone out. On TV, Mom had a quivering lip. The camera panned to her, tears silently rolling down her face as she sorted through her index cards, while my dad talked about the new reward money. Always now she carried around her index cards. Kirk Donovan had tried to coax them from her, saying she’d look more natural if she just “spoke from her heart,” but she’d told him flatly no, as if he’d suggested she drop her baby in the gutter or kick one of the rescue beagles in the snout. She read from them that we’d hired a private investigator. “Howard,” she looked up and told Kirk Donovan, as if the reporter might know him. She read that we were thinking of renting a billboard along the highway. Her delivery reminded me of the stilted student presentations on “How to Pitch a Tent” and “Why the Constitution Is Important” we had to sit through during speech class.
    In real life she was crying again, making a soft clucking noise that made me want to rip my ears from my head. She was the only one on the couch now. Poppy, one of the rescue beagles, lay draped on Mom’s lap, half asleep. My mom stroked Poppy’s head with such an intense neediness it made me feel bad for the dog, who just lay there and took it. I was on the floor, close enough to the TV that in other circumstances my parents might have told me to move back so as not to ruin my eyes. Dad sat in his chair, doing an imitation of a tired statue. Oliver and Olivia, the other two rescue beagles, pulledon opposite ends of a braided rope toy, dragging each other around the family room and making loud snorfling noises. It was like someone laughing during a funeral, and I found it a relief.
    Our house had an uncomfortable stillness now, without Danny barking into the phone to friends or bounding up the stairs with such force it seemed as if he could bring the house down around him or dribbling a basketball against the vestibule tiles as Dad told him halfheartedly to knock