Scum (2 page)

It's on the news that night—man shot dead in bar. The news story is maybe three sentences long. Danny was shot dead. His death is the twenty-third homicide in the city so far this year. The police are investigating.

My parents don't see the tv news. My mother is upstairs by the time it comes on. She has been up there for hours. At first, when she and my father got back
from identifying Danny's body, she stayed busy by making a list of all the people to call, what to do about the funeral arrangements, what to do about work. But a couple of hours later, she started to cry, and I don't mean just tears. I mean weeping. Sobbing. Moaning. Howling. It got worse and worse. Louder and louder. Finally my father called Shannon's father, who is a doctor, and he prescribed something to calm her down and help make her sleep. By the time the news comes on, my mother has been upstairs in her room for hours, and it's quiet up there.

My father is in the kitchen. He has been calling people—relatives, friends, friends of Danny. He's been saying the same thing over and over again. Danny was shot. No, the police don't know who did it. No, he has no idea why it happened. Yes, he hopes the police will make an arrest soon.

Finally it's too late to call any more people. He comes into the living room where I am, and he says, “You should go to bed.”

I want to ask him why he thinks Danny got shot. But I already know the answer to that. I keep thinking about what Detective Rossetti said. There were other people in the bar, but no one has been able to give the police a description of who shot Danny. You don't have to be a genius to figure out what that means. I tell my father I'm not tired. I tell him I'll go to bed soon. He doesn't argue with me.

I stay up most of the night and eventually fall asleep on the couch. I don't wake up until I hear my father open the front door to get the newspaper. When I don't hear the front door close again, I look up over the top of the couch.

My father is standing in the open doorway, reading something on the first page of the newspaper. Then he looks out across the street. He closes the door and goes into the kitchen with the newspaper. When I join him in the kitchen a few
minutes later, the newspaper is nowhere in sight. My father is putting a teapot onto a tray along with a mug.

“I'm taking this up to your mother,” he says. His face is gray. He looks like he hasn't slept.

After he leaves the kitchen, I look for the newspaper. I find it in the garbage under the sink. I pull it out and see that there is a story about Danny on the front page. In the article, it says that Danny was known to police. It also says that there were over fifty people in the bar at the time Danny was shot. No wonder my father threw the newspaper away.

The phone rings all morning, and all morning my father answers it. Mostly it's people my parents know who have heard about what happened and who are calling to say how sorry they are. But a few times it's reporters. I hear my father tell them that he has no comment. I hear him say this over and over during one phone call. I hear him say, “Do you have children?
Well, imagine that this had just happened to your child. Would you want to talk to a reporter about it?”

But this particular reporter must be good at his job, because a few moments later I hear my father talking about Danny, about how, when he was little, he drew the most amazing pictures, about how he used to talk about going to art school, how he talked about being an architect like my father and how he had finally gone to university to study art history. Then I hear my father say, “He was my son. He was
our
son. We want to remember him as our son. Do you understand?”

Caitlin comes over later, and my father sends her up to my room to see me. We sit on my bed, and Caitlin tells me how sorry she is about Danny. She asks if the cops have arrested the guy yet. She says she read what it said in the paper. She says with fifty people in that bar, the police will catch the guy for sure. Then she says,
“What did they mean when they said Danny was known to the police?”

I tell her I don't know.

That night, when my father is cleaning up the kitchen after a supper that we all barely touched, the phone rings. My father answers it. Mostly he listens. Then he says, “Yes, thank you, I would appreciate that. Thank you.”

When he hangs up the phone, he turns to my mother. “That was a reporter I spoke to earlier,” he says. “He says the police have found a car that matches the description of a car that was seen driving away from the bar after Danny was...” He shakes his head. “He says the car is parked behind a house in the east end but no one is home. The police have the house under surveillance. He's going to call us as soon as he hears anything.”

I feel like I don't breathe for the rest of that night. We all sit in the family room. The tv is on, but the sound is down so low
that I can't hear what anyone is saying. But that's okay. I don't really care what's on. My parents don't even look at the tv. We all just sit there, waiting for the phone to ring again, waiting for news.

An hour goes by.

Two hours.

Three hours.

It is close to midnight, and my father says, “We should all try to get some sleep.” He stands up.

My mother stays where she is.

My father sits down again.

We wait some more.

The phone rings. My mother's eyes never leave my father as he picks up the phone and says hello. Again he mostly listens. Finally he says, “I see. Well, thank you for calling.” He puts down the phone. He looks more tired than I have ever seen him.

“That was that reporter,” he says, his voice as lifeless as his face. “It wasn't the right car after all. It was a false alarm.”

My mother stands up and goes to him. For the first time since Danny died, she is the strong one. She kneels down in front of my father and puts a hand on his knee. She says to him, “It's okay.” And for the first time since Danny died—the first time that I know about, anyway—my father cries. The sound is terrible—long, anguished sobs. His shoulders shake. His whole body shakes. My mother wraps her arms around him and holds him and says over and over, “It's okay.”

Danny's funeral is held on Monday morning at a funeral home instead of at our church. The service is led by someone I've never seen before instead of by our church minister. When I ask my father why, he says, “It's what your mother wanted.” The guy who does the service calls me Margaret instead of Megan. He says things about Danny that I haven't heard anyone say since I was a little kid,
like how Danny loved dogs and how he liked to ski. The last time Danny talked about getting a dog was when he was twelve years old. The last time he went skiing was when he was in high school. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I glance at my mother to see how she's reacting, but her face is like a mask. I can't tell what she's thinking.

After the service, we all go to another room in the funeral home, where there are tables and chairs set up and sandwiches and cakes for people to eat. My mother and father move from table to table to thank everyone for coming. Everyone says the same thing: “I'm so sorry.” No one asks any questions about what happened. As far as I can tell, nobody even says anything privately about it. No one wants to hurt my parents.

After the funeral, we go home—my mother and my father and I. One of my mother's friends offers to come over, but my mother tells her, no, it's okay, she's tired and she wants to try to get some sleep.
But when we get home, my mother doesn't go up to her room to lie down. Instead she goes down to the basement. My father goes down maybe two hours later, when she still hasn't come up again.

“What's she doing?” I ask him when he comes back upstairs.

“Looking at things,” my father says. He doesn't say what things. He doesn't have to. I know. When Danny moved out, he left behind everything but his clothes and his music. He even left most of his sketchbooks and art supplies at home. My mother packed everything into boxes and put it downstairs. She changed his room into an upstairs den. She is down in the basement, going through Danny's things. She doesn't come up for hours.

I go back to school the day after the funeral. I feel like everyone knows what happened to Danny. I walk down the hall and kids turn to look at me, even kids I barely know, kids in lower grades than
me, kids who aren't in any of my classes, kids who are new to my school, kids who never even met Danny. They all turn to look at me. Now I am the girl whose brother was shot dead in a bar. I hear them talking in low voices. I can guess what they're saying about Danny and about my family. I act like I don't care. What else can I do?

My mother doesn't go back to work. She doesn't even get out of bed. My dad stays home too. He keeps making her cups of tea and mugs of soup. He makes her toast. He makes sandwiches. He takes these things up to her on a tray and eventually carries them back down again untouched. I hear him talking to her sometimes. I hear him say the word doctor. He says Shannon's father's name. My mother stays in bed for days, but Shannon's father never appears.

My father looks at the newspaper every day, but there is nothing about Danny. He is never mentioned on the tv news, either. It's as if it never happened.

Every day my dad calls Detective Rossetti. Every day he asks Detective Rossetti if there's been any progress. Every day he gets the same answer: there is nothing new to report. Then one day I am in the kitchen making myself a cup of tea, and I see Detective Rossetti's business card stuck to the fridge door. My father isn't home. He has finally gone back to work. My mother is upstairs in bed. The bed is piled high with photograph albums and school yearbooks and drawings and paintings and sketchbooks from when Danny was serious about wanting to be an artist. My mother looks at them when she is awake. Right now it's quiet up there.

I look at Detective Rossetti's business card. I pick up the phone and punch in his number. I carry the phone with me into the family room at the back of the house so that if my mother is awake upstairs, she won't be able to hear me. To my surprise, Detective Rossetti answers, his tone brisk, efficient: “Detective Rossetti, Homicide.”

When I tell him who I am, his voice changes. He asks me how I am. He asks about my parents too. I ask him why no one in the bar saw anything.

“It was a rough crowd in there,” he says. “You know what I mean, Megan?” Then he tells me what he usually tells my father—he says he's sorry, but there has been no progress in the case.

On a Wednesday night nearly two weeks after Danny was shot, I hear my father leave the spare bedroom, where he has been sleeping since the funeral, and go downstairs. I get up and go downstairs after him. I find him in the front hall, pulling on a jacket and fishing his car keys out of the brass bowl on the front hall table.

“Where are you going?” I say.

“Out,” he says, sounding in that instant just like Danny used to sound, when he still lived at home and when he used to leave the house when everyone else was getting ready to go to bed.

“Out where?” I say.

He doesn't answer my question. Instead he says, “Stay here. Keep your mother company.”

My mother has barely said a word to me since it happened. If I go into her room, she doesn't always look at me. When she does, she looks right through me, as though I'm a window and if she looks hard enough, she can see Danny through me.

“She doesn't want company,” I say. That's why my father is sleeping in the spare room now. “Where are you going?” I say again.

“Downtown.”

“Downtown where? It's late.”

He finally tells me.

I understand what he is doing. He thinks that if he can find out who killed Danny, my mother will get out of bed again. She will eat again. She may even smile again, although I don't think he expects that to happen any time soon.

I think about what Detective Rossetti said, but that only helps me make up my mind.

“I'm going with you,” I say. “And you can't stop me.”

He doesn't even try. If you ask me, he wants me to go with him. Unlike my mother, he wants company.

I have never before driven downtown so late on a weeknight. There are bright lights everywhere, even in the office towers, even though they are empty except for the cleaning staff. But the streets are much quieter than they are during the day, and my father has no trouble finding a place to park. We get out of the car. My father draws in a deep breath before he starts
across the street. I have to scramble to catch up to him.

I've never been in the bar where my brother was killed, and I almost don't get in now. A heavyset man is standing just inside the door. He stops us and demands to know how old I am. He demands to see
ID
.

“Please,” my father says. “The boy who was shot here—he was my son. He was her brother.”

The heavyset man looks at me. There is no sympathy in his small eyes. No pity. No emotion at all.

“Were you here that night?” my father asks him.

“I didn't see nothing,” the man says right away, without my father having to ask him.

I think about my English teacher, who is crazy about grammar, and what he would say if he were here:
If you didn't see nothing, then you must have seen something.
But even if that's what the
heavyset man means, I don't think he'll tell my father. His eyes are too small, too cold, too uncaring.

My father looks into the man's eyes. I can see he is disappointed. He tries to move past the man, but the man steps in front of my father again.

“She can't go in there,” he says. “She's too young.”

My father looks back over his shoulder at the street and at our car, which is parked on the other side. It's late and the street is empty.