Silent Alarm by Jennifer Banash Read Free Book Online Page B

voice grows shrill, then collapses into sobs that are so deep that it sounds as if she is drowning in a bottomless black pool, water reducing her lungs to gray, spent balloons.
    â€œI
didn’t,
” I whisper, pleading now. “It wasn’t—”
    (me)
    There is a wailing that shudders through the phone, jarring me to my core, Ben’s voice in the background, a low mumbling, ripped and gravelly. Then the line goes dead.

FOUR
    When we first get into the car, my mother reaches over and snaps the radio off the minute the engine sparks up. Still, there are seconds where I hear the announcer’s voice booming through the cramped space, my eyes straining in the darkened garage filled with old, rusty bikes and my father’s workbench, the tools that he cleans and organizes incessantly but rarely uses. Organization and order are more important to my father now than creativity. The neater things are, the happier he is. For most of my childhood, he spent hours here, sanding wood into supple softness, building first a chest of drawers, then a kitchen table for some friends of theirs as a wedding present. But lately it seems that the only reason he steps foot in the garage is to make sure that things are in their rightful place, tucked safely away. Sometimes, if I look at his hands and concentrate really hard, I can almost see his fingers splayed against the grain of wood, a piece of sandpaper clutched in his grasp, the tinge of wood stain tracing his skin like a henna tattoo.
    â€œLucas Aronson, eighteen, shot and killed a total of fifteen students in one of the largest mass murders in Wisconsin history yesterday . . .”
    With every mention of my brother’s name, I am shrinking down smaller and smaller. Soon there will be nothing left. A dot, a slick, greasy smear where I once stood. My mother, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, nervously adjusts her mirrors, her hair pulled back into a messy bun. Her hand hovers over the garage door opener, and she turns and looks at me for a moment, her face an empty canvas. The car smells of the sickly sweet vanilla air freshener my mother likes to spray, the one Luke always said made the car smell like a fucking bakery. Sometimes, but not often, she would let Luke drive it instead of the twelve-year-old, hand-me-down Volvo my dad gave to Luke on his sixteenth birthday, and I wonder if his prints are still on the steering wheel, the whorls of his fingers imbedded onto the worn leather, if I will become one of those crazy, grief-stricken people I’ve seen in movies, crawling on the floor looking for a scrap of hair, looking for something, anything, left behind. My head is swimming with images: me, Katie, Ben, Luke. It’s like the sadness in my body is so large that I don’t know which part to acknowledge first. It all blurs together in an uncontainable heap, trash spilling out of a Dumpster. Yesterday, I was a girl on her way to school, her brother beeping the horn once, twice, before she slid inside the car, the door barely closed before his foot stepped firmly on the gas. Luke’s car always smelled of sweaty gym clothes, motor oil, and inexplicably of popcorn, though he always said he hated it.
    (—Luke’s face as he backed out of the driveway, one hand draped over the back of my seat, his ebony-colored jacket and heavy boots sucking the air from the interior. A black hole. “Going to a funeral?” I quipped, pulling down the visor and checking my face in the mirror, my lips twisted in a sarcastic grin. He stared straight ahead at the road, turning up his iPod so that music blasted through the car’s speakers, buzzing through the seats. I closed my eyes, lulled into safety by the trees whipping past the windows, the sound of my brother’s breathing, the heat coming through the vents. “Alys,” he said as we pulled into the school parking lot and the car came to a stop, his hands tightening on the wheel.