I shake my head, realizing a lot of time has passed.
“I must have really been knocked out,” I finally respond. I gently kick a chair leg to make room for my thin frame to slide in while my grandfather coughs out a laugh at my expense. I have a feeling he knows I was daydreaming about Eleanor. I set his coffee by the seat next to me, then cradle my own mug and breathe in the steam coming from the top. I’ll need this smell to trick my brain into telling my mouth that these eggs I’m about to get aren’t a threat.
Grandpa shuffles in a circle, pan in one hand and one of mom’s blue plates in the other. He slides what he likes to call an omelet onto the dish before setting it down in front of me.
“Mmmm,” I hum through tight, lying lips.
This time, the cheese he sprinkled on top is melted. That’s a positive step.
My lips pressed to the rim of my cup, I suck down a hot sip that coats my tongue with the bitterness of pure black coffee, then immediately scoop up a quarter of my eggs. The texture is its usual gag-worthy self, but I’ve managed to temporarily burn my taste buds enough to get through this first bite.
“Someone has a birthday next week.” He’s talking about me. The big one-eight. It’s not that I’ve forgotten, I just don’t get excited about my birthdays anymore. When I was nine or ten, we had parties. There would be cake and presents, and Dad actually took time off from work. It’s hard not to see my birthday as a financial inconvenience now. Especially since my mom insists I don’t work part time during the school year. I saved a good amount from cleaning movie theaters all summer to pay for incidentals, but it still doesn’t feel like enough.
Grandpa slices a thick pat of butter and swirls it in the hot pan; it crackles as it melts. I wonder how much of what I’m eating is egg and how much is butter.
“You think about what you want?” he asks, turning to meet my gaze. It shakes me out of my head and I shrug.
“Not really.” There’s a tinge of pity in his eyes while we stare at one another, both probably realizing how sad that statement is. I’m a boy about to hit a huge milestone and I couldn’t care less about the celebration of it all.
I drop my focus back to my plate and immediately shovel another forkful of eggs into my mouth, relieved when I see my grandpa turn his back to me again in my periphery. Sometimes, it’s hard to pretend things are normal. I do such a good job of convincing myself that this life is fine when really, it sucks a lot of the time. It’s tougher to keep up the act when someone’s calling me out on it, even though he doesn’t mean anything by it. I know if he could, my grandpa would rewind time and try to change the present for my mom and me. The pessimist in me is pretty certain we’d end up right where we are. I still wouldn’t have a clue who my father really was—what made him tick. The things that made him so brilliant also made him closed off.
“Hey,” Grandpa barks. I gulp down bite number three and dart my focus toward him with my fake satisfied grin plastered in place. He’s uninterested in my culinary opinion, though, and nods toward the window above the sink. “There’s a lot of coppers over at that house you’re always staring at.”
I’m both embarrassed and rushed with intrigue.
“I’m not . . .” I shake my head as I get up and move toward the window, knowing that finishing that statement is pointless. I am always looking at that house across the street.
Grandpa Hank slides back toward the stove and cracks more eggs to serve himself, but he leans to the left to stare out the window alongside me. He wasn’t exaggerating. There are five squad cars outside the Trombley home, two in the driveway and another three pulled up alongside the curb. There aren’t any lights flashing, and we would have heard sirens. Weird that they showed up sometime between me being upstairs and making my way down here.
“I bet that pretty blonde you’re always looking at is up to funny business,” Grandpa says. He waits for my sideways glance to pretend to pinch a doobie and draw in a hit. He follows it up with a cackling laugh as he elbows me in the ribs.
“Eleanor isn’t like that,” I defend. I don’t know for sure that she isn’t, but my instincts tell me she plays by the rules—mostly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her stumble into her house after a late Friday or Saturday night. Her older sister did that plenty of times. The only thing Eleanor does is get kissed in the car. Shamelessly, I’ve watched most of those goodnight kisses. At least the beginnings of them.
Why am I thinking about all of this now? Damn Grandpa Hank! Old fart didn’t even wait for the whiskey to start in on me today.
I stare on, partly because there’s no way I’m going back to those eggs when they’re cold, but mostly because I’m glued to the scene unfolding across the street. Two officers pace around the front of the yard, stopping to squat and look closely at the grass every few feet or so. Another cop walks toward the back of the house with a German shepherd. The dog’s nose is fixed in the blades of grass, his head weaving methodically from left to right along the ground.
“Hey.” My voice is hushed as I alert my grandpa. I feel as if I’m on a stakeout or something. “Look, there’s another.”
Dumping his egg mush onto a plate, he abandons the pan in the sink then sidles up next to me, eating while we stand squared with the side-by-side window panes. A woman dressed in a black suit gets out of the new car, and walks up the center path in the Trombley front hard. I catch a glimpse of her gun at her side as she shifts her jacket. She stops to talk with one of the officers who’s been fixated on something in the flower bed. I hadn’t noticed before, but he’s wearing blue gloves.
“I don’t think this is good, Jonah.” My grandfather’s words are dulled, and as I turn to glance his way, his expression is just as void. He finishes his eggs and clears my plate once he’s done, not even bothering to ask if I want more. I don’t. And for once, it’s not because I can’t stand the texture passing over my tongue.
No. Right now, I feel strangely sick. My gut is heavy with a sense of doom. And a selfish paranoia. The pretty blonde girl I like to stare at across the street hasn’t come outside since I’ve been looking out this window.
Two
Events like this have a way of grabbing everyone’s full attention in a matter of hours. Oak Forest isn’t a big city. It isn’t even that close to Chicago, the city we all say we’re from when anyone asks. This place is a suburb of a suburb, a clustered grid of streets that look the same at every turn. Giant oaks line wide, uneven sidewalks that have been cracked from years of snow storms and massive root systems. Before today, the biggest news to happen in Oak Forest was the arrival of the actual car used in the original Ghostbusters movie. Orson Symanski won it in an auction six years ago. He brings that sucker out for every New Year’s parade.
Today’s news is a little different. The first media truck showed up in front of our house about two hours after the cops arrived across the street. Grandpa Hank isn’t afflicted with the same debilitating social anxiety I am, so he ran out to offer the camera guy and reporter lady coffee and got the scoop before the news officially broke on Channel 7 thirty minutes later.