by Melanie Tem
Prodigal
Prodigal
Melanie Tem
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
© Copyright 1991 by Melanie Tem
First e-reads publication 1999
www.ereads.com
ISBN 0-7592-1018-7
Other works by Melanie Tem
also available in e-reads editions
Wilding
Desmodus
Revenant
For my daughter Veronica,
who taught me how to tell this story,
and who goes on teaching.
And, of course, for Steve.
Prodigal
Melanie Tem—Prodigal
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1
Ethan came into Lucy’s room without warning, without knocking. He always did whatever he felt like. She didn’t even see or hear the door open; she had her eyes closed and her earphones on. Before she knew he was there, Ethan was beside her bed, leaning close over her and breathing bad breath into her face as if he was trying to say something, and he had his hands around her neck.
Ethan had been missing for a long time. Everybody knew he was dead.
Lucy slapped his hands away and pulled back from him against the wall. “Ethan!”
This wasn’t a dream. She had lots of weird dreams about her dead brother Ethan; in some of them, he tried to kill her because what had happened to him was somehow her fault. In the dreams, and for a while before and after, Lucy believed it was her fault, even though she couldn’t understand how, even though Ethan was the one who’d kept getting in trouble, who’d gotten into drugs, who’d run away and not come back. The times when she believed it was her fault weren’t as scary as the times when she knew she couldn’t have done anything to keep her brother safe, and neither could Mom or Dad.
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This wasn’t a dream. She wasn’t asleep. It was the middle of a drizzly Saturday afternoon in May, and she was taking a break from chores and lying on her bed listening to the Top Forty Countdown, hoping she’d get through to number one before Mom or Dad found her and made her finish dusting.
Maxx Well the deejay had been just about to announce number three when Ethan showed up in her room.
She took the earphones off and laid them in the sheets. Now the music sounded funny, voices without mouths. Ethan was still leaning over her, still had his mouth open, still had his hands raised and cupped to choke her. He could still reach her if he just straightened out his arms, and she couldn’t move any farther back. She drew up her knees, crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you doing here? What’s going on? Are you in trouble again?”
That was a dumb question. Ethan was always in trouble.
He didn’t say anything. She turned off the radio. Now she never would know what this week’s number one was. Ethan’s mouth hung open. She could see his tongue, coated white, and his dirty teeth. His breath made her sick to her stomach.
“God, Ethan, don’t you ever brush your teeth?”
He still didn’t say anything. He was trying to; his mouth twisted and awful choking sounds came out. But she couldn’t understand him. He leaned and shook till she thought for sure he’d fall on top of her.
She longed to hug him again, like when they were little. She’d dreamed about hugging him, about punching him for all the stupid things he’d done, about holding on to him so he couldn’t run away again. But she knew Ethan was dead.
“I’m going to get Mom or Dad.” She scrambled to her hands and knees on the bed and started to crawl toward the foot, thinking she could circle around him. He put both hands on her shoulders and pushed her down.
Lucy screamed. “Mom! Dad!” She covered her head with a pillow, pulled the bedspread over her. When Mom came running into her room and Lucy opened her eyes again, Ethan was gone.
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2
Mom sobbed and rocked back and forth on Lucy’s bed. She was bent over and hugging herself with the arm that wasn’t holding Lucy, as if her heart and stomach would explode if she didn’t hold them in. Lucy hadn’t seen her cry like that for a long time; she’d thought she was over it.
Lucy sobbed, too, and they clung to each other. That helped some. But Mom’s body felt as if it had holes in it that Lucy’s hands could go right through, and she thought probably her body felt the same way to Mom. The other noises of the household sounded thin and not quite real, as if they were coming from earphones that had been knocked off her ears: the dishwasher rumbling in the kitchen under her room; Priscilla running the vacuum cleaner on the stairs and singing; the little kids squabbling; Dad’s saw in the basement. She wondered irritably what the number-two song was, whether it had moved up or down the charts from last week. She bet it was “You’ll Never Be Free of Me.”
The harder Mom cried and held her, the surer Lucy was that they were both going to slide off the edge of the earth, and that Mom knew it, too.
Ethan had. He’d been missing for almost two years, and nobody had seen or heard from him, nobody had any idea what had happened to him. The cops 3
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couldn’t find him. That social worker Jerry Johnston couldn’t find him. She didn’t think they’d looked very hard. Mom and Dad couldn’t find him, and they’d looked everywhere.
“I’m…sorry…Mom,” she gasped. Her chest hurt and her throat was closing around the words. She didn’t feel scared like this much anymore, except when she made Mom cry. “I’m…so sorry!”
Mom took a few deep, shuddering breaths and smoothed Lucy’s hair.
Lucy liked it when her mother touched her hair, and she tipped her head back into the unsteady stroking. “No, baby, no,” Mom whispered. Her voice shook, but she’d stopped crying. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I scared you.”
“Lots of things scare me since Ethan disappeared. That’s not your fault, and you can’t fix it. I have to fix it, or I have to learn to live with it.”
“Why did he run away?” She’d asked that lots of times; she didn’t know why she was asking it again now. “Why did he do all that bad stuff? Stealing cars and doing drugs and stuff?”
Mom shook her head. “We don’t know, Lucy. We may never know.”
“Do you think he’s dead?” She’d never come right out and asked that before.
“No,” Mom said flatly, and when she didn’t say any more, Lucy thought she was mad.
That made her burst into tears again. She’d always hated it when Mom or Dad was mad at her, and since Ethan had disappeared she could hardly stand it. Rae didn’t care; half the time she went out of her way to get them mad at her, and the other half she didn’t seem to notice. But then Rae was almost fourteen. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry!” Lucy wailed.
Mom hugged her, stroked her hair, and said, so quietly that Lucy had to hold her breath to hear, “I’m his mother. I’m the one who was supposed to keep him safe.”
Lucy buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and curled her knees up, for the moment not caring that fifth graders shouldn’t act like babies. Her mother’s guilt was too much for her, but she had to say something. She mumbled,
“You didn’t know. You an
d Dad didn’t know.”
“We did our best, just like we do with all you kids. But our best wasn’t good enough for Ethan. It still isn’t good enough.”
Chills raced through Lucy’s body, and she cried again, “I’m sorry!”
Mom was rocking her, as if she were Cory’s age. “Lucy, Lucy, none of this is your fault.”
“I’m sorry I called you in here and scared you. It was just…a dream.”
Mom held her by the shoulders a little away from her. “Lucy.” Lucy fought against the separation, but finally looked into her mother’s face. Her eyes were red and swollen, frantic with a love that made Lucy, every time she saw 4
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it, swear she’d never have kids. “I don’t think they are dreams. He comes to me, too.”
Lucy’s heart suddenly pounded against her rib cage, and her head swam.
For a minute she thought she was going to throw up. “He does?”
“Maybe ten times over the past year.”
“What does he want?”
“I don’t know. He won’t talk.”
“Where does he come from?”
“I don’t know. I’ve tried to follow him, but I always lose him.”
“He…tried to strangle me.” Lucy put her hands to her throat.
Mom’s eyes widened. She tipped Lucy’s head back, pushed Lucy’s fingers aside, and put her own there, probing, rubbing. “Are you hurt? I don’t see any marks. Did he hurt you?”
“No. He wasn’t trying very hard. I got away from him.” Lucy laughed a little. She and Ethan always used to fight like that. Once she’d shut the car door on his hand; she’d insisted it wasn’t on purpose, and her parents and even Ethan had believed her, but it was.
Mom bent her head and kissed Lucy’s throat, then pulled her close again.
“He’s done things like that to me, too. But I think it’s just that he needs something. He’s in trouble and he needs something from me, and I can’t help him now any more than I could when he was at home or at New Beginnings because I don’t know what to do.”
“Does Dad see him, too?”
Mom smiled sadly and shook her head. The white streak in the front of her hair showed a lot in the rainy light, and a lock fell over her forehead, a white lock out of her dark brown hair. Lucy’s hair was dark brown, too; she was afraid she’d have a white streak like Mom’s when she got that old. She wished Mom would just dye it. Mom said it was her badge of courage, from having seven kids. Lucy resented that. And, anyway, she hadn’t noticed it getting any bigger since all the trouble with Ethan—but then, it was hard to remember a time in the family when there hadn’t been trouble with Ethan, when they hadn’t all been thinking mostly about him. “Dad and Ethan haven’t gotten along very well the last few years,” Mom said. “They haven’t been very close.”
Lucy didn’t see what that had to do with anything, and it seemed to her that somehow Mom was putting Dad down. “Ethan wasn’t close to anybody in the family,” she said angrily, and sat up on the bed away from her mother’s arms.
“I don’t know about that.” There was a dreamy look on her mother’s face that made Lucy even madder. “There was always something special between Ethan and me. I guess there still is.”
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“Does Dad know you see Ethan?”
“I used to tell him. I don’t anymore. He thinks it’s all in my head, because I want so much to see him. He says it’s just grief. He believes Ethan is dead.”
“He is dead.”
“I don’t think so.”
Now Lucy was furious. She knew she wasn’t as special as Ethan because she didn’t get in all kinds of trouble and she hadn’t disappeared and she wasn’t dead. She turned the radio up loud again and slammed the earphones onto her head. Then she took them off long enough to demand, almost yelling,
“So does Rae know?” She doubted it. Rae spent most of her time away from the house these days and didn’t know anything that was going on. Didn’t know about the cute new guy in Lucy’s math class. Didn’t know that Cory was finally potty-trained, mostly. Didn’t know that Ethan kept showing up without knocking, except that couldn’t be true because everybody but Mom knew he was dead.
Mom cupped Lucy’s chin. Lucy closed her eyes tight so she wouldn’t have to look at her and put the earphones back on, but she could still hear Mom say, “I won’t be telling anybody but you,” and then Lucy felt very special, indeed, and very much afraid.
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3
”Jerry Johnston doesn’t work at Nubie anymore,” Mom said to Dad.
He doesn’t? What happened?”
I don’t know the circumstances, whether he was fired or quit or what. I guess the turnover at places like that must be pretty high.”
They were sitting back in their chairs at the two ends of the dining-room table, drinking coffee and talking to each other. They almost always did that after dinner, when the kids had left the table. They hugged in the kitchen, too; you’d carry your plate in to put it on the sink and there they’d be, arms around each other, maybe even kissing, sometimes dancing to some silly old song they sang together.
For a long time after Ethan had disappeared, Mom and Dad had hugged each other all the time, as if they didn’t dare let go. It had scared Lucy.
They’d touched the kids all the time, too. It was embarrassing; you’d be standing in line at the grocery store and Dad would put his hand on your head, or you’d be crossing the street and Mom would grab your hand as if you were Cory’s age.
Lucy kept wanting to yell at them, “Leave me alone! Nothing’s going to happen to me! Nothing can happen to me!”
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Then there’d been a long time when she hadn’t seen her parents touch each other at all. They’d hardly even looked at each other. Dad had kept touching the kids; sometimes you could find enough room to sit beside him in the big chair even if you were almost twelve years old. But Mom didn’t touch anybody unless she had to. She’d braid Priscilla’s hair, she’d put her hand on Molly’s forehead to check for fever, she’d put her arms around Dominic from behind to get his jacket zipper started. But she didn’t hug, she didn’t spank, she didn’t kiss the top of Dad’s head when she passed behind his chair.
That had gone on for months. Lucy was relieved they were kissing and dancing in the kitchen again, even though she didn’t know how they could do it when Ethan was still missing and everybody knew he was dead. Everybody but Mom.
Their chairs had arms. None of the others did. Someday Lucy would sit in a captain’s chair with arms and a high back at the head of a long table.
There’d be flowers on the table. There’d be a lot of kids, and Lucy would take care of them all.
She poured herself another glass of milk and dished up more chili into her bowl. She pretty much knew how to make chili now, even though she still did need Mom to tell her how long to brown the hamburger and how much chili powder to put in. Rae couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cook anything. She didn’t know that Ethan kept coming back.
Rae would eat all her meals in her room if they’d let her. She took tiny servings and gobbled her food, all hunched over her plate and not looking at anybody. She said she wasn’t hungry. She said she had to lose weight. But Lucy knew there were Reese’s cups and M&M’s stashed in her top dresser drawer under her bras and panty hose.
The little kids chattered and ate a lot, but they couldn’t sit still for very long. They didn’t care, didn’t even understand what the grown-ups talked about.
Lucy didn’t care either, most of the time, but she kept thinking that she ought to, that there was coded information in their conversations that someday she’d need. Only recently had she realized that they talked about stuff when sh
e wasn’t around. That bothered her.
“He’s in private practice now,” Mom was saying.
Lucy didn’t know what that was, or why it mattered what Jerry Johnston was doing. She had other things to worry about. She was afraid she’d flunked the math test today. A couple of sixth-grade boys had called her and Stacey a dirty name; Lucy wasn’t even sure what it meant. Stacey had promised to show her how to use eyeliner today, but the teacher had caught them whispering about it in class and had confiscated Stacey’s entire makeup bag.
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Stacey said her dad would sue. Stacey always said that, but her dad never did.
Her dad lived in California with his new wife and a baby brother Stacey had never seen.
“How do you know?” Dad asked Mom.
“I called him at Nubie and they told me. They gave me his number, but all I got was a snotty answering service.”
When Lucy grew up, she was going to have a beach house on Malibu with Emilio Estevez or Charlie Sheen, whichever one of them waited for her. She’d have a pink stretch limo and she’d drive it herself, even though most rich people had chauffeurs. Lucy couldn’t wait to drive. Dad said he’d teach her when she was fifteen. In the back of the limo there’d be a pink-and-white marble hot tub. She’d drive around with all her friends in the hot tub, cruising.
Dad’s scolding voice brought her attention back to what he and Mom were talking about. “I thought we decided to quit doing that.”
“I never decided that. You decided that. You and Jerry.”
“I thought you agreed that calling him or the cops every other day is just making it harder on you.”
“Not knowing is harder. Not doing anything is harder. I can’t just let them drop it.”
“Carole, it’s been two years.”
“It’s been one year and nine and a half months.”
“The chances of turning up anything get slimmer and slimmer. You know that.”
“You’re so sure he’s dead. I think you’d rather believe that than admit nobody knows.”
Dad rested his forehead on his hand. “You think I don’t fantasize that someday Ethan will just stroll in here like none of this ever happened and he’ll be fine? You think I don’t look at every brown-haired teenage boy on the street to make sure it’s not him?”