Prodigal

by Melanie Tem

  The word sounded dangerous, but Lucy kept on. “Are you sick?”

  “I feel awful!”

  “I don’t know what to do. I better call them—”

  “I hate them!” Rae’s voice was like a growl.

  Lucy stopped with her back to the door and stared at her.

  Her sister’s face was twisting and twitching as if there were snakes under the skin. Her body jerked, knees brought up to her chest and then kicked straight again. She pounded her fists backward onto the mattress. A dark pool stained the sheets under her hips. “Rae,” breathed Lucy. “Your period—” But then her sister was on her feet and coming toward her, and Lucy saw that it was just a shadow and not blood and that Rae was going to hurt her.

  She fumbled behind her for the doorknob. “Stop it! I’ll tell! I’ll tell Dad!”

  Rae burst into little-girl tears and collapsed onto the floor. “Dad hates me!” she wailed. “Oh, he hates me!” and then, “Go away! Get out of here!”

  It was her room, too, but she didn’t stop to say so. She opened the door, backed through it, shut it behind her. Something soft bounced off it on the other side. Probably one of her stuffed animals.

  Her parents weren’t in the front part of the house. Lucy reached way back into the hall closet and pulled coats and sweaters off hangers and hooks, until they covered the floor of the closet knee-high. She sat down on the mound, curled her legs up under her, lay down. Mom’s torn gray jacket hung toward the back; it had belonged to Lucy’s great-grandfather who had died when her mother was fifteen. Lucy pulled it down; the hanger pinged against the closet wall. Gently she folded the jacket; it held her mother’s smells and her great-grandfather’s, and it made a perfect pillow.

  “Lucy?” Her mother’s head poked around the closet door. “What are you doing?”

  “Can I sleep in the closet tonight?”

  Mom crouched, but she was still taller than Lucy was. “In the closet? What for?” Lucy snuggled deeper into the nest of family clothes. “It’s cozy here,”

  she said.

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  Her mother hesitated, then smiled and bent forward on her hands and knees to kiss Lucy’s cheek. “Why not,” she said. “Pleasant dreams, honey.”

  Mom left the door ajar when she left, so that a pale streak of not-quite darkness cut the darkness of the closet. Lucy fell asleep to the quiet sounds of her parents readying themselves and the house for sleep.

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  6

  From the middle of the amusement park, between the funhouse and the little train, there was a weird glow. Lucy thought it was just moonlight on the lake, but she wasn’t sure. The sky was dark blue, like the eighth-grade graduation robe Rae had worn last month, and the lights of the Ferris wheel and roller coaster and Tilt-a-Whirl were like buttons and tassels, coming loose.

  Lucy was ready to go home. She was tired. She had a headache from too much sun and noise and sugar. Her shoulders were sunburned. Her mouth and fingers were sticky from cotton candy and sno-cones, and so much dirt had stuck to her that she felt furry.

  But Pris was still going strong, racing between rides and concession stands, trying to laugh louder than the mechanical lady in front of the funhouse, singing at the top of her lungs, “Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!”

  Nobody else in the family seemed tired. Even Mom and Dad were having a good time. Mom had ridden the roller coaster six times already and was in line again now with Priscilla. Dad, who’d always claimed that rides made him sick, was on the big Ferris wheel with Molly and Dom.

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  It wasn’t fair. The kids who had summer birthdays got to have neat parties—here, or swimming, or slumber parties in the backyard tent. When your birthday was in January, like Lucy’s and Ethan’s, you never got to do anything fun.

  Scowling, Lucy stood and watched the merry-go-round animals go up and down and around. Cory was on an elephant with turquoise tusks. He screamed every time it went up in the air, and Lucy wasn’t sure he was having fun, but it was too late to get him off now.

  The striped pole stuck right through the elephant’s fat stomach and back made Lucy cringe. When the elephant went up, the scalloped shadow of the roofline seemed to cut off both its head and her little brother’s. Cory was yelling and the elephant’s painted wooden eye swelled out at her. She imagined how that huge, smooth, red eyeball would feel in her palm.

  “Hey, Lucy! Look at me!” Cory’s baby voice was muffled and he was carried out of her sight again under the red and white fringe.

  The merry-go-round slowed down. It took a long time to stop complete-ly, and even then she had the feeling that it could start up again for no reason, at any time, whether anybody wanted it to or not, that it could work itself back up to full speed before she knew it and send Cory and the others spinning out into space, way beyond her reach.

  But the tinny, tinkly music kept on, never missed a beat. She used to imagine that the music and the motion were connected somehow, that the circling ran a hidden motor that created the music, or that the music actually made the platform turn. It bothered her that she didn’t know which caused which, or whether there was some third mechanical force that caused them both. The animals looked different when they weren’t moving. Scarier.

  Little kids scuttled from between the animals’ legs and from under their tails and necks. The cute teenage operator leaned his bare arms on the railing to talk to another boy. They didn’t seem to care much about the merry-go-round or about Cory on it. They hadn’t even noticed her.

  Somebody stopped to talk to them. A huge man, not as tall as Dad but big around, legs like tree trunks in white shorts, a red striped shirt stretched over a hard-looking belly and shoulders like mountains, short thick arms, a short thick neck.

  She knew him. Jerry Johnston, the social worker from Nubie where Ethan had been. She’d sat with her brothers and sisters and parents in Jerry Johnston’s office every month for family meetings; she’d never said much unless they made her, but she’d watched the gold and silver fish in Jerry’s aquarium and the gold and silver rings on Jerry’s fingers that sparkled when he moved his fat hands.

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  Now she saw him put his hand on the arm of the ride operator’s not-so-cute friend, saw the boy shrug and glance at his friend and then follow Jerry into the crowd. Lucy was relieved that she wouldn’t have to say hello.

  Cory must be on the other side. She started that way, making a tight, cau-tious circle. There were more kids on the ride than she’d thought. Uneasily she wondered where they all could have come from, who was taking care of them. She didn’t see anybody taking care of them. She didn’t see Cory.

  Ethan walked by.

  Reddish-brown hair cut very close to his skull, like a punker’s. Everybody in her family had either reddish-brown or dark brown hair, except Rae, whose hair these days looked like lemon cotton candy. Brown eyes like hers and her brothers’ and sisters’, his going in every direction at once. Thin face, thin shoulders and arms sticking out of a gray sleeveless sweatshirt, thin ankles above tennis shoes that were so new they glared.

  She’d never seen Ethan so thin. She’d always thought of him as big and strong, sometimes a bully and sometimes a protector, her big brother.

  Suddenly it crossed her mind that maybe the only reason he’d seemed big was because she’d been so small. Maybe that was true about Dad, too.

  Maybe the older and bigger she got, the smaller and thinner and weaker everybody else would get, until she’d have to take care of them all. Ethan looked right at her, even turned his head as he walked past, but she didn’t think he saw her.

  She yelled, “Cory!” and pushed through the crowd, racing to the other side of t
he merry-go-round. But the thing had moved. It wasn’t moving, but it had moved. The stiff, polished animals on this side were the same as the ones she’d been watching on the other side. The spotted giraffe. The cream-colored horse with the purple mane. The pink and gold flamingo with the beak that looked sharp but wasn’t when she put her hand to it. Cory wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. She’d lost him.

  Lucy burst into tears.

  Somebody sneered. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Lucy jumped and turned away from the merry-go-round, which was filling with little strangers for the next ride. She forced herself to peer into the crowd again. Just a few minutes ago she hadn’t been able to find anybody she knew—though she always had the feeling that if she stood still long enough in any one place, everybody she knew, dead or alive or imagined, would come by like a parade. Now Rae was coming toward her. She had hold of Cory’s wrist and was walking too fast for him. He was crying and stumbling.

  “Nothing,” Lucy said, and wiped her nose with a sticky hand.

  Rae glared. “Then what are you crying for? You’re always crying. God, you’re such a baby.”

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  Lucy kicked at the hard-packed dirt of the midway. Some of it came loose and puffed up against Rae’s smooth leg. She hoped it got into the high-heeled sandal, stuck to the red toenail polish. “I couldn’t find Cory,” Lucy said sullenly, and took him away from Rae, picked him up though he was getting awfully heavy for her, pressed his head into her shoulder. Someday she’d have a baby of her own, just like Cory when he was a baby. She’d be a good mother. She’d never let anything bad happen to her baby, like Mom had let happen to Ethan.

  Rae wiped her hands on her jeans. Lucy had watched her practice that gesture in front of the mirror; it called attention to her hips. “Jesus, sometimes I wish he would get lost. I wish they’d all get lost.”

  “That’s a mean thing to say,” Lucy said. “I’m telling.”

  Rae reached out both hands with the long red nails and pushed Lucy so hard that she almost fell, carrying Cory. “You, too,” she sneered. Thick lipstick made her teeth look very white when she pulled her lips back. “I wish you’d get lost, too. Permanently. Like Ethan.”

  Nearly blind with fury, Lucy balanced her little brother higher on her hip and crouched. She swept her free hand across the ground in search of a weapon, found only an empty potato chip bag, threw it as hard as she could at Rae, who was laughing and walking away. A tall boy was with her. Lucy hadn’t noticed him before. The glittery bag sailed back to the ground. “I hate you!” she shouted after her sister, though already she’d lost her among the colors and shapes of the crowd. “You bitch!”

  “Bitch!” Cory echoed gleefully, tugging at her hair. His baby voice made the bad word sound even worse than it was, and she put her hand over his mouth. He turned his head and chortled: “You bitch!”

  “Lucy, what’s going on?”

  Lucy was so glad to see her mother, and so embarrassed at being caught swearing in public, that she started crying again. Mom had her hair in pigtails, and bangs almost hid the ugly white streak. She looked too young to have seven kids.

  Cory squirmed out of Lucy’s arms and ran to his mother. She patted his head and smiled at him. But she didn’t pick him up, even though Lucy could see that was what he wanted and knew that Mom could see it, too. When she had kids, she’d always give them what they wanted. “What’s going on?” Mom asked her again, and Lucy could tell that she was already mad at her.

  “Rae’s being obnoxious. I hate her.”

  Her mother glanced around. The pigtails flopped. “Where is Rae? I haven’t seen her since we got here.”

  “I don’t know where she is. She saw some guy she knew and they took off.” Lucy didn’t know if her sister really had known the tall boy, if she’d even really gone off with him or just happened to be walking in the same direction for a while.

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  “Was she okay?”

  Lucy scowled. Sure, she was okay. Why wouldn’t she be okay? “I guess,”

  she said.

  Cory was wandering off, following a little girl with three pink balloons.

  Lucy started after him, but Mom reached him first and hoisted him onto her shoulders. Mom was really strong.

  Dad came up with Molly and Dominic. He was holding his stomach and his face was pale, so that all the little hairs of his beard stood out like dirt on his cheeks and chin and down the front of his neck. “Three times in a row on the Ferris wheel,” he groaned.

  Mom patted his arm. “You’ll earn a star on your daddy badge.”

  “The guy stopped us at the top. All three times. And then we rocked.”

  “And we could see everything!” Dom crowed. “We could even see you guys!

  It was neat! Huh, Dad?”

  Dad groaned again and rolled his eyes. Lucy giggled. She went over and put her arms around him, but he pushed her away gently when she pressed her face too hard into his tummy.

  “Lucy says she saw Rae,” Mom told Dad. “She went off with some boy. I could hear Lucy calling her names from clear over at the hot-dog stand.”

  Lucy looked down guiltily, but all Dad said was, “Rae can be—difficult sometimes. It’s her age.”

  “I’m not going to be like that when I’m a teenager,” Lucy said heatedly.

  “Oh, you probably will. But you’ll get through it. And so will Rae.”

  “Ethan didn’t get through it,” Lucy said.

  “He hasn’t yet,” Mom said sharply. “There’s still plenty of time. He’s still young.”

  “I bet he’s dead.”

  “Stop it, Lucy,” Dad said, and she did, her eyes glazed with tears, her mind pulsing with the image of Ethan in the short haircut and the white shoes, thin and silent and with eyes everywhere at once, maybe watching all of them from the crowd right now. She’d stop, if that’s what they wanted. She wouldn’t tell them. She wouldn’t mention Ethan again.

  Dominic and Molly were chasing each other around their father’s legs. He wasn’t really paying attention. Mom said, “We shouldn’t have let Rae come, Tony. Not after last night.”

  Dad sighed. “You’re the one who said how important birthdays are.”

  “I just think we should keep her feeling a part of the family for as long as we can.”

  “Hey, you guys! I wanna go on the roller coaster again!” Priscilla was yelling from all the way across the midway. She zigzagged over to them and didn’t stop moving once she got there, dancing from one foot to the other, poking at 31

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  Cory with the pointed cardboard tube from her cotton candy, tugging at her mother’s arm. “Let’s go again!”

  “Oh, Pris.” Mom reached to hug her and missed. “Do we have to?”

  “It’s my birthday!”

  Pris was a year and four months younger than Lucy, but she was already taller. At the moment, she was also wearing Lucy’s rainbow T-shirt under the long-sleeved blue shirt of her own, which she’d now rolled up and tied by the tails around her midriff. Lucy didn’t care whose birthday it was. Infuriated, she grabbed for the T-shirt, but Priscilla twisted away and the shirt would have ripped if Lucy had held on.

  “How about something else?” Mom pointed. “How about that?”

  Everybody looked up. Molly cried, “Oooh! Pretty!”

  A string of cars one after another, red and blue and red and blue, swung through the night air. Some of them were as high as the tops of the trees.

  They looked like big half shells—a giant’s necklace, or the homes of giant slimy clams. They dipped and twisted, rose and fell, but they didn’t make any noise. At first Lucy didn’t see the cable holding them up or the people riding inside, and so it was easy to imagine that they were traveling empty, alone, and with no reason.


  The cars were like bonnets, she thought, without any faces in them.

  It would be easy to fall out, she thought. You probably wouldn’t make much noise coming down. She heard little screams, like bugs.

  “The Sky Ride!” Priscilla squealed. “All right!”

  She started down the midway at full speed and bumped into a fat lady whose sundress showed lots of different sunburn lines on her neck and shoulders, layers and scoops of pink. The lady didn’t say anything, and Priscilla kept going. Dom and Molly went after her.

  Lucy was suddenly afraid. But all her family was leaving, so she went, too.

  Behind her she heard Mom calling to them to slow down, Cory howling to be let down, Rae laughing somewhere away from the family, and Ethan’s quiet cold breathing as he watched.

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  7

  Ethan was waiting for them when they got home. Lucy saw him right away when they turned onto King Street, standing under the apple tree out front. For a minute she thought the chain-link fence was wrapped right through him.

  Lucy had lived on King Street all her life. So had Ethan, until he’d started getting in trouble, and now she didn’t know where he lived. In a way you could still say he lived here; she didn’t think he had any other home, and a person had to have a home somewhere. Someday she’d live in the Malibu Colony with Emilio Estevez, in a huge house with a giant pink marble bathtub shaped like a shell.

  Mom was driving. Lucy saw her turn her head to look at their house, and was reassured. Mom always did that after they’d been away someplace, even for just a little while, even to the grocery store or to the dentist. She always turned her head to look at their house as they drove past on the way to the alley and the garage; it was one of the ways Lucy’d always been able to tell they were almost home, even back when she was so little she couldn’t recognize the corner by herself.

  Tonight Ethan was in their yard, by their house. Lucy braced herself. But Mom didn’t say anything, so Lucy didn’t either. Ethan was their secret.

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  He was camouflaged. Inside the fence with the roses climbing on it that separated the Brill place from the neighbors’ on two sides and the street in front and the alley in back, he was hard to pick out. He was part of it. He belonged there.