by Melanie Tem
“He called to tell us what he died of.”
“Well, why’d he ask for you? He could have told me that.”
“I guess because now I’m the oldest in the family next to Mom and Dad.”
“You’re only two years older than me.”
Rae shrugged and tossed her hair. Dusty mite-filled sunshine puffed around her head. The voice of the recorded operator was leaking out of the receiver, trying to warn them that the phone was off the hook. Both of them heard. Neither of them did anything about it.
“Jerry says it was an OD.”
“What’s an OD?”
“Overdose.”
“Oh. Well, big deal. We already figured that.”
“Jerry says there were all kinds of drugs in his system. Downers, speed, crack, pot, acid.” The names of the drugs sounded like dirty poetry coming out of her sister’s mouth. “Some traces of stuff they couldn’t even identify.
Jerry says any one of them could have killed him. Jerry says drugs are really dangerous. I’ll never take drugs, that’s for sure.”
“Just say no,” Lucy sneered. “You better go tell Mom and Dad.”
“Oh,” Rae said dreamily, the same way she’d said it on the phone to Jerry Johnston. “Okay.”
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“Right now.”
“Sure,” Rae said. “I will.”
Her legs gleamed as she swung them down. Her hair moved like sunny water; she brushed it back from her face with a practiced pretty gesture. Lucy tried it, but her own hair was tangled; her fingers got stuck in it. A red ant was crawling up Rae’s leg. Apparently she didn’t feel it, but Lucy saw it reach the little hollow at the back of her sister’s knee before Rae’s long slow strides carried it out of her sight. Now she’d never know what happened to it.
Lucy stood against the living-room wall. She heard her little brothers and sisters in various parts of the house and yard, like crickets. Patches was purring somewhere; he must be nearby, because the purring was loud, but she didn’t see him.
She heard voices upstairs, where Rae was telling their parents the latest bad news about Ethan that Jerry Johnston had brought. Right now, it seemed important to know which voice was which. There was Rae’s, singsong. There was Mom’s, sharp, furious. There was Dad’s, sleepy, asking a question, asking another question, crying.
Hearing Dad cry made Lucy slide down the wall until she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up and her face in her arms, as small a target as she could be. After a few minutes she realized it was hard to breathe, so she turned her head to one side, where she saw the blue triangle of the couch between her arm and her leg, the cat’s black and white feet padding up to her, and Ethan.
Ethan was dead. Lucy raised her head. Ethan was dead. His funeral was at three o’clock this afternoon. But there he was, just outside, between the living-room window and the lilac bush, hands cupped around his eyes, peering in.
Lucy tried to meet his gaze, but couldn’t quite see his eyes in the hollows of his face and the shadows made by his hands. He didn’t seem to see her. He seemed to be looking for something; he turned his head to scan the room.
After a few minutes, he just stepped back away from the window, ducked under the branches, and was gone.
Upstairs, Dad was still crying.
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10
Amonth passed, another week, another day. Things started to get back to normal. Sometimes Lucy had to remind herself that her brother Ethan was dead, she’d gone to his funeral, she’d seen and touched his body, and that he’d ever even been alive at all. And sometimes “Ethan is dead” was the only thing real.
She and Priscilla and Dominic took swimming lessons at the Y again.
Lucy finally went off the high board headfirst. Water slapped her stomach and thighs and got up her nose, but it wasn’t as scary as she’d thought it would be and she’d probably do it again before summer was over.
Rae went to therapy every Wednesday evening at Jerry Johnston’s house.
A few times Lucy rode with Mom or Dad to pick her up, and watched the other kids come out. They looked like any other teenagers. That was disappointing. You couldn’t tell by looking at them that they had problems, that they had to see a therapist. A couple of the guys were cute. Rae was always the last one out, and she was always very quiet on the way home.
Dad went to work every day, just as he’d always done, but now he didn’t talk about his work at dinner anymore. The whole family used to laugh at his stories about how the computers ate up programs, or when they turned 58
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what he put into them into secrets and wouldn’t let him have them back.
Lucy didn’t think her family would ever laugh again.
Mom went to her class every Tuesday night. She brought home a test paper with a big red A on it and showed it to everybody in the family. Dad said he was real proud of her, the same thing he said to the kids when any of them got good grades. Lucy didn’t know exactly how to think about her mother as a student.
Rae went to a party at her friend Gina’s, just four blocks away. Mom talked to Gina’s parents about who was going to be there and what they were going to do, and she made Rae write down Gina’s name and address and phone number. Rae threw such a fit about that that she almost didn’t get to go to the party after all. And then she was over an hour late getting home and got herself grounded again. From the way she smirked, you’d have thought that was what she wanted. She was almost fourteen. Mom and Dad were starting to bug her about what she wanted for her birthday. She said she didn’t want anything, but Lucy knew she liked the shiny black parachute pants they’d seen at the mall, if Lucy could just remember what store.
At the funeral, Lucy had actually touched Ethan’s wrist. She hoped nobody had seen her do it. It was kind of weird, touching a dead body, even if it was your brother. The flesh had stayed white where she’d poked it down. His blood hadn’t gone back to that spot. Hers did when she poked her own arm. He’d been really cold. She’d wished hard for his hand to move, but it didn’t.
Pris fell off the parallel bars in gymnastics class. That same night, she rolled out of the top bunk; everybody in the house woke up from the thump and the yelling. Both times Dad took her to the emergency room and Mom stayed home with the other kids, turning the porch light off and on and waiting for the phone to ring. “It’s weird there are only five kids at home now,”
Lucy had said, and then wished she hadn’t because Mom got tears in her eyes and turned away. Priscilla had broken a little bone in each foot; she’d have casts and crutches until school. Already she was complaining that the casts made her feet itch. Lucy thought it would be neat to break something. She wrapped one foot in a towel and hobbled noisily around the house until Dad yelled at her to stop it.
Dad had cried through Ethan’s whole funeral. Lucy had heard him cry before but she’d never seen him, and she was scared that he’d never stop. He didn’t even try to hide it. In fact, she saw him turn his face up toward the sky, and sunshine glistened on his cheeks.
Mom was like a mannequin. Once, when Lucy was just little, there’d been a pretty pink blouse on a mannequin at Penney’s and she’d reached up to rub the material between her fingers and then against her cheek, and 59
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then the mannequin had moved and smiled and said something to her. It was a real lady. It still embarrassed Lucy to think about that. At the funeral she’d been afraid to touch her mother, for fear the same thing would happen only in reverse: her mother would turn out to really be a mannequin, with no life in her.
Mom got a B in her class. Dominic’s baseball team came in next to last in the league, but Dom learned to run the bases without tripping over his own feet. Molly’s guppies had babies and
the tank was full of little brown dots zipping around, leaving the tiniest ripples. Dad shaved off his beard and looked exactly like Benjamin Franklin; he had a dimple in his cheek that Lucy had never seen.
So, daily life swirled and puttered on, the same as always except that now Lucy kept thinking about what was not, what she had lost, what was going to die.
A bird with a song like a wind chime woke her up one morning; she’d never heard this bird before, and she lay there for a long time filled with it, feeling its notes slide inside her body over and over like sweet immortal flowers down a waterfall, trying to picture the bird that made it, thinking it might be a message from Ethan, or just about the world and her place in it. But then the song stopped, and all she could hear was the screeching of a jay, the neighbor revving his old car, dogs barking, a siren, and those things only made her nervous, didn’t fill her with any sense of harmony at all. Rather than wait to hear that bird song again, Lucy decided it was gone forever, and that made her cry.
She went out to the front porch one afternoon and Mom was standing there holding Cory, and you could see their bodies through their clothes and their bones and blood and nerves inside their bodies. Ethan’s bones and blood and clothes were in the ground now. She didn’t know where he was. She didn’t know where Mom and Cory were, or where they’d be a minute from now.
She didn’t know where she was; she was here, but not really.
They didn’t have their own fireworks on the Fourth of July this year. Dad said they were too dangerous, and besides they were illegal. They’d always had their own fireworks, and it wasn’t any more dangerous or any more against the law this year than any other year. It was because Ethan was dead.
It wasn’t fair. Lucy closed her curtains and turned her radio up loud and refused to pay any attention to the fireworks from the stadium, even though the view from her bedroom window was the best in the house. With a guilty feeling of relief, Lucy recognized this as something she could dare to be mad at her parents about for the rest of her life.
The world didn’t come to an end, other people wouldn’t die, just because Ethan Michael Brill was dead. It wouldn’t come to an end if she died, either, 60
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Lucy Ann Brill. Sometimes she’d be thinking about starting sixth grade or something, and then she’d be ashamed of herself for worrying, for being excited, for thinking about anything but Ethan.
She watched Mom, paid close attention to what Mom said and what she didn’t say. She listened for her to check on all the kids every night, waited for her own turn, and every night reminded herself that Mom would never again be able to check on Ethan, would never again know where he was. She watched how Mom made pancakes, rocked Cory, kissed Dad, combed her hair so the white streak showed. It didn’t help. As far as she could tell, Mom was just going through the days, one after another. But then, Ethan came to her again.
It was a sweltering Saturday morning in early July. Sun in her window had awakened Lucy early. She was restless. She didn’t want to watch cartoons; just the sound of them was driving her crazy. She didn’t feel like starting her weekend chores. It was too hot to play outside. She thought about going back to bed, but she wasn’t tired. She was getting crankier and crankier; when Dom asked her for the third time where the Cheerios were, she threw the box at him. He wailed, “I’ll tell!” but then he got so busy eating that she knew he wouldn’t. Rae had left a note that she was at the park until noon. Lucy didn’t believe it. Dad was out mowing the lawn. Every once in a while she’d hear the mower screech, and there’d be a loud cracking sound, and she’d know he’d run over some toy. He’d be furious and sweaty when he came in.
Lucy hadn’t seen Mom at all this morning. She was probably still asleep.
It used to be Mom was up before any of them, even on weekends; since Ethan had died, she slept in as late as she could. Maybe she was sick. Maybe she needed something and was too weak to call anybody, a glass of juice or aspirin or something.
Lucy went quietly up the stairs. Patches was coming down; she stopped to pet him and he rubbed against her hand. Sunlight was streaming in the stairway windows, and the carpet was warm in places under her bare feet.
Mom and Dad’s bedroom door was open a little. That was so Patches could get in and out; otherwise, he’d yowl and scratch at the carpet and wake everybody up. The only time Mom and Dad closed their door tight was when they were doing something that had to do with being naked, like getting dressed or making love. Lucy still could hardly believe her parents did that. She wished they’d let her watch them so she could see how it was done.
She knocked on the doorframe, lightly so that if Mom was asleep it wouldn’t wake her up. At first she thought the TV or the radio was on, but then she realized Mom was talking to somebody, a low stream of words like a lullaby, like the way you’d talk to a hurt dog that might attack you. Lucy 61
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pushed the door open just a little farther, wincing when it creaked, prepared to say, “Can I get you anything?” or “Are you sick?”
Ethan was in bed with Mom.
Horrified, Lucy took several steps backward, which brought her right to the top of the stairs. She didn’t have to turn to look; she could feel the stair-well behind her, straight through the heart of the house. Dizzy, afraid she’d fall and nobody would come to pick her up because Dad was outside and Mom wouldn’t notice, she clutched at the newel post with both hands. But the door to Mom and Dad’s room had creaked far enough open by itself now that she could see right in, and she couldn’t take her eyes off the scene in the bed.
Ethan was in bed with Mom. The weight of his body pushed down the rumpled sheets. She could see little shadows from him. She could hear him breathing, see the wet red hole that was his mouth, like a baby crying, only he wasn’t making any noise. She could smell him, a cold smell, sweet and sour at the same time, like Cory when she used to give him his bottle.
Ethan was dead. She’d seen his body. His hand hadn’t moved, and his skin had felt like cold blue rubber. She’d watched as they’d lowered his body into the grave. Ethan was dead. It had taken her a long time to believe that, to understand it, but at this moment she couldn’t imagine why she’d ever thought it was a lie. She knew, in the same way that she knew she was alive and it was a hot summer morning and the stairs were waiting right behind her, that Ethan was dead.
But here he was, in bed with their mother, and he was too old to do that, too big, he wasn’t a baby anymore even though he seemed like one. He would hurt Mom. Mom would hurt him. There was something awful about this; Lucy wasn’t clear, couldn’t have put words to it, but her skin crawled.
There was also something so beautiful about it that the beauty seemed to get inside her, like mites, and it made her skin itch from underneath. Lucy ached to be where her brother was now, as close to their mother as he was, as he was becoming while she watched. She shouldn’t be watching, but she clung to the post and didn’t move.
Mom cried out, hurt, and then cooed as if to a hurt baby. Ethan was making sounds that came before words, gurgling, hiccuping, mewling. Mom wrapped her bare arms and legs around him. Ethan was naked, too, and Lucy couldn’t tell one body from the other or how they fit together, except that she could see Ethan’s mouth on Mom’s breast, sucking, biting.
Ethan was getting smaller and smaller. Lucy didn’t understand how that could be, but he was, and she tried not to blink at all because he might disappear while her eyes were closed and then she’d never know what had happened to him.
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Ethan was tiny now, and curled, and colorless. He could be in anything, anywhere, and she wouldn’t know it. Mom said his name one more time. “Ethan.”
Then he was gone. Mom groaned and arched her back and spread her knees, fists flung back on the pillow, hair dark and tangle
d. Lucy thought clearly: She looks like she’s having a baby, only backward, because nothing’s coming out.
Ethan’s going back in.
Then, abruptly, Lucy couldn’t watch anymore. She turned and ran unsteadily down the stairs. Nobody was around to yell at her for running; nobody was chasing her. She was careful not to trip, not to catch her heel, not to miss the bottom step. Her chore this weekend was to clean the living room. It took her a while to get the vacuum cleaner cord untangled from all the boots and backpacks on the closet floor. Then she was grateful for its loud noise and for the way it sucked up everything in its path.
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11
”Lucy! Lunch!”
Dominic made each of the words two syllables, like a marching song. Lucy couldn’t see him, but she could tell he was in the driveway, not really looking very hard for her, probably sitting on the ground playing with a bug or a rock with mica in it.
He had a friend named Micah, and he never would believe that that shiny stuff like tin foil was called mica, even though she’d told him a hundred times.
Mom was inside the house. Ethan was inside Mom inside the house.
Lucy pulled up her knees and hid her face, trying to look like part of the tree. “Lucy! Dad says to come right now!”
She couldn’t go in. She couldn’t ever go in that house again. She’d stay up in her tree for the rest of her life. Or she’d run away. She thought about running away to Jerry Johnston.
When she moved, the whole tree swayed. She hoped Dom wouldn’t notice, or would think it was just the wind, even though probably none of the other trees in the yard was moving. Unless somebody was hiding in them, too. She shivered.
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She didn’t know if he could see her from the ground. This was her tree; nobody else in the family ever climbed it. So she’d never been the one on the ground looking up trying to see somebody.
Suddenly she was wondering if Ethan had ever been up here. She didn’t remember if he had, but she knew he’d done lots of things that she didn’t remember. It was weird to realize that she’d been alive and doing things and thinking things when she’d been one and two and three, and she didn’t remember any of it, or just flashes: a red basin; snow on her face. It was weirder to realize that the little kids, Cory and Molly and maybe even Dom, wouldn’t remember most of what was happening to them right now.