Prodigal

by Melanie Tem

  That meant that all kinds of stuff could have happened to her when she was real little, and it would be part of her now because everything that ever happened to you was part of you, and she wouldn’t even know it. Ethan could have been up here in her tree lots of times before it was her tree, and she would never know.

  “Lucy! Come on! I’m telling!”

  Maybe Mom would do to her what she’d done to Ethan. Swallow her up.

  Keep her safe by swallowing her up. Lucy didn’t know what to think about all this, how to think about it. She needed to talk to Mom, but Mom was asleep, Dad said Mom was sick and they all had to stay away from her.

  She had already climbed as high as she dared. She was a lot higher than her usual reading place, which was a big forked branch that just fit her bottom, and curled up so she could lean her back comfortably against it, with knotholes and scars from sawed-off limbs that she could prop her heels into.

  Sometimes, when she’d been reading for a long time or writing in her diary or just looking at the leaves and the sky, a bird would come really close, or a squirrel, or a bug with a million legs would crawl up the tree trunk and even though she hated bugs, Lucy would think what a long trip that must be for him, like walking to the moon.

  But the branch she was sitting on now was high and thin. It bent till she thought she could hear it crack, till she was almost resting on the stronger branches underneath, almost falling through the empty spaces between them.

  Maybe she would fall. Then Mom would come running and pick her up.

  It used to be that when Mom kissed owies they really did feel better.

  Not anymore. Just ask Priscilla, with both her feet in casts. Just ask Cory, with the burn on his knee from the inside of the oven door. Just ask Ethan.

  Ethan was dead.

  Lucy squinted up into the pale blue sky spotted with green leaves. She would climb higher if she could. She tested an even thinner branch right above her head, and it snapped off in her hand. She would climb all the way to the sky if she could. Disappear into it. Transform into blue air.

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  She didn’t exactly understand what made the sky blue. Something about light bending and breaking. If light could break, anything could break. She clenched her fist, but no light was trapped inside and none oozed out between her fingers. She twisted her wrist sharply, but as far as she could tell, no light broke.

  The branch between her legs was hurting a little. Lucy shifted her weight, and then a good feeling, kind of a bubbly feeling, gathered there, kind of squirmy and exciting, mixed up with the discomfort. She felt herself blushing, and she could hardly bring herself to think about what she was doing, but she moved the same way again, as if the branch were a rocking horse with a narrow back, and both the pleasure and the pain came again, strong.

  Reminding herself that nobody but the squirrels and the birds could see her up here, and the squirrels and the birds didn’t care, Lucy did it again.

  Then, abruptly, she’d had enough. She lowered herself precariously down to her reading place. Once she was settled into the fork she felt safe again, but exposed to anybody who might be watching from the ground. She looked down, felt dizzy, looked around. Dom had quit calling her, and she didn’t see him. She wondered a little wistfully what they were having for lunch. She was hungry. She wondered if Mom was up. As she climbed quickly down from her tree, her foot slipped and for a second her heart raced painfully, but really she hadn’t come close to falling. She went inside.

  They were just sitting down to lunch. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Mom was at the table, still in her bathrobe, but holding Dominic on her lap and looking over his head at Lucy.

  “Where were you?” Dad demanded as he ladled tomato soup into eight white bowls.

  “Up in my tree.”

  “Didn’t you hear Dom calling you? You almost missed lunch.” Lucy just shrugged.

  Dad always made great grilled cheese sandwiches. He wouldn’t tell anybody what his secret was. Lucy didn’t think he really had one. The tomato soup was a little lumpy, but Rae was the only one who cared. She sat all hunched over, staring into her bowl and squashing the lumps with the back of her spoon, but even she didn’t say anything snotty.

  Molly sang them a song she’d made up about bears, a long song. If she hadn’t told you it was about bears, or that she was singing, you’d never have known. Dominic told a joke. He said the punch line first and gave it away, but he laughed and laughed until finally everybody else started laughing at him, so then he decided it must have been a really funny joke and told it again.

  They talked about normal, everyday things. The snake Cory’d found in the gutter, so brown and flat that it looked like a piece torn off a grocery sack; 66

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  he wanted to keep it as a pet and would not believe it was dead, so finally Dad just said no. Priscilla had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon; she asked whether she’d be getting her casts off, and Dad said he doubted it, it had only been three weeks, and Priscilla said huh-uh, it was almost four, and there was a dumb little argument.

  Rae said she was going to a movie tonight with friends. Dad said what movie. She said just a movie, we haven’t decided yet. Dad said what friends.

  She said you know, just some of my friends, what’s the big deal? Dad said she couldn’t go unless he knew what movie and what friends and who was driving and what time they’d be home. Mom nodded. Rae slammed her spoon down so hard that tomato soup splattered out of the bowls. It didn’t really look like blood; it was too thin and too orange. But Lucy didn’t eat any more of it.

  Lucy noticed that Mom didn’t eat very much. She took one bite and put the sandwich back down on her plate. Her bite mark looked like somebody’s secret smile.

  Molly put her hands over Mom’s eyes from behind. “That was a awful dream we had last night, huh, Mom?” She yawned noisily.

  Mom tried to look around at her, but Molly wouldn’t let go of her head.

  “I don’t know what you mean, sweetheart.”

  “You do so. The bad dream where the monster chased me and I got scared and then you came and chopped off its head.”

  Mom chuckled. “Molly, honey, I didn’t have that dream. That was your dream.”

  “But you were there. I saw you.”

  For a second Lucy thought maybe Molly had seen Ethan. That made her feel weird. Then she thought Mom must be lying to Molly, and to her, too.

  That thought didn’t last long, but it made her feel guilty and nervous.

  “Sometimes when you’re little,” Mom said to Molly, and Lucy knew Mom was talking to her, too, and she listened even though she pretended not to,

  “it seems as if your mom and dad are everywhere. Even in your thoughts and dreams. But we’re not. Your dreams belong to you.”

  Molly lowered her hands until they were around Mom’s neck. Mom put up her hands and loosened Molly’s, then brought the little girl around to settle her on her lap, saying, as she almost always said about any of them, “Oh, you’re getting so big!” Molly was frowning. Mom kissed her and smoothed her hair.

  Right after lunch Mom went back to bed. Lucy and Dominic had to clear the table. Lucy took a long time on purpose, to give Mom time to write messages in her diary, if there was something she wanted to say to Lucy and to nobody else. Cheese from the sandwiches had hardened across the bottom of the skillet, and she had to scrub and scrub to get it off.

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  She wanted to take a bath. There weren’t any clean towels. Lately there were never any clean towels. She went out to the back porch and found the dryer full. She fished through the tangled, faded pastels and found her favorite pink one, then defiantly shut the door and left the other towels for somebody else to put away. For Mom to put away. That was Mom’s job.

  She w
as hurrying toward the bathroom with her towel in her arms when she saw Dad on the living-room floor. She saw him out of the corner of her eye, and Rae leaning over him, and it took Lucy a minute to realize what she’d seen, and then she stopped and went back. If Rae was hurting Dad, she’d have to do something. She didn’t know what to do.

  Then she saw that Rae was giving Dad a back rub. His arms were folded under his head and Rae was straddling his hips. His back was bare. Lucy’s face grew warm, and she lifted her towel to cover it, peering through the nubby folds. Dad loved back rubs, and he always said Rae was good at giving them, because her hands were small and strong. Sunlight through the window lit the room as if Dad and Rae were in a pretty box. Patches had folded himself onto the wide blue arm of the couch above them and was purring loudly.

  Lucy could hear her father and her sister breathing rhythmically together.

  Rae looked up and saw her. Caught spying, Lucy took a guilty step back.

  But Rae just smiled. Her hands didn’t stop in the circular motions along their father’s shoulders, but she held her little sister’s gaze for a long time, and she smiled. Lucy could hardly stand it, there was suddenly so much love. She stood there as long as she could, then ran up the stairs and slammed and locked the bathroom door.

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  12

  Something woke her.

  She sat up and opened her eyes very wide to see in the dimness of the sunrise and the fading streetlight. Rae was asleep in the other bed; Lucy could see the mounds of her shoulder and hip, the shiny blond tangle of her hair that looked silvery green.

  She listened. There weren’t any sounds that weren’t always there when she woke up in the night: just the dripping of the bathroom faucet, Patches purring on the heap of Rae’s clothes in the corner by the closet. In the tree outside her window, birds were starting to sing because the sun was coming up, and next door Dudley’s daughter yelled good-bye to her father because he was hard of hearing and slammed the back door on her way to work. She did that every morning. Usually Lucy put the pillow over her head and went back to sleep.

  This morning she got up. She didn’t think Dudley’s daughter had awakened her, or the birds. Maybe it had been a dream, a good dream, because she wasn’t sad or afraid. The shadows were just tree limbs, eaves, Dudley’s chimney. Nothing lived in the shadows. They had no hands or eyes. Her house was a safe place and all her family was safe in it. Except her brother Ethan. Who was dead.

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  She was wide-awake and had to go to the bathroom. She swung her feet over the side of the bed. Patches trilled good morning and came to rub around her ankles.

  Lucy went down the hall to the bathroom. Patches came with her, and noisily used the cat box while she used the toilet. That made Lucy smile.

  From across the hall she could hear Dad snoring, tiny little round sounds like seashells.

  She was combing her hair in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, trying to decide whether it looked better behind her ears, and Patches was sitting at her feet watching, when she heard the noise that she knew had awakened her. A regular snipping sound. The sound, she realized, of garden clippers. And singing. Her mother’s voice, singing a song.

  Standing on tiptoe, she could just see out the bathroom window.

  There was Mom, in the pink flowered robe the kids had given her for her birthday and short white gardening gloves that made her hands look like a child’s, on her hands and knees in the peachy light of the sunrise, working in her flower garden and singing a song that, as far as Lucy could tell, didn’t have any words.

  This was a wonderful thing. An adventure. A beautiful experience she would remember all her life. Lucy propped her elbows on the high win-dowsill and held her face in her hands, already trying different words in her mind for writing about this in her diary. Maybe Mom would write in the diary about it, too. Now and then Mom’s trowel glinted. The long narrow garden, in the space between the sidewalk and the street, trailed out behind her like the train of a wedding dress, and there were little piles of gray-green weeds along the curb. Mom didn’t look up, but Lucy could tell she knew she was there, and that they loved each other very much.

  Suddenly she saw what Mom was doing. She was cutting the heads off all the flowers. Bright blue and yellow blooms grew in the rows ahead of her, round like marbles, but the plants behind her were bare.

  She raced down the stairs and out the front door. She had to get to her mother. She had to stop her.

  The early-morning air was cool and she shivered in her thin nightgown.

  Sharp little stones here and there on the sidewalk hurt her feet. But when she rounded the corner, she saw Mom in the middle of the flower garden, lit by the sunrise that was spreading across the sky now, snipping and snipping, and she saw the pile of flower heads on the ground at Mom’s side, and she ran faster, calling out, “Mom! Don’t!”

  Mom looked over her shoulder and smiled, but the clippers didn’t stop.

  “Good morning, honey. You’re up early.”

  “Why are you killing the flowers?” Lucy stopped before she got too close.

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  Mom looked at the clippers in her hand, opened her palm to look at the squashed blossoms she’d been holding there, looked back at Lucy, and laughed gently. “I do this so they’ll grow better.”

  Lucy didn’t know whether to believe her or not. “You do?”

  “Come here.”

  Lucy hesitated. Then she put one foot into the grass. The dew was cold and she jerked her foot back, shivering violently.

  “Come here, honey. Let me show you.”

  Lucy high-stepped over the wet grass until both feet were on the dirt of the garden, which was warmer. Her toes sank in; she liked that. Mom was still on her knees, so that Lucy was taller than she was, and the early sun made silver streaks shine all over the top of her head. Lucy wanted to touch it, to cover them up.

  “If you kneel down,” Mom told her quietly, “I can show you better. Come on down here with me.”

  Lucy knelt in the dirt between the rows of plants, some of them with pretty flowers on them and some of them ugly and bare. Her mother took her hand, guided it to one of the plants that still had a yellow head.

  “These are marigolds,” Mom said, and her voice was soft and soothing, like a lullaby, or a reverse lullaby, since it was morning and they were supposed to be waking up. “The blue ones are ageratum. If you let them bloom too early, the plants get spindly, and they’ll stop blooming altogether before the season’s over.”

  “What’s spindly?”

  “Thin. Weak. Kind of sickly. The energy of the plant goes into the flower, and not into the stem and the leaves and the roots, where it belongs.”

  Mom moved Lucy’s fingers so that she could feel the stem, the hairlike leaves, the too-fat flower on top.

  “Sometimes I talk to them. I say things like, ‘You’re just too young. Let yourselves get stronger first. Later, I promise, I’ll let you keep your flowers, and then everybody will say how beautiful you are all the way through Octo-ber, if we don’t get a heavy frost.’”

  “You talk to the plants?”

  Without warning, Mom pinched Lucy’s thumb and forefinger together, and the head of the flower popped off. Lucy gasped and tears welled into her eyes. She tried to pull her hand away, but Mom held it, and the yellow ball of the marigold lay dying in both their palms.

  “Sometimes plants get—spindly anyway,” Lucy said carefully, looking at the decapitated marigold and not at her mother. “Sometimes plants die no matter what you do, huh?”

  “Sometimes a wind comes along,” her mother agreed sadly. “Or a hail-storm. Or somebody takes a shortcut through the flower bed and crushes 71

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  all the plants. Or a dog digs them up. Or some animal eats them—rabbits supposedly like the taste of marigolds, and deer, too. There are all kinds of dangers.”

  Abruptly Lucy’s knees gave out and she sat down in the damp grass, pulling her hand away from Mom’s and dropping the flower head into the dirt. She found a rock and set it over the fading yellow ball, ground it down, left it there. “You’re supposed to keep them safe,” she said, half under her breath. When Mom didn’t answer right away she thought maybe she hadn’t heard her, so she looked up and said out loud, “You’re supposed to keep us safe. You and Dad. You’re the parents.”

  The sunrise was full in Mom’s face, making her look older because it brought out the wrinkles and at the same time younger because it was a soft peachy color. The tears in her eyes and on her cheeks were peach-colored. Lucy wanted to wipe them away, stopped herself by thinking deliberately, Serves her right, and then felt guilty. Mom said, so softly that Lucy could hardly hear her and anyway she didn’t want to, “I know. That’s what I always thought, too. But sometimes things happen to kids that parents can’t help. Sometimes—”

  Shut up, Lucy thought furiously, but all she dared say was, “Then why bother?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do.” Mom spread her white-gloved hands.

  “Doesn’t it bother you to have to do all this stuff? Like pull the heads off plants?”

  “Yes. But it’s the right thing to do.”

  “What do you do with them when you break them all off?”

  “You’re supposed to leave them in the garden so they’ll decay and add their nutrients to the soil. That’s what Grandpa does. But I can’t stand to see them lying there, so I put them in a bag and throw them away.”

  “There’s Jerry Johnston,” Lucy said before she knew she was going to. He was halfway down the block, his big square head turned to look up at their house.