Prodigal

by Melanie Tem

  “Where?” Then Mom saw him, too, and dropped Lucy’s hand.

  Jerry kept coming closer, passed the side steps, seemed to be looking at them now. The brightest part of the sunrise was at his back, so it was hard to see his face.

  “Jerry?” Mom said out loud. “Jerry Johnston? What are you doing here so early in the morning?”

  “Hello, Carole.” He stopped on the sidewalk between them and the house. He nodded to Lucy but didn’t say hello to her. “You’re up early.”

  “I—couldn’t sleep,” Mom said.

  He was standing over them with his arms folded across his big chest.

  Rings glinted from his hands where they were tucked under his elbows.

  His white shorts and striped shirt were huge. From where Lucy crouched 72

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  on the ground next to her mother, he looked like a giant in a fairy tale.

  He was frowning at them. “It’s kind of an odd time to be working in the garden, isn’t it?”

  “I—it’s hard to find time to do this during the day,” Mom said. “With the kids and school and everything.”

  He nodded, as if he understood something that Mom hadn’t said. Jerry Johnston was a smart man.

  “How’s Rae doing in the group?” Mom asked. Lucy thought it was a weird question to be asking him before the sun was even up, and she was embarrassed for her mother.

  “She’s doing fine,” he said. Lucy could tell from the tone of his voice that he and Rae had secrets, even from Mom.

  If Mom hadn’t asked again, “What are you doing here?” Lucy would have.

  “My aunt lives a few blocks away.” He gestured vaguely. “I always take early-morning walks, especially when I’m not in my own neighborhood.”

  “I didn’t know you had an aunt who lived around here.”

  “Oh, I believe I mentioned it when we first met and I saw your address.

  Aunt Alice. She’s eighty-three, and things around her place tend to pile up, so every once in a while I spend the weekend with her and help her catch up.”

  He was talking a lot, Lucy thought uneasily. Usually he just sat and nodded and maybe said, “Uh-huh,” taking in everything you said—and everything you didn’t say, everything he saw about you that you didn’t see—and putting it to his own use inside that enormous body and mind. She had a feeling he was taking in and using everything about herself and Mom right now, but talking so much that you wouldn’t notice it. Lucy noticed.

  “We were just—weeding,” Mom said. Lucy didn’t see why she said anything at all. “I was showing Lucy about dead-heading.”

  “Uh-huh.” His big pale head bobbed. There was a long pause. Lucy cupped her hands around a little ageratum plant, fuzzy with blue flowers, and savagely snipped them all off with her nails, one by one, until there was a pile on the ground. The sun was bright enough now that they didn’t look quite blue. Mom was sitting back on her heels, staring at Jerry Johnston and fid-geting her hands in the little white gardening gloves. Lucy was afraid she was going to invite him into the house for a cold drink, or suggest they walk to 7-Eleven together for coffee.

  “Well,” he said, and had already started to move away before he’d finished the sentence, “I guess I’d better go get Aunt Alice’s breakfast started. Say hello to Tony and the other Brills for me…” His voice trailed off. He was walking very fast, almost running. He didn’t go all the way to the end of the block but turned into the alley instead. Lucy watched him curiously, warily, realizing 73

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  how little she or Mom or anybody knew about this man who knew so much about their family.

  Lucy and her mother finished pulling the flowers off the plants. The sun was all the way up now. More and more cars went by. The lady across the street was calling her dog; she did that every morning, and Dad always complained because she woke him up. Lucy glanced up at the bedroom window and wondered if he was awake now; it made her feel funny not to know. Birds were chirping so furiously in the trees that she looked around for Patches or some other cat, but there wasn’t any; they must be singing because they were happy, or just because it was morning.

  The dead heads looked like scraps of cloth on the ground. Mom stuffed them and the gray weeds into a black plastic garbage sack and stood up. Lucy heard her knees crack. “I’ll go put these in the trash,” Mom said. “Why don’t you go on in, and we can start breakfast. Cory’s probably awake by now.”

  He wasn’t. The house was still very quiet. Lucy was sitting in the kitchen with Patches on her lap, feeling quiet and peaceful like the morning as long as she didn’t let herself think about Jerry Johnston and what he’d been doing outside her house, when she heard somebody scream.

  Priscilla. In the upstairs hallway, outside Rae and Lucy’s room, Priscilla was shrieking.

  Patches cocked his head and twitched his ears. Lucy sat there for a moment, not knowing what to do. She heard running footsteps upstairs, and lots of voices. Mom ran past her. Lucy hadn’t even known she was in the house.

  After a minute, Lucy pushed Patches off her lap and followed Mom because she had to, so scared she almost collapsed when she first tried to stand up, had to hold on to doorframes and dining-room chairs as she passed by.

  When she got to the top landing, she saw Dad at the end of the hallway in his baggy yellow pajamas, and Pris in his arms. Her crutches were on the floor, blocking the bedroom door. She was crying. “It’s Rae! Oh, Daddy, something awful has happened to Rae!”

  Dad pulled away from her so roughly that she almost fell. Mom grabbed her shoulders and leaned her against the wall, bent to pick up the crutches and prop them under Priscilla’s arms. Molly and Dominic had come sleepily out of their rooms, and Cory was wailing in the big-boy bed. Lucy made herself take a step toward her room, then another.

  “Shit!” she heard Dad say. And then: “My God!”

  He was pressing against the doorjamb with both hands and Lucy had to duck under his arm to see. She went all the way inside, and nobody stopped her. When she raised her head inside her own room, she screamed and clapped both hands over her mouth.

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  Rae’s bed was all messed up. The top sheet and the green blanket were bunched on the floor. One corner of the fitted bottom sheet had been pulled loose, exposing the gray mattress. The head of the bed had been pulled away from the wall, crookedly. The cords of Rae’s radio and headphones and speakers looked like spiderwebs, like thin black bones. And the whole bed was soaked with blood.

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  ”Are you all right, ma’am?”

  The detective leaning over Mom had a little mustache and a certain way of talking. Lucy thought he was gay. Rae would know. Rae wasn’t here. Rae said you could tell if guys were gay but not girls.

  Rae was missing. Chills raced through Lucy. Ethan was dead. Her family was changing. Her family was falling apart. She was the next-oldest kid.

  Maybe she was next.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?”

  Mom was on her stomach on the hallway floor. She hadn’t fainted; Lucy had watched her deliberately kneel, then curl up on her side, then stretch out and lay her cheek and the palms of her hands and her stomach and her thighs on the wooden floor.

  She wasn’t dead either, though it wouldn’t have surprised Lucy if she was.

  She was panting, and her fingers kept moving across the floorboards like the legs of helpless bugs, like a mother’s hands helplessly trying to hold on.

  She hadn’t fainted. She wasn’t dead. But she was on the floor and she wouldn’t get up, and that really bothered the gay detective. Lucy had a hard time imagining gay sex. She had a hard time imagining any kind of sex.

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  She didn’t know why it bothered him so much that Mom was on the floor.

  Let her stay there. “Mom, please get up,” Lucy tried to say. But she must have been whispering it, or saying it just to herself, because nobody even looked at her and Mom didn’t move, except that her hands kept opening and closing across the slippery, dusty wood.

  Lucy tried to make her thoughts into words, black letters marching across the troubled white spaces of her mind, like something written into her diary and there forever. She tried to send the message straight to her mother: Can’t you tell there’s nothing to hold on to? Why don’t you quit trying? You look really stupid.

  Rae had been gone a whole day now, and there was no sign of her. The cops had taken her bloody sheets. Things that had belonged to her already didn’t feel as if they belonged to anybody; no matter how long Lucy sat and held her sister’s pink robe or how heavily she smeared her sister’s silver lipstick across her own lips, there was no presence in anything, no message, no clue. Lucy wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, but nobody even noticed.

  “Ma’am?” the detective asked one more time. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  Suddenly Mom was up on her knees, clawing at the man, screaming at him. “No, I’m not all right! My son is dead and my daughter is missing! I’ll never be all right again!”

  You still have us, Lucy thought fiercely through fierce embarrassment. You still have me. But she understood that it wasn’t enough.

  The detective had caught Mom’s wrists and was holding them easily, but the forward motion of her body as she attacked him threw him off balance and he sat down hard. Now he didn’t look like a detective anymore, and it didn’t matter whether or not he was gay; he was an ordinary man sitting on the floor in Lucy’s house holding her mother in his arms.

  They were not alone. They were part of other people, and other people had had people die. Nobody could change what had happened or keep other bad things from happening to them. But there were people who could help them stand it, help them get through. Not just Mom and Dad, not just Lucy herself, the oldest child left. But people like Jerry Johnston, and Stacey who’d lived through her parents’ divorce when she’d thought she never could, and this detective holding Mom who was sobbing so hard she could hardly catch her breath.

  Lucy wanted him to hold her, too. She wanted to cry like that while he was holding her so she wouldn’t go flying off in bloody little pieces into the wind.

  She looked away, embarrassed, and tried to listen to Dad on the phone, but the detective murmuring to Mom was louder. “We’ll do everything we can to find her, ma’am. And the rest of your family is right here. Your family needs you, ma’am.”

  Mom beat weakly at his chest and her crying turned to coughing. “My family is slipping away! I can’t keep them safe! They’d be better off without me!”

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  Lucy looked around frantically. Priscilla had taken the three youngest kids into the kitchen for breakfast. Dominic, Molly, Cory. If you named them, it would make them real. Even though Lucy knew where they were, it was easy for her to believe that she’d never see them again.

  This day had passed like any other day. They’d all eaten, slept some, gotten up, breathed, had mites on and in them, petted the cat, brushed their hair, touched things. Molly and Cory had watched cartoons. Dad had watched the news. Lucy had gone swimming at Stacey’s house. A day like any other day, except that nothing was the way it had ever been before.

  They were hunting for Rae. Just like they’d hunted for Ethan. A lifetime ago. A moment ago. This time Lucy helped, but it wasn’t making any difference. They couldn’t find her. Mom drove all over the neighborhood, was gone so long that Lucy thought she must have had an accident, or driven off the edge of the world. On her way to and from Stacey’s house, Lucy asked every kid she saw: “Have you seen my sister? Have you seen Rae?” Nobody had. Some of them didn’t even know who her sister Rae was. Dad called all her friends, Jerry Johnston, the other kids in the therapy group, teachers.

  Nobody knew anything.

  Now Lucy sat quietly at the big dining-room table, where she’d sat hundreds of times before. This was Dad’s chair; it had arms. There was a smudge on the shiny wood; she rubbed at it and it got bigger. The sunshine coming in the bay window had the same shape and color it had had on other late-summer mornings, as if everything were the same. But she knew there were invisible feeding mites in the sunshine and that anything bad could happen at any time, in the next minute or the next year or at any time during her life.

  Time was rushing around her like a cyclone, and it had also stopped.

  Anything bad could happen, and would. Anything good could happen too, which was the truth but wasn’t real.

  Mom was crying so hard now that Lucy could hardly understand her. She didn’t want to understand her, but she couldn’t help it. “I was their —mother! I was supposed to —keep them safe!”

  Mom pulled away from the detective and curled up again on the floor, curled up her knees, curled her arms around her legs. But she didn’t cover her face, and Lucy stared, mesmerized, at the plain terror and anguish there.

  The detective was taking notes in a blue spiral notebook like the ones Lucy used in school. “You’d had some trouble with both of them, hadn’t you?”

  When Mom nodded, her head slid up and down on the floor.

  “What about the other kids?”

  Mom didn’t answer.

  “How many other kids do you have, Mrs. Brill?”

  Mom still didn’t answer. Finally Lucy said, “Five,” and shuddered.

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  “Have you had any trouble with any of them?”

  Lucy stiffened. Mom moaned, “No! What difference does it make?”

  All her words were stuck together. The detective waited, pen poised over the notebook.

  Dad hung up the phone, strode across the living room into the hall. To Mom he said, very firmly, “You can’t just lie there on the floor, Carole. Come on, now, get up.”

  “Why not? This is as good a place as any.” But she let him pull her to her feet and lead her to the couch. The detective followed at a short distance, writing something down. Lucy got up, took a few steps after them, stopped.

  She wasn’t holding on to anything. She couldn’t reach anything to hold on to. All the voices and other sounds came and went and crisscrossed and tangled, like hundreds of radio stations interfering with each other. Colors got brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer: the golden-brown patches of sun across the floor, the green vine on the outside of the bay window, a red book open on the arm of the couch. She thought she was going to throw up.

  But the sickness already belonged to someone else’s body, because she didn’t have a body anymore, or a place in the world to be in.

  “Nobody’s seen her,” Dad told them again. “A couple of her friends said they talked to her on the phone the evening before she disappeared and there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.”

  Just like Ethan, Lucy thought, and Mom said her thought: “Just like Ethan.”

  Then Lucy’s thoughts went on: Just like me. I’m next. She waited for Mom to speak that, too, but she didn’t.

  “I went through her address book,” Dad said wearily, passing his hand over his eyes as if they hurt, as if everything hurt. “I called everybody I could think of.”

  “Has Jerry found out anything?” Mom’s voice was shaky, but the terrible sobbing had quieted. Lucy relaxed a little. The side of her neck hurt. She put her hand there and discovered a knot, proof of the inside working of her own body.

  “He says she never gave him any reason to suspect she was planning to run away or involved in anything dangerous.”

  “Who’s this Jerry?” the detective wanted to know. Lucy had almost forgotten he was there, but now
that he’d spoken up she was convinced that he would always be here in her house.

  “Jerry Johnston.” Mom said the name as if she hated it. Lucy wondered why. “Her therapist.”

  “Where can I get in touch with him?” Dad gave him Jerry Johnston’s address and phone number. The detective copied it down in his notebook, nodded, then asked, “Why did she need therapy?”

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  “To help her with things we couldn’t help her with.”

  “What things?”

  Lucy’s mixed-up thoughts suddenly came together. Don’t tell him, she sent in silent warning to Dad. The detective was an outsider. The Brill family was falling apart.

  But her father didn’t hear the warning, or didn’t believe it. He took a deep breath. “Shoplifting. Lying. Moods. Generally being unhappy and hard to get along with.”

  “Sounds like every teenager I know,” the detective said, with a little laugh that made Lucy instantly furious.

  “Things with our oldest son went too far before we took them seriously enough. We wanted to head things off with Rae.” Dad laughed a little, too, but Lucy didn’t think he thought anything was funny.

  “How long had she been having problems?”

  “For a while. A year or so. But it got worse after Ethan died.”

  And then Dad was crying, tears were streaming down his face, Mom was rushing to hold him, and Lucy couldn’t stand it anymore. She ran into the kitchen and slammed the door.

  All her younger brothers and sisters sat around the sunny kitchen table eating cereal. They were giggling and squabbling as if this were any other morning, as if nothing had happened and nothing was going to happen, as if Ethan weren’t dead and Rae weren’t missing and Dad weren’t crying in the living room and Mom hadn’t been lying flat on the floor with no good reason to get up, as if there weren’t cops in their house. Even Priscilla, who was old enough to know better, was reading the jokes on the back of the cereal box and laughing out loud.

  Lucy stood there for a few minutes, watching and waiting. Then she sank to the floor, pressed her cheek against it like Mom, and let herself be drowned by the horror of what had happened and what was happening now and what might happen at any time.