Prodigal

by Melanie Tem

  “Lucy?” Priscilla asked. Dominic laughed.

  Molly ran to get Mom or Dad.

  “Where do you think Rae is?” Pris wanted to know.

  It was late afternoon now, hot, and the western sky was clouding up. Lucy saw that the plants out here on the porch were getting dry. She stuck her finger into one of the pots, then pulled it out and wiped it off in disgust. It was Mom’s job to take care of the plants, not hers. If they all died, it would be Mom’s fault, not hers. “How would I know? Nobody knows.”

  “Well, I think she’s dead. Just like Ethan.”

  “Well, where’s that?”

  “Huh?”

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  “Where’s dead?”

  Pris slid all the way to the other end of the swing. “You’re weird, Lucy.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you ever want to know what it’s like to be dead?”

  Priscilla got down from the swing, even though Lucy was pushing hard with her feet against the concrete floor and making the swing go high and wide. She had to get her crutches before she could run away into the house, and that slowed her down.

  Lucy had time to say, “Someday I’m going to find out.”

  Priscilla couldn’t get away from her fast enough to keep from bursting into tears. “Everybody’s gonna find out someday!” she wailed. “Everybody’s gonna die someday! I don’t wanna die! I don’t want Rae or Ethan to die!”

  “Too late,” Lucy said, not quite under her breath, wondering why she was being so mean to her little sister, who was going to die someday.

  Pris went clomping into the house, yelling, “You’re mean! I’m telling!” As soon as she was out of sight and earshot, Lucy felt terrible. She made the swing go as hard as she could, then drew her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her knees and made herself very small. As if that would keep bad things from finding her. She knew it wouldn’t.

  She hated it that cops were in her house again, the gay detective talking some more to Mom and Dad, and a bigger guy, half-bald, old, with a big stomach. Right now he was in Rae’s room, which was also Lucy’s room but nobody seemed to remember that, going through their stuff. When she’d gone in to rescue her diary, he’d pulled it right out of her hands, flipped through the pages a couple of times, read a few things, then handed it back to her without a word. Lucy had been really embarrassed. But the fat old balding cop hadn’t cared about either her diary or her embarrassment.

  Now she took the diary out of her pocket and flipped through it from the back. Page after page was blank. It was weird to think what words might end up on them, whether she’d write them or somebody else would. Rae had known all the places where Lucy’d ever tried to hide the diary. You couldn’t keep a secret from her if she wanted to find it out. Maybe she’d write Lucy a message.

  Lucy kept turning pages. The gold edges glistened; she kept running her fingers over them to make sure they weren’t wet. The more blank pages she turned, the more her heart hurt. Her arms and legs hurt, too, like in those TV

  commercials for pain medicine where there was an outline of somebody’s body hollow except for pain. There was pain in her ears. There was pain in the tips of her fingers.

  She had to go through a lot of blank pages before she got to the last thing she’d written, which was about the two cute guys in the apartment across the 81

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  street who were not too old for her even if they were in their twenties. Rae hadn’t written her any messages. Mom hadn’t written her any messages. The stuff she’d written herself was stupid.

  Lucy closed the diary and closed her eyes. The swing kept moving back and forth. She could just barely feel the concrete porch floor under her toes as she pushed on it, scraped across it, pushed on it again. She could just barely feel the slats of the swing under her thighs, the hot afternoon air with mites and dust and oxygen in it all over her skin and up and down her nose and inside her lungs like fear.

  She was so afraid.

  Rae rose out of the bushes in front of the porch. Lucy stared. Rae’s hair was a mess, and her makeup looked like bruises and blood.

  She scrabbled up the porch wall. Her nails made screaking noises on the brick, and Lucy cringed to think of how they must be breaking. One leg came over the wall toward Lucy. Her black shoe and thick rolled black sock looked way too hot to wear in this weather.

  Lucy wanted to pull back away from her as far as she could. She also wanted to grab her wrists and help her over the wall onto the porch beside her. She didn’t do either one. She stayed where she was and whispered urgently, “What are you doing? Where have you been? You’re in a lot of trouble! Everybody’s looking for you. The cops are looking for you and Mom and Dad and it’s been in the paper—”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up,” Rae said softly and clearly. “You’re such a baby.”

  Lucy answered back, “You think you’re such hot shit.” She felt tears in her eyes but she didn’t wipe them away because she didn’t want Rae to think she was crying or anything. She didn’t dare blink or the tears would come loose.

  “You always think you know everything about everything.”

  “I know a helluva lot more about life than you do. You are such a baby.

  Why don’t you grow up?”

  Rae was still trying to climb over the porch wall. Now she was stuck halfway, as if she was too weak to push herself the rest of the way over. The way she straddled the wall looked painful, and she teetered. When her hands grabbed at bushes and the brick wall and the air, her long red nails flashed like drops of blood and she couldn’t grab hold of anything.

  There was a noise from inside the house, somebody coming, and Rae fell over backward. Lucy heard branches snap inside the big rosebush in front.

  Mom would be mad about that.

  She got up off the swing. It pitched forward and almost tipped her off.

  She went and looked over the wall, leaned way over to see down to the ground through the thorny bush. Rae wasn’t there. Rae was gone again.

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  Lucy was still bent way over, clutching her diary against her and trying to find some proof that Rae had really been there, when Priscilla screamed from right inside the front door, “It was her period!”

  Lucy jumped. Her heart took up her whole body, beating hard and fast.

  She stumbled backward until she felt the swing against the backs of her thighs, then collapsed onto it. The swing careened wildly, then stopped moving altogether. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter and didn’t look at Priscilla, who was balancing on her crutches in the doorway. “What?”

  “The cops just got a phone call on our phone. That was blood from her period all over her bed.”

  Lucy pressed her hands over her face, but sobs came out anyway, like big hot stones, tearing out of her chest and smashing back into it again.

  Priscilla came and sat beside her, crying, too, and after a while they were holding hands.

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  ”I hate you!” Running up the stairs, Lucy bumped against the suncatcher Ethan had made in the third grade. The day he’d brought it home, it had seemed magical; she’d been just little. But all it was was a plastic lid with the face of a sun drawn on it in magic marker. She didn’t know why Mom kept the stupid thing. The edge of the lid was cracked now all the way around, and the magic marker was smeared. She swung her fist at it, hit the leaded glass window behind it instead, threw herself off balance, fell to one knee.

  “I don’t want to be part of this family. I hate families! This isn’t even a family anymore!”

  Priscilla was just coming out of the bathroom. When Lucy stumbled past her, she stuck out one of her crutches, trying to trip her. Lucy saw it in ti
me, though, and kicked it out of her sister’s hand. Pris howled.

  “You’re terrible parents! You don’t know how to take care of kids! I don’t want you for my parents! You let your kids die!”

  She slammed her bedroom door and flung herself, shrieking, onto her bed. The door jumped open again. Lucy looked over her shoulder to see if 84

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  Rae was there, or Ethan. If they might have followed her, might have come back. Might never have gone away at all, and everybody had been wrong or lying. That wouldn’t surprise Lucy.

  They weren’t there. Nobody was there, come to comfort her or bring her secret messages. She’d made the door open herself, by trying to shut it too hard.

  “I’m gonna run away!”

  They’d grounded her for two days just for talking back to Dad about chores. Lucy didn’t see what was such a big deal about talking back. She was just expressing her opinion. She had a right to her opinion. Stacey talked back to her mother all the time and didn’t get in trouble for it. Or if she did, all she had to say was she hated her mom and she wanted to go live with her dad, and pretty soon her mom would give in and Stacey would be back to doing whatever she felt like doing.

  Lucy’s mom and dad never gave in. They were strong. They held on. Even now, when a lot of the time they didn’t pay much attention to any of the kids who were still alive. When they looked at you or talked to you or listened to you, you knew they were doing it through the smeared, multicolored presence of Ethan and Rae, who were always there and more real than anybody else. Ethan Michael Brill. Rae Ellen Brill. Peeled off the Brill family like strings off string cheese.

  Lucy pounded the pillow, kicked the wall, yelled, “I hate you” as loud and as mean as she could. She hoped they could hear her. She hoped the whole world could hear her. It wasn’t fair. This was the last week before school, and she and Stacey had plans. Go to the library—Mom and Dad almost always would say yes to the library, and lots of times Jeremy Martinez was hanging out in the park with his friends. Ride the roller coaster a hundred and one times. Spend the night at one of their houses and watch scary movies all night, then at the other one’s house and watch love movies all night.

  There weren’t very many days left before school. There weren’t very many days left, period.

  Just ask Ethan. He’d spent a long time trying to hurt everybody else because he was hurting, even though, as far as Lucy could tell, that was his own fault. He’d tried to take stuff from other people that wasn’t his, and he refused to use what they did give him.

  Lucy thought about Ethan’s huge, stinking mouth that got bigger and smelled worse every time she saw him because the flesh around it and inside it was rotting away. She thought about his wild empty eyes. She thought about him getting smaller and smaller and finally going back inside their mother where they’d all come from.

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  Lucy couldn’t look at her mother now without thinking about Ethan pos-sessing her, haunting her from inside her own body. Sometimes when she let Mom close to her, when she touched Mom, she was sure she could feel her brother inside her mother’s belly, kicking and feeding and curling tighter and tighter around himself.

  Just ask Rae, who’d started her period and then disappeared. Lucy put her hand down between her legs and felt a suspicious moisture there, but when she looked at her fingers, there was no blood.

  She didn’t see what the big deal was about chores, either. What difference did it make if the tables got dusted and the trash got taken out? Keeping the house clean was just another trick to make you think it was a safe place when it wasn’t. Yesterday she’d heard Mom yelling over the noise of the vacuum cleaner, yelling and yelling as she pushed it back and forth across the living-room rug. “No! No! No!” she’d yelled, apparently thinking nobody could hear her, but Lucy heard.

  Lucy had better things to do. For one thing, she’d keep herself safe. Nothing bad was going to happen to her anyway; she didn’t seem to be afraid of stuff anymore. Today she’d done a bunch of things she never would have done before: crossed Federal Boulevard without a light, stuck her hand through the fence to pet the big white dog that always acted as if it was going to attack you, waded out into the lake till the water was up to her armpits. Stacey had said, “Lucy!” a lot, but the green pickup had slowed down in time, the dog had finally started wagging its tail, and she’d fed a whole family of ducks or geese out of her hand. Their beaks had felt like rubber across her palm.

  Still crying, still trembling with rage, even still kicking at the wall, she reached with one hand into the dresser drawer where she kept her diary. She couldn’t find it. She sat up so quickly that it made her dizzy, pawed through underwear and tapes. The diary wasn’t there.

  Rae. Rae had stolen her diary and was going to write in it. Lucy pulled her knees up to her chest and shuddered with excitement.

  There was a knock at her door that made it open even farther and she could see Dad standing there. She turned her head away from him, pressed her cheek against her knees, and snarled, “Go away!”

  He came in anyway. He shut the door behind him, made sure it stayed shut, said her name. “Lucy.”

  “Go away! Leave me alone! I hate you!” Suddenly she saw her diary, on the floor behind her closet door. There wouldn’t be any messages in it, from Rae or from anybody else. Lucy said again, “I hate you.”

  He sat down on the other bed. Rae’s bed, piled high now with Lucy’s stuff.

  She shouldn’t put her stuff there; Rae would be mad. He had no right to sit there. “Well, regardless of what you feel about me, I love you.”

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  “No, you don’t.”

  “I love you,” he repeated.

  “All you care about is homework and chores. You don’t care anything about me. You wish I was the one who was dead.”

  He leaned forward and slapped her. Not hard, but enough to make her cheek sting, and he’d never slapped her before. Lucy screamed. Her father grabbed her. She tried to fight him off, but he was bigger and stronger than she was, and he was her father. For a minute she was scared of what he was going to do. She’d gone too far and he was really mad at her; she deserved whatever he did.

  She could also feel his sadness, and that scared and disgusted her more than his anger. She imagined the hollowness of his bones, the hollowness of his veins, all of his internal organs like sacks. Like the Visible Man in biolo-gy class. She was going to throw up.

  What he did to her was hug her. She twisted and yelled to get free, but he held on. Underneath the anger and sadness and fear, inside the hollowness that those feelings made, she had no choice but to feel her father’s love. It didn’t take much of a struggle before she gave up and collapsed against him.

  “I’m sorry, Lucy,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have hit you.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not all right. But you have to expect me to react like that when you say I don’t care about you. That’s going to be hard for me to take for a long time. Maybe forever.”

  “Because of Rae and Ethan.” He nodded. “Everything’s changed! They’ve ruined everything!”

  “A lot of things are changed, yes. But not everything. And it’s up to each of us whether our lives are ruined.”

  “Where do you think they are?”

  “I don’t know. Ethan’s dead. I don’t know where he is.”

  “What about Rae? Do you think she’s dead, too? She’s been gone a long time. Almost a month. She must be dead.”

  “No,” he said. “She’s not.”

  “How do you know?”

  He didn’t answer. Lucy sat up away from him and looked up at his face.

  When she examined it up close like this, it was the face of a stranger, torn apart into pieces, into bones and flesh
and tears.

  “Do you see her?” she breathed. “Like Mom used to see Ethan?”

  She could tell that he was surprised and not too happy that she knew about that. Parents thought you didn’t know anything.

  She could tell he considered lying to her, or pretending he didn’t know what she meant. But he decided to be honest. As far as she knew, he and 87

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  Mom were always honest. Sometimes she was glad and proud. Other times it drove her crazy.

  “I think I’ve seen her,” Dad said. “I’m not sure. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Me, too,” Lucy breathed.

  Dad looked at her sharply, as if she’d done something wrong. As if it was her fault that Ethan and now Rae had run away. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t think it was her fault. “You’ve seen her, too?”

  “Maybe I just dreamed it,” Lucy lied. “Maybe I just thought I saw her because I was thinking about her so hard.”

  “Maybe.” Dad didn’t believe it, which gave Lucy an uncomfortable little thrill.

  “How come Ethan came to Mom and Rae comes to you? What do they want?”

  “I saw Ethan a few times. Or thought I did.”

  “Did he try to hurt you?” Did he try to go inside you was what she wanted to ask, but she couldn’t bring herself to say something like that out loud. She could only hope he’d know what she meant. Parents were supposed to always know what you meant.

  He didn’t know. He answered only what she’d asked. Lucy was disappointed and irritated by her father’s stupidity. “No. He never attacked me or anything. Not after he ran away. He did a few times while he was still living at home, but you remember that, don’t you?”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know. Twice I saw him, or thought I saw him, in the doorway, and once I thought he was looking in the living-room window. That’s all.”

  “So how come he—how come Mom saw him more and talked to him and—touched him and stuff?”