Prodigal

by Melanie Tem

  “I don’t know, Lucy. I don’t understand any of this.”

  That was a lie, and it infuriated her. Parents understood stuff, and they could always explain it to you if they wanted to. She tried to pull away from her father but there wasn’t enough room on the bed.

  “Maybe,” he said, more to himself than to her, “it has something to do with teenagers’ ambivalence toward the parent of the opposite sex.”

  Now he was using big words and weird sentences on purpose so that she wouldn’t know what he was talking about. So that she’d feel dumb. Lucy was getting madder and madder.

  He wouldn’t say any more. His hand was still on her knee and he was still looking in her direction, but she could tell that Rae had come between them again. The fact that Rae was gone was more important than the fact that Lucy was still here.

  He looked so miserable that Lucy snuggled back against his chest so she wouldn’t have to see his face, so he’d have to protect and comfort her from his own pain. At first he didn’t say anything. Lucy felt the terror and hurt get-88

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  ting big again. She started thinking of terrible things to yell at him so he’d deny them and hold her again.

  But she didn’t have to. Dad sighed, put his arms around her, kissed the top of her head. “We’ll get through this, honey. It’s a terrible time for our family, but we’ll get through it together.”

  She pressed her ear against his heart and adjusted her breathing to match his. His body was warm. Some of her coldness and some of the pain in her chest started to go away.

  “And,” he said to her, gently, “you still have to do chores.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’m still not going to let you get away with talking to me like that.”

  She laughed a little, embarrassed. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “And you’re still grounded till Wednesday.”

  “That’s not fair! Stacey’s mom—” She stopped, then said, “I know.”

  He kissed her again and stood up. “Mom’s making hamburgers for dinner.

  You want to help her?”

  Lucy fell over onto her bed in the same curled-up position she’d been in while he was holding her. She was so tired.

  “Lucy?”

  She opened her eyes. “No. I’ve got stuff I want to do.”

  “Okay, we’ll call you for dinner. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she managed to say, and waited until he’d left the room and shut the door before she moved. Then she sat up. Her body ached. She stood, made her way across the room, and checked that the door was latched. They weren’t allowed to have locks on their doors because there might be a fire or something might happen to them. Rae and Ethan hadn’t had locks on their doors, and something had happened to them anyway.

  Lucy retrieved her diary, found a pencil with enough of a point to write, and turned to the next blank page. The diary was thick with blank pages that she would have to write in. She caught her tongue hard between her teeth and wrote, experimentally, “I hate you.”

  She paused, then read it aloud. “I hate you.” She didn’t know whom she was writing it to, and now she wasn’t even sure that she meant it, but it was better than the empty page. She wrote “I hate you I hate you I hate you” until the whole page was full.

  It was still hot when Lucy went back up to her room around nine o’clock.

  She might as well go to bed early; she couldn’t do anything fun anyway. She turned the fan on high and, before she could stop herself, was thinking with guilty satisfaction that now she didn’t have to fight about it with Rae, who’d hated the noise.

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  Lucy put on Dad’s old white T-shirt that she liked to sleep in. The tail came down to her knees and the sleeves almost covered her elbows. She liked the way it smelled.

  She crawled under her sheet, turned on her radio, settled the earphones over her ears. She stared out the window at the pine tree and the streetlight and the telephone pole. In the daytime, squirrels ran up and down the pole and drove Patches crazy. One summer Ethan had nailed a tunafish can as high as he could reach and kept it full of Rice Krispies and Cheerios for the squirrels. That was before they had Patches. Before Cory was born. Before Ethan died.

  Lucy rolled over, punched her pillow, changed stations. This was going to be one of those nights when she had trouble getting to sleep. It had always taken her a long time to fall asleep, even when she was little, and she always woke up two or three times, because of dreams or noises or having to pee. It had never bothered her, being awake when everybody else was asleep; in fact, it had been kind of exciting, her own dark quiet time.

  But lately the hours she tossed and turned seemed longer than those she slept, and she’d just start to doze off when something would jerk her awake again. The big house with all those sleeping bodies in it had turned haunted and scary.

  A pretty love song was playing on the radio. Tracy Chapman, she thought. She listened to it and tried to think peaceful thoughts. But the sunny field of flowers where Mom had taught her to go in her mind for one-minute vacations now had weird things living in the tall grass. She kept trying to find hidden messages in the music, like those people who played records backward and heard the devil’s voice. Finally she turned the radio off before the song was over. Then she heard the crickets. They were like one huge beast with its mouth open around her house, and she was afraid of them.

  School would be starting in one week. Sixth grade. She was allowed to wear panty hose in the sixth grade, makeup in the seventh. Rae had left behind a drawerful of panty hose, all different colors. Her bedtime would be ten o’clock. Ms. Haeger would have had her baby by now. Lucy wondered what it would be like to have a baby. Next year she’d be going to Pruitt Middle School. Next year was too far away to even imagine.

  She must have fallen asleep without knowing it, because somebody opening her door woke her up. The rush of fear gave way almost at once to an equally strong rush of relief; it was Dad, come to check on her. Lucy pretended to be asleep, because the magic only worked if parents thought the kids were sound asleep.

  Dad came in and shut the door behind him. He didn’t usually do that.

  Lucy heard him moving, but he didn’t seem to be coming any closer to her.

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  Finally, she slitted her eyes. His white T-shirt, a newer version of the one she was wearing, glowed silvery blue in the streetlight and moonlight.

  He hadn’t come in to check on her after all. He wasn’t anywhere near her. She doubted if he’d even noticed she was there. He was sitting on her sister’s bed.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” Lucy heard her father whisper.

  “Oh, God, Rae, I don’t know how to keep you safe.”

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  15

  The bell rang again, and Lucy jumped. Bells were always ringing.

  You’d just get settled in one room for math and then the bell would ring and you’d have to go all the way to the other end of the hall for social studies. The halls were crowded. Kids yelled and pushed. Lucy kept thinking she saw Rae, coming the other way in the hall or watching her from halfway up the stairs; Rae hadn’t gone to this school in two years. If you were late to class, you got your name up on the board.

  Only the sixth graders had to change classes. The little kids didn’t have to. Lucy remembered when she was a little kid; it didn’t seem that long ago, but her whole life had changed. The teachers said it got you ready for real life, for middle school. Lucy hated it. She was nervous all the time, and she hated school more than ever, and she had nightmares about bells.

  Somebody pulled her hair and pinched her hip. She whirled. It was Justin Tagawa. She knew it was, even though h
e was clear over on the other side of the hall by now pretending to talk to his friends. She yelled “Slimeball!” at him and kept going. Justin was kind of cute, even if he did get straight As .

  Maybe he liked her. Maybe she liked him.

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  The principal was walking beside her. Behind them, Stacey and Tammy hooted because the principal was walking with Lucy. Lucy’s face got hot. She tried to ignore them and the principal, just kept on walking to social studies.

  They were having a test. She hadn’t studied. She hadn’t even told Mom and Dad they were having a test. Since Rae had disappeared, they tried to act interested in her schoolwork, but they weren’t really.

  “So how’s it going, Lucy?” The principal was trying to be friendly.

  “Fine.” She hugged her book against her chest and didn’t look at him.

  “School going okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How are things at home?”

  “Fine.”

  “Any word yet about your sister?”

  The bell rang right over them and kept on ringing in her head, making her vision blur for a minute, making her dizzy. She tried to brace herself on the wall without being obvious about it. At least the bell saved her from having to answer Mr. Li’s dumb question. She ducked into her classroom and he went on down the hall, probably to talk to some other kid about stuff that was none of his business.

  “Hey, Luce, you in trouble again?” Stacey demanded out loud in front of everybody. She was laughing. She was supposed to be Lucy’s best friend.

  “Nah!” Tammy yelled. Tammy was always yelling. At the moment she was squatting on top of the desk. Even when she got caught doing stuff like that, even when they called her parents, she never got in trouble. “Nah, Lucy’s the principal’s pet. Maybe she’s his girlfriend!”

  Everybody in the whole room, including Justin Tagawa and Jeremy Martinez, was laughing at her. They were laughing at her because her brother had died and her sister had disappeared and who knew what was going to happen in her family next. Nothing was normal or the same or any good anymore. The Brill family was weird.

  Once Mr. Michaelson got Tammy off the desk and Justin and his friends away from the windows, he started talking about report cards. With a few exceptions, he said, grades were going to be pretty good this first time. He was proud of them. Lucy sank down in her chair, then pulled herself up straight and tried to stare at him defiantly. She was one of the exceptions.

  He’d warned her last week that if she didn’t finish the report on South America, she’d get an F. She hadn’t even started it. South America was dumb.

  Then he passed out the test. Lucy just looked at it. The questions didn’t make any sense. She filled in all the multiple choice with A, B, C, or D; it didn’t matter, and when she tried to read one or two of the questions, the words didn’t go with each other. She finished before anybody else and then sat 93

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  there with her head down, pretending to write, remembering to move her pencil once in a while, pretending to think.

  Lucy had no place to put her thoughts that was safe, and she seemed to have more thoughts than ever before in her life. If she thought about school, there were bells and reports and tests and sisters in the hall who couldn’t possibly be there and who disappeared again and again, scaring you every time.

  If she thought about home, there were Mom and Dad and Ethan and Rae and danger and sadness and her little brothers and sisters and fear. If she thought about her friends, there were all kinds of things she didn’t even understand, like boys and makeup and AIDS and college and French kissing and drugs. If she thought about herself, there was a headful of strangers.

  So she tried not to put her thoughts anywhere. She tried not to have any thoughts. But they rattled around inside her head as if she’d broken something in there, and her stomach hurt all the time. Maybe everybody was lying to her and you could get pregnant without having sex. Maybe she had cancer. Kids got cancer. Maybe she was going to die.

  “Time’s up,” Mr. Michaelson said from right beside her, and she wondered how long he’d been there. She passed her test paper in with the others. After it was gone, she couldn’t remember whether she’d put her name on it.

  They were starting a unit on Mexico. Angela Garcia went up to the map to point out the place where she visited her cousins every Christmas. Angela was fat, but she had straight thick black hair that she could sit on. Angela and Mr. Michaelson said some things back and forth to each other in Spanish.

  Lucy squirmed. What they were saying didn’t make sense. They shouldn’t talk in words that didn’t make sense. Maybe they were talking about her.

  She stretched noisily and turned her head to look out the window, hoping to make them shut up. Rae was looking in.

  Walking around the room to keep everybody involved in the conversation, Mr. Michaelson stopped between Lucy and the window. He held up a picture in a magazine that he said was Mexico City and asked her some stupid question about it. She just shook her head and didn’t even try to answer.

  When he finally moved out of the way, Rae wasn’t there anymore.

  Stacey passed her a note. Let’s go to the store after school. I have money.

  Lucy frowned and shook her head. She always had to go straight home after school. Stacey knew that. Stacey was just trying to make her feel bad.

  She had to finish her homework before she could do anything else. Probably now she could say she didn’t have any homework and they wouldn’t even ask her about it. She crumpled up the note, making as much noise as possible, and threw it across the aisle at Stacey.

  The bell rang. Everybody headed for the door except Tammy, who was on her hands and knees under a desk barking, and Justin, who was tugging at 94

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  the tie on Tammy’s blouse and yelling, “Here, doggie! Here, doggie!” He was calling Tammy a dog and she didn’t even know it; she thought he was paying attention to her. Any minute, Lucy thought, the tie would come undone and you’d see Tammy’s boobs; she didn’t wear a bra yet. That was probably what Justin wanted. It was probably what Tammy wanted, too.

  Mr. Michaelson stopped Lucy at the door. “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  “I have to get to gym.”

  “It’s important. If you’re late, I’ll write you a note.”

  Detention again, she thought as she followed him to his big desk at the front of the room. Until this year she’d never had detention in her life. Now she’d already had it three times in the first six weeks. She’d thought her parents would be mad, but they didn’t seem to care much. Dad said he knew she was having a hard time. She wasn’t having a hard time. It was just that school was so dumb.

  Mr. Michaelson sat on the corner of his desk, like he was trying to bring himself down to her level or something, and said, “Sit down,” but she didn’t. Noise came like mosquitoes from the open windows behind him and the halls behind her. There was a lot of noise everywhere these days; that was what made it so hard for her to concentrate. The first and second graders were going out for recess. Rae wasn’t out there anymore. Or maybe she was; Lucy thought Rae could probably be anywhere, feeding, like mites, whether you could see her or not.

  “I’m worried about you, Lucy,” Mr. Michaelson said.

  Surprise made her look at him. She caught herself and looked away again.

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not ‘fine.’ Nobody would be ‘fine’ in the situation you’re in.”

  Lucy made herself shrug. What she wanted was to bury her face against him. Maybe he knew how to take care of kids, since her parents didn’t. In as smart-alecky a tone as she could muster, she said, “Oh, well.”

  “It’s been a terrible year for you and your family, hasn’t it?”

  If she
said anything, she’d start to cry, and then she’d never stop, she’d go crazy. She was going crazy anyway. Her whole family was crazy, or dead.

  Mom didn’t have tears running down her face all the time, but Lucy knew she never stopped crying, and Dad wasn’t the same anymore.

  Three big beautiful trees had stood in front of Stacey’s house for as long as either of them could remember, for years and years before either of them had been born. It used to make Lucy feel safe to think about how old those trees were, to lean against them and imagine how deep the roots went if it was true that there was as much of a tree underground as you could see above ground.

  Then last spring two guys from Public Service came with a saw that sounded like a giant dentist’s drill and cut down all those trees. They said the trees were diseased. They said they were dead inside.

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  Lucy and Stacey didn’t believe that. The trees had leaves and branches.

  Every year they turned green. Every year they seemed a little bigger. They couldn’t be dead. But then they’d looked inside the stumps, which had been full of some disgusting brown pulp that must have been dead tree. So all those years, when she’d leaned against those trees and walked under them and felt safe because they were so old and tall and deep, all that time they’d been rotting inside, and dead, and they could have fallen on her at any time and crushed her. It was dumb to feel safe.

  “My sister isn’t dead,” she heard herself saying.

  Mr. Michaelson nodded. “Sometimes it’s harder not to know.”

  “I kept saying my brother was dead even when I didn’t know whether he was or not, and then he was. Dead.”

  Mr. Michaelson walked over to the board and started erasing it really hard, around and around in the same spot, even though he’d already erased everything he’d written on it about Mexico. Mites probably loved chalk dust.

  She saw little bones twitch in the back of his hand as he rubbed and rubbed.

  She saw little crisscross threads in his blue shirt where sunshine fell across his shoulder. He stayed at the chalkboard for such a long time that she thought he was done talking to her and she was late for gym for no good reason.