by Melanie Tem
So if something happens to them, it’ll be my fault. That’s okay. This is all my fault anyway.
“I’ve been sick, remember? I’ve got chicken pox. I can’t go outside.”
“You’re not that sick now. It’ll do you good to get some fresh air.”
“You’re trying to kill me. You want all your children dead.”
It was a mean thing to say and Lucy hated herself for saying it. But she hated her parents more. They were trying to keep her away from Jerry.
Mom had gone pale. She and Lucy stared at each other for long minutes across a teeming shaft of sunlight that angled in the windows. Then Mom turned and said evenly to Pris, who’d been standing behind her all this time 167
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with her duffel bag full of dance stuff in her hand, making faces at Lucy, “Let’s go. You don’t want to be late.”
It struck Lucy that some kind of power was shifting in her relationship to her mother, because if she really refused to go, she was probably too big for Mom to force her. Knowing that gave her a dangerous, heady feeling.
But she’d give in on this one. It wasn’t worth it. She had other things to think about. She had to figure out some way to get to Jerry.
Priscilla said something snotty to her, but Lucy didn’t even hear what it was. When Mom came back from getting the little kids settled with snacks in front of the television, she didn’t look at Lucy at all. Lucy just shrugged, wrapped the quilt around herself some more, and followed her mother and sister out to the car. She didn’t put a coat on. Mom didn’t tell her to. To her disappointment, it wasn’t all that cold outside.
Priscilla sat in the front seat with Mom and they chatted all the way there. Huddled in a corner of the backseat, Lucy might as well not have been there. That was fine with her. She stared out the window and tried to fill her mind with nothing but thoughts of Jerry. After Pris got out, Mom didn’t invite her to move up to the front seat. That was fine with her. She felt like crying, but not because of Mom. She didn’t care what Mom thought.
She found herself staring at the back of her mother’s head and neck and shoulders as they drove home. There wasn’t any gray yet in the back of her mother’s hair, but there would be. Someday her mother would be old. Someday her mother would die.
They didn’t say anything to each other all the way home, until they turned into the driveway and the station wagon was there and Mom said,
“Oh, your father’s home,” as if Lucy’d been worried about that.
Dad was there, and so was Jerry. They were standing in the entranceway by the front door, under the dusty umbrella lamp. Dad’s shoulders were all hunched up and he was breathing hard. Lucy thought Jerry looked like a blown-out eggshell, like Humpty Dumpty.
Mom said, “Tony?”
Dad said, “Lucy, go into the family room with the other kids,” but she didn’t, and he didn’t make her.
Jerry said, “Hi, Lucy,” and she said hi back. “I’ve told Mr. Johnston that he’s not to have anything to do with Lucy anymore,” Dad said to Mom, “but he doesn’t accept that.”
Mom said, “You told Mr. Li that we’d given you permission to take Lucy out of school when you’d never spoken to us about it. That alone would be reason for us to terminate her therapy, let alone—”
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“Lucy is a very disturbed child,” Jerry said. His voice was hollow. He sounded sick, or very tired. Lucy was afraid she might have given him chicken pox. “She needs both individual and group therapy.”
“We’ll make that decision,” Mom said. “We’re her parents.”
“He says we’re unfit parents,” Dad said. Lucy caught her breath.
“You’ve been through a great deal in the last few years,” Jerry said quietly.
“Losing two children would put a tremendous strain on anyone.”
Dad grabbed the collar of his shirt. It was a green shirt, one Lucy had never seen before. “Where’s my daughter, you filthy bastard? Where is she?”
Dad had lifted Jerry off his feet. She saw the surprise on Dad’s face when he realized that, and he set Jerry back down.
“Take your hands off me, Mr. Brill, or I’ll file assault charges as well,” Jerry said, and Dad took his hands away.
“What do you mean ‘as well’?” Mom demanded. “What are you threatening us with?”
“When I got here, the three small children were here by themselves.
That’s child neglect.”
“It was just for a few minutes,” Mom protested. “Priscilla—”
“That combined with Ethan’s problems and Rae’s mysterious disappearance and Lucy’s behavior problems in school indicates to me that this is a highly dysfunctional family.”
“We tried to get them help—”
“Stop it, Carole,” Dad snapped. “We don’t have to defend ourselves to this—buffoon.”
“Well, actually, you do,” Jerry said reasonably.
Lucy noticed that he kept standing up on his tiptoes and then putting his heels down again, up and down, up and down, as if he were about to float away. She didn’t want him to float away. She wanted to float away with him. She wondered what a buffoon was. Dad had no right to call Jerry names.
“Because, you see, if you insist on preventing Lucy from participating in therapy with me, I will report child abuse and neglect to the Department of Social Services. They would be required to investigate. Chances are good that they would remove the children, at least Lucy, in her own best interests. I do, after all, know most of the workers down there.”
“I can’t believe anybody would think we’re abusive parents.” Mom couldn’t seem to stop shaking her head.
“Ever spank your kids?”
“Dominic got spanked yesterday for lying,” Lucy said. “I heard it.”
Jerry just nodded.
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“Get out of this house!” Dad thundered. He didn’t touch Jerry and he didn’t move toward him, so Lucy was disappointed when Jerry turned to go.
“Wait!” she cried, and ran after him.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Jerry said, just to her, the same time that Dad caught her from behind and wouldn’t let her go.
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”Can he really do that?”
“Jesus, Carole, I don’t know. He is a social worker, and because of Lucy we’re clients again. That gives him power.
Makes him dangerous.”
“If he heard you saying that, he’d use it as more evidence of how ‘dysfunctional’ we are. He’d probably write it down somewhere.”
“Well, I think we’d better proceed on the assumption that he isn’t bluffing.”
“What are you saying, Tony? That we ought to allow him access to Lucy again because of what he might do to the family if we refuse?”
“No.”
“Good. Because if anything, we have more reason to protect her now.”
“I’m saying we can’t afford to underestimate the enemy. We have to understand the risk we’re taking.”
“Well, I don’t understand. Why is Jerry Johnston our enemy?”
“I don’t know. But there’s more to Jerry Johnston than we know.”
“There’s something—I don’t know—desperate about him,” Mom said.
“Like an addict who can’t get a big enough fix.”
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Dad agreed. “I don’t trust him. I can’t say exactly how, but I think he’s dangerous. It has something to do with other people’s turmoil. He needs it somehow. He stirs it up, exaggerates it, especially in teenagers when they’re in so much turmoil anyway, and then somehow he uses it for his own purposes. But I can�
�t pin it down to anything more specific than that, and that’s all intuition and—metaphysics.”
Lucy had never heard the word metaphysics before. More adult secret code. The older she got, the more of it she thought she learned, but there was always a whole bunch of stuff that grown-ups kept hidden from her.
“This is the farthest thing from metaphysical,” Mom was saying. “One of our children is dead. One is missing. Lucy’s in danger. If there’s any pattern to this at all, Priscilla is next. Tony, we have got to do something. We can’t just stand here and let our children be—taken. Used, one after another.”
Lucy waited for Dad to say something that would make sense out of all this, but he didn’t. She should have known better than to think he would.
Finally Mom asked him, “Do you still think Jerry knows something about Rae and Ethan?”
“Yes.”
“Then you should tell the police.”
“Tell the police what? All I have is a hunch, and that’s probably just me looking for answers and reasons when there aren’t any.”
“They really are gone, aren’t they? Our babies really are gone. I always thought I’d die if anything happened to any of my children. Now I’ve lost two, and I’m amazed at how much pain a human being can stand. But God, Tony, I don’t want to lose Lucy, too.”
Then Mom was making that noise again that she’d made so long for Ethan and then for Rae. Lucy wouldn’t have thought a person could make a noise like that. It sounded like one of those dolls from the olden days that you tipped backward and it cried. Just a really short cry and then it stopped, and when you tipped it again, it made another short sharp cry. Lucy’d almost gotten used to hearing it. In the night, in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon with the football game on, when she came into the house after school.
Now Mom was making that awful rhythmic noise for her, the noise that took the place of breathing.
The sound changed. First it got kind of muffled, as if Mom had hidden her face in something soft. Then it got softer and the rhythm changed; it wasn’t just Mom’s breathing that made the sound now, but some kind of movement, like dancing or swinging on a swing. Dad said out loud, “I love you, Carole,” and then Lucy, crouched in the hall outside their bedroom with her duffel bag under her elbow, knew what was going on.
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Her parents were having sexual intercourse. Maybe they were making another baby. Maybe she’d have another brother or sister whose life was starting right this minute, and she was there. At the same instant that she was getting ready to run away forever.
For just an instant, she wanted to stay here. But she didn’t see how she could. She turned away from her parents’ door. Of course, they didn’t notice.
Patches followed her downstairs, meowing loudly for food. She filled his bowl and patted his head a few times, feeling sad. But he just kept flicking his ears and tossing his head and eating, and so finally she left him alone.
Very quietly she lifted the phone receiver and dialed Jerry’s number, wincing at the beeps the numbers made when she pressed them. He’d been expecting her, because he answered in the middle of the first ring. With her hand cupped over her mouth, she whispered, “Jerry?”
“Are you ready, my love?”
It was hard for her to talk then, but she managed to say, “Yes. Can you come get me?”
“I’ll meet you in front of your parents’ house in twenty minutes. It’s a gray van.”
Your parents’ house. That made her feel funny, but he was right; it wasn’t her house anymore. “Okay,” she said, and nodded, and carefully hung up. The receiver made a tiny click when she set it back on the hook, but she didn’t think anybody had heard.
Twenty minutes. What would she do for twenty minutes? It was too cold to wait outside. She put on her heavy coat. Last spring she’d gone shopping with Dad, Priscilla, and Rae, and they’d all bought coats on sale, and her sleeves were already too short. She put on her boots and scarf and gloves.
The red scarf and gloves had been a Christmas present from Molly. Lucy felt tears hot behind her eyes, but she was tired of crying, tired of everybody crying, and she held them back.
She picked up a Time magazine from the arm of the couch and flipped through it. There was a picture of some old Russian guys, and pictures of that earthquake. She didn’t care. It had nothing to do with her. She was running away from home. Jerry was on his way to get her. She looked some more at the picture of the mother crying in the grandmother’s arms, and then put the magazine back down.
Patches squatted right in front of her and peed on the living-room carpet.
Lucy stared at him in disbelief. When he was done, he arched his back and stretched his tail up straight with just a kink at the very end, then rubbed himself once back and forth across her ankles and walked away. She ought to clean up the puddle, but she didn’t have time to go find the ammonia and a rag and, anyway, it wasn’t her house anymore.
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She hadn’t been watching a clock or anything, but it must be time. Making sure to step way over the wet spot on the rug, she carried her bag to the front door, and started to go out. Then she unzipped the side pocket and took out her diary. Holding it away from her as if it were a mouse by the tail, she carried it gingerly back to the dining room and left it on the table. She wouldn’t need it once she was out of here. She wouldn’t be able to keep secrets from Jerry anyway.
Patches tried to go out when she did. It was too cold for him, and she shut the door quicker and harder than she meant to. But if anybody heard the door slam it was too late anyway, because there was Jerry Johnston’s gray van waiting for her in front of the house. Lucy ran down the steps, slipped and almost fell, ran through the snow to the curb, and climbed up into the high van beside Jerry.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. When he put his arm around her and drew her to him, she felt herself sink into his down jacket and then into the soft side of his rib cage and belly. He kissed her cheek. His lips were cold and she hardly felt his breath. It was warm and dark in the van, with little bursts of light here and there where streetlights and snow reflected off metal.
By the time they got to the end of her street, Lucy realized they weren’t headed toward Jerry’s house. “Where are we going?” Her voice was loud and echoey, and she was embarrassed to even be asking the question.
“I have another house in another part of the city.” He glanced over at her; she saw the quick blue flash of his eyes. “You’ll be joining others there.”
“Others?”
That was a funny way to put it.
She didn’t want there to be any “others.”
Maybe he meant Rae. She thought about that for a minute.
She didn’t even want it to be Rae.
They went around another corner. In the dark and snow and from the van’s high seat, Lucy couldn’t recognize any landmarks. She didn’t think they could have gone very far away from her neighborhood yet, but she had no idea where they were.
It didn’t matter. She was with Jerry. “Other troubled kids,” he explained.
“Other people your age who are angry and sad and scared, like you.”
“Who?”
Jerry reached over and patted her knee. Her jeans were stiff, her legs so cold they burned, and even though his hand rested there for a minute or two, her knee was no warmer than it had been before. “We’re being followed,” he said suddenly, and put his hand back on the wheel to turn the van hard around another corner. Lucy slid away from him across the seat and scrambled to right herself.
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Like a little kid, she pulled her knees up under her and peered over the back of the seat. The back window was a small, steamed-up, grayish rectan-gle at the far end of the gray box that was th
e van, and she couldn’t see much of anything through it except headlights.
But when Jerry stopped for a red light, swearing under his breath, the other car pulled up on his side. It was weird to be looking down like this.
Lucy recognized the dented white body and blue-gray top of her mother’s car. Behind the wheel—leaning way far forward to see up into the van, gesturing frantically with her mouth and hands, the white streak glittering like ice all through her hair—was Mom.
“That’s my mother!”
“Shit, I know that. I thought you’d have enough sense not to let anybody know you were leaving.”
He was mad at her. Lucy couldn’t stand it. Suddenly she wanted more than anything to be in that car with her mother, on her way home. She grabbed the door handle.
She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t leave Jerry.
She dropped to her hands and knees between the seats. The gearshift pressed into her thigh. She pushed past it and crawled through the long, dim, empty van to the back window. She sat on her knees and leaned her forehead against it. It was cold and wet between her and her mother. Her mother couldn’t reach her, to punish her or rescue her or tell her what to do.
She was alone with Jerry in the closed van, on the nighttime street, in the whole world.
“God dammit,” Jerry said, and Lucy knew he was swearing at her. She pressed the side of her face hard against the window glass, for the moment understanding that she was in as much danger here as anywhere else.
The van shot forward through the intersection while the light was still red. Lucy grabbed the metal ridge around the window to keep from tumbling backward, and thought how easy it would be to get your fingers stuck in there. A car on the other street passed barely behind them and in front of Lucy’s mother’s car, honking its horn wildly, and then there was a whole stream of cars.
A busy street for this time of night, Lucy thought. Maybe it was Federal Boulevard. If it was, she’d have some idea where she was.
By the time there was a break in the traffic and the blurry headlights that were Mom’s car could start after them again, they were almost a whole block ahead. Mom ran the red light, too. Lucy hugged herself in surprise. This must be really important for Mom to break the law.