Listening for Lucca

by Suzanne LaFleur

  The girl’s hair hung in wet strings just below her ears. Her bathing suit had a skirt. The boy was wearing swim trunks and looked like he played sports.

  “How come you can play with me today?” the girl asked. “Where’s William?”

  “He can’t come over today,” the boy said, his tone a bit heavy. “What about you, where’s that awful friend of yours?”

  “Who?”

  “Jezzie.”

  “You mean our cousin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She can’t play today, either.” The girl trailed her toes through the water, making deep grooves in the sand that turned into soft ridges as the water washed over them and back again. “She had to go to the doctor.”

  “Her ears again?”

  “I guess so.” The girl crouched down to pat her hands gently over the smooth sand. Then she stood up. “But this is her bathing suit. It’s mine now. Hand-me-down so Mama wouldn’t have to buy me a new one. Why did you call her awful?”

  “She just … she’s strange.”

  The girl shrugged. “What should we play?”

  “Big slimy sea monster.”

  “How do you play that?”

  “Like this!” The boy jumped into the water and stood up with seaweed stuck to his hair and arms. Then he took a big scoop of mud, slathered it across his chest, and howled in a monster voice, “Arrgh! I’m gonna get youuuu!”

  The girl shrieked and ran, but the boy caught up with her and dragged her back to the water. She kept shrieking, but she was laughing, too. Her brother swung her through the waves and she screamed with happiness, until it seemed like she could no longer breathe. The boy set her down and they started chasing each other through the shallow water, splashing as they went. They ran along the beach until I couldn’t see them anymore.

  They hadn’t noticed me at all. Maybe I would have gotten along with them. Maybe I could say hi next time. Maybe.

  I sighed, got up, and found my sneakers.

  3

  They don’t tend to like me, other kids. There’s something about me they think is very strange. I have to admit: they’re right.

  It’s why I’d wanted to ignore the man on the bench in the park last night.

  I’ve always seen people in odd clothes, which isn’t unusual in New York, so I never thought anything of it. But about a year ago Mom had been invited to a playdate for Lucca with her friend’s kids at the playground in Washington Square Park, and I went along. When we were getting ready to go home, I was standing in the archway at the end of Fifth Avenue, looking up the street, when it changed. The taxis and cars were gone, the modern buildings.… There were horses and buggies, and people dressed in gray and black and brown suits and dresses.

  I’d swayed and closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them, everything would be back to normal.

  “Are you all right?” Mom was asking.

  I looked at Lucca in his stroller; he was swinging his feet as if nothing odd had happened at all. Mom wouldn’t have believed or listened to my answer, so I didn’t say anything, and she decided I was faint with hunger and pulled us into a little shop for open-faced sandwiches.

  I tried to forget the whole thing, but then it happened again. Only it was worse. Because I was with kids from school.

  We’d gone on a field trip to the Natural History Museum on the Upper West Side. We went on a school bus and rode in the big semicircle loop where they have school-group drop-off. After we got off the bus, we stood around for a few minutes before they let us inside. We got a glimpse of the pretty park surrounding the museum and of the elevated train that ran up and down the next avenue.

  The trouble was, when we were inside the museum and our guide was talking about the beautiful mosaics they’d put in the many levels of underground subway platforms for the museum stop, I raised my hand. “But the subway is aboveground here.”

  The kids laughed at me. “The subway is definitely underground here,” someone said.

  “But we saw it,” I insisted. “We saw it before we came inside.”

  Everybody laughed harder. The tour guide exchanged a brief glance with my teacher. “It’s possible, honey,” she said to me, “that you once saw an old photograph. The Ninth Avenue line used to run here along Columbus, on the other side of the museum, but it hasn’t been there for, oh … more than half a century.”

  My cheeks burned. The tour guide changed the topic to science. Or, as the museum called it, natural history. Things that happened naturally. It wasn’t natural to have the present fall away and suddenly see history, was it?

  After eating unnatural chicken tenders shaped like their ancestral dinosaurs, we were given an hour of free time. I sat by myself under the enormous blue whale in the ocean room in the half darkness, listening to its sad calls playing over hidden speakers, my ears still ringing with the kids’ laughter.

  Kelsey found me and sat down next to me.

  “The guide was probably right, you know,” she said. “You saw an old photo once before and imagined you could still see the train tracks outside. It could have happened to anybody.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “I saw it. I saw a moving train! And I don’t know if it could happen to anybody, but it happened to me. You never get it!”

  Kelsey looked stung; she had only been trying to help, after all. She wandered off to stare at the fake elephant seals for an awfully long time. On the bus ride home, she didn’t sit with me. Nobody did.

  Things weren’t the same after that. Not with the other kids, or Kelsey, or even just with myself.

  Before then, I’d always had these vivid dreams. More than just about the house. About sinking ships. Plane crashes. Wars. Speeches. I used to wake up and talk about my dreams, thinking they were like everyone else’s, and then Mom and Dad would ask how I knew about such and such, it’d happened so long ago. I’d say I didn’t know about it, I’d just dreamed it. Sometimes they would catch each other’s eyes and then Dad would shrug and say, “Odder coincidences have happened.”

  But when it started happening during the daytime … well, it was just scary. It was scary to be awake and suddenly have the world change, to see things that weren’t there now. Had I fallen asleep? Or did I really have as little control over my thoughts during the day as when I was sleeping?

  For our first dinner in the new house, we had a picnic of sandwiches on the kitchen floor. I was sure Mom would never let us do that again. She’s very into cleanliness, routine, and order. It was well after dark, so it was very late for dinner in July.

  I opened my ham sandwich and inspected it. Just mustard, no mayo. Good, Dad had remembered. I put the bread back on and took a bite. It tasted dry and boring and stuck in my throat.

  Lucca had opened his, too, and was eating the ham out by itself. After the meat was gone, he started tearing his bread into little squares. Every once in a while he’d eat one.

  “How was the beach?” Mom asked.

  “Oh, good,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Dad asked. “Wish I’d gotten a chance to get out there. Maybe I will tomorrow, after I swing by the school and see how things look for camp.”

  Dad’s a science teacher and sports coach. This summer he was going to be running a soccer camp. He and Mom had this idea that I should be his assistant a couple of days a week. I’d reminded them that I don’t like soccer, but Dad said I’d be helping with attendance and equipment more than anything else.

  We were all quiet again for a few minutes.

  I looked around the kitchen. It wasn’t familiar to me from my dream, though most of the house did seem similar.

  I felt a chill pass through me again. These dreams were really starting to affect me during the day, when I was supposed to be awake and safe from them. I filtered back in my memory through the worst ones. Could any of them come true?

  “What if something bad happens to you on an airplane?” I asked.

  My parents didn’t answer right away.

  Then D
ad, more used to kids asking questions because of his jobs, spoke first. “You mean like being in a plane crash? It would probably happen so fast that it would be over before you even knew about it. Before you could feel a thing.”

  Maybe he’s right and maybe he isn’t. It’s not like you can ask people who died in a plane crash if it was quick. What if the plane dropped suddenly and you got that sickening swoop in your stomach?

  Mom took her turn. “Are you worried about terrorists, honey? Statistics show that you’re more likely to win the lottery than to die in a terrorist attack.”

  I almost bought that as comfort. Winning the lottery is rare, so that seemed like good odds. But … “I’m not even old enough to buy a lottery ticket, so there’s no chance of me winning the lottery. But if I ride trains and buses and fly in planes and go to public places, then there is some chance of being in a terrorist attack.”

  Lucca didn’t say anything. As usual.

  My parents didn’t really understand what I was asking. I wasn’t just talking about what if something went wrong with the jet engines or if your plane was hijacked.

  I’m not really afraid of flying. Flying is kind of fun. You get to drink soda and look at the clouds from the top side and, most importantly, that’s how we get to Florida to visit Grandma since she moved there. I even flew to visit her without my parents, proudly in charge of Lucca, when Mom and Dad went to go house- and job-hunting in the spring.

  And flying is how I’ll get to all those faraway places I want to see one day.

  What I meant was more about how you go out in the world and continue being you when something terrifying and unexpected could happen.

  I decided to try a different route. “Let’s say you’re in Europe in the nineteen thirties or forties and the Nazis might invade your country any day now.… How do you calmly sit on the toilet to go to the bathroom?”

  Dad actually put down his sandwich.

  “Siena, this is the oddest dinner conversation we have ever had,” Mom said, her sandwich hovering an inch from her mouth. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about anymore.”

  I sighed.

  “Oddest or most odd?” Dad muttered to himself.

  “Nobody cares about that right now,” Mom snapped at him. “Our thirteen-year-old seems to be having some kind of mental breakdown.”

  “I am not,” I insisted. “I just want to know something.”

  “I think,” Dad said, “that her breakdown is philosophical, not mental.”

  “Meaning?” Mom asked.

  “I think she’s trying to … pry apart the essence of being in our world.”

  “It seems to me more like she has some kind of anxiety.”

  Oh, my favorite. Now they were talking about me as if I weren’t there.

  “Children might just be more anxious these days than ever before,” Dad said.

  Mom, Dad, and I all looked at Lucca.

  He didn’t look anxious. He was carefully stacking those little squares of bread into a tower on his paper plate.

  Lucca is three years old, almost four now. There’s nothing wrong with his ears or his mouth or his throat that any doctor can find. He did really well on the intelligence tests they could give him, the ones where he pointed to pictures and played with blocks, so he understood what people said. He just wouldn’t talk. The doctor said that sometimes anxiety might make a kid not talk. We don’t really know what Lucca has to be anxious about, but that was one reason we moved—Mom and Dad thought maybe he’d be less anxious someplace less hectic and busy.

  The other reason was me. The weird dreams, the lack of friends. I’d refused to see a therapist, which Mom suggested over and over. That would only confirm that I was crazy: no thanks. I didn’t tell them about the daytime visions. I couldn’t add that to Mom’s worries.

  So Dad looked for new jobs someplace quiet.

  “Listen.” Both of my parents resumed eating but kept their eyes on me. “All I’m trying to say is, this world is crazy.”

  “You’re being too dramatic,” Mom said.

  “No,” Dad countered. “I think she’s got it.”

  4

  Mom came by at bedtime.

  “You have everything you need?” she asked. “You have sheets, a toothbrush?”

  “Yeah, Mom, I’m fine.”

  She sat down on my bed with me and looked around my room, which was not quite my room yet. “This will be nice for you when it’s all set up.” She smoothed her hand over my ponytail, and then she pulled out my hair tie and ran her fingers through my loose hair. She had tucked me in this way every night a long time ago, but she hadn’t checked on me at bedtime in ages. I liked her fingers in my hair, so I lay down, even though I felt far from sleepy.

  “Good night,” she said after a few minutes, and she left me alone.

  It was strange going to sleep in the new house.

  It seemed extra dark. There were no lights on outside the house at all.

  I thought I could hear the ocean, just a little. There were no voices, no cars, no buzzers or elevators or air conditioners. No rumble of the subway underneath. No neighbors stomping around above. There were just the creepy sounds of the old house, of water in the pipes as Mom and Dad used the bathroom before bed, of squeaky hinges as they opened and shut doors, of floorboards. Constant noise used to lull me to sleep; these sounds stood out and kept waking me up.

  The salty breeze coming in my window distracted me, too. It was unsteady and somehow damp and cool, despite the warm night air.

  Would I still dream of this house now that I was here?

  I sat bolt upright in my bed, looking around.

  I’d heard someone, I was sure. A voice. Had there been movement in my room?

  I must have imagined it.

  I dropped back onto my bed, trying to catch my breath.

  Then my door actually creaked open, not in my imagination. But it was just Lucca. I guess he was having trouble sleeping in a new place, too.

  The morning was bright, and because there were no curtains or shades on my windows yet, all the bright got right in my eyes and woke me up.

  I hadn’t dreamed at all.

  Lucca seemed to be still asleep, his sandy-haired head on my chest.

  I listened to the morning, to birds calling. And because it was early and quiet, the faint sound of the waves still carried up to the house. The air was sweet with all the plants and the water. It didn’t smell like pee or garbage or traffic or greasy food cooking, like Brooklyn did. Not that I’d ever left my window open. Air-conditioning was the only choice in the summer. Here, even though it was already starting out to be a pretty warm day, a nice breeze rolled in my window.

  I lay there for just a while. Was it the breeze gently lifting the hairs on my arm, making me wish I had blankets to pull over me rather than just a sheet?

  Lucca stirred.

  “Do you feel that? Like someone’s here?”

  His head moved up and down against my T-shirt, saying yes.

  “Mom, do you think this house is haunted?” I asked as I headed into the wide, square hallway of our upstairs.

  “These are your boxes,” she said, gesturing to a stack. “Make them disappear.” Then she picked up a misplaced box marked KITCHEN and carried it away.

  Had she even heard me? Maybe she couldn’t handle the idea of her lunatic daughter sensing ghosts in the house she’d bought so everyone would feel better.

  I carried my boxes into my room one at a time. Then I got one of Lucca’s and dumped out toys for him on his bedroom floor. His favorites: plastic cars and trucks, Duplo, baby Playmobil. He’d play with them for hours. He always built the most intricate things.

  I wanted to set up my collection, but I would need Dad to build shelves first, and he was out at the school. I hung up my posters of places I wanted to see one day: Stonehenge, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Colosseum, Machu Picchu.

  I opened some of my boxes and hung clothes in the closet. I came across t
he pink shirt I’d bought with Kelsey—she had a matching one. Why had I even packed it? Why was I hanging it up now? But I did.

  Kelsey used to like my dreams.

  The first time we had a sleepover, I went to her house. We’d known each other only a couple of weeks, the first weeks of sixth grade, but they’d felt like long weeks. I’d shown up with a DVD and polka-dot pajamas, and at bedtime in her small apartment we climbed into her twin bed to sleep head to toe.

  “Siena—you’re kicking me—you’re kicking me in the face!”

  I woke to find Kelsey shaking my feet.

  “Huh?”

  It took me a minute to realize where I was.

  “Bad dream?” Kelsey asked. She turned and crawled to have her head at the same end of the bed as me.

  “No, it was okay. I was a pioneer, traveling with a covered wagon. But it was daytime. We got out to walk next to the wagon.”

  “So you were walking on my face?” Kelsey asked.

  “I guess so.”

  Then she started giggling. And I started giggling. And her mom came by and knocked on the door. Our giggles immediately became silent as we pressed our faces into my pillow.

  After we were sure her mother had walked away, Kelsey said, “Tell me more about your dream.”

  And so I told her about how the prairie stretched on and on as if never-ending, the expanse of sky, the people walking with me who must have been my family.…

  I realized she was sleeping and drifted off again myself.

  At lunchtime Mom suggested I take my sandwich out on the porch. It was nice out there, with a breeze, and the water was a dull blue, very pretty, that faded into sky in the distance. She also gave me a tall glass of iced tea, which helped me cool down. Then I went to tell her I was going for a walk on the beach, but she said, “Keep going in your room. We’ll all feel more free and settled when the house is in order.”