Keeping Lucy

by T. Greenwood

  Rosa led her to a dormered bedroom at the top of the stairs. The walls were a slate blue, and there were two twin beds with identical red-and-blue plaid spreads. Two matching desks faced the windows, though there was no paraphernalia to indicate recent usage. Unlike the rest of the house, the wooden floors here were scuffed and scratched. It struck her that this had likely been Ab’s childhood room, perhaps the one he shared with his brother, Paul, before he passed, though why two boys would share a room in a house with so many bedrooms (six or seven was Ginny’s guess) was beyond her. Marsha and her sisters had shared a room growing up, purely out of necessity, but given a choice (and amenable real estate), they would gladly have separated.

  Ginny looked at the closed door, listened for any sounds of life outside, and, hearing none, tiptoed to the closet, turning the glass knob carefully in her hand. The door opened with a slow groan and she winced, furtively glancing back at the door.

  She didn’t know what she was expecting. Ab’s dead brother’s clothing, still hanging from the rod? A baseball uniform still smudged with grass and dirt? Or maybe banker’s boxes filled with all the history of his life, filed by year?

  The closet was empty. Just a half dozen wire hangers, some with the paper dressings of the dry cleaner, Lewandos, still affixed. The shelf above the rack was empty, save for a stack of extra blankets. The floor was clear as well; not even a neglected dust bunny huddled in the corner. Not a bit of evidence of the room’s former inhabitants. Not a scrap of proof that two boys once shared this space, maybe even searched the sky through that window looking for constellations. Something about this weighed heavy on her, a sorrow more profound than if the room had been preserved, their childhood entombed inside.

  They ate dinner quietly, though Ginny could hardly eat, her stomach was in such knots. Somehow, while they were sipping on glasses of chardonnay, Rosa had magically shelled and deveined each shrimp as well as prepared beef Wellington and the creamiest mashed potatoes Ginny had ever eaten.

  Mrs. Richardson asked polite questions about what it was like growing up in Amherst and asking if she enjoyed her work at the library. But she was clearly distracted, looking at the empty chair at the head of the table every few minutes before glancing toward the foyer and the closed front door.

  And then, as if conjured by Mrs. Richardson’s sheer will, the front door opened and Mr. Richardson entered. From her spot at the dining table, Ginny had a full view of the foyer and Ab’s long-awaited dad.

  What struck Ginny first was his size. He had to have been six feet two or three inches tall, broad shouldered and looming. He filled the foyer as he removed his hat and coat, depositing them in Rosa’s arms. Even after a full workday, his clothes were immaculate, his shoes gleaming.

  “Dad!” Ab said. “Come meet Ginny.”

  Mr. Richardson came into the dining room and Ginny didn’t know whether to remain sitting or stand. She opted to rise, the china before her rattling as she bumped the table’s edge to stand up, reaching across the table, hand extended.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Virginia,” he said, nodding at her, then gruffly taking his seat at the empty head of the table. “Sorry,” he said to Mrs. Richardson. “Burning the midnight oil again.”

  “We’ll wait for you to finish before we start dessert,” Mrs. Richardson said, and Rosa appeared with another steaming Wellington.

  Soundlessly, Mr. Richardson ate while the rest of them waited. Luckily, he devoured the entire meal in just a few awkward minutes, before wiping the cloth napkin across his lips and sitting back in his chair.

  Rosa scurried in, removing the dirty dishes and quickly replacing them with dessert plates, each holding a teetering slice of a four-layered pastel-pink cake with white frosting.

  “Pink champagne cake,” Rosa said to Ginny. “It’s Missus’s favorite.”

  “So you’re the one who’s been keeping our son occupied this year,” Mr. Richardson said, abruptly breaking his silence.

  Ginny smiled but wondered what on earth this meant. Had someone else been occupying Ab’s time last year? Ab hadn’t mentioned other girlfriends, though there must have been some. Or did occupying mean distracting?

  “You a Smith girl? Wasn’t the last one a Smith girl?” he asked Mrs. Richardson.

  “Ginny works at the library,” Ab said. “She grew up in Amherst.”

  “Ah, a local girl,” he said.

  Again, she couldn’t ascertain if this statement had any judgment associated with it or was simply a statement of fact.

  “So what does your father do for work?” Mr. Richardson asked.

  “My father’s passed,” Ginny said. “Car accident when I was ten. My mother works at the college, too.” She didn’t mention that her job was in the dining hall kitchen, then felt guilty for feeling this to be a shameful thing.

  “Just a few months left until graduation,” Mr. Richardson said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table. He peered at Ginny with a new intensity, as if she were just now coming into focus. “This book’s due date is coming up, so to speak. Time for it to be returned.”

  Ginny felt her breath catch, her jaw drop.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Dad,” Ab said suddenly, setting his fork down on his empty dessert plate. “I actually have some really good news to share.”

  Mrs. Richardson looked up from her cake, which she’d been studying with the intensity of a surgeon. Ginny looked at him, too.

  “I’ve been accepted to Harvard. Law school.”

  Ginny felt the champagne cake turn from bubbles to lead in her stomach. She knew of course, that he had sent his applications out. All the Ivy League schools had received his LSAT scores and transcripts. But he’d avoided talking about what would happen when one of these schools offered him admission.

  “But,” he said, “I’ve decided not to accept their offer.”

  Ginny sucked in her breath, and Mrs. Richardson’s spoon clattered from her hand to the floor. Rosa swooped in like a seagull going after a sandwich.

  “What are you talking about?” Mrs. Richardson said. “Of course you’ll go to Harvard. Your father, your grandfather … you’re a legacy.”

  Ab rolled his shoulders as if he’d just been spared an enormous burden. “I’ve joined up with IVS, a group of aid workers. They’re sending me to Southeast Asia. Vietnam. In the fall. I’ll only be gone six months. Harvard isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Vietnam?” Mrs. Richardson said incredulously. She turned to Mr. Richardson and asked, “Isn’t there some sort of civil war going on there?”

  Vietnam. Ginny couldn’t even begin to place the country on a map.

  “I suppose this is your doing?” Mrs. Richardson said, suddenly turning everyone’s attention to Ginny, who felt her eyes widen at this odd accusation, especially given that the rug had just been pulled out from under her as well.

  “I … no…”

  “Because Abbott has wanted to be an attorney like his father since he was six years old.”

  Really? What sort of six-year-old aspires to be an attorney?

  “Ma’am,” Ginny started and then realized it wouldn’t matter what she said. She would forever be linked in Mrs. Richardson’s mind with Ab’s decision not to go to law school. There was no taking back this moment. It made her angry at Ab, almost angrier than the fact that he was leaving her to go to some remote corner of the earth to be some sort of do-gooder.

  Mrs. Richardson continued, “His whole life, he’s been studying, preparing for this, and suddenly, he meets you and everything goes out the window.”

  Mr. Richardson, who had remained silent, shook his head. “Your brother wouldn’t have gotten caught up in such foolishness.”

  At this the color drained from Ab’s face.

  Mr. Richardson’s demeanor, however, was calm, scarily so.

  “How do you know that, Dad?” Ab said. “Really. He was twelve years old.”

  “You’re right,” Mr. Richardson said. “We never got a chance to kn
ow what he could have become.”

  Ab was quiet now, his face completely impassive.

  Mrs. Richardson pushed her full dessert plate away from her. “Well, you’ll just need to tell those IVS people that you’ve changed your mind. Your father will call them tomorrow. Figure out how to undo whatever it is you’ve done here. We’ll figure this out in the morning after everyone’s had a good night’s sleep.”

  “Actually, I think we better just head back to Amherst tonight,” Ab said, pushing himself away from the table. “I’m sorry, Ginny. I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

  Ginny nodded silently and cast her eyes down before looking up at Mrs. Richardson. But Ab’s mother refused to return her gaze. Mr. Richardson stood up and without a word disappeared down the hall.

  Ginny felt duped. Just as blindsided as his parents were. Here, she’d been falling head over heels, and Ab was surreptitiously making plans to move to the other side of the world. He’d effectively chosen a village of strangers over her.

  They gathered their things and silently loaded them back into the car. Rosa walked them out, and Ab kissed her on the cheek. “Bye, Rosey Posey. Dinner was lovely. I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Ginny after nearly thirty minutes of silence in the car. “I didn’t mean to spring it on you like that. But I knew if I talked about it with you, I’d never be able to go through with it.”

  “Well, good thing, then,” Ginny said, peering out at the night.

  “It’s just six months, Gin. I don’t even leave until September, and I’ll be home by Valentine’s Day. A year from now, I’ll already be home again. You need to understand, this was the only way I could get out of law school. The only way to get my father off my back. I’ve bought myself a year to come up with another plan.”

  “But what about us? Do you just want me to twiddle my thumbs while you’re off milking cows or digging ditches or whatever you plan to do?”

  “No,” he said. And then he steered the car over to the shoulder of the dark road. He put the car in neutral and idled for a moment. He took a deep breath and turned to her. A shiver ran through her body, and she pulled her sweater around her tightly. “While I’m gone, I was thinking you could plan our wedding.”

  “What?”

  “Our wedding,” he said and pulled a ring from his pocket. It was large. Dazzling. “This is part of the reason I needed to go home. It’s been sitting in our safe since I was sixteen. My grandmother’s. She gave it to me, and now it’s yours, if you’ll have it.”

  She gawked, speechless.

  “Is that a yes?”

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Yes,” she croaked.

  Ab hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and whooped. He looked at her, checking as if he might have made a mistake. When she nodded again, saying “Yes!” he rolled down the window, leaned his head out, and hollered out at a passing car, “She said yes!”

  * * *

  Instead of going back to Amherst, Ab drove them an hour southeast to his family’s little cottage on Cape Cod. He found the key hanging behind a battered shutter and opened the door. Inside the musty living room, he started a fire in the fireplace while she studied the ring on her finger, trying to figure out how a simple trip to meet Ab’s parents had turned into this.

  When the fire finally caught, he came to her where she was sitting on a lumpy down-filled sofa and knelt on one knee before her, proposing properly this time.

  Then, in the firelight, he undressed her as if she were a gift. He kissed her stomach and neck and hair, and every follicle sang. Wild nights, wild nights! she thought. Oh, Emily, if you could see me now.

  Afterward, they lay breathless, watching the flickering flames.

  “My brother and I used to come here,” he said. “In the summers. The woods on one side of us. The beach on the other. It was like our own magical world.”

  “What happened?” she asked. “To Paul?”

  “Influenza,” he said. “Then pneumonia.”

  “What your father said … that wasn’t fair.”

  “Yeah, well.” Ab shook his head and propped himself up on his elbow, studying Ginny’s face. “What about here?”

  “What?” She was still breathless, her heart a ragged thing. Her bones and brain felt happily bruised.

  “We’ll move here. In exactly one year. When I get back. I’ll make you fires, and you can read your poetry to me.”

  In the firelight, Ab’s face was as bright and sincere as the snow that had started to fall outside the little paned windows.

  “Promise?” she said holding out her pinky, hooked and awaiting his.

  He linked his pinky with hers. “Promise.”

  Fourteen

  September 1971

  “I think we should just get out of town for the weekend,” Marsha suggested. “We can drive to the beach. Think this through without worrying about your asshole father-in-law. Willowridge isn’t expecting Lucy back until Monday night. We can leave early tomorrow, have a couple of days to think about it, and be back here in plenty of time. It’ll also send a message to Ab that you’re serious about this. That you won’t just go along with whatever plan his father dreams up.”

  Maybe they could take the kids to the little house on the Cape. But then again, her father-in-law could easily find her there. She was livid that Ab had gotten his father involved; he was no longer playing fair. It was cowardly. Lucy was not Abbott’s daughter; she was Ab’s.

  The children were still asleep, and Marsha and Ginny were sitting at Marsha’s little red Formica table, drinking coffee and smoking. Ginny didn’t generally smoke, but she needed something to do with the nervous energy that was running through her like an electric current.

  “I don’t know. Ab will be furious if he gets all the way here only to find that we’re gone. And who knows what Abbott will do? Probably sic the hounds on us,” Ginny joked, but her heart felt heavy with all that Abbott Richardson might be capable of. He was a man who got exactly what he wanted. Always. There was no negotiating with Abbott Senior. He was a lawyer, but with him, there was no reasoning. No compromise. She’d witnessed her husband’s multiple failed attempts to confer with Abbott—on everything from what to have for dinner to what house he should buy. Abbott won every time.

  “Where would we go?” Ginny asked, with the Cape out of the question and exactly $150 in her purse.

  “I don’t know,” Marsha said. “Where would be a good place to take the kids? Someplace we can drive to in a few hours? Someplace Abbott wouldn’t think to look?”

  Ginny shrugged. The idea of getting in the car and driving anywhere with her children but without her husband seemed like a betrayal.

  “God, maybe I should just stay here. See what their idea is.”

  “Their idea?” Marsha said, snorting. “Their idea is that you should never have gone to the school. That you should have left Lucy there. That you should have just kept pretending that everything was okay. That she was dead. That is what their idea is. And that is exactly what Abbott is going to make you do.”

  Ginny dragged deeply on her Virginia Slim and then exhaled. She knew Marsha was right. If she stayed, Ab and his father would convince her that it was better for all of them. Better for Lucy, even, to go back to the only home she’d ever known. But she also knew that something had snapped inside her. Something had shifted, broken, even, and like the ceramic lamp that Peyton had once knocked over, there was no putting things back together again. Not without visible evidence of those fissures.

  “I know!” Marsha said suddenly, clapping her hands together.

  Ginny looked at her, waiting.

  “Atlantic City!” she said. “The beach for us, and the boardwalk for the kids. We’ll find a cheap place to stay.”

  “The school says I’m not allowed to take her out of state,” Ginny said, shaking her head.

  “How will they know?” Marsha said.

  She had a p
oint. If Ginny returned her by Monday, there was no way they’d know where they’d gone. It wasn’t as though Lucy would say anything.

  “What do I tell Ab?” she said.

  “You tell Ab to hold his damned horses.”

  * * *

  They left just after seven-thirty the next morning, settling the children into the backseat of Marsha’s car, the Dart with its tattered upholstery and squeaky brakes. Ginny had done the laundry that night, so the clothes she’d brought for Peyton and bought for Lucy were clean. Enough to get them through the weekend, she hoped. They swung by the supermarket as soon as it opened and picked up a package of Pampers, baby wipes, and a couple more plastic bottles. Lucy really was much more infant than toddler. She still drank from a bottle, something Ginny couldn’t bear to take away from her, though Peyton’s doctor had cautioned that bottles caused teeth not only to rot but to buck outward. Besides, Lucy’s baby teeth were already ruined; she figured the damage was already done.

  The last stop was at a gas station just outside of town where Marsha had the attendant fill up the tank, refusing Ginny’s money when she reached into her pocketbook.

  “Please,” Ginny said. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “Save your money for the shore,” she said.

  Marsha kept insisting that Ginny consider this a vacation. And while this seemed ludicrous to Ginny, the notion that this was some sort of holiday from her life, the word itself—vacation—was oddly fitting. That was exactly what this felt like; she was vacating. Vacating her life, vacating the world she’d been residing in for the last seven years, a world not much bigger than the four walls of their home, the four square blocks of their neighborhood. The idea of going to the beach, of checking into a hotel, of walking in the sand, seemed scandalous but also tempting.

  Marsha said she’d been meaning to go to Atlantic City forever. She’d gone there once when she was a little girl; it was the first time she and her sister had ever seen the ocean. After that, they were both smitten. Now she finally had an excuse.