I wondered if her father had said that before or after the tear gas attacks on campus.
“And now,” Lucy said, looking at the floor instead of me. “I’m the only one left.”
My breath caught. Suddenly, her attitude and the mess in the apartment started to make sense. She had been frightened this spring. She had leaned on Darla and her friends. Her friends had left her to face summer school alone. But Lucy had probably felt comfortable with Darla, and then Darla disappeared.
“You think something happened to her?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I mean, people are coming and going all the time this year, and they don’t tell their parents. I mean, would you?”
If my parents were still alive, maybe. Although I doubted it. I wouldn’t have been able to say anything to my father about him or the pregnancy.
Or the botched abortion.
Lucy was watching my face through her fringe of curls. She must’ve seen something in my expression, because she lifted her head just enough to nod.
“You wouldn’t’ve said anything either,” she said with more than a little triumph. “See? That’s what I mean. And last fall, when everyone moved in, we all promised we wouldn’t get involved in each other’s lives and be all nosy like our parents. Live and let live, you know? Everyone has their own shit, and we all have to own it.”
That sounded well and good, but these girls were still young. They needed someone to watch out for them, and apparently no one had. They had made their little pact, not realizing what was coming for them. Hell, I had been a full adult, married, divorced, and I hadn’t known what was coming for me.
“Wouldn’t Darla have said something if she was just skipping out on the rent?” I asked.
“Well, if she talked to you about subletting, maybe she talked to somebody else too. And maybe she’d made an agreement and that somebody never showed. How would she know if someone didn’t show?” Lucy uncrossed her arms, then ran a hand through her curls. “I mean, she never told me about the subletting, so maybe she never told me that she had actually contracted with someone. Which isn’t fair, you know? Because I have to live with that person.”
My lie was snowballing. I hated that.
“It’s not fair,” I agreed. “I can’t imagine how it would feel to have a stranger say she had the right to move in.”
“I know, right?” Lucy shook her head. “Darla used to tell me stuff. I thought we were friends. I don’t know why she wouldn’t’ve told me about this.”
“Well,” I said, trying to change the direction of the conversation away from my lie. “I thought she was going to sublet to me. She mentioned bringing me up to see you. That’s the last we discussed. We were going to come up here about a month ago, and I never saw her again.”
More lies. I kept spinning them, hoping they would get rid of the thought that Darla would have sublet to someone else.
“Huh.” Lucy sighed, then looked over her shoulder. “I don’t get anything anymore. She shouldn’t’ve left. I mean, she knew we were all counting on her.”
I didn’t ask how they were counting on her. I assumed it was for rent, but I didn’t know.
I touched the stuffed dog. The fur had worn off its back and sides. One button eye had been sewn back on with red thread.
“This looks well loved,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to touch it,” Lucy said.
Then we looked at each other. We clearly had the same thought at the same time. Who left a childhood treasure like this behind?
“Did her father say anything about this dog?” I asked quietly.
“I didn’t let him in here. I didn’t let him past the living room.” Lucy straightened, almost as if she were going to battle him again. “He was so angry, and stuff. I lied and told him that the other girls were in the back, and no man was supposed to go back there. I figured a father would want to hear that.”
That was probably true. “And he listened?”
“Yeah.” The word was curt.
I pressed my lips together, then looked around the room. No loose papers, nothing out of place. I bet if I looked in the dresser, I would find underwear. I bet if I looked in the closet, I would find a suitcase.
I didn’t care how Darla was paying for this room, no scholarship student I had ever met had enough disposable income to leave all of her possessions behind and buy new.
Unless…
“Was she involved in that back-to-nature stuff?” I asked.
“Why?” Lucy asked. “Do you see something?”
“No,” I said. “I just thought, well, I mean, if I were going to deliberately leave everything behind, I would do it because I was giving up material things.”
“God, communes,” Lucy said, her dry tone letting me know exactly what her opinion of the back-to-nature movement was. “I don’t think she could have lived in one. She was all about Lysol and clean dishes and pick up your towel and stuff like that. Have you ever been to one of those communes? Some of them don’t even have running water.”
I hadn’t been to any of them, but that sounded true, at least from what the media reported.
“I was just thinking—”
“You’re thinking it’s weird that she’s gone,” Lucy said. “I think it’s weird that she’s gone. But I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Were you the one called her dad?” I asked, deliberately misunderstanding what Lucy had told me.
“God, no,” Lucy said. “Darla was happy to be outta there. She would’ve thought I betrayed her or something.”
“Were her parents tough on her?”
“Naw.” Lucy half-smiled. “They were just…Republicans. You know?”
Not exactly. I didn’t know how to say that. The way she said it, it sounded like I should understand. Maybe other students would have.
I tried to figure out how to ask the question without sounding like a full-grown adult.
“So, you mean, she didn’t agree with them about stuff, right?” I asked, hoping that was good enough.
“Oh, God, yeah,” Lucy said. “Her folks were so Establishment. She couldn’t take it, you know?”
I didn’t, exactly. I was probably what Lucy called Establishment. I hadn’t realized how much I was until the women at the gym—housewives, some of them—had looked at my Chicago PD t-shirt in disbelief.
“Is that why Darla left?” I asked. “Politics?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lucy said. “All of us disagree with our parents about that shit. Don’t you?”
“I don’t talk to them about it,” I said, which was technically true. I didn’t need to tell her that I couldn’t.
“God, I wish I could stop talking to mine about politics,” Lucy said. “My dad won’t shut up about it. He thinks I’m too stupid to understand his point.”
She wasn’t stupid. That was clear. But she was young. I suspected that was what her father thought.
She shrugged. “But, you know, I have no idea if that’s why she left home, though. I think she’d had enough of them, plus, she was like completely brilliant, you know?”
Lucy was using past tense. I wondered if she realized that. She wasn’t just thinking that Darla was gone; part of her believed Darla was dead.
A shudder ran through me.
“I thought she was going to summer session because she needed to make up classwork,” I said, guessing on summer session.
“Apparently, she didn’t go to summer session,” Lucy said, “even though that’s like completely weird because she was looking forward to some econ class. I mean, like who looks forward to econ?”
I shrugged. Certainly not me.
“She really liked it here,” Lucy said. “Her folks hated it. That much I know for a fact. They fought all the time her senior year. They hated that she was coming here. They wanted her to go to Fresno State. Can you imagine? With her grades?”
I frowned. I hadn’t heard of Fresno State. I had heard of UC-Berke
ley. I supposed that told me something about Darla, but it told me more about Lucy.
She cared about grades. She cared about this apartment. She wasn’t into the “Movement,” whatever that was. She cared about her education, and she thought that Darla had too.
“I’m really confused now,” I said. “I don’t know if I should take the room. It sounds like she’ll come back.”
“She hasn’t. It’s been a month.” Lucy was looking down.
“I hate to…” I paused thinking about my next sentence. “I hate to say this.”
Lucy raised her head, and looked at me through her curls again.
“But…” I said as timidly as I could, as if I didn’t know, “shouldn’t we call the police?”
Lucy barked out a laugh. “And tell them what, exactly? That my roomie skipped on the rent—oh, wait! I got her daddy to pay. So never mind on that. Should I tell them that she ‘disappeared’ somewhere? C’mon. Jeez, sister, for a black chick, you sound totally square.”
My cheeks heated. I did sound square. Because I was, deep down. And I had finally revealed it to Lucy.
I let my fingers run across that stuffed dog.
“Yeah, I know I sound square,” I said, “but I’ve never heard of anything like this before. What if she’s in trouble? I mean, what are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.” Lucy sounded miserable. She clearly had thought about this. Those arguments she made were all arguments she had probably had inside her own head. “If she’s in trouble, she’s been in trouble for a month.”
The words hung between us.
She swallowed hard, once, twice, and then a third time, almost like she was swallowing back words.
“I, um, I was hoping she was at home.” Her voice was almost inaudible. “I was kinda hoping she went home, but when her dad came, it was clear she hadn’t.”
I felt a little dizzy, and I realized I hadn’t inhaled. I made myself breathe.
Lucy’s anger, on the phone and when I arrived, hadn’t been at other people. It had been at herself.
When Darla’s father had shown up, Lucy could no longer deny what she feared—that something bad had happened to Darla.
I patted the stuffed dog one last time. Someone should do something. And no one would.
I started to ask if Darla’s dad was going to file a missing person’s report, and then I stopped. That was a question Valentina Wilson, ex-wife of Chicago PD Detective Truman Johnson, would ask. Not a question that the girl I was pretending to be would ask.
“Maybe we should talk to her friends?” I said, reverting to that timid voice again. “I mean, was she in some kind of group or something? Maybe, like, protesting something? You mentioned politics.”
“She studied,” Lucy said defensively. “She didn’t have time for most of that stuff.”
And neither, apparently, had Lucy. So that single connection Eagle, Pammy, and I had thought we had found back at the gym didn’t seem to be a connection at all.
“But you said she was political…?” I let the question hang, hoping it would get her to say even more.
“Like all of us. I mean, it’s life and death out there,” Lucy said. “Especially for the guys. You know? They could get drafted and then get shot, and not do anything. So we, like, hand out flyers sometimes or something. But I thought Darla agreed with me. It was better to get an education and infiltrate the Establishment and change it from the inside.”
Her passion surprised me as much as her naiveté. I had never known any major organization to change from the inside—not like that, anyway.
“She handed out flyers?” I asked. “I never saw that.”
“Like, at Homecoming, and stuff. If you did that, you got into the game for free. Not that we’re supposed to care about football.” Lucy shrugged her shoulders. She clearly did care about football. “I don’t think she did anything since the election. We were all getting disheartened, especially after Bobby got murdered, but for a while, we thought that we could keep fighting. Or just vote. I mean, we thought our votes would count. And then, the summer, and the Democratic National Convention, and Humphrey, and the campaign and Nixon, and who has the heart for this stuff?”
I frowned at her, a little startled. Lucy had been active, and I hadn’t expected it. She had clearly worked for Kennedy. She called him Bobby, and said he was “murdered,” not assassinated.
I had felt that death, but not as keenly as Doctor King’s death a few months before. And I never would have thought of calling him Martin, even though I believed in his cause.
“I thought…” I stopped myself before I could make a mistake. Because I almost said, I thought you had told me that she wasn’t political at all when I called from the Clean For Gene Campaign.
Lucy looked at me.
I had to finish the sentence.
“She just never struck me as political?” I said, putting on that timid voice, partly to keep my own comments in check. “I mean, she never talked to me about anything political.”
“She gave up when Bobby died.” Lucy swallowed hard again. “She really liked him. She wrote letters trying to get him to run, and then he did, and she was really happy. I think she thought she might’ve gotten him killed.”
That explained the Clean For Gene reaction. The majority of Kennedy supporters didn’t move to Eugene McCarthy after Kennedy died. They had seen Bobby as their only hope, and no one could substitute for that. That was one reason why Humphrey had lost so big in November.
But Lucy’s comment was a little weird. How could Darla have thought she had gotten Kennedy killed? By asking him to run?
That was a lot of misplaced guilt.
I frowned. “Was she Catholic?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “She didn’t go to Mass or anything. Why?”
And then Lucy made a face at me as a thought hit her.
“Not everyone who likes a Kennedy is Catholic,” she said, as if she had explained that before.
“I know,” I said. “Just something you said.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t very good at this.
Then I decided to be somewhat honest.
“I’m confused,” I said. “You told me she was giving out flyers at Homecoming. That was, like, October, right?”
I was guessing. I had no real idea. Usually Homecoming was late September, early October at most colleges.
“Yeah, for all the good it did us,” Lucy said. “They were having a ‘sit-out.’ No one was supposed to go to football, like football is the Antichrist. And y’know, people listened. I don’t get it. Who doesn’t go to football? Jeez.”
The politics of all of these movements had started to confuse me. How was I supposed to react? Was I supposed to support Lucy’s opinion? Or the opinion of the students who staged the—what had she called it?—the sit-out.
“And we got called all kinds of names, you know, like about us personally, how we looked, and ah, hell you know. It was filthy.” She shook her head. “I decided not to go back.”
“And Darla too?” I asked in my normal voice. Lucy glanced at me, as if she hadn’t expected that.
“No,” she said, frowning. “She didn’t say anything about it. And when I tried to talk to her, she changed the subject. I think she met some guy.”
My heart started to pound and I wasn’t sure why.
“You think?”
“Yeah,” she said, “but I never saw him again. He was older, kinda straight-looking, but then, most guys at the football game were straight-looking. Freaks don’t go to games, you know?”
I nodded, even though I didn’t know. I supposed I would if I were in college.
She waved her hand, almost dismissively, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was lost in a memory.
“That guy,” she said, “that guy was weird. She talked to him for a long time.”
“Did he drive a truck?” I asked.
She looked at me like I had lost my mind. “How the hell do I know?”
“I just thought, have you heard about that guy with the truck? Because I’ve been warned to stay away from him.” I made myself sound scared. It wasn’t hard.
She shook her head. “I haven’t heard anything about any truck. But Darla, she wouldn’t talk to me about the guy. And she didn’t go back with the flyers, but I figured that was because it was such a bummer.”
“She didn’t date him?” I asked.
“She didn’t date anybody that I know of,” Lucy said. “If she did, she never brought the guy here. But then, who would? I mean, three other girls? Thin walls? If he had a better place, then she could’ve gone there.”
I almost asked if she spent a lot of nights away from here, but that felt like I was crossing a line.
I didn’t know what to do with the information Lucy was giving me. And I didn’t know how to keep pushing without seeming completely weird.
I had to end this conversation, partly for me. I was getting really uncomfortable.
I walked out of the bedroom, musing aloud as I went. “So, fifty bucks a month. That’s a lot of money.”
“Not really,” Lucy said, almost defensively. “Not for a place like this.”
“Well, it is for me,” I said as defensively. “I mean, I thought it would be cheap. Because I thought Darla was on scholarship, which I thought meant no money. But I guess I didn’t understand something or something. I don’t know.”
“Darla was on scholarship,” Lucy said. “She worked three jobs her first year, and bitched a lot, because doing that and the homework was tough on her. But she got some good job last fall, and she never mentioned money again.”
“What job?” I asked, trying to make it sound like I wanted that job, not like I wanted to know more about Darla.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said, apparently unconcerned with this part of my nosiness. “She never said. But she didn’t seem to have a lot of hours, and she had more money than all of us. It was weird.”
Then she looked at me fiercely, as if I had asked another question, even though I hadn’t.
“And before you say anything, she wasn’t dealing. I would have known. She would’ve been kicked out of here.”
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