“I scared you.”
“Lots of things scare me since Ethan disappeared. That’s not your fault, and you can’t fix it. I have to fix it, or I have to learn to live with it.”
“Why did he run away?” She’d asked that lots of times; she didn’t know why she was asking it again now. “Why did he do all that bad stuff? Stealing cars and doing drugs and stuff?”
Mom shook her head. “We don’t know, Lucy. We may never know.”
“Do you think he’s dead?” She’d never come right out and asked that before.
“No,” Mom said flatly, and when she didn’t say any more, Lucy thought she was mad.
That made her burst into tears again. She’d always hated it when Mom or Dad was mad at her, and since Ethan had disappeared she could hardly stand it. Rae didn’t care; half the time she went out of her way to get them mad at her, and the other half she didn’t seem to notice. But then Rae was almost fourteen. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry!” Lucy wailed.
Mom hugged her, stroked her hair, and said, so quietly that Lucy had to hold her breath to hear, “I’m his mother. I’m the one who was supposed to keep him safe.”
Lucy buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and curled her knees up, for the moment not caring that fifth graders shouldn’t act like babies. Her mother’s guilt was too much for her, but she had to say something. She mumbled, “You didn’t know. You and Dad didn’t know.”
“We did our best, just like we do with all you kids. But our best wasn’t good enough for Ethan. It still isn’t good enough.”
Chills raced through Lucy’s body, and she cried again, “I’m sorry!”
Mom was rocking her, as if she were Cory’s age. “Lucy, Lucy, none of this is your, fault.”
“I’m sorry I called you in here and scared you. It was just … a dream.”
Mom held her by the shoulders a little away from her. “Lucy.” Lucy fought against the separation, but finally looked into her mother’s face. Her eyes were red and swollen, frantic with a love that made Lucy, every time she saw it, swear she’d never have kids. “I don’t think they are dreams. He comes to me, too.”
Lucy’s heart suddenly pounded against her rib cage, and her head swam. For a minute she thought she was going to throw up. “He does?”
“Maybe ten times over the past year.”
“What does he want?”
“I don’t know. He won’t talk.”
“Where does he come from?”
“I don’t know. I’ve tried to follow him, but I always lose him.”
“He … tried to strangle me.” Lucy put her hands to her throat.
Mom’s eyes widened. She tipped Lucy’s head back, pushed Lucy’s fingers aside, and put her own there, probing, rubbing. “Are you hurt? I don’t see any marks. Did he hurt you?”
“No. He wasn’t trying very hard. I got away from him.” Lucy laughed a little. She and Ethan always used to fight like that. Once she’d shut the car door on his hand; she’d insisted it wasn’t on purpose, and her parents and even Ethan had believed her, but it was.
Mom bent her head and kissed Lucy’s throat, then pulled her close again. “He’s done things like that to me, too. But I think it’s just that he needs something. He’s in trouble and he needs something from me, and I can’t help him now any more than I could when he was at home or at New Beginnings because I don’t know what to do.”
“Does Dad see him, too?”
Mom smiled sadly and shook her head. The white streak in the front of her hair showed a lot in the rainy light, and a lock fell over her forehead, a white lock out of her dark brown hair. Lucy’s hair was dark brown, too; she was afraid she’d have a white streak like Mom’s when she got that old. She wished Mom would just dye it. Mom said it was her badge of courage, from having seven kids. Lucy resented that. And, anyway, she hadn’t noticed it getting any bigger since all the trouble with Ethan—but then, it was hard to remember a time in the family when there hadn’t been trouble with Ethan, when they hadn’t all been thinking mostly about him. “Dad and Ethan haven’t gotten along very well the last few years,” Mom said. “They haven’t been very close.”
Lucy didn’t see what that had to do with anything, and it seemed to her that somehow Mom was putting Dad down. “Ethan wasn’t close to anybody in the family,” she said angrily, and sat up on the bed away from her mother’s arms.
“I don’t know about that.” There was a dreamy look on her mother’s face that made Lucy even madder. “There was always something special between Ethan and me. I guess there still is.”
“Does Dad know you see Ethan?”
“I used to tell him. I don’t anymore. He thinks it’s all in my head, because I want so much to see him. He says it’s just grief. He believes Ethan is dead.”
“He is dead.”
“I don’t think so.”
Now Lucy was furious. She knew she wasn’t as special as Ethan because she didn’t get in all kinds of trouble and she hadn’t disappeared and she wasn’t dead. She turned the radio up loud again and slammed the earphones onto her head. Then she took them off long enough to demand, almost yelling, “So does Rae know?” She doubted it. Rae spent most of her time away from the house these days and didn’t know anything that was going on. Didn’t know about the cute new guy in Lucy’s math class. Didn’t know that Cory was finally potty-trained, mostly. Didn’t know that Ethan kept showing up without knocking, except that couldn’t be true because everybody but Mom knew he was dead.
Mom cupped Lucy’s chin. Lucy closed her eyes tight so she wouldn’t have to look at her and put the earphones back on, but she could still hear Mom say, “I won’t be telling anybody but you,” and then Lucy felt very special, indeed, and very much afraid.
3
“Jerry Johnston doesn’t work at Nubie anymore,” Mom said to Dad.
“He doesn’t? What happened?”
“I don’t know the circumstances, whether he was fired or quit or what. I guess the turnover at places like that must be pretty high.”
They were sitting back in their chairs at the two ends of the dining room table, drinking coffee and talking to each other. They almost always did that after dinner, when the kids had left the table. They hugged in the kitchen, too; you’d carry your plate in to put it on the sink and there they’d be, arms around each other, maybe even kissing, sometimes dancing to some silly old song they sang together.
For a long time after Ethan had disappeared, Mom and Dad had hugged each other all the time, as if they didn’t dare let go. It had scared Lucy. They’d touched the kids all the time, too. It was embarrassing; you’d be standing in line at the grocery store and Dad would put his hand on your head, or you’d be crossing the street and Mom would grab your hand as if you were Cory’s age.
Lucy kept wanting to yell at them, “Leave me alone! Nothing’s going to happen to me! Nothing can happen to me!”
Then there’d been a long time when she hadn’t seen her parents touch each other at all. They’d hardly even looked at each other. Dad had kept touching the kids; sometimes you could find enough room to sit beside him in the big chair even if you were almost twelve years old. But Mom didn’t touch anybody unless she had to. She’d braid Priscilla’s hair, she’d put her hand on Molly’s forehead to check for fever, she’d put her arms around Dominic from behind to get his jacket zipper started. But she didn’t hug, she didn’t spank, she didn’t kiss the top of Dad’s head when she passed behind his chair.
That had gone on for months. Lucy was relieved they were kissing and dancing in the kitchen again, even though she didn’t know how they could do it when Ethan was still missing and everybody knew he was dead. Everybody but Mom.
Their chairs had arms. None of the others did. Someday Lucy would sit in a captain’s chair with arms and a high back at the head of a long table. There’d be flowers on the table. There’d be a lot of kids, and Lucy would take care of them all.
She poured herself another glass of milk and
dished up more chili into her bowl. She pretty much knew how to make chili now, even though she still did need Mom to tell her how long to brown the hamburger and how much chili powder to put in. Rae couldn’t, or wouldn’t, cook anything. She didn’t know that Ethan kept coming back.
Rae would eat all her meals in her room if they’d let her. She took tiny servings and gobbled her food, all hunched over her plate and not looking at anybody. She said she wasn’t hungry. She said she had to lose weight. But Lucy knew there were Reese’s cups and M&M’s stashed in her top dresser drawer under her bras and panty hose.
The little kids chattered and ate a lot, but they couldn’t sit still for very long. They didn’t care, didn’t even understand what the grownups talked about.
Lucy didn’t care either, most of the time, but she kept thinking that she ought to, that there was coded information in their conversations that someday she’d need. Only recently had she realized that they talked about stuff when she wasn’t around. That bothered her.
“He’s in private practice now,” Mom was saying.
Lucy didn’t know what that was, or why it mattered what Jerry Johnston was doing. She had other things to worry about. She was afraid she’d flunked the math test today. A couple of sixth-grade boys had called her and Stacey a dirty name; Lucy wasn’t even sure what it meant. Stacey had promised to show her how to use eyeliner today, but the teacher had caught them whispering about it in class and had confiscated Stacey’s entire makeup bag. Stacey said her dad would sue. Stacey always said that, but her dad never did. Her dad lived in California with his new wife and a baby brother Stacey had never seen.
“How do you know?” Dad asked Mom.
“I called him at Nubie and they told me. They gave me his number, but all I got was a snotty answering service.”
When Lucy grew up, she was going to have a beach house on Malibu with Emilio Estevez or Charlie Sheen, whichever one of them waited for her. She’d have a pink stretch limo and she’d drive it herself, even though most rich people had chauffeurs. Lucy couldn’t wait to drive. Dad said he’d teach her when she was fifteen. In the back of the limo there’d be a pink-and-white marble hot tub. She’d drive around with all her friends in the hot tub, cruising.
Dad’s scolding voice brought her attention back to what he and Mom were talking about. “I thought we decided to quit doing that.”
“I never decided that. You decided that. You and Jerry.”
“I thought you agreed that calling him or the cops every other day is just making it harder on you.”
“Not knowing is harder. Not doing anything is harder. I can’t just let them drop it.”
“Carole, it’s been two years.”
“It’s been one year and nine and a half months.”
“The chances of turning up anything get slimmer and slimmer. You know that.”
“You’re so sure he’s dead. I think you’d rather believe that than admit nobody knows.”
Dad rested his forehead on his hand. “You think I don’t fantasize that someday Ethan will just stroll in here like none of this ever happened and he’ll be fine? You think I don’t look at every brown-haired teenage boy on the street to make sure it’s not him?”
Mom shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Tony. You don’t talk about it—”
“You think you’re the only one who dreams about him?”
Mom didn’t say anything for a minute. Lucy was listening carefully now, blowing bubbles in her milk that made a ring around the rim of the glass like a necklace or a noose. Finally Mom said quietly, “They’re not dreams.”
Dad slammed his hand down on the table and Lucy’s milk spilled. “Carole, for God’s sake, after all we’ve been through!”
Mom had started gathering up the dirty dishes, the Crockpot with the scum of chili in the bottom, the salad bowl littered with lettuce and celery leaves. She wasn’t looking at Dad. She wasn’t looking at Lucy either. I saw him, too, Lucy knew she ought to say, but she didn’t, and Mom didn’t give her away. Mom just said, “They’re not dreams. That’s all,” and left the room.
Dad sat still with his head on his hand. Lucy mopped up the spilled milk with her napkin, chugged the rest of it, and stood up. She stacked the bowl on her salad plate and the glass in her bowl, remembering only then that Mom didn’t like them to do that because it got food all over the outside of the glass. There were so many rules, so many ways you could do things wrong.
She started to go around the back of Dad’s chair. He pulled her to him and kissed the top of her head. Her glass tipped over, dribbling little white specks of milk onto the floor. She kissed him back. His cheek was scratchy, and he smelled nice, the way Dad always smelled, the way dads were supposed to smell.
When Lucy went upstairs, Rae was lying on her bed. They’d put the shelves in between their beds for privacy, so Lucy couldn’t see what her sister was doing over there, could only hear her breathing. Rae didn’t say anything when Lucy came in, so Lucy didn’t say anything either.
The first thing she did, as always, was to check for her diary. She moved it often, and she hadn’t written in it for a long time because there wasn’t anything to say, so sometimes she forgot where it was and thought somebody had stolen it. But there it was now, under the dirty clothes in her laundry basket. She’d have to remember to take it out before it got washed, but she couldn’t move it now because Rae was in the room. She patted its cover, imagined what the blank page with today’s date would look like, put the dirty clothes back on top of it.
She sat down in front of the mirror and stared at herself, leaned so close to the glass that her breath made little clouds. Her skin looked funny up close, but at least she didn’t have zits. Rae had zits.
All of a sudden Rae was in the mirror with her. It surprised Lucy, scared her a little. “Want me to do your hair?”
“Sure.”
The brush caught in the tangles, and Rae didn’t hold on to the roots like Mom did to keep it from hurting. But Lucy didn’t jump or say anything.
Rae brushed and combed Lucy’s hair, pinned it this way and that. Sideways over one ear. Slanted across her forehead like a scarf. Twisted into pompons on the sides of her head. She never once asked Lucy which way she liked it, and Lucy didn’t know, anyway.
Finally Rae settled on what she said was a French twist, and she pinned a white plastic flower in the middle of it that Lucy could just barely see if she turned her head a certain way. “There,” Rae said. “Now turn around this way and I’ll do your face.”
Lucy sat very still, although her heart pounded with excitement and the little brushes tickled her nose and cheeks and eyelids. She could see the tiny wet wrinkles in Rae’s lips when the older girl leaned over her. She could smell the perfume and lotion on Rae’s fingers.
“There,” Rae said again, and stepped back. “You’re done.”
At first Lucy didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Then she turned to the mirror. She looked the same as she had before, but she also looked very different. She looked like Rae, and Mom, and Dad, and Ethan, who didn’t look like each other at all. She looked the way she would when she grew up.
“Like it?” Rae asked.
Lucy nodded. “I guess.”
“Go show Mom and Dad,” Rae ordered, and went back to her side of the room.
4
Later that night Lucy sat in the living room hugging Patches and watched her mother check the outside lights again. The fat old cat meowed and twisted, trying to scratch, but most of the time she could avoid his claws. Her mother glanced back sharply but didn’t say anything, which pleased Lucy; if it had been one of the younger kids, her mother would already be scolding, “Don’t be mean to the kitty! He’ll scratch you, and he’ll be right!” Lucy eased her grip. Patches shook his head furiously, glared at her, then settled solidly back onto her lap.
Her mother stooped to pick up a sock from the floor, and the white streak glistened. She should dye it. The rest of her hair was so dark
it was almost black. Lucy wished her own hair was that color, or blond like her sister Rae’s and like the little kids’ before it started to turn. She suspected Rae of lightening her hair, and she suspected Mom of suspecting it, too, even though they’d said she couldn’t until she was sixteen.
There were two round switches on the wall beside the door, one above the other like buttons on a card. One was for the hall light that hung like an umbrella from the high ceiling. The other one worked the porch light and the lamp at the top of the outside front steps.
Nobody in the family could remember which switch worked which light. You’d think people would guess right at least half the time, but almost every time they pushed the wrong one first, turning the outside lights off by mistake and then hastily turning them back on again. Her mother did it every night, more than once if anybody was away from home. In the two years since Ethan had been gone, Lucy bet her mother had turned those lights off and on, off and on, half a dozen times a night, looking for him, making sure he’d be able to find his way home.
Which was stupid, because Ethan was dead. And even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t come here. And even if he did, they wouldn’t let him in.
“What happened to your brother?” She must have answered the question a million times. Even if she told them it was none of their business, she was still answering it. If you timesed how many questions she’d had to answer or not answer about Ethan by the number of minutes each time took by the other six kids in her family, that was a huge amount of time Ethan had already taken up out of their lives. Which didn’t even count the time Mom and Dad spent talking about him and thinking about him, which sometimes Lucy thought was all the time and sometimes she thought was never.
“He’s in jail, kind of,” was what she’d said at first.
“How can you be ‘kind of’ in jail? Either you’re in jail or you’re not.”
“How old is he? He’s only fifteen, right? They don’t put kids in jail. Do they?”
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