“It’s a place called Nubie. New Beginnings.”
“What’s that?”
She’d asked Mom what it was. “It’s a children’s home.”
“You mean, like for kids who don’t have parents?”
“Ethan has parents! He’s got a whole family! We visit him every week and he comes home on pass on Sunday sometimes and we have family therapy and Mom and Dad—”
“So what’d they do, give him up?”
Once she’d understood what that even meant, she’d been astonished at the very thought. “No!”
“My dad says parents are supposed to raise their own kids. He’d never put me in a place like that.”
Lucy had asked Dad what to say to that. Then she was sorry she had; his face and his voice had stiffened; he’d said it wasn’t her he was mad at. She’d said what he’d told her to say, though it hadn’t satisfied either her or her questioners. “Ethan was out of control. He just kept stealing and doing drugs and nothing Mom or Dad did could stop him, so finally the judge put him at Nubie to get him to stop. He’ll only be there for a year. Then he’ll come home.”
But Ethan hadn’t come home. He’d run away from Nubie. No one had known where he was for more than two years. He would be seventeen now. It was hard for Lucy to comprehend that she hadn’t known him at all when he was sixteen, and never would. The cops were supposed to be looking for him, but Mom and Dad didn’t think they were looking very hard anymore. They must think he was dead. It was easier to think that than not to know where he was or when he might show up again.
It had been so long that people didn’t ask much anymore. But when they did—when they came to her house, for instance, and saw the pictures that Mom and Dad wouldn’t take down—Lucy just said, “He doesn’t live here anymore,” which was what her parents had told her to say, or, “He died,” which she knew they wouldn’t like but was probably the truth.
Now Mom reached to turn off the dusty hall light. Lucy waited. Her mother hit the wrong switch as usual and turned off the outside lights. She swore under her breath and punched the switch to get them back on.
Lucy wasn’t allowed to say words like that, but she practiced them a lot in her mind and out loud with some of her friends. Her parents had pretty much stopped yelling at Rae for swearing a year or so ago, and they’d given up on it altogether with Ethan when he hadn’t been much older than Lucy was now, because they’d had so many other things to yell at him about.
That was one way to do it: be so bad all the time that grown-ups couldn’t keep up. The other way was to be so good all the time that you never broke any rules, never got into any trouble. Either way was hard.
If any of the neighbors were watching, Lucy thought—as she thought every time somebody pushed the wrong light switch—the lights flashing at the big old house on the hill would look like a distress signal. Lucy put a considerable amount of time and energy into thinking up ways you could let somebody know you needed help when the phone lines had been cut and the murderer was standing in your living room with a gun in one hand trained on you and his arm around one of your little brothers or sisters. Or when your crazy teenage brother came back from the dead and your parents didn’t know what to do, your father didn’t even believe he was there, and your mother welcomed him home.
Sneakily flicking the outside lights was one of the ways she’d come up with and kept on a list in her head. But it had been ruined. By now, the neighbors had seen the lights go off and on so many times that they would ignore the signal. So Lucy would have to find some other way, a lot of other ways, to save herself and her family from the man with the gun, from the lady who put razor blades in the Halloween candy, from Ethan sneaking around the house at night or in broad daylight, from nuclear war.
Her mother opened the door to look out, then went out onto the porch. Soft summer air drifted in; Lucy smelled flowers, heard the hum of the city at night. Someday she was going to live in the country, maybe in the mountains. Her mother had grown up on a farm and had always dreamed of living in a place where there were sidewalks, where a date could walk her home. It was weird to think of Mom as a girl, with dates. Sometimes Lucy liked that a lot.
Patches had pricked up his ears when the door opened but, not hearing the rattle of his food dish, settled back down into her lap. She rubbed a knuckle under his chin. He stretched out one spotted paw to claw at the arm of the couch, which was already worn from bright blue to gray blue by so many hands and feet, knees and bottoms.
Lucy whispered, “Stop that, you bad cat!” and pulled his paw back, liking the way his toes stretched and separated under her fingers. She was fascinated with the inner workings of things: bones and veins, pipes under streets, electric wires in the walls of the house, thoughts and dreams. You called that stuff infrastructure; Mom had said that word over and over one night while she was studying for a test, and Lucy had asked what it meant and how to spell it. Lucy liked big words that looked like what they meant; written out on the page, “infrastructure” looked like the inside of something, the frame you could hang something on. Patches let her play with his toes for a few minutes, two white and two black, then languidly put out his claws.
Her mother came back in carrying Molly’s yellow dump truck, an empty white plastic grocery sack, and a pink tennis shoe that was either Lucy’s or Priscilla’s. Lucy frowned; she got blamed for everything.
Sometimes Lucy was mad at Mom and Dad because they still loved Ethan, after all this time and all the awful things he’d done. Sometimes she was mad at them because they didn’t talk about him all the time; they went on with their lives. Mom went back to school. Dad changed jobs. They took care of their other kids. They kissed in the kitchen. It seemed they’d forgotten all about Ethan. Someday they might forget about her.
Lucy sighed. “They’re all right. Nothing happened to them.”
“Of course they’re all right.”
The sharpness of her tone brought tears to Lucy’s eyes, and she buried her face in the cat’s fur. He gave a very low growl, so quiet she knew it was a secret message meant for only her to hear. But she didn’t know what it was supposed to mean.
“But they’ve been gone a long time,” her mother said. “It doesn’t take an hour to go to the corner store for the paper.” She looked at her watch. “Over an hour.”
“They’re with Dad. They’re safe,” Lucy said, only half believing it.
“He could have called.”
“Molly’s probably giving him a hard time,” Lucy said wisely. “You know three-year-olds.”
“More likely it’s Rae,” her mother said, laughing a little. “You know fourteen-year-olds.” And Lucy felt the fear and excitement, like a cyclone threatening to blow her off her feet and set her down somewhere else, that she always felt when she thought about being a teenager.
It wouldn’t be long now. She was almost twelve. She had to wear a bra with most of her shirts, and Rae had finally convinced her that if you were going to shave your legs, you had to put up with all those tiny cuts.
Her mother reached to pet the cat. Lucy admired the shape of her hand where it caught the lamplight, although the nails were too short and there were nests of wrinkles across the knuckles. Her mother’s wedding ring glinted silver. Dad wore one just like it, and when she was little, Lucy used to set their hands side by side and slide her two index fingers around and around their rings. She liked the rings, because they had pretty designs in them, and because they made circles that went around and around and didn’t stop, and because they meant that her parents were going to stay married forever.
When her mother’s fingers expertly massaged his ears, Patches’s purring got louder and his whiskers flared in pleasure. All the animals liked Mom best. If she was anywhere in sight, Dominic couldn’t get the dogs to sit still while he put their leashes on. Patches slept on Mom and Dad’s bed if he could, arranging himself like another of the black-and-white star patterns on their green quilt. Even Priscilla’s canary, which L
ucy didn’t like to be around since she’d found out in science that birds have hollow bones, would let Mom catch him when he got out of the cage. Lucy could hardly stand to look at that fragile feathered creature wrapped in Mom’s two hands, with just his head sticking out the top and just his feet like broken yellowish twigs out the bottom.
Mom said pointedly that the animals liked her best because she was the one who fed them, even though every time the Brill family acquired another pet, one kid or another had promised to take responsibility. Lucy knew it was more than that. The animals liked Mom—kept an eye on her, followed her around—because they thought she would keep them safe.
Lucy used to believe that, too, and that Dad would keep everything bad away from her and her brothers and sisters until they were old enough to protect themselves. Sometimes, even now, she let herself believe that.
“I wish they’d get back soon,” Mom said. “I’d like to get to bed. Rae has to catch the summer-school bus at seven in the morning. I don’t know why they start these things so early.” Chattering about normal, everyday things was her mother’s way of reassuring her, Lucy knew—of reassuring both of them. It didn’t work; instead, it reminded her that if something had happened to Dad and Rae and Molly, not much would be normal tomorrow or for a long, long time. Rae wouldn’t go to summer school. Priscilla wouldn’t have her birthday party. They wouldn’t even have breakfast, probably. Just cereal.
“You can go to bed,” she offered. “I’ll wait up for them.”
Mom smiled and patted her knee. The instant her hand left him, Patches stopped purring. The instant it came back, he started up again. Lucy thought it must be wonderful to have power like Mom’s, to stop and start a cat’s purring. Maybe when she grew up, she’d be powerful, too. “That’s all right, honey. You need your sleep. Priscilla’s party is tomorrow, and amusement parks are tiring enough on a good night’s sleep.”
“I’m not even tired,” Lucy protested feebly.
“I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway until I heard them come home. It’s all I can do to sleep with Ethan out there somewhere, not safe in his own bed.”
“Ethan’s dead,” Lucy said automatically.
“No, he’s not.”
Though her mother didn’t raise her voice, Lucy felt the tension, the slight pulling away, and was sorry she’d said anything. Ethan’s name, just his name, came between her and her mother. He’d always tried to take things away from people. Hatred for her brother made Lucy say, “The cops think he’s dead. That social worker, that Jerry Johnston, thinks he’s dead. Everybody but you thinks he’s dead.”
“I’m his mother. It’s my job to believe he’s alive. And anyway, nobody can say for sure that he’s dead. Some kids are missing for a long time and they’re still alive.”
“Dad thinks he’s dead too.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I heard him say so. You guys were having a fight.”
Her mother reached out to ruffle her hair. Patches stopped purring. Lucy felt like crying, but didn’t. “It’s also my job to worry about your father and your sisters until they get home. Even if it is silly.” She got up and went back to the door, pressing her nose against the glass and cupping her hands around her eyes. Lucy didn’t like it when her mother deliberately blocked out the reflections of what was safe and real inside the house—including the two of them—to see what might be outside.
Her mother’s worry was like the earwig in the old Twilight Zone that Lucy had seen a couple of times: eating its way through the brain. Leaving eggs.
The phone rang. Lucy’s heart beat so hard that her ears hurt, and she made no move to answer it. Her mother got to it on the first ring. “Hello?
“Tony, where are you? Is something wrong?
“Are the girls all right?
“I know, I know. It’s the age.”
A brief laugh, that tired, brave sound that always made Lucy feel guilty and indignant at the same time. Nobody’d forced them to have seven kids. There was nothing to say they wouldn’t have more. Cory was the youngest, and he was already two, and they liked babies.
Her mother passed a hand over her eyes, ran fingers through that ugly white streak. Furiously Lucy wondered if she could sneak into her parents’ room at night and dye it herself.
“Okay, Tony. Thanks for calling. I know it’s silly, but it helps.”
“I love you, too.”
When Ethan had disappeared, there had been a phone call in the middle of the night, just like in the movies. Lucy had heard the ringing, had heard Cory start to wail at the monster sound of it, had dragged the pillow over her head. Finally Rae had got up, swearing, and stomped down the hall to the little boys’ room. When Cory’s howling had subsided and it had seemed safe to come out, Lucy had rolled over onto her back to stare at the gray ceiling and listen to the things that were happening in her house.
She could hear her father’s voice, so low she was almost feeling it, like music through the walls. He wasn’t saying much. Then she heard him put down the phone and say to her mother, “That was Jerry Johnston. Ethan’s missing.”
At first Lucy hadn’t been able to place Jerry Johnston. Then she remembered: the social worker from the place where the judge had sent Ethan the last time he stole a car. New Beginnings Children’s Home; the kids who lived there called it Nubie. Jerry was huge, actually not as tall as Dad but so big around that he seemed like a fairy-tale tree. With homes inside the trunk and branches for tiny scared creatures with made-up names. He was very pale, and his voice didn’t change no matter what he was saying, and he’d keep asking and asking a question until he got an answer, whether or not it was the truth. Ethan liked him, as much as he liked anybody.
“He had Ethan over at his apartment this evening,” her father was telling her mother, “to get him away from the institution for a while. He left him in the living room watching TV while he went to put the pizza in the oven, and Ethan just walked out the door.”
Lucy couldn’t hear what her mother said. Dominic hollered something about being hungry, wanting pizza. Rae said, “Shut up,” gently, and he did.
“He thought he’d come back. He thought he could find him. That’s why he didn’t report it until now. He says not to worry, that when kids go AWOL they’re almost always picked up in a matter of hours for jaywalking or disturbing the peace or some other minor offense. They’ll find him. If he shows up here, we’re supposed to call.”
But in two years they hadn’t found Ethan or any sign of him. Lucy wanted to believe he was dead; she also wanted to believe he’d come home someday and everything would be all right again.
Sometimes he’d be standing in the hall when she got up to go to the bathroom at night; his eyes were like punched-out circles of paper, white and flat. Sometimes he’d be hiding in the lilac bush outside her parents’ bedroom window, and his flesh looked like the undersides of leaves when it was going to rain. She saw him often.
And now she knew that Mom saw him, too. She didn’t want to know that. She was afraid of secrets.
“I’m going to check on the other kids,” her mother said now, and started up the stairs with an armload of stray belongings.
Suddenly terrified of being left alone, Lucy scrambled to her feet, dumping Patches onto the floor. “I’ll come with you.”
5
It was a nightly ritual. Like cakes on birthdays and the smell of coffee in the morning, her mother’s rounds had always made Lucy feel safe in the net of her family and her home. It hadn’t kept Ethan safe, but her mother still did it, and Lucy still waited for her mother’s footsteps in the hall before she let herself fall asleep. Now she watched closely to see how it was done.
Cory was asleep in the big-boy bed. The much-used crib—tooth-marked, toy-dented, the same crib Ethan and then each of the other babies had slept in—stood nearby in case anybody needed it again. Cory slept like a baby, with his knees bent under him and his bottom in the air and his thumb in his mouth. Asleep, he wa
s awfully cute.
Across the little room, Dominic’s bed was so crowded with stuffed animals that she could hardly see him in it. A big pink dog, almost as big as he was, had a Star Wars quilt tucked under what would be its chin if it had one. Sometimes it was hard for Lucy to believe that he was five already; she clearly remembered when he’d been born.
Both Dom and Cory were light sleepers; you didn’t dare touch either one of them. Mom stood so still in their doorway that Lucy wanted to sneak up behind her and poke her in the ribs. It doesn’t work, she wanted to yell at her. Right now Cory had a cat scratch that just missed his eye, and Dom had skinned both knees yesterday when he fell on the basement steps trying to carry the pink dog down to the playroom. It doesn’t keep us safe. Even when we’re little, you can’t keep us safe, and the older we get the more dangers there are.
As though she’d thought of that too, Mom sighed sadly and moved on. The door to the younger girls’ room was shut tight; Lucy grinned to herself. Priscilla had had her way now, but when Molly got home, she’d want it open.
Mom knocked, waited, then put her head in. Lucy could just see past her. Priscilla was asleep on Molly’s bottom bunk, flat on her back, snoring. Lucy giggled, put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t wait to tease Pris about that in the morning. Pris said she never snored: “Girls in the fourth grade don’t do stuff like that! Farting and burping and snoring! Yuck!”
Her mother lifted Priscilla under the shoulders and knees. The snoring changed key. Priscilla’s red-brown hair fell across her mother’s arm. She wouldn’t get it cut, and so every morning she screamed when Mom brushed the tangles out, and Dad was always reaching over to push it out of her face.
Something was wrong with the room. Lucy was afraid to see what it was. But fear for her little sister made her barge in.
There was the hint of a face at the window, she thought, lit by the streetlight. She almost cried out. She pointed and knocked a doll off the shelf. Priscilla stirred in their mother’s arms, kicked a little. Mom made a shushing gesture with her mouth and eyes.
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