Mites. She’d stared at the picture in her mother’s book: huge mouths and pincers, lots of legs, no eyes. No eyes; that especially gave her the creeps. There were billions of mites in the world—in the air, on your food, in your sheets, up your nose. They lived off dead stuff: the hair in your brush, dead skin scales. Most people never knew they were there, but now Lucy did, and now she felt them and tasted them and saw them everywhere, and they made her sneeze. She felt her own skin dying.
“Hello?” she said again, impatiently, into the phone, and then suddenly, and for no good reason, the thought came whole into her mind: Ethan was dead.
His being dead kept sneaking up on her, the same way he himself had all that time he’d been missing, the same way he still did, though snow she had the feeling he wasn’t looking for her. Showing up in windows and mirrors and dreams. Following her too close down stairs, so that she almost fell. Making the floorboards creak and the curtains move when he played hide-and-seek in her house at night; it wasn’t his house anymore, he’d lost it, he’d run away, he didn’t live here anymore because he’d been so bad, he was dead. Singing. Saying to come with him and do what he was doing. Singing to Rae, really, but Lucy could hear the tune and most of the words.
He really was dead. Mom and Dad had seen the body. They’d identified it. They’d said, “Yes, that’s our son, Ethan Michael Brill.” Rae had asked Mom exactly what they’d had to say, and that’s what she’d told her. The funeral was at three o’clock this afternoon. He really was dead.
The man’s voice on the phone was asking again for Tony. It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning and Dad was still asleep. Lucy didn’t say that right away, though, as if it were a shameful family secret not to be shared with a stranger. As politely as she could, she demanded, “Who’s calling, please?”
“This is Jerry Johnston.”
She still wasn’t recognizing him right away; he could sneak up on her. He hadn’t even said hello to her.
He had no right to be calling here anyway, invading her house, telling bad news, making her say stuff she didn’t want to say. She imagined the phone lines like hypodermic needles in and out of her house, sucking stuff out, injecting other stuff in.
“Dad’s still asleep,” she said, finally.
“Oh.”
“He’s—he doesn’t feel good.”
“I’d like to speak to your mother then, if I may.”
“Mom’s taking a shower.” Water in the pipes made the old house cough. It also made her think, unwillingly, about things that were hollowed out and then filled with other things; walls and pipes and molecules of water, dancing and sticking together.
“Well, then.”
Jerry Johnston’s voice on the phone was just a voice, without particular power. That was because he wasn’t here in the room, with his bulk, his beige eyes, his baby-powder smell. At first, a long time ago, she’d liked his voice, but the longer she’d had to be in the same room with him, the more uncomfortable his voice had made her, even a little afraid.
“Well, then, is Rae there?” he asked.
“Rae?”
“Let me speak to Rae, please.”
She didn’t have to let him. She could have refused. She could have said that Rae was at a friend’s house or taking the trash out or at the park with Molly. She could have said that Rae had run away, or Rae was dead. He’d never know. She had the power.
But Rae was sitting right there on the couch, and she’d looked up at the sound of her name. “Just a minute,” Lucy said sullenly, and shoved the receiver into her sister’s hand.
“Well, Jesus, you don’t have to throw it at me!” Rae gave her the finger and then said into the phone, in the same mean voice, “What?” There was a brief pause, and then Rae said in a different tone altogether, “Oh, hi,” and her face changed. Her whole body softened, delicately twisted, spread. She stretched out along the nubby blue couch and raised one knee. Her toes flexed like a cat’s; the toenails were red. She was wearing baggy orange short-shorts, and Lucy could see way up to the lace on her yellow underwear. Her head was tilted, so that her bright blond hair draped across her cheek and across the hand that propped up her head, red-nailed against tanned skin and bent back at the wrist.
Cradling the receiver there, Rae smiled a little and nodded as she listened. She didn’t say much, but what she did say had a tone to it that Lucy, no matter how much she practiced, couldn’t quite get. Rae was flirting. Lucy felt a grudging admiration for her older sister, a strong desire to be like her.
“Oh,” Rae said quietly. “Okay.” Lucy wondered uneasily what she was agreeing to.
Jerry Johnston must have a penis and everything. The thought made Lucy blush, made her feel funny in the lower part of her stomach. Of course she’d seen her little brothers’ penises lots of times, but they were like noodles, small and soft, and she really found it hard to believe that a penis ever got big and hard like the ones in Rae’s magazine. If Jerry’s went with the rest of him, it must be awesome. Lucy almost giggled.
Her brother Ethan must have had a penis, too. She’d never seen it. Ethan was dead. Pretty soon his body, all of his body, would start to decay. The funny feeling in Lucy’s groin turned to nausea, and she pressed her palms there.
She forced her thoughts back to Jerry Johnston. He was kind of cute. He had pretty eyes and a nice smile. He was probably available, too; he didn’t wear a wedding ring, though there was a giant square turquoise and silver ring on one of his pinkies, and she didn’t think there were any pictures on his desk. Dad had a family portrait on his desk at work. Ethan was still in it.
“Sure,” Rae said warmly. “I will.”
It was disgusting to flirt with Jerry Johnston over the phone when Ethan was dead. Lucy turned resolutely away from her sister, but kept listening.
Finally, Rae said lingeringly, “Bye.” Then she sat with the receiver still to her ear, waiting, Lucy supposed, for Jerry Johnston to hang up. Lucy stayed where she was, leaning against the wall; she expected Rae to yell at her for eavesdropping, and she got ready to yell back. Instead, the older girl lowered the receiver, sighed, and said almost dreamily, “That was Jerry.”
“I know, dummy. I answered the phone.”
“He called to tell us about Ethan.”
“He already told us Ethan’s dead. What else is there?”
“He called to tell us what he died of.”
“Well, why’d he ask for you? He could have told me that.”
“I guess because now I’m the oldest in the family next to Mom and Dad.”
“You’re only two years older than me.”
Rae shrugged and tossed her hair. Dusty mite-filled sunshine puffed around her head. The voice of the recorded operator was leaking out of the receiver, trying to warn them that the phone was off the hook. Both of them heard. Neither of them did anything about it.
“Jerry says it was an OD.”
“What’s an OD?”
“Overdose.”
“Oh. Well, big deal. We already figured that.”
“Jerry says there were all kinds of drugs in his system. Downers, speed, crack, pot, acid.” The names of the drugs sounded like dirty poetry coming out of her sister’s mouth. “Some traces of stuff they couldn’t even identify. Jerry says any one of them could have killed him. Jerry says drugs are really dangerous. I’ll never take drugs, that’s for sure.”
“Just say no.” Lucy sneered. “You better go tell Mom and Dad.”
“Oh,” Rae said dreamily, the same way she’d said it on the phone to Jerry Johnston. “Okay.”
“Right now.”
“Sure,” Rae said. “I will.”
Her legs gleamed as she swung them down. Her hair moved like sunny water; she brushed it back from her face with a practiced pretty gesture. Lucy tried it, but her own hair was tangled; her fingers got stuck in it. A red ant was crawling up Rae’s leg. Apparently she didn’t feel it, but Lucy saw it reach the little hollow at the back of her sister�
�s knee before Rae’s long slow strides carried it out of her sight. Now she’d never know what happened to it.
Lucy stood against the living room wall. She heard her little brothers and sisters in various parts of the house and yard, like crickets. Patches was purring somewhere; he must be nearby, because the purring was loud, but she didn’t see him.
She heard voices upstairs, where Rae was telling their parents the latest bad news about Ethan that Jerry Johnston had brought. Right now, it seemed important to know which voice was which. There was Rae’s, singsong. There was Mom’s, sharp, furious. There was Dad’s, sleepy, asking a question, asking another question, crying.
Hearing Dad cry made Lucy slide down the wall until she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up and her face in her arms, as small a target as she could be. After a few minutes she realized it was hard to breathe, so she turned her head to one side, where she saw the blue triangle of the couch between her arm and her leg, the cat’s black and white feet padding up to her, and Ethan.
Ethan was dead. Lucy raised her head.
Ethan was dead. His funeral was at three o’clock this afternoon. But there he was, just outside, between the living room window and the lilac bush, hands cupped around his eyes, peering in.
Lucy tried to meet his gaze, but couldn’t quite see his eyes in the hollows of his face and the shadows made by his hands. He didn’t seem to see her. He seemed to be looking for something; he turned his head to scan the room. After a few minutes, he just stepped back away from the window, ducked under the branches, and was gone.
Upstairs, Dad was still crying.
10
A month passed, another week, another day. Things started to get back to normal. Sometimes Lucy had to remind herself that her brother Ethan was dead, she’d gone to his funeral, she’d seen and touched his body, and that he’d ever even been alive at all. And sometimes “Ethan is dead” was the only thing real.
She and Priscilla and Dominic took swimming lessons at the Y again. Lucy finally went off the high board headfirst. Water slapped her stomach and thighs and got up her nose, but it wasn’t as scary as she’d thought it would be and she’d probably do it again before summer was over.
Rae went to therapy every Wednesday evening at Jerry Johnston’s house. A few times Lucy rode with Mom or Dad to pick her up, and watched the other kids come out. They looked like any other teenagers. That was disappointing. You couldn’t tell by looking at them that they had problems, that they had to see a therapist. A couple of the guys were cute. Rae was always the last one out, and she was always very quiet on the way home.
Dad went to work every day, just as he’d always done, but now he didn’t talk about his work at dinner anymore. The whole family used to laugh at his stories about how the computers ate up programs, or when they turned what he put into them into secrets and wouldn’t let him have them back. Lucy didn’t think her family would ever laugh again.
Mom went to her class every Tuesday night. She brought home a test paper with a big red A on it and showed it to everybody in the family. Dad said he was real proud of her, the same thing he said to the kids when any of them got good grades. Lucy didn’t know exactly how to think about her mother as a student.
Rae went to a party at her friend Gina’s, just four blocks away. Mom talked to Gina’s parents about who was going to be there and what they were going to do, and she made Rae write down Gina’s name and address and phone number. Rae threw such a fit about that that she almost didn’t get to go to the party after all. And then she was over an hour late getting home and got herself grounded again. From the way she smirked, you’d have thought that was what she wanted. She was almost fourteen. Mom and Dad were starting to bug her about what she wanted for her birthday. She said she didn’t want anything, but Lucy knew she liked the shiny black parachute pants they’d seen at the mall, if Lucy could just remember what store.
At the funeral, Lucy had actually touched Ethan’s wrist. She hoped nobody had seen her do it. It was kind of weird, touching a dead body, even if it was your brother. The flesh had stayed white where she’d poked it down. His blood hadn’t gone back to that spot. Hers did when she poked her own arm. He’d been really cold. She’d wished hard for his hand to move, but it didn’t.
Pris fell off the parallel bars in gymnastics class. That same night, she rolled out of the top bunk; everybody in the house woke up from the thump and the yelling. Both times Dad took her to the emergency room and Mom stayed home with the other kids, turning the porch light off and on and waiting for the phone to ring. “It’s weird there are only five kids at home now,” Lucy had said, and then wished she hadn’t because Mom got tears in her eyes and turned away. Priscilla had broken a little bone in each foot; she’d have casts and crutches until school. Already she was complaining that the casts made her feet itch. Lucy thought it would be neat to break something. She wrapped one foot in a towel and hobbled noisily around the house until Dad yelled at her to stop it.
Dad had cried through Ethan’s whole funeral. Lucy had heard him cry before but she’d never seen him, and she was scared that he’d never stop. He didn’t even try to hide it. In fact, she saw him turn his face up toward the sky, and sunshine glistened on his cheeks.
Mom was like a mannequin. Once, when Lucy was just little, there’d been a pretty pink blouse on a mannequin at Penney’s and she’d reached up to rub the material between her fingers and then against her cheek, and then the mannequin had moved and smiled and said something to her. It was a real lady. It still embarrassed Lucy to think about that. At the funeral she’d been afraid to touch her mother, for fear the same thing would happen only in reverse: her mother would turn out to really be a mannequin, with no life in her.
Mom got a B in her class. Dominic’s baseball team came in next to last in the league, but Dom learned to run the bases without tripping over his own feet. Molly’s guppies had babies and the tank was full of little brown dots zipping around, leaving the tiniest ripples. Dad shaved off his beard and looked exactly like Benjamin Franklin; he had a dimple in his cheek that Lucy had never seen.
So, daily life swirled and puttered on, the same as always except that now Lucy kept thinking about what was not, what she had lost, what was going to die.
A bird with a song like a wind chime woke her up one morning; she’d never heard this bird before, and she lay there for a long time filled with it, feeling its notes slide inside her body over and over like sweet immortal flowers down a waterfall, trying to picture the bird that made it, thinking it might be a message from Ethan, or just about the world and her place in it. But then the song stopped, and all she could hear was the screeching of a jay, the neighbor revving his old car, dogs barking, a siren, and those things only made her nervous, didn’t fill her with any sense of harmony at all. Rather than wait to hear that bird song again, Lucy decided it was gone forever, and that made her cry.
She went out to the front porch one afternoon and Mom was standing there holding Cory, and you could see their bodies through their clothes and their bones and blood and nerves inside their bodies. Ethan’s bones and blood and clothes were in the ground now. She didn’t know where he was. She didn’t know where Mom and Cory were, or where they’d be a minute from now. She didn’t know where she was; she was here, but not really.
They didn’t have their own fireworks on the Fourth of July this year. Dad said they were too dangerous, and besides they were illegal. They’d always had their own fireworks, and it wasn’t any more dangerous or any more against the law this year than any other year. It was because Ethan was dead. It wasn’t fair. Lucy closed her curtains and turned her radio up loud and refused to pay any attention to the fireworks from the stadium, even though the view from her bedroom window was the best in the house. With a guilty feeling of relief, Lucy recognized this as something she could dare to be mad at her parents about for the rest of her life.
The world didn’t come to an end, other people wouldn’t die, just be
cause Ethan Michael Brill was dead. It wouldn’t come to an end if she died, either, Lucy Ann Brill. Sometimes she’d be thinking about starting sixth grade or something, and then she’d be ashamed of herself for worrying, for being excited, for thinking about anything but Ethan.
She watched Mom, paid close attention to what Mom said and what she didn’t say. She listened for her to check on all the kids every night, waited for her own turn, and every night reminded herself that Mom would never again be able to check on Ethan, would never again know where he was. She watched how Mom made pancakes, rocked Cory, kissed Dad, combed her hair so the white streak showed. It didn’t help. As far as she could tell, Mom was just going through the days, one after another. But then, Ethan came to her again.
It was a sweltering Saturday morning in early July. Sun in her window had awakened Lucy early. She was restless. She didn’t want to watch cartoons; just the sound of them was driving her crazy. She didn’t feel like starting her weekend chores. It was too hot to play outside. She thought about going back to bed, but she wasn’t tired. She was getting crankier and crankier; when Dom asked her for the third time where the Cheerios were, she threw the box at him. He wailed, “I’ll tell!” but then he got so busy eating that she knew he wouldn’t.
Rae had left a note that she was at the park until noon. Lucy didn’t believe it. Dad was out mowing the lawn. Every once in a while she’d hear the mower screech, and there’d be a loud cracking sound, and she’d know he’d run over some toy. He’d be furious and sweaty when he came in.
Lucy hadn’t seen Mom at all this morning. She was probably still asleep. It used to be Mom was up before any of them, even on weekends; since Ethan had died, she slept in as late as she could. Maybe she was sick.
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