But he made it up the steps, unlocked the front door, and led them inside. First there was one of those entryways where you put your coat. Some of the kids hung theirs on hooks, but Lucy kept hers on. Then there was an ordinary living room—green carpet, white walls, furniture and lamps and pictures that you wouldn’t remember from one visit to the next.
In Lucy’s house, everything was there to remind you of somebody: the picture Aunt Kathy had painted of the house she and Dad had grown up in, which had been torn down when North Valley Mall was built; the couch where bedtime stories always got read; the old-fashioned red rug Mom had bought when they took that family vacation to Boston the summer before Molly was born. No, Dominic, because he hadn’t been with them either.
Anybody could have lived in Jerry’s house. Lucy wanted to.
It would be easy for Ethan to be living here.
It wouldn’t surprise her at all if he jumped out from behind that door, or crawled out from under that couch, or sort of oozed out from under the kitchen sink.
It wouldn’t surprise her, except that he really was dead. She’d touched his body. She’d watched him get buried. He couldn’t be living here. He couldn’t be living anywhere.
Rae could be. It wouldn’t surprise her if Rae was living here right now. Lucy listened hard but didn’t hear anything. It was weird how quiet Jerry’s house was. It didn’t even make the noises that other houses made. No creaks, no motors turning off and on, no faucets dripping or clocks ticking.
It was a hungry quiet. It sucked at you. She felt its teeth and tongue, and the hollow places just under the surface that it wanted her to fill up.
“Come on in,” Jerry said, not just to her. “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.”
He made his way across the room and through a door at the other end. The bathroom, Lucy thought, or the kitchen. Maybe he was going to serve food. She wasn’t hungry, but she’d have to eat something so he wouldn’t feel bad. Mom felt bad whenever anybody didn’t like what she fixed, especially since Ethan and Rae were gone.
Mike started after Jerry, taking great big high steps on his tiptoes. Lucy and some of the others laughed, but Stephanie yawned and said, “Oh, don’t be an asshole, Mike,” and Mike quit and came to sit on the floor beside her. Lucy guessed they liked each other, and wondered how long that had been going on. She wondered what else was going on in the group that she didn’t know about. She hated secrets. She hated Stephanie and Mike. She hated Jerry because he’d known all along. The door Jerry had gone through opened a crack and Rae was looking out.
Lucy blinked. Now the door was shut and nobody was there. But it had been open, just a crack, and her sister had been behind it looking out. She got to her feet.
“Gee,” somebody said sarcastically, “this is fun.”
“I gotta be home by four-thirty,” Julia said. “I gotta go to the dentist. What time is it?”
Somebody else—Mike, probably—farted loudly, and everybody laughed, even Stephanie. Lucy laughed, too, but she was moving toward the door.
“Look at this!” Billy teased. “Lucy can’t stand to let Jerry Johnston out of her sight for one minute!”
Lucy flushed painfully. “Lucy loves Jer-ry! Lucy loves Jer-ry!” She was sure that wherever he’d gone in his house, Jerry would hear them. But she was at the door now, and when it opened too easily at her pull, it slammed her in the face.
She gasped and pressed both hands over the bridge of her nose. Her cheekbones ached. Maybe she’d have a black eye. Behind her people were hooting, and she knew she must look dumb. Stephanie said, “She’s hurt, you guys. You think that’s funny?” but they kept on. She hated them. She went through the door and shut it tight after her, hoping it would lock her in.
She was in a short hallway. There was a ceiling light at the other end, but it wasn’t very bright. The carpet was green and the walls were white, like in the living room, and there was nothing on the walls. The only room opening off the hall was at the very end, under the light, on the left-hand side.
Her nose hurt. Her head ached. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her coat, trying not to think about it because it was gross, and started down the hall toward the closed door.
Voices. She stopped, the backs of both hands pressed against the walls for balance and direction. In Jerry’s living room behind her, the kids were talking loud. The wall on her right must be an outside wall, because she could hear somebody whistling to a dog. But she was sure there were also voices ahead and to her left, from behind that door, and that Jerry’s was one of them.
He came out of the doorway while she was standing there listening for him. In the split second before he saw her, Lucy stared at him and felt funny in her throat and between her legs.
“Lucy?”
He pulled a key out of his pocket and locked the door, tested the knob. She’d never seen anybody lock a door inside a house before.
He was coming toward her. There wasn’t much distance between them; it was a short hall, and he was walking fast now, not at all unsteadily. His head and body blocked the light, and she was covered with his big dim shadow.
“Lucy.” He said her name again, not a question this time. His voice wasn’t very loud and she couldn’t see his face, but she knew she’d displeased him. “What are you doing?”
She backed up a couple of steps. “Where’s Rae?”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question. That surprised her. “You just have to live with the fact that nobody knows, and nobody may ever know.” He shook his big shadowy head as if he felt sorry for her. “I’ll bet you still look for her everywhere, don’t you? Even in my house, where you know you won’t find her. That’s a normal part of the grieving process, honey. We call it denial.”
Honey. “I saw her,” Lucy said.
“Where?”
“Here.”
Jerry looked from side to side and spread his hands. “Here?”
“I saw her,” Lucy insisted. “She was looking out that door into the living room.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, then looked to make sure that she hadn’t gotten turned around, that the door she’d come through was still there. It was. She fumbled behind her and rested her palms flat against it.
“Did anyone else see her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s just because you want so badly to see her, Lucy. Because it’s so hard to accept that death is final.”
“She’s not dead,” Lucy said stubbornly, but now she wasn’t sure again.
“We’ll deal with those feelings in group.”
“No.”
“Lucy, everybody feels those things, especially at your age, especially when you’ve gone through hard times. You don’t have to hide them.”
“They’ll think I’m really stupid,” she said, and, just saying that, felt as if she were crossing Federal Boulevard without a light again.
Jerry had taken more steps than she’d realized, and now his hands were on her shoulders and he was pulling her toward him, turning her around. For a second she thought he was going to spank her, or kiss her, or carry her away in his arms. He pulled her back against his, big, hard, warm body just enough to reach around her and open the door.
The living room was white and green and noisy. She’d been away from it for so long she wouldn’t know what to do once she went back in. But she didn’t have any choice. Jerry pushed her through, hard enough that she stumbled. Then he came through, too, and locked the door behind them with another key.
It hadn’t been locked before. He must not want anybody else going into the inside parts of his house, where she had just been. Tingling with a fearful feeling of being too special, she sat down beside Julia as Jerry said, “All right, people, let’s get started. We have a lot of work to do today.”
20
It was darker outside her head than in. Inside her head were all sorts of colors and shapes. She saw them when she closed her eyes, and Jerry had taught her that they were always there, and
that they had names. Electricity. Synapses. Terror. Rage. And that they could be used.
Outside her head, when she opened her eyes, almost no light at all was coming through the heavy curtains at Jerry’s one living room window, and there weren’t any lights on in the room. She could see just vague silhouettes of the people in the circle all around her, and couldn’t tell who was who. That wasn’t supposed to matter. You were supposed to trust them all.
“Concentrate,” Jerry murmured. “Celebrate what you feel.”
She knew where he was. She always knew where he was and what he wanted her to do.
Obediently she held her hands out a little way from her body and closed her eyes again. Red came to her, red with fat fingers and long teeth. She tried to make her breathing even more shallow and irregular than it already was. Pretty soon she’d have to fall.
“Feel it as much as you can. Don’t run away from it. Run into it.”
She’d tried to do this every time since they’d started meeting at Jerry’s. Stephanie and Billy could do it, but she was too afraid. Jerry said that was because she put her fear in the wrong place. Today was her birthday. She was twelve today. She’d never be eleven again. Nobody in the group knew that, including Jerry, and she didn’t want them to know. But she wasn’t a little kid anymore and today, finally, she was going to do this right.
Mike coughed. Somebody’s knuckles cracked. Jerry said again, in a singsong voice, “Concentrate.”
When she got home, there would be cake and ice cream and presents. Mom was fixing hamburgers and french fries for dinner because she thought that was still Lucy’s favorite meal, when the truth was she couldn’t care less.
“Concentrate,” he said again, so softly that she thought she might be the only one who heard. “Find the rage and go into it.”
She hated Ethan. She hated Rae. She hated Mom and Dad and Priscilla and Dominic and Molly and Cory. She hated Stacey. She hated school. She hated herself. She hated herself.
“That’s right,” Jerry breathed. Lucy thrilled, and redness grew.
“It hurts,” she whimpered.
“Of course it hurts, honey,” he told her gently. “But it’s real.”
“You’re making it hurt worse.”
“I make you face what’s already inside you. So you can get rid of it.”
“You make it worse,” she insisted. She could hardly believe she was arguing with Jerry. “I do get mad sometimes, and I get scared, and I miss my sister and my brother. But you make me feel worse than I feel.”
“It hurts because you’re afraid of it,” Jerry told her. She’d heard him say that before. “It hurts because you’re trying to hold it in.”
“It’ll kill somebody,” Lucy moaned. “It hurts. It’ll kill me.”
“Use it,” Jerry urged. “Give it away. Give it to me.”
She was falling backward. She tried to stop herself but couldn’t think how. She was falling backward and sideways and from the outside in. Redness rose, sank, spread. She was falling.
Jerry caught her.
He’d been standing behind her all the time and she hadn’t, after all, known he was there.
He caught her but she kept on falling. She thought she would break right through his body into the hollow inside, which used to be filled with redness, too.
But other hands were on her then. Under her shoulders, under her knees, at her sides just under her breasts. “Put your hands on her,” Jerry was saying, and, “That’s right, that’s right, put your hands on her,” and the rage was draining out of her into all of them, into him.
Jerry leaned over her. His face was upside down. He lowered his upside-down face and whispered almost without sound, a very secret message meant only for her, “Happy birthday, darling.” Then he kissed her full on the mouth.
21
Lucy lay on her bed. It was the evening of her birthday, almost the end of her first day of being twelve. They’d had the hamburgers and french fries, the chocolate cake and strawberry ice cream. She’d blown out the candles on the first try, and Molly and Dominic had clapped because now she’d get her wish. That was a lie and it made her mad that they were allowed to believe it, but she didn’t say anything. Priscilla tried to get her to tell what her wish was, but she wouldn’t because then it wouldn’t come true.
She’d had to go to school today even though it was her birthday. Mr. Michaelson had said happy birthday after history class. How had he known? He said didn’t she want her diary back now and she took it to shut him up, but it wasn’t hers anymore.
Maybe everybody would leave her alone for a while now, because they thought she was up here playing with her birthday presents. She wasn’t, though. The presents didn’t have anything to do with her; they were just somebody else’s idea of what she’d like. Nobody knew her.
Except Jerry Johnston. He knew her better than she knew herself. He’d given her the best and most confusing present of all. The kiss.
She could only think about the kiss a little bit at a time. His big face lowering over hers, upside down but fitting. His open mouth, teeth, tongue.
Afterward, she’d been really tired, in a way that had felt sort of good, and Jerry had seemed bigger than before, stronger, with more energy. There hadn’t been any sunken places on him. But she could only think about that a little bit at a time.
The books she’d gotten for her birthday were piled on Rae’s dresser, and as far as she was concerned they could stay there forever. One was from Pris, about a summer romance, with this truly nerdy-looking guy and girl on the cover. Priscilla didn’t know anything about romance yet. She was still a little girl. She didn’t know anything about anything. Jerry didn’t even know her name. But he will, Lucy thought, and didn’t like thinking it. It won’t be long.
One book was from Mom, about invisible things in the world, because once a long time ago Lucy had asked a few questions about mites; you had to be careful what you showed an interest in around here.
Dom had given her the Tina Turner tape she’d asked for. He kept saying he bought it with his own money. Big deal. It was in the new tape player, her big present from Mom and Dad, and she had the earphones on, but the volume was so low that she could just barely hear the whooshing and clicking of the tape as it turned. Right now the earphones were to keep sound out, not to let it in. Tina Turner didn’t have anything to say to her. Tina Turner didn’t know Ethan Michael Brill or Rae Ellen Brill. Or Jerry Johnston.
Happy birthday, he’d said with his mouth over hers, and she’d felt the words instead of hearing them. How did he know?
Darling, he’d said with his mouth over hers.
Somebody knocked on her door, and it wasn’t the first time. All of a sudden Lucy thought maybe people had been knocking on her door for hours, knocking and then running away.
She wouldn’t answer. She’d pretend she was listening to the tape and couldn’t hear the knocking. She’d pretend she was asleep.
Lucy looked around her room and was disgusted. It was a little kid’s room, a baby’s room. From here she could reach the stuffed animals on her shelves, and the big dancing doll Grandma had made with elastics on her feet that fit over your feet so she could dance with you. She stuffed them all under her bed. Then she stood on her bed and ripped all seven pictures of Emilio Estevez off the wall. Little pieces of green paint came off with the tape. Dad would be mad. If he even noticed.
For a minute she stood up there, trying to keep her balance on the bouncy mattress, crumbling the pictures into tighter and tighter balls. The blotches on the green wall reminded her that there was other paint and wallpaper underneath, that other people she’d never even heard of had lived in this room.
She got off the bed and rummaged through her desk drawer till she found the picture she’d cut out of the newspaper a couple of weeks ago of that guy from Libya that everybody thought was so awful. Muammar Qaddafi. His fist was raised and his eyes were blazing. He was so cute.
Smoothing the square of newspape
r with her palm, Lucy wondered what it would be like to live in Libya. She didn’t know for sure where Libya was, except that it was far away from here.
She got tape and climbed back on the bed. The picture of Muammar Qaddafi didn’t cover most of the places where the paint had peeled off, and she knew it was making more. She didn’t care. Muammar Qaddafi was so cute. He didn’t let anybody push him around.
There was another knock and then the door opened and Mom stuck her head in. Lucy frowned and turned the volume up, but not before she heard Mom ask, “Lucy? You all right?” Since Ethan died and Rae disappeared, you couldn’t get any privacy around here.
Mom came in, uninvited, and stood in front of her. Lucy closed her eyes and listened to the end of “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” But that was the last song on the tape and so she couldn’t help hearing Mom ask, “Did you have a good birthday?”
“It was fine,” Lucy said automatically.
“Next year you’ll be an official teenager.”
Big deal, Lucy thought furiously, but despite herself she did feel a little thrill.
“I remember when I was twelve.”
I don’t want to hear it don’t tell me. When you were twelve you didn’t know terrible things were going to happen in your life. Don’t talk about it don’t talk about when Rae and Ethan were twelve I don’t want to hear it.
But Mom said, “Twelve can also be a really confusing time. I remember being unhappy a lot.”
Lucy lay rigid with the earphones still in her ears. What was she being asked to admit to? She watched her mother’s face and could see the twelve-year-old girl there, could also see the old lady with all white hair.
Mom bent and kissed her forehead. When Mom kissed her, nothing left Lucy’s body or mind; nothing was taken from her and used. Lucy put her arms around her mother’s neck and held on tight, and Mom lifted her a little off the bed to cradle her.
They stayed like that for a few minutes. Lucy said into her mother’s shoulder, “I’m too old for this. I’m not a baby. I’m twelve years old.”
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