Dad grabbed the collar of his shirt. It was a green shirt, one Lucy had never seen before. “Where’s my daughter, you filthy bastard? Where is she?”
Dad had lifted Jerry off his feet. She saw the surprise on Dad’s face when he realized that, and he set Jerry back down.
“Take your hands off me, Mr. Brill, or I’ll file assault charges as well,” Jerry said, and Dad took his hands away.
“What do you mean ‘as well’?” Mom demanded. “What are you threatening us with?”
“When I got here, the three small children were here by themselves. That’s mild neglect.”
“It was just for a few minutes,” Mom protested. “Priscilla—”
“That combined with Ethan’s problems and Rae’s mysterious disappearance and Lucy’s behavior problems in school indicates to me that this is a highly dysfunctional family.”
“We tried to get them help—”
“Stop it, Carole,” Dad snapped. “We don’t have to defend ourselves to this—buffoon.”
“Well, actually, you do,” Jerry said reasonably.
Lucy noticed that he kept standing up on his tiptoes and then putting his heels down again, up and down, up and down, as if he were about to float away. She didn’t want him to float away. She wanted to float away with him. She wondered what a buffoon was. Dad had no right to call Jerry names.
“Because, you see, if you insist on preventing Lucy from participating in therapy with me, I will report child abuse and neglect to the Department of Social Services. They would be required to investigate. Chances are good that they would remove the children, at least Lucy, in her own best interests. I do, after all, know most of the workers down there.”
“I can’t believe anybody would think we’re abusive parents.” Mom couldn’t seem to stop shaking her head.
“Ever spank your kids?”
“Dominic got spanked yesterday for lying,” Lucy said. “I heard it.”
Jerry just nodded.
“Get out of this house!” Dad thundered.
He didn’t touch Jerry and he didn’t move toward him, so Lucy was disappointed when Jerry turned to go. “Wait!” she cried, and ran after him.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Jerry said, just to her, at the same time that Dad caught her from behind and wouldn’t let her go.
26
“Can he really do that?”
“Jesus, Carole, I don’t know. He is a socia1 worker, and because of Lucy we’re clients again. That gives him power. Makes him dangerous.”
“If he heard you saying that, he’d use it as more evidence of how ‘dysfunctional’ we are. He’d probably write it down somewhere.”
“Well, I think we’d better proceed on the assumption that he isn’t bluffing.”
“What are you saying, Tony? That we ought to allow him access to Lucy again because of what he might do to the family if we refuse?”
“No.”
“Good. Because if anything, we have more reason to protect her now.”
“I’m saying we can’t afford to underestimate the enemy. We have to understand the risk we’re taking.”
“Well, I don’t understand. Why is Jerry Johnston our enemy?”
“I don’t know. But there’s more to Jerry Johnston than we know.”
“There’s something—I don’t know—desperate about him,” Mom said. “Like an addict who can’t get a big enough fix.”
Dad agreed. “I don’t trust him. I can’t say exactly how, but I think he’s dangerous. It has something to do with other people’s turmoil. He needs it somehow. He stirs it up, exaggerates it, especially in teenagers when they’re in so much turmoil anyway, and then somehow he uses it for his own purposes. But I can’t pin it down to anything more specific than that, and that’s all intuition and—metaphysics.”
Lucy had never heard the word metaphysics before. More adult secret code. The older she got, the more of it she thought she learned, but there was always a whole bunch of stuff that grown-ups kept hidden from her.
“This is the farthest thing from metaphysical,” Mom was saying. “One of our children is dead. One is missing. Lucy’s in danger. If there’s any pattern to this at all, Priscilla is next. Tony, we have got to do something. We can’t just stand here and let our children be taken. Used, one after another.”
Lucy waited for Dad to say something that would make sense out of all this, but he didn’t. She should have known better than to think he would.
Finally Mom asked him, “Do you still think Jerry knows something about Rae and Ethan?”
“Yes.”
“Then you should tell the police.”
“Tell the police what? All I have is a hunch, and that’s probably just me looking for answers and reasons when there aren’t any.”
“They really are gone, aren’t they? Our babies really are gone. I always thought I’d die if anything happened to any of my children. Now I’ve lost two, and I’m amazed at how much pain a human being can stand. But God, Tony, I don’t want to lose Lucy, too.”
Then Mom was making that noise again that she’d made so long for Ethan and then for Rae. Lucy wouldn’t have thought a person could make a noise like that. It sounded like one of those dolls from the olden days that you tipped backward and it cried. Just a really short cry and then it stopped, and when you tipped it again, it made another short sharp cry. Lucy’d almost gotten used to hearing it. In the night, in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon with the football game on, when she came into the house after school. Now Mom was making that awful rhythmic noise for her, the noise that took the place of breathing.
The sound changed. First it got kind of muffled, as if Mom had hidden her face in something soft. Then it got softer and the rhythm changed; it wasn’t just Mom’s breathing that made the sound now, but some kind of movement, like dancing or swinging on a swing. Dad said out loud, “I love you, Carole,” and then Lucy, crouched in the hall outside their bedroom with her duffel bag under her elbow, knew what was going on.
Her parents were having sexual intercourse. Maybe they were making another baby. Maybe she’d have another brother or sister whose life was starting right this minute, and she was there. At the same instant that she was getting ready to run away forever.
For just an instant, she wanted to stay here. But she didn’t see how she could. She turned away from her parents’ door. Of course, they didn’t notice.
Patches followed her downstairs, meowing loudly for food. She filled his bowl and patted his head a few times, feeling sad. But he just kept flicking his ears and tossing his head and eating, and so finally she left him alone.
Very quietly she lifted the phone receiver and dialed Jerry’s number, wincing at the beeps the numbers made when she pressed them. He’d been expecting her, because he answered in the middle of the first ring. With her hand cupped over her mouth, she whispered, “Jerry?”
“Are you ready, my love?”
It was hard for her to talk then, but she managed to say, “Yes. Can you come get me?”
“I’ll meet you in front of your parents’ house in twenty minutes. It’s a gray van.”
Your parents’ house. That made her feel funny, but he was right; it wasn’t her house anymore. “Okay,” she said, and nodded, and carefully hung up. The receiver made a tiny click when she set it back on the hook, but she didn’t think anybody had heard.
Twenty minutes. What would she do for twenty minutes? It was too cold to wait outside. She put on her heavy coat. Last spring she’d gone shopping with Dad, Priscilla, and Rae, and they’d all bought coats on sale, and her sleeves were already too short. She put on her boots and scarf and gloves. The red scarf and gloves had been a Christmas present from Molly. Lucy felt tears hot behind her eyes, but she was tired of crying, tired of everybody crying, and she held them back.
She picked up a Time magazine from the arm of the couch and flipped through it. There was a picture of some old Russian guys, and pictures of that earthquake. She didn’t
care. It had nothing to do with her. She was running away from home. Jerry was on his way to get her. She looked some more at the picture of the mother crying in the grandmother’s arms, and then put the magazine back down.
Patches squatted right in front of her and peed on the living room carpet. Lucy stared at him in disbelief. When he was done, he arched his back and stretched his tail up straight with just a kink at the very end, then rubbed himself once back and forth across her ankles and walked away. She ought to clean up the puddle, but she didn’t have time to go find the ammonia and a rag and, anyway, it wasn’t her house anymore.
She hadn’t been watching a clock or anything, but it must be time. Making sure to step way over the wet spot on the rug, she carried her bag to the front door, and started to go out. Then she unzipped the side pocket and took out her diary. Holding it away from her as if it were a mouse by the tail, she carried it gingerly back to the dining room and left it on the table. She wouldn’t need it once she was out of here. She wouldn’t be able to keep secrets from Jerry anyway.
Patches tried to go out when she did. It was too cold for him, and she shut the door quicker and harder than she meant to. But if anybody heard the door slam it was too late anyway, because there was Jerry Johnston’s gray van waiting for her in front of the house. Lucy ran down the steps, slipped and almost fell, ran through the snow to the curb, and climbed up into the high van beside Jerry.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. When he put his arm around her and drew her to him, she felt herself sink into his down jacket and then into the soft side of his rib cage and belly. He kissed her cheek. His lips were cold and she hardly felt his breath. It was warm and dark “in the van, with little bursts of light here and there where streetlights and snow reflected off metal.
By the time they got to the end of her street, Lucy realized they weren’t headed toward Jerry’s house. “Where are we going?” Her voice was loud and echoey, and she was embarrassed to even be asking the question.
“I have another house in another part of the city.” He glanced over at her; she saw the quick blue flash of his eyes. “You’ll be joining others there.”
“Others?”
That was a funny way to put it.
She didn’t want there to be any “others.”
Maybe he meant Rae. She thought about that for a minute.
She didn’t even want it to be Rae.
They went around another corner. In the dark and snow and from the van’s high seat, Lucy couldn’t recognize any landmarks. She didn’t think they could have gone very far away from her neighborhood yet, but she had no idea where they were.
It didn’t matter. She was with Jerry. “Other troubled kids,” he explained. “Other people your age who are angry and sad and scared, like you.”
“Who?”
Jerry reached over and patted her knee. Her jeans were stiff, her legs so cold they burned, and even though his hand rested there for a minute or two, her knee was no warmer than it had been before. “We’re being followed,” he said suddenly, and put his hand back on the wheel to turn the van hard around another corner. Lucy slid away from him across the seat and scrambled to right herself.
Like a little kid, she pulled her knees up under her and peered over the back of the seat. The back window was a small, steamed-up, grayish rectangle at the far end of the gray box that was the van, and she couldn’t see much of anything through it except headlights.
But when Jerry stopped for a red light, swearing under his breath, the other car pulled up on his side. It was weird to be looking down like this. Lucy recognized the dented white body and blue-gray top of her mother’s car. Behind the wheel—leaning way far forward to see up into the van, gesturing frantically with her mouth and hands, the white streak glittering like ice all through her hair—was Mom.
“That’s my mother!”
“Shit, I know that. I thought you’d have enough sense not to let anybody know you were leaving.”
He was mad at her. Lucy couldn’t stand it. Suddenly she wanted more than anything to be in that car with her mother, on her way home. She grabbed the door handle.
She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t leave Jerry.
She dropped to her hands and knees between the seats. The gearshift pressed into her thigh. She pushed past it and crawled through the long, dim, empty van to the back window. She sat on her knees and leaned her forehead against it. It was cold and wet between her and her mother. Her mother couldn’t reach her, to punish her or rescue her or tell her what to do. She was alone with Jerry in the closed van, on the nighttime street, in the whole world.
“Goddammit,” Jerry said, and Lucy knew he was swearing at her. She pressed the side of her face hard against the window glass, for the moment understanding that she was in as much danger here as anywhere else.
The van shot forward through the intersection while the light was still red. Lucy grabbed the metal ridge around the window to keep from tumbling backward, and thought how easy it would be to get your fingers stuck in there. A car on the other street passed barely behind them and in front of Lucy’s mother’s car, honking its horn wildly, and then there was a whole stream of cars.
A busy street for this time of night, Lucy thought. Maybe it was Federal Boulevard. If it was, she’d have some idea where she was.
By the time there was a break in the traffic and the blurry headlights that were Mom’s car could start after them again, they were almost a whole block ahead. Mom ran the red light, too. Lucy hugged herself in surprise. This must be really important for Mom to break the law.
Jerry turned the van sharply to the right and Lucy fell against the wheel well, hitting her shoulder and the side of her head. When she sat up again, they were hurtling down an alley. She, saw garbage cans, parked cars with snow on their roofs, a couple of garage doors with words spray-painted on them that she couldn’t read.
Mom’s car nosed into the alley after them. There must have been a hill, because Lucy slid toward the window as the van went up and then toward the seat as it went back down, and for a few seconds Mom’s headlights weren’t there. But before they came out of the other end of the alley onto the street, the dented and dirty old white and blue car was there again, and gaining. It always embarrassed Lucy to be seen in that car.
They sped along streets she was sure she’d never seen before, careened through neighborhoods she couldn’t quite picture anybody living in. Houses and trees hardly looked like houses and trees as they streamed out behind the van like ribbons, like tin cans tied to the bumper of a newlyweds’ car.
They jumped over curbs, into and out of parking lots. Lucy bumped her knee. They squeezed through alleys so skinny that she thought sure they’d smash into one wall or the other. Mom stayed with them. Lucy hadn’t known Mom could drive like that.
Then, all of a sudden, they were in a park somewhere, and Mom’s car wasn’t behind them anymore. Tears of abandonment flooded Lucy’s eyes, hot at first and then prickly cold on her cheeks. If Mom really loved her, she’d have caught up with the van.
It excited her, scared her, made her mad to see so plainly that there were things her parents couldn’t do for her no matter how much they wanted to. That was what Rae and Ethan must have learned before she did. That was what it must mean to grow up.
There were lots of tall dark trees here, and open snowy spaces, and they’d lost Mom. Jerry still drove fast for a while on the road that spiraled deeper and deeper into the park. Then he slowed down. Then he came to a stop in a grove of blackish pine trees taller than the van and close together, with snow on their branches like the streak in Lucy’s mother’s hair. Jerry turned the engine off, and in the silence she could hear him panting. “Come here,” he said.
She hesitated, staring out the back window. There was no one else in the park.
“Lucy,” he said. His voice was weak, and he was slumped back in the seat. “Please, sweetheart, come here.”
He needed her. When she crawl
ed to him, the van shifted a little under her weight. She pushed between the seats, between the gearshift and Jerry’s thigh; Jerry’s thigh gave, as if it were making itself hollow to take her in.
He put his arms around her and she relaxed into him. Then he pushed her down across the seat and wedged one massive leg over her. She struggled to free herself but couldn’t; he wasn’t very heavy, but he was bigger, stronger, and he needed her to stay where she was.
“It’s okay, Lucy, it’s okay.”
He was murmuring against her ear, against her temple. She felt her own pulse there, and his tongue and teeth against it.
“You feel rage. It’s good to feel rage. Rage is nourishing. Feel it, my love. Feel it as big and as full as you can, and then give it to me.”
Rage.
Rage at Ethan for dying.
Rage at Rae for going away.
Rage at Mom and Dad for not keeping anybody safe, at Mom for coming after her tonight and then losing her, at Stacey for not really being her friend, at the world because it wasn’t the way she wanted it to be.
Rage hot and cold, red and flashing silver and every color, bursting out of her ears and mouth and vagina. She was screaming. She was moaning. Jerry pressed his open mouth over hers and sucked.
“That’s good, that’s good, oh, you’re so good, you’re so beautiful. Give it to me, Lucy, give it to me.”
Then his huge, heavy, growing body stiffened and shook on top of her. He groaned into her open mouth, and she knew she was dying or being born again or turning into something she’d never been before.
27
He carried her over the threshold of his secret place. Without words or pictures in her mind, she was aware of his sheepskin coat under her cheek and ear: the different colors of brown in it, the way the plush spread part, the odor of lanolin.
Vaguely she thought to put her arm up round his neck. She tried, but it wouldn’t stay. Even if she couldn’t hang on to him, she knew he wouldn’t let her go.
She was hollow. Her body was hollow; she didn’t think there were any organs left inside. Her mind was hollow. She wasn’t scared or mad or hurting anymore, or tired or hungry. She didn’t have to go to the bathroom. She didn’t miss Rae or Ethan, didn’t hate Mom and Dad, didn’t worry about the little kids. Nothing itched or cramped. All she was was with Jerry, in his arms.
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