by Joseph Grady
“Lucy, please, come in. Good to see you. Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable.” He shook her hand at the door, and invited her to sit in the chair in front of his desk. He straightened his tie and asked, “Can I get you something to drink? Water? Ice tea?”
“No thanks.”
“Alright, well, let’s get straight to it, I guess,” he said, taking a seat in his captain’s chair behind a long desk. “I’ve just had a look at your chore reports from Juanita and your mother. It looks very positive, as always. Your mother’s report also tells me that your attendance at extra-curricular activities is up to 96%. Those are encouraging figures. That’s a four percent increase over last quarter. I see that you’ve joined the cross-country team. That’ll look great on your college applications. After two years you’ll be eligible to letter in that sport. This looks like a great performance overall. Keep up the good work.”
Lucy remained silent. Her father shuffled through some more pages, “And I see you’ve already drawn up a first draft of your goals and objectives for personal growth for freshman year printed out on official family letterhead. I do apologize. With the meetings getting bumped forward in Dubai, I didn’t get a chance to review these before our sit down meeting tonight. We’ll table that discussion to our next appointment in November, alright? Well, let’s have a look at those grades.”
She sat forward, set the leather bound folder on the desk, and leaned over to slide it across to him, getting excited, but keeping a straight face.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, scanning down the page. “Spanish, A+, Freshman P.E., A-, Geography, A, English Literature, A-, Advanced Algebra, B-, Chemistry, A-, Photography, A+.”
Lucy looked down, and forced herself not to smile too much.
“Well, that certainly is different,” he studied the page again and again. “One B minus.” He started rubbing his forehead, and then his cleanly shaven chin. “Indeed, that is an improvement. Of course, last year, you had an even number of classes, and an equal number of B’s and C’s… This year, on the other hand, is really quite different. Definitely very different.”
Lucy stopped smiling.
His gaze turned slightly agitated, and he started to shake his head back and forth making hmmm noises as he thought to himself. “Yep. A nice even number of B’s and C’s. Here we’ve got just one B, and an odd number of classes. Alright. Alright. That’s alright, I guess. That’ll do.”
“But it’s an advanced algebra course,” she finally said something. “It’s weighted the same as an A. Look at the top. It’s still a 4.0. That’s, like, a whole 1.6 points higher than last quarter.”
He continued to scratch his chin. She bit her lip and dug her fingernails into her palms to stop her eyes from moistening. Her father now had his elbows on his desk, and his forehead in his hands. He raised his voice, more so trying to convince himself than Lucy. “It’s fine. It’s fine. No, it’s not just fine, it’s great. It’s just great.” He started breathing hard and, ever so slightly, rocking back and forth. “It’s just that… it’s just that… you know I like symmetry. You know I just like to see clean and clear results that I can expect. But this is fine. No, this is great. It’s just great. You did good.”
Lucy crossed her arms and looked down.
He stayed in his trance for a few more seconds, then stopped rocking back and forth and said very quietly, his hands still folded in front of his face, “Why don’t you go tell your brother John that it’s his turn?”
“Five minutes early?” she sniffed.
“No. Wait a minute, and have him come in four minutes early.”
Later that evening, their mother, Amy, and all three kids were lined up outside the house in front of the black airport limo. He came out of the house at precisely 6:14pm, shook all of the kids’ hands, pecked his wife on the cheek, got in the car and sped off. That was also the first night their mother ever dared to change the schedule. She sent Juanita home early, got in the car, and returned twenty minutes later with a case of white wine.
Amy changed the dress code for dinner from business formal to business casual and ordered Chinese food. She set the table with the Flora Danica porcelain set, which was usually only ever seen on Christmas and Thanksgiving. If you’re gonna have Chinese, there’s no sense in not using the china set, right? Everyone was poured a large glass of wine.
At the beginning of the meal, their mother hoisted up her Waterford crystal wine glass and proposed a toast, “And our shrink says I’m the enabler. Here’s to co-dependency all around, kids. Cheers.”
“I’m not hungry,” said Lucy.
“We’re going to have a nice meal.”
“May I be excused?”
“Lucy, I would like just one relaxed meal in this house.”
“Mom.”
“Honey, your Dad’s been going through a lot.”
“What else is new?”
“Don’t you dare start with that tone of yours.”
It took all of Lucy’s strength not to roll her eyes.
“As we all know,” continued her mom, “they stopped using Led Zeppelin in Cadillac commercials and he finally realized how old he is… well we’ve all been under a lot more stress, that’s all. So let’s just have a laid back evening. Would it really be that hard?”
“Mom, I just —”
“Absolutely not. You will stay and we will socialize.”
“Can you please pass the soy sauce?” asked Kelly.
Young Lucy stumbled upstairs to her rooms after her third generous glass of white wine and not enough sesame chicken. I was on the couch in her sitting room, reading Kelly’s latest issue of Seventeen. She slammed the door behind her, pointed at me, and yelled, “What the hell were you thinking?”
I turned my paws up and shrugged my shoulders.
“This is all your fault, you know! If you weren’t always sleeping, you would’ve been there on Tuesday for that stupid pop quiz!”
I tried to change the direction of the conversation. “You know, in the past when young men found themselves frustrated, I used to always try to find the source of the frustration, and see if we could channel that energy towards something positive, like hunting, or some kind of mission — stuff like that, y’know? You can only lick your wounds for so long. Channel that energy. Find the source and channel it. It’ll make you feel much better.”
She paused and considered my advice.
“Hunting,” she repeated to herself. “Mission.”
“Or whatever the equivalent of that is for twenty-first century teenage girls.”
“I’ll channel that energy,” she said. “I’ll let her know what she is. I’ll give her what she deserves.”
“Who?”
“That asshole who made today possible. I’ll channel some energy and tell her what I think of her.”
She left her sitting room and went into her bedroom. I continued reading that month’s featured article: “Ten Times the Disney Princesses Totally Explained Your Life.” Lucy came out of the bedroom five minutes later in jeans, a Regis Jesuit hoodie, sneakers, a backpack on one shoulder, a bandana tied around her neck, and a mission consciousness. She left without saying anything to me.
I followed her down the stairs. “Where are you going? Hey, I’m talking to you! What are you up to?”
In the garage she got on her bicycle — there were an even number of very expensive bikes in the garage — and headed down the half mile tree lined driveway that led off the family property. It’s hard for me to keep up with her on foot for long distances, so imagine a bicycle. And she was hauling. I followed at a distance as fast as possible, sniffing the air and ground as I went. Three miles from home, her scent turned off the main road into a large housing subdivision full of hundreds of identical houses and lawns. When I finally caught up to her, she was standing on a sidewalk next to her bike, with the handkerchief covering her face, holding a bottle of spray paint, and admiring a large red letter B that now decorated the front of
someone’s garage. The mailbox bore the same last name as her math teacher, Mrs. Fleschner.
She turned to me and said calmly, “It’s not working.”
“What’s not working?”
“You said I’d feel better if I channelled my energy.”
“Well…” I was at a loss for words. “I’m not sure this kind of thing counts as channelling energy.”
She took off her backpack and removed a small crowbar.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“You’re right. I need to channel my energy in other ways.”
“Give me that crowbar, right now.”
She tried to make a break for it and run away from me, but luckily I reacted quickly enough to catch up with her in the front yard, just in time to snag the crowbar and hold onto it. She pulled back, and started screaming, “Give it back! It’s mine! Give it back!”
The handkerchief fell from her face. She put one foot up on my gut and pushed me away, while pulling back on the crowbar with both of her arms as hard as possible. Unfortunately for her, I was three hundred pounds heavier, and she didn’t have any chance of ever prying it from my grip. But she still kept on screaming, “Give it back! Give it back, right now, or else!”
When Mr. and Mrs. Fleschner looked out the window with the police on the phone, all they saw was one of Mrs. Fleschner’s more talented students with one leg held aloft in the air, holding a crowbar out in front of her with straight arms, and yelling at a point in space just beyond the crowbar, “Give it back!”
“I’m going to let go,” I tried to tell her. “Lucy, listen to me. I’m going to let go.”
But she wouldn’t listen, and kept screaming and tugging. So I just let go, and she tumbled back hard. She took the fall like a champ, though, because she sprang up right away, ran over to the Fleschner mailbox and treated it like a piñata. By the time the two cop cars pulled up, she had dropped the crow bar by her feet and was breathing hard, standing on the sidewalk and looking down through wet cheeks at the pile of wood and metal that had once been a mailbox.
On a Thursday in October eleven years later, Brian came home from class and opened the door to Lucy’s room.
“Oh, sorry,” he said. At first he was startled to have woken her up, but then he was startled that she was there at all, lying in her orange Ikea chair — the mabbled palioderm that was more trib than bibble — with her feet up on her antique leather ottoman — the one they had flunged during their Appalachian werbgurbling expedition last June. An ice pack was perched on top of her right fist.
“What’s going on?” she asked, shielding her eyes from the light now streaming in from the hallway. “Did you want first dibs on all of my stuff?”
“No, I just wanted to make sure… nothing… just wanted to see if… if… nevermind. Sorry, I thought you’d already left this morning.”
“Look in there.” She pointed at her trashcan.
It was empty, except for two scraps of paper at the bottom. Brian pulled them out, and put them together at the place where they had been ripped apart. It was a one-way ticket for a Swissair flight from Zürich to Denver.
CHAPTER TEN
ROMA, SEI BELLA.
On Saturday morning, Lucy’s eyes pealed open in bed at the sound of yelling and gunfire coming from Brian’s room next door. She closed her eyes and let out a noise that was somewhere between a sigh and a groan. She rolled onto her left side, and stacked a pillow on top of her right ear, with her right arm on top of it. No results. The noise was too loud, and the pillow didn’t help. She rolled onto her back, and hit the wall next to her bed once with her right fist, but she immediately had to use a choice word and choke back tears. The impact with the wall gave her a sharp reminder of the bruised and purple state of her right fist. Andrew’s skull had not been a soft target. So she reached across with her left fist and banged on the wall yelling, “Brian!”
The shooting sounds let up, but Scott’s voice fired back, “Don’t speak unless spoken to!”
“Guys! It’s Saturday morning!”
“Ms. Fox, don’t think we didn’t hear that word that you used a second ago. You had better think about cleaning out your mouth, young Lady,” Scott yelled back from the other room. “And give us a break. It’s ten thirty. I slept in more than normal too, but I’ve been awake for three hours.”
The explosions and bedlam set off again. Lucy made another attempt at banging on the wall and yelling, “Shut up!”
So Scott took a different approach, “The rest of the world is awake and taking the bull by the horns, Lucy. We’re getting stuff done. You can spend your life zoned out and detached or you can wake up and focus. You had better take some time and think long and hard about what you’re doing with your life.”
They gave her twenty seconds to stare at her ceiling and contemplate the direction of her life, before Brian lobbed another plasma grenade and Scott went to town with the sniper rifle. Lucy closed her eyes and pressed both of her palms to her ears. This is how I found her when I came into her room, after having spent the entire morning out searching around Rome.
I took hold of the edge of her mattress and gave it a shake.
“Are you serious?” she yelled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing in here? Get the fu — ” she opened her eyes and saw that it was me. “Oh… sorry… I thought you were…”
“You thought I was…”
“Nobody… um… ” she sat up in bed, clearing the sleep out of her eyes. “Can nobody ever let me just sleep in this place?”
I threw a green North Face rain jacket onto her lap.
She yawned and fiddled with the zipper, “Oh, hey, you found my rain jacket.” She stopped moving her hands and squinted at it, as a vague and distant memory slowly passed through her mind. Her head shot up at me and with her eyes wide open she yelled, “You found my rain jacket!”
The shooting in the room next door came to a stop again.
“What was that?” yelled Brian.
“Nothing,” she hollered back.
“Lucy,” said Scott. “What did we tell you about not speaking unless being spoken to?”
She didn’t respond.
“That’s right!” yelled Scott. The shooting picked up again.
“Yeah, and you’re never going to believe the best part about that jacket,” I told her. “There’s blood on the sleeves.”
Her hands flew off the jacket into the air, and she crawled out from under it, to ball herself up on the other side of the bed, looking suspiciously back at the jacket.
“That’s disgusting!” she said to me, now keeping her voice down so that they wouldn’t hear her in the other room. “I’m not a germaphobe, or something — like some people here — but come on! You don’t touch blood. It could have AIDS all over it or something.”
“That blood’s been on that jacket since Monday. Viruses don’t survive that long outside the body.”
“Yeah, but still,” she responded, employing that universal comeback, valid in any situation, regardless of the weakness of your argument. She leapt out of bed, and went to sit at her desk chair. She pulled her feet up onto the seat, and wrapped her arms around her legs, still looking at the bed with suspicion. Having put a safe distance between herself and the jacket, she then got curious. “Where did you find that?”
“Well, this morning, I was having this really awesome dream about that great pile of trash that I’d found in Boulder that day after Thanksgiving a few years ago. Remember that one? I think I told you about that, right? It had all that salmon and raw turkey legs, and something with a hint of fermented fruits. Oh my gosh. That was a day.”
I closed my eyes for a second in ecstasy, and Lucy scrunched her nose at me.
“Well, anyways,” I went on, “I was dreaming about that pile of trash this morning, and this group of Roman trash collectors came running at me with those giant witch brooms yelling, ‘It’s trash day, it’s trash day, it’s trash day!’ and I was like, ‘No way, it’s Saturd
ay. It can’t be trash day!’ But they were like, ‘We work on Saturdays too, Blue Bear. It’s trash day!’ and then I realized. Oh crap. Those guys are right. They do collect trash on Saturdays.”
“Okay…” said Lucy, not seeing the point.
“Then I woke up, and I thought, wow, they’re right. They do collect trash on Saturdays. If there is still any evidence from last Monday, it’s probably going to get collected by today at the latest.”
Lucy nodded her head in understanding.
“So while you were getting your beauty sleep, I got my ass out of bed, and spent the whole morning canvassing every garbage dumpster within a mile radius of Palazzo Mortimer and Doria Pamphili.”
“Don’t you do that most days anyways?”
“Well, yeah, but not this early in the morning. And this time I was looking out for any smells that I could recognize from the Palazzo.”
“Where did you find it.”
“There’s a lot of great dumpsters in Rome, but there’s a few that always smell pretty bad. Do you remember that one on Via dei Corridori, just off Via della Conciliazione?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“You know the neighborhood, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so there’s that one set of dumpsters on that street, those ones that always smell pretty bad over there.”
“Blue Bear, they all smell bad.”
I sighed. Poor creatures with a completely unsophisticated sense of smell should not be the judges of these things. “Just trust me. That one smells bad. Anyways, there was a trash truck pulling up, ready to empty them all, but I got there just in time, because the two guys driving the truck all of the sudden stopped, and decided to take a smoke break. So I shimmy up to it, and what do I smell?”