B004XTKFZ4 EBOK

by Conlon, Christopher

  “You like beer?”

  She shrugged, moving her hands absently over the displays of motor oil and air filters. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Well, you’re a little young for it,” he admitted. “It’s kind of a grown-up thing.”

  Lucy’s eyes flashed annoyance. “I’m almost thirteen.”

  Mike McCoy laughed. It was a harsh, throaty sound. “You’re almost there, then. You’ll be gettin’ wasted with the best of ’em.”

  “You bet I will.”

  “You come on by sometime,” he said to her, glancing at me, including me. “I’ll give you a little beer. Only a little, though. Stop by my place.” He lived in a tiny house some distance from town. I’d seen it; it was plain clapboard, run-down, streaked with grime, with nothing around it but dirt and weeds. It was a house, more or less, but I thought of it as a shack.

  “Maybe we will, Mike,” Lucy announced boldly. “We might just do that.”

  “You ought,” he said, nodding. “Got lots of things to do there.”

  “Like what?”

  “Got a pool table. You girls like to shoot pool?”

  “Maybe. Never tried,” Lucy said.

  “Oh, you’ll like pool, big girl like you. You’ll be good at it.”

  She nodded. “Maybe we’ll come by sometime, then.”

  “Yeah. The both of you. C’mon over. We’ll have us some fun.”

  Later, as we rode back toward town, Lucy turned her head back toward me and said, “Nice guy. Kinda weird, though. Looks at me funny.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I don’t like him, Lucy.”

  “But pool might be fun,” she said, facing the road again and pedaling harder. “And beer. You want to go sometime?”

  “Lucy,” I said, “he’s not supposed to give us beer. It’s illegal.”

  “Oh my God, Fran, you’re such an M.R.!” She swerved the bike then, hard, which she knew would scare me. I shrieked, tightening my grip on her waist. She did it again.

  “Don’t call me an M.R.,” I protested. “I’m not mentally retarded.”

  “All right, you’re a dingleberry, then.”

  “I’m not a dingleberry either.”

  “Dingleberry!”

  We came to a downhill. There was no traffic so she pulled into the middle of the street, picked up speed and swerved back and forth wildly.

  “Lucy, cut it out!”

  “Why? You afraid? You a fraidy cat?”

  “No. Just cut it out.”

  “Fraidy cat, fraidy cat!”

  It suddenly occurred to me that, wrapped around her from behind, I had a weapon of my own, and I goosed her, hard, in her side. She yelped, reached around to slap my arm, and lost control of the bike. We careened to the left, then to the right. The handlebars seemed to spin backwards. For a moment I was airborne. Then my palm scraped against the asphalt and my knee banged against something hard and immovable as we crashed down into the gutter and tumbled over each other.

  “Jesus Christ, Fran! That was your stupid fault.”

  “No it wasn’t!” I said furiously.

  “You’re the one that goosed me!”

  “You’re the one calling me names!” I was crying. My hand and knee hurt, but mostly I was just frightened.

  “Aw, crap,” she said, disgusted, brushing herself off. “Now you’re gonna be a crybaby. Great.”

  “Shut up, Lucy!”

  I sat up on the sidewalk then and buried my head in my arms, gave myself over to tears. I’d been disturbed by the Local Girl Missing headline, the photo of the girl beneath it; uncomfortable with Mike McCoy’s eyes and the things he said; terrified by Lucy’s dangerous bike-riding; and finally hurled into the street, my hand torn and bleeding. I’d had enough, enough of everything.

  I calmed down after a while, my breath slowing, my tears subsiding to hiccoughs. I felt lost, alone, cut loose. I felt as if my life had ended right there in the gutter.

  “Here.”

  The voice surprised me. I looked to my left and there stood Lucy, an ice cream cone in her hand. She sat, offering it to me.

  I looked away, aggrieved.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have called you an M.R. I’m the M.R.”

  Our eyes met. She handed me the cone.

  “You’re not an M.R.,” I told her quietly.

  We were silent for a time.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  She pointed behind us with her thumb. “Drug store. At least we were smart enough to crash in front of a place that sells ice cream.”

  “I guess that was a good idea,” I said, starting to lick it. Involuntarily I smiled.

  “Yeah,” she said, with a little chuckle.

  We sat there in the peaceful morning, sharing the ice cream cone between us, best friends again.

  Quiet ended a mile or so past Soames Elementary, at the place where the land was suddenly bisected by Highway 101. At the freeway onramp was a small state-run rest stop for travelers—nothing much, just a big colorless concrete building with restrooms and vending machines alongside a big parking lot. Surrounding this was half an acre or so of grass, a few picnic tables, a handsome oak tree. It was the kind of place thousands upon thousands of travelers had stopped at over the years on their way north to San Francisco or Seattle or south to Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego—stopped at, taken a quick stretch, gone to the bathroom, perhaps grabbed a Coke or a candy bar from a machine, and then departed, the memory of the place vanishing as quickly as the image of it in their rear-view mirrors. But for Lucy and me it became a hangout. No local kids ever came here, and the lawn was well-tended, the tree good for climbing. Though only a couple of miles from our houses, it was a place set apart, a different world: we were in the freeway culture here, people rushing up and down the state to get to their exotic, unimaginable destinations. Strangers we would never see again got out of their cars, ambled around, moved on. License plates displayed mysterious dreamlike place names: Nevada, Wyoming, Connecticut, New York.

  “Santa Barbara,” Lucy said one Saturday, lying on her back in the grass with her arms folded behind her head, chewing on a grass stem. “Malibu. That’s where I want to go. Where there’s ocean. And Hollywood. I want to meet John Travolta. He’s a fox.”

  I was sitting up next to her, tearing little clumps of grass out of the ground and sprinkling them across her shirt. “He’s cute,” I said. “I like Donny Osmond better.”

  “Donny Osmond?” She gathered the grass I’d placed on her chest and tossed it lightly into my face. “You really are a spaz, Franny-Fran.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, smiling. “I still like him better, though.”

  She shook her head in mock-disgust, looking toward the parking lot. “We should hitchhike with somebody over there,” she said. “Let ’em take us to Malibu and those places. Seems like we’ll never get out of this dump.”

  We stayed there for a long time, peacefully sipping sodas and watching the traffic pass by to its unknowable destinations. I found myself looking at Lucy, noticing again the pale brown birthmark that ran from her jaw to the middle of her neck.

  “Were you born with that?” I asked, pointing to it.

  “What?” She looked at me, then touched the mark, ran her finger along it. “This?”

  “Yes.”

  I was surprised that she suddenly looked uncertain of herself, even shy. “Does it show really bad?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said, honestly. “It’s not bad at all.”

  “’Cuz sometimes I think I should try to cover it up with makeup. My mom and I talked about it. We even tried it a couple of times. But…I dunno. I’m not the makeup-wearing type.” She looked at me again. “It doesn’t look too bad, does it?”

  “No, Lucy, it doesn’t look bad at all. Really. But what is it? It’s a birthmark, right?”

  “Nah,” she said. After a moment she added, “I got cut.”

  I studied her, looked c
losely at the brown line, realized she had to be telling the truth. It couldn’t be a birthmark; no birthmark was shaped like that.

  “It must have been…pretty bad,” I said.

  She shrugged. In the stillness I reached out to her neck, touched the scar gently with two fingers. I could feel her pulse.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Nah. Not at all. I don’t even feel it.”

  I ran my fingers slowly down the brown line, suddenly heartsick that anything like this could have happened to her, to Lucy.

  “How…?” I didn’t finish the question.

  “Nothing,” she said, abruptly sitting up. “It was just a stupid accident. Hey, I got an idea.”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to be blood sisters?”

  I thought about it. “Is that like blood brothers?”

  “Yeah. Same thing.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, a bit uneasy. “It seems kind of gross. I mean, you really swap blood?”

  “Sure. Have you ever done it with anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I. I always wanted to, though.”

  “Really?” I brightened suddenly as I always did whenever Lucy expressed affection toward me, even indirectly. She wanted to do something she’d never done. With me!

  “How do we do it?” I asked.

  “With this.” She brought her little billfold out of her pocket. It contained a couple of dollars and, to my amazement, a razor blade.

  “Lucy, where did you get that?”

  “My mom shaves her legs with ’em. I just took one.”

  “You have to be careful,” I said. “You might cut yourself.”

  She looked at me, shaking her head again and chuckling. “That’s the idea, Franny-Fran.”

  “Oh. Right.” I was embarrassed, but only for a moment.

  The blade glinted in the Saturday sunlight. “So,” she said, her voice low and excited, “are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Well—can’t we just use a pin or a needle?”

  “I’m fresh out. You got one?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then.”

  I studied her for a moment, then nodded. My breath came short.

  “This is serious, you know,” she said. “Being blood sisters is serious.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, it makes us sisters. Real sisters. We share the same blood. We’re bonded forever.”

  “I know, Lucy.”

  She looked closely at me. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. “We need some paper. Like toilet paper or something. For the blood.”

  “I have a paper napkin.” I brought it out of my pocket.

  “Great. Should I go first?”

  I nodded.

  She looked at me and nodded back, raising her left hand, palm up. She pushed the edge of the razor into the tip of her index finger, causing a tiny droplet of blood to bead onto her skin.

  “Now you,” she said, trying to hand me the blade. But instead I held out my hand to her.

  “No, Lucy,” I said. “You do it.”

  She nodded, smiling. I clenched my eyes shut as she took my hand and I felt a small sting, like a needle piercing my skin. When I opened my eyes I had a similar blood-bead on my finger.

  “Now,” she said, “we press them together.”

  We moved close to each other, pushed our fingers together so that the blood commingled. We stayed motionless for what seemed a long time, then slowly parted, little blood smears like Magic Marker streaks on our fingers. Lucy tore the napkin in two and we each dabbed at our wounds. Neither of us said anything; words might have broken the spell of the moment, the feeling of solemn sacrament.

  After a while Lucy wiped the razor blade and put it back in the wallet. We sat there together for a long time, close enough that our arms touched, watching the tourists’ cars come and go in the parking lot. The light paled and then darkened across the grass. Finally we stood and brushed ourselves off, preparing to hop onto Lucy’s bike for the ride back to town.

  I knew—I believe that we both did—that words like love and sister and forever were inadequate to the occasion, so we said nothing, then or on the ride back. At the end, when we’d reached our houses and were about to part, we didn’t kiss or hug or say friendship words. We just looked at each other, astonished at what we’d done, the importance of it, the permanence.

  “Well—’bye,” she said finally.

  “’Bye, Lucy.”

  —Seven—

  THE GRAVEYARD WAS less than two miles from Ms. Sparrow’s house, on a gentle grassy hill overlooking the town. There were few trees, making the place look—at least to my eye—a bit like a golf course. I disliked it immediately. (But who could ever really like any graveyard?) I could see the road that had brought me here far below, the traffic moving slowly by, much of it heading south, back toward where I’d come from, in a line I would soon be joining when I left here. I knew I would never return.

  Ms. Sparrow had no hesitation in moving through the main gate and then following the various paths. She knew exactly where she was going.

  “I come here every few weeks,” she said. “Always on her birthday. And on Christmas. The kids come sometimes too. I love them so much for that.”

  “Why here, Ms. Sparrow? Why Mumford?”

  “There’s no cemetery in Quiet, you know,” she said. “Or there wasn’t then. Just an old church graveyard that was already full. There’s one about twenty miles north of Quiet, off 101, but I didn’t like it. This was the nearest decent one in the county.”

  I considered.

  “And after that,” she said, “well, I met my husband. He’s lived here all his life. So I just never left…And that’s okay. I needed to be near my baby.”

  We passed by various old monuments—angels and cherubs, very nineteenth century, though nothing was dated before 1920—and came to an area where there were several nondescript rows of ground-level plaques. Again she turned unhesitatingly, hardly looking.

  “What about her father?” I asked as we walked.

  “I heard he went to Alaska,” she said, “twenty years ago. To make his fortune—doing what, God only knows. He always had stupid ideas like that. I have no idea where he is now. He may be dead too, for all I know. I can’t say that I care.”

  “And…” I didn’t want to say it, but I had to. “And McCoy?”

  “Oh, they let him out, you know.”

  That stopped me, literally, in my tracks. We stood in the late-afternoon sunshine. It was a beautiful day, clear, cloudless. The shadows were slowly lengthening, darkness sliding imperceptibly across the graves.

  “They let him out?” I said, aghast.

  “Oh yes,” she said, bitterness creeping into her voice. “Didn’t you know?”

  “Ms. Sparrow, I—I didn’t know anything, until I came here today. Nothing at all.”

  “Well, they let him out,” she said. “He spent twenty-four years in that place. That mental hospital. Atascadero. And then they just…let him out.”

  “But he—he murdered three girls!”

  “Yes.” She nodded, looking at the ground. “We had a lawyer, of course, for the hearings. She represented all the families. She tried hard. But they let him out anyway.”

  “Oh my God.” I shook my head, feeling sick. “Where—where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. We can’t get any information. Privacy rights, they say.”

  I looked across the grave markers. “You could probably find out,” I said, silently recalling what I’d begun to understand about why I’d come to Quiet, to this area. “I mean, if you wanted to hire someone—”

  “We considered that.” She was silent for a moment. “But we finally decided it wouldn’t serve any purpose. You have to move on, you know. Never forget, but—but move on.”

  She turned and started to walk again. At last we came to a simple black plaque in
the middle of a row of plaques indistinguishable from it. Lucille Catherine Sparrow, it read, in engraved letters.

  Ms. Sparrow knelt down, ran her fingers slowly across the name and dates. I stayed silent, waited for her to stand, then knelt and did the same.

  “Hi, Lucy,” I whispered, but it felt wrong, knowing that I was talking to nothingness. Everything seemed wrong, suddenly. The flat, undistinguished plaque. The golf-course graveyard. McCoy walking under blue skies while Lucy had to stay locked in the dark forever, rotting, disintegrating to dust. It wasn’t right, I knew. It wasn’t right.

  Morbid thoughts raced through my mind. How many bits had he left her in? I wondered. And putting her in the coffin all those years ago—did they try to put her together again, in as close an approximation to a human form as they could? (A Frankenstein’s monster!) Or did they simply bag her remains, toss whatever was left of her into the box in a jumble, like so much trash to be dumped and forgotten? What would she look like now, after three decades? Would her flesh still cling to any part of her? Would it have dried and mummified, stretching tight across her bones? Or would bones be all that was left, the sole remaining evidence of Lucy Sparrow’s passage across this dark and merciless earth?

  I stood finally. I couldn’t cry. What I felt was too deep, too bruising for tears. We stood there, the two of us, gazing down at the plaque.

  “I don’t think I ever knew her middle name,” I said quietly.

  Ms. Sparrow smiled slightly, not looking away from the plaque.

  “It’s nice,” she said finally, “when the family comes. When Jack’s here, and the kids. Those are nice times. They—her brothers and sister—they bring flowers. Sometimes we sit around on the lawn here. We make her part of things.” She smiled again. “And then we say goodbye…and go have lunch at McDonald’s.”

  I laughed, a little. “Really?”

  She nodded. “It’s a ritual we got into when the kids were still small. It wouldn’t be a proper visit if it didn’t end at McDonald’s.”

  The sun dropped lower in the sky. The plaques were enveloped in darkness now. I found myself wanting to talk, to say to her: You never knew this, Ms. Sparrow, but I saw Lucy after you did. I saw her just before she left that night and never returned. She came to my window, Ms. Sparrow. She asked me to go with her.