“Oh, yeah?” she said, uninterested.
“Yeah,” I said, aware that her mind was on something else but unable to figure out what else to say to her. “Melissa’s in the hospital. Well, I think they let her out today. Susan and Miriam were suspended for a day. They’ll be back tomorrow, I guess.”
“Did you get in trouble?” she asked, her voice distant.
“I had to go to Mr. Blatt’s office with my uncle. He didn’t suspend me, though.”
“That’s good.”
“Lucy—” I reached out, then stopped, my hand dangling in mid-air. “Lucy, what is it?”
She looked at me, her silver-gray eyes glistening in the dark. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Sure I can. You don’t have to ask me that, Lucy.”
She looked away, picked at the bark of the pepper tree’s trunk. “My mom and me are moving.”
I felt a terrible free-fall sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“Moving?” I gasped.
“Yeah.”
We stood there. A breeze pushed a few pepper leaves in my face, tickling my cheek.
“Lucy, why? Is it this…this thing with Melissa? I’m sure Mr. Blatt will let you come back, Lucy. Boys get in fights all the time and they—”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s not that at all. That doesn’t matter now. It’s not even important.”
“Well, then what?”
“My fucking dad,” she said, practically spitting the word. As she said it she dropped suddenly to the ground, sat lotus-legged on the floor of our little personal forest. I fell to my knees beside her.
“What about your dad, Lucy?”
She didn’t look at me. “My mom thinks he’s found us.”
“Found you? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“I mean found us. So we have to move again.”
“Lucy, I don’t get it. Why do you have to leave because your dad found you?”
She scowled at me and I was sure she was about to call me stupid, but instead she reached to her jaw and ran her finger down the long line there that I’d once taken for a birthmark.
“’Cuz of this,” she said. “’Cuz my dad put it there. And lots of others, too.”
“He…?”
She sighed shakily, but in talking seemed to regain her composure. “That’s what my dad does when he gets drunk. He gets crazy. He knocked my mom out once. I still remember the sound of the punch and coming into the room and seeing her there on the floor, not moving, like a pile of old garbage. And my dad coming at me with a kitchen knife in his hand. He grabbed me, pulled my head back by the hair, and—well, I don’t remember the rest. That was just the last time. He’d done it before.” She picked at pepper leaves on the ground. “Knives. Lit cigarettes. He was always careful to do it where it wouldn’t show, until the last time.”
We sat there silently. I could hear crickets chirping. I didn’t know what to say. I had absolutely no idea what on earth I could possibly say.
She took the little pepper leaves into her fingers and slowly tore them apart, studying each closely, holding them to her nose and breathing in their spicy odor. “When I was being punished,” she said, her voice strangely calm now, dispassionate, “one thing he used to do was make me pull my pants down and then stick things into me. The toilet paper roller or the handle of a screwdriver or something like that. In my butt. In my privates. He’d say, ‘This is what happens to bad girls, Lucy.’ He’d do it when Mom wasn’t home and then tell me he’d stick a gun in there the next time if I said anything. He has a gun, too. A couple of ’em.”
After a moment she added expressionlessly, “Anyway, we’re moving.”
I swallowed. “Why isn’t he is jail, Lucy?”
“Oh, he’s been there. They let him out. One month, two months, six months. They always let him out. And he comes looking for us…I’m not from around here, you know. I’m not from anywhere around here. I grew up in Wyoming. Near Casper.” She was silent for a time. Then: “Do you believe in God?”
“Um…” I hesitated. “I don’t know. Sometimes I do.”
“Know what I think?” she asked, looking at the sky. “I think that there are people that God hates.”
“Why would He hate people, Lucy?”
“Well, why does He love people—some people? Who knows? Who knows why God does anything? Why does He let wars happen? Why does He let little babies starve? I mean, God is everything, right? He’s everything and everywhere.”
“I—I don’t know. He’s supposed to be, I guess.”
“If He’s everything, then He’s not just love, He’s hate, too. And I think that there are just some people that God hates. That’s the only way to understand the things that happen in the world. When I hear about a bad thing happening to somebody I just can’t help but think: God must’ve hated that person.”
We were quiet for a moment.
“My parents use drugs,” I blurted out.
Lucy looked at me.
“That’s why they got rid of me,” I said. “They use…heroin and things like that. And they sell it. They think I don’t know about it, but I do. We live in this nice house with a maid and everything but they’re…dope pushers,” I said, remembering the phrase from the school assembly. “I always thought dope pushers were, like, weird dirty people on street corners. But my dad owns a store, a nice one—three of them. Like a chain. They sell radios and stereos and, like, electronic stuff there.” I had never told anyone about my parents. No one. But Lucy’s revelations seemed to demand my own. “My mom, she—she actually worked as a model for magazines. But that was a long time ago. Now she’s a—” I could hardly believe I was saying it, but out it came—“My mom’s a drug addict. They’re just…messed up. Both of them.”
We sat silently together.
“I don’t wanna move again,” Lucy announced finally. “I hate moving. I never have any friends. I don’t know anybody. My mom…I love my mom, but she’s just—I dunno. She’s talking about us going to fuckin’ Mexico.” She was silent for a moment. “Her life would be better if I wasn’t around. He always hit me more than he did her. I think…I think if I wasn’t there he might not come after her at all. Crap, maybe I should just kill myself. I’m not worth anything to anybody.”
“You are,” I said, “to me.”
She smiled then, weakly. “Aw, Franny-Fran,” she said, tossing the leaves away.
“I think we should—” But I didn’t finish the thought.
“Should what?”
I looked away. “Nothing,” I said.
She sat forward, studying me closely. “C’mon, what?”
“Never mind.”
“You’re thinking about Mr. Griffin’s van, aren’t you?”
“No,” I lied. Then: “Yes.”
“So am I.”
“Where would we go, Lucy?”
“I dunno. Who cares? Away from this place. Malibu, maybe. Santa Barbara. Those beaches. Hollywood. I told you, I wanna meet John Travolta.”
“Do you think you could?”
“Why not? I’d just walk up to him on Sunset Boulevard or whatever and say, ‘Hi, Johnny-Boy, I’m Lucy.’”
I smiled. “You wouldn’t call him Johnny-Boy.”
“The heck I wouldn’t. Of course with my luck we’d probably never see him at all. We’d probably see goddamn Donny Osmond instead.”
“Donny Osmond is cute,” I insisted.
“Donny Osmond looks just like his sister Marie,” she said contemptuously. “They must be twins. Those awful buck teeth.”
“They’re not buck teeth. They’re just big.”
“Buck.”
“Big.”
“Buck!”
She shoved me on my shoulder and we giggled.
“Do you think we could?” I asked finally.
“What?”
“Make it to Hollywood.”
“Maybe. Malibu, at least.”
“What would we do when we
got there?”
“I dunno. Somethin’. Maybe we can get on a TV show. You could. With your dimples.”
There was suddenly what felt like a current of electricity between us. We were about to jump off a cliff together. This was the last moment to pull back.
“Do you want to?” Lucy asked quietly.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“If you come with me, yeah.”
“Really?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be any fun alone, would it?”
“No, I guess not.”
We looked at each other.
“C’mon,” Lucy said, jumping up. “C’mon, right now, before we chicken out!”
The first moment of terror came when I realized that we mustn’t go without anything at all: we would need food, money. I found myself crawling back into my room again and then rushing barefoot into the kitchen, grabbing a box of crackers, some fruit, and several cans of soda pop, pushing them into my rucksack along with a few toiletry items: hairbrush, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste. Finally I returned to my room, slipped on my shoes, and took what little money I’d saved—it was about thirty dollars—from where I kept it in my desk and stuffed the bills into my pockets. At last I climbed outside again to where Lucy was waiting. I slid the window completely shut, locking myself out of my own house. But I knew I was never coming back.
“C’mon!” Lucy whispered breathlessly.
We ran giggling up the street. What we would have done had Mr. Griffin’s van not been in its usual spot, or if the keys had been missing, I don’t know; we would have been crushed beyond words, certainly. But it didn’t happen.
“Shh. He’s home,” Lucy said, pointing at the car in Mr. Griffin’s driveway. “We’ll have to be really quiet.”
“What if he hears the van start?”
“If he hears it, he hears it. Look, he’s asleep. His lights are off. He won’t hear anything.”
We stood next to the van and Lucy peered in. “The keys are in it!” she whispered triumphantly.
“Okay,” I said.
“Get in the other side,” she instructed. “Open the door as quietly as you can and don’t close it.”
“Don’t close it?”
“We’ll close the doors just as soon as we get a little ways from the house. He might hear the doors slamming.”
I ran around the side and jumped in, held the door handle in my hand.
“Here goes nothing,” she said, her eyes wild with excitement. She turned the key. The van’s engine burst into life, as loud, I imagined, as a supersonic jet. She put the vehicle in gear and eased slowly off the clutch until we were sliding slowly forward on the street. After we’d traveled perhaps fifty yards she said, “Okay, close ’em!” and we shut the doors. I locked mine. Neither of us bothered to put on seatbelts.
We rolled through the neighborhood streets, Lucy focused completely on the road before her. She turned on the lights. My heart was pounding. My mouth was dry. I was perspiring, even though I felt cold. My eyes darted about, searching for the police car I was sure would come roaring up to us with a policeman sticking his head out the window and pointing his gun toward us, shouting, Pull over! Pull over!
But the drive through the neighborhood was as uneventful as a drive with an unlicensed twelve-year-old driver can be. There were no cars in front or behind us; none approached us from the opposite direction. The van’s flatulent engine was loud but the world outside seemed silent, still, lifeless, like a dead city on the moon. I inhaled as Lucy made the final turn out of the housing tract and we moved onto Bridgewater Avenue, the bridge itself looming before us. I wondered what it would be like if she were to lose control of the vehicle, smash into the guardrail and send us careening over the edge into the riverbed a hundred feet below. Would we have time to scream? Would the impact kill us instantly, or would we survive for a few minutes, blood leaking everywhere from our shattered bodies? I thought of the girls who had been found in the riverbed recently, their corpses, their mutilated faces, flies on their lips, river rats chewing on their cheeks. Death seemed very close.
And yet Lucy negotiated the bridge perfectly. We were moving very slowly—she hadn’t shifted out of first gear. But once we were over the bridge she did. The gears made a bad grinding sound for a moment and we slowed nearly to a stop, but then she found second and we lurched forward. We were moving a bit faster now as we pulled through the town. Nothing was open. There were no people anywhere. This seemed a completely different world than the one that Lucy and I rode through in the daytime. The darkness covered everything, sucked the life from it, obliterated it. Lucy and I were the only two people in the world, it seemed. I was terrified. I was happy.
Eventually we neared the freeway. Lucy glanced at me; I smiled and said nothing. I was with her all the way now; there was no turning back. If we ran off the road, if we died fiery deaths, we would do it together. We passed the familiar rest stop and I looked at the oak tree, the grass, the building. I wouldn’t miss any of it, I thought. All I could ever miss in my broken-up life was here, in this van, sitting beside me, taking me away to a place where we would stay together forever. I was exactly where I should be, where I had to be.
“We want to go south, right?” Lucy asked, her expression pensive.
“Yeah,” I said. “South.”
She followed the sign for U.S. 101 South. It led us onto a big loose curve that Lucy took very slowly. When it ended it merged straight into the freeway and we, giddy with excitement, were suddenly on it. We were on the freeway!
The problem was that we weren’t moving very fast. Lucy kept the vehicle in second gear as one car and then another came whizzing up behind us only to swerve into the left lane and pass us by. One honked.
“Lucy, we…we’d better go faster!”
“Yeah, um…” She hesitated. “Actually I’ve never gotten past second gear. I don’t really know how.”
I looked at her. “Don’t you think,” I said, “you should have thought of that before?”
“Well, I didn’t!” She glanced at me uneasily. I found myself giggling, through sheer nervous energy.
But then a huge truck, an eighteen-wheeler, came roaring up behind us. In the passenger’s side rear-view mirror I could see it sweeping up to us at frightening speed. I thought it was going to crash into our van, but at the last moment, horn blaring, it changed lanes and blew past us.
“Lucy, come on, we really have to go faster! Somebody will hit us!”
“I know, I know. My mom showed me once…It’s like an ‘H.’ ” She outlined the motion with her hand. “First is here, second is here…then you, like, push it up, then to the right, and then up again. Yeah. That’s it. I’m sure of it. Okay.” She pushed in the clutch and took the gear shift in her hand. She tugged at it, but nothing happened except the awful grinding noise. The van slowed down even more. “Shit! Shit!” she cried, pushing and pulling at the thing. Finally she slipped the vehicle back into second.
“I can’t find it,” she admitted.
“Let me try,” I said.
“You? What do you know about it?”
“Well, I can’t do any worse than you! It’s like the top part of the ‘H,’ right?”
“Yeah. Up, over to the right, and then up again. Supposedly.”
I leaned over and took the gearshift in both my hands. “How will I know if I’ve done it right?”
“The grinding noise will stop!”
“Oh. Right.”
“Ready?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah!”
She pushed in the clutch and I, ever the dutiful student, pushed the gear shift up, to the right, and then up again. It slid in perfectly, and the van smoothly began to speed up.
“Franny, you did it!” Lucy cried. “You did it!”
I laughed again, almost hysterically. Lucy was behind the wheel but I was helping. I was helping to drive. I was helping to drive our stolen car.
�
�How many gears are there?” I asked, my nerves jumping, wild. “Do you want to try another?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet. We’re okay now. People are still passing us but it’s not bad now. Look—we’re going forty.”
I gazed at the speedometer and then through the windshield. The roadway seemed to be sucked under the van as we rode.
“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this!” I said finally.
She laughed. “Neither can I!”
Another car passed us on the left. Aghast, I realized that it was a police car.
“Oh my God! Lucy!”
“I don’t think he sees us,” she said, breathing quickly. She was as nervous as I was. “I think we’re okay. Everybody knows these VW vans are slow, anyway.” And indeed, the car passed us by.
We drove for nearly an hour like that. We didn’t shift again. The road was straight, for the most part; what curves there were had the grace to be gentle, easy for Lucy to negotiate. Eventually we came over a rise in the road and saw the Pacific Ocean off to our right: an immense black expanse that stretched nearly to eternity.
“The ocean!” we cried simultaneously, and laughed.
Quiet was only twenty miles or so inland, but my aunt and uncle had certainly never bothered to take me to the sea. The sight was astonishing, unbelievable. “There’s nothing like this in Fresno!” I said. “It’s so big!”
We rode in satisfied silence for a time.
“Is Malibu far?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Lucy said. “Maybe a sign’ll tell us soon.” Then, suddenly: “Oh, crap!”
“What? What’s wrong?”
She looked at me sickly. “I just noticed. We’re almost out of gas.”
She pointed to the gauge. I leaned over and saw that the needle was directly over the E.
I thought. “Maybe there’ll be a gas station.”
“I don’t know how to put gas in this thing. Do you?”
“No,” I admitted. “Maybe we could get full service. I’ve got money.”
“Fran, what’s the gas station guy gonna think when we pull up?”
“Well…you look older than you are, Lucy.”
“I don’t look old enough to be driving this thing.”
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