B004XTKFZ4 EBOK

by Conlon, Christopher

We kept on, both of us frozen in indecision.

  “Well, shit,” she said at last, “We have to do something. I don’t wanna run out of gas right here on the freeway!”

  “Lucy, look,” I said, pointing. “There’s an exit. It looks like it goes down to the beach.”

  She glanced at me. “You think we should take it?”

  I swallowed. “It’s better than running out of gas out here.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Here goes nothing.”

  She swerved onto the exit ramp. The road drifted to the right toward the ocean and Lucy kept the van moving smoothly in the lane for a time. But suddenly we went into a tight turn too fast and the van began swerving between lanes.

  “Lucy, slow down!”

  “I’m trying!”

  But she couldn’t get it under control. Her eyes were wild and sweat glistened on her face; she seemed to freeze. We careened toward the beach, sideswiping a tree. Its branches clattered against my window and made me instinctively duck away. She overcorrected then, yanking the wheel suddenly; we crossed the center line, banged against the guardrail on the other side of the road. Then we lurched into the middle of the street.

  “Lucy, look! A parking lot! Try to pull into it!”

  She did. Mercifully it was empty; we slid uncontrollably across its many spaces, straight across the lot, heading toward a little darkened booth at the far end whose sign advertised Hot Dogs / Cold Drinks / Bait.

  “Lucy, hit the brake, the brake!”

  She must have; the tires began to squeal. We slid sideways across the end of the lot. The back end of the van clipped the corner of the snack booth hard, sending the vehicle spinning. I was thrown to the floor, my head slamming against the dashboard as I dropped. We bumped and crashed over rough terrain and then, bang! we suddenly stopped.

  I looked up; my eyes had been clenched shut in terror. I was practically upside-down, my head on the floor, my legs splayed upward. I felt pains in my neck and back. My forehead throbbed.

  Lucy had held onto the steering wheel; she still did, clutching it with both hands in a virtual death-grip. She sat there, eyes wider than I’d ever seen them, staring straight ahead, frozen. Her breathing was hard and fast.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered finally. It was very quiet; I realized suddenly that the motor wasn’t running anymore.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” she whispered again, then looked down at me. “Oh my God, Franny-Fran, are you okay? Are you all right?”

  “I’m—okay,” I said, struggling to get back up into the seat.

  “You’re not. Your head’s bleeding. Oh my God, Franny, oh my God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry...”

  “It’s okay,” I said, touching the spot with my fingers. It only seemed to be a little cut. “Are you okay, Lucy?”

  “I—” It seemed to be the first time she’d thought about it. “I’m—I’m fine. I guess. But Fran—you—” Her eyes were still big, horrified.

  “I think I’m okay, Lucy. Let’s get out.”

  I opened the door and jumped down to the ground, which was sand. I looked around. We had managed somehow to crash into a little grove of palm trees that sat at the edge of the beach, where the road ended. It was one of those trees that had finally stopped us. I stretched, rubbed the back of my neck. I took a Kleenex I had in my pocket and dabbed the blood on my head. There wasn’t much. It was a scratch.

  Lucy came around to me. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “No…Just a little sore. I’m okay, Lucy.”

  She looked around the darkness. “I—I could’ve killed you.”

  “I’m okay. It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right.” She wrapped her arms around herself. She was trembling. “It’s not all right.”

  “Lucy—”

  She looked at me, eyes brimming over with tears. Then, suddenly, she ran off toward the sea.

  “Lucy, wait!”

  I followed her. It was a surreal feeling, the ocean monstrously huge and black before us, the sound of the waves pounding the shore, the way the beach sand seemed to want to suck me down into it. She reached the water’s edge and stood there facing infinity.

  She was doubled-over and weeping, as if someone had punched her in the stomach. But these weren’t the quiet tears of earlier in the night; this was a deep, mournful cry, an agonized wail that seemed to contain within it all the misery of the world.

  I stood behind her in the night.

  “Don’t cry, Lucy. Please don’t cry. I—I’m supposed to be the one who cries….”

  But she didn’t stop. Her hair dangled over her head, obscuring her face. It shook as her body did. Standing close I could see the tears dropping from her cheeks onto the wet sand, disappearing into it.

  “I’m—” she tried to say, her voice choked, “I’m—so sorry, Fran.”

  “I’m okay, Lucy,” I said again. “We’re both okay. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Yes it was!” She dropped down to the sand then, sat with her face in her hands. “It was all my fault! You never would have been here if it hadn’t been for me! I’m a…I’m an idiot!”

  I sat beside her. Our shoulders touched lightly.

  I was in a strange mood, perhaps some very mild form of shock. I wasn’t upset at all, about anything. I was worried that Lucy was crying, but the danger I’d been in, our hopeless future, none of it seemed important just then. The beach was completely deserted. Lucy and I were alone together and we were all right. That was all that mattered.

  “Lucy,” I said after a while, “look at the ocean. It’s beautiful.”

  She stared at me, her tears slowing at last.

  “How can you talk about the ocean,” she said shakily, “right now?”

  “What else is there to talk about, Lucy? We wanted to see the ocean, didn’t we? Here we are.”

  She chuckled slightly then, shook her head. “Franny, you’re crazy.”

  I smiled, shrugged. The ocean truly was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I felt very peaceful sitting there, looking at it with Lucy beside me.

  After a while she calmed down and stared out at the ocean with me.

  “They’ll come get us, you know,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I mean they really will.”

  “I know.”

  Silence between us. The ocean, surging.

  “Maybe we could hide in the sand dunes,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Aw, crap,” she said finally. “Who am I kidding? They’d just catch us, sooner or later. This whole thing was stupid. It’s all my fault.”

  “It wasn’t stupid, Lucy.”

  “Well, we’re in trouble now, that’s for sure.”

  We were silent for a long time.

  Finally she said, “I’ve got an idea.” She reached into her pocket, where she kept her little billfold. She brought it out, reached into it and took the razor blade from inside. “Remember this?” she asked.

  “Sure I do. Blood sisters.” I smiled and held up the finger she’d pricked.

  “Yeah, well…” She held out her arm, palm up. The pose reminded me of my mother with her rubber tubing and syringe. “See,” she said, “this is the way you do it. Right across like this. Both arms.” She drew the blade lightly across the blue veins on the inside of her wrist. She looked at me, her eyes glistening brightly. “I’ll do it if you will.”

  I reached out my hand, took the razor blade from her. I pressed it lightly to my own wrist. I wondered what it would feel like.

  Then I jumped up and threw the blade as far as I could into the sea.

  Lucy came up behind me. “What’d you do that for?”

  I just looked at her.

  “Aw, crap,” she said finally. “You’re right. It was stupid.”

  We watched the ocean rolling toward us. The waves made a sizzling sound as they flattened out and slid toward our feet. There was a sudden shriek overhead—a bird? a bat?—and I looked u
p, startled, my fear of the dark slicing abruptly into me. But when I looked toward Lucy, she seemed not to have noticed. That calmed me again.

  “Let’s go swimming,” she said at last.

  “Now?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  I smiled quizzically. “It’s kind of cold. And I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”

  “Aw, who cares? There’s nobody here. We’ll skinny-dip.”

  “You mean swim naked?”

  “My mom and I used to do it at this lake we went to. It’s fun. C’mon!”

  She kicked off her shoes then and pulled off her socks. Facing away from me, she lifted off her shirt. She wasn’t wearing her bra. I saw her scars immediately: jagged stripes on her shoulder blades, little raised brown spots. She pulled off her pants then. There were scars on her bottom as well.

  “Well, c’mon!” she said, running a few feet toward the water, squatting in it, scooping some back at me, trying to get me wet. I squealed and backed away.

  “Fraidy cat!” she called.

  I pulled off my own clothes, hardly self-conscious at all. I knew that Lucy was the only person on earth I would do this for, that I could do this for. When I finished I scrambled into the icy surf and we splashed water at each other, shrieking and giggling. Her body was mature: she had hard little breasts, curving hips, a light-colored triangle of hair between her legs. I felt suddenly ashamed of my scrawny little girl’s body—flat, angular, practically featureless.

  But Lucy, looking at me, said: “You’re pretty, Fran.”

  Then she plunged laughingly into the surf, her powerful arms pulling her past the curling waves and into the sea. I tried to keep up, but she was a much better swimmer. Dog-paddling as best I could out past the waves, I watched her arms lift and plunge, lift and plunge. They looked like an angel’s wings, I thought. Soon, though, the wings seemed to shrink, to disappear, and I was alone in the darkness.

  “Lucy, no,” I whispered. “Lucy, please don’t leave me.”

  I treaded water for a time, slowly growing frightened. I accidentally swallowed some cold salt water and began to cough. I started to wonder what monstrous sea-beasts were lurking just past my naked feet, ready to latch onto me with their teeth or tentacles. The sea looked huge then, the lightless sky vast—there was no moon, few stars. The sand dunes on the shore seemed to loom threateningly toward me. It was dark, so dark that it was impossible to imagine a time it would ever be light.

  And then a sea-monster grabbed me. I gasped as it slipped over my ankle, rope-like and slimy. I kicked frantically at it, but only managed to bind it tighter to me. My legs were tangled in it. I flailed wildly, trying to scream, gulping saltwater.

  “Lucy! Lucy!”

  And somehow she was there, her glistening arm appearing around my neck from behind, her voice in my ear: “Fran, stop kicking! It’s only kelp! It’s kelp, Fran! It’s seaweed! Stop kicking!”

  But I was still struggling and swallowing water as she pulled me to the shore. Finally I felt firm sand under my feet and staggered onto the beach, coughing and whimpering.

  “Franny, Franny,” she said, stroking my back gently. “Are you okay? It was only seaweed, Franny. Look, see? Here’s some.” She held up the strange substance, all green rope with spiky leaves and weird otherworldly growths like tumors, slick and slimy.

  “I’m—sorry,” I choked, looking at it.

  “It was my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have swum so far out.”

  “I thought—I thought maybe you’d left me…I thought…” I coughed.

  “Left you?” She looked at me. “Nah. I—well, I thought about it, swimming out there. Just keep going, you know? Swim to China or something. But nah. I couldn’t leave my Franny-Fran.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “for coming back.”

  She grinned. “There’s one problem, though.”

  “What?”

  “I’m freakin’ cold!”

  I giggled. “So am I! Oh, it’s freezing!”

  “Let’s get our clothes and get in the van!”

  But when we looked, we discovered that we’d left our things too close to the surf: they were all soaked.

  “Oh, no! Lucy!”

  “Never mind!” she cried. “Just pick ’em up!”

  Gasping, shivering with the cold, we gathered them in our arms and ran pell-mell to the vehicle.

  “Get in, get in!”

  We leapt into the vehicle, slammed the doors shut. We knocked the sand from our wet feet. There was a little heap of dirty blankets in the back and we each took the end of one, rubbed ourselves dry, our teeth chattering, our skins covered with goose bumps.

  After a time we calmed. I reached to the windows around us and closed each set of curtains. We lay back then, pulling one of the dry blankets over ourselves and using another, rolled up, as a pillow.

  “I have a couple of shirts in my bag,” I said. “They’re dry.”

  “In a bit,” Lucy said. “It’s too cold to move now.”

  And it was. But our body heat soon began to warm us, our shoulders pressed together in the narrow space.

  “I wish we could hear the Mystery Theater,” she said after a while.

  “Yeah. It’s okay like this, though.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Then she said: “We did it, Franny.”

  “Yeah. We did.”

  What would happen later didn’t seem to matter then. We were here, together. In our own world. No one on earth could see us or knew where we were. We were happy.

  Once we were warmer I asked, “Do you want something to eat? I brought crackers and stuff.”

  “Okay,” she said, looking at me. “Sure. We’ve been through a lot. We need to build up our strength!”

  I smiled, reached over to my rucksack, brought out crackers, bananas, cans of warm Coke. It was the best meal I’d ever eaten. Afterwards Lucy burped loudly. I followed suit. We giggled, goosed each other under the blanket.

  “Hey,” I said, remembering, rummaging in my bag, “I have my little hairbrush in here.” I brought it out, swept it several times through my own hair, then reached to Lucy’s. She turned around and I slowly pulled the brush through hers, untangling the rats’ nests as I went. She smelled of the sea; we both did. She grew quiet and calm. Brushing her hair took a long time.

  Finally we lay back down together, holding hands. Slowly, wordlessly, we somehow turned to face-to-face, wrapped our arms around each other, the full length of our bodies pressing together. The feeling of another person’s skin on mine was strange, thrilling. I found myself looking at her breasts, her hips, awestruck at the idea that, if she wanted to, she could have a baby. And that I would be like that too, soon, even if I couldn’t imagine it.

  There were several light scars on Lucy’s chest, including one across her right breast that ran straight down through the nipple. She saw me looking at it.

  “Fran…is it ugly?”

  “Lucy, you could never be ugly.”

  “Honestly?”

  Somehow, here, our eyelashes and lips nearly touching, it was okay to say it, to murmur it to her: “I think you’re beautiful.”

  “Aw,” she said, “you’re a retard.”

  I found myself touching the scar on her breast, tracing the line gingerly down to her nipple with my index finger, my blood-sister finger.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Nah.”

  “Do you mind my touching it?”

  “Nah.”

  Then I astonished myself. Instinctively, without thinking at all—I never could have done it if I’d thought about it—I leaned down and touched my lips to the top of her breast, where the scar began. Her skin tasted of salt.

  She hugged me tightly then. The sensation of her palms on my back, my waist, my thighs sent tiny electric jolts all through me, making me shiver and tingle. Our hands moved. Mine didn’t seem under my control at all. We touched each other’s faces slowly, gently. I studied her little freckles, the cracked pla
ces on her lips. I stroked her shoulders, cupped her breasts in my hands, touched her pubic hair lightly, curiously. Her fingers brushed my chest, my belly, briefly traced over the place between my legs that no one, absolutely no one had ever touched, or, for many years, would again.

  “Lucy?” I whispered.

  “Hm.”

  “Lucy, are—are we having sex?”

  She snickered. “Franny, you’re such a spaz.” But then, immediately: “No, I didn’t mean that. You’re not a spaz at all.”

  I giggled. Our hands settled again, grew still. Her arm was under my head, the perfect pillow: in my ear I could feel her pulse slowly beating, beating. I sensed that there was something else I should say to her, something more, but in this place, this moment, sleepiness began to overtake me. I could hear the ocean and her heartbeat and after a while there was a light pattering of rain on the roof of the van. Lucy and the sea were all I knew. I drifted away, knowing beyond doubt that the two of us would stay here together forever, even as I knew beyond doubt that they would be coming for us soon. Very soon.

  —Eleven—

  I DROVE ALL night.

  Hey, Mike, how ya doin’?

  Well, hey, lovely lady. What brings you here?

  Said you’d teach me how to play pool. How ’bout it?

  Why, sure, sure! C’mon in!

  Where’s the pool table?

  It’s downstairs. C’mon, right through here. Be careful on the steps.

  No: it probably didn’t happen that way. Lucy would have had no reason to ride her bike out to Mike McCoy’s shack that night. She had other plans. But the fact was, no one ever really knew how it did happen. McCoy never said, at least not publicly. He never uttered a word during the trial. Apparently he never said anything to his own lawyers. Crucial facts in the timeline of all three cases remained a mystery…Except that they weren’t really crucial facts. The crucial facts were in that basement. The crucial facts were strewn around the riverbed in pieces.

  Hey, lovely lady, whatcha doin’ here this time of night?

  Hopin’ you’ll give me a piece of that licorice, Mike.

  You bet. Shouldn’t you be home, though, this hour?

  Nah. It’s okay. I got a light on my bike.