by Gin Phillips
“Luther?” I asked.
“The security guard,” she said.
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
“Will the guard be at the bathrooms watching you? Or do I need to go to his office?” she said.
“I don’t know if he’s in his office,” I said, which was true. “I haven’t seen him yet this morning. But you don’t need to say anything.”
She turned away, not answering.
I should have expected it, of course. Had I really thought she would be content to meander through the flowers? Had I secretly hoped she would do this—storm through the park, Jedi-mind-tricking anyone in her way?
I did not feel like I had hoped for it.
“Seriously, Lucia—” I started.
She was scanning the gray gravel path behind us, where an older couple had started tossing handfuls of Corn Flakes into the water. “Excuse me,” Lucia said, talking over me. “Do you happen to know where the guard shack is?”
The old couple didn’t happen to know. But the two girls on the other side of the water pointed us in the right direction after Lucia called to them loudly enough that a duck scuttled across the pond.
She did things like that. She asked strangers questions. They gave her answers. I had once walked around the Galleria in Birmingham with my mother for almost an hour looking for the Things Remembered monogramming store, and she refused to ask a single person for help. If I wanted to get my hair done for prom, she’d pace around the house, practicing the phone call for days. I want to make an appointment with Mildred, she’d whisper, circling the kitchen. Clickety-clack of heels. It’s for my daughter. No. Hello, I’d like to make an appointment for my daughter with Mildred. Hello, this is Margaret Morris, and I’m calling about an appointment for—Hello? May I ask who this is? I’m Margaret Morris calling about an appointment for my sixteen-year-old.
Circling circling. Clickety-clack.
Lucia’s sandals crunched on the gravel. She wore sandals when she wasn’t at work, even in the winter, and her toenails were perfect and red. Evan held her hand, and I walked slightly behind.
“What are you going to say?” I asked.
She paused, dropping Evan’s hand. “I won’t embarrass you.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
She set a pace faster than I could think. I could not form the right words, not even in my head, and I had no choice but to follow along, duckling-ish. I had just spotted the guard shack in its open clearing when I heard footsteps coming fast enough that it made me spin around.
“Hey,” Luther said, stopping a couple of feet away. “I was looking for you.”
His white T-shirt was wet at the armpits. He had a tattoo on the inside of his wrist—blurry and dark—that I somehow hadn’t noticed before.
“Maxwell was asking where you were,” he said. “I told him you didn’t feel good. I told him that.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You better come back with me, though. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
Lucia had stepped closer to me, shoulder to shoulder.
“I’m Rachel’s friend,” she said.
She held out her hand, and there was nothing about her tone that could possibly be considered threatening. Only she wasn’t smiling and she never looked away from him, not once, and was that all it took, I wondered? Eye contact and no teeth?
Because Luther wouldn’t look at her. He shook her hand but stared past her shoulder the whole time.
“I didn’t want her to get yelled at,” he said.
Behind him, crossing through a bed of pine straw, I saw a familiar figure in navy blue approaching. Maxwell came to a stop when he reached us, and the look on his face was not grandfatherly.
“Where you been?” he asked me. No one here remembered names.
“I—”
“We distracted her,” said Lucia, holding out a hand again, but this time she was smiling. “I apologize, Officer—”
“Maxwell,” he said. “Just Maxwell.”
“Rachel,” Evan said softly to me, “come get that popcorn with me now, why don’t you?”
I shook my head, stepping away from Evan. Lucia frowned, but she turned back to Maxwell.
“I’m Lucia Gilbert,” she said, and she let her hand hover above his arm. Jedi strategy. “You’re in charge of the community service placements here? I had a little experience with that back when I handled juvenile cases.”
“Lawyer?” said Maxwell.
“I am.”
“I handle the placements all right,” he said, shifting his feet. “Keep them organized, give them a schedule, check to make sure they’re on track. I’ve been doing it, oh, six years now. You got a good, hardworking girl here.”
He assumed, I realized, that she was my mother.
She didn’t correct him.
“Do you know he touched her?” she asked.
Maxwell twitched. “What?”
“A child rapist placed in a park,” she said. “You know what he’s charged with, correct? And he’s assigned to a place that’s swarming with children. It defies explanation. On top of that, he’s paired with a teenager. Who he invites to go camping. Who he touches—her elbows, her thigh. Without her consent.”
Maxwell looked down at me. I could feel Luther watching me, too, but I hadn’t looked at him since Lucia said the work “rapist.” She was moving too fast for me.
“Is that right?” Maxwell said, and he had hairs growing from a mole above his left eyebrow. “You didn’t tell me he touched you.”
“No, sir,” Luther answered. “I never—”
“I think it was an accident,” I said, and Luther nodded, but no one else seemed to hear me.
“This is not acceptable,” Lucia said. “Surely you can fix it. Surely you can move this man to a more appropriate location.”
As uncomfortable as I was, I could appreciate her. She was not accusing Maxwell. She was letting him be the one who could fix things.
“The court people will think I did something wrong,” said Luther, looking only at Maxwell now. Stepping farther away from me, putting the whole pathway between us. “If you make me move. I’ll get more hours or—I don’t know. It’s not right. I didn’t touch her. Not once. I only invited her and her dad—”
“You come on in the office with me,” Maxwell said to Luther. He looked back at Lucia. “Ma’am, we can take care of this quick and easy.”
“I appreciate that,” said Lucia.
Luther ran a hand over the curve of his skull, his T-shirt sleeve pulling up so that I could see his bullet scar, pale and crooked.
“Rachel,” said Evan, stepping closer. He blocked my view of Luther, exchanging a look with Lucia in that mute language they had.
“Popcorn,” Lucia said, and I felt Evan’s hand light on my shoulder blade.
“Come on,” he said.
I let him lead me away, and I could hear Luther murmuring, and I wondered what would happen in that office. Lucia might be a part of it, but I wouldn’t be, apparently, even though I’d made it all happen. I had not meant to make it happen. Lucia had never asked me, and she’d never asked Luther anything, either, and he had never threatened me and never hurt me, and if I’d set some punishment in motion, I wanted to undo it. Lucia would not undo it, I knew. Not when she had won. That was what this was, I supposed. Winning.
Lucia
I.
Natalie Wood died,” said Rachel, toeing off her shoes in the kitchen before following Lucia through the dining room and into the sunroom.
“I saw the headline,” said Lucia.
Rachel stopped in front of the wide window that faced the street. “We never come in here. It’s nice.”
With the sun vanishing behind the trees, the whole room was golden. The light spilled into the dining room, but this sp
ace soaked up most of the glow. A dozen cacti decorated the end tables, rounded shapes covered in needles and fangs and fuzz. Lucia climbed onto the futon so she could reach the hook she’d already screwed into the ceiling. It needed a few more turns.
“It gets too hot,” she said. “I just need one more minute with this.”
“Has it ever seemed strange to you,” Rachel said, “that Robert Wagner would be married to someone who wasn’t Stefanie Powers?”
Lucia bent down and picked up the Christmas cactus Marissa had given her, stretching to hang the planter on the hook. “I hate to tell you this, but Robert Wagner is actually a different person than Jonathan Hart. Hart to Hart is not a documentary.”
She let go of the cactus, watching it sway.
“I know that,” said Rachel. “But isn’t it better when it’s real? Like Bogart and Bacall?”
“Maybe,” admitted Lucia.
Rachel flopped onto the futon, feet flying up. Her hair was falling from her ponytail, and she swiped it from her mouth. It was always the hair over the ears, Lucia thought, that would not be contained. Back in her own ponytail days, she had hated those uncontrollable bits—they’d had the look of sideburns.
“I feel guilty about this,” Rachel said, “but when I heard about Natalie Wood on the news, my first thought was finally! Finally, he can marry Stefanie Powers. I mean, I’m not actually glad his wife died. That would be terrible. But don’t you think there must be something between them, in real life, for them to seem so in love?”
Sometimes Lucia forgot Rachel’s age entirely. Other times it seemed like the girl still believed in Santa Claus.
“How can you fake it that well?” Rachel went on, lifting a throw pillow onto her lap, jamming her elbows into the cotton. “Do you ever wonder that? Why do we want to believe them? Why does acting even work? Why do I feel anything at all about Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner?”
And this was why Lucia liked to let the girl keep talking. Just when you thought she was blathering, she’d spin off in some interesting direction.
“A need for escape?” Lucia suggested, sinking onto the cushions.
“How did you know? With Evan? That he was the one?”
“Well,” said Lucia, and it was actually shocking that the question had never been asked. “It was a complicated beginning. I was nearly done with law school, and I was dating someone else. I didn’t want to start anything with Evan. But—soul mates.”
It was not a term that divorce lawyers tended to use.
Still. She thought of Perry Jones, tall and killer dimples, and he was a good guy, but as he talked—even as she talked—she’d felt herself, so often, floating away, a part of her distant and contemplating. When she’d met Evan, there was no part of herself floating. No part of her that he didn’t reach.
“So you knew right away?” the girl asked.
Lucia groaned silently. Yes, was the answer that came to her.
“I don’t think it’s that easy,” she said instead. “I felt like he was different right away. But I don’t think that you can know for sure, ‘Aha! This is the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.’ You’re sixteen—you really can’t know it at sixteen. And here’s a better answer—I think you can feel sure and still be wrong. Sometimes you think there’s a click, and really it’s just sex or neediness or a thousand other things. A lot of people get it wrong.”
“I know,” said Rachel.
Lucia heard the refrigerator door open and close, and Evan came into view briefly, Moxie at his heels. A moment later, he stepped through the kitchen doorway.
“It looks good,” he said, nodding at the cactus. He reached out and straightened a dining-room chair. “Geez, it’s a furnace in here, Lucia.”
“I know,” she said. “Come on, Rachel. Let’s move to the den. I can’t take it anymore.”
She held out an arm, waving Rachel toward the doorway, and she could see the wet marks on the back of the girl’s shirt as she stood. Those stray pieces of hair at her temples were damp.
Lucia was still looking at Rachel’s head when the window behind the futon shattered. The sweaty stray strands and the frizzing curls against the nape of her neck.
The pale curve of her neck.
The bite of glass against Lucia’s bare calves. Chunks of glass on the cushions, geometric.
A gunshot. The thought was so clear Lucia could almost see the words. It came to her after standing there for hours, and also it came to her before the shot was even fired.
She wrapped one arm around Rachel, shoving her down and landing next to her, her chin slamming against the girl’s shoulder hard enough to make her teeth ache. The second shot came then, a sharper, clearer crack with no glass involved. She didn’t see where it hit. She had a hand over Rachel’s head and she was trying to inch them both under the dining-room table, away from the window, and, God, her jaw ached.
Evan. He had been right there at the doorway to the kitchen, and now there was an empty space. She called his name as another bullet went into the doorframe. Shards of wood fell to the carpet.
Rachel moved underneath her, not making a sound other than breathing. They were pressed against the dining-room chairs, and when Lucia craned her neck, she could see something shining and black on the den floor. Evan’s shoe. His pants leg hitched up past his knee.
Another shot. A cactus hit the floor, dirt spilling, black. Moxie was barking madly from somewhere. Another shot—the fifth?—then silence. The sound of an engine outside?
Lucia lifted her head. Rachel was still partially underneath her.
“Evan?” she called again.
“I’m okay,” he said, and the shoe jerked out of her sightline. His face came into view, and he crawled toward them. “You?”
“Rachel?” Lucia asked, and the girl turned her head just enough that the curve of her cheek and ear were visible, along with one brown eye. Everything else was covered by hair.
“Yeah,” Rachel said.
“You’re sure?” said Lucia.
“Yeah,” Rachel repeated, showing all of her face, pale but whole.
“I’ll call the police,” Evan said. “Keep away from the window.”
“Obviously I’ll keep away from the window,” Lucia said, getting to her knees, though she looked back at the window, considering trajectories.
“We’re going to crawl into the den,” she told Rachel. “Keep down until we’re out of view. Okay?”
They crawled. Moxie bounded into the room, her tongue lapping at every inch of skin she could reach. Lucia herded her forward, wanting to keep her away from the glass. When Lucia finally stood up, she had a long scratch from her wrist to her elbow, smooth and straight like someone had tried to dissect her. Evan was on the phone, his back to them, checking the lock on the carport door as if that mattered when someone could just climb through the front window. It’s 5285 Avalon, he was saying. Someone in a car shot through the front window of the house.
Rachel leaned against the bookshelves. She skimmed a hand over the driftwood. She touched one fingertip to the milk-glass chicken.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” Lucia asked, laying her hands on the girl’s shoulders.
“I’m fine,” Rachel said. “I promise.”
“Nothing hurts? Nothing at all?” Because sometimes it happened, Lucia had heard, that shock set in and kept you from feeling injuries.
“Someone just shot at your house,” Rachel said, shifting under Lucia’s hands. “Someone just shot at your house.”
Lucia felt the hard knobs of the girl’s shoulder bones, the slight rise and fall of breath. “Yes,” she said. “But we’re all okay. It’s all fine.”
Fine. No one bleeding. No one dead. Standing here, the dog slobbering over their feet.
“Were they shooting at you?” said Rachel. “On purpose?”
If the woman had been right, though, it helped to assure Lucia that she herself was not in shock. Nothing was blurry. She could see so clearly. She thought about an old Spider-Man comic where Peter Parker suddenly realized his superpowers. She could see and hear more clearly than she ever had. The molding along the doorway had seven distinct edges. The tendrils of the carpet stood up in formations like coral. Evan had a small hole in his sleeve, no bigger than a pencil eraser. The pork chops he’d planned to grill were marinating by the sink, and orange juice had splashed over the side of the pie plate onto the counter.
Glass broke, quietly, in the sunroom. Probably a stray piece falling from the window.
“We need to get you home,” she told Rachel.
“Surely she’ll need to talk to the police,” Evan said. He’d hung up the phone and was walking toward them, headed past the doorway that led to the sunroom.
“Stay back,” said Lucia.
“They’re gone,” said Evan, although he sped up his steps.
“I don’t know why Rachel has to stay,” Lucia said. “She didn’t see anything.”
“Still.”
“Fine,” said Lucia, turning back to Rachel. “We need to call your mom. She should know what happened. You might be in shock, so you probably shouldn’t drive home. I could drop you off or she could pick you up. I’ll explain what happened.”
Rachel let out a long breath. “Don’t call her. You should not call her.”
“She’s your mother. I can’t not tell her—”
Rachel laid a hand on her arm, her grip tighter than Lucia would have expected.