by Melanie Tem
Dad was talking to Mom about a project at his work. Rae had earphones on and was leaning against the door on the other side, as far away from everybody else as she could get. The little kids were playing old maid in the way-back. Beside her, Priscilla the birthday girl was staring dreamily out the window; the pale pink streetlight that must have just come on was right in Priscilla’s face for a minute, and Lucy thought how much they all looked like Mom and Dad, even though Mom and Dad didn’t look a thing like each other.
Suddenly Lucy was filled with such love for her family and her place in it that she felt like a hot-air balloon. It hurt her, there was so much love. She closed her eyes and held on to the edge of the seat. Mom slowed down for the turn into the alley. Two cars went by, and Lucy could tell they were carrying families or people who belonged to families, taking them home.
Mom took them slowly toward the garage, and everybody started making rustling sounds and little sighs as they got ready to get out of the car. Lucy twisted in her seat to peer out the back window, but she couldn’t see Ethan anymore. Her knee bumped into Priscilla, and Pris complained loudly, “ Lu -
cy!” From the front seat Dad scolded without even turning his head, “Cut it out, girls!” Lucy sulked.
Dad got out of the car to open the garage door. As usual, Lucy wondered irritably why they didn’t have an automatic garage door opener like Stacey’s.
She’d asked that so many times that Dad got mad at her if she even mentioned it, so she didn’t. But she still wondered. Nobody could tell her what to think.
She watched Dad leave the safe shell of the family car. At first—mad at him because he’d yelled at her and because he wouldn’t get a garage door opener—she was glad to see him go, hoped he’d disappear altogether into the smelly shadows around the garbage cans, hoped Ethan would get him.
Then she was sorry, and terrified, and had to clamp her mouth shut tight to keep from crying out, “Daddy!” Then she thought, with a rush of hot pride, that he looked like a hero, striding away from the car while they all watched and waited, lifting the heavy garage door with one hand, as if it weighed nothing, to let them all in.
When she got out of the car, Lucy went to her father and hugged him.
They walked on into the house with their arms around each other, while the rest of the family chattered and yawned around them. “You’re getting so tall,”
Dad said to her. “Look, you come all the way up to my second shirt button,”
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and his big hand rested on the top of her head as he showed her how tall she was and held her for a minute against his chest.
Everybody just sort of drifted off to their beds. Even the little kids went without complaining. Lucy lay under her sheet and waited for Mom and Dad to come say good night to her. Rae still had the earphones on and was curled up on her bed across the room with a pillow over her head and her back to Lucy. Lucy stuck her tongue out.
Lucy kissed Dad and hugged him and said, “I love you.” He said it back.
He did love her, too. When it was Mom’s turn, Lucy kept her arms around her neck and whispered, “Can I talk to you later?”
Mom tried to pull back a little in surprise, but Lucy held her close. “Can’t it wait till tomorrow? It’s late. You’ve had a big day. We all have.”
“Can I come talk to you when everybody’s asleep? I’ll meet you in the living room in half an hour.” Only when Lucy felt Mom’s shoulders shrug and her head nod did she let her go.
She almost fell asleep. Or maybe she did fall asleep, because all of a sudden the house was awfully quiet. She could hear just the edges of music seep-ing out from around the earphones, and from Rae’s breathing she could tell she was asleep. There was a cricket in their room, a big one from the sound of it; Lucy liked the sound crickets made but they looked gross, and she swung her feet gingerly over the side of the bed.
She didn’t know how late it was. Maybe Mom had given up and gone to bed. Lucy hurried. She’d made it all the way down to the bottom of the stairs before she heard her mother whisper his name.
“Ethan!”
Lucy stifled her own cry of “Mama!” and tiptoed rapidly toward the sound of her mother’s voice. The hall between the stairs and the living room was only a few steps long, and she’d probably traveled it every day of her life, but now she thought maybe she could get lost.
She was really aware of things, as if she had a fever: her own breathing, which filled her ears and hurt in her chest. The places under her bare feet where the nap of the carpet had been flattened by hundreds, maybe thousands, of footprints, including her own, including these she was making now.
Patches’s breathing that turned to purring when she passed him asleep in a chair, though he didn’t open his eyes or flick his ears or give any other sign that he knew she was there. The way the house felt full, because of all the people and things in it that she loved.
The French doors at this end of the living room were ajar. Lucy could hardly bring herself to go any closer. She stood behind the lacy curtains and, afraid to look through, looked instead at each of the tiny holes that, if you looked from a little distance, made patterns of flowers and leaves.
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She tasted coldness; her mouth puckered and her teeth hurt. She smelled Ethan, sour, as if he hadn’t taken a shower in a long time, as if he were sick.
She heard her mother say his name again. If Lucy hadn’t already known what the word was and hadn’t been expecting her to say it, it would have sounded like a sigh.
Lucy took a big sideways step, like in Mother May I? or Simon Says, and forced herself to peek through the crack between the doors. Her mother’s back was to her, and she was close enough that Lucy could have reached through and touched her. Her brother Ethan crouched at the other end of the long room, facing them both.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t do any of the things he used to do: grin at them, or pout, or yell dirty words, or call out like in a bad dream. His mouth was hanging open, crooked, as if it hurt. It looked full of dirt or blood; Lucy felt sick. Furiously, she wondered what he’d been doing to hurt himself now. Maybe chewing snuff; she’d heard what snuff could do to your gums and lips and tongue.
Ethan started toward them. Lucy backed up, and her hand on the door opened it farther. Mom stayed where she was and said his name out loud. He was panting and his hands were in fists, as if he’d been running hard, but really he was hardly moving at all.
Mom raised her arms. Horrified, Lucy thought she was going to pull Ethan to her, the way she did the rest of them when they were hurt or sad, and then Mom would be filthy, too. But the distance between Mom and Ethan closed only a little bit at a time.
Ethan’s face was blank. Lucy tried to tell herself that he looked tired, or sick, or mad, but really there wasn’t any expression on his face at all. What he looked was empty.
But when he took another shaky step, she could see into his eyes. The same look was there that had been there for years, since before she’d been old enough to know that you could tell things about people from the look in their eyes. It was the same look she was seeing more and more in Rae’s eyes, too. She didn’t know what to call it. A wildness that good parents should be able to make go away. Lucy was suddenly furious with her father, asleep upstairs, and with her mother, who stood with her back to Lucy, close enough to touch, not doing anything.
“Ethan,” Mom said again, and her voice broke. Lucy wondered savagely why she did that. In the seventeen years and six months since Ethan had been born, Mom had probably said his name a million times—maybe a million times just since he’d started getting in trouble, or just since he’d disappeared—and it never had done any good.
Help him! Lucy thought wildly, and the delicate threads in the lace curtain gave a little in her fist. Do something. You’re the mother. Help him, or mak
e him go away.
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Ethan didn’t answer to his name, of course. He didn’t say anything. Seeing the way he strained, the way his throat worked and his wet mouth hung open, Lucy understood that he was trying to talk and couldn’t.
Whatever had happened to him, whatever big trouble he’d gotten himself into this time, he’d lost the power of speech. All of a sudden, Lucy hated it that he couldn’t talk, even though, for a long time before he’d run away, all he’d said were ugly things to everybody, obscenities and accusations and lies.
Mom was begging. “Ethan, talk to me, honey. Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what you need from me.” He still didn’t say anything, and Lucy knew why: Kids shouldn’t have to tell their parents what they needed. Parents should just know. He took another long, labored step toward Mom’s outstretched arms.
Suddenly Lucy realized that Ethan needed something he couldn’t get from Mom and Dad, and that Rae did, too, and that maybe she herself would, too. Maybe she already did and didn’t know it, like having some disease that you carried around inside you for years before there were any symptoms.
Maybe all kids did. The realization both scared and excited her. Help him! she thought thunderously, but she could tell that at this very moment, Mom was failing him again.
Lucy’s head swam. To keep herself from falling she held on to the curtains with both hands, and in several places her nails went through with tiny tearing sounds. The door creaked, but Mom and Ethan were paying too much attention to each other to notice that she was there.
“Ethan!”
Ethan lunged or stumbled and fell on top of Mom. Lucy dodged backward, pulling the door wide open although she didn’t mean to. Her own cry was lost in Mom’s. She saw them on the floor, Mom’s white shirt and Ethan’s pale skin against the dark brown carpet. She saw Mom close her arms around him, heard her actually start to hum as if she were singing a lullaby, then saw his hands go to Mom’s throat.
“Ethan! Stop it!”
Mom’s scream was a croak, but Lucy tried to help her by echoing it out loud. She fell to her knees beside them, afraid to touch them, not sure she should even be here, not knowing what to do.
She pulled at her brother’s shoulders, his dirty shirt, his hair so short she couldn’t get a hold on it. He wasn’t very heavy, she could move parts of his body, but his grip was so tight that she couldn’t even think how to break it; she clawed at his fingers, bit at them. His thumbs bored into the soft places in their mother’s neck; the flesh was turning white around them, and Mom was coughing. Lucy wrapped her legs around her brother’s thin waist and clamped her hands over his mouth and nose, trying not to think about the stuff she’d seen coming out of there.
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There was a thin crash behind them. Ethan twisted underneath her, and she tumbled sideways onto the floor. She landed on top of Patches; he yowled and struggled free, but he didn’t scratch.
“Lucy, Lucy, are you all right?”
“I guess.” She was crying. Mom held her tight.
“What’s going on?” Timidly Lucy opened her eyes. Dad was in the doorway, holding the fallen curtain rod. The curtains fluttered around him like torn skin.
“Lucy was having a nightmare,” Mom told him, still panting, her voice strained as if she had a bad sore throat. She gathered Lucy up in her arms and carried her to the couch. Vaguely, Lucy was surprised that Mom could still carry her, that she could still fit into her mother’s lap. She drew her knees up, put her thumb in her mouth, buried her face against Mom’s soft shirt. “A nightmare about Ethan,” Mom added.
“How did the curtains get torn down?”
“I think she was still half-asleep when she came downstairs. She lost her balance and grabbed them.”
Dad came to sit beside them and put his arm around both of them. His cotton pajamas smelled like sunshine. Lucy snuggled against him. “Damn,” he said softly. “It just goes on and on.”
“And we can’t protect them from their dreams,” Mom said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “We can’t keep any of them safe.”
But Lucy, sitting in her mother’s lap in her father’s arms in her own living room on a quiet summer night, felt safe.
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8
The doorbell rang before Masters of the Universe was over, so Lucy knew the social worker was early, it wasn’t even nine yet. That made her mad. It was bad enough that he was coming to her house, upsetting everybody, making her dad come home from work; he could at least wait till the right time.
The police had come to her house very early this morning. They’d stood in the entranceway underneath the dusty umbrella-shaped lamp, a man and a woman. She’d only known it was a man and a woman because of their voices; otherwise they were the same, same height, same hair under the same hats. Ethan was dead, they’d said. It made her really mad. Everybody already knew that. They must have said it a hundred times. She and Rae had listened at the upstairs railing, holding hands.
Mom and Dad had called everybody together before breakfast. “Ethan is dead,”
they’d said, a hundred times. “Your brother is dead.” Cory and Molly had started crying because Mom and Dad were crying. Everybody else had just sat there, waiting to be released. It wasn’t like they didn’t already know: Ethan was dead.
So what was Jerry Johnston coming for now? Probably to tell them that Ethan was dead. Lucy scowled. Then she had the crazy idea that maybe he 39
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was coming to tell them it wasn’t true, the cops were wrong, everybody was wrong, Ethan wasn’t dead.
When she heard Mom yell her name, she realized she hadn’t cleaned up the kitchen like she was supposed to. “I will, Mom!” she called, and scrambled to her feet.
But at the door of the family room she paused to look back at Cory, Molly, and Dominic. They sat in a row, cross-legged on the crumb-specked brown carpet in front of the TV, little shoulders rounded, little feet bare, little toes like pebbles or like teeth.
It would be so easy for somebody to make them sad. So easy for somebody to hurt them. Right now, they seemed safe and happy. Molly giggled at something on the screen. Cory unfolded his legs, leaned back on his elbows, and stuck his feet straight up in the air. Dom yawned and made a sound like a car horn, in a miniature version of a game Dad played with all of them, one after another, until they got too old to play with him that way. Cheerios were scattered on the floor around them: lace on a wedding dress, or stepping-stones across a raging river, or tiny flying saucers carrying tiny aliens from a tiny distant planet to bring messages only Dominic could hear, or Molly, or Cory, just as they once had brought messages to Lucy.
Everybody had been like that once upon a time. All the grown-ups in the world had been kids, though some of them, she was learning, never had been safe. Mom and Dad had been children once. They hadn’t known each other then. Lucy hadn’t known them, either. She hadn’t even existed. It was all connected, and hard for her to think about.
The doorbell rang again. Irritably Lucy wondered what Jerry Johnston was in such a hurry about, why Mom didn’t answer the door. A cereal commercial came on, and Molly sang along; she knew all the words, even the whoop at the end.
Lucy pushed the door shut. It caught a breeze from the open kitchen window and slammed. She winced and waited, but nobody yelled at her.
The kitchen really was a mess. She didn’t see what was such a big deal. If the house was clean enough for the family to live in, why wasn’t it clean enough for some stranger to walk into? Even a stranger with power. Even a stranger with terrible news about Ethan.
Her big brother was dead. She would never see him again. Tears filled her eyes. The dishcloth was stiff and sour. Clean ones were in the chin
a cabinet in the dining room, next to the living room where her mother would now be taking Jerry Johnston to sit. Lucy didn’t want to go in there. Wrinkling her nose, she held the dishcloth under hot running water. An ant crawled across the counter. Lucy shuddered and watched it disappear under the metal edge 40
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of the sink. Dad said everything had a right to live, but Lucy didn’t think that ought to include bugs.
She wiped at the dribbles of milk across the red tablecloth. Some of them were hardened by now and she had to scrub. One of Ethan’s probation officers, a fat lady with soft white hair like a grandmother from a little kids’
book, had put into a court report that the Brills’ house was “mediocre” and the housekeeping was “passable.” Lucy hadn’t seen what was so bad about that; she hadn’t even known for sure what mediocre meant until she looked it up. But Mom had been furious. “They read the damn things in open court!”
Mom had yelled at Dad, who was just trying to calm her down. “It will be in our permanent record!”
“I don’t think she meant it the way it sounds,” Dad had insisted. “The whole report is sloppily written. I just think she picked the wrong words. I mean, look, Carole, if she’d said the house was ‘modest’ and the housekeeping was ‘adequate,’ it would mean the same thing literally but it would have an entirely different tone.”
“But she didn’t say that. She didn’t mean that. Haven’t you seen her, Tony?
She noticed the spot where the paint is peeling on the outside of the front door. She brushed off the chair with her hand before she’d sit down. She examined her coffee cup before she’d drink out of it.”
“Maybe she doesn’t have kids or pets,” Dad had suggested, chuckling.
Then, seeing that Mom wasn’t amused, he’d demanded, “Well, anyway, what do you care what she thinks?”
“I don’t exactly care what she thinks. But it’s such a gratuitous little cruel-ty to write things like that about a family that’s already vulnerable, that’s already going through hell.”
