Prodigal

by Melanie Tem

  She found she was having to concentrate on stuff that she’d hardly even thought about until now. Like how her hands and knees, shoulders and hips were supposed to work together. Like how the muscles in her thighs were supposed to get shorter in the front and longer in the back so that she could stand up. Like where she and Jerry and Mike and Rae and Ethan and Mom and Dad all were, in relation to each other.

  By the time she was finally on her feet, both the outside door and the door to the back hallway were shut again. Jerry came into the living room with his arm around Mike’s shoulders. Lucy looked away.

  “Lucy’s here, too,” Jerry told Mike. “Must be my lucky day.” Lucy thought that was a funny thing to say. Mike gave her a dirty look.

  Jerry held out his other arm. After a minute, Lucy went to him. His arm around her was like the feather boa she’d worn one Halloween with a blond beehive wig and Mom’s high heels; it wasn’t very heavy, but it wrapped her up.

  “Well,” Jerry said cheerfully, “who wants to be first?”

  There was a silence. Lucy tried hard to figure out what he was talking about, embarrassed that she didn’t know. Then, from the other side of Jerry, Mike said, “First at what?”

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  “Working on feelings.” Jerry’s voice was husky and shaking a little. Lucy thought he sounded excited. “Working on rage and fear.”

  Lucy wanted to say she’d be first because she knew that would please Jerry, but she was afraid to. “Oh, shit, I will,” Mike said.

  “Good for you, Mike.”

  I’m sorry, Lucy wanted to say. I’ll be next. She thought she heard the click and creak of the hallway door opening again, but before she could turn around to see, Jerry sat down on the floor, pulling her and Mike with him.

  “You sit at his feet, Lucy. I’ll take the rest of his body.”

  Obediently she crawled over by Mike’s feet.

  Jerry settled Mike’s head and shoulders in his lap. Jerry’s thin jeans pulled up away from his socks when he crossed his legs, showing white pocked flesh.

  “Take his shoes off.”

  Mike laughed shrilly, but he didn’t try to kick her or anything when she pulled his sneakers off. They were soaking wet, and so were his socks. Lucy hoped frantically that Jerry wouldn’t make her take Mike’s socks off, too.

  That would be so embarrassing.

  “Now don’t touch him unless I tell you to. Just pay attention to what happens. Maybe you’ll be able to do it sometime.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “I’ll be next.”

  “Not today.” She’d lost his attention. It was her own fault. She’d missed her chance. “I can only do one of these a day. I don’t want to OD.”

  Pushed away, hurt, Lucy sat back. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to go home. But she couldn’t leave until Jerry told her to.

  “Are you comfortable?”

  Lucy started to answer before she realized he wasn’t talking to her anymore, he was talking to Mike. Mike said, “Yeah.”

  “Now I want you to pay attention to your body. Are there places where it hurts? Where you feel tension?”

  After a minute Mike said, “I’ve got kind of a stiff neck.”

  Jerry slid one hand inside Mike’s shirt on each side of his neck. Lucy heard both of them start breathing harder.

  “Jesus Christ, it hurts!” Mike was crying, and his body writhed on the floor.

  Jerry was holding the top half of him still, but his legs twisted and his feet kicked. Lucy backed away.

  “Use the pain!” Jerry hissed, his face very close to Mike’s, very far away from Lucy. “Don’t try to get away from it! Make it as big and as strong as you can!”

  Mike groaned. “It hurts everywhere! Down my arms and down my back!”

  “That’s right, that’s right,” Jerry crooned. “Make the pain as awful as you can, and then give it to me!”

  “I can’t!”

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  “What are you feeling, Mike? Right now?” Jerry was bent so low over Mike that they looked to Lucy like one creature. His hands were pressing on Mike’s neck and shoulders, and his thick legs were stretched out beside Mike’s body, hemming him in.

  “Shit.” Mike laughed. “How the hell should I know?”

  “What are you feeling? This is not a game.” Jerry could have been yelling, even though really he was whispering. Lucy was glad he wasn’t yelling at her.

  “Mad,” Mike said.

  “How mad?”

  “Real mad.”

  “You’re furious. Good. You’re enraged. Who are you mad at?”

  “My old man,” Mike whispered.

  “Who? I can’t hear you.”

  “My fucking father!” Mike suddenly yelled. His knees drew up and then kicked out straight. Lucy scooted farther back. Jerry bent lower. “My father!”

  “Yes. Do you hate him?”

  “I hate him!”

  “Do you wish he was dead?”

  “I wish he was dead!”

  “Yes. He’s a lousy father. He hurts you.”

  “He hurts me!” Mike was screaming so much now that Lucy could hardly understand the words.

  “Feel it,” Jerry whispered urgently. “Feel the anger and the fear.”

  “It hurts!”

  “Yes. Stay with it, Mike. You’re doing fine.”

  Lucy’s back was to the hallway door, but she heard it open. It stayed open for a long minute, then closed again. She wanted desperately to look. She wanted to go back there and find Rae. But she was afraid to move. If she left Jerry and Mike alone together now, Jerry would never notice her again.

  “Do you wish I was your father?”

  Mike didn’t say anything. He was sobbing. Lucy was embarrassed to see him crying. She watched his feet in the dirty wet socks, twisting on the dim floor in front of her almost as if they weren’t attached to his legs.

  “Mike, Mike, do you wish I was your father?”

  “Yes!”

  “Say it!”

  “I—wish—you—were—my father!”

  “Then I am. I am your father. I am your father.”

  Lucy lost count of how many times he said it, and finally lost track even of the sense of the words. Somehow Jerry contorted his huge body until it had slid out from under Mike and over his head like an envelope, like a 146

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  shroud, until Jerry was on top of Mike, covering all of him except his feet, which kicked and twisted and then relaxed and lay still. There was the loud noise of gulping and swallowing.

  “Lucy.”

  From close behind her, Lucy heard her name. Afraid to take her eyes off Jerry, she whispered, “Rae?”

  “Lucy. Go home.”

  “I can’t. He won’t let me.”

  “Get out of here. Go home.”

  Hardly aware of what she was doing, Lucy pushed herself backward across the carpet. Then she was crawling. Then she was standing up, fumbling with the lock on the front door. Then she was outside, where it was dark and cold and snowing hard, and running down the slippery steps and out through the hedge and along the sidewalk toward home, all the time hearing voices calling her name. Jerry moaning, “Lucy!” because he wanted her to stay, but he didn’t really need her because he had Mike, and Rae crying, “Lucy!” because she wanted her to run away, stay away, go home. Lucy ran home.

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  23

  The door was locked.

  The extra key wasn’t under the brick. Panic-stricken, Lucy pressed the doorbell again and again. Feeling it buzz under her fingertip, she imagined the tiny spurt of electricity transforming into chimes that were supposed to tell somebody inside the house that she wanted in.

  Some part of all that wasn’t wor
king, because nobody was coming.

  Lucy leaned on the doorbell again. It played the first few lines of “You Are My Sunshine” again. That was the song Dad had set it on when he’d first brought it home, a long time before, while Rae was still at home. On the box Lucy had read that there were eleven other tunes you could choose from, including “Happy Birthday” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” But Dad had never bothered to change it. Another thing he obviously didn’t care about anymore.

  It only played as far as “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray.” But by that time, Lucy was rigid, from cold and from terror brought on by a series of full-blown fantasies that had come at her like crystals in an ice storm—no two exactly alike, but all of them cold and sharp and hurtful:

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  They’d moved.

  They’d all been killed by a mass murderer. Stabbed. Shot. Raped. And the murderer was waiting by the hall table to get her.

  She’d never lived here. She’d dreamed it. She’d made it all up. She’d never had a family.

  “Boy, are you in trouble!” Priscilla said as she opened the door. “You’re in so much trouble!”

  Lucy practically fell inside. It smelled like home. Light from the umbrella lamp made a circle on the wood floor, the way it always did.

  The stairs still went up to the right. It was warm, except for the cold air that still chased her. “Goddamn you!” she yelled at her sister. “Shut the damn door!”

  “Shut it your damn self!” Pris yelled back, and then just stood there with her teeth bared and her arms folded. The door was wide open. Ice crystals were coming in.

  Lucy slammed and locked the door, then leaned against it. Her chest hurt from the cold air, and way down low on her stomach, where Jerry’s hand had been, there was a weird warm ache that she’d never felt before. “Where’s Mom?”

  “What makes you think I’d tell you anything?” Pris was staring at her.

  “God, your face looks awful. You’ve got zits all over!”

  Lucy put her hand to her face and felt a few bumps, but both her fingers and her cheek were too cold to tell much of anything. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Out looking for you.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Out looking for you.”

  “Oh, God. Who’s taking care of the little kids?”

  “I am.”

  “Oh, God.” Lucy slid down the door to sit on the floor. Right away, the snow and ice soaked through her pants, so that now her butt and legs were cold and wet just like her feet, ankles, hands, ears, face.

  Pris nodded, still grinning. “You are in so much trouble.”

  “How’d they know?”

  “Guess.”

  “Priscilla.”

  “The school called, dummy. Whaddaya think?”

  Molly came running down the stairs. Mom and maybe Dad would say,

  “Don’t run on the stairs.” Priscilla didn’t say anything. Priscilla was supposed to be in charge while Mom and Dad were out. Out looking for her. So if something happened, if Molly fell and got hurt, it would be Lucy’s fault.

  Lucy had a sudden vivid image of her littlest sister tumbling all the way from the top of the stairs to the bottom and landing in her lap, dead. There 149

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  was blood. There was coldness. But at least she and everybody else knew whose fault it was.

  She tried to reach out her hand, tried to say something, but Molly was leaning safely over the railing halfway down and kicking at the posts and yelling, “Pris, Pris, he took my truck and he won’t give it back! It’s my truck!

  Make him give it back!”

  “Work it out yourself,” Priscilla told her smugly. It sounded a lot meaner than when Mom and Dad said it, and they said it a lot.

  “I hate you!” Molly screamed, already on her way pounding up the stairs.

  “I’m telling Mom!”

  Lucy tried to get up, but her feet slipped in the water and she sank back against the door to wait until she was strong enough to try again. She knew she couldn’t stay here for the rest of her life, but she really didn’t see why not.

  “How long ago did they leave?” she asked Pris.

  Priscilla didn’t answer. With an effort Lucy opened her eyes. Pris was still standing there with her arms folded, looking at her and laughing.

  Laughing at her.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are!” Priscilla chuckled out loud now, and she unfolded an arm to point at her. “You’re sitting there in the water like you peed your pants, and you think nobody knows you’re in love with that stupid, ugly, fat Jerry Johnston—”

  Lucy flew at her. She didn’t know how she got her feet under her, or how she kept from falling back into the spreading cold dirty water. But she managed to throw herself against her sister, and Priscilla’s shouts of laughter turned into shouts of surprise and self-defense, and Lucy wanted to kill her.

  Wanted her dead and broken and shut up. Wanted them all dead.

  She had hold of Priscilla’s braids. They were both rolling around on the floor now, in the water, knocking over the dish of cat food and the trash can under the table. See how Pris liked getting her fancy new pink sweater dirty.

  Priscilla kicked her between the legs. Pain forked upward through her body, and Lucy shrieked. They were both shrieking, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” over and over again until you didn’t have to hear the words to know what they meant. Dimly, Lucy was aware that sounds of a big fight were coming from upstairs, too, Molly and the two little boys banging around and yelling, “I hate you!” too.

  The house was overflowing with anger. Lucy couldn’t keep her footing in it. It was soaking through everything. Pris sank her teeth into Lucy’s hand, and Lucy doubled the hand into a fist and rammed it into Priscilla’s mouth.

  Somebody pushed between them. Dad. And Mom went racing up the stairs. Don’t run on the stairs, Lucy thought confusedly, and imagined her 150

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  mother tumbling down the stairs and landing in her lap all broken and dead. At least they’d know whose fault it was, which was better than it not being anybody’s fault.

  Dad was yelling, “Stop it!” He held each of them away from his body in one-armed bear hugs. Behind his back they both tried at the same time to kick each other, and ended up kicking him. “Stop it! Both of you!” He shook them, hard.

  The jumble of noise from upstairs was sorting itself out now into Mom yelling, “Cut it out!” and Cory crying and Molly screaming, “He broke my new truck!” and Dominic yelling, “I did not!” Lucy sagged against her father’s arm.

  He shook them again, not so hard this time, and Lucy was afraid they might already be wearing him out. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

  Both Priscilla and Lucy were crying and could only say, “I hate her! She hates me!” Lucy’s hand hurt, and she thought she saw blood at the corner of her sister’s mouth.

  Dad was glaring at her. “Where have you been?”

  “At Jerry’s,” she managed to say. “For group.”

  “You’re lying. You walked out of school at two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Your group doesn’t start until four. We went to Jerry Johnston’s house looking for you, but nobody answered the door.”

  “She’s in love with Jerry Johnston.” Priscilla sneered, and Lucy wanted to kill her again but Dad wouldn’t let her.

  “Where were you?”

  “At Jerry’s!”

  “Lucy, don’t lie to me!”

  Dad was roaring at her. His voice filled her ears. She broke away from him, but then for a minute didn’t know which way to run.

  He let go of Pris and grabbed both of Lucy’s shoulders. She was afraid of him; she thought he was going to hurt her, and she
deserved it, too. But instead he brought his face so close to hers that she saw only a little part of it, and for an instant she wasn’t sure whether this really was her dad at all.

  Maybe a monster had invaded their house. Maybe she’d called the monster there because she was bad. Maybe— ”You’re grounded!” Dad said to her very very quietly. “You’re grounded to your room until you tell us the truth.”

  “I was at Jerry’s,” she repeated, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Why won’t you believe me?” But it didn’t much matter whether he believed her or not. She knew what was real.

  Shaking his head in disgust, Dad turned away from her to deal with Priscilla. Abandoned, Lucy stumbled up the many stairs and down the long hall to her room.

  She collapsed onto the bed nearest the door, which was Rae’s. She fell right away into a sort of half sleep where snow covered things and ice crys-151

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  tals changed how things looked and most of her body belonged to somebody else, and none of those were bad feelings.

  She woke with a little scream and sat up straight. For long minutes she didn’t know where she was, because she was on the wrong side of the room.

  Her first thought was of Jerry. She missed him; she was afraid of him. Her next was that she couldn’t have been asleep very long: she could hear the little kids still crying, Mom still trying to settle them down, and she saw by her alarm clock that it wasn’t quite six o’clock yet. And her clothes were still sopping wet.

  She tried to think. She’d never been grounded to her room before, but Rae and Ethan had, and she knew that Mom and Dad had to let you go to the bathroom. They had to feed you. They made you go to school; tomorrow was Thursday, so maybe she could ditch school and run away.

  Maybe she could go to Jerry’s.

  Maybe Rae was wrong. Maybe Rae was all in her head.

  Right now she was tired and cold. She turned on the light, found a flan-nel nightgown and socks and slippers and her robe, and carried them into the bathroom. Nobody yelled at her. Nobody even noticed.

  She shut the bathroom door before she turned the light on. For a minute she stood shivering in the darkness without touching anything.