Once Upon a Day: A Novel

by Lisa Tucker

  When Mick told her to get up, she wasn’t sure she could.

  “I said get up, you bitch!”

  She still didn’t move, and Mick told Ron to lift her up. He grabbed her under her arms and pulled her to face Mick.

  “You gonna kiss me now?”

  Her lips were covered in blood; she could feel it running down her chin and taste it dripping into her mouth. And they were already swelling. She could sense the top one brushing against the bottom of her nose.

  “Damn,” Ron muttered. “You wanna kiss her like that?”

  “Fuck no. But she’s gotta learn.” He grabbed Lucy’s ear, twisting the lobe. “You ready to do what I say now, you little whore?”

  Choose, Joan.

  She saw Charles coming toward her. “I won’t do it,” she told Charles. “Don’t worry.” He nodded, but then she realized he was crying. “It doesn’t even hurt,” she told him, which was such a lie. She’d been thrown to the floor, and now she was curled in a ball. She couldn’t see anything, but she could feel the stabs and punches and kicks. There were so many pains now, white-hot places on her stomach, the backs of her knees, the side of her neck. Her throat hurt from screaming, and then she was vomiting and spitting blood and her throat hurt more.

  She smelled the smoke and she thought of Dorothea, but then it became only a small point of fire pressing marks into her flesh. Joan had died of fire, but she wasn’t brave like Joan. The agony was overwhelming her. She would have to renounce God, unless he heard her screams for help.

  And then, just like that, it was over.

  Later the doctors would tell Lucy that a violent blow to her head had knocked her unconscious. Charles had found her that way, and it was three days before she came out of it. She tried to tell them it wasn’t true, that before Charles came home she had regained consciousness, at least for a minute or two. They humored her, but she could tell they didn’t believe it. No matter, Lucy knew it was real. It was one of her most vivid memories: the moment when she’d opened her eyes and discovered that the men had run away, the torture had stopped.

  For the rest of her life, she would never forget the peace that came over her then. She was lying on the floor of her house, and she could feel the warmth of the afternoon light as it poured in the windows. She could hear the soft clicking of their dog’s paws on the back door, and something else, a sound that would make its way into her dreams for years to come. Of course it was real. It was the sound of her baby girl singing.

  PART THREE

  Angel Moon

  eleven

  THOUGH MY FATHER never talked of my mother, I’d grown up knowing that he’d loved her with his whole soul and being. This was why he couldn’t bear to see pictures of her, according to my grandmother, who’d told me many times how happy Father had been before Mother died. “I remember the day they got married,” Grandma said. “Oh, your father was so delighted! He stood up and told all his guests that he would never again doubt there was a heaven because he’d already found it.”

  My parents, Grandma said, were every bit as happy together as Jane and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. Because I’d read the novel to Grandma so many times, I had many chances to think about this, and to wonder what it would be like to be in love. One sentence in particular seemed curious: “I know no weariness of my Edward’s society; he knows none of mine.” I tried to imagine never, ever growing weary of someone. It seemed impossible to me, for though I adored Father and Grandma and Jimmy, I couldn’t spend more than a few hours with them before I longed to be back in my room with my books and my daydreams.

  It seemed impossible, that is, until I found myself passing day after day in my strange new life with Stephen.

  Our primary task, of course, was trying to help my brother. Each afternoon we would go to the hospital, and Stephen would sit with me while I gave Jimmy a report of my progress (or lack thereof) in discovering the truth about our family’s past, and then we would listen to my brother talk, sometimes for an hour or more, about his own memories and his continuing feelings of guilt that he had been somehow responsible for what happened to our mother. I told him repeatedly it wasn’t true, but I didn’t tell him that we’d requested her death certificate from California. It was Stephen’s idea, as a practical way to make Jimmy feel better. This document would list the cause of death, which, we both felt sure, wouldn’t be murder at the hands of a six-year-old.

  I hadn’t told Jimmy yet because the soonest we could possibly receive the certificate was five days, and this was with the help of the hospital records department, who’d agreed to put in the request after Dr. Baker talked to them. There were a few problems to be overcome, including my lack of knowledge of the exact date of her death, or even of the date she was born. Both of these could be solved, Stephen thought, by contacting my father, but after I explained Father’s condition, and how upset he would be by even these simple requests, Stephen talked to the hospital records clerk himself, and the appropriate documents were rushed to California, listing only the year of death, 1984, and other identifying criteria, including Father’s name as next of kin.

  While we were awaiting the arrival of the certificate, I worked on the task of remembering. Stephen had done what he called a “search” on how to recover childhood memories—using a truly wonderful thing known as a laptop computer. He discovered that most people do remember certain events before age five, and I might be able to do the same if I just tried to talk more about that period of my life. Each night, we would sit at dinner and talk about what kinds of things people typically remembered from their early lives, and what he himself remembered. I loved listening to all this, though it was never enough to jar even the smallest memory loose in my own mind, and I became increasingly desperate to give Jimmy something to hold on to, so he would not lose hope.

  Finally, on Tuesday night I realized there was another possible direction I could try, and I started to tell Stephen some of the things Grandma had said about our home. He said it was obvious we’d lived in Southern California, near enough to L.A. to go to movie studios and the pier on Santa Monica. Then I told him Grandma had often mentioned a particular place called Malibu. I asked him if it was near L.A., and he said yes. When I asked him how he’d heard of it, he laughed and said everyone had heard of it. It was home to movie stars and very rich people. It was right on the Pacific Ocean.

  We’d just finished having dinner, and he was driving me to a bookstore because I’d told him I would love something to read. He said perhaps I could pick up a book on Malibu while we were there, though if I didn’t find anything, it would be all right. “We can always look it up on my laptop when we get home.”

  The cab was dark; he couldn’t see me smile. He’d called it “home.” Not “my place” or “my apartment” or “my house” or any of the ways he’d referred to it previously. Just “home.” As though it were ours together, which it felt like it was after the six days we’d spent there talking and having breakfast, putting groceries away, doing laundry in the basement of his building, watching movies, which he’d rented from a place called Blockbuster, until the wee hours of the morning.

  Not that his apartment was the real attraction. In truth, it had very few of the conveniences of my own home. His bathtub didn’t have jets of water shooting from each corner as each of our tubs had. His refrigerator had only one plain door, no ice or water could be obtained without going inside. Parts of his floor were covered with an ugly beige carpet and other parts were exposed, showing a pale wood that was nothing like the gleaming planks of Brazilian cherry wood Father had chosen to cover our floor. He didn’t have a baby grand piano, or indeed any piano, and his book collection was really quite awful, containing only a dictionary, an almanac and several forbidding-looking textbooks about medicine, which I guessed was a hobby of his.

  But Stephen himself was an entirely different matter, and I loved his apartment for the simple reason that he was in it. I woke up every morning eager to begin another day of just being
with him.

  Was this my first crush? I did try to convince myself it was that and nothing more. Actually, I spent much of my time alone giving myself stern warnings. Dorothea, how can you be so foolish? You are in no position to judge what you are feeling. Oh please, your whole notion of love has been formed from romantic novels and childish fantasies! And the sensation you have when you see him? This especially means nothing. As he himself said, how many men have you seen in your life? The answer, as you know, is very, very few. For all you can tell, you would have the same response to a thousand other men.

  And then my heart would throb—but not race—and I would want to throttle the voice in my head for even daring to suggest that any other man could ever compare to Stephen.

  What other man could be as sensitive and intelligent? Taxicab driver though he was, I’d seen into his deeper nature and found that he had the soul of a poet and the mind of a scholar (if not the book collection). Of course he also had that musical voice and such interesting eyebrows and those remarkably perfect teeth.

  He was also very kind, not only to Jimmy and me, but to the elderly people he insisted on picking up in his cab, charging them very little or nothing. Some of these people were older than Grandma when she died, but Stephen said they still liked to get out and see their families or go to the store or just sit on a bench in the park. When I asked how he knew their habits, he said he’d been picking them up for months. At first, it seemed odd that Stephen barely spoke to them, and I would turn around from my position in the front, ready to make pleasant conversation, but then I discovered that many of them seemed to want to talk the entire trip, without interruption, and I decided that Stephen was really just being polite by listening.

  He was in every way so very appealing. His only flaw was a tendency to limp a little when he was tired, but this only endeared him to me more. So many of my books had heroes with some flaw, often from an injury, sometimes from birth. Of course I couldn’t risk asking him the cause in his case, for fear of drawing attention to something I sensed he was sensitive about. Whatever the origin, I admired the way he pushed himself, since it was his weak right foot that he used to drive his taxicab. And even though he’d told me he wasn’t driving much now that I was staying with him—only picking up a few of these older people who he knew would have no other ride—still, he had to take me to the hospital and out to dinner and usually at least one more place: the Blockbuster or the mall (for additional modern clothes, which I’d become quite fond of), or the bookstore, where we were headed now.

  I was seeking a book about love, though naturally I was a little shy about discussing that fact. The more I’d discovered how little I knew about modern life, the more concerned I’d become that I would not be able to judge what was normal in Stephen’s and my situation. Specifically, I wanted to know what was required of a woman. Was it possible that I was supposed to act first, not him?

  I was almost certain he’d thought many times of kissing me. During our nightly television or movie, I would often turn to catch him staring at my lips. He watched my movements more closely each day, and when we would brush against each other, the look that would come over him was less embarrassment than expectation, as if he wanted me to do something, as if he couldn’t be content until I did. I worried that I was failing him in some essential way, especially after watching a television movie the night before, where the woman not only kissed the man first, but pushed him against a wall and proceeded to pull off his shirt. It was all done with much laughter, and even Stephen laughed, so I knew my failure to find it funny was due to some deficiency of mine. I decided a book must be had.

  The store Stephen took me to was three floors tall and so wide, I imagined they had every book that had ever been written in the world. While he was looking in the travel section, I went to the woman behind the counter and whispered what I was interested in. She pointed me to an entire wall of volumes on the topic, but a tall book jumped out at me at once: Dating and Love for the Clueless. The title intrigued me, as I already liked the word “clue” from reading mysteries. I found it very cheering that love might be like a mystery, and there would be clues I could discover that would add up to an easy solution of how to act around Stephen.

  I managed to buy the book and have it safely installed in a bag before I went to locate him. When he asked what I’d bought, I told him I’d rather not say. Because of his impeccable manners, that was the end of the discussion.

  When he showed me the book he was looking at, I felt the breath leave my body, but all at once, rather than gasp by gasp as it did during my attacks. The inscription under the photograph was “Malibu: Paradise on Earth,” and it did seem to be exactly that. The sun was setting, and the beach looked orange and pink, the blue water stretched as far as the eye could see. My first thought was that I could not imagine a place more different from where Father had settled us, because Tuma was rocky and brown and as forbidding as Malibu seemed welcoming. My second thought was that I really had seen this before, many, many times. It wasn’t that I remembered seeing it, but that I remembered what it felt like to see it. It felt like being embraced.

  “I would like to buy this,” I said.

  “There are other good ones on California.” Stephen started to reach for another book.

  “Thank you, but no,” I said. “This one.”

  We were back in his cab when he asked if I was all right. I told him yes, and then he started telling me about his own experience in California, a trip taken with two friends when he was in college. He told me he’d learned to surf, and explained what was involved. When I told him I couldn’t even swim, he said that if I was from Malibu, I had to be the only native in the history of the place who couldn’t surf or swim.

  “Not the only native,” I said. “My brother would be another one, and surely there are people who are incapable of surfing or swimming due to handicaps or—”

  “I’m exaggerating,” he said, and smiled. “Remember?”

  “Yes, of course. Exaggeration is normal in all but the most serious conversations, and is often used for comic effect.” I smiled back. “I remember now.”

  When we arrived at his apartment, Stephen used the small key to check his mailbox, as always, but then he handed an envelope to me. It was from the California Office of Vital Records. The certificate had finally arrived.

  My hands were shaking a little, but I didn’t hesitate to open the envelope once we were inside the apartment. It was very thin, which was a good sign, I thought. Not too many women named Helena O’Brien who had been born in Missouri and married to a Charles and had died in 1984.

  In fact, they claimed they couldn’t find even one.

  “How can this be?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe you have the year wrong.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Stephen sat down on the couch. We were supposed to watch the second half of another movie we’d started late last night: They Might Be Giants. I’d been looking forward to it, but now I wanted to talk to my father. Something about that Malibu photograph had made me anxious to talk to him anyway. Now I felt I didn’t have a choice.

  I couldn’t call him (because of our unusual phone that wouldn’t ring), but I could call Dr. Humphrey. We’d spoken nearly every day, and Father continued to improve. It was quite a relief, especially as it freed my mind to concentrate on my brother.

  I told Dr. Humphrey that it was very important that my father call me. As luck would have it, Dr. Humphrey was already planning to see Father. It was still only eight o’clock in New Mexico. They had arranged to play a game of chess tonight.

  “He really is feeling better,” I told Stephen. And then I was so happy at the idea of him inviting Dr. Humphrey in for chess that I started twirling around Stephen’s kitchen.

  He smiled. “Do you still want to watch the movie?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I can. My father will be calling soon.”

  “The pause button,” he sai
d, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yes, right.” I smiled. “The pause button for videos, and you don’t watch the commercials on TV.”

  I sat down on the couch and by the time the phone finally rang, I’d nearly forgotten about Father. This movie was so wonderful, easily my favorite of all we’d seen so far.

  Stephen told me to answer. As I was walking to the phone, he said, “You might want to leave out the fact that you’re staying with your cab driver.”

  I gave him a new gesture of which I was very fond. I’d learned it from television: the A-Okay. The gesture was made by connecting the thumb and the index finger to form a circle, while holding the other three fingers up. It apparently had many uses, ranging from a simple yes to any approval, general or specific, of something another person had done.

  “Dorothea?” He sounded very far away.

  “Oh Father! It is you. I’m so happy to hear your voice!”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, very.”

  “Where are you? Dr. Humphrey said you located Jimmy in St. Louis. Are you staying in a hotel there?”

  He sounded so worried and so loving; I couldn’t lie to him. I told him I was staying with a friend. “A new friend,” I said, “but very trustworthy. This friend helped me find our Jimmy.”

  I was careful not to use the male pronoun, but Father guessed. He told me he wanted to speak to “this man.”

  “Father, I so wish you wouldn’t.” I was whispering. “Please trust my judgment on this.”

  “I need to speak to him,” he said.

  Shit, I thought; my new word, which thankfully I didn’t also say. I told Father to wait a moment, and then I asked Stephen if he would mind speaking to him.

  “Sure, if you want me to,” he said, but his voice sounded very tired. I felt momentarily annoyed with Father, but then I busied myself with trying to interpret what Father was saying from Stephen’s responses.