Then the face wasn’t there, and Lucy saw that the only thing different about the room was its colors. The walls were silvery instead of their usual white. The curtains, which by day were a crisp apple green, now looked gray. It confused her a little, made her wonder about tricks of the light, made her wonder which colors were real and which were just in her mind, then confused her even more when she wondered whether colors ever existed anywhere but in your mind.
For as long as she could, Mom stood rocking the little girl in her arms. Put her down, Lucy thought furiously. She’s too heavy for you. You’ll drop her.
Suddenly she was remembering: Ethan bigger than their mother, sitting on the floor at their mother’s feet with his arms folded on her lap and his head on his arms, asking to be read to. It was the last weekend he’d had a home pass from Nubie. Mom had read him poetry from Grandpa’s frayed old book. Lucy had seen him smiling, her mother with tears in her eyes. It had bothered Lucy at the time and it bothered her now; he’d been way too old for a bedtime story.
Finally, sadly, Mom lifted Pris up onto her own bunk, tugged off the dirty lavender tennis shoes, pulled the rumpled Strawberry Shortcake sheet up over her, stretched on tiptoe to kiss her cheek. Lucy’s jealousy was like hot tar inside her, like when they’ve just done the street and your shoes stick in it and if it gets on your skin it burns and you can’t get away from the awful smell.
“Why’d you guys have so many kids?” she whispered. Mom frowned and put her finger to her lips, but Lucy repeated more loudly, “Why’d you have seven kids?”
“We like being parents,” Mom whispered, but she was looking at Priscilla and Lucy wanted her to look at her.
“You should have stopped after three,” she said, almost out loud.
“We like children,” Mom whispered. “We like babies.”
The hot-tar feeling got hotter and stickier, and Lucy said, “How come Ethan and Rae and me weren’t enough for you?”
“Lucy. Are you saying you wish we didn’t have the others? Are you saying you wish Priscilla and Dom and Molly and Cory had never been born?”
Not exactly, Lucy thought fiercely. But sort of. I wish Ethan and Rae had never been born, too. I wish it was just me.
Priscilla stirred, snored, brushed at her cheek as though shooing away a fly, settled into her pillow, snored again. In the corner, under the cage cover, the canary chirped sleepily; Mom cooed at him, almost soundlessly, and he quieted.
Downstairs the front door opened. Lucy heard Dad’s voice and Molly’s, and a third set of footsteps—jerky, like Cory’s when he pounded his heels on the floor in a tantrum—that were her sister Rae’s. Relief made Lucy sick to her stomach. She saw it mirrored on her mother’s face and said quickly so that she wouldn’t have to hear her mother say it, “They’re home!”
Mom turned Lucy by the shoulders and pushed her out of the little girls’ room. She was too rough; Lucy would have gone by herself. It wasn’t worth saying anything about now; Lucy just added the small hot resentment to the pile of little bad things kept in the back of her mind about her mother, her father, her family, her life. Every day, the pile got bigger. Every day, she looked at every hard stone in it, knowing that someday she’d find a use for them all.
“You go straight to your room!” she heard her father say. His voice was raised, just a little but dangerously, the closest he ever came to yelling at any of them except Ethan. When Ethan had been at home, she’d sometimes been afraid of both of them. Now she was only afraid of Ethan.
“You already said that,” Rae snapped back.
“Hey!”
Lucy heard scuffling and rushed to the landing to see.
Dad half turned Rae before she could shake him off, and she was shrieking, “Get your hands off me!” while he said in a voice like low thunder, “Don’t you get smart with me, young lady!”
Paying no attention, Molly ran to her mother at the foot of the stairs. “Mommy, look at my telecoat! It makes stars!”
Lucy saw with disgust that it was just the tube from a roll of paper towels. It was soaked; when Mom took it, it drooped in her hand. “It doesn’t make stars, honey. The stars are already in the sky. A telescope helps you see them.”
“Daddy said it makes stars,” Molly said stubbornly, and grabbed her tube back.
Rae had slammed the front door so hard that the umbrella lamp was still swaying. She stormed up the stairs, bumping into Lucy on purpose and muttering, “Son of a bitch” just barely under her breath. Dad had sat down hard in the blue chair in the living room and Mom sat beside him; they didn’t seem to know Lucy was there.
“Mommy, I’m hungry!” Molly was wailing.
“You may have a banana, and then it’s bedtime.”
“I don’t want a nana! I want ice cream!”
“I just bought her an ice cream cone,” Dad said in a tired voice.
“I want ice cream!”
“Molly, it’s a banana or nothing.”
Molly ran down the hall to the kitchen. She’d stopped whining, but Lucy could tell by the way she moved that she was mad, and she could imagine her pouty little face. Suddenly infuriated by her own terror of what would happen if they weren’t all very good, she thought: You better make her behave while you still can.
Dad said, “Shoplifting.”
“Oh, Tony, no.”
“Two movie magazines under her shirt. The manager came out after us. I never even suspected.”
Her mother’s voice was a flat rock that Lucy could slip on. “What happened?”
“The manager said pressing charges was more trouble than it was worth. I told him he ought to. We don’t do her any favors by protecting her from the consequences of the things she does,” he said, sounding like a social worker, like that Jerry Johnston.
It bothered Lucy to be thinking about Jerry Johnston again. She was sure he was a very nice person; she was sure he had a mother and father and brothers and sisters and maybe a girlfriend and maybe a cat. But he’d only been part of their lives because of her screwed-up brother. She hated remembering those endless family meetings, everybody in the family in tears but Ethan. Jerry had sat calm and sweet as a marshmallow Easter chicken, massive legs crossed, taking notes.
“This is how Ethan started, you know,” her mother was saying. “Shoplifting from that same store.”
“Candy bars,” Dad agreed. “But let’s not jump to conclusions. A lot of kids shoplift and never go on to bigger things.”
“Come on, Tony, you know that isn’t all. The cheating at school. The lying. I’m not sure she even knows what’s true a lot of the time.”
“There was a five-dollar bill missing from my wallet when I went to pay for gas this morning,” Dad said, as if he didn’t want to. “I’ve been trying to tell myself I lost it or miscounted, but it’s the second time in two weeks.”
“I suppose we better get her into therapy,” Mom said. “Not that it did Ethan much good.”
Dad rubbed his eyes. “Our job is to give her every chance we can think of, every resource. It’s up to her what use she makes of anything. Just like it was up to Ethan.”
“It still is,” Mom said, and then hastily went on before Dad could say anything, although he’d looked up at her sharply. “I’ll call Jerry Johnston in the morning. He already knows our family. Maybe that’s an advantage.”
“Who knows.”
“Six more to raise.” Mom sighed, and the stone in Lucy’s chest twisted. She was one of those six. She couldn’t help it. “I don’t know if I’m going to make it till they’re all grown.”
“You’ll make it. So will I. What choice do we have? Shit.”
Lucy always wanted to laugh when one of her parents said a dirty word. She put her hand over her mouth, then hurriedly left the landing and went down the hall to her room. Below her in the living room, she knew her parents were hugging and kissing. That embarrassed her and made her feel good at the same time.
She almost smashed her nose against the doo
r of the room she shared with Rae when it didn’t open to her shove. She took a step back and pushed on it again. “Rae. Let me in.” No answer. “Rae, come on. It’s my room, too.” She thought she heard the sounds of someone in there, but the door stayed shut. Lucy pounded hard on the door. “You pig! I didn’t do anything to you!”
The door couldn’t be locked; they weren’t allowed to have locks on their doors, in case there was a fire. Rae had just pushed something in front of it. Lucy took a few more steps backward and then charged, hitting the door with her shoulder. It hurt, and it made a much louder bang than she’d hoped, but the door jerked open and she stumbled over the toy chest Rae had used as a barricade. It was Lucy’s toy chest; Rae had no business touching it.
The room was dark, and unfamiliar because the furniture had been rearranged. Lucy had her hand on the light switch when she turned to look at the bed.
Her sister was lying flat on her back. The streetlight turned her skin blue and silver; her profile shimmered, as if somebody had drawn it with Dominic’s Glo-in-the-Dark Etch-a-Sketch. Her breasts stuck up; Lucy couldn’t help being shocked and envious at how big they were. Her eyes shone dully, like pennies.
“Are you all right?” Lucy stood in the doorway and left the lights off. Her knees were braced against the toy chest, out of which spilled toys she hadn’t played with in years; she saw the glittery eyes of her blue panda bear, the green ribbons on the braids of her dancing doll, whose long stuffed legs seemed to be curled around her own neck. “Rae? Should I call Mom and Dad?”
“No!”
The word sounded dangerous, but Lucy kept on. “Are you sick?”
“I feel awful!”
“I don’t know what to do. I better call them—”
“I hate them!” Rae’s voice was like a growl.
Lucy stopped with her back to the door and stared at her.
Her sister’s face was twisting and twitching as if there were snakes under the skin. Her body jerked, knees brought up to her chest and then kicked straight again. She pounded her fists backward onto the mattress. A dark pool stained the sheets under her hips. “Rae,” breathed Lucy. “Your period—” But then her sister was on her feet and coming toward her, and Lucy saw that it was just a shadow and not blood and that Rae was going to hurt her.
She fumbled behind her for the doorknob. “Stop it! I’ll tell! I’ll tell Dad!”
Rae burst into little-girl tears and collapsed onto the floor. “Dad hates me!” she wailed. “Oh, he hates me!” and then, “Go away! Get out of here!”
It was her room, too, but she didn’t stop to say so. She opened the door, backed through it, shut it behind her. Something soft bounced off it on the other side. Probably one of her stuffed animals.
Her parents weren’t in the front part of the house. Lucy reached way back into the hall closet and pulled coats and sweaters off hangers and hooks, until they covered the floor of the closet knee-high. She sat down on the mound, curled her legs up under her, lay down. Mom’s torn gray jacket hung toward the back; it had belonged to Lucy’s great-grandfather who had died when her mother was fifteen. Lucy pulled it down; the hanger pinged against the closet wall. Gently she folded the jacket; it held her mother’s smells and her great-grandfather’s, and it made a perfect pillow.
“Lucy?” Her mother’s head poked around the closet door. “What are you doing?”
“Can I sleep in the closet tonight?”
Mom crouched, but she was still taller than Lucy was. “In the closet? What for?”
Lucy snuggled deeper into the nest of family clothes. “It’s cozy here,” she said.
Her mother hesitated, then smiled and bent forward on her hands and knees to kiss Lucy’s cheek. “Why not,” she said. “Pleasant dreams, honey.”
Mom left the door ajar when she left, so that a pale streak of not-quite darkness cut the darkness of the closet. Lucy fell asleep to the quiet sounds of her parents readying themselves and the house for sleep.
6
From the middle of the amusement park, between the funhouse and the little train, there was a weird glow. Lucy thought it was just moonlight on the lake, but she wasn’t sure. The sky was dark blue, like the eighth-grade graduation robe Rae had worn last month, and the lights of the Ferris wheel and roller coaster and Tilt-a-Whirl were like buttons and tassels, coming loose.
Lucy was ready to go home. She was tired. She had a headache from too much sun and noise and sugar. Her shoulders were sunburned. Her mouth and fingers were sticky from cotton candy and sno-cones, and so much dirt had stuck to her that she felt furry.
But Pris was still going strong, racing between rides and concession stands, trying to laugh louder than the mechanical lady in front of the funhouse, singing at the top of her lungs, “Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!”
Nobody else in the family seemed tired. Even Mom and Dad were having a good time. Mom had ridden the roller coaster six times already and was in line again now with Priscilla. Dad, who’d always claimed that rides made him sick, was on the big Ferris wheel with Molly and Dom.
It wasn’t fair. The kids who had summer birthdays got to have neat parties—here, or swimming, or slumber parties in the backyard tent. When your birthday was in January, like Lucy’s and Ethan’s, you never got to do anything fun.
Scowling, Lucy stood and watched the merry-go-round animals go up and down and around. Cory was on an elephant with turquoise tusks. He screamed every time it went up in the air, and Lucy wasn’t sure he was having fun, but it was too late to get him off now.
The striped pole stuck right through the elephant’s fat stomach and back made Lucy cringe. When the elephant went up, the scalloped shadow of the roofline seemed to cut off both its head and her little brother’s. Cory was yelling and the elephant’s painted wooden eye swelled out at her. She imagined how that huge, smooth, red eyeball would feel in her palm.
“Hey, Lucy! Look at me!” Cory’s baby voice was muffled and he was carried out of her sight again under the red and white fringe.
The merry-go-round slowed down. It took a long time to stop completely, and even then she had the feeling that it could start up again for no reason, at any time, whether anybody wanted it to or not, that it could work itself back up to full speed before she knew it and send Cory and the others spinning out into space, way beyond her reach.
But the tinny, tinkly music kept on, never missed a beat. She used to imagine that the music and the motion were connected somehow, that the circling ran a hidden motor that created the music, or that the music actually made the platform turn. It bothered her that she didn’t know which caused which, or whether there was some third mechanical force that caused them both. The animals looked different when they weren’t moving. Scarier.
Little kids scuttled from between the animals’ legs and from under their tails and necks. The cute teenage operator leaned his bare arms on the railing to talk to another boy. They didn’t seem to care much about the merry-go-round or about Cory on it. They hadn’t even noticed her.
Somebody stopped to talk to them. A huge man, not as tall as Dad but big around, legs like tree trunks in white shorts, a red striped shirt stretched over a hard-looking belly and shoulders like mountains, short thick arms, a short thick neck.
She knew him. Jerry Johnston, the social worker from Nubie where Ethan had been. She’d sat with her brothers and sisters and parents in Jerry Johnston’s office every month for family meetings; she’d never said much unless they made her, but she’d watched the gold and silver fish in Jerry’s aquarium and the gold and silver rings on Jerry’s fingers that sparkled when he moved his fat hands.
Now she saw him put his hand on the arm of the ride operator’s not-so-cute friend, saw the boy shrug and glance at his friend and then follow Jerry into the crowd. Lucy was relieved that she wouldn’t have to say hello.
Cory must be on the other side. She started that way, making a tight, cautious circle. There were more kids on the ride than she’d
thought. Uneasily she wondered where they all could have come from, who was taking care of them. She didn’t see anybody taking care of them. She didn’t see Cory.
Ethan walked by.
Reddish-brown hair cut very close to his skull, like a punker’s. Everybody in her family had either reddish-brown or dark brown hair, except Rae, whose hair these days looked like lemon cotton candy. Brown eyes like hers and her brothers’ and sisters’, his going in every direction at once. Thin face, thin shoulders and arms sticking out of a gray sleeveless sweatshirt, thin ankles above tennis shoes that were so new they glared.
She’d never seen Ethan so thin. She’d always thought of him as big and strong, sometimes a bully and sometimes a protector, her big brother.
Suddenly it crossed her mind that maybe the only reason he’d seemed big was because she’d been so small. Maybe that was true about Dad, too. Maybe the older and bigger she got, the smaller and thinner and weaker everybody else would get, until she’d have to take care of them all. Ethan looked right at her, even turned his head as he walked past, but she didn’t think he saw her.
She yelled, “Cory!” and pushed through the crowd, racing to the other side of the merry-go-round. But the thing had moved. It wasn’t moving, but it had moved. The stiff, polished animals on this side were the same as the ones she’d been watching on the other side. The spotted giraffe. The cream-colored horse with the purple mane. The pink and gold flamingo with the beak that looked sharp but wasn’t when she put her hand to it. Cory wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. She’d lost him.
Lucy burst into tears.
Somebody sneered. “What’s the matter with you?”
Lucy jumped and turned away from the merry-go-round, which was filling with little strangers for the next ride. She forced herself to peer into the crowd again. Just a few minutes ago she hadn’t been able to find anybody she knew—though she always had the feeling that if she stood still long enough in any one place, everybody she knew, dead or alive or imagined, would come by like a parade. Now Rae was coming toward her. She had hold of Cory’s wrist and was walking too fast for him. He was crying and stumbling.
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