“Nothing,” Lucy said, and wiped her nose with a sticky hand.
Rae glared. “Then what are you crying for? You’re always crying. God, you’re such a baby.”
Lucy kicked at the hard-packed dirt of the midway. Some of it came loose and puffed up against Rae’s smooth leg. She hoped it got into the high-heeled sandal, stuck to the red toenail polish. “I couldn’t find Cory,” Lucy said sullenly, and took him away from Rae, picked him up though he was getting awfully heavy for her, pressed his head into her shoulder. Someday she’d have a baby of her own, just like Cory when he was a baby. She’d be a good mother. She’d never let anything bad happen to her baby, like Mom had let happen to Ethan.
Rae wiped her hands on her jeans. Lucy had watched her practice that gesture in front of the mirror; it called attention to her hips. “Jesus, sometimes I wish he would get lost. I wish they’d all get lost.”
“That’s a mean thing to say,” Lucy said. “I’m telling.”
Rae reached out both hands with the long red nails and pushed Lucy so hard that she almost fell, carrying Cory. “You, too,” she sneered. Thick lipstick made her teeth look very white when she pulled her lips back. “I wish you’d get lost, too. Permanently. Like Ethan.”
Nearly blind with fury, Lucy balanced her little brother higher on her hip and crouched. She swept her free hand across the ground in search of a weapon, found only an empty potato chip bag, threw it as hard as she could at Rae, who was laughing and walking away. A tall boy was with her. Lucy hadn’t noticed him before. The glittery bag sailed back to the ground. “I hate you!” she shouted after her sister, though already she’d lost her among the colors and shapes of the crowd. “You bitch!”
“Bitch!” Cory echoed gleefully, tugging at her hair. His baby voice made the bad word sound even worse than it was, and she put her hand over his mouth. He turned his head and chortled: “You bitch!”
“Lucy, what’s going on?”
Lucy was so glad to see her mother, and so embarrassed at being caught swearing in public, that she started crying again. Mom had her hair in pigtails, and bangs almost hid the ugly white streak. She looked too young to have seven kids.
Cory squirmed out of Lucy’s arms and ran to his mother. She patted his head and smiled at him. But she didn’t pick him up, even though Lucy could see that was what he wanted and knew that Mom could see it, too. When she had kids, she’d always give them what they wanted. “What’s going on?” Mom asked her again, and Lucy could tell that she was already mad at her.
“Rae’s being obnoxious. I hate her.”
Her mother glanced around. The pigtails flopped. “Where is Rae? I haven’t seen her since we got here.”
“I don’t know where she is. She saw some guy she knew and they took off.” Lucy didn’t know if her sister really had known the tall boy, if she’d even really gone off with him or just happened to be walking in the same direction for a while.
“Was she okay?”
Lucy scowled. Sure, she was okay. Why wouldn’t she be okay? “I guess,” she said.
Cory was wandering off, following a little girl with three pink balloons. Lucy started after him, but Mom reached him first and hoisted him onto her shoulders. Mom was really strong.
Dad came up with Molly and Dominic. He was holding his stomach and his face was pale, so that all the little hairs of his beard stood out like dirt on his cheeks and chin and down the front of his neck. “Three times in a row on the Ferris wheel,” he groaned.
Mom patted his arm. “You’ll earn a star on your daddy badge.”
“The guy stopped us at the top. All three times. And then we rocked.”
“And we could see everything!” Dom crowed. “We could even see you guys! It was neat! Huh, Dad?”
Dad groaned again and rolled his eyes. Lucy giggled. She went over and put her arms around him, but he pushed her away gently when she pressed her face too hard into his tummy.
“Lucy says she saw Rae,” Mom told Dad. “She went off with some boy. I could hear Lucy calling her names from clear over at the hot dog stand.”
Lucy looked down guiltily, but all Dad said was, “Rae can be—difficult sometimes. It’s her age.”
“I’m not going to be like that when a teenager,” Lucy said heatedly.
“Oh, you probably will. But you’ll get through it. And so will Rae.”
“Ethan didn’t get through it,” Lucy said.
“He hasn’t yet,” Mom said sharply. “There’s still plenty of time. He’s still young.”
“I bet he’s dead.”
“Stop it, Lucy,” Dad said, and she did, her eyes glazed with tears, her mind pulsing with the image of Ethan in the short haircut and the white shoes, thin and silent and with eyes everywhere at once, maybe watching all of them from the crowd right now. She’d stop, if that’s what they wanted. She wouldn’t tell them. She wouldn’t mention Ethan again.
Dominic and Molly were chasing each other around their father’s legs. He wasn’t really paying attention. Mom said, “We shouldn’t have let Rae come, Tony. Not after last night.”
Dad sighed. “You’re the one who said how important birthdays are.”
“I just think we should keep her feeling a part of the family for as long as we can.”
“Hey, you guys! I wanna go on the roller coaster again!” Priscilla was yelling from all the way across the midway. She zigzagged over to them and didn’t stop moving once she got there, dancing from one foot to the other, poking at Cory with the pointed cardboard tube from her cotton candy, tugging at her mother’s arm. “Let’s go again!”
“Oh, Pris.” Mom reached to hug her and missed. “Do we have to?”
“It’s my birthday!”
Pris was a year and four months younger than Lucy, but she was already taller. At the moment, she was also wearing Lucy’s rainbow T-shirt under the long-sleeved blue shirt of her own, which she’d now rolled up and tied by the tails around her midriff. Lucy didn’t care whose birthday it was. Infuriated, she grabbed for the T-shirt, but Priscilla twisted away and the shirt would have ripped if Lucy had held on.
“How about something else?” Mom pointed. “How about that?”
Everybody looked up. Molly cried, “Oooh! Pretty!”
A string of cars one after another, red and blue and red and blue, swung through the night air. Some of them were as high as the tops of the trees. They looked like big half shells—a giant’s necklace, or the homes of giant slimy clams. They dipped and twisted, rose and fell, but they didn’t make any noise. At first Lucy didn’t see the cable holding them up or the people riding inside, and so it was easy to imagine that they were traveling empty, alone, and with no reason.
The cars were like bonnets, she thought, without any faces in them.
It would be easy to fall out, she thought. You probably wouldn’t make much noise coming down. She heard little screams, like bugs.
“The Sky Ride!” Priscilla squealed. “All right!”
She started down the midway at full speed and bumped into a fat lady whose sundress showed lots of different sunburn lines on her neck and shoulders, layers and scoops of pink. The lady didn’t say anything, and Priscilla kept going. Dom and Molly went after her.
Lucy was suddenly afraid. But all her family was leaving, so she went, too. Behind her she heard Mom calling to them to slow down, Cory howling to be let down, Rae laughing somewhere away from the family, and Ethan’s quiet cold breathing as he watched.
7
Ethan was waiting for them when they got home. Lucy saw him right away when they turned onto King Street, standing under the apple tree out front. For a minute she thought the chain link fence was wrapped right through him.
Lucy had lived on King Street all her life. So had Ethan, until he’d started getting in trouble, and now she didn’t know where he lived. In a way you could still say he lived here; she didn’t think he had any other home, and a person had to have a home somewhere. Someday she’d live in the Malib
u Colony with Emilio Estevez, in a huge house with a giant pink marble bathtub shaped like a shell.
Mom was driving. Lucy saw her turn her head to look at their house, and was reassured. Mom always did that after they’d been away someplace, even for just a little while, even to the grocery store or to the dentist. She always turned her head to look at their house as they drove past on the way to the alley and the garage; it was one of the ways Lucy’d always been able to tell they were almost home, even back when she was so little she couldn’t recognize the corner by herself.
Tonight Ethan was in their yard, by their house. Lucy braced herself. But Mom didn’t say anything, so Lucy didn’t either. Ethan was their secret.
He was camouflaged. Inside the fence with the roses climbing on it that separated the Brill place from the neighbors’ on two sides and the street in front and the alley in back, he was hard to pick out. He was part of it. He belonged there.
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,” 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 seeping 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’ 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.
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 su
ddenly 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 make him go away.
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.
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