“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.
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.
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 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 china 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 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 cruelty to write things like that about a family that’s already vulnera
ble, that’s already going through hell.”
Lucy hadn’t understood much of that, except to see that she’d been wrong to think of the probation officer as a friendly, grandmotherly lady come to help them and to help Ethan. During the probation officer’s second visit, Lucy’d had to leave the room, because all she could think about was the empty raisin box, crumpled and dusty, on the floor under the lady’s chair, just behind her thick crossed ankles.
Now she ate bran flakes dry from her hand for her own breakfast while she scrubbed at a stubborn sticky place on the corner of the table. Good thing that probation officer lady never went in Ethan’s room. The thought almost made Lucy giggle. There were posters all over the walls. Posters of naked ladies in all different poses. Sometimes Lucy and the other kids sneaked in there to look. Lucy would try to bend her arms and legs the way those ladies did, twist her face to arrange it like this one or that one, fluff her hair, push out her chest. Dom was always wanting to see “those naked ladies with the boobies and everything.”
She stuck her hand inside the cereal boxes to check for prizes. Somebody had already taken them, of course. She folded down the plastic bags, closed the flaps, and stacked the boxes in the cupboard. She ran hot water into the sink, squeezing in enough of the green dish soap that it swelled up into a mound; Mom always said she used too much. One by one she slid the breakfast bowls and spoons and glasses in under the very edge of the soapy hill, disturbing its shape as little as possible. What was the point of having a dishwasher if you had to wash the stupid dishes first? When she grew up, she’d have a robot to do all the housework for her.
Adult voices came at her from both sides. Her mother was bringing Jerry Johnston in the front door, offering him a seat in the living room, asking if he wanted coffee. Her father had come in the back door, home in the middle of the day, and was talking to the little kids on his way through the family room.
The last time Jerry Johnston had been here, he’d taken away some of Ethan’s stuff, and he’d never brought it back. Lucy had watched from the doorway, trying not to look at the naked ladies on the wall, while Mom and Dad and Jerry Johnston searched Ethan’s room. The social worker had said maybe they’d find a clue to where he was, even though Dad had pointed out that Ethan had been on restriction for weeks before he’d run away and hadn’t been home to leave any clues. Jerry had asked permission to take a few things away with him, and they’d let him. Lucy wouldn’t have let him.
One dirty tube sock, stiff at the toe, white with green stripes. A blank book that had been in Ethan’s stocking a couple of Christmases ago, before Mom and Dad gave up trying to get him to express himself some way other than stealing and doing drugs; still blank, but its spine was broken as if it had been opened and looked at a lot. A little metal thing kind of like a barrette with feathers that Rae had said was a roach clip and then later had to explain how you used it because Lucy couldn’t figure out why Ethan would want to trap cockroaches. A Playboy centerfold of a red-haired lady with blue and purple scarves floating around her and her nipples filled in with red magic marker. A Garfield calendar from last year, with none of the pages torn off.
Jerry had put all that stuff into his briefcase, which had been empty when he came to their house. Lucy wondered if he had his briefcase now. The briefcase had a combination lock; Lucy had seen his fat fingers delicately turn the knobs around, then slide to the sides of the case to make sure it was locked.
Then Jerry Johnston and Mom and Dad had left Ethan’s room. They’d walked single file right past Lucy and nobody had said anything to her, explained anything, even seemed to notice her. Offended, Lucy had decided they were trying to pretend that they hadn’t been in Ethan’s room without his permission, that they hadn’t done anything wrong. But she’d seen them. She was a witness.
Now Jerry Johnston said yes, he’d have coffee, two sugars and a cream. A person that big probably never refused food or drink. Lucy heard Mom’s footsteps and hurried to the cupboard to look for a clean cup, having to stand on tiptoe to see onto the second shelf and unable to see onto the top shelf at all. The only clean one was Molly’s My Little Pony. That wouldn’t be right for Jerry Johnston. Hastily, she fished a mug out of the dishwater and rinsed it out. There wasn’t any dishtowel by the sink. The mug would be wet, but it would be clean. Unless she’d missed something. She peered into it again, ran her fingers around inside it to be sure. She still wasn’t sure.
Mom and Dad came into the kitchen at the same time from different directions. Lucy stood at the sink hugging herself. “He’s here,” Mom said, and from the way she looked at Dad Lucy knew that she’d had the same crazy thought: Jerry Johnston was here to tell them that Ethan was alive.
Mom and Dad didn’t say anything to her.
Mom got a clean cup down from the back of the top shelf where Lucy couldn’t have seen it. Her hands were shaking; she spilled coffee across the counter. Lucy wiped it up.
Dad asked, “Has he said anything?”
Mom shook her head.
“Does the kitchen look okay?” Lucy demanded. “I already got a clean cup out for him.”
“It’s fine,” her mother said without even looking. “Thanks, honey.”
“Can I come in and listen?”
“I guess so. Rae and Priscilla are already in there.”
Lucy hadn’t heard her sisters come downstairs. That bothered her, as if they were keeping secrets from her. She stalked down the hall to the living room, leaving Mom and Dad to close the kitchen door if they wanted it closed.
“Good morning,” Jerry Johnston said to her. He didn’t remember her name, she could tell. She wasn’t about to make it any easier for him. She said hello only because her parents were there, and went to sit on the floor underneath the cuckoo clock, where she could play with the weights and chains.
Mom and Dad sat down. Neither of them said a word. That scared Lucy. She pulled up her knees. The clock struck nine and made her jump. She could feel the vibrations in the chains that rested against her back.
“I know you’ve heard the bad news about Ethan,” Jerry began.
Mom was ready for him. “The police were here this morning. They told us Ethan is dead.”
Jerry nodded. “I thought you’d want to hear how it happened.” He stopped. Lucy kept her eyes on her mother’s face, which looked like a mask. She couldn’t look at Dad’s. When nobody said anything, Jerry went on softly, like a bedtime story.
Ethan used to read her bedtime stories, when she was real little and he must have been about the age she was now. She’d forgotten all about that, and she didn’t want to remember it now.
“He showed up at my place about five o’clock this morning. He said he’d split if I called you or anybody at New Beginnings before we’d had a chance to talk. That’s against the rules, of course. But I knew he meant it, and I could see he was desperate for somebody he could trust, so I chose to take that personal risk.”
He paused. He was smiling a little and his thin eyebrows were raised. After a minute he took a long drink of coffee. Over the rim of the cup his pale brown eyes floated like moths from one person to another to another around the room. Lucy cringed when they lighted on her and held her breath until they moved on, to rest for a long time on her sister Rae.
There was something special between Rae and Jerry Johnston. They saw each other every Wednesday in therapy. Lucy didn’t like Jerry Johnston, and she didn’t much like Rae either these days, but suddenly she wanted to be in therapy, too. Rae would never tell her what they talked about. Lucy hated secrets, unless they were her own.
Lucy had just finally realized that Jerry was waiting for somebody to tell him he’d done a good job when Dad said gruffly, “We appreciate all you’ve done.”
Jerry nodded. He looked away from Rae, and his soft voice started up again. His voice was soothing; it seemed to say everything was all right. It was a lie. “He said he was hungry, and he looked as if he hadn’t eaten in days. So I went to make sandwiches. I w
as only gone fifteen or twenty minutes, but when I came back he was dead.”
Priscilla started to cry. Rae punched her and the crying got louder. Mom hadn’t moved. Dad barked, “How?”
“I don’t know,” Jerry answered, and took another sip of coffee. “He was on his back on my living room floor, and I thought he’d fallen asleep. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days, either. So I left him alone for a while. But then when I went to check on him, there was no pulse and he wasn’t breathing.”
“Drugs,” Dad said, and slammed his fist onto the arm of the chair. Patches, who had been curled up there, meowed once and jumped down.
Jerry nodded. “Looks like it.”
“Thank you,” Mom said, in a child’s voice, and Lucy was suddenly furious. She didn’t like this big thick man, like a tree trunk where mean little creatures lived. He was the last one to see her brother alive. He was the first one to see him dead. And her mother was thanking him.
Not wanting to look at her parents, Lucy looked instead at her sisters on the couch. Pris was curled up like a baby, sobbing, her face hidden against the pillow Lucy had embroidered last year in school, her braids sticking up. Rae’s legs were crossed and her toes were pointed in white high-heeled sandals, pink toenails glittering, the long pink nails of one hand spread over one gleaming knee. Her eyes were on Jerry Johnston.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
9
They had to identify the body. They had to say out loud that it was Ethan, and some stranger had to write it down.
The place where they kept bodies was called a morgue. Lucy held the word in her mouth like a lump of old bread. When Mom and Dad wouldn’t let any of the kids go with them to the morgue, Rae got really mad. “He was my brother! I have a right! You’re always telling me what to do!”
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