Maybe she needed something and was too weak to call anybody, a glass of juice or aspirin or something.
Lucy went quietly up the stairs. Patches was coming down; she stopped to pet him and he rubbed against her hand. Sunlight was streaming in the stairway windows, and the carpet was warm in places under her bare feet.
Mom and Dad’s bedroom door was open a little. That was so Patches could get in and out; otherwise, he’d yowl and scratch at the carpet and wake everybody up. The only time Mom and Dad closed their door tight was when they were doing something that had to do with being naked, like getting dressed or making love. Lucy still could hardly believe her parents did that. She wished they’d let her watch them so she could see how it was done.
She knocked on the doorframe, lightly so that if Mom was asleep it wouldn’t wake her up. At first she thought the TV or the radio was on, but then she realized Mom was talking to somebody, a low stream of words like a lullaby, like the way you’d talk to a hurt dog that might attack you. Lucy pushed the door open just a little farther, wincing when it creaked, prepared to say, “Can I get you anything?” or “Are you sick?”
Ethan was in bed with Mom.
Horrified, Lucy took several steps backward, which brought her right to the top of the stairs. She didn’t have to turn to look; she could feel the stairwell behind her, straight through the heart of the house. Dizzy, afraid she’d fall and nobody would come to pick her up because Dad was outside and Mom wouldn’t notice, she clutched at the newel post with both hands. But the door to Mom and Dad’s room had creaked far enough open by itself now that she could see right in, and she couldn’t take her eyes off the scene in the bed.
Ethan was in bed with Mom. The weight of his body pushed down the rumpled sheets. She could see little shadows from him. She could hear him breathing, see the wet red hole that was his mouth, like a baby crying, only he wasn’t making any noise. She could smell him, a cold smell, sweet and sour at the same time, like Cory when she used to give him his bottle.
Ethan was dead. She’d seen his body. His hand hadn’t moved, and his skin had felt like cold blue rubber. She’d watched as they’d lowered his body into the grave. Ethan was dead. It had taken her a long time to believe that, to understand it, but at this moment she couldn’t imagine why she’d ever thought it was a lie. She knew, in the same way that she knew she was alive and it was a hot summer morning and the stairs were waiting right behind her, that Ethan was dead.
But here he was, in bed with their mother, and he was too old to do that, too big, he wasn’t a baby anymore even though he seemed like one. He would hurt Mom. Mom would hurt him. There was something awful about this; Lucy wasn’t clear, couldn’t have put words to it, but her skin crawled.
There was also something so beautiful about it that the beauty seemed to get inside her, like mites, and it made her skin itch from underneath. Lucy ached to be where her brother was now, as close to their mother as he was, as he was becoming while she watched. She shouldn’t be watching, but she clung to the post and didn’t move.
Mom cried out, hurt, and then cooed as if to a hurt baby. Ethan was making sounds that came before words, gurgling, hiccupping, mewling. Mom wrapped her bare arms and legs around him. Ethan was naked, too, and Lucy couldn’t tell one body from the other or how they fit together, except that she could see Ethan’s mouth on Mom’s breast, sucking, biting.
Ethan was getting smaller and smaller. Lucy didn’t understand how that could be, but he was, and she tried not to blink at all because he might disappear while her eyes were closed and then she’d never know what had happened to him.
Ethan was tiny now, and curled, and colorless. He could be in anything, anywhere, and she wouldn’t know it. Mom said his name one more time. “Ethan.”
Then he was gone. Mom groaned and arched her back and spread her knees, fists flung back on the pillow, hair dark and tangled. Lucy thought clearly: She looks like she’s having a baby, only backward, because nothing’s coming out. Ethan’s going back in.
Then, abruptly, Lucy couldn’t watch anymore. She turned and ran unsteadily down the stairs. Nobody was around to yell at her for running; nobody was chasing her. She was careful not to trip, not to catch her heel, not to miss the bottom step. Her chore this weekend was to clean the living room. It took her a while to get the vacuum cleaner cord untangled from all the boots and backpacks on the closet floor. Then she was grateful for its loud noise and for the way it sucked up everything in its path.
11
“Lucy! Lunch!”
Dominic made each of the words two syllables, like a marching song. Lucy couldn’t see him, but she could tell he was in the driveway, not really looking very hard for her, probably sitting on the ground playing with a bug or a rock with mica in it. He had a friend named Micah, and he never would believe that that shiny stuff like tin foil was called mica, even though she’d told him a hundred times.
Mom was inside the house. Ethan was inside Mom inside the house.
Lucy pulled up her knees and hid her face, trying to look like part of the tree. “Lucy! Dad says to come right now!”
She couldn’t go in. She couldn’t ever go in that house again. She’d stay up in her tree for the rest of her life. Or she’d run away. She thought about running away to Jerry Johnston.
When she moved, the whole tree swayed. She hoped Dom wouldn’t notice, or would think it was just the wind, even though probably none of the other trees in the yard was moving. Unless somebody was hiding in them, too. She shivered.
She didn’t know if he could see her from the ground. This was her tree; nobody else in the family ever climbed it. So she’d never been the one on the ground looking up trying to see somebody.
Suddenly she was wondering if Ethan had ever been up here. She didn’t remember if he had, but she knew he’d done lots of things that she didn’t remember. It was weird to realize that she’d been alive and doing things and thinking things when she’d been one and two and three, and she didn’t remember any of it, or just flashes: a red basin; snow on her face. It was weirder to realize that the little kids, Cory and Molly and maybe even Dom, wouldn’t remember most of what was happening to them right now.
That meant that all kinds of stuff could have happened to her when she was real little, and it would be part of her now because everything that ever happened to you was part of you, and she wouldn’t even know it. Ethan could have been up here in her tree lots of times before it was her tree, and she would never know.
“Lucy! Come on! I’m telling!”
Maybe Mom would do to her what she’d done to Ethan. Swallow her up. Keep her safe by swallowing her up. Lucy didn’t know what to think about all this, how to think about it. She needed to talk to Mom, but Mom was asleep, Dad said Mom was sick and they all had to stay away from her.
She had already climbed as high as she dared. She was a lot higher than her usual reading place, which was a big forked branch that just fit her bottom, and curled up so she could lean her back comfortably against it, with knotholes and scars from sawed-off limbs that she could prop her heels into. Sometimes, when she’d been reading for a long time or writing in her diary or just looking at the leaves and the sky, a bird would come really close, or a squirrel, or a bug with a million legs would crawl up the tree trunk and even though she hated bugs, Lucy would think what a long trip that must be for him, like walking to the moon.
But the branch she was sitting on now was high and thin. It bent till she thought she could hear it crack, till she was almost resting on the stronger branches underneath, almost falling through the empty spaces between them. Maybe she would fall. Then Mom would come running and pick her up.
It used to be that when Mom kissed owies they really did feel better. Not anymore. Just ask Priscilla, with both her feet in casts. Just ask Cory, with the burn on his knee from the inside of the oven door. Just ask Ethan. Ethan was dead.
Lucy squinted up into the pale blue sky spotted with green leaves. She would
climb higher if she could. She tested an even thinner branch right above her head, and it snapped off in her hand. She would climb all the way to the sky if she could. Disappear into it. Transform into blue air.
She didn’t exactly understand what made the sky blue. Something about light bending and breaking. If light could break, anything could break. She clenched her fist, but no light was trapped inside and none oozed out between her fingers. She twisted her wrist sharply, but as far as she could tell, no light broke.
The branch between her legs was hurting a little. Lucy shifted her weight, and then a good feeling, kind of a bubbly feeling, gathered there, kind of squirmy and exciting, mixed up with the discomfort. She felt herself blushing, and she could hardly bring herself to think about what she was doing, but she moved the same way again, as if the branch were a rocking horse with a narrow back, and both the pleasure and the pain came again, strong. Reminding herself that nobody but the squirrels and the birds could see her up here, and the squirrels and the birds didn’t care, Lucy did it again.
Then, abruptly, she’d had enough. She lowered herself precariously down to her reading place. Once she was settled into the fork she felt safe again, but exposed to anybody who might be watching from the ground. She looked down, felt dizzy, looked around. Dom had quit calling her, and she didn’t see him. She wondered a little wistfully what they were having for lunch. She was hungry. She wondered if Mom was up. As she climbed quickly down from her tree, her foot slipped and for a second her heart raced painfully, but really she hadn’t come close to falling. She went inside.
They were just sitting down to lunch. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Mom was at the table, still in her bathrobe, but holding Dominic on her lap and looking over his head at Lucy.
“Where were you?” Dad demanded as he ladled tomato soup into eight white bowls.
“Up in my tree.”
“Didn’t you hear Dom calling you? You almost missed lunch.” Lucy just shrugged.
Dad always made great grilled cheese sandwiches. He wouldn’t tell anybody what his secret was. Lucy didn’t think he really had one. The tomato soup was a little lumpy, but Rae was the only one who cared. She sat all hunched over, staring into her bowl and squashing the lumps with the back of her spoon, but even she didn’t say anything snotty.
Molly sang them a song she’d made up about bears, a long song. If she hadn’t told you it was about bears, or that she was singing, you’d never have known. Dominic told a joke. He said the punch line first and gave it away, but he laughed and laughed until finally everybody else started laughing at him, so then he decided it must have been a really funny joke and told it again.
They talked about normal, everyday things. The snake Cory’d found in the gutter, so brown and flat that it looked like a piece torn off a grocery sack; he wanted to keep it as a pet and would not believe it was dead, so finally Dad just said no. Priscilla had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon; she asked whether she’d be getting her casts off, and Dad said he doubted it, it had only been three weeks, and Priscilla said huh-uh, it was almost four, and there was a dumb little argument.
Rae said she was going to a movie tonight with friends. Dad said what movie. She said just a movie, we haven’t decided yet. Dad said what friends. She said you know, just some of my friends, what’s the big deal? Dad said she couldn’t go unless he knew what movie and what friends and who was driving and what time they’d be home. Mom nodded. Rae slammed her spoon down so hard that tomato soup splattered out of the bowls. It didn’t really look like blood; it was too thin and too orange. But Lucy didn’t eat any more of it.
Lucy noticed that Mom didn’t eat very much. She took one bite and put the sandwich back down on her plate. Her bite mark looked like somebody’s secret smile.
Molly put her hands over Mom’s eyes from behind. “That was an awful dream we had last night, huh, Mom?” She yawned noisily.
Mom tried to look around at her, but Molly wouldn’t let go of her head. “I don’t know what you mean, sweetheart.”
“You do so. The bad dream where the monster chased me and I got scared and then you came and chopped off its head.”
Mom chuckled. “Molly, honey, I didn’t have that dream. That was your dream.”
“But you were there. I saw you.”
For a second Lucy thought maybe Molly had seen Ethan. That made her feel weird. Then she thought Mom must be lying to Molly, and to her, too. That thought didn’t last long, but it made her feel guilty and nervous.
“Sometimes when you’re little,” Mom said to Molly, and Lucy knew Mom was talking to her, too, and she listened even though she pretended not to, “it seems as if your mom and dad are everywhere. Even in your thoughts and dreams. But we’re not. Your dreams belong to you.”
Molly lowered her hands until they were around Mom’s neck. Mom put up her hands and loosened Molly’s, then brought the little girl around to settle her on her lap, saying, as she almost always said about any of them, “Oh, you’re getting so big!” Molly was frowning. Mom kissed her and smoothed her hair.
Right after lunch Mom went back to bed. Lucy and Dominic had to clear the table. Lucy took a long time on purpose, to give Mom time, to write messages in her diary, if there was something she wanted to say to Lucy and to nobody else. Cheese from the sandwiches had hardened across the bottom of the skillet, and she had to scrub and scrub to get it off.
She wanted to take a bath. There weren’t any clean towels. Lately there were never any clean towels. She went out to the back porch and found the dryer full. She fished through the tangled, faded pastels and found her favorite pink one, then defiantly shut the door and left the other towels for somebody else to put away. For Mom to put away. That was Mom’s job.
She was hurrying toward the bathroom with her towel in her arms when she saw Dad on the living room floor. She saw him out of the corner of her eye, and Rae leaning over him, and it took Lucy a minute to realize what she’d seen, and then she stopped and went back. If Rae was hurting Dad, she’d have to do something. She didn’t know what to do.
Then she saw that Rae was giving Dad a back rub. His arms were folded under his head and Rae was straddling his hips. His back was bare. Lucy’s face grew warm, and she lifted her towel to cover it, peering through the nubby folds. Dad loved back rubs, and he always said Rae was good at giving them, because her hands were small and strong. Sunlight through the window lit the room as if Dad and Rae were in a pretty box. Patches had folded himself onto the wide blue arm of the couch above them and was purring loudly. Lucy could hear her father and her sister breathing rhythmically together.
Rae looked up and saw her. Caught spying, Lucy took a guilty step back. But Rae just smiled. Her hands didn’t stop in the circular motions along their father’s shoulders, but she held her little sister’s gaze for a long time, and she smiled. Lucy could hardly stand it, there was suddenly so much love. She stood there as long as she could, then ran up the stairs and slammed and locked the bathroom door.
12
Something woke her.
She sat up and opened her eyes very wide to see in the dimness of the sunrise and the fading streetlight. Rae was asleep in the other bed; Lucy could see the mounds of her shoulder and hip, the shiny blond tangle of her hair that looked silvery green.
She listened. There weren’t any sounds that weren’t always there when she woke up in the night: just the dripping of the bathroom faucet, Patches purring on the heap of Rae’s clothes in the corner by the closet. In the tree outside her window, birds were starting to sing because the sun was coming up, and next door Dudley’s daughter yelled good-bye to her father because he was hard of hearing and slammed the back door on her way to work. She did that every morning. Usually Lucy put the pillow over her head and went back to sleep.
This morning she got up. She didn’t think Dudley’s daughter had awakened her, or the birds. Maybe it had been a dream, a good dream, because she wasn’t sad or afraid. The shadows were just tree limbs, eav
es, Dudley’s chimney. Nothing lived in the shadows. They had no hands or eyes. Her house was a safe place and all her family was safe in it. Except her brother Ethan. Who was dead.
She was wide awake and had to go to the bathroom. She swung her feet over the side of the bed. Patches trilled good morning and came to rub around her ankles.
Lucy went down the hall to the bathroom. Patches came with her, and noisily used the cat box while she used the toilet. That made Lucy smile. From across the hall she could hear Dad snoring, tiny little round sounds like seashells.
She was combing her hair in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, trying to decide whether it looked better behind her ears, and Patches was sitting at her feet watching, when she heard the noise that she knew had awakened her. A regular snipping sound. The sound, she realized, of garden clippers. And singing. Her mother’s voice, singing a song.
Standing on tiptoe, she could just see out the bathroom window. There was Mom, in the pink flowered robe the kids had given her for her birthday and short white gardening gloves that made her hands look like a child’s, on her hands and knees in the peachy light of the sunrise, working in her flower garden and singing a song that, as far as Lucy could tell, didn’t have any words.
This was a wonderful thing. An adventure. A beautiful experience she would remember all her life. Lucy propped her elbows on the high windowsill and held her face in her hands, already trying different words in her mind for writing about this in her diary. Maybe Mom would write in the diary about it, too. Now and then Mom’s trowel glinted. The long narrow garden, in the space between the sidewalk and the street, trailed out behind her like the train of a wedding dress, and there were little piles of gray-green weeds along the curb. Mom didn’t look up, but Lucy could tell she knew she was there, and that they loved each other very much.
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