Suddenly she saw what Mom was doing. She was cutting the heads off all the flowers. Bright blue and yellow blooms grew in the rows ahead of her, round like marbles, but the plants behind her were bare.
She raced down the stairs and out the front door. She had to get to her mother. She had to stop her.
The early morning air was cool and she shivered in her thin nightgown. Sharp little stones here and there on the sidewalk hurt her feet. But when she rounded the corner, she saw Mom in the middle of the flower garden, lit by the sunrise that was spreading across the sky now, snipping and snipping, and she saw the pile of flower heads on the ground at Mom’s side, and she ran faster, calling out, “Mom! Don’t!”
Mom looked over her shoulder and smiled, but the clippers didn’t stop. “Good morning, honey. You’re up early.”
“Why are you killing the flowers?” Lucy stopped before she got too close.
Mom looked at the clippers in her hand, opened her palm to look at the squashed blossoms she’d been holding there, looked back at Lucy, and laughed gently. “I do this so they’ll grow better.”
Lucy didn’t know whether to believe her or not. “You do?”
“Come here.”
Lucy hesitated. Then she put one foot into the grass. The dew was cold and she jerked her foot back, shivering violently.
“Come here, honey. Let me show you.”
Lucy high-stepped over the wet grass until both feet were on the dirt of the garden, which was warmer. Her toes sank in; she liked that. Mom was still on her knees, so that Lucy was taller than she was, and the early sun made silver streaks shine all over the top of her head. Lucy wanted to touch it, to cover them up.
“If you kneel down,” Mom told her quietly, “I can show you better. Come on down here with me.”
Lucy knelt in the dirt between the rows of plants, some of them with pretty flowers on them and some of them ugly and bare. Her mother took her hand, guided it to one of the plants that still had a yellow head.
“These are marigolds,” Mom said, and her voice was soft and soothing, like a lullaby, or a reverse lullaby, since it was morning and they were supposed to be waking up. “The blue ones are ageratum. If you let them bloom too early, the plants get spindly, and they’ll stop blooming altogether before the season’s over.”
“What’s spindly?”
“Thin. Weak. Kind of sickly. The energy of the plant goes into the flower, and not into the stem and the leaves and the roots, where it belongs.”
Mom moved Lucy’s fingers so that she could feel the stem, the hair-like leaves, the too-fat flower on top.
“Sometimes I talk to them. I say things like, ‘You’re just too young. Let yourselves get stronger first. Later, I promise, I’ll let you keep your flowers, and then everybody will say how beautiful you are all the way through October, if we don’t get a heavy frost.’ ”
“You talk to the plants?”
Without warning, Mom pinched Lucy’s thumb and forefinger together, and the head of the flower popped off. Lucy gasped and tears welled into her eyes. She tried to pull her hand away, but Mom held it, and the yellow ball of the marigold lay dying in both their palms.
“Sometimes plants get—spindly anyway,” Lucy said carefully, looking at the decapitated marigold and not at her mother. “Sometimes plants die no matter what you do, huh?”
“Sometimes a wind comes along,” her mother agreed sadly. “Or a hailstorm. Or somebody takes a shortcut through the flower bed and crushes all the plants. Or a dog digs them up. Or some animal eats them—rabbits supposedly like the taste of marigolds, and deer, too. There are all kinds of dangers.”
Abruptly Lucy’s knees gave out and she sat down in the damp grass, pulling her hand away from Mom’s and dropping the flower head into the dirt. She found a rock and set it over the fading yellow ball, ground it down, left it there. “You’re supposed to keep them safe,” she said, half under her breath. When Mom didn’t answer right away she thought maybe she hadn’t heard her, so she looked up and said out loud, “You’re supposed to keep us safe. You and Dad. You’re the parents.”
The sunrise was full in Mom’s face, making her look older because it brought out the wrinkles and at the same time younger because it was a soft peachy color. The tears in her eyes and on her cheeks were peach-colored. Lucy wanted to wipe them away, stopped herself by thinking deliberately, Serves her right, and then felt guilty. Mom said, so softly that Lucy could hardly hear her and anyway she didn’t want to, “I know. That’s what I always thought, too. But sometimes things happen to kids that parents can’t help. Sometimes—”
Shut up, Lucy thought furiously, but all she dared say was, “Then why bother?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.” Mom spread her white-gloved hands.
“Doesn’t it bother you to have to do all this stuff? Like pull the heads off plants?”
“Yes. But it’s the right thing to do.”
“What do you do with them when you break them all off?”
“You’re supposed to leave them in the garden so they’ll decay and add their nutrients to the soil. That’s what Grandpa does. But I can’t stand to see them lying there, so I put them in a bag and throw them away.”
“There’s Jerry Johnston,” Lucy said before she knew she was going to. He was halfway down the block, his big square head turned to look up at their house.
“Where?” Then Mom saw him, too, and dropped Lucy’s hand.
Jerry kept coming closer, passed the side steps, seemed to be looking at them now. The brightest part of the sunrise was at his back, so it was hard to see his face.
“Jerry?” Mom said out loud. “Jerry Johnston? What are you doing here so early in the morning?”
“Hello, Carole.” He stopped on the sidewalk between them and the house. He nodded to Lucy but didn’t say hello to her. “You’re up early.”
“I—couldn’t sleep,” Mom said.
He was standing over them with his arms folded across his big chest. Rings glinted from his hands where they were tucked under his elbows. His white shorts and striped shirt were huge. From where Lucy crouched on the ground next to her mother, he looked like a giant in a fairy tale. He was frowning at them. “It’s kind of an odd time to be working in the garden, isn’t it?”
“I—it’s hard to find time to do this during the day,” Mom said. “With the kids and school and everything.”
He nodded, as if he understood something that Mom hadn’t said. Jerry Johnston was a smart man.
“How’s Rae doing in the group?” Mom asked. Lucy thought it was a weird question to be asking him before the sun was even up, and she was embarrassed for her mother.
“She’s doing fine,” he said. Lucy could tell from the tone of his voice that he and Rae had secrets, even from Mom.
If Mom hadn’t asked again, “What are you doing here?” Lucy would have.
“My aunt lives a few blocks away.” He gestured vaguely. “I always take early morning walks, especially when I’m not in my own neighborhood.”
“I didn’t know you had an aunt who lived around here.”
“Oh, I believe I mentioned it when we first met and I saw your address. Aunt Alice. She’s eighty-three, and things around her place tend to pile up, so every once in a while I spend the weekend with her and help her catch up.”
He was talking a lot, Lucy thought uneasily. Usually he just sat and nodded and maybe said, “Uh-huh,” taking in everything you said —and everything you didn’t say, everything he saw about you that you didn’t see—and putting it to his own use inside that enormous body and mind. She had a feeling he was taking in and using everything about herself and Mom right now, but talking so much that you wouldn’t notice it. Lucy noticed.
“We were just—weeding,” Mom said. Lucy didn’t see why she said anything at all. “I was showing Lucy about dead-heading.”
“Uh-huh.” His big pale head bobbed.
There was a long pause. Lucy cupped her hands around a little a
geratum plant, fuzzy with blue flowers, and savagely snipped them all off with her nails, one by one, until there was a pile on the ground. The sun was bright enough now that they didn’t look quite blue. Mom was sitting back on her heels, staring at Jerry Johnston and fidgeting her hands in the little white gardening gloves. Lucy was afraid she was going to invite him into the house for a cold drink, or suggest they walk to 7-Eleven together for coffee.
“Well,” he said, and had already started to move away before he’d finished the sentence, “I guess I’d better go get Aunt Alice’s breakfast started. Say hello to Tony and the other Brills for me …” His voice trailed off. He was walking very fast, almost running. He didn’t go all the way to the end of the block but turned into the alley instead. Lucy watched him curiously, warily, realizing how little she or Mom or anybody knew about this man who knew so much about their family.
Lucy and her mother finished pulling the flowers off the plants. The sun was all the way up now. More and more cars went by. The lady across the street was calling her dog; she did that every morning, and Dad always complained because she woke him up. Lucy glanced up at the bedroom window and wondered if he was awake now; it made her feel funny not to know. Birds were chirping so furiously in the trees that she looked around for Patches or some other cat, but there wasn’t any; they must be singing because they were happy, or just because it was morning.
The dead heads looked like scraps of cloth on the ground. Mom stuffed them and the gray weeds into a black plastic garbage sack and stood up. Lucy heard her knees crack. “I’ll go put these in the trash,” Mom said. “Why don’t you go on in, and we can start breakfast. Cory’s probably awake by now.”
He wasn’t. The house was still very quiet. Lucy was sitting in the kitchen with Patches on her lap, feeling quiet and peaceful like the morning as long as she didn’t let herself think about Jerry Johnston and what he’d been doing outside her house, when she heard somebody scream.
Priscilla. In the upstairs hallway, outside Rae and Lucy’s room, Priscilla was shrieking.
Patches cocked his head and twitched his ears. Lucy sat there for a moment, not knowing what to do. She heard running footsteps upstairs, and lots of voices. Mom ran past her. Lucy hadn’t even known she was in the house.
After a minute, Lucy pushed Patches off her lap and followed Mom because she had to, so scared she almost collapsed when she first tried to stand up, had to hold on to doorframes and dining room chairs as she passed by.
When she got to the top landing, she saw Dad at the end of the hallway in his baggy yellow pajamas, and Pris in his arms. Her crutches were on the floor, blocking the bedroom door. She was crying. “It’s Rae! Oh, Daddy, something awful has happened to Rae!”
Dad pulled away from her so roughly that she almost fell. Mom grabbed her shoulders and leaned her against the wall, bent to pick up the crutches and prop them under Priscilla’s arms. Molly and Dominic had come sleepily out of their rooms, and Cory was wailing in the big-boy bed. Lucy made herself take a step toward her room, then another.
“Shit!” she heard Dad say. And then: “My God!”
He was pressing against the doorjamb with both hands and Lucy had to duck under his arm to see. She went all the way inside, and nobody stopped her. When she raised her head inside her own room, she screamed and clapped both hands over her mouth.
Rae’s bed was all messed up. The top sheet and the green blanket were bunched on the floor. One corner of the fitted bottom sheet had been pulled loose, exposing the gray mattress. The head of the bed had been pulled away from the wall, crookedly. The cords of Rae’s radio and headphones and speakers looked like spiderwebs, like thin black bones. And the whole bed was soaked with blood.
13
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
The detective leaning over Mom had a little mustache and a certain way of talking. Lucy thought he was gay. Rae would know. Rae wasn’t here. Rae said you could tell if guys were gay but not girls.
Rae was missing. Chills raced through Lucy. Ethan was dead. Her family was changing. Her family was falling apart. She was the next oldest kid. Maybe she was next.
“Ma’am, are you all right?”
Mom was on her stomach on the hallway floor. She hadn’t fainted; Lucy had watched her deliberately kneel, then curl up on her side, then stretch out and lay her cheek and the palms of her hands and her stomach and her thighs on the wooden floor.
She wasn’t dead either, though it wouldn’t have surprised Lucy if she was. She was panting, and her fingers kept moving across the floorboards like the legs of helpless bugs, like a mother’s hands helplessly trying to hold on.
She hadn’t fainted. She wasn’t dead. But she was on the floor and she wouldn’t get up, and that really bothered the gay detective. Lucy had a hard time imagining gay sex. She had a hard time imagining any kind of sex.
She didn’t know why it bothered him so much that Mom was on the floor. Let her stay there. “Mom, please get up,” Lucy tried to say. But she must have been whispering it, or saying it just to herself, because nobody even looked at her and Mom didn’t move, except that her hands kept opening and closing across the slippery, dusty wood.
Lucy tried to make her thoughts into words, black letters marching across the troubled white spaces of her mind, like something written into her diary and there forever. She tried to send the message straight to her mother: Can’t you tell there’s nothing to hold on to? Why don’t you quit trying? You look really stupid.
Rae had been gone a whole day now, and there was no sign of her. The cops had taken her bloody sheets. Things that had belonged to her already didn’t feel as if they belonged to anybody; no matter how long Lucy sat and held her sister’s pink robe or how heavily she smeared her sister’s silver lipstick across her own lips, there was no presence in anything, no message, no clue. Lucy wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, but nobody even noticed.
“Ma’am?” the detective asked one more time. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
Suddenly Mom was up on her knees, clawing at the man, screaming at him. “No, I’m not all right! My son is dead and my daughter is missing! I’ll never be all right again!”
You still have us, Lucy thought fiercely through fierce embarrassment. You still have me. But she understood that it wasn’t enough.
The detective had caught Mom’s wrists and was holding them easily, but the forward motion of her body as she attacked him threw him off balance and he sat down hard. Now he didn’t look like a detective anymore, and it didn’t matter whether or not he was gay; he was an ordinary man sitting on the floor in Lucy’s house holding her mother in his arms.
They were not alone. They were part of other people, and other people had had people die. Nobody could change what had happened or keep other bad things from happening to them. But there were people who could help them stand it, help them get through. Not just Mom and Dad, not just Lucy herself, the oldest child left. But people like Jerry Johnston, and Stacey who’d lived through her parents’ divorce when she’d thought she never could, and this detective holding Mom who was sobbing so hard she could hardly catch her breath. Lucy wanted him to hold her, too. She wanted to cry like that while he was holding her so she wouldn’t go flying off in bloody little pieces into the wind.
She looked away, embarrassed, and tried to listen to Dad on the phone, but the detective murmuring to Mom was louder. “We’ll do everything we can to find her, ma’am. And the rest of your family is right here. Your family needs you, ma’am.”
Mom beat weakly at his chest and her crying turned to coughing. “My family is slipping away! I can’t keep them safe! They’d be better off without me!”
Lucy looked around frantically. Priscilla had taken the three youngest kids into the kitchen for breakfast. Dominic, Molly, Cory. If you named them, it would make them real. Even though Lucy knew where they were, it was easy for her to believe that she’d never see them again.
This day had passed like any other
day. They’d all eaten, slept some, gotten up, breathed, had mites on and in them, petted the cat, brushed their hair, touched things. Molly and Cory had watched cartoons. Dad had watched the news. Lucy had gone swimming at Stacey’s house. A day like any other day, except that nothing was the way it had ever been before.
They were hunting for Rae. Just like they’d hunted for Ethan. A lifetime ago. A moment ago. This time Lucy helped, but it wasn’t making any difference. They couldn’t find her. Mom drove all over the neighborhood, was gone so long that Lucy thought she must have had an accident, or driven off the edge of the world. On her way to and from Stacey’s house, Lucy asked every kid she saw: “Have you seen my sister? Have you seen Rae?” Nobody had. Some of them didn’t even know who her sister Rae was. Dad called all her friends, Jerry Johnston, the other kids in the therapy group, teachers. Nobody knew anything.
Now Lucy sat quietly at the big dining room table, where she’d sat hundreds of times before. This was Dad’s chair; it had arms. There was a smudge on the shiny wood; she rubbed at it and it got bigger. The sunshine coming in the bay window had the same shape and color it had had on other late-summer mornings, as if everything were the same. But she knew there were invisible feeding mites in the sunshine and that anything bad could happen at any time, in the next minute or the next year or at any time during her life. Time was rushing around her like a cyclone, and it had also stopped.
Anything bad could happen, and would.
Anything good could happen too, which was the truth but wasn’t real.
Mom was crying so hard now that Lucy could hardly understand her. She didn’t want to understand her, but she couldn’t help it. “I was their—mother! I was supposed to—keep them safe!”
Mom pulled away from the detective and curled up again on the floor, curled up her knees, curled her arms around her legs. But she didn’t cover her face, and Lucy stared, mesmerized, at the plain terror and anguish there.
The detective was taking notes in a blue spiral notebook like the ones Lucy used in school. “You’d had some trouble with both of them, hadn’t you?”
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