Mom chuckled softly. “Nobody’s ever too old for this.”
“I wish I was all grown up.”
“I know.”
“I wish I was still a baby.”
“I know.”
“I wish Rae and Ethan were here.” For once, it didn’t make Lucy cry to say that.
Mom didn’t cry either, but her hug got tighter. “I know.”
“Mom?”
“Yes, honey.”
“Dad … sees Rae.”
“I know.”
“Do you see her?”
“I think so. I’m so confused and tired by now that I can’t always tell what’s real and what’s just in my head.”
“She’s trying to tell me something.”
“What do you mean?”
“I get—messages from her.”
Mom leaned back a little to look at her. “What do you mean, ‘messages’?”
Lucy felt dumb. “Oh, you know. To be careful and stuff like that.” Not to trust you.
“Have you talked to Jerry about this?”
You don’t understand anything, Lucy thought frantically, but out loud she said, “Yes.”
“What does he say about it?”
None of your business. “I don’t know. Nothing.”
“Lucy, listen. This is important. If you actually see Rae, you have to tell Dad or me. We have to tell the police everything that might help them find her.”
Lucy made a deliberate decision then that both scared her and gave her a little rush of power: I won’t ever tell you anything. Out loud, she said, “Okay.”
Her neck had started aching, but she didn’t want to move and hurt Mom’s feelings. She ran her fingers along the stripes in Mom’s sweater, trying to follow any one particular strand of yarn as it twisted to make the pattern.
Mom sighed and sat up straighter, then reached to take the earphones gently off Lucy’s head. Now everything sounded weird, as if Lucy’d been underwater for a long time, or underground.
Mom took her hands. Lucy realized how cold her own hands were, and then she was cold all over, shivering. She wanted to turn her electric blanket on high and pull the covers up over her head, but Mom was holding her hands so hard they hurt, and Lucy imagined their cold hollow bones and icy blood.
“There’s something really important that I want to say to you, Lucy. Kind of a birthday present.”
She paused, swallowed, looked away. It scared Lucy to think what she might be going to say. Your father and I are getting a divorce, maybe, or I don’t love you anymore. Her heart hurt, and she thought about its four chambers, ventricles and another word she couldn’t remember. Blood pumping in and out, in and out. Oxygen and stuff in her blood. Those things with the weird name. Corpuscles.
Mom said, “I want you to understand that Ethan’s death and Rae’s—disappearance are not more important than your life.”
Lucy stared at her.
“Not to Dad. Not to me. And most important, not to you.”
“Oh,” Lucy said.
Mom stood up, then leaned over and kissed her again. “Happy birthday, sweetheart. I love you very much.” Her eyes were full of tears, and the streak in her hair was very wide and white, but right now Lucy didn’t mind.
She thought about what Mom had said as she fell asleep listening to Tina Turner. Her dreams were about blood and bones and boxes inside boxes, but they weren’t scary dreams and they didn’t wake her up. On her way to school the next morning she was still thinking about what Mom had said, and it had snowed just enough in the night that the sidewalks were glittery and beautiful, and she was feeling good until Jeremy Martinez threw a snowball at her that was mostly mud and it got in her hair and she called him an asshole and he called her a honky bitch. They weren’t on school property yet, so they didn’t get in trouble, but Lucy was in tears by the time she got to the bathroom and her hair was ruined for the day. Stacey said Jeremy must like her.
It snowed off and on all day. The footprints she’d left on the sidewalks would be gone by the time she went home. She was in math class sixth period, half listening to Ms. Abercrombie talk about how a normal number like 100 could be broken down further and further and further—25 x 4, 10 x 10, 2 x 50, till it wasn’t the same number anymore—when she saw Rae flicker past the window like a handful of snow, and she couldn’t stand it anymore.
She stood up. Ms. Abercrombie stopped in the middle of another sentence about factors. “Lucy?”
“This is stupid,” Lucy said, and walked out. Behind her she heard the class break up into shouts and whoops and catcalls, and she heard Ms. Abercrombie yell her name, but none of it had anything to do with her.
She wanted to run down the hall but she didn’t, because somebody might notice and try to stop her, and then she’d have to hurt them or something because she wasn’t going to be stopped. But nobody was in the hall. Even when you had a hall pass and were on your way to the bathroom, it felt funny to be out in the hall when nobody else was, as if you were doing something wrong, and now she really was doing something wrong, and it felt really funny. For a minute she thought about just walking the halls forever, walking and walking, but that was too dangerous and anyway Rae wasn’t in the school. She knew now where Rae was. And maybe Ethan, too.
She went down the gray steps by the library. She thought the librarian saw her but nobody came after her. The door at the bottom of the steps went out onto the end of the playground. She pushed it open and went outside, pulled it shut behind her. It was as easy as that. The door was locked now. She couldn’t go back inside even if she wanted to.
It was cold outside and snowing, and she’d left her coat in the building. She hugged herself and ran. All the way to Jerry’s house, she didn’t see Rae. She didn’t see anybody in any of the houses; maybe nobody lived there. Maybe they were all dead. Maybe houses were for something else altogether, and the idea of people living in them was just a trick to make you miss what was really going on.
By the time she turned in at the skeletal hedgerow, she was shivering violently and panting. No lights were on in Jerry’s house, and for a minute she was scared that she’d been wrong. But she couldn’t stop now; she didn’t know where else to go or what else to do. She ran up the five slippery steps and onto the porch, which thumped under her wet shoes, and before she knocked on the door Jerry opened it to her.
He was huge. He filled the doorway. But he made her think of those fake buildings Dad had told her they used on movie sets, that looked solid from the front but there was nothing behind them. He looked tired and sick. She realized that this was Wednesday and he looked like that every week before group. After group he always looked better.
He smiled at her. His pale eyes were like the glitter on the sidewalks late in the afternoon. His flabby cheeks seemed to crack and split, but there wasn’t any blood.
“Welcome, Lucy,” he said.
22
“I’m proud of you,” Jerry told her.
Her heart swelled. She had no idea what she’d done to make him proud of her, but it was what she wanted to hear more than anything in the world.
“You know when you need me. You know when you’re ready. That makes me proud.”
She smiled.
“And you knew to come before the others get here.”
“I left school,” she said.
He nodded. “You did the right thing.”
“Mom and Dad wouldn’t like it.”
“For quite a while now I’ve known that you’ve needed more intensive work than the others. I didn’t want to push you until you were ready.”
Lucy said again, “My mom and dad—”
“Parents don’t always know what their children need,” Jerry said. Lucy remembered Ethan needing something from Mom that she couldn’t give him, Rae needing something from Dad.
Jerry was having trouble catching his breath. He was panting, and she could see his tongue, coated with some kind of white stuff. Snow, she thought confusedly, or fur. P
robably dead skin cells. She thought there was a caved-in place above his right eye.
She peered past Jerry. His house was more familiar to her these days than her parents’ house, felt more like home. She didn’t see Rae, but she would. Rae must be all right if she was here with Jerry. Lucy would be all right now, too.
Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe Rae wasn’t here. Maybe she was alone in the house with Jerry. Something moved inside when she thought that.
“What does that mean? ‘Intensive work’?” Her voice came out embarrassingly loud, and she didn’t know why she’d asked anyway. She didn’t need to know what it meant. She trusted Jerry.
The sound of her voice was absorbed right away, soaked up, by the spongy quiet of Jerry’s house. Softly, almost lovingly, he answered, “You’re not getting what you need from your parents or anybody else right now. The only person you can get it from is me.”
That sounded so good. Still standing in the open doorway, still shivering, Lucy blushed and nodded.
He reached around her to shut the door. His arm brushed against her, his chest and belly. She noticed that he didn’t have much body heat. Even though she was so cold, she was a lot warmer than he was, and his coldness seemed to be pulling her warmth out of her, so that she shivered all the more.
With the door shut, the house was dim. Fuzzily, she wondered if it could somehow be coated, too, the windows covered with snow or with dead skin.
He must have the furnace turned way up, because the air got warmer and warmer as she followed him into the living room. There was a time when Dad would have had a fit if anybody’d turned the heat up that high in their house. Now Lucy didn’t think he’d even notice. Maybe Jerry’s house was like the earth: the deeper you went the hotter it got, until at the core things that should be solid weren’t, and volcanoes started.
Abruptly Jerry turned and put his hands on her shoulders. They were so lightweight they could have been gloves. He was a whole lot taller and bigger than she was, but at the moment she was heavier, she was holding him up.
In one graceful movement, as if they were dancing, he swung her around and sat her down on the big red pillow in the middle of the floor. He was leaning close over her, and his breath smelled awful.
He lowered himself to sit beside her, hardly creaking the floorboards at all, and gently pulled her over backward so that her head was in his lap. She felt his lumpy thighs under her, and the hollow between his thighs and his belly where she knew his penis was, like a dragon in its cave. His belly in its red plaid shirt loomed over her; when she turned her face into it, it indented, as if there were nothing inside.
“Are you comfortable?”
She squirmed around a little, mostly to get the feel of his lap against the back of her head, and felt a hardness that she recognized right away. Jerry had a hard-on. Lucy lay very still and shut her eyes and whispered, “Yes.”
“Now I want you to pay attention to your body. Are there places where it hurts? Where you feel tension?”
“My head hurts.”
The headache was so deep that she thought her brain was hurting. She imagined her brain to be an ugly, pulpy brown, with red and green lights flicking on and off to indicate trouble, but nobody there to see.
Jerry’s hands were on both sides of her head, and it hurt worse, pounding at her temples, cutting across the bridge of her nose. She was starting to get sick to her stomach.
“And—my stomach.”
He put his hand low on her stomach. Pain and nausea swelled like a balloon, gathered at the spot where his hand was and started spreading all though her. She didn’t think she could stand it, but she didn’t try to get away.
“It hurts everywhere!” She was crying. She’d always been crying, and she’d never stop.
“Use the pain!” Jerry hissed.
She didn’t know what he meant.
“Make the pain as big and as strong as you can!”
She couldn’t. It would tear her apart. It would eat her alive. She couldn’t do what he wanted. She couldn’t do this right.
“That’s right, that’s right,” Jerry was crooning. “Make the pain as awful as you can, and then give it to me.”
All of a sudden, her head didn’t hurt quite so much and her stomach wasn’t quite so sick. At the same time she realized that Jerry’s hands and thighs and face were filling out, so that there was more solid flesh and not so many wrinkles.
“What are you feeling? Right now?”
She struggled for the right words. “I—don’t know.”
“You’re scared,” he prompted.
Once he’d said it, she was. So scared.
“You’re furious.”
Rage crawled around inside her; it lived there now. Lucy curled up her knees and clenched her fists against her mouth. That way, all of her fit into Jerry’s wide, deep lap.
For a minute she wanted to be in her father’s lap instead. Her father’s lap didn’t feel empty, like Jerry’s; her father’s arms didn’t seem brittle. With Dad, she wasn’t expected to fill something up or to keep something from breaking.
“You’re scared and mad because your parents are lousy parents.”
“No,” she whimpered.
“Yes. They let your brother die. They let your sister disappear. Parents are supposed to keep their kids safe.”
“It’s—not their fault.”
“You don’t have to defend them to me, honey. That’s not your job.”
Honey.
“Your job is to work through your feelings in a safe environment. This is a safe environment. I’ll take care of you.”
Lucy relaxed some. The fear and fury were, in fact, bigger and stronger now, but not so scary, not so much enemies.
“You’re scared.”
“Yes.”
“You’re angry.”
“Yes.”
“Your parents have lost two children, and now you’re next.”
“No!” Yes. Jerry’s voice pulled at her, pulled something out of her. His big body was folded over her, and his mouth, pursed to kiss or to suck, was almost on hers.
The doorbell rang.
Somebody to save me. Mom and Dad to take me home.
But nobody knew she was here. And Jerry was right: Mom and Dad were bad parents. They didn’t save anybody.
And anyway, why would she want to be saved from Jerry? He was the only person in the world she could trust. She curled up smaller in his lap, around his hand that kneaded her belly like a cat making a nest, way down inside the waistband of her jeans.
“Feel it!” he whispered urgently. “Feel the anger and the fear.”
But she knew she couldn’t. Not the way he wanted.
“See it. What color is the anger? What color is the fear?”
“Black,” she said. “Red.” But she was just saying those things so he’d let her stay on his lap.
“Good. Stay with it, Lucy!”
But she’d already failed him.
The doorbell rang again, and they both heard somebody yelling. A guy. Mike. “Hey, Jerry, let me in! It’s fuckin’ cold out here!”
Jerry kissed her. Lightly, but she felt his teeth and the hollow probing tube of his tongue.
Then he lifted her off his lap and got up off the floor. He was still having a hard time; he had to get up on his knees first, then hold on to the arm of a chair to hoist himself up. But she saw that he was a lot stronger and steadier, and this time the floorboards did creak under his weight.
“Mike’s here,” Jerry said with a smile. He was towering over her like a papier-mâché giant.
“What’s he doing here?” Lucy protested feebly. “It’s not time for group yet, is it?” She sat up, stretched, rubbed at her eyes. Moving hurt. Inside her bones was marrow, soft spongy stuff. Inside her flesh was blood. Her headache and nausea were just about gone, but she was so tired.
“Mike’s been needing a little extra from me, too,” Jerry said over his shoulder. “Looks like he’s ready.”
<
br /> He lumbered into the entranceway, where she couldn’t see him anymore. She heard him unlock and open the front door, and both the light and the temperature in the room changed. She heard him say, “Mike. Come on in. I’m proud of you.”
Jealousy made her private parts ache. The door to the hallway at the other end of the living room eased open. She saw a shiny eye peeking out, heard a faint hissing as if somebody wasn’t even strong enough to whisper very loud.
Rae.
Lucy struggled to get to her feet. It was like being in the tub full of plastic balls at the amusement park. She kept slipping and sliding. Everything around her kept moving.
She found she was having to concentrate on stuff that she’d hardly even thought about until now. Like how her hands and knees, shoulders and hips were supposed to work together. Like how the muscles in her thighs were supposed to get shorter in the front and longer in the back so that she could stand up. Like where she and Jerry and Mike and Rae and Ethan and Mom and Dad all were, in relation to each other.
By the time she was finally on her feet, both the outside door and the door to the back hallway were shut again. Jerry came into the living room with his arm around Mike’s shoulders. Lucy looked away.
“Lucy’s here, too,” Jerry told Mike. “Must be my lucky day.” Lucy thought that was a funny thing to say. Mike gave her a dirty look.
Jerry held out his other arm. After a minute, Lucy went to him. His arm around her was like the feather boa she’d worn one Halloween with a blond beehive wig and Mom’s high heels; it wasn’t very heavy, but it wrapped her up.
“Well,” Jerry said cheerfully, “who wants to be first?”
There was a silence. Lucy tried hard to figure out what he was talking about, embarrassed that she didn’t know. Then, from the other side of Jerry, Mike said, “First at what?”
“Working on feelings.” Jerry’s voice was husky and shaking a little. Lucy thought he sounded excited. “Working on rage and fear.”
Lucy wanted to say she’d be first because she knew that would please Jerry, but she was afraid to. “Oh, shit, I will,” Mike said.
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