Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  They got a phone with an unlisted number, using the same fake name he’d given the school. The phone rang only once a day, and Lucy rushed for it. They had agreed she wouldn’t speak until she heard his voice, and when she did, she relaxed, braceleting the cord around her wrist. “I miss you like crazy,” she whispered.

  “I’m kissing you,” he said quietly. “I’m imagining your gorgeous face and counting every freckle on your shoulders.”

  “Come home, I’m lonely.”

  “Soon,” he told her. She heard someone shouting his name, and then there was a rush of his breath. “I got to go,” he said. She could hear kids yelling in the background, and then he hung up and there was the dial tone. She always felt better after he called, but she wished that his calls would last longer, that the feeling she got from his voice wouldn’t fade so quickly.

  Lucy roamed around the yard, but the only sounds she heard were the cry of a heron and the twittering of the chickens. No matter where she stood, when she turned around, all she saw was sky and land and bugs. She thought of the cashier at the Giant Eagle, but that was forty-five minutes away by car. And William took the car every day. And Lucy didn’t know how to drive yet, though William still promised to teach her. It would be hours to walk, and even then, how could she know the girl would even be there? William wouldn’t be home until around four or five, which was at least three hours away. She came back inside and fiddled with the radio, finding a rock station. “Good Morning Starshine” came on and she danced a little, lost in the music, swaying, and then she stopped. If they had a TV, she could watch movies at least. It didn’t have to be stupid game shows or the soaps that Iris was so addicted to. There were educational shows on TV. She could make that case to William.

  Every week he came home with cash. “This is for us,” he told her, but she never knew where he put it, and when she asked him, he teased her and said, “Now who’s the banker around here? If you need money, just ask me.” She searched the house anyway, but she couldn’t find it. Well, it was their money. If she needed some, she was sure he’d give it to her.

  She wandered around the house, looking at William’s books. He had a macrobiotic cookbook, You Are All Sanpaku. What the heck was sanpaku? She leafed through the book until she found the definition: if the whites of your eyes showed below your pupils, you were in danger both physically and spiritually. She stood in front of a mirror and stared at herself. Holy hell, she was sanpaku. The book was filled with curing recipes. Rice and seaweed. Rice and broccoli. Rice and raisins. They sounded worse than being sanpaku. She shoved that book aside and picked up The Ten Talents, but when she opened it up, she saw it was from the Seventh-Day Adventists. God’s original diet for humans, it said. The recipes were complicated. You had to mix and match vegetables with grains to get whole proteins, and she didn’t like the tone of the authors, who seemed a little bossy to her. What was wrong with a piece of fish? She thought of Iris’s baked chicken and sweet potato casserole, the crunch of the skin, the creamy marshmallow bonnet. The skirt steaks Iris would sizzle up in a pan, smothering them in gravy. Then she thought of Iris’s concern about her grades, Charlotte’s obsession with college. No, she was lucky to be here with William.

  IT WAS SUPPOSED to be her job to feed the chickens, but she hated doing it, having to get into the henhouse with all the hens, the rooster with them, like a little martinet. He was always watching the hens. It looked as if he was swaying in a dance, and as soon as he noticed her, he would stop and crow at the hens, as if he were warning them about her. She quickly set down fresh water, scattered feed, and hightailed it out of there.

  But most of the time the hens were outside, waiting for her. As soon as she came near them, they got manic. All she had to do was reach out her hand, feed clenched in her fist, and they would poke and prod one another out of the way, jockeying for position. When she scattered the feed, as far away from her as she could, they pecked noisily to get at it. But it wasn’t just food that excited them. Sometimes something as simple as a squirrel running past their pen would set them off on a twenty-minute fusillade of squawks and ruffling feathers. Knowing the birds were penned up was the only thing that made her feel safe.

  One day she walked into the little house where the hens were sitting. All the chickens were accounted for. She looked around for George and finally saw him lazing in a spot of sun, ignoring her. Good. Good. She’d be in and out of the coop as fast as she could. Lucy wanted to check to see whether there were any eggs, but the thought of putting her hands under the hens’ bodies scared her. The hens, bobbing their heads, watching Lucy suspiciously, weren’t making it any easier.

  Lucy didn’t even like eggs that much, and she didn’t taste any difference between these and store bought, though William shut his eyes and practically swooned. Why couldn’t William collect the eggs instead of her if he liked them so much? William had told her to reach in quickly with her hand facing down, so that if a hen got nippy, she was more prone to snip at the back of your hand. But Lucy just poked a finger under Mabel, who bit Lucy’s thumb, a sharp pinch that made her wince. “Hey!” She put the thumb in her mouth, wondering about what diseases chickens carried. The other chickens began screaming, which brought George running toward her. He lunged, beating with his wings, making her jump. She slid her hand under Dorothy, feeling the weight of the hen on top of it, then quickly grabbed for the egg and removed her hand before the hen could attack her. Dorothy bobbed her head and squawked. Lisa was easier. Lucy gathered the eggs, just three of them, warm and speckled in her hands, feeling the strange glittering eyes of the hens on her, the heated stare of the rooster.

  Already she was dirty. She’d have to do laundry, but she didn’t really know how. It was something William had been doing for them. She was tired of her T-shirts, of her bell-bottoms. She wanted cutoff shorts and a halter top.

  She put the eggs in a blue bowl on the kitchen table, like a vase of flowers. She had to admit they looked pretty, like a still-life painting. Then she went to get the watercolors and paper that William had bought for her. She’d capture the eggs while she waiting for him to come home to her again.

  THE SOUND OF the door woke her. She had been sleeping on the bed, a book beside her. “Hello!” William called, and she wandered out into the living room. She was cranky from having just woken up, but as soon as she saw him, her whole body felt lighter. The air seemed to glow. “You can’t believe what a great day I had!” he told her. In the morning, he said, a nurse came in and all the kids had their fingers pricked so she could tell what blood type they were. “Dig it, I’m B Positive,” he said, showing her the card. He said that later one of the kids was interested in studying the lake, and then all the kids were, so they spent the whole day swimming in their clothes, using math to calculate how long it would take to swim out to the float, how long it might take for their clothes to dry. “You went swimming?” Lucy said wistfully. She thought about how hot it had been that day, how she had wanted someone to wring her out.

  “It was educational. I’m starving,” William said. “What’s for dinner?”

  Lucy blinked at him. She hadn’t had lunch, hadn’t even thought of eating.

  “You didn’t cook us dinner?” He looked around the house as if there must be some mistake. “Honey, we have all this food.”

  “I didn’t think—you usually do the cooking—”

  “I’m exhausted, Lucy. I had a really hard day. What did you do all day?”

  She showed him the painting. “Wow, that’s pretty,” he said, but he was headed into the kitchen, and she followed. William took out some noodles, which would be quick, some canned sauce. There was a green pepper in the refrigerator.

  “Could you start teaching me to drive?” she said. “Then I could drive you and pick you up from school. I could have the car all day so I could go places.”

  “That won’t work. I never know when school will be out. We go until the kids decide they want to stop.”

  “Well, I
could hang out. I could watch you—”

  “No, no,” he said. “It might be disruptive to the kids. They think of themselves as this self-sufficient community.”

  The world seemed to stretch out in front of her like a hard pane of glass.

  He noticed her deep frown and wrapped one arm around her, drawing her close. “I’ll take you exploring, Lucy. But you know, I like knowing where you are, knowing that you’re safe.”

  “I’d be safer if I was with you,” she said.

  ON HIS WAY out the door the following morning, William reminded Lucy that there was brown rice in the cupboard, tahini, fruits, and vegetables. He left the Ten Talents cookbook pointedly on the counter. There was more than enough to make them dinner, and no, it didn’t matter that she didn’t know what time he would be coming home, because the beauty of vegetarian food was that it was quick. “You can spend your time going through the cookbooks, finding us something great to eat. Just get all the prep work done, and then when I come home, it’ll take you just ten minutes at most. Surprise me.” Prep work. She had no idea what that even meant. He promised that soon he would take her into town. They’d find a great GED program for her, or even a job, which would be helpful because William’s salary barely covered their expenses and they couldn’t save a thing. Even if the transportation might be tricky, they’d work it out. “You’ll be a great driver,” he told her.

  BUT JUNE TURNED into July and then August, and Lucy was still at home doing not much of anything. In another month, school would start up and she wouldn’t be there, and what would all the kids back home say about her being missing? She tried to imagine it, to hear their voices. She thought of Charlotte off at Brandeis, of Iris living alone in the house, and she swelled with longing. Soon, she told herself. Soon she could make contact, when her adult life was in place.

  One morning, as soon as William left, she turned on the radio just to hear other human voices. She wasn’t used to being so alone. She liked noise all around her. Even at Iris’s, she liked hearing Charlotte thumping around or Iris singing along to the radio. The quiet dug into her bones. The announcer was talking about a murder, some actress she’d never heard of, Sharon Tate, and a bunch of other people, brutally killed right in their own home, the word pig scrawled on the door. Helter skelter. But misspelled in blood, healter, and somehow that made it all the more terrifying to Lucy. Sharon Tate had been pregnant, and when Lucy heard who she was married to, she gasped, because Roman Polanski was one of the filmmakers William used to talk about in his class. No one knew who did it. Her mouth went dry and she switched off the set. It was in California. It wasn’t here.

  She went outside, feeling funny, because here she was, and the best company available to her was chickens, who were no company at all. She grabbed some feed from the big bag by the coop and scattered it. The hens squawked and Lisa pecked Dorothy out of the way. “Cut that out,” Lucy ordered. She put some feed in her hand, crouched down, holding out her palm for Dorothy, lifting it up and away when Mabel tried to get near. “This is Dorothy’s,” she said. Dorothy pecked at her palm, her beak like tiny little scissors. She made an odd purring sound.

  When all the feed was gone, the chickens headed for the henhouse, pushing Dorothy out of the way so they could go into the coop first, picking out their favorite places. Dorothy went in last, but she settled farthest from the door, in a patch of sun. “At least you have some warmth,” Lucy told Dorothy.

  Lucy went back inside and, because there was really nothing else to do, fell asleep on the bed, dreaming that someone was talking to her, telling her something important, but she couldn’t make out the sound. Something bit her, and she woke up. Dorothy was on the bed, her head cocked, murmuring. Lucy didn’t move, and Dorothy then settled down, her eyes shutting, the steady buk-buk-buk winding down. William had told her that chickens could be smart, that they could figure out ways to escape if they really wanted. Or maybe she had just left the door open. “You smarty-pants,” she whispered. Lucy reached out a finger and stroked the hen’s side, the feathers smooth and glossy, but Dorothy kept sleeping, and then Lucy yawned, and the two of them napped in the summer heat.

  Chapter 4

  After twenty-four hours, then seventy-two hours, then days, weeks, a month, the police still seemed to have no leads in Lucy’s disappearance, and Iris was beside herself. “She’ll come home,” Iris insisted some days, and then on others Charlotte would find her sobbing by the window. “Where is she?” Iris cried. “Why would she do such a thing?” Iris called the police every day, but there was never any news, and after a while the cops seemed to be tired of talking to her. They assured her that they were working on it, that they had feelers out and one of their best detectives was on the case, but they kept telling Iris how unworried they were. “Teenagers run away all the time,” they told her. “She’ll be back.” Iris called Lucy’s friends Heather and Sable, but neither girl knew a thing, and Sable was furious because Lucy had been supposed to come to a party the day she left, and Lucy hadn’t told her anything about not showing up. “I thought she was my best friend,” Sable said. “I thought we told each other everything.”

  Iris put ads in Boston After Dark and some of the San Francisco papers. Lucy. Come home. She even hired a private detective, but he never seemed to turn up any information. “Sometimes people don’t want to be found,” the detective told her, which made her so angry she fired him.

  Charlotte was floored. Of course she worried about and missed her sister, of course she was terrified, but she was angry, too. Lucy had planned this. She had goddamned planned this. Why couldn’t Lucy just call Iris and let her hear for herself that she was fine? Why couldn’t she give an address? Lucy had done what she wanted without even thinking of anyone else. Look at Lucy, out in the world somewhere, acting like a grown-up without having the responsibilities that would really make her one.

  Still, Charlotte’s fear for Lucy kept gnawing at her, and she couldn’t share it with Iris. No, she had to keep calming her down. “What if she’s hurt? What if she’s in trouble?” Iris kept crying.

  “She’s fine, I just know it,” Charlotte lied. She told herself that, over and over, as if it were a mantra. Because it had to be true.

  There were memories, like splinters. How when Charlotte went off every day to kindergarten, Lucy would be waiting for her to come home, leaping up from her front-step perch and running out to hug her. Once, Charlotte was in a play in seventh grade, and she hadn’t been very good—she knew that—but Lucy made a big deal of her. They were walking out and Charlotte overheard a girl behind her say, “I never realized Charlotte’s not that ugly.” Charlotte wanted to die, to sink into herself. Lucy whipped around, glaring. The girls were all bigger than Lucy, but Lucy didn’t care. “My sister was asked to be in Ingenue magazine,” she lied. “Did they ask you?” And for the next month, until they forgot, the girls were nicer to her, more respectful. Just the year before, when Charlotte had been huddled over her college essay, crumpling up yet another piece of paper, Lucy had walked by her and impulsively hugged her, as if she had known exactly what Charlotte needed. Why hadn’t Charlotte known what Lucy needed? Had she been so absorbed in her own life that she had lost sight of her sister?

  Charlotte did her own detective work. She scoured Lucy’s room, trying to figure out where she had gone. She couldn’t even open Lucy’s top drawer without giving it a yank, and then it spilled open, filled with stretchy orange-and-red love beads. She tugged open another drawer crammed with concert tickets. When had Lucy ever gone to see the Who? Who knew she even liked them? There were tickets to Tom Rush and a napkin from Club 47, which didn’t even let you in if you weren’t eighteen, something Charlotte knew because she had tried to go there herself with her friend Birdie and had been turned away.

  “Did you find anything?”

  Charlotte saw the way Iris was hovering there, as if she wanted something. “We’ll find her,” Charlotte insisted. “She’ll come back to us.”


  BUT LUCY DIDN’T. Every time Charlotte heard a noise in the house, she leaped up, sure it was Lucy, but it was always the burner kicking on. When the phone rang, her breath stopped, but it was someone wanting to sell her a magazine subscription or get her to donate to one cause or another. She told herself there were things she could do, like make sure that Lucy’s bedroom window was open every night so that if Lucy came home, she could easily climb back in. She went to the head shop in Harvard Square, way to the back room where the magic stuff was—spells, candles, and potions. “I need to find someone,” she said to the salesgirl, who sold her a small blue rayon bag that smelled like an old feather duster. “This will do it,” the salesgirl insisted. “Put it where you want the person to be.”

  “How long does it take?”

  The girl sighed. “You think you can hurry magic?” she said.

  Charlotte put the bag in Lucy’s room, tucked under the blanket. Every day she came into the room and handled the bag, as if her yearning would make the magic more powerful.

  BY THE TIME September came and Charlotte needed to move to school, the window sills in Lucy’s room were mottled from the rain. How could she leave when Lucy wasn’t here? How would Iris do living alone?

  Charlotte went to find Iris, who was in the backyard, under a big gardening hat, digging up weeds. “Do you want me to live at home and commute?” Charlotte blurted out, and Iris sat up, taking off her gardening gloves. Charlotte felt sick with guilt. She’d spent so much time thinking about what it would be like to be on her own, to be at college, but Lucy’s vanishing had never been part of the scenario.