Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  Well, she was still strong, still active. And she had to admit that living here had eased a lot of her burdens. She didn’t have to worry about the grass being mowed, or the basement leaking. She had time now for more things. Tomorrow she would call the police and ask them if they had any more leads. She would take out another ad in more newspapers, and this time, she’d put in a photo of Lucy.

  Chapter 14

  Patrick had to admit he liked Lucy’s company. She was now comfortable enough to ask whether she could go into his house to get some water or make a sandwich or read one of his books. He always left his door open, and when he came back inside, he found traces of her. A barrette on the couch, a glass washed and stacked in the kitchen by the sink. It made him feel good, taking care of her, as if he had a connection to the world.

  He began to think that maybe she was telling the truth. Yes, she did seem spooked. He caught her staring at him, as if she wanted to tell him something. Her gaze was a little too intense, and he always looked away. A few times she told him she had to leave early, and she bolted away on her bike. But maybe she really was eighteen and a Brandeis student taking time off. No one came by asking about Lucy. No cop. No social worker. No parent. He glanced in the notices in the local papers, but there was never any mention of a missing girl. Maybe she wasn’t lying. And if she was, he figured she would tell him the truth when she trusted him enough.

  She worked hard and was helpful. It was almost July when she came in one day with a little farm newsletter she had neatly written up, talking about the fruits that were in season, including recipes. He liked her writing, how it fancied up his fruit. Peaches are like the first blush of summer. “You could make copies and then hand them out for free, right by the cash register,” she said shyly. “If you wanted to, I mean.”

  “Lucy, this is a great idea. I can have the copy shop put it on really pretty paper, too.”

  She shone when she smiled.

  “And I want you to put your name on this.”

  “Really? My name?”

  “This is great stuff, and I want you to have the credit.”

  The next piece she turned in, about fresh figs, was signed “Lucy Smith.” “Smith?” he said, and she shrugged. “Lots of people have that name, including me,” she said.

  Customers began to look forward to her newsletter, to comment on the recipes. In one day, the peaches sold out because everyone wanted to try the cobbler recipe Lucy had included. “You,” he told her, “are a goddess.”

  She flushed. When she walked past him, he felt her fingers brush against his. He stepped back to give her room.

  ONE AFTERNOON, PATRICK felt overwhelmingly tired. He couldn’t concentrate. It took him three times to understand that a customer was asking for Gala apples. He walked over to Lucy. “I’m going to go lie down,” he told her. “I’ll set my alarm and be back in an hour.” She was wrapping up a jar of homemade jam for a customer, and she nodded.

  He poured himself one glass of wine, then two, and then another. Just to drown out the distractions. He shut the blinds and the door. Outside, a car backfired. A woman shouted, “Jason, I told you no!” He jammed the pillow over his head, but it didn’t muffle enough. A fly was buzzing in the room, and he began to doze fitfully, moving in and out of dreams where he was biking into the ocean, or having lunch with a shark that kept eyeing his right leg. He tumbled back into sleep, turning, trying to get comfortable. And then he felt someone watching him. His eyes flew open.

  Vera stood at the foot of his bed.

  She was in jeans and an old sweater. Her lips were moving, saying something to him, something important, he just knew it, but her voice was mangled, a record being played backward. He tried to get up, to touch her, to talk to her, but his arms and legs were cemented to the sheets. The only sound in the room was the whir and click of his fan.

  She crawled into bed, curling against him, and there was the shock of her, and his body trembled. Her silky warmth. Her vanilla smell. Her head resting on his back. He wanted to beg her to stay. He wanted to touch her and talk to her and do everything with her. Sleep, Vera whispered, and his lids glued shut, even though he tried to wrench them open. But he could still hear her—the rasp of her breathing, the Vera-ness of her—and he clung to it as long as he could.

  HE WOKE WITH a start. The fan was still going, but now it was blowing dust around. He felt a weight in the bed behind him. She was still there. Vera was there. For a moment he felt so ridiculously happy, so buoyant with hope.

  He tried to move, first his fingers, then his legs, and when they worked, he kicked off the sheets so he could move toward her. “Vera,” he said.

  Lucy was sleeping beside him, her mouth faintly open.

  He jolted out of bed, a roaring in his ears, bracing his arms on the wall. There was his dresser, his closet, his shoes on the floor. There was Lucy.

  Lucy was fully clothed, her rainbow socks winking in the light. “Lucy,” he said, and her eyes fluttered open. She propped herself up on her elbow. “What are you doing here?” he asked. His voice sounded funny to him, like someone scraping rust off steel.

  She climbed out of the bed, and he felt his anger rising like a tide.

  Lucy was standing too close to him, and then she moved even nearer. There was something in the air that he didn’t like, poking him in the ribs just like a finger. The way she was looking at him. She looked so small and lost he almost felt sorry for her. Her face looked as if it were collapsing.

  “What were you doing?” he asked.

  “I was just tired,” she said. “I thought we were friends.” She bent, shoved her feet into her sneakers, and rushed out of the room.

  FOR THE REST of the day, they worked together in silence. She was at the cash register ringing up customers, and then he went out to the fields to see what was ready to pick. He didn’t have to look at her at all. He didn’t have to think how he had thought she was Vera. He could concentrate on pulling carrots, inspecting the corn, pinching the basil back so it would grow more lush. He felt the sunburn glazing over him. His nose would be clown red, most likely, but he kept working. He was glad when the afternoon was upon them. He had picked two big buckets of carrots, some peppers, and a little bucket of red leaf lettuce and was washing them with the garden hose when he saw her leaving, walking her bike to the road, her head bent down, anger still coming off her in waves.

  He almost hoped she wouldn’t come back.

  THAT NIGHT HE was at the grocery store, looking for paper towels, when he heard a man arguing. “Because I told you,” the man said. When Patrick looked up and followed the sound to the frozen-food section, he saw the back of a tall guy in a tight T-shirt and bleached jeans, his hair shaggy to his shoulders, arguing with someone, jabbing his finger in the air. Patrick rounded the corner, curious, and then he saw the guy’s face. And then he moved closer and saw Lucy, staring at the ground, her arms tightly folded.

  Lucy lifted her hand, and he saw a wedding band. He felt a flare of heat. It wasn’t that he had feelings for her—he didn’t—but somehow the fact that she was married and he hadn’t known it made him feel as if he’d been taken.

  For a moment he thought her husband couldn’t possibly be this guy, who looked as if he was at least thirty, but then she balanced on her tiptoes and kissed him on the mouth.

  What else had she lied to him about? Was she playing him, somehow, and if so, for what?

  He walked over. “Hello.” His voice sounded like a bark. The color drained from Lucy’s face.

  “Hi,” her husband said, furrowing his brow. “I’m sorry—have we met? You know my wife?” He looked at Patrick as if he were memorizing him, then looked at Lucy, saw her eyes trained on the floor. “You know this guy, Luce?”

  Something wasn’t right.

  “Luce?” her husband repeated.

  Lucy shook her head and wouldn’t meet Patrick’s eyes.

  Patrick thrust his hand out to her husband. “I run the farm stand,” he said. Lucy�
�s husband slowly shook Patrick’s hand but kept his gaze on Lucy.

  “What farm stand?” Lucy said, her voice wavering. “Is there a farm stand near here?”

  Up close, Patrick could see that Lucy’s husband was much older than she was, maybe older than Patrick, too, which made things even stranger. Lines fanned out from his eyes, and there were a few wires of gray threaded in his hair.

  “Hey, man, I think you’re mistaken,” Lucy’s husband said.

  “I thought I knew you, but I guess I don’t,” Patrick said. Lucy raised her eyes to look at him, but Patrick turned and walked away.

  He knew now that she had lied, but instead of being angry, he felt concerned. He hadn’t liked Lucy’s husband. Well, so what? he told himself. It was none of his business. They were having an argument, a bad time. The world was filled with rotten relationships. He saw it all the time at the farm market. Husbands yelled at their wives for dragging them there when they wanted to be watching the game on TV. Wives complained that their husbands couldn’t pick out a properly ripe tomato. Nobody held hands or put a tender arm around anyone’s back. He wanted to shake them. If you were lucky enough to have love, shouldn’t you protect it while you could?

  Chapter 15

  “What was up with that guy? Do you think he was high?” William said when they were driving home. He studied her. “You didn’t really know him, did you, Lucy?”

  “No way.” Lucy hunkered down in her seat, her arms wrapped around her, feeling sick. William would be furious if she told him she had a job at the farm stand. He’d be even more angry about the lying, and now she was stuck and she couldn’t say a word. She had seen, too, the way Patrick looked at her. She was sure that he would fire her if she returned to the stand.

  Lucy wanted to cry. He had been her only friend. And maybe she had wished that he was more than that, too. And then she had blown it.

  She opened a window, the cool air flooding her face. “You hot, honey?” William said, rolling down his window, too. He reached over and tapped her leg the way he always did. Love taps, he called them, but sometimes they hurt. She stared at his hand, confused and miserable, and drew her leg away. She shut her eyes, pretending to sleep.

  She thought how, at Patrick’s, she liked to snoop around his house. She had seen the photographs of him with that woman. The way they looked at each other, she knew it was some sort of huge, majestic love. Something had happened there. A mystery. Maybe the woman had left him, and he was hoping she would come back. Maybe she had cheated on him and he had left her. Lucy had stood in his closet, breathing in the smell of his leather jacket, resting her cheek against the sleeve. You have no idea how I feel, she thought. And she could never tell him. Especially not after the way he had acted when she had fallen asleep beside him, one of the biggest mistakes of her life.

  WILLIAM PARKED THE CAR, and Lucy scooted ahead of him into the house. As soon as the door closed behind them, she wanted to go curl up in bed, but William took her hand, burying his head against her shoulder, kissing her neck. Not now. Oh no, not now. He kissed her neck, her shoulders. He tugged her dress off her body, and she let him, because she didn’t know what else to do. “Wait, wait,” he said, and then he rushed to the table and lit the candles so that shadows flickered along the walls. He lowered her to the ground, taking off his clothes. He touched her breasts and she shut her eyes, and then she put her hand on him. He was too soft. He’d never get inside her, but he was hovering over her, trying, one time and then two. “Just a little more,” he whispered, but she could tell it wasn’t working. His face shut and then he rolled off her and the two of them lay on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, and Lucy thought of the curve of Patrick’s back, the way he had felt when she slept against him. She had felt so safe. She’d do anything to feel that way again.

  She shut her eyes, but that didn’t stop the tears from streaming down her cheeks. “What’s wrong? Tell me, please tell me,” he said.

  She didn’t know what to say, how to make sense of her confusion. “I hate being so alone all the time.”

  “But you’re not alone. You have me. Don’t you know I’m with you every second even when I’m not?”

  “Don’t say that. What does that even mean, what you just said?”

  “It means we have a connection, like we’re part of each other.”

  She felt as if she were skating on a frozen lake, the ice crackling under her feet.

  “I’m afraid of Charlie Manson,” she blurted out, and William laughed. “What?” he said. “He can’t hurt you. He’s locked up a million miles away. He’s on trial now and he’ll never get out of prison.”

  “But his family’s still out there—some of those girls—”

  “They’ll get locked up, too. You’ll see.”

  “The world is so crazy now,” she said. “We live in the middle of nowhere. I’m alone all day. Anyone could come here and I wouldn’t be able to stop them.” She thought of Charlotte living in Waltham, getting on a subway, surrounded by people and noise and cars. She could go anywhere she wanted, do anything she wanted. “Maybe a city would be safer,” Lucy said. “It doesn’t have to be Boston. We could go to LA. Or Chicago. Or Santa Fe.” You could vanish in a city, she thought.

  “A city? God, no,” he said. “I’ll never live in a city again.”

  “I miss skyscrapers,” she said quietly. “And all-night diners. I miss subways.”

  “No. You don’t mean that. You’re just missing me because I’m gone all day,” he said. “But I like that you miss me. It makes me feel good.” He kissed her hair. “Let’s just lie like this,” he told her, one leg thrown over her hip, pinning her in place. Lucy’s eyes were open, her mind roaring like a train.

  “You know, you could get another teaching job,” she said quietly.

  He looked at her as if she understood nothing.

  “Really. I mean it. Why couldn’t you?”

  “Lucy, no—” He held up one hand. “We can’t.”

  “Why not? What’s holding us back? We could go to a new place. I could get my GED. You’re a great teacher. You could get a better job—”

  “Lucy, I can’t.”

  “But I don’t get it. Why can’t you?”

  “Because I was fired in Waltham. ”

  She sat up and blinked hard at him. “What?”

  “I was fired. I was refused a recommendation.”

  She started. “You were fired? You told me you quit.”

  “I would never have quit. I had benefits and vacation. I was tenure track. I was fired because I wouldn’t follow the curriculum. Because of the handouts. Parents complained. The principal didn’t like me. And now no place reputable will hire me.”

  He was looking straight ahead. Lucy’s bones filled with glass. If she moved, she might shatter. “But you’re doing okay at this school, right?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he said. He was so still she wanted to shake him.

  “What does that mean, ‘not really’?”

  “It means it’s hard. No one wants to learn anything, and you can’t insist. I can’t adjust to their methods. I might as well just sit and smoke a jay with the teenagers because I’m sure as hell not doing any teaching. You know what the senior kids are reading? Picture books. The teacher tells me they can learn so much by keeping things simple. She says, ‘Why should a kid who can’t read be made to feel inferior to those who can?’ ”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.

  He was quiet for a moment. “I didn’t want to worry you,” he said. “I didn’t want you to know that things weren’t working out here as I’d planned.”

  “I miss my family,” she said. “I miss my home. If you hate it here so much and I hate it, why can’t we go back? Why can’t we go home?”

  He shook his head. “Go back to what? To sneaking around? To no job?”

  “To my family—”

  “Your family? I’d be arrested, Lucy. And anyway, do you think if they really cared ab
out you, they wouldn’t have found you by now?”

  She swallowed. “How come you can call your mother and I can’t call Iris or Charlotte?”

  “We’ve had this conversation before. You know why. It’s different.”

  “Maybe my family is looking for me.”

  “If they were, I’m sure they would have found us.” He looked at her with great pity, and she felt a wash of horror. He was right. Charlotte and Iris didn’t care. They really didn’t. She had kept expecting them to show up. She had sent a postcard, and no one came for her. Charlotte was at Brandeis. Iris was traveling.

  He took her hand in his free hand and held it for a moment. “Baby, I know you aren’t happy, but things are going to be better. As soon as you’re eighteen, we can go anywhere we want. We can stop hiding. We can get married. And in the meantime, you have all this time to write. Isn’t that what you want?”

  She didn’t tell him that she hid her blue journal now and that her stories were all about a runaway girl who gets a job at a farm stand and doesn’t tell her boyfriend and is rescued by the guy who runs the farm stand. She didn’t tell William that he could go out anywhere he wanted, but she had to be hidden, like Rapunzel.

  “I’m the only family you’ve got now,” he told her.

  Lucy waited until he was sleeping, then gently squirmed out from under his embrace. She got up and went to the hall closet to count the money she had made. Eighty dollars. But how far would that get her?

  She went into the bathroom, peed, and then stared at herself in the mirror, at the hollows in her cheeks. She took off the fake wedding ring he had bought for her and put it in the toilet and then flushed.

  BY JULY, LUCY hadn’t been back to the farm stand in almost a month. She was too ashamed, or maybe too afraid of what Patrick thought of her now. Instead she rode her bike up and down the roads until she was too tired to think about all the things she had done wrong.

  One night, William brought home a small black-and-white TV and settled it on the end table. Lucy’s mouth flew open. William hated television, but he was grinning, switching it on. A weather girl swam up into view, windmilling her long bare arms at a map, tapping a sun icon, her smile blooming, and Lucy felt the world ignite. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she cried. “Thank you for changing your mind.”