Prodigal Page 2

  Mom shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Tony. You don’t talk about it—”

  “You think you’re the only one who dreams about him?”

  Mom didn’t say anything for a minute. Lucy was listening carefully now, blowing bubbles in her milk that made a ring around the rim of the glass like a necklace or a noose. Finally Mom said quietly, “They’re not dreams.”

  Dad slammed his hand down on the table and Lucy’s milk spilled. “Carole, for God’s sake, after all we’ve been through!”

  Mom had started gathering up the dirty dishes, the crockpot with the scum of chili in the bottom, the salad bowl littered with lettuce and cel-ery leaves. She wasn’t looking at Dad. She wasn’t looking at Lucy either.

  I saw him, too, Lucy knew she ought to say, but she didn’t, and Mom did-9

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  n’t give her away. Mom just said, “They’re not dreams. That’s all,” and left the room.

  Dad sat still with his head on his hand. Lucy mopped up the spilled milk with her napkin, chugged the rest of it, and stood up. She stacked the bowl on her salad plate and the glass in her bowl, remembering only then that Mom didn’t like them to do that because it got food all over the outside of the glass. There were so many rules, so many ways you could do things wrong.

  She started to go around the back of Dad’s chair. He pulled her to him and kissed the top of her head. Her glass tipped over, dribbling little white specks of milk onto the floor. She kissed him back. His cheek was scratchy, and he smelled nice, the way Dad always smelled, the way dads were supposed to smell.

  When Lucy went upstairs, Rae was lying on her bed. They’d put the shelves in between their beds for privacy, so Lucy couldn’t see what her sister was doing over there, could only hear her breathing. Rae didn’t say anything when Lucy came in, so Lucy didn’t say anything either.

  The first thing she did, as always, was to check for her diary. She moved it often, and she hadn’t written in it for a long time because there wasn’t anything to say, so sometimes she forgot where it was and thought somebody had stolen it. But there it was now, under the dirty clothes in her laundry basket. She’d have to remember to take it out before it got washed, but she couldn’t move it now because Rae was in the room. She patted its cover, imagined what the blank page with today’s date would look like, put the dirty clothes back on top of it.

  She sat down in front of the mirror and stared at herself, leaned so close to the glass that her breath made little clouds. Her skin looked funny up close, but at least she didn’t have zits. Rae had zits.

  All of a sudden Rae was in the mirror with her. It surprised Lucy, scared her a little. “Want me to do your hair?”

  “Sure.”

  The brush caught in the tangles, and Rae didn’t hold on to the roots like Mom did to keep it from hurting. But Lucy didn’t jump or say anything.

  Rae brushed and combed Lucy’s hair, pinned it this way and that. Sideways over one ear. Slanted across her forehead like a scarf. Twisted into pom-pons on the sides of her head. She never once asked Lucy which way she liked it, and Lucy didn’t know, anyway.

  Finally Rae settled on what she said was a French twist, and she pinned a white plastic flower in the middle of it that Lucy could just barely see if she turned her head a certain way. “There,” Rae said. “Now turn around this way and I’ll do your face.”

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  Lucy sat very still, although her heart pounded with excitement and the little brushes tickled her nose and cheeks and eyelids. She could see the tiny wet wrinkles in Rae’s lips when the older girl leaned over her. She could smell the perfume and lotion on Rae’s fingers.

  “There,” Rae said again, and stepped back. “You’re done.”

  At first Lucy didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Then she turned to the mirror. She looked the same as she had before, but she also looked very different. She looked like Rae, and Mom, and Dad, and Ethan, who didn’t look like each other at all. She looked the way she would when she grew up.

  “Like it?” Rae asked.

  Lucy nodded. “I guess.”

  “Go show Mom and Dad,” Rae ordered, and went back to her side of the room.

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  Later that night Lucy sat in the living room hugging Patches and watched her mother check the outside lights again. The fat old cat meowed and twisted, trying to scratch, but most of the time she could avoid his claws. Her mother glanced back sharply but didn’t say anything, which pleased Lucy; if it had been one of the younger kids, her mother would already be scolding, “Don’t be mean to the kitty! He’ll scratch you, and he’ll be right!” Lucy eased her grip. Patches shook his head furiously, glared at her, then settled solidly back onto her lap.

  Her mother stooped to pick up a sock from the floor, and the white streak glistened. She should dye it. The rest of her hair was so dark it was almost black. Lucy wished her own hair was that color, or blond like her sister Rae’s and like the little kids’ before it started to turn. She suspected Rae of light-ening her hair, and she suspected Mom of suspecting it, too, even though they’d said she couldn’t until she was sixteen.

  There were two round switches on the wall beside the door, one above the other like buttons on a card. One was for the hall light that hung like an umbrella from the high ceiling. The other one worked the porch light and the lamp at the top of the outside front steps.

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  Nobody in the family could remember which switch worked which light.

  You’d think people would guess right at least half the time, but almost every time they pushed the wrong one first, turning the outside lights off by mistake and then hastily turning them back on again. Her mother did it every night, more than once if anybody was away from home. In the two years since Ethan had been gone, Lucy bet her mother had turned those lights off and on, off and on, half a dozen times a night, looking for him, making sure he’d be able to find his way home.

  Which was stupid, because Ethan was dead. And even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t come here. And even if he did, they wouldn’t let him in.

  “What happened to your brother?” She must have answered the question a million times. Even if she told them it was none of their business, she was still answering it. If you timesed how many questions she’d had to answer or not answer about Ethan by the number of minutes each time took by the other six kids in her family, that was a huge amount of time Ethan had already taken up out of their lives. Which didn’t even count the time Mom and Dad spent talking about him and thinking about him, which sometimes Lucy thought was all the time and sometimes she thought was never.

  “He’s in jail, kind of,” was what she’d said at first.

  “How can you be ‘kind of’ in jail? Either you’re in jail or you’re not.”

  “How old is he? He’s only fifteen, right? They don’t put kids in jail.

  Do they?”

  “It’s a place called Nubie. New Beginnings.”

  “What’s that?”

  She’d asked Mom what it was. “It’s a children’s home.”

  “You mean, like for kids who don’t have parents?”

  “Ethan has parents! He’s got a whole family! We visit him every week and he comes home on pass on Sunday sometimes and we have family therapy and Mom and Dad—”

  “So what’d they do, give him up?”

  Once she’d understood what that even meant, she’d been astonished at the very thought. “No!”

  “My dad says parents are supposed to raise their own kids. He’d never put me in a place like that.”

  Lucy had asked Dad what to say to that. Then she was sorry she had; his face and his voice had stiffened; he’d said it wasn’t her he was mad at.
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  She’d said what he’d told her to say, though it hadn’t satisfied either her or her questioners. “Ethan was out of control. He just kept stealing and doing drugs and nothing Mom or Dad did could stop him, so finally the judge put him at Nubie to get him to stop. He’ll only be there for a year. Then he’ll come home.”

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  But Ethan hadn’t come home. He’d run away from Nubie. No one had known where he was for more than two years. He would be seventeen now.

  It was hard for Lucy to comprehend that she hadn’t known him at all when he was sixteen, and never would. The cops were supposed to be looking for him, but Mom and Dad didn’t think they were looking very hard anymore.

  They must think he was dead. It was easier to think that than not to know where he was or when he might show up again.

  It had been so long that people didn’t ask much anymore. But when they did—when they came to her house, for instance, and saw the pictures that Mom and Dad wouldn’t take down—Lucy just said, “He doesn’t live here anymore,” which was what her parents had told her to say, or, “He died,”

  which she knew they wouldn’t like but was probably the truth.

  Now Mom reached to turn off the dusty hall light. Lucy waited. Her mother hit the wrong switch as usual and turned off the outside lights. She swore under her breath and punched the switch to get them back on.

  Lucy wasn’t allowed to say words like that, but she practiced them a lot in her mind and out loud with some of her friends. Her parents had pretty much stopped yelling at Rae for swearing a year or so ago, and they’d given up on it altogether with Ethan when he hadn’t been much older than Lucy was now, because they’d had so many other things to yell at him about.

  That was one way to do it: be so bad all the time that grown-ups couldn’t keep up. The other way was to be so good all the time that you never broke any rules, never got into any trouble. Either way was hard.

  If any of the neighbors were watching, Lucy thought—as she thought every time somebody pushed the wrong light switch—the lights flashing at the big old house on the hill would look like a distress signal. Lucy put a considerable amount of time and energy into thinking up ways you could let somebody know you needed help when the phone lines had been cut and the murderer was standing in your living room with a gun in one hand trained on you and his arm around one of your little brothers or sisters. Or when your crazy teenage brother came back from the dead and your parents didn’t know what to do, your father didn’t even believe he was there, and your mother welcomed him home.

  Sneakily flicking the outside lights was one of the ways she’d come up with and kept on a list in her head. But it had been ruined. By now, the neighbors had seen the lights go off and on so many times that they would ignore the signal. So Lucy would have to find some other way, a lot of other ways, to save herself and her family from the man with the gun, from the lady who put razor blades in the Halloween candy, from Ethan sneaking around the house at night or in broad daylight, from nuclear war.

  Her mother opened the door to look out, then went out onto the porch.

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  at night. Someday she was going to live in the country, maybe in the mountains. Her mother had grown up on a farm and had always dreamed of living in a place where there were sidewalks, where a date could walk her home. It was weird to think of Mom as a girl, with dates. Sometimes Lucy liked that a lot.

  Patches had pricked up his ears when the door opened but, not hearing the rattle of his food dish, settled back down into her lap. She rubbed a knuckle under his chin. He stretched out one spotted paw to claw at the arm of the couch, which was already worn from bright blue to gray blue by so many hands and feet, knees and bottoms.

  Lucy whispered, “Stop that, you bad cat!” and pulled his paw back, liking the way his toes stretched and separated under her fingers. She was fascinated with the inner workings of things: bones and veins, pipes under streets, electric wires in the walls of the house, thoughts and dreams. You called that stuff infrastructure; Mom had said that word over and over one night while she was studying for a test, and Lucy had asked what it meant and how to spell it. Lucy liked big words that looked like what they meant; written out on the page, “infrastructure” looked like the inside of something, the frame you could hang something on. Patches let her play with his toes for a few minutes, two white and two black, then languidly put out his claws.

  Her mother came back in carrying Molly’s yellow dump truck, an empty white plastic grocery sack, and a pink tennis shoe that was either Lucy’s or Priscilla’s. Lucy frowned; she got blamed for everything.

  Sometimes Lucy was mad at Mom and Dad because they still loved Ethan, after all this time and all the awful things he’d done. Sometimes she was mad at them because they didn’t talk about him all the time; they went on with their lives. Mom went back to school. Dad changed jobs. They took care of their other kids. They kissed in the kitchen. It seemed they’d forgotten all about Ethan. Someday they might forget about her.

  Lucy sighed. “They’re all right. Nothing happened to them.”

  “Of course they’re all right.”

  The sharpness of her tone brought tears to Lucy’s eyes, and she buried her face in the cat’s fur. He gave a very low growl, so quiet she knew it was a secret message meant for only her to hear. But she didn’t know what it was supposed to mean.

  “But they’ve been gone a long time,” her mother said. “It doesn’t take an hour to go to the corner store for the paper.” She looked at her watch. “Over an hour.”

  “They’re with Dad. They’re safe,” Lucy said, only half believing it.

  “He could have called.”

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  “Molly’s probably giving him a hard time,” Lucy said wisely. “You know three-year-olds.”

  “More likely it’s Rae,” her mother said, laughing a little. “You know fourteen-year-olds.” And Lucy felt the fear and excitement, like a cyclone threatening to blow her off her feet and set her down somewhere else, that she always felt when she thought about being a teenager.

  It wouldn’t be long now. She was almost twelve. She had to wear a bra with most of her shirts, and Rae had finally convinced her that if you were going to shave your legs, you had to put up with all those tiny cuts.

  Her mother reached to pet the cat. Lucy admired the shape of her hand where it caught the lamplight, although the nails were too short and there were nests of wrinkles across the knuckles. Her mother’s wedding ring glinted silver. Dad wore one just like it, and when she was little, Lucy used to set their hands side by side and slide her two index fingers around and around their rings. She liked the rings, because they had pretty designs in them, and because they made circles that went around and around and didn’t stop, and because they meant that her parents were going to stay married forever.

  When her mother’s fingers expertly massaged his ears, Patches’s purring got louder and his whiskers flared in pleasure. All the animals liked Mom best. If she was anywhere in sight, Dominic couldn’t get the dogs to sit still while he put their leashes on. Patches slept on Mom and Dad’s bed if he could, arranging himself like another of the black-and-white star patterns on their green quilt. Even Priscilla’s canary, which Lucy didn’t like to be around since she’d found out in science that birds have hollow bones, would let Mom catch him when he got out of the cage. Lucy could hardly stand to look at that fragile feathered creature wrapped in Mom’s two hands, with just his head sticking out the top and just his feet like broken yellowish twigs out the bottom.

  Mom said pointedly that the animals liked her best because she was the one who fed them, even though every time the Brill family acquired another pet one kid or another
had promised to take responsibility. Lucy knew it was more than that. The animals liked Mom—kept an eye on her, followed her around—because they thought she would keep them safe.

  Lucy used to believe that, too, and that Dad would keep everything bad away from her and her brothers and sisters until they were old enough to protect themselves. Sometimes, even now, she let herself believe that.

  “I wish they’d get back soon,” Mom said. “I’d like to get to bed. Rae has to catch the summer-school bus at seven in the morning. I don’t know why they start these things so early.” Chattering about normal, everyday things was her mother’s way of reassuring her, Lucy knew—of reassuring both of them. It didn’t work; instead, it reminded her that if something had happened to Dad 16

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  and Rae and Molly, not much would be normal tomorrow or for a long long time. Rae wouldn’t go to summer school. Priscilla wouldn’t have her birthday party. They wouldn’t even have breakfast, probably. Just cereal.

  “You can go to bed,” she offered. “I’ll wait up for them.”

  Mom smiled and patted her knee. The instant her hand left him, Patches stopped purring. The instant it came back, he started up again. Lucy thought it must be wonderful to have power like Mom’s, to stop and start a cat’s purring. Maybe when she grew up, she’d be powerful, too. “That’s all right, honey. You need your sleep. Priscilla’s party is tomorrow, and amusement parks are tiring enough on a good night’s sleep.”

  “I’m not even tired,” Lucy protested feebly. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway until I heard them come home. It’s all I can do to sleep with Ethan out there somewhere, not safe in his own bed.”

  “Ethan’s dead,” Lucy said automatically.

  “No, he’s not.”

  Though her mother didn’t raise her voice, Lucy felt the tension, the slight pulling away, and was sorry she’d said anything. Ethan’s name, just his name, came between her and her mother. He’d always tried to take things away from people. Hatred for her brother made Lucy say, “The cops think he’s dead. That social worker, that Jerry Johnston, thinks he’s dead. Everybody but you thinks he’s dead.”