Prodigal Read online

  “I’m his mother. It’s my job to believe he’s alive. And anyway, nobody can say for sure that he’s dead. Some kids are missing for a long time and they’re still alive.”

  “Dad thinks he’s dead too.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I heard him say so. You guys were having a fight.”

  Her mother reached out to ruffle her hair. Patches stopped purring. Lucy felt like crying, but didn’t. “It’s also my job to worry about your father and your sisters until they get home. Even if it is silly.” She got up and went back to the door, pressing her nose against the glass and cupping her hands around her eyes. Lucy didn’t like it when her mother deliberately blocked out the reflections of what was safe and real inside the house—including the two of them—to see what might be outside.

  Her mother’s worry was like the earwig in the old Twilight Zone that Lucy had seen a couple of times: eating its way through the brain. Leaving eggs.

  The phone rang. Lucy’s heart beat so hard that her ears hurt, and she made no move to answer it. Her mother got to it on the first ring. “Hello?

  “Tony, where are you? Is something wrong?

  “Are the girls all right?

  “I know, I know. It’s the age.”

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  A brief laugh, that tired, brave sound that always made Lucy feel guilty and indignant at the same time. Nobody’d forced them to have seven kids. There was nothing to say they wouldn’t have more. Cory was the youngest, and he was already two, and they liked babies. Her mother passed a hand over her eyes, ran fingers through that ugly white streak. Furiously Lucy wondered if she could sneak into her parents’ room at night and dye it herself.

  “Okay, Tony. Thanks for calling. I know it’s silly, but it helps.

  “I love you, too.”

  When Ethan had disappeared, there had been a phone call in the middle of the night, just like in the movies. Lucy had heard the ringing, had heard Cory start to wail at the monster sound of it, had dragged the pillow over her head. Finally Rae had got up, swearing, and stomped down the hall to the little boys’ room. When Cory’s howling had subsided and it had seemed safe to come out, Lucy had rolled over onto her back to stare at the gray ceiling and listen to the things that were happening in her house.

  She could hear her father’s voice, so low she was almost feeling it, like music through the walls. He wasn’t saying much. Then she heard him put down the phone and say to her mother, “That was Jerry Johnston. Ethan’s missing.”

  At first Lucy hadn’t been able to place Jerry Johnston. Then she remembered: the social worker from the place where the judge had sent Ethan the last time he stole a car. New Beginnings Children’s Home; the kids who lived there called it Nubie. Jerry was huge, actually not as tall as Dad but so big around that he seemed like a fairy-tale tree. With homes inside the trunk and branches for tiny scared creatures with made-up names. He was very pale, and his voice didn’t change no matter what he was saying, and he’d keep asking and asking a question until he got an answer, whether or not it was the truth. Ethan liked him, as much as he liked anybody.

  “He had Ethan over at his apartment this evening,” her father was telling her mother, “to get him away from the institution for a while. He left him in the living room watching TV while he went to put the pizza in the oven, and Ethan just walked out the door.”

  Lucy couldn’t hear what her mother said. Dominic hollered something about being hungry, wanting pizza. Rae said, “Shut up,” gently, and he did.

  “He thought he’d come back. He thought he could find him. That’s why he didn’t report it until now. He says not to worry, that when kids go AWOL

  they’re almost always picked up in a matter of hours for jaywalking or disturbing the peace or some other minor offense. They’ll find him. If he shows up here, we’re supposed to call.”

  But in two years they hadn’t found Ethan or any sign of him. Lucy wanted to believe he was dead; she also wanted to believe he’d come home someday and everything would be all right again.

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  Sometimes he’d be standing in the hall when she got up to go to the bathroom at night; his eyes were like punched-out circles of paper, white and flat.

  Sometimes he’d be hiding in the lilac bush outside her parents’ bedroom window, and his flesh looked like the undersides of leaves when it was going to rain. She saw him often.

  And now she knew that Mom saw him, too. She didn’t want to know that.

  She was afraid of secrets.

  “I’m going to check on the other kids,” her mother said now, and started up the stairs with an armload of stray belongings.

  Suddenly terrified of being left alone, Lucy scrambled to her feet, dump-ing Patches onto the floor. “I’ll come with you.”

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  5

  It was a nightly ritual. Like cakes on birthdays and the smell of coffee in the morning, her mother’s rounds had always made Lucy feel safe in the net of her family and her home. It hadn’t kept Ethan safe, but her mother still did it, and Lucy still waited for her mother’s footsteps in the hall before she let herself fall asleep. Now she watched closely to see how it was done.

  Cory was asleep in the big-boy bed. The much-used crib—tooth-marked, toy-dented, the same crib Ethan and then each of the other babies had slept in—stood nearby in case anybody needed it again. Cory slept like a baby, with his knees bent under him and his bottom in the air and his thumb in his mouth. Asleep, he was awfully cute.

  Across the little room, Dominic’s bed was so crowded with stuffed animals that she could hardly see him in it. A big pink dog, almost as big as he was, had a Star Wars quilt tucked under what would be its chin if it had one.

  Sometimes it was hard for Lucy to believe that he was five already; she clearly remembered when he’d been born.

  Both Dom and Cory were light sleepers; you didn’t dare touch either one of them. Mom stood so still in their doorway that Lucy wanted to sneak up 20

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  behind her and poke her in the ribs. It doesn’t work, she wanted to yell at her.

  Right now Cory had a cat scratch that just missed his eye, and Dom had skinned both knees yesterday when he fell on the basement steps trying to carry the pink dog down to the playroom. It doesn’t keep us safe. Even when we’re little, you can’t keep us safe, and the older we get the more dangers there are.

  As though she’d thought of that too, Mom sighed sadly and moved on.

  The door to the younger girls’ room was shut tight; Lucy grinned to herself.

  Priscilla had had her way now, but when Molly got home, she’d want it open.

  Mom knocked, waited, then put her head in. Lucy could just see past her.

  Priscilla was asleep on Molly’s bottom bunk, flat on her back, snoring. Lucy giggled, put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t wait to tease Pris about that in the morning. Pris said she never snored: “Girls in the fourth grade don’t do stuff like that! Farting and burping and snoring! Yuck!”

  Her mother lifted Priscilla under the shoulders and knees. The snoring changed key. Priscilla’s red-brown hair fell across her mother’s arm. She wouldn’t get it cut, and so every morning she screamed when Mom brushed the tangles out, and Dad was always reaching over to push it out of her face.

  Something was wrong with the room. Lucy was afraid to see what it was.

  But fear for her little sister made her barge in.

  There was the hint of a face at the window, she thought, lit by the streetlight. She almost cried out. She pointed and knocked a doll off the shelf.

  Priscilla stirred in their mother’s arms, kicked a little. Mom made a shushing gesture with her mouth and eyes.

  Then the f
ace wasn’t there, and Lucy saw that the only thing different about the room was its colors. The walls were silvery instead of their usual white. The curtains, which by day were a crisp apple green, now looked gray.

  It confused her a little, made her wonder about tricks of the light, made her wonder which colors were real and which were just in her mind, then confused her even more when she wondered whether colors ever existed anywhere but in your mind.

  For as long as she could, Mom stood rocking the little girl in her arms. Put her down, Lucy thought furiously. She’s too heavy for you. You’ll drop her.

  Suddenly she was remembering: Ethan bigger than their mother, sitting on the floor at their mother’s feet with his arms folded on her lap and his head on his arms, asking to be read to. It was the last weekend he’d had a home pass from Nubie. Mom had read him poetry from Grandpa’s frayed old book.

  Lucy had seen him smiling, her mother with tears in her eyes. It had bothered Lucy at the time and it bothered her now; he’d been way too old for a bedtime story.

  Finally, sadly, Mom lifted Pris up onto her own bunk, tugged off the dirty lavender tennis shoes, pulled the rumpled Strawberry Shortcake sheet 21

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  up over her, stretched on tiptoe to kiss her cheek. Lucy’s jealousy was like hot tar inside her, like when they’ve just done the street and your shoes stick in it and if it gets on your skin it burns and you can’t get away from the awful smell.

  “Why’d you guys have so many kids?” she whispered. Mom frowned and put her finger to her lips, but Lucy repeated more loudly, “Why’d you have seven kids?”

  “We like being parents,” Mom whispered, but she was looking at Priscilla and Lucy wanted her to look at her.

  “You should have stopped after three,” she said, almost out loud.

  “We like children,” Mom whispered. “We like babies.”

  The hot-tar feeling got hotter and stickier, and Lucy said, “How come Ethan and Rae and me weren’t enough for you?”

  “Lucy. Are you saying you wish we didn’t have the others? Are you saying you wish Priscilla and Dom and Molly and Cory had never been born?”

  Not exactly, Lucy thought fiercely. But sort of. I wish Ethan and Rae had never been born, too. I wish it was just me.

  Priscilla stirred, snored, brushed at her cheek as though shooing away a fly, settled into her pillow, snored again. In the corner, under the cage cover, the canary chirped sleepily; Mom cooed at him, almost soundlessly, and he quieted.

  Downstairs the front door opened. Lucy heard Dad’s voice and Molly’s, and a third set of footsteps—jerky, like Cory’s when he pounded his heels on the floor in a tantrum—that were her sister Rae’s. Relief made Lucy sick to her stomach. She saw it mirrored on her mother’s face and said quickly so that she wouldn’t have to hear her mother say it, “They’re home!”

  Mom turned Lucy by the shoulders and pushed her out of the little girls’

  room. She was too rough; Lucy would have gone by herself. It wasn’t worth saying anything about now; Lucy just added the small hot resentment to the pile of little bad things kept in the back of her mind about her mother, her father, her family, her life. Every day, the pile got bigger. Every day, she looked at every hard stone in it, knowing that someday she’d find a use for them all.

  “You go straight to your room!” she heard her father say. His voice was raised, just a little but dangerously, the closest he ever came to yelling at any of them except Ethan. When Ethan had been at home, she’d sometimes been afraid of both of them. Now she was only afraid of Ethan.

  “You already said that,” Rae snapped back.

  “Hey!”

  Lucy heard scuffling and rushed to the landing to see.

  Dad half turned Rae before she could shake him off, and she was shrieking, “Get your hands off me!” while he said in a voice like low thunder, “Don’t you get smart with me, young lady!”

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  Paying no attention, Molly ran to her mother at the foot of the stairs.

  “Mommy, look at my telecoat! It makes stars!”

  Lucy saw with disgust that it was just the tube from a roll of paper towels. It was soaked; when Mom took it, it drooped in her hand. “It doesn’t make stars, honey. The stars are already in the sky. A telescope helps you see them.”

  “Daddy said it makes stars,” Molly said stubbornly, and grabbed her tube back.

  Rae had slammed the front door so hard that the umbrella lamp was still swaying. She stormed up the stairs, bumping into Lucy on purpose and muttering, “Son of a bitch” just barely under her breath. Dad had sat down hard in the blue chair in the living room and Mom sat beside him; they didn’t seem to know Lucy was there.

  “Mommy, I’m hungry!” Molly was wailing.

  “You may have a banana, and then it’s bedtime.”

  “I don’t want a nana! I want ice cream!”

  “I just bought her an ice cream cone,” Dad said in a tired voice.

  “I want ice cream!”

  “Molly, it’s a banana or nothing.”

  “Molly ran down the hall to the kitchen. She’d stopped whining, but Lucy could tell by the way she moved that she was mad, and she could imagine her pouty little face. Suddenly infuriated by her own terror of what would happen if they weren’t all very good, she thought: You better make her behave while you still can.

  Dad said, “Shoplifting.”

  “Oh, Tony, no.”

  “Two movie magazines under her shirt. The manager came out after us. I never even suspected.”

  Her mother’s voice was a flat rock that Lucy could slip on. “What happened?”

  “The manager said pressing charges was more trouble than it was worth.

  I told him he ought to. We don’t do her any favors by protecting her from the consequences of the things she does,” he said, sounding like a social worker, like that Jerry Johnston.

  It bothered Lucy to be thinking about Jerry Johnston again. She was sure he was a very nice person; she was sure he had a mother and father and brothers and sisters and maybe a girlfriend and maybe a cat. But he’d only been part of their lives because of her screwed-up brother. She hated remembering those endless family meetings, everybody in the family in tears but Ethan.

  Jerry had sat calm and sweet as a marshmallow Easter chicken, massive legs crossed, taking notes.

  “This is how Ethan started, you know,” her mother was saying.

  “Shoplifting from that same store.”

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  “Candy bars,” Dad agreed. “But let’s not jump to conclusions. A lot of kids shoplift and never go on to bigger things.”

  “Come on, Tony, you know that isn’t all. The cheating at school. The lying. I’m not sure she even knows what’s true a lot of the time.”

  “There was a five-dollar bill missing from my wallet when I went to pay for gas this morning,” Dad said, as if he didn’t want to. “I’ve been trying to tell myself I lost it or miscounted, but it’s the second time in two weeks.”

  “I suppose we better get her into therapy,” Mom said. “Not that it did Ethan much good.”

  Dad rubbed his eyes. “Our job is to give her every chance we can think of, every resource. It’s up to her what use she makes of anything. Just like it was up to Ethan.”

  “It still is,” Mom said, and then hastily went on before Dad could say anything, although he’d looked up at her sharply. “I’ll call Jerry Johnston in the morning. He already knows our family. Maybe that’s an advantage.”

  “Who knows.”

  “Six more to raise,” Mom sighed, and the stone in Lucy’s chest twisted.

  She was one of those six. She couldn’t help it. “I don’t know if I’m going to make it till they’re all grown.”

  “You’ll make it. So will
I. What choice do we have? Shit.”

  Lucy always wanted to laugh when one of her parents said a dirty word.

  She put her hand over her mouth, then hurriedly left the landing and went down the hall to her room. Below her in the living room, she knew her parents were hugging and kissing. That embarrassed her and made her feel good at the same time.

  She almost smashed her nose against the door of the room she shared with Rae when it didn’t open to her shove. She took a step back and pushed on it again. “Rae. Let me in.” No answer. “Rae, come on. It’s my room, too.”

  She thought she heard the sounds of someone in there, but the door stayed shut. Lucy pounded hard on the door. “You pig! I didn’t do anything to you!”

  The door couldn’t be locked; they weren’t allowed to have locks on their doors, in case there was a fire. Rae had just pushed something in front of it.

  Lucy took a few more steps backward and then charged, hitting the door with her shoulder. It hurt, and it made a much louder bang than she’d hoped, but the door jerked open and she stumbled over the toy chest Rae had used as a barricade. It was Lucy’s toy chest; Rae had no business touching it.

  The room was dark, and unfamiliar because the furniture had been rearranged. Lucy had her hand on the light switch when she turned to look at the bed.

  Her sister was lying flat on her back. The streetlight turned her skin blue and silver; her profile shimmered, as if somebody had drawn it with 24

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  Dominic’s Glo-in-the-Dark Etch-a-Sketch. Her breasts stuck up; Lucy couldn’t help being shocked and envious at how big they were. Her eyes shone dully, like pennies.

  “Are you all right?” Lucy stood in the doorway and left the lights off.

  Her knees were braced against the toy chest, out of which spilled toys she hadn’t played with in years; she saw the glittery eyes of her blue panda bear, the green ribbons on the braids of her dancing doll, whose long stuffed legs seemed to be curled around her own neck. “Rae? Should I call Mom and Dad?”

  “No!”