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  Lucy hadn’t understood much of that, except to see that she’d been wrong to think of the probation officer as a friendly, grandmotherly lady come to help them and to help Ethan. During the probation officer’s second visit, Lucy’d had to leave the room, because all she could think about was the empty raisin box, crumpled and dusty, on the floor under the lady’s chair, just behind her thick crossed ankles.

  Now she ate bran flakes dry from her hand for her own breakfast while she scrubbed at a stubborn sticky place on the corner of the table. Good thing that probation officer lady never went in Ethan’s room. The thought almost made Lucy giggle. There were posters all over the walls. Posters of naked ladies in all different poses. Sometimes Lucy and the other kids sneaked in there to look. Lucy would try to bend her arms and legs the way those ladies did, twist her face to arrange it like this one or that one, fluff her hair, push out her chest. Dom was always wanting to see “those naked ladies with the boobies and everything.”

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  She stuck her hand inside the cereal boxes to check for prizes. Somebody had already taken them, of course. She folded down the plastic bags, closed the flaps, and stacked the boxes in the cupboard. She ran hot water into the sink, squeezing in enough of the green dish soap that it swelled up into a mound; Mom always said she used too much. One by one she slid the breakfast bowls and spoons and glasses in under the very edge of the soapy hill, disturbing its shape as little as possible. What was the point of having a dishwasher if you had to wash the stupid dishes first? When she grew up, she’d have a robot to do all the housework for her.

  Adult voices came at her from both sides. Her mother was bringing Jerry Johnston in the front door, offering him a seat in the living room, asking if he wanted coffee. Her father had come in the back door, home in the middle of the day, and was talking to the little kids on his way through the family room.

  The last time Jerry Johnston had been here, he’d taken away some of Ethan’s stuff, and he’d never brought it back. Lucy had watched from the doorway, trying not to look at the naked ladies on the wall, while Mom and Dad and Jerry Johnston searched Ethan’s room. The social worker had said maybe they’d find a clue to where he was, even though Dad had pointed out that Ethan had been on restriction for weeks before he’d run away and hadn’t been home to leave any clues. Jerry had asked permission to take a few things away with him, and they’d let him. Lucy wouldn’t have let him.

  One dirty tube sock, stiff at the toe, white with green stripes. A blank book that had been in Ethan’s stocking a couple of Christmases ago, before Mom and Dad gave up trying to get him to express himself some way other than stealing and doing drugs; still blank, but its spine was broken as if it had been opened and looked at a lot. A little metal thing kind of like a barrette with feathers that Rae had said was a roach clip and then later had to explain how you used it because Lucy couldn’t figure out why Ethan would want to trap cockroaches. A Playboy centerfold of a red-haired lady with blue and purple scarves floating around her and her nipples filled in with red magic marker. A Garfield calendar from last year, with none of the pages torn off.

  Jerry had put all that stuff into his briefcase, which had been empty when he came to their house. Lucy wondered if he had his briefcase now.

  The briefcase had a combination lock; Lucy had seen his fat fingers delicately turn the knobs around, then slide to the sides of the case to make sure it was locked.

  Then Jerry Johnston and Mom and Dad had left Ethan’s room. They’d walked single file right past Lucy and nobody had said anything to her, explained anything, even seemed to notice her. Offended, Lucy had decided they were trying to pretend that they hadn’t been in Ethan’s room without his 42

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  permission, that they hadn’t done anything wrong. But she’d seen them. She was a witness.

  Now Jerry Johnston said yes, he’d have coffee, two sugars and a cream. A person that big probably never refused food or drink. Lucy heard Mom’s footsteps and hurried to the cupboard to look for a clean cup, having to stand on tiptoe to see onto the second shelf and unable to see onto the top shelf at all. The only clean one was Molly’s My Little Pony. That wouldn’t be right for Jerry Johnston. Hastily, she fished a mug out of the dishwater and rinsed it out. There wasn’t any dishtowel by the sink. The mug would be wet, but it would be clean. Unless she’d missed something. She peered into it again, ran her fingers around inside it to be sure. She still wasn’t sure.

  Mom and Dad came into the kitchen at the same time from different directions. Lucy stood at the sink hugging herself. “He’s here,” Mom said, and from the way she looked at Dad Lucy knew that she’d had the same crazy thought: Jerry Johnston was here to tell them that Ethan was alive.

  Mom and Dad didn’t say anything to her.

  Mom got a clean cup down from the back of the top shelf where Lucy couldn’t have seen it. Her hands were shaking; she spilled coffee across the counter. Lucy wiped it up.

  Dad asked, “Has he said anything?”

  Mom shook her head.

  “Does the kitchen look okay?” Lucy demanded. “I already got a clean cup out for him.”

  “It’s fine,” her mother said without even looking. “Thanks, honey.”

  “Can I come in and listen?”

  “I guess so. Rae and Priscilla are already in there.”

  Lucy hadn’t heard her sisters come downstairs. That bothered her, as if they were keeping secrets from her. She stalked down the hall to the living room, leaving Mom and Dad to close the kitchen door if they wanted it closed.

  “Good morning,” Jerry Johnston said to her. He didn’t remember her name, she could tell. She wasn’t about to make it any easier for him. She said hello only because her parents were there, and went to sit on the floor underneath the cuckoo clock, where she could play with the weights and chains.

  Mom and Dad sat down. Neither of them said a word. That scared Lucy.

  She pulled up her knees. The clock struck nine and made her jump. She could feel the vibrations in the chains that rested against her back.

  “I know you’ve heard the bad news about Ethan,” Jerry began.

  Mom was ready for him. “The police were here this morning. They told us Ethan is dead.”

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  Jerry nodded. “I thought you’d want to hear how it happened.” He stopped. Lucy kept her eyes on her mother’s face, which looked like a mask.

  She couldn’t look at Dad’s. When nobody said anything, Jerry went on softly, like a bedtime story.

  Ethan used to read her bedtime stories, when she was real little and he must have been about the age she was now. She’d forgotten all about that, and she didn’t want to remember it now.

  “He showed up at my place about five o’clock this morning. He said he’d split if I called you or anybody at New Beginnings before we’d had a chance to talk. That’s against the rules, of course. But I knew he meant it, and I could see he was desperate for somebody he could trust, so I chose to take that personal risk.”

  He paused. He was smiling a little and his thin eyebrows were raised.

  After a minute he took a long drink of coffee. Over the rim of the cup his pale brown eyes floated like moths from one person to another to another around the room. Lucy cringed when they lighted on her and held her breath until they moved on, to rest for a long time on her sister Rae.

  There was something special between Rae and Jerry Johnston. They saw each other every Wednesday in therapy. Lucy didn’t like Jerry Johnston, and she didn’t much like Rae either these days, but suddenly she wanted to be in therapy, too. Rae would never tell her what they talked about. Lucy hated secrets, unless they were her own.

  Lucy had just finally realized that Jerry was waiting for somebody to tell him he’d done a good job when Dad
said gruffly, “We appreciate all you’ve done.”

  Jerry nodded. He looked away from Rae, and his soft voice started up again. His voice was soothing; it seemed to say everything was all right. It was a lie. “He said he was hungry, and he looked as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

  So I went to make sandwiches. I was only gone fifteen or twenty minutes, but when I came back he was dead.”

  Priscilla started to cry. Rae punched her and the crying got louder. Mom hadn’t moved. Dad barked, “How?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry answered, and took another sip of coffee. “He was on his back on my living-room floor, and I thought he’d fallen asleep. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days, either. So I left him alone for a while. But then when I went to check on him, there was no pulse and he wasn’t breathing.”

  “Drugs,” Dad said, and slammed his fist onto the arm of the chair. Patches, who had been curled up there, meowed once and jumped down.

  Jerry nodded. “Looks like it.”

  “Thank you,” Mom said, in a child’s voice, and Lucy was suddenly furious.

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  lived. He was the last one to see her brother alive. He was the first one to see him dead. And her mother was thanking him.

  Not wanting to look at her parents, Lucy looked instead at her sisters on the couch. Pris was curled up like a baby, sobbing, her face hidden against the pillow Lucy had embroidered last year in school, her braids sticking up.

  Rae’s legs were crossed and her toes were pointed in white high-heeled sandals, pink toenails glittering, the long pink nails of one hand spread over one gleaming knee. Her eyes were on Jerry Johnston.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

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  9

  They had to identify the body. They had to say out loud that it was Ethan, and some stranger had to write it down.

  The place where they kept bodies was called a morgue. Lucy held the word in her mouth like a lump of old bread. When Mom and Dad wouldn’t let any of the kids go with them to the morgue, Rae got really mad. “He was my brother! I have a right! You’re always telling me what to do!”

  Mom just kept saying, “No, no,” as if she couldn’t stop, and Dad tried to hug Rae, but she pushed him away. Lucy complained, too, that they wouldn’t let her go, but secretly she was glad. She spent the night at Stacey’s, and they stayed up till two o’clock in the morning eating popcorn and watching scary movies on the VCR, and Lucy didn’t have any nightmares.

  “What did it look like?” she asked Mom when she got home.

  “Oh, honey, I don’t know.” They were folding laundry, and Mom bent her head over the towels.

  “I mean, could you see anything wrong with him?”

  Mom sort of stared off through the bay window where all the plants were.

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  was awfully thin and pale, as if he’d been sick. The word I kept thinking was ravaged.” Her voice broke.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Used, sort of.”

  Lucy shook her head, bewildered. “What—”

  “Patches!” Mom yelled, and the cat jumped down from the window seat.

  A piece of spider plant stuck to his fur. When he shook himself and high-stepped away, the leaves like spread fingers and the tiny white flower like an eye dropped onto the floor behind him. Somebody would step on it there, Lucy thought a little frantically, or vacuum it up.

  Stooping to rescue the broken plant, Mom was crying. It was dumb to be upset over a plant, Lucy thought, especially a spider plant; there were always so many of them. On top of the refrigerator were three or four cups of water with spider-plant cuttings floating in them, waiting for roots, and there must be ten hanging or sitting in pots around the house. They always caught.

  Mom said it would be a shame just to let them die when they were so easy to save, even though she had all the spider plants she wanted and so did everybody else she knew, so she couldn’t even give them away.

  “It wasn’t him, was it?” Rae was standing by the table, but she didn’t fold anything. Lucy snapped a towel at her. Rae caught the end, yanked it out of her hand, and dropped it back onto the table.

  Still crouched on the floor with the broken spider plant in both hands, still crying, Mom nodded. “Of course it was. It was Ethan.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Stop it, Rae!”

  Lucy fished a pair of tiny Mickey Mouse underwear out of the pile.

  Dominic’s. They fit over her fist like Grandma’s toaster cover. A red striped tube sock dangled off the edge of the table; there was no mate for it anywhere in the jumble of still-warm clothes.

  Rae sighed, too, and Lucy looked up sharply, sure she was being mocked.

  But her sister’s eyes were on their mother, who had stood up and was saying,

  “Rae, honey, I know how hard it is, but we all have to accept it. Ethan is dead.

  His funeral is today.”

  “You’re glad! You hate him! You and Dad both!”

  “You’re wrong,” Mom said dully, as if she’d run out of words. She poked at the plant in the palm of one hand with her other forefinger. “Have you talked about this in your therapy group? Maybe Jerry could help you—”

  “You leave Jerry out of this!” Rae yelled, enraged.

  Mom just stared at her. Lucy held her breath. A car went by on King Street with its radio blaring. Then Mom said, “I miss Ethan. I’ll always miss Ethan.”

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  “Gee, now he can’t give you guys any more trouble, can he?”

  Lucy added another folded washcloth to the teetering pile. Hit her, she thought grimly. If you don’t make her shut up, I will. The washcloth had pretty blue designs on it; flowers, she thought, or birds. It was a new one, and it was folded, so you couldn’t quite tell.

  Mom said to Rae, “Oh, sweetheart, you don’t understand. We loved him.

  We still love him. We’ll always love him.”

  Mom and Rae were standing in the middle of the dining room, hugging each other. Lucy kept folding laundry. She found the missing sock balled up inside the corner of a fitted sheet. Rae was actually a little taller than their mother now, but Mom was stronger, steadier. Lucy supposed Mom used to hug Ethan too, although it was hard to remember a time when he’d let anybody in the family come that close.

  “But he did all that —stuff!” Rae was saying into Mom’s shoulder. “How can you love somebody like that? He did drugs. He dropped out of school. He wouldn’t quit stealing. They finally locked him up in that place, that Nubie, and he still wouldn’t straighten up.”

  “Yes. And there’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Tell me! He was my brother! I have a right to know!”

  “No, you don’t. What you have a right to know is that parents keep loving their kids no matter what the kids do. That’s what parents are for.”

  “It is?” Rae’s baby voice made Lucy sick, but she buried her face in Molly’s cotton nightgown with the pink ribbons and held her breath and listened for Mom’s answer.

  “Yes. It is.”

  “Well, I’m never having kids.”

  “There were a lot of wonderful things about Ethan. There were a lot of good times. Joyous times. I wouldn’t have missed having him.” Mom’s voice broke.

  “Like what?”

  “Remember the time you and Ethan were butterflies for Halloween? You were barely two years old, so there were just the two of you.”

  “I
don’t remember that,” Rae said suspiciously.

  “We have pictures. You’ve seen the pictures.”

  “You and Dad think I’m turning out just like him.”

  “I don’t think anybody ‘turns out.’ You’re only fourteen. You’ll keep growing and changing all your life.”

  “You’re lying! You’re just trying to get me mixed up! You think I’m just like him!”

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  “Well, Rae, in some ways you are. That’s not such a terrible thing. He’s not—he wasn’t a monster. For instance, you look a lot like him.”

  “No! My hair is blond!”

  Lucy said loudly, “Bleached.”

  “You both like to read. You both hate enchiladas. Or he used to, anyway, before he disappeared.”

  “I don’t want to be like him! I hate him! You’re his mother, so you have to still love him, but I don’t and I hate him!”

  “Rae, you’re not just like anybody. You’ll make your own choices and you’ll do things your own way.”

  By now Rae was sobbing, her head down on the table, and Mom was standing behind her, rubbing her back. Mom seemed to have forgotten about the broken piece of spider plant, dropped it or broken it some more. Or maybe she’d put it in her pocket to keep it safe until she could stick it in water. “I love him,” she heard her sister say. “He was the only big brother I ever had. I’ll miss him.”

  “Me, too,” Mom said, very softly. “Oh, me, too.”

  Me, too, Lucy thought deliberately, but she didn’t know yet if it was really true. I’ll miss him, too, she made herself think, but she wasn’t even really sure that he was gone; he didn’t feel gone.

  The laundry basket was empty. Mom and Rae didn’t seem to know she was there. She gathered up her pile of clothes and went up the stairs to her room. Ethan’s funeral was today. She had to get ready.

  She didn’t know what to wear. She couldn’t do anything with her hair.

  She stared into her closet for a while, into her mirror. Then she grabbed her diary and a pencil and shut herself into the bathroom with them. She turned the water in the tub on full force and straight hot; maybe she’d take a bath for Ethan’s funeral and maybe she wouldn’t, but she liked the noise and the steam.