They loaded the suitcases into their borrowed car through a downpour of rain, Mum blessing the skies for not unleashing until today. As they approached London, Mum turned to smile at Lucy in the back seat. “How about we repot the French hybrid lilac when we get h—”
And all went screeching and black after that. Bits of sirens and raindrops breaking through. Glimpses of Father at Lucy’s side as she lay in a strange white room. Bright lights and the smell of rubber gloves and medicine.
And finally, the waking up to what was most certainly no fairy tale. A home half-empty. The French hybrid shriveled crisp and brown in its too-small pot.
Father stroked her hand gently as they sat side by side in silence each night as she slowly came to understand . . . Mum was gone.
No longer a child at fourteen, but feeling more lost and childlike than ever, she began to understand that it wasn’t just Mum she had lost. She pruned and deadheaded the lilac, watering it, repotting it, moving it from sunny spot to sunny spot as the light shifted. But it would not come back.
And neither would Dad.
He was there . . . but he was gone. He smiled at her, but the smile was so unnatural, so untrue, that it broke her heart over and over again. Gone were the riddles and stories.
Gone was Dash, except for the books he left on her doorstep. He did not know how to enter their broken lives any more than they knew how to bring him back in. Not with Mum gone.
Light itself. That was what Dad called Lucy. So one day, when he did not even get out of bed, she put on her best dress, brushed her stick-straight black hair, and pulled down his cup from the kitchen shelf. It had a coating of dust inside, so she rinsed it, dried it, taking care around the chip, and brewed him his favorite chamomile, just as Mum used to.
When she cracked open the door of her parents’ room—his room, she reminded herself—she found him sitting in the dark, holding Mother’s watch. His chin trembled and he moved the back of his fist over his eyes, stifling a moan that sounded, to Lucy, like all the pain she felt caught up inside of herself. He took the face off Mum’s watch, stopped the ticking hands, and clicked the tiny, fragile face back in place with a click so soft and final it made Lucy’s hands shake.
The cup echoed her trembling upon its saucer, and Father saw her for the first time. His eyes grew wide and pooled deeper with tears.
“Oh, my girl,” he said in a ragged, shuddering breath. And that was all. She sat on the edge of his bed and leaned against him, feeling the tremble of his chin upon her head, the silent tears baptizing her hair as his large palm ran itself over, and over, and over her head, pressing her close to his broken heart.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
She whispered the same. But it had not been enough . . . for then, he was gone.
“A week and no more,” he explained, “and I’ll come back ready to be the father you deserve, Lucy.”
She had not understood. Even after the kindly Mrs. Richards, who lived on the third floor in Candlewick, came down to stay with her in Father’s absence, explained. “He just needs time, dearie.” She was kind but a stranger, when all Lucy wanted was her family.
And so she took herself to Dash’s door once again. Not to summon the lost boy home . . . but clutching hopes that the lost boy could help her find her way.
four
Dash answered her knock, beheld her with solemn face, stepped into the hallway, and closed the door behind him, as if he refused to let his own flat’s emptiness seep into her newly acquired emptiness. There was something new in him. Where before they had shared camaraderie, now his presence held protectiveness, too.
“Dash, I . . .” Lucy’s voice burned. She had not spoken of her grief yet and did not know how to put this great billowing pain into words. “I don’t know what to do.” It was all she could manage, but he took up where her words failed.
“It’s okay, Matchstick Girl,” he said. “Come on.”
Just two words: Come on. No treatise on healing or hope, no magic cure . . . but somehow they infused her with hope all the same. As if this boy, who knew how to be alone and still live, was promising to show her how to be okay.
They stopped to tell Mrs. Richards where they were going, and Dash grabbed Lucy’s atlas. After proper instructions for when to be back, Mrs. Richards waved and watched them from the gates of Candlewick all the way until they disappeared down the street.
Lucy looked at the calendar at the ticket window and thought how strange it was to see a date there when time was all a blur, when she did not even know what day of the week it was. August 28, 2004. The numbers baffled her.
What baffled her more was how Dash, at sixteen, felt suddenly so grown up. Though she had traveled the Tube many times over the years, she saw a different side of him as he navigated their journey as one accustomed to fending for himself. His slim height looked solitary but assured here in the crowd, rather than gangly as it did at home. Perhaps he had been right—her life had been a fairy tale, compared with his.
And now he could show her how to live the other sort of life.
She followed him down into the station’s maze of stairs and passageways, past a busker fiddling a folk tune that sounded like it belonged more at a country ball than in a sweaty dark tunnel.
As she stood at a fork in the station, wondering which way to take, Dash leaned down and whispered, “Greenwich.” A thrill went through her. For while Greenwich was not far, it had felt in all their armchair conspiring like a distant promised land.
The Tube swayed and clicked along, beginning to feel like an embrace around her broken self. Dash opened the atlas of oceans in Lucy’s lap.
“Are you shore you want to bring this big book?”
Lucy gave a confused look. “What? You’re the one who said to—”
His deadpan face flashed mischief. “Shore,” he said. “Get it? Oceans . . . shore . . .”
“Oar not,” she said dryly.
“Whoa, way to barge into my joke, Matchstick Girl. Sea what I did there?”
It was the silliest thing. Puns cheesier than the Harrod’s cheese counter. But for the first time in weeks—she felt her spirit lighten. Even a smile began.
And then, right in the middle of a pun spree sprouting the beginnings of hope . . . the Tube stopped. The lights cut out, speed slowed . . . and then nothing. Just darkness, too many stories beneath the sunlight and fresh air above.
Slowly emergency lights clicked on, giving a yellow glow to the worried murmurs coursing through the train. Someone mentioned the Twin Towers attack from almost three years before. Was this . . . that? An attack?
Lucy slammed her atlas shut, every muscle going tight in her body.
“Hey,” Dash said, leaning close. “Fear knot.”
Lucy swallowed.
“Get it? Knot?” He tapped her atlas.
Lucy tried to keep from shaking, but her hands trembled. The last time everything went dark . . .
She pressed her eyes closed, willing away the visions of sirens and the smell of rain. It was more than a memory. It was as if the Tube had slammed her right back into that car crash. She felt too small, not enough for this. Her breaths came quick and shallow.
Dash laid his hands on hers. “It’s gonna be okay, Matchstick Girl. Probably just a power outage. And what does a power outage have on a girl who is . . . How does your dad say it?”