chapter three NIGHT RIDE
Dinner the next night was Crock-Pot roast beef with carrots, potatoes, and a heaping helping of oppressive parental concern. The Hendersons even had the dining room lamps dimmed like Lucy had become some kind of albino newt which would shrivel and die in direct light. The entire day had been polite knocks on her bedroom door and quiet, calm voices and offers of favorite desserts, and the look of faces drawn tight with worry. It felt like Bill and Carol held their breath when she entered the room.
To be fair, she’d barely spoken to them since heading out with Bucket the night before, and she’d spent the morning in bed, staring at the wall. She wished she could keep faking it, partly for Bill and Carol’s sake, and partly so they’d leave her be—sometimes, she’d learned, you need to shut the fuck down.
What did Dr. Nielsen call it? Avoidance?
That sounded fine by Lucy, and she was comfortable letting reality drift away for a while like she’d done when the Hendersons first brought her to the States. But she knew she didn’t have long before they started breaking down—a few months into her adoption, they’d nearly divorced. She felt like they craved normalcy for her more than anything, a return to the routines that kept their family moving forward through time in a way they could all live with.
Well, fuck them. This is my life, and they haven’t had to see what I saw. They’d be popping fucking Xanax and quitting their jobs by now.
Lucy observed that feeling, somewhere at the back of her mind.
And what did Nielsen call that? Reactivity, right?
When she finally, begrudgingly crawled out of bed to pee, she had walked by Bill’s office, where he was watching the local news. He was normally pinned to cable news this time of day.
He saw her walking by and smiled. “Morning, Lulu.”
“Morning. No CNN?”
“Nope. Cable’s on the fritz now. Between this and the phones being down, I’m about ready to chew somebody’s ear off. I always feel bad for the call center folks, but somebody needs to get us back online. Talked to the Danielsons yesterday and they said they’re having the same problem, so…” Bill gave a What can you do? shrug.
“I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.”
“Hope so. Local news still looks like they’re recording it in a coat closet. You’d think for a town with this much money, they’d be able to bring our station out of the ’70s. Instead we get this.” Bill held out a dismissive middle finger at the TV, and Lucy started to laugh until she saw the face on the screen.
Jason.
“… with police reporting no new developments in the case of missing local boy Jason Ward. The Ward family and Turner Falls PD encourage anyone with information of value to contact the number below.”
Bill looked over at Lucy, a question on his face, but he said nothing, since she was already turning away and bolting to the bathroom.
She’d flipped on the vent fan for noise cover, grabbed a thick towel from the rack by the tub, and sat down to pee. She folded the towel over twice and jammed her face into it and let out a scream as quietly as she could. It came out like a moan, or a growl, some animal sound she couldn’t quite recognize, and that scared her worse. She tried to ignore the feeling that rolled up from her heart into her mind and made her want to tear the towel in her hands to shreds and smash the mirror and kick a hole in the door and keep rending the reality around her until all of it was subatomic and floating in a cloud around her anger. She imagined herself tilting her head back and opening her mouth to scream again, only this time her mouth kept opening and her jaw detached like a snake’s and she kept splitting until she was cleaved in two and all that came out of her was white flame. She shook and waited for the bad energy to leave her mind, and wondered what happened to all the rage in her body when she trapped it inside like that. She smashed her face deeper into the towel and bit it and held her breath until she saw stars darting. The waves of anger fell to low tide, as they always did. She dried her eyes, then rinsed and got back to her bed and the comfort of doing nothing and thinking as little as possible.
She heard Bill and Carol later that day, their voices hushed but urgent out in the kitchen, Bill’s voice getting much louder suddenly. “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do, Carol? Why don’t you tell me, huh?”
They were breaking already.
So: dinner. Lucy walked out to the kitchen and watched their love for her soften both of their faces.
She said, “Pot roast, Carol? That smells yummy. Can we eat at the table tonight?”
“Of course, honey. I’ll set it now.”
A loud, wailing sound came from the street. Blue and red light flashed on the Hendersons’ ceiling for a moment before zooming past. Lucy thought that was the first time she’d ever heard sirens in her neighborhood.
“Finally cracking down on speeders, I hope. I swear those speed bumps did nothing.”
A second burst of light and sound as another police car came blasting down their residential street.
It wasn’t normal, but Lucy was pretending to be all right, and she knew Bill and Carol weren’t about to let some distraction ruin that.
Nobody said much of anything real while they ate, for fear of breaking the spell. Bill mentioned the weather, and how the wind dried his sinuses this time of year. Carol was excited that the western scrub jays were coming back to her garden this year. All three took turns complimenting the meal. Lucy tried to keep a light on in her eyes, and hoped she was smiling hard enough to be believed. Between every third or fourth bite, she swallowed back a burgeoning scream.
Don’t break.
Look at them. They love you. They need you to be okay.
Lucy wanted to say the right things to them, the true things that would let them breathe, and she imagined herself saying, I love you and I will always love you for saving me, even if I don’t feel safe right now. But two boys and a teacher have died in the last two weeks and I saw something I can’t explain and it’s a nightmare I can’t escape, and I’m terribly scared and I need you now. And then she knew she would cry, in that way that left her shaking and far too open, and they would come to her and hold her and be grateful for the chance to love her back.
She felt the world swirling around her, how strange everything had become, and she realized that maybe telling them the truth was the only way to get back to any kind of safe place, and she braced herself in her chair and felt brave for a moment before another streak of red/blue light ran flashing across their dining room ceiling and the sound of sirens shot her through with panic and stole her courage to speak.
Still, she finished her meal, briefly joking with Bill about the cable outage and paying further compliment to Carol’s cooking skills and carefully avoiding saying anything real.
Once the performance was complete, Lucy said, “Thank you,” and excused herself from the table and walked as calmly as she could to the front door, hoping she might find more breathable air out on the front lawn.
It was a moonless night, and the stars swam in thick drifts across the sky. Lucy looked straight up and breathed deep and wished that something would take hold of her and pull her straight out into space.
She lived inside that dream for a moment until bright, unnatural light and a rumbling engine took over her senses. A horn blared twice, and her eyes adjusted to see an old, heavily dented red truck with duct tape covering a missing cab window. A mismatched gray canopy covered the truck bed and displayed years’ worth of laminated trailhead passes and a peeling “Led Zeppelin” decal.