Lucy (11 page)

“Sorry. It’s kind of like YouTube, I guess. Anyway, in the forest you have to fend for yourself. You have family, people who care about you. But it’s so dangerous, you’re really on your own. You have to be aware. So everyone communicates the way animals communicate. It’s like a special channel called The Stream.”

“The Stream,” Amanda said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“You know how sometimes you’ll meet someone and immediately like her? Or you meet someone who instantly makes you uncomfortable?”

“Sure, like you’ve either got chemistry or you don’t.”

“Yes. Or you hear about how animals might run away before an earthquake?”

“Sure, I’ve heard about that.” Amanda thought it over, then she smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right. And speaking of The Stream, I’ve really gotta pee!”

They both started giggling, and then they couldn’t stop. Rolling on the bed, Amanda said, “Stop! Oh, my God, stop! I’m gonna pee in my pants!” She leapt up and ran to the bathroom.

15

LUCY AND HER FATHER
did not celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas. She had read about Christmas in Dickens. When she asked her father about it, he said that it was a religious holiday and that religion was part of the problem and launched into a lengthy discourse about intolerance. But Lucy was just a child. She didn’t care about all that. She wanted presents.

“We celebrate birthdays,” her father said. “We give presents then.” But Lucy knew how to manipulate him, and her father had a soft spot in his heart. So as a compromise they began celebrating the winter and summer solstices, exchanging small presents that they fashioned themselves. Not everyone seemed able to join in. But some of the family members would come with a twisted bit of grass, a bunch of flowers, an offering of fruit.

Seeing the holiday season in America for the first time was both thrilling and shocking to Lucy. It began with a crescendo of gluttony in the fall. Lucy and Amanda dressed up for Halloween and ran up and down the streets with the smaller children, gathering sweets in bags. At Amanda’s suggestion, Lucy dressed as Dorothy from the
Wizard of Oz
. (“Because,” she said, “you’re not in Kansas anymore.”) Amanda dressed as the Good Witch Glinda. Months later they would still have bags of candy.

Then Thanksgiving came. The Christmas decorations were already in the stores. It was a system that seemed to be tripping over itself in its fervor. Lucy and Amanda helped to cook the meal, but the process seemed all out of proportion. Jenny’s mother came. Lucy regarded the small busy woman with the nervous cough and asked if she should call her Grandma, since she called Jenny Mom.

“Don’t you dare call me Grandma, young lady.”

Lucy and Amanda were preparing sweet potatoes. Harry was slicing carrots. “Carrots!” he said in a theatrical voice. “Let’s have a carrot joke.” Then he intoned, “A zucchini and a carrot were walking down the highway when a truck sped past and hit the carrot. The carrot was rushed to the hospital. The zucchini paced nervously in the waiting room for hours. Then at last the doctor appeared. He said, ‘Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is: Your friend is going to survive. The bad news is that he’ll be a vegetable for the rest of his life.’”

Jenny said, “You tell that joke every time.”

“Yeah, I crack myself up.”

Lucy watched as his flashing hazel eyes met Jenny’s and wondered if they’d ever mated. Most of the time they just seemed like old friends. But their feelings for each other were clear to Lucy in those fleeting glances.

Once everyone was seated before plates heaped high with food, Lucy asked, “Can we really eat this much?”

Mrs. Lowe said, “Eat up or you won’t get big and strong. You’re such a tiny thing.”

“Oh. I don’t think I’m going to grow much taller. And I’m already pretty strong.”

“Smart mouth,” Mrs. Lowe said, digging into her mashed potatoes.

“I only meant—”

“It’s okay,” Jenny said. “You’re right. It is extravagant. Eat what you like, honey.”

Harry looked up and said, “This is too delicious. I want no interruptions. Everyone, please switch your phones to ‘stun.’ That way we won’t hear a thing when your phone rings. We’ll just see you go rigid and slump to the floor.” Mrs. Lowe giggled.

Amanda laughed and winked at Lucy, and then she knew that everything was all right. Because of her mother, Amanda had learned to be wary and to use all the communication channels that were available to her. When Lucy had invited her to come for dinner, she had added, “That is, if you don’t have to be with your mother for Thanksgiving.”

Amanda had laughed and said, “Oh, you don’t want to be around my mom on holidays.”

During dinner both Harry and Mrs. Lowe were stealing glances at Lucy as if searching for clues to something just out of reach. When everyone was cleaning up the dishes, Harry said to Jenny, “Her ears are set too high.”

“You can have them surgically clipped,” Mrs. Lowe said. “Aunt Josie did that for Becky when she had her nose job.”

The following Saturday night Amanda took Lucy Christmas shopping in the Loop and Lucy saw snow for the first time.

Lucy felt the rush of adrenaline as the train dove from the elevated tracks into the dark tunnel, and the yellow firefly lights went swarming past. Amanda didn’t seem to notice as she sat listening to music through her headphones.

When they emerged onto State Street, Lucy saw millions of glittering white lights all up and down the boulevard, caught up in the trees as if mysterious albino spiders had woven their secret webs in the night. The fat snowflakes glowed as they swirled around the high streetlamps, and she had the impression that she was floating in a fantasy world of those white spiders, all moving and pulsing around her, weaving her into a cocoon of fleece.

“Taste it, taste it,” Amanda said. “It’s good luck.” And she tilted her head back and opened her mouth. As Lucy watched the white spiders fall into Amanda’s mouth, she tilted her head back and let them fall onto her own tongue.

“It’s snow.”

“Duh, yeah, it’s snow. Probably filled with yummy lead and mercury after falling through the air of Chicago.”

“Sweet,” Lucy said.

Amanda linked arms with Lucy and pulled her along, saying, “Come on, silly goose. Hey! Luce the Goose. That’s what I’m going to call you.”

They went along State Street, peering into the display windows at scenes from
A Christmas Carol
laid out in antique dioramas, with Scrooge and Tiny Tim and Marley’s Ghost. Lucy ran up and down excitedly examining each display and reading the didactics aloud.

Inside the department store, Lucy felt as if they’d been shipwrecked on a stormy sea and were floating amid the scattered cargo of a vast and fallen empire.

“No way,” Lucy said. “There’s just no way that I can possibly choose from all this stuff.” They came to a glass case full of beautiful sparkling stones, and Lucy said, “Ooh, how about one of these?”

“Nope. Inappropriate to buy your mother a wedding ring. And too expensive anyway.”

“I have my allowance.”

“Nope, nope, nope.” Amanda took Lucy’s arm and dragged her through the store. But Lucy had to stop and examine each dazzling new display that they encountered.

“Timepieces are good.”

“Nope.” Amanda dragged her along. “No watches.”

“A carpet? They’re pretty.”

“Sorry, too big. Too expensive. Come on. I know just the thing. We’re the shopping marines. We get in, complete our mission, and get out.”

Amanda assured her that a sweater was the perfect gift for a daughter to give her mother. When they emerged from the store, the snow had grown much heavier and the wind was whistling in the wires. They ran for the train station, sliding on the sidewalk, and hurried down the stairs. On the ride home Lucy felt exhausted from all the excitement. The train climbed the grade from the tunnel and out onto the elevated tracks.

Amanda looked out the window. The snow was blowing sideways, impenetrable in the glare of the streetlights. “Wow, this is bad.”

“Bad?” Lucy thought it was miraculous.

“It’s a blizzard.”

“Yes, but it’s beautiful. It makes me think of Dr. Zhivago.”

“Think again, my little rutabaga. It’s Dr. Chicago.”

Lucy wasn’t sure what it meant to be in a blizzard until they set out on the walk home from the el station. The snow was already up to her calves, and walking was slow and wearying. She could feel herself getting colder and colder as they went. Her fingers hurt, and her toes had gone numb. It seemed that no matter which way they turned, the wind was directly in her face. The snowflakes were made of steel. About halfway home, Lucy stopped, and Amanda turned on her almost angrily.

“Don’t stop.”

“Where are we going? I can’t remember.”

“Come on!”

Lucy didn’t understand why she was shouting. “I think I’m going to sit down for a while and rest.”

Then Amanda began screaming and pulling on her, saying, “No! No, Lucy! Keep moving.”

“Why?” She felt warm now and knew how good it would be to take a nap.

Amanda shook her shoulders and looked right into her face. “Because you’ll never get up if you do that. Come on. It’s only a few more blocks.”

“I’m really okay. I’m warm now. I’m going to take off my coat.”

Amanda grabbed her lapels and shook her. “No! No, you’re not. Keep moving.”

Lucy could no longer talk by the time they reached the house. Jenny was getting up to greet them as they opened the door. “Do you have a sleeping bag? Lucy’s got hypothermia.”

“Oh, my God,” Jenny said. “I knew I should have driven you downtown.”

As Lucy stared at them, a blank and puzzled expression on her face, her knees buckled. She sat heavily in the front hall without even taking off her coat. Jenny returned a moment later with a sleeping bag. Amanda was undressing, saying, “Get her clothes off. We have to warm her up.”

Lucy felt like a rag doll as Jenny took off her coat and sweater and stripped her down to long underwear. Amanda stuffed her into the sleeping bag with Jenny’s help. Then Amanda stripped and climbed in with Lucy, saying, “Zip it up. This is going to warm her up. Make something hot to drink.”

Lucy was laughing.

“What’s so bleeping funny?”

“Mom, I wanted to buy you a wedding ring.”

Amanda held Lucy against her and said, “She did. She wanted to buy you a rug and a watch, too.”

“God,” Jenny said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Mom. I think I like blizzards.”

“I’m an idiot,” Amanda said. “I should never have taken her out there. Growing up in Africa, Jesus.”

“Stop biting your cuticles,” Lucy said.

Amanda laughed. “Come on, wrestling girl. Let’s see you get out of this hold. You’re in the zipperlock now.”

An hour later they were sitting in front of the fire drinking hot chocolate. Lucy had a big down comforter wrapped around her and they were laughing about it.

“I knew I should have driven you girls,” Jenny said again. “Thank you, Amanda. For knowing what to do.”

“Oh, I’ve always been good at this rescue shit,” Amanda said. “I practiced on my mother.”

Jenny looked confused, but Lucy knew what Amanda was talking about.

16

LUCY MET WESTON TEMPLE
every afternoon for practice. She liked the boy. The messages she received from him in The Stream were gentle. He didn’t even realize that he was sending them, and she didn’t want to embarrass him by mentioning it. She could tell that he was shy. Lucy had the impression that his father had put him up to wrestling as a way of making more of a man of him. What a silly concept. He was man enough.

Lucy thought that wrestling was such an odd pursuit: To take someone off his feet. It was all about status. For millions of years people had walked upright. It was one of their special gifts. To take a person down to the ground was so elemental. She understood why the crowds reacted as they did. At the wrestling meets everyone entered The Stream and received the powerful messages that the players sent by way of their actions on the mat. The triumph of one human over another. To turn a person into a beast. And she saw that sports provided a means for those lonely humans to communicate more deeply.

Wes had taught her how to take someone down, taught her the good positions for gaining points, and the pin. She had to be careful not to hurt him, and she had gradually learned how to conceal her strength. Then she learned to use those skills in the contests with other schools. She would take down a wrestler, and everyone would chant, “Lew-See! Lew-See!” Whenever Lucy received a big gold trophy, Coach Barnacle put it in a vitrine in the school hallway near the gym.

They traveled in buses and stayed in hotels. Lucy saw the countryside, which was mostly crops, then the yellow stubble of corn, the snow in the winter. Every time they passed through a stretch of forest, she felt a yearning to leap into it and fly through the crowns of the glorious trees.

By the end of the season, Lucy stood nearly undefeated. No one could explain how she could take down opponents so efficiently. She was interviewed in all the newspapers. When asked where she came by her uncommon agility and strength she attributed it to an active life growing up in the jungle. Someone had started a Jungle Girl blog to track her performance. And one Sunday, a headline in the
Chicago Tribune
read “Jungle Girl Goes to State.” Jenny winced when she read that, thinking, If only they knew the truth.

Lucy had come to Jenny in tears after a big meet when she’d brought home the first of her trophies. As Jenny held her, Lucy had said, “It’s not fair. I’m cheating. I had to lose to one of their wrestlers just to make it look like I wasn’t some freak of nature.”

She was right. But Jenny didn’t know what to do about that. Her status as a star athlete served to hide Lucy in plain sight. Jenny told her that she could quit if she wanted. But Lucy said that she didn’t want to disappoint her team and her coach and especially Wes. Moreover, Lucy’s high-profile participation in sports had gotten Dr. Mayer off her back. No one argues with athletic success.

One night in winter, they built a fire in the fireplace and Lucy fed the first of the orange notebooks into it. They watched it curl and blacken and vanish into ash. But then Lucy said, “I can’t do it.”

“But what if someone finds them?”

“Mom, it’s all I have left. That one photograph and these.”

“Okay,” Jenny could see how torn Lucy was. And anyway, who would ever know to look for them?

After the last big meet in Indiana, the wrestling team had checked in to a drab hotel of poured concrete, set at the intersection of two highways that roared and hissed like battling boa constrictors. There had been a big banquet after the matches. Then the players had dispersed, and Wes and Lucy were standing out in the parking lot under a snowy moon. The air was chilled and the moon looked like a glowing boat in a fairy tale. Lucy could tell that Wes was nervous, trying to get something off his chest.

“What is it, Wes? What do you want to tell me?”

“I’m sorry, Lucy. I know I’m not supposed to think things like this about a teammate, but you’re just so beautiful.”

“Why, thank you, Weston. That’s so sweet of you to say. You’re not bad yourself.”

“Thanks. Okay. I can do this.” He took a deep breath. “Lucy, will you go to the prom with me?”

“Of course I will. You’re really nice, Wes. Perhaps one day we’ll mate.”

She saw him flush crimson and recognized her blunder.

“Oops. My bad. I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I?”

“It’s okay. I know you meant it in a nice way.”

On a weekend in April, they celebrated Lucy’s fifteenth birthday with Amanda and a few friends from school. The temperature went up to almost 70 degrees and the wind picked up. The warm air, the saturated colors of the leaves, barely open, and a new kind of smell announced spring with great fanfare. Lucy and the other kids played on the front lawn in shorts.

Harry came over and made pizza from scratch, and Jenny tossed a salad. Harry and Jenny watched the children, now almost adults, as they laughed and talked with music blaring out the open front windows of the house. Amanda’s boyfriend, Matt, threw a football to Lucy in the bright April air. With simian grace and improbably long arms, he’d launch the ball at the sky. But no matter where he put it, Lucy was there when it fell. Jenny looked at Harry and saw him smiling to himself in some private reverie.

He shook his head. “How does she do that?” he asked. Then he shouted, “Way to go, Luce the Goose!”

Lucy turned and beamed at him, then caught another one of Matt’s passes.

Jenny watched Harry and saw the love for Lucy in his eyes. She thought, I really should tell him. Of all the people in all the world, Harry would completely get it. He and Lucy had bonded. Lucy lit up when Harry turned those eyes on her. If anything, Harry would love Lucy even more once he knew the truth. And the secret would always be safe with him.

One warm and rainy day in May, Jenny made Lucy a cake with “Happy Mother’s Day, Leda” stenciled on it in icing. It was waiting when Lucy came home from school. She had unexpectedly brought Amanda. Lucy wept and hugged Jenny when she saw the cake.

“What is it?” Amanda asked. “Who’s Leda?”

“My mother.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I should let you guys be alone.”

“No, don’t go,” Lucy said.

“Have dinner with us,” Jenny said.

“No. I should probably go be with my mom.” But Jenny and Lucy could tell how sad it had made her. And Jenny thought, I should tell Amanda, too. Or Lucy should. Here was this dear girl, Lucy’s best friend, who didn’t know the most basic thing about her. But then where would it all end? Where would they draw the line? And Jenny saw that their need to keep the secret was cutting them off from the people they loved the most. After Amanda went home, Lucy and Jenny had a quiet dinner and went to bed.

Yes, the secret had served them well so far. As the school year drew to an end, Jenny felt almost as if she and Lucy were home free. No one knew, and it seemed that there was no way for anyone to find out. Jenny began to feel that they had cast a protective web around themselves that could repel the busybodies and mischief makers of the world.

Lucy and Amanda had become inseparable. Amanda slept over almost every weekend. Jenny would make a big pot of vegetable soup or a casserole. Sometimes Harry would come over and grill fish and vegetables on the patio. They’d all eat together and then watch a movie or play Scrabble. Amanda was on the high school chess team and was teaching Lucy to play. Sometimes the girls stayed up late playing, and Jenny would go to bed to the sound of them whacking the clock and giggling as they practiced swearing in French. She was feeling domestic for the first time in her life. And she couldn’t imagine how Lucy would have managed without Amanda. Jenny recalled the first time that she found a box of Tampax in Lucy’s bathroom and realized that she’d neglected one of her primary duties in Lucy’s socialization. Thank heaven for Amanda, she thought.

At the end of the school year in a big auditorium, with mortarboards flying in the air, Jenny heaved a sigh of relief. The girls both graduated with honors. Lucy seemed the picture of normalcy. And that was all that Jenny wanted for her.

Amanda had helped Lucy study the college catalogs online. Their scores on the entrance exams were good, and by April they’d both been accepted to half a dozen schools. But Lucy wanted to live at home and go to Jenny’s school. She said it so simply: “Mom, I can get the same education anywhere. I mean, look what I learned in the jungle. I want to be with you.”