Once Upon a Day (19 page)

“Just a kiss?” she said. Hopefully. Stupidly.

“That’s not all.” He laughed harshly and pulled the robe off her shoulders. “But we can skip right to the part where you fuck me. Wanna do that?”

Ron coughed or laughed, Lucy wasn’t sure.

The air-conditioner vent was only a foot or so away and she was shivering. Her suit wasn’t all the way dry yet, which seemed impossible. It seemed like they’d been in this house for hours.

“No,” she said. It was the only word she could think of right then, so she repeated it. “No,” she said, and tried to run, but Mick caught up with her before she was halfway to the door. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back to face him.

“You’re pissing me off again, Lucy. First you lie to me and now you tell me no. Why you wanna make me mad?”

“I don’t.”

“Then kiss me right now before I beat the crap out of you.”

Dorothea’s presence had kept Lucy grounded even in her fear, but now she felt something breaking apart in the back of her mind. The knife, his breath, how close he was. What he wanted her to do. So unreal. Was this her house? The room itself looked different. Ron was standing in front of the wall of windows. His tall shadow was making a slash of darkness on the floor. Jimmy had left his Snoopy under the wicker table. They were both white, and Lucy kept thinking the table was melting, only to remember again that the shape she saw was Snoopy’s foot.

Better to lose the world and save your soul.

None of Charles’s movies had ever had a rape. Sometimes the evil man tried to rape a woman, but she always managed to get away. Or someone saved her. Or she told them no, and they stopped. How could Lucy have forgotten that?

“I won’t have sex with you,” she finally said. It wasn’t her voice. She was gone, and in her place was a sassy, confident heroine. A woman who looked like Belinda Holmes, the actress Charles had used in several of his Westerns: tall and tough with black hair, big brown eyes and a wide jaw, wide hips, muscular arms.

Belinda was the only one of Charles’s former girlfriends that Lucy had ever asked him about. “Why didn’t it work with her?” Lucy said, out of the blue, during the weepy period she had right after Jimmy was born. They were watching the television premier of
The Last Train.
Charles looked at her and said so gently, “Because she wasn’t you.”

“She don’t mean it, Mick.”

“Yes, I do,” Lucy said. “I’d rather die.”

The first slice opened up her cheek, but it wasn’t that bad. The blood felt warm, almost comforting, running down her face.

Mick came closer to her. “Had enough? Ready to kiss me now?”

“No, I’m sorry, I can’t.” She heard the words come out of her mouth, but she wasn’t speaking, neither was Belinda. Someone else was speaking now, someone brave and principled.

Choose, Joan.

“It’s against the will of God,” Lucy muttered, before she let out a moan as the knife came down again.

This cut was much worse, on the fleshy part of her right arm, a deep gash that burned so badly it brought tears to Lucy’s eyes. Why did cuts burn? Lucy remembered the fire that the real Joan had died from. She had faith that could move mountains. Lucy wanted faith, but she was just so scared.

“Throw her down and do her, man,” Ron said nervously. “Get it over with so we can get out of here.”

“No. She’s a rich bitch and I’m gonna teach her a lesson. She
needs to learn that all this expensive shit she has doesn’t mean she’s better than us.”

Lucy wanted to say she didn’t think she was better than anyone, but her mouth wouldn’t form the words. She saw him move the knife from his right hand to his left, and then she watched as his fist came toward her, inch by inch, like the slow-motion violence in a movie she remembered watching with Charles at Walter’s house. Charles had told her the guy who directed that film made all his movies with slowed-down violence, but she couldn’t remember the reason. Was it to make it more real or less?

The punch felt as real as falling off the jungle gym bars in third grade. The slam of her head against the concrete then was like the slam of his knuckles into her mouth now. Her face exploded in blood, and Lucy lost her balance and fell backward into the wall. She heard the cracking sound her body made—or was it the wall?—and then she was crumpled on the floor.

When Mick told her to get up, she wasn’t sure she could.

“I said get up, you bitch!”

She still didn’t move, and Mick told Ron to lift her up. He grabbed her under her arms and pulled her to face Mick.

“You gonna kiss me now?”

Her lips were covered in blood; she could feel it running down her chin and taste it dripping into her mouth. And they were already swelling. She could sense the top one brushing against the bottom of her nose.

“Damn,” Ron muttered. “You wanna kiss her like that?”

“Fuck no. But she’s gotta learn.” He grabbed Lucy’s ear, twisting the lobe. “You ready to do what I say now, you little whore?”

Choose, Joan.

She saw Charles coming toward her. “I won’t do it,” she told Charles. “Don’t worry.” He nodded, but then she realized he was crying. “It doesn’t even hurt,” she told him, which was such a lie. She’d been thrown to the floor, and now she was curled in a ball. She couldn’t see anything, but she could feel the stabs and punches
and kicks. There were so many pains now, white-hot places on her stomach, the backs of her knees, the side of her neck. Her throat hurt from screaming, and then she was vomiting and spitting blood and her throat hurt more.

She smelled the smoke and she thought of Dorothea, but then it became only a small point of fire pressing marks into her flesh. Joan had died of fire, but she wasn’t brave like Joan. The agony was overwhelming her. She would have to renounce God, unless he heard her screams for help.

And then, just like that, it was over.

Later the doctors would tell Lucy that a violent blow to her head had knocked her unconscious. Charles had found her that way, and it was three days before she came out of it. She tried to tell them it wasn’t true, that before Charles came home she had regained consciousness, at least for a minute or two. They humored her, but she could tell they didn’t believe it. No matter, Lucy knew it was real. It was one of her most vivid memories: the moment when she’d opened her eyes and discovered that the men had run away, the torture had stopped.

For the rest of her life, she would never forget the peace that came over her then. She was lying on the floor of her house, and she could feel the warmth of the afternoon light as it poured in the windows. She could hear the soft clicking of their dog’s paws on the back door, and something else, a sound that would make its way into her dreams for years to come. Of course it was real. It was the sound of her baby girl singing.

T
HOUGH MY FATHER
never talked of my mother, I’d grown up knowing that he’d loved her with his whole soul and being. This was why he couldn’t bear to see pictures of her, according to my grandmother, who’d told me many times how happy Father had been before Mother died. “I remember the day they got married,” Grandma said. “Oh, your father was so delighted! He stood up and told all his guests that he would never again doubt there was a heaven because he’d already found it.”

My parents, Grandma said, were every bit as happy together as Jane and Mr. Rochester in
Jane Eyre.
Because I’d read the novel to Grandma so many times, I had many chances to think about this, and to wonder what it would be like to be in love. One sentence in particular seemed curious: “I know no weariness of my Edward’s society; he knows none of mine.” I tried to imagine never, ever growing weary of someone. It seemed impossible to me, for though I adored Father and Grandma and Jimmy, I couldn’t spend more
than a few hours with them before I longed to be back in my room with my books and my daydreams.

It seemed impossible, that is, until I found myself passing day after day in my strange new life with Stephen.

Our primary task, of course, was trying to help my brother. Each afternoon we would go to the hospital, and Stephen would sit with me while I gave Jimmy a report of my progress (or lack thereof) in discovering the truth about our family’s past, and then we would listen to my brother talk, sometimes for an hour or more, about his own memories and his continuing feelings of guilt that he had been somehow responsible for what happened to our mother. I told him repeatedly it wasn’t true, but I didn’t tell him that we’d requested her death certificate from California. It was Stephen’s idea, as a practical way to make Jimmy feel better. This document would list the cause of death, which, we both felt sure, wouldn’t be murder at the hands of a six-year-old.

I hadn’t told Jimmy yet because the soonest we could possibly receive the certificate was five days, and this was with the help of the hospital records department, who’d agreed to put in the request after Dr. Baker talked to them. There were a few problems to be overcome, including my lack of knowledge of the exact date of her death, or even of the date she was born. Both of these could be solved, Stephen thought, by contacting my father, but after I explained Father’s condition, and how upset he would be by even these simple requests, Stephen talked to the hospital records clerk himself, and the appropriate documents were rushed to California, listing only the year of death, 1984, and other identifying criteria, including Father’s name as next of kin.

While we were awaiting the arrival of the certificate, I worked on the task of remembering. Stephen had done what he called a “search” on how to recover childhood memories—using a truly wonderful thing known as a laptop computer. He discovered that most people do remember certain events before age five, and I might be able to do the same if I just tried to talk more about that
period of my life. Each night, we would sit at dinner and talk about what kinds of things people typically remembered from their early lives, and what he himself remembered. I loved listening to all this, though it was never enough to jar even the smallest memory loose in my own mind, and I became increasingly desperate to give Jimmy something to hold on to, so he would not lose hope.

Finally, on Tuesday night I realized there was another possible direction I could try, and I started to tell Stephen some of the things Grandma had said about our home. He said it was obvious we’d lived in Southern California, near enough to L.A. to go to movie studios and the pier on Santa Monica. Then I told him Grandma had often mentioned a particular place called Malibu. I asked him if it was near L.A., and he said yes. When I asked him how he’d heard of it, he laughed and said everyone had heard of it. It was home to movie stars and very rich people. It was right on the Pacific Ocean.

We’d just finished having dinner, and he was driving me to a bookstore because I’d told him I would love something to read. He said perhaps I could pick up a book on Malibu while we were there, though if I didn’t find anything, it would be all right. “We can always look it up on my laptop when we get home.”

The cab was dark; he couldn’t see me smile. He’d called it “home.” Not “my place” or “my apartment” or “my house” or any of the ways he’d referred to it previously. Just “home.” As though it were ours together, which it felt like it was after the six days we’d spent there talking and having breakfast, putting groceries away, doing laundry in the basement of his building, watching movies, which he’d rented from a place called Blockbuster, until the wee hours of the morning.

Not that his apartment was the real attraction. In truth, it had very few of the conveniences of my own home. His bathtub didn’t have jets of water shooting from each corner as each of our tubs had. His refrigerator had only one plain door, no ice or water could be obtained without going inside. Parts of his floor were covered with an ugly beige carpet and other parts were exposed, showing a pale
wood that was nothing like the gleaming planks of Brazilian cherry wood Father had chosen to cover our floor. He didn’t have a baby grand piano, or indeed any piano, and his book collection was really quite awful, containing only a dictionary, an almanac and several forbidding-looking textbooks about medicine, which I guessed was a hobby of his.

But Stephen himself was an entirely different matter, and I loved his apartment for the simple reason that he was in it. I woke up every morning eager to begin another day of just being with him.

Was this my first crush? I did try to convince myself it was that and nothing more. Actually, I spent much of my time alone giving myself stern warnings. Dorothea, how can you be so foolish? You are in no position to judge what you are feeling. Oh please, your whole notion of love has been formed from romantic novels and childish fantasies! And the sensation you have when you see him? This especially means nothing. As he himself said, how many men have you seen in your life? The answer, as you know, is very, very few. For all you can tell, you would have the same response to a thousand other men.