Once Upon a Day (32 page)

But she didn’t believe he’d really do it, and she told him so. He said he would, she said he wouldn’t, and finally she threw up her hands.

“Okay, but just so you know, I won’t take it lying down. I’ll kick and scream and beg for help until your servants call the police.”

“No, you won’t,” he said, “because our children are downstairs. You won’t want to frighten them.”

They argued for several more minutes, but it didn’t help. She couldn’t change his mind; she couldn’t even get him to think about what he was doing. He kept saying the same thing, that he was protecting her. The whole time, he made sure he was standing between her and the door. When she tried to move past him, he took her by the arms and told her he didn’t want to physically restrain her, but he would if he had to.

“I warned you not to fight me on this. I’m sorry, but I can’t let anything happen to you. I can’t and I won’t.”

She turned away from him and wandered over to the rock fireplace, one of the first things she’d loved when she and Charles found this house. She stared at the fireplace for a moment. She didn’t plan to bend down and pick up the iron fireplace tool, but once it was in her hand, she turned around and walked toward Charles.

Her aunt and uncle used to lock her in her room whenever she did anything wrong. Once she spent three days in there, eating stale
crackers, using a bucket for bodily functions, whimpering, half out of her mind. Of course it was completely different now: their bedroom was beautiful, she had her own bathroom, her husband loved her. So why did she feel this sudden, awful desperation?

“The end of that is sharp,” he said. “Give it to me.”

The tool gleamed in the sun like a knife. She lifted it level with her face. On the end was a hook; Lucy wasn’t sure exactly what it was for. She’d never used it. In the seven years they’d lived here, Charles would never let her start a fire.

“I want you to listen to me.” She took her left hand and ran it down the narrow iron until she was inches away from stabbing her palm on the hook. “Will you do that?”

“Be careful,” he said, taking a step toward her.

“No,” she said. “That’s the first thing you have to understand. I can’t be careful enough. It didn’t make any difference.” She dropped her hand down on the hook and shoved hard until it broke the skin. “If you don’t listen, I’ll push it in all the way.”

“Lucy, please—”

“This is what you’re afraid of,” she said, and pushed the hook in a little deeper. “That I’ll be hurt. But what you don’t understand is that I no longer feel pain.” She laughed, but it sounded hysterical even to herself. “Except sometimes. Most of the time even.”

“Stop it,” he whispered. “Please.”

“No. I can’t stop it until you understand. And you don’t understand. You haven’t understood from the beginning.”

The blood was dripping down her wrist and onto the carpet. She watched the drip with a strange fascination. She wouldn’t look at Charles.

“I’ll try to understand, but first—”

She pushed it in even deeper and groaned softly. “Don’t tell me what to do. Just listen.”

“Fine.” His breath was coming quicker. “I’m listening.”

“Okay, once upon a time in America.” She laughed again. “What movie is that from?”

“Mr. Keenan?” Susannah was at the door, knocking. “Is everything all right?”

Charles glanced behind him.

“Tell her yes,” Lucy said quietly. “Tell her we’ll be down in about a half hour.” Charles did, and Lucy waited until they heard Susannah’s footsteps walking away.

“Anyway, once upon a time, a man made a movie about Joan of Arc.” She was starting to feel a little dizzy from watching the blood, so she lifted her head up, but she still wouldn’t look at Charles. “The man made the movie because he thought it was so admirable that Joan would rather die than renounce God. And the thing is, there was this girl, this stupid nobody from nowhere, who believed him.” Lucy sighed. “Even when she was in the fire herself, she wanted so badly to believe it was burning away everything but her faith in him and her love.”

Lucy pushed her hand again until the blood was so thick she couldn’t see her palm or the hook. “God, how did we end up here, where we won’t die for anything?” Her voice was shaky. “We won’t even risk getting too tired or driving late or living in a house without twenty-four-hour armed guards.”

“I would die for you. With all my soul, I promise—”

“I know that.” She exhaled. “You would die for me, I know.” She felt like she was losing her point. Maybe she didn’t have one. She was too tired to make any sense. She’d been tired for so long, she couldn’t remember the way she was before. “And I would die for you. I was ready to die for you. But it didn’t make any difference, don’t you see?”

“Please stop,” he gasped.

“We don’t get to die for each other. I guess that means we’re stuck.”

She grimaced because the wound was starting to burn. Why had she done this to herself? What was it that she’d been so desperate for Charles to know?

“I wish I could really be brave,” she whispered.

“Oh God,” he said. His voice was thick. “I can’t stand this anymore.”

She finally looked up at her husband then, and discovered he was crying.

She’d never seen Charles cry before, and it made her feel like her heart was opening up or breaking, she wasn’t sure. Either way, she couldn’t bear it. She nodded at her hand and told him he could help her. “I need your help,” she said.

He moved his glasses to wipe his eyes and then he was next to her. She let him ease the hook out, and he cleaned up the blood and knelt down beside her to bandage the wound. He thought it would need stitches, but she asked him to wait and see if it stopped. When he said she’d need a tetanus shot, she reminded him she’d had one not that long ago, but she didn’t mention the hospital.

When he was finished, he told her to go back to bed, and she did because she was so tired.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she was, for everything. She felt like she saw it all at once: him kneeling by her hospital bed, smoking the cigar in the garden, asking her if she was a thief, swimming naked with her in the moonlight. He was confident and brilliant, the way he was on the set of Joan, funny and gentle, the way he was with their babies, and angry and broken, the way he was when he threw the pearls. And through it all, he was crying, she kept seeing him cry, it was burned into her mind, even though he’d stopped as soon as she asked for his help.

Her eyes were closed; he was already out of the room when she said she was glad this was over now. Her hand hurt, but she felt like something had been solved. “I’ve never stopped loving you,” she mouthed into his pillow.

She woke up about an hour later, when Charles and a doctor were standing by the side of the bed. Charles told her the doctor was going to sew up her hand, but it wouldn’t hurt because he’d give her a shot first. She was grateful for the shot because her hand was really hurting now. It worked almost immediately, and it must
have put her back to sleep because she didn’t remember the stitching at all.

When she woke up again, it was already dark, and she realized she’d missed the whole day. She felt bad for the children, thinking about them finger-painting the picture for her, waiting to show it to her. But it wasn’t that late yet. Maybe if she hurried she could still sing to Dorothea and tuck her in bed.

She stood up and put her robe on. As she walked to the door, she was thinking how much better she felt. She was even glad Charles had told her to go back to bed, because the sleep was wonderful. But then she reached for the door, and it wouldn’t open. Charles had still locked her in this room, after everything they’d said to each other.

She knew it would have made sense to feel hurt or angry or at least surprised, but the only surprise was that she felt nothing. Even as she walked to the balcony, still in her robe and nightgown, with the left sleeve bloodied by her hand, she felt nothing. Getting out of that room wasn’t something she wanted to do, it was something she had to do, or she might disappear in all the nothingness.

Once she climbed over the balcony, she would be in the garden and then she would find her baby girl. For the last week or so, every night, she’d been teaching Dorothea another line of “Moondance.” Maybe they could sing it together, the same way Lucy had sung with her mother when she was a little girl.

Her mother’s name was Dorothy: a pretty name, Lucy thought, though her mother had hated it. “Dorothy is an old lady’s name,” Lucy’s mother would say. “Or a farm girl in the middle of Kansas.” When Lucy and Charles were picking out names for a girl, he came up with Dorothea. They agreed it was close enough for Lucy, but far enough away for Lucy’s mother, if she’d been there. If only she could have been there. It used to make Lucy feel so bad that she didn’t even have a picture of her mother; she hadn’t had time to grab one when she ran away from her uncle.

Charles and Lucy’s bedroom was on the second floor, but the drop from the balcony wasn’t very high because of the grassy hill
right underneath. She and Charles had talked about how easy it would be to climb over it, back when they were making their fire evacuation plan, when they first moved into the house. In the plan, he would climb over first, and then she would climb into his arms. She’d always been afraid of even small heights after she fell off the jungle gym bars in third grade.

She was over the balcony wall and trying to use her hands to move down when she realized what she’d forgotten. Her right wrist was weak, and her left hand was completely bandaged. She couldn’t hold up her weight even for the few inches it would have taken to get down low enough to jump safely.

And so she just gave up and let herself fall. She fell backward and landed on the ground with a thud, but she sat up immediately, glad she wasn’t hurt. Her stitches must have ripped because her hand was bleeding through the bandage, and her legs were scraped, but she could still stand and walk. She could see Dorothea through the breakfast room window, drinking her nightly glass of chocolate milk. She worried she might scare her daughter if she knocked on the patio door, so she headed around to the front.

She got stopped by Martinez, the night security guard, but as soon as he saw who it was, he said, “Good evening, Mrs. Keenan,” as though there was nothing strange about her suddenly appearing from the garden in her nightgown and robe.

Inside the front hall, she said, “Hi honey, I’m home,” and laughed.

Both Jimmy and Dorothea ran to meet her, and they didn’t seem frightened by her scrapes or her hand. They gave her little hugs of comfort while Charles stood a few feet back, silently watching. When she told them she wanted to tuck them in, even six-year-old Jimmy agreed.

After her children were in bed, Lucy asked Tom to bring her some of her things and then she took a shower in the downstairs guest room. She slept there too, with the door locked from the inside, the normal way, after telling Charles there was nothing to discuss. There was a phone in the guest room, and when she called
Brett at home, he was relieved to hear that she’d be back tomorrow. She also scheduled a car service to take her to the set. In the morning, when Charles begged her to let him drive her instead, she turned away from him. “I’ll be back tonight,” she said, and then she got in the car and left her husband standing in the driveway.

Every day for the rest of the week, it was the same. She took a car to the location, worked until five or six, and came home in time to be with her children for as long as possible before they went to bed. Her head hurt a lot, but she wouldn’t take a pain pill because of the baby. She threw up if she tried to eat before noon, but she made sure she ate well the rest of the day and took her prenatal vitamins.

The baby was the one thing Lucy was holding on to. She pushed away all her worries about the future with this one central fact: next April, she would have her infant in her arms. Nothing that had happened to her body or her mind or her soul was irreversible as long as she could still give birth to a brand-new life.

P
ART OF
L
UCY
knew that she was holding on so tightly to the idea of her baby because she feared she’d done something terrible when she fell from the balcony. She’d seen enough movies to know a fall could cause a miscarriage. Her obstetrician told her it wasn’t really true, but Lucy thought the doctor was just trying to make her feel better. She was already considered a high-risk pregnancy because she had so much internal scar tissue from the attack.

Charles wasn’t with her at the OB’s office when she asked about the effects of her fall. It was the next week, on Wednesday, and she’d gone over to Dr. McAffey’s during lunch break on set. She figured Charles was angry with her for jumping from the balcony; she didn’t want him to know that she was upset about this too. Especially now, when he was being an even better father than usual. Every night when she came home, the children talked nonstop about the stories he told them, the games he played, the funny movies
they saw. It made her feel like reaching out for him again, but she couldn’t do it yet. She was too confused.

Now that the bandages were off, Jimmy wanted to know what had happened to her hand. Lucy had neglected to have her stitches repaired, and the wound had closed up ugly and raw. Charles said, “She hurt it at work,” but she felt terrible, imagining what her little boy would feel if he knew the truth.

Thank God for acting, she thought. Playing Adele, the savior, was so much easier than playing herself.

She had Labor Day weekend off, and she and Charles got Jimmy ready for school. He was so excited, picking out his first notebook and pencil box and new big-kid backpack. When he told Lucy he was worried the other kids wouldn’t like him, she knelt down and said, “You are funny and smart, just like your daddy. Everyone will like you. I’ll bet you three hugs, two pineapples and a kiss from the sun.”

This was Lucy and Jimmy’s favorite bet. She’d made it up when he was only a year old, and they were spending a weekend in Hawaii, so Charles could meet with an actor Walter had suggested for
Main Street.
Their suite had a basket of pineapples and coconuts, and Jimmy kept putting the pineapples in bed with them. Lucy thought it was so funny. He even tried to kiss the leaves on top, calling them hair.