Keeping Lucy Read online

She heard the sounds before she understood what they meant: something hitting the front of the car, the screech of the brakes, and the screams.

  “Shit!” Marsha said as the car came to a stop in a ditch at the side of the road. “What the fuck was that?”

  Ginny had bumped her forehead against the dash and felt dizzy as she whirled around, reaching blindly into the backseat for her children. The children were both crying and crumpled on the floor behind each respective front seat. Peyton was crying the loudest, but Lucy was whimpering as well, a look of terror in her eyes. Ginny couldn’t open the passenger door wide enough to get out, so she crawled into the backseat.

  “Everybody okay?” Marsha asked.

  Ginny pulled Lucy into her arms and helped Peyton up from the floor. “Where does it hurt, Pey?”

  “My arm, Mama!” he cried out.

  “Sh-sh-sh,” she said as he eased himself back into the seat and held out his arm for her inspection. Her heart raced like a hot engine idling in her chest. She examined his tiny arm; thankfully, it didn’t appear (at least at first sight) to be broken. No bones protruding through the skin. No swelling. No blood. She studied Lucy next. She, too, showed no immediate signs of distress. She was scared. That was all. Ginny pressed her hand against her own chest as though to still her racing heart, waiting for it to resume its natural rhythm.

  Lucy reached out and touched the soft painful bump on Ginny’s forehead, and her little fingers came away with her blood.

  “Oh, goodness,” Ginny said and touched her own fingers to the wound.

  “I think we hit an animal, Mama,” Peyton said.

  Marsha opened the driver’s-side door slowly and got out, looking like someone who had just stumbled out of bed, still half asleep. She wondered if Marsha had bumped her head, too.

  “Stay here,” Ginny said, setting Lucy down next to her brother before climbing out of the backseat.

  The car had slid down into a small ditch. Marsha was about thirty feet behind the car, standing over something in the road. Ginny walked tentatively toward her and the animal that clearly had been the cause of their crash.

  “What is it?” she asked as she approached.

  Marsha’s eyes were wide and red.

  “It’s a fawn,” she said.

  The baby deer was bloodied, its neck twisted. The body was steaming in the cool morning air, and its chest twitched.

  “I didn’t even see it until it was too late.”

  “What do we do?” Ginny asked, feeling her bottom lip trembling as she fought tears. But sadness quickly gave way to fear, and she glanced up the road, terrified that someone would see them here, call an ambulance. Or worse, the police.

  Marsha walked back to the car, purposeful. She opened the driver’s-side door and leaned inside. When she returned, she had a small revolver in her hand, and Ginny’s heart stopped. Now she understood why the glove box was locked. Still, the idea that there had been a gun hidden there filled her with worry. Why hadn’t Marsha said anything?

  “Where did you…?” Ginny started.

  “Go back to the car,” she said to Ginny. “Distract the kids.”

  Ginny did as she was told, the pain in her head pulsing with each beat of her heart. She climbed into the car and turned the ignition so that the radio came on. “Jeremiah was a bullfrog…” That damned song again. But when Lucy squealed with delight and Peyton clapped, she turned the music up and started to sing along, turning to the children. Lucy was hugging herself, rocking, and Peyton was cradling his arm.

  “Never understood a single word he said…” she sang loudly.

  Still, the music wasn’t loud enough to mask the crack of the gunshot. It took every ounce of self-control she had not to cry out.

  Marsha returned to the car somberly, getting in without saying a word. She carefully and quietly slid the gun, which was hot to the touch and smelled like something charred, across the bench seat to Ginny, motioning for her to return it to its hiding place in the glove box. “Lock it,” she said. “The key’s under the floor mat.”

  Marsha put the car into gear and revved the engine as she tried to climb out of the ditch. The wheels spun futilely, and Ginny tensed.

  “My arm hurts, Mama!” Peyton cried from the backseat as dirt flew up around the car in a dusty storm.

  “I know, Pey,” Ginny said, trying to soothe him, but her voice felt panicked.

  “Come on, you motherfu…” Marsha muttered as she revved again.

  Then there were lights behind them. The woop, woop of the black-and-white police car.

  Marsha froze, hands on the wheel. Ginny held her breath, felt her vision beginning to darken at the edges as she watched the officer park behind the dead fawn, get out of the cruiser, walk past the steaming carcass, and make his way to them.

  Ginny felt paralyzed as the officer leaned into Marsha’s open window and said, “See you had a little accident here?”

  “Yes, Officer. She came out of nowhere,” Marsha said. Her voice sounded otherworldly. Disembodied. Ginny gripped the edge of her seat so she wouldn’t pass out.

  “You ladies okay?”

  Marsha nodded and Ginny reached for the bump on her head, hoping it had stopped bleeding.

  Peyton and Lucy were suddenly, and thankfully, silent in the backseat.

  The officer smiled at Marsha, chewing on something and smirking. She watched his gaze travel from Marsha’s face to her chest and below to her golden stomach.

  “We’re just a little shaken up,” Marsha said. Ginny wondered if he could smell the strong scent of gun smoke that still burned her eyes and made her throat feel raw.

  The officer cocked his head and peered into the backseat, and Ginny felt like she might be sick. If Peyton showed him his arm, then the officer would want to call for an ambulance. It would all be over.

  “Oh! Look at this. You’ve got a couple of little buggers along with you,” he said. “You kids okay back there?”

  “We’re on our way to the new Disney World,” Marsha said brightly. “In Orlando?”

  “Driving all the way to Florida on your own?” the officer said, scowling. “What do your husbands think of that?”

  Marsha smiled demurely. “What makes you think we’ve got husbands?” she asked. Ginny felt queasy watching Marsha flirt with him.

  The cop cocked his head again, possibly contemplating what she could be insinuating. His face was host to a half dozen emotions before he finally settled back into one of professional concern.

  “Well, if y’all are okay, I’ll just give you a little push and get you on your way. Wouldn’t want to keep Mickey waiting,” he said into the backseat.

  “That sure would be kind of you, Officer,” Marsha said.

  Ginny’s heart had to be nearly audible, it was beating so hard. Her head ached.

  Marsha raised an eyebrow at Ginny and whispered, “Holy freaking crap,” as the cop moved behind the vehicle and hollered from the rear, “Okay, sweetheart, on the count of three give it some gas. One, two, three…”

  Marsha gunned it, and the car lurched forward, leaving the cop in a virtual tornado of dust. Gripping the wheel for dear life, Marsha got the car out of the ditch and took off down the highway, grinning.

  Twenty-three

  September 1971

  Hundreds of miles later, when they finally felt safe enough to stop for lunch, Marsha double-checked both kids for bumps and bruises and fractured bones. Peyton’s arm was sore, but as far as Marsha could see, nothing appeared broken.

  “We’ll keep an eye on it for swelling, though,” she said to Ginny. To Peyton, she said, “You are so brave! I bet you got this owie protecting your sister, didn’t you?”

  Peyton smiled proudly.

  Ginny insisted that she pay for the meal this time. She knew Marsha’s own cash must be dwindling as well, though she had insisted that Ginny shouldn’t worry, that once they got to their destination, she’d get a wire transfer from her bank. Marsha had been saving for this eventual
departure for years and promised she had a pretty nice stash of cash in the bank.

  “I have a Master Charge,” Ginny said. “By the time Ab gets the bill, we’ll already be in Florida.”

  And so they feasted. The kids had gooey grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk shakes. French fries smothered in ketchup. Lucy delighted at the cold silver canister with the frothy shake inside. Ginny ordered a club sandwich, her appetite the heartiest it had been since they left. But though Marsha ordered herself a large Cobb salad, she did little more than pick at the hard-boiled egg.

  “How far along are you?” Ginny asked her softly when the kids were preoccupied.

  Marsha’s mouth twitched and she shrugged. “Not far.”

  “Will you … do you plan…” Ginny didn’t know how to ask the questions that had been bubbling up inside her ever since they left Pepper and Nancy’s place.

  Marsha, like Ginny, had been raised Catholic. Both had grown up going to church. They’d taken their First Communions together, made their first confessions, been confirmed. They’d suffered through catechism classes on Sunday mornings and later, in high school, youth group retreats. Ginny and Ab had been married in a Catholic ceremony in Boston, and the first thing she had done when she finally left the house after Lucy was born was light a candle at their local church in Dover. Marsha, on the other hand, had resisted it all. Fought God, mocked the alcoholic priest (rolling her eyes as he slurred through his sermon on temptation). She’d refused to go to confession, convinced the same priest would blab her transgressions to her father one night over beers at the local pub. By the time they were juniors, she’d stopped going to mass and started sleeping with boys.

  Ginny had only personally known one girl who’d gotten pregnant in high school. A freshman girl when they were sophomores. She’d been kicked out of school and had to get her GED. Ginny had seen her sometimes in town, at the market—trying to soothe her crying baby, looking at least twenty years older than her sixteen years. She knew she was likely not the only girl who’d gotten pregnant in high school, however. One girl mysteriously disappeared their sophomore year only to return the fall of their junior year looking hollowed out. The rumors were that she’d been sent away, somewhere in New England, and that the baby had been given up for adoption. She’d also heard about girls who’d gone to see a woman in Boston, a nurse who helped solve the problem of an unwanted pregnancy. She’d heard the stories, whispered like a secret language, of all the ways to take care: angelica, parsley, pennyroyal tea.

  “That fawn,” Marsha said, staring into her salad plate. “It wouldn’t have survived, would it?”

  “No,” Ginny said.

  “You would have tried to save it, though,” Marsha said, looking at her. “Tried to find its mother?”

  Ginny shook her head, feeling Marsha’s anguish like something palpable. Like smoke hovering in the air between them.

  “You did the right thing,” Ginny insisted, though her heart felt heavy. Her stomach was suddenly leaden with the meal. “You did. It was suffering, Marsh.”

  She thought that Ab too had only thought he was doing the right thing. That sending Lucy away was his way of protecting her, protecting them. Still, the fact that he refused to accept that it had been a mistake angered her. She had no idea what it would take to change his mind.

  When they finished their meal, Ginny slid the plastic card across the table to the waitress, knowing she was taking a chance. The card didn’t even have her name on it. What if the restaurant refused to take it? Would they call Ab? If Ab knew where they were, he would probably come after her.

  “This is my husband’s Master Charge,” Ginny said. “He gave it to me for our trip.”

  The waitress shrugged and took it, returning only moments later with a paper for her to sign, the imprint of the numbers in inky blue.

  “That’s all?” Ginny asked.

  “Y’all ain’t never used a credit card before?” the waitress asked.

  “Oh, of course,” she said, backtracking. “It’s just my husband’s usually the one to get the check.”

  It was exhilarating, the freedom she felt now. The credit card was like a passport, a free ride. “I’ll get this!” she said at the gas station. She came out of the market with dimpled Tab bottles and bags of chips and even a key chain of a Georgia peach, which she presented to Marsha like a gift.

  * * *

  They drove south through Georgia, and Ginny tried to squash the thoughts of where they were supposed to be right now. It was nearly three o’clock. Peyton would have been home after his first day of school. He was supposed to be sitting at the kitchen table having a snack of warm cookies and milk, relaying the adventures of his first day. By the time they got home, how much school would he have missed? And what if … what if they didn’t go home? Couldn’t go home? What if they had to, as Marsha had suggested, stay?

  “Where’s Daddy?” Peyton asked suddenly from the backseat, as if on cue, and she felt her face flush. “Is he coming to Disney World, too?”

  So he had been paying attention in the backseat. She’d need to be careful about the things she and Marsha talked about. She was actually surprised he’d brought Ab up. He hadn’t mentioned him once since they’d left Dover on Thursday.

  “Daddy’s at home,” she said, adding, “He has to work.” How many times had this exact sentence come from her mouth? While it had pained her nearly every time she’d needed to use this excuse for Ab’s absence, now she was grateful.

  “Okay,” Peyton said and shrugged.

  She thought of her own father: her big, boisterous bear of a dad. Her memories of him stood out in high relief against the flat backdrop of her childhood. Ginny’s memories of her father were of piggyback rides and playing horse (of yee-haws and his back transformed into that of a bucking bronco). He liked to make things and cook and was the one to teach her a love of books, reading stories to her for as long as she could remember, making up voices for every character in the hundreds of books he collected from yard sales and thrift shops. By the time she was ten, he’d created a home library for her, crafting bookshelves from pallets he brought home from work. He worked for the physical plant at UMass as a custodian. He got up before dawn each day but was always home by the time the bus dropped her off after school. While her mother prepared dinner, he’d take her to the park or on “adventures” in the neighborhood. He was the one who first showed her Emily Dickinson’s house, the enormous yellow estate only a mile from their home. He’d recited Emily’s poetry to her as they walked down the sidewalk in front of the house. Together, they’d imagine what her life must have been like, living in that upstairs room. They visited her grave as well; she remembered he took his hat off and pressed it against his chest in reverence. It had been autumn then, cold, and he’d carried Ginny on his back the whole way home when she stepped in a puddle and got her feet wet.

  When she’d married Ab, she’d expected he’d be a similar kind of father. And, at first, he had been. But after Lucy, he’d slipped away, and she’d been left alone. He blamed work, the demands of a livelihood that depended upon billable hours. She couldn’t help but think that for each hour he was away from his office, his mind continued with the same calculations, each hour spent with their family an hour he could not bill anyone for. Each one a loss, creating a deficit in his imagination. She could see it in the way he glanced at his watch, at the way he hurried, harried, when he should have been enjoying himself. It was almost easier, she thought, to just let him go. Let him live inside that office, inside his briefcase.

  When her father died, it felt like an amputation, a raw wound. Her life had felt severed, into before and after. Everywhere she went she was reminded of her father, the silence left in his wake nearly deafening. She’d gone to Emily Dickinson’s grave alone and sat on the cold hard ground, imagining his voice booming the poetess’s words: This is the hour of lead, remembered if outlived … Though it pained her, she wondered if Peyton would even notice if Ab were
dead. He was already becoming not much more than a ghost.

  * * *

  “Shit,” Marsha cussed.

  Ginny startled awake. Her eyes shot open, worried that they’d hit another animal. Her heart flew to her throat, and she braced herself.

  “What’s the matter?” Ginny asked.

  “I think it’s the radiator,” Marsha said. “The car’s overheating.”

  “What are we going to do?” Ginny asked.

  “Hell if I know.”

  Marsha pulled over, this time off the main road so as not to attract any unwanted “help” from a passing police officer. She popped the hood and started fiddling around. As far as Ginny knew, Marsha had no expertise when it came to automotive repair, but then again, she’d had no idea Marsha knew how to shoot a gun, either. Lucy was fussing, so Ginny got her out of the car; her diaper was heavy again. She’d been changing her in gas station restrooms most of the way so far, but the diaper was soaked; she had to be miserable.

  “Peyton, you stay here, okay? I’m going to change Lucy’s diaper. Come on, sweets,” she said. She grabbed one of the beach towels and made her way down an embankment and behind a large tree to a shady area, where she set Lucy down and spread out the towel. Lucy lay on the beach towel, sucking on her bottle, and Ginny unpinned her, preparing herself for the worst. However, the diaper rash was not nearly so angry, and, thankfully, there was no evidence of the parasites, either. She quickly cleaned her up, powdered her bottom, and put on a fresh diaper. She pulled Lucy onto her lap; she smelled clean and powdery with just a touch of milk, and she could feel Lucy’s heart beating behind her ribs. She was a stranger, this tiny creature, but Ginny felt connected to her, exactly as she had felt connected to Peyton.

  Lucy’s chest rattled a little, and she coughed. Then she pointed up, and through the green leaves of the tree, Ginny followed her gaze to a fat peach hanging from a branch.

  “Moon,” she said.

  “Oh, goodness! Look at that,” Ginny said and reached up. The peach came free easily, and she held it out to Lucy. “It’s a peach.”