Keeping Lucy Read online

  “I need to get her cooled down,” Ginny said, trying not to panic. She wished desperately that Marsha were here.

  “I’ve got some rubbing alcohol; that’ll cool her off,” Lois said.

  “I think maybe just a cool sponge bath?” Ginny said. Marsha had told her once when Peyton was running hot that it could be dangerous to try to bring a fever down with alcohol. At the hospital, Marsha had seen a little boy go into a coma after his mother tried to reduce his fever with an alcohol rub. It seeped from his skin into his bloodstream and poisoned him. She remembered aching at the thought of that poor mother who had caused so much harm just trying to help her child.

  She carried Lucy up the stairs to the bathroom where she had just taken a steaming bath and filled the tub with cool water. She undressed Lucy carefully and started to lower her into the water. Lucy was shivering violently, so much so, Ginny nearly dropped her. Her eyes were heavy lidded, and for the first time, Ginny started to feel panicked.

  Ginny picked her up, naked, and pressed her body against her own as she made her way back down the stairs. The lights flickered once, and she heard the wind howling at the windows.

  “I think she needs to see a doctor,” she said to Lois, who was rifling through the freezer in the kitchen.

  “I was just looking for some frozen veggies to put on her forehead. That always used to help with my little ones.”

  “She’s really, really sick,” Ginny said, her voice catching in her throat. “Do you know where everyone went? Is there someplace I could call to find Marsha? She’s a nurse. She’ll know what to do.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I have no idea. The closest town is Odessa, but they could have gone anywhere.”

  “Is there a hospital close by?” Ginny asked. “Someplace with an emergency room?”

  Lois nodded quickly. “There’s one in Tampa. That’s the one where I had my kids. It’s about twenty miles from here. But you don’t want to go out in this weather. It’s started to rain again. I really wish Brenda and the others had stayed home, too. This storm’s not over yet.”

  Lucy coughed again, and her whole body convulsed with the effort.

  “It’s okay. I can drive,” Ginny said. “Marsha taught me.”

  Ginny thought about how empowered she’d felt when Marsha let her take the wheel, but that seemed like eons ago. And Marsha had been talking her through every step, plus, there had been clear skies then, not a brewing hurricane.

  “Would you be able to stay here with Peyton?” Ginny asked. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I hate to wake him up. He can sleep down here on the couch. He probably will sleep right through the night.” She wanted nothing more than to stay inside, to crawl into bed with both of her babies, to sleep and sleep and sleep.

  “Of course, sweetheart,” Lois said, but her eyes were filled with concern. “You sure that car of yours is fixed up? Theresa told me you broke down earlier. Maybe you should just wait until the kids get back. Maybe have Tony drive you?”

  It was only ten o’clock; they might be out for hours still.

  “Can you hold her while I put on my shoes?” Ginny asked.

  Outside, the rain was coming down hard again, but the air was remarkably warm. Muggy, even. She navigated her way across the muddy drive to the parked Dart. Lois followed behind her, carrying Lucy. As Ginny climbed into the driver’s seat, Lois put Lucy into the backseat, where she immediately curled up into a ball. Lois covered her with a crocheted afghan, bent over, and gave her a little kiss on the forehead.

  “She’s such a sweet girl,” Lois said, closing the rear door. She came around to the driver’s side, reached in through the open window, and squeezed Ginny’s shoulder. “She’s going to be okay. Just drive slow and safe. You got the house phone number?”

  Ginny nodded. Lois had scratched it on a paper napkin for her along with directions to the hospital.

  She pressed her shaking foot down on the clutch, her other foot on the brake, and turned the key. The car didn’t start right away, and so she tried again, feeling a cry of relief crawl up her throat when the engine finally turned over and sputtered to life. She located the lights and the windshield wipers and turned on both. As the rain started to pour down in sheets, Lois made a dash for the house. Inside the lights flickered again, as though the house were illuminated by a candle.

  Ginny put the car in reverse and slowly released her foot from the brake, the Dart lurching backward. She held her breath and cranked the wheel so that she was facing in the right direction. She depressed the clutch again, put the car in first gear, and repeated the process, until she was rolling forward. She was trembling so hard—cold and wet and terrified, but when she turned to see that Lucy had fallen into a fitful slumber, her chest whistling, her breaths frighteningly shallow, she shifted into second, turned onto the main road, and then gave it gas and said a prayer.

  Thirty-two

  December 1951

  She was ten when her father died.

  They’d been out of milk, and her mother was making Christmas cookies. The entire kitchen table was covered with rows of cooling racks, all her specialties hot out of the oven: oatmeal lace cookies, chocolate crinkles, gingerbread men.

  Ginny was old enough to help now. She was busy at one end of the table decorating the gingerbread men: tiny silver balls for eyes and red cinnamon buttons. Her fingertips were pink from the bleeding candies.

  “Well, you can’t have cookies without milk,” her father said, peering into the refrigerator. “That would be unconscionable!”

  “Oh, dear,” her mother said as she reached into the cupboard. “I’m nearly out of vanilla, too. If you go to the market to get milk, could you pick me up some extract?”

  “Yessirree,” her father said. “Come on, Ginny girl. I need you to drive me to the market.”

  That was what her father always said. He didn’t mean it, of course, it was just his way of inviting her along. She loved to accompany her father—it didn’t matter where they were going. He made even a trip to the gas station an adventure. He was filled with stories. Jam-packed with information and gossip and speculations, too.

  They left her mother busy in the kitchen, loading the next batch of thumbprint cookies into the oven. As she piled into the passenger seat, he wiped off the snow that had accumulated on the windshield. It had been snowing for three days straight. He had spent almost the entire weekend shoveling the drive. He’d also made her her very own snow cave—a sort of makeshift igloo. It had been magnificent. Every kid on the street had wanted to come sit inside its cold walls. Marsha had gotten the idea to charge admission. Ginny had fifty cents in nickels in her pocket—her cut from the entry fees.

  As the sun had started to go down that night, while her mother was busy inside baking, she and her father had climbed up the small hill behind their house. He’d carried the sled, an old Sky Plane, an artifact from his own childhood, and together they had sped through the shimmering darkness, him whooping into the night and her clinging to his rough wool coat. They must have made a dozen trips up and down the hill. By the time they made their way back to the house, her cheeks were on fire and her boots were filled with snow, her ankles raw with cold. She had never felt so blissfully happy. A warm kitchen filled with cookies, the scent of wet wool as their socks dried on the radiator in the kitchen, the soft sounds of the radio playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”

  Now, her father tuned the car radio to the same station, the one that played round-the-clock carols this time of year, and began to sing along, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!”

  They pulled out of the driveway and onto the street, the windshield wipers furiously beating time like the metronome that tick-tocked on top of the small upright piano her mother played.

  Her father reached over and turned the radio off as they approached Emily Dickinson’s home. Softly, he recited: “It sifts from leaden sieves, / It powders all the wood, / It fills with alabaster wool / The wrinkles of the road.”
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  She thought of her mother in the kitchen with her tin sieve, cranking the dry ingredients through, the sifted flour and baking soda and salt becoming snow filling a bowl.

  He slowed as they reached the Dickinson homestead, decorated for the holidays. He put his hand across his breast as he always did, such a reverential gesture, she thought.

  They didn’t speak; they didn’t need to. She understood her father’s silences. And he, hers.

  “What did your mother want again? From the market?” he asked, breaking the silence and beginning to turn back onto the main road. He was looking at her, grinning.

  But before she could remind him of the milk, the vanilla, there was the terrible sound of brakes squealing and ice breaking and glass, all at once, accompanied by the surprised expression on her father’s face when he realized what was happening.

  The snowplow slammed directly into the driver’s-side door. In quiet disbelief and the strange place before the horror set in, she recalled looking up at the sky at the snow falling and dreaming it was only flour, sifting down from her mother’s sieve. And she’d looked at that yellow house and wondered if Emily’s ghost had been looking out the window when her father died.

  Thirty-three

  September 1971

  She was terrified, her hands gripping the wheel tightly as she navigated the wet highway. Thankfully, there were no other vehicles on the road except for an occasional eighteen-wheeler. Each time one approached to pass her, she clutched the wheel and held her breath. She was weeping, she realized, but soundlessly.

  Lois had said the hospital was about twenty miles away. It was only ten thirty, but the lights in the local businesses were all out. It took only a moment to realize that every building along the road was dark as well. The power must have finally gone out.

  For a moment, as a gust of wind shook the Dart and she had to clutch the wheel even tighter, she thought that maybe this was crazy. Maybe she should just turn around and go back, wait until Marsha and the others got home. Wait until the rain stopped. But when she reached into the backseat and touched Lucy’s head, it was even hotter than it had been before, and Ginny felt like she might vomit. Her body was so tense, she could barely breathe.

  Maybe Ab was right. Maybe they all were right. She wasn’t equipped to care for this child. This poor little girl. Lucy had been perfectly fine less than a day ago, and now her body was aflame. If Ginny had functioning maternal instincts toward her, wouldn’t she have intuited that something was wrong?

  The rain slowed for a moment, allowing her to stop holding the wheel so tightly. She saw a sign for Tampa, only fifteen more miles. She adjusted the rearview mirror and turned on the overhead light to check on Lucy, but she hadn’t moved.

  “Lucy,” she said, hoping she’d stir. She reached behind her and touched her leg. “Lucy, baby. It’s okay.”

  The next cough sounded like something inhuman, and Ginny’s foot instinctively pressed the gas pedal. Outside the rain began to come down hard again. The wipers could barely keep up, their sweeping arcs seeming both futile and somehow desperate. Ginny leaned closer to the dash, as though she would be able to see the road ahead better this way.

  On either side of the highway, giant palm trees bent as if in supplication to the wind that rattled and shook the car.

  Another sign. Ten miles to go. She hoped there would be signs for the hospital so she wouldn’t have to pull over to look at Lois’s directions.

  When the lights first appeared in her rearview mirror, she thought it was an ambulance. Red lights and a blaring siren. There must have been an accident. She expected at any moment she would stumble upon the wreckage. But when she pulled over to the shoulder of the road to let the ambulance pass, the vehicle stopped behind her, and her throat began to close.

  The police.

  Had she been speeding? She hardly knew. Her heart rattled in her chest like a can filled with dry beans, and she broke into a sweat. She tried to conjure the explanation that she could give that would get her out of this, send her on her way.

  I have a sick child, she thought. I need to get to the hospital.

  But if she revealed that she had Lucy with her, this stolen child, he could arrest her. Ab had said they hadn’t put out any sort of warrant yet, but could she trust this to be the truth? And what about Abbott Senior? He could have called law enforcement himself.

  No, best to not mention Lucy. Best to apologize, claim ignorance, say that she was so worried about the storm she didn’t realize the speedometer was creeping upward.

  She heard the cruiser door slam shut like a fist to her chest. It was raining so hard now, she knew that if she were to roll her window down, she’d be soaked. Still, she didn’t want to show disrespect, so she reached for the handle and started to roll the window down just enough so when the officer leaned in, she could see his face. His handlebar mustache. Thank God, he didn’t have a beard.

  “Pretty bad night to be out on the road,” he said.

  She nodded and turned to him, smiling weakly.

  “Do you know why I pulled you over, ma’am?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t realize I was speeding. It’s the rain. I was so focused on staying on the road.” Her words tumbled out of her mouth, like a child caught in a lie.

  “You weren’t speeding, ma’am. Actually, if anything, you were going below the limit.”

  “Oh?” she said, surprised.

  “Where are you headed so late?” he asked.

  Now, maybe now she should just tell him she was taking her daughter to the hospital. That the little bundle in the backseat was burning up. No, no. Too dangerous.

  “I’m headed home from a friend’s house,” she said. “Tampa?”

  “Well, can I see your license and registration, sweetheart?” he asked.

  Ginny felt herself grow hot, as though she were the one with the raging fever.

  She had no license. And the car was registered in Massachusetts. And if she were to open the glove box, then he might see the gun.

  “It’s not my car,” she blurted out.

  “Well, honey,” he smirked. “I know that. I pulled you over because your tag belongs to a 1970 Dart. This here’s a ’67. I called it in when I saw you swerving all over the road back there. You want to explain how it is you wound up in a car with a stolen license plate?”

  Ginny felt tears coming to her eyes. Then Lucy coughed. The sound was animalistic, primitive. And the bundle moved.

  His hand flew to grip his holstered gun, and he backed up a few steps.

  “Who’s that in your backseat?”

  Ginny was crying now, her hand over her face. She reached into the backseat and the officer barked, “Keep your hands where I can see them!”

  Her hands flew up in surrender, but Lucy was sitting up now, still coughing. The officer moved to the rear of the car, slowly drawing his gun from his holster. He opened the rear passenger door with his free hand and Ginny held her breath, her heart pounding.

  “Please, no,” she managed.

  At the sight of the man, Lucy let out a howl unlike anything Ginny had heard in her life.

  “She’s afraid!” Ginny pleaded, desperate for him to put his gun down. “She’s just a baby.”

  The officer lowered his gun but lifted his flashlight and shined it into the backseat. Lucy squinted and cried, covering her eyes.

  “Jesus Christ, lady. You should have told me you had a kid back there,” he said, lowering his firearm. “Wait, is there something wrong with her?”

  “Yes,” Ginny said, sucking in a sob. “She’s sick.”

  “No, I mean, she’s … handicapped?”

  Ginny felt rage replace all the fear she’d been feeling. For a moment, she considered reaching over and getting Marsha’s gun from the glove box, of pointing it at him the way he’d just pointed his at her child. For a moment, she wanted to turn all of this around. To be the one in power as he cowered.

  Instead, she felt a certain calm descend u
pon her. She would not lose sight of the goal here. Of what she needed to do.

  “I borrowed the car from a friend. I don’t know anything about stolen plates. I’m on my way to the hospital,” she said. “I think she has pneumonia. She’s burning up. I just need to get her to the hospital.”

  The officer nodded one short nod.

  “Listen,” he said. “I don’t know what your game is, lady. But I’m also a little more concerned about your baby than I am about the rest of that right now. I’ll get you to the hospital in my squad car, but after we get her help, you’re going to have some explaining to do. Deal?”

  Ginny was exhausted. She felt like she’d just run ten miles rather than having driven them.

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Whatever you say, Officer…?”

  “Marley,” he said.

  * * *

  Officer Marley got them situated in the backseat of the cruiser, which smelled heavily of cigarettes. Lucy was still crying, though not wailing like she had been before. But her fever was raging. Ginny could feel the heat all the way through the afghan.

  The rain was still coming down hard, making visibility terrible. But the officer seemed unfazed by the storm. He periodically glanced in the rearview mirror at her, through the mesh that separated them.

  They pulled up in front of the ER, and the officer accompanied her into the brightly lit hospital. Under the glare of the fluorescent lights, it felt as if she’d walked out of a dark theater into the sunlight.

  She sat down with Lucy in an uncomfortable yellow plastic chair in a waiting area while the officer spoke to the women at the front desk. He returned to her and said, “They’ll take her in a couple of minutes. You’re going to need to go give her your information. You got insurance?”

  Ginny nodded. They had Blue Cross at home. Though she had no idea if the insurance would work down here or if it would cover Lucy. She fumbled in her purse and pulled out her insurance card.