Keeping Lucy (ARC) Page 4

  “What’s this?” he asked, as if she were still about to spring some wonderful surprise on him. Ab lived his life always expecting the best. What a uniquely fortunate state to be in, she thought, trusting that every surprise is a good one.

  He took the papers from her and moved to a small sofa across the room. He sat down and scratched the back of his neck before reading the headline: TRAGEDY AT WILLOWRIDGE.

  His face blanched.

  “I need you to get her out of there,” Ginny said.

  Ab didn’t look up from the papers. His hands were trembling as he rustled through them, one horrifying photo after another. He wasn’t reading them, though, and something about this made her furious. She wanted him to read each word; to know what kind of place Abbott Senior had convinced them to deposit their daughter.

  “Ab,” she said. “You need to fix this. Your father was wrong about this place.”

  He set the papers down and rubbed his temples, then his chin, before looking up at her.

  “My father,” he started, and she felt like she might scream.

  “Is he here? He should see this, too.”

  “No, he had a late lunch meeting with a client. Listen, my father—”

  “Your father,” she said. “Your father is wrong. This was a terrible mistake. It’s been almost two years, Ab. Two years our daughter has been in that horrible place. There are parents, other parents of these children, that are filing a class-action lawsuit. Against the school.”

  He took a deep breath and set the papers down on the end table next to the sofa.

  “I know,” he said softly.

  She felt her body go cold. “You know? How do you know?”

  “I told you. Dad and the state mental health commissioner went to Harvard together. They were both in the Spee. They’ve been friends for thirty years, Gin. But you have to understand, this isn’t the school’s fault. It’s a state-run institution, and it operates on state funding. The funding has been cut . . . and when funding gets cut, conditions can suffer. They’re just understaffed.”

  “You knew about this? You knew that Lucy was living like this? In this cesspool?”

  Ginny felt as though she were lifting out of her body, rising, rising upward toward the ceiling. Air was thin, she could hardly breathe.

  “Ginny,” he said. His voice swam to her, from below, like smoke rising.

  “You knew this,” she said, though it was no longer a question but a horrible, awful truth.

  “Listen,” he said, his eyes gentle. Apologetic. “The reporter, this guy Banks, he has a reputation for creating scandals. It’s all about selling papers. He did a so-called exposé about a local dry-cleaning business being a front for money laundering a few years ago. Turns out his unnamed source was a con man. It ruined an entire family’s livelihood.”

  “There are photos, Ab.”

  “Gin?” he said and moved toward her again, but when he reached out for her, she yanked her arm away.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t touch me.”

  Ab stumbled back as if she’d just shot him.

  “Ginny,” he said. “I’ll talk to Dad. But I still believe we did what was best for her. For us. For our family.”

  Ginny studied Ab’s face for some sort of evidence of the man she’d married, the boy she’d fallen in love with all those years ago. But he was gone. Swallowed whole by this man before her. This callous man. This stranger.

  She turned to the door and walked toward it, shaking her head.

  “Please, Gin. Let’s talk this through. We can take the train home together . . .”

  “Who are you?” She hadn’t meant to say this aloud, but there it was between them: this question she was sure neither of them could answer anymore.

  Four

  Amherst, Massachusetts

  October 1963

  “Who are you?” the boy standing at the circulation desk asked.

  Ginny was confused. The endless stream of Amherst boys who came through the library’s doors rarely, if ever, spoke to her other than to offer a sleepy good morning or ask an anxious question about a book’s availability. Every now and then, she might get an apology for a book being returned after the stamp’s mandate.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your name,” he said. “I’d like to know what it is.”

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s Ginny. For short. Virginia for long.”

  “Well, Virginia for Long, I’m Abbott for Long. But you can call me Ab.” But rather than grabbing his teetering stack of books and turning to go, he continued to stand there, looking at her thoughtfully.

  “Can I help you with something else?” she asked, studying his face for clues. He had the same easy, breezy composure that so many men here had, particularly the affluent upperclassmen. But there was something else: a hint of mischievousness, a certain sparkle in his big brown eyes.

  Without losing her gaze, he plucked something from his shirt pocket and set it down on the counter. At first it looked like a library card, but when she picked it up, she realized what it was.

  Admit One to

  Convocation to Honor

  The President of the United States

  Saturday, October 26, 1963

  Indoor Athletic Field, Amherst College

  “How did you get these?” she exclaimed, losing any sense of occupational propriety.

  “Would you like to go with me, Virginia for Long?” he asked.

  “To see John F. Kennedy?” she said, still in utter disbelief.

  “Well, I understand Kennedy’s still the sitting president.”

  “My girlfriend Marsha and I were planning to go to the groundbreaking,” Ginny said, nodding and studying the ticket. “Try to catch a peek of him there.” The president’s visit had been all that anyone was talking about since the semester started. He was coming to receive an honorary degree and then to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the Frost Library, named after the college’s beloved poet, who had recently passed away. “These tickets are for the actual convocation?”

  He cocked his head and grinned. “Front row and center.”

  “But why me?” she asked, peering around as if there might be another girl he had meant to invite. But unless he’d had his sights set on old Mrs. Beasley, with her cotton candy hair and moth-eaten sweaters, she was the only girl around.

  “I’ve seen you reading Frost, for one,” he offered. In the fall, she often sat outside on the front steps of the library, back against one of the giant columns, reading while she ate her lunch. Had he been spying on her?

  “Well, it’s not exactly as though Frost himself will be there,” she said, and then thought better of her gallows humor. Robert Frost was a minor god here. While poor Emily Dickinson had spent her years in Amherst holed up in the second story of that big yellow house on Main Street, Mr. Frost had spent his tenure teaching here. His name was uttered with the hushed respect usually reserved for Jesus Christ himself.

  Ab lowered his voice and leaned across the counter, whispering conspiratorially. “Also, I think you’re pretty.”

  No one besides her father had ever called her “pretty,” and no one had ever gazed at her with any sort of interest before now.

  So they went together to the convocation, listened as the president spoke of poetry. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, he promised. Afterward, as they walked across the leaf-strewn quad, Ab explained that he was graduating that spring and heading to Harvard to follow in his father’s footsteps.

  “My father wants me to run for office one day,” he said. “Law school is just the first step. Then practice for a few years before running for assistant DA or local government. Mayor, maybe. Or state representative. He has me running for president by the time I’m forty.”

  “Wow,” she said. The presumptuousness of such a dream was what struck her, the assumption that one could simply decide to hold the highest office in the country.

  “One fundamental problem with the plan, though,” he sa
id.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “I hate the law,” he said. He chuckled, but his eyes belied something like fear. As if he’d spoken a secret aloud and wanted to take it back. “Of course, I don’t have much say in the matter.”

  “What would you like to be?” she asked. “When you grow up?”

  “Well, I do like the idea of helping people,” Ab said. “That part of politics appeals to me. But so much of it seems self-serving. I prefer to have my boots on the ground. I’ve got a friend who’s joining up with the IVS. Have you heard of it?”

  Ginny shook her head.

  “International Voluntary Services. A bit like Kennedy’s Peace Corps. Volunteers who go to third-world countries—help the people build houses, get clean water, farm their land.”

  “How noble,” she said.

  Ab shrugged. “How about you? Do you plan to stay in the stacks at the Converse forever?”

  “Well, I’ve always thought it would be nice to be a poet,” she said boldly, realizing she had never articulated this to anyone before, her chicken scratches in her leather-bound journal safely locked away with a tiny tin key.

  He grinned suspiciously, as if he couldn’t tell if she was pulling his leg or speaking in earnest.

  She continued, “You know, like Frost. To live in a little cabin in the woods and sit around thinking big thoughts. Studying the birds and trees.”

  “Yes!” he exclaimed, slapped his thighs, and then leapt to his feet. “To take the road less traveled by,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Though I do hear it’s a hard road to walk alone,” he said.

  “Is it, now?” she asked, feeling her heart quicken.

  “Yes, it’s always a good idea to travel in pairs.”

  She’d fallen in love with Ab in that moment, despite the chasm that existed between their worlds. She was a townie, and he was an Amherst man. She’d grown up in a clapboard house near the railroad tracks, and he’d been raised in a tony suburb of Boston. Her widowed mother had toiled away as a cook in the Amherst dining hall, while his mother played bridge and hosted charity events. But they both loved books, and she later learned they had both suffered a huge loss when they were children; she had lost her father, and he his older brother. They were bonded by those old sorrows and by dreams of a simple, meaningful life. At twenty-two years old, they’d been stupid and hopeful and blind enough to believe this was enough.

  They couldn’t see the future then, of course. They didn’t know that within a month that handsome, hopeful president would be assassinated by a gunman’s bullet. That Ab’s dreams of a life spent in service of others was just that—a dream. They also didn’t know that there would be a whole series of roadblocks on that road less traveled, all of them put up by his father.

  Five

  September 1971

  Abbott. Of course, Abbott was behind all of this. He had proactively convinced Ab that the exposé was a farce. But to what end? To protect the carefully crafted fiction of their perfect family, of his perfect son. At the cost of his granddaughter’s safety. She was livid: at Abbott for his callousness and Ab for his compliance.

  When the train finally arrived at the station in Needham, it was nearly dusk. Ginny grabbed a cab, which dropped her off in front of her house. Peyton and Christopher were in the front yard, Christopher about to pocket Peyton’s newest Hot Wheels car. She paid the cabbie and slammed the door shut.

  “Listen here, you little thief,” she growled at the towheaded child. “That does not belong to you, and if you don’t give it back this minute, I’ll sic Arthur on you.” Arthur, as if on command, barked on the other side of their front door.

  Startled, Christopher threw the tiny car at Peyton and scrambled to his feet, running across their wide front lawn to his own home, and Ginny ushered Peyton inside. Marsha was at the kitchen stove pulling the roast from the oven. The smell of it stung Ginny’s eyes.

  “Can I get a ride with you back to Amherst?” Ginny said. “Tonight?”

  “Of course,” Marsha said.

  Ginny wrapped the roast in foil, fed Arthur, and left Ab a note that she was taking Peyton to Amherst for the long weekend. Told him she needed time to think about everything that had transpired. To see her mother. Marsha would drive them there, and they’d be back by Monday afternoon. She hurriedly packed a small suitcase for herself and one for Peyton, making sure to include his favorite blanket and Brownie, his teddy bear.

  It was the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, the last weekend of the summer. Most traffic on the road was headed in the opposite direction: east toward Boston or south to the Cape. Before Peyton was born, Ginny and Ab often made the journey from Cambridge to Cape Cod, where his family had a rustic little beach house they rarely used. But the last two summers, Ab had spent at least one day of the weekend working. He’d suggested she and Peyton go alone, enjoy the peace and quiet of the quaint cottage with its cedar shakes, climbing roses, wooded yard, and private beach. But Ginny didn’t drive, and the elaborate use of public transportation it would require to get there was daunting. Besides, what sort of family getaway was it without Ab?

  It was eight o’clock, dark out, when they arrived at Marsha’s apartment, one she shared with her younger sister, Melanie, who went to UMass Amherst but worked as a waitress at a local steak house in the summer. She was at the Cape herself, soaking up the last bit of summer before classes started again after the holiday. Ginny would have stayed with her mother, but her duplex apartment was too small for all of them.

  “Peyton can sleep in Melanie’s room,” Marsha said. He stood groggily swaying in the doorway, clutching both blanket and bear. “You take my bed, and I’ll crash on the couch.”

  “I don’t mind the couch,” Ginny said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Marsha said. “My sleep schedule’s all out of whack because of work. On my nights off, I stay up half the night watching TV anyway.”

  After high school graduation, Marsha, like many girls in their class, went to nursing school. After her training, she’d gotten a job at the hospital in Holyoke. Marsha’s dream, however, was to one day save enough money to move to Florida, where her older sister, Theresa, worked as a “mermaid” at a roadside attraction near Tampa. Theresa sent Marsha postcards from Weeki Wachee Springs, which Marsha had pasted over her bed in a collage of fins and tails. Marsha said she figured she could get a job at a retirement home. “Everybody down there’s a hundred years old. If I’ve got to be changing some old lady’s bedpan, I might as well be doing it somewhere with a little bit of sunshine,” she said. Even though they hadn’t lived in the same town together since she and Ab got married, Ginny hated the idea of Marsha leaving Massachusetts. Luckily, this dream—like so many local girls’ dreams—had not yet come to fruition, however, and Marsha was still here.

  Ginny was wondering if she should call home and let Ab know she and Peyton had arrived safely, but the fury of their conversation rekindled. She felt the anger igniting again, burning hot.

  Marsha put her arms around Ginny and squeezed.

  “We’ll figure this out, Gin. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ve got the whole weekend before you need to get Peyton back for school. I’m not on at work again until Monday night, either. Maybe you can reach out to that parent group? I think they published the guy’s name in the paper. The one who’s heading it up? Maybe you can even contact the reporter. I dated a guy who wrote for the Gazette. I can ask him if he knows him?”

  But that night as she tossed and turned in Marsha’s twin bed beneath the mermaids’ tails, she tried to imagine what she would say to the other Willowridge parents, to these mothers and fathers who had been fighting tirelessly for their children while she had been ironing shirts and cooking pot roasts in Dover, pretending she hadn’t abandoned her child two years ago. Hadn’t allowed her husband and her father-in-law to convince her that Lucy was somehow better off with strangers for the rest of her life, regardless of how brief that life
might be.

  The room was hot, an old electric fan spinning the stale air around and around. The buzz of it crept under her skin, pricking at her.

  What would she ask of the reporter, the one who had exposed the school for what it truly was: a prison, a torture chamber? Did you see my child? He would want to know what she looked like, and Ginny didn’t even know. She wouldn’t know her own child if she was standing in front of her.

  The next morning, Ginny woke with a start, drenched in sweat, her nightgown twisted about her legs. She’d been dreaming of the ocean, of being caught in a fishing net. She sat up and flicked on the light, still gasping for air. She was disoriented, expecting when she clicked the light on to see the familiar expanse of her own bed, Ab’s body next to her. She expected the golden fleur-de-lis wallpaper, the heavy gold drapes blocking out the sun. But instead, she found herself tangled up in softly worn daisy-printed sheets, under a faded patchwork quilt, and with nothing hanging in the window but several strings of glass beads. Somewhere a wind chime tinkled.

  It was Friday. She imagined Ab waking to an empty house. Normally, she rose at least an hour before he did during the week, relishing the peace of the sleeping house. The thick shag carpeting made stealth easy. She would pee without flushing the toilet and wait until later to wash her face and brush her teeth. She could navigate the labyrinthine house’s twists and turns without turning a light on.

  She always stopped at Peyton’s door to peek inside, where she invariably found him sprawled out across his bed, flat on his back with his arms and legs spread wide, before making her way down the hall.

  Ab had, as promised, turned the nursery, that tiny room near the top of the stairs, into a study for her. He had ordered a desk from Design Research in Boston as well as the most comfortable chair, brought her an electric typewriter that was being disposed of at his office. He had the walls painted a soft mauve and hired the same man who built Peyton’s tree house to install floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He’d been so proud of himself when he presented the transformed room.