It wasn’t just about telling their friends, though; Lucy knew that too. It was about Melissa’s family. When her parents had been fighting, they’d been fighting over her: who would get custody, who had hurt her worse. Now, no one was fighting over her. Her mom was happy with the Minnesota businessman. Her dad had his new wife. Melissa was just one of their kids now, a picky teenager worried about her diet.
Lucy pulled herself to her feet. She found Melissa’s keys and her own bag of unacceptable clothes, including the satin pajamas she’d bought to tantalize Jack. She went down to the car. Outside everything was dead silent, the small Tudor houses stretching along the curve of the street. She could hear the highway a few blocks away, a constant riverlike hum. The windows of the car were fogged. She opened the door and climbed into the driver’s side, then slid the key into the ignition.
She thought about what would happen if she turned the key, if she pulled out into the street, if she drove all the way to Cincinnati and then took the bus home. She thought about what that would mean for Melissa. Melissa would have to go to California. There could be no backing out, after she’d made all those plans and then bragged about them. Lucy wanted to make her do it. She thought about how things would go for Melissa once she was living in Jack’s ratty bungalow near the beach. Within weeks they’d hate each other. If they lasted, it would be worse. She imagined Melissa with a crying baby on her hip. Meanwhile, Lucy would have graduated from high school and gone on to college. Maybe Melissa would send a postcard from some miserable town out West. Lucy would spread the word, all right. She couldn’t wait to do it.
Then she thought of the girl who’d crashed into her at the skating rink, the girl in the pink tank top who might or might not have been Connie. How Lucy had tried to let the girl know it was okay. How the girl had glared at her and said fuck you. That was what happened when girls treated each other the way those girls had treated Connie. They got to the point where they couldn’t recognize help, where every other girl seemed like an enemy.
Lucy slid over to the passenger seat and opened the glove compartment. Inside, cool and solid, was the gun. She took it in her hand. It made her feel better just to hold it. What strange power, to be sitting there in a car on a quiet street, sleeping neighbors all around, with a gun in her hand and millions of things to shoot. She opened the door and aimed at a light post, at a bush beside the drainpipe of Jack’s house, at the weathervane on the roof. Bang, she whispered. Bang, bang, bang. She put her hand up under her sweater, pressing the gun flat against her belly. She had to remind herself that it was real, a weapon, a thing that could make someone die. She imagined aiming at the ceiling of Jack’s room, the pistol jolt and then plaster falling.
She got out of the car and went up the walk, into the house, and stood in the middle of the living room on the turquoise-rose and gold-scroll carpet. The house was quiet now. Outside, a streetlamp flickered. Squares of yellow light fell through the window and onto the carpet like scattered cards. Lucy climbed the stairs, the gun cocked before her, and edged down the hallway toward the bathroom. The sex noises had stopped. There was just the sound of the shower and of Jack talking. She listened. He was describing a problem he’d been having with his toenails. She could hear Melissa’s faint uh-huh. They both sounded exhausted.
She went into Jack’s room and lay down on the air mattress, holding the gun tight against her chest, beneath her shirt. The porno tape had ended, and the TV screen glowed blue. It had been hours since Lucy had eaten. She wondered what kind of food Jack’s mother kept in the house, if there was cereal or a bagel. She would eat lox and cream cheese when she got home, lots of lox, lots of cream cheese, on an everything bagel with capers. Oh, she was tired. Maybe she could just take a little nap.
But down the hall there was the sound of a door opening and closing, and all the muscles in Lucy’s back went tight. She pulled the covers over herself, keeping one eye half open. Jack came in, a towel around his waist, his hair wet from the shower. He knelt beside Lucy and touched her face. She breathed in through her nose in a way she hoped suggested deep sleep. There was a soft dull thump, his towel hitting the bedroom floor, and he climbed in beside her, naked. He was saying her name, shivering, pressing himself hard against her thighs.
“Wake up,” he said into her hair. “Melissa’s in the shower. It’s our last chance.” He reached under her skirt and wedged a hand between her legs.
She moved away from him, toward the wall, but he followed, trying to move his hand around inside her panties. She jerked away and stood up on the air mattress, bracing herself against the wall. In her other hand, still hidden beneath her shirt, she held the gun.
“Hi,” he said, and gave her a weak smile.
“Get up,” she said. “Now.”
“Why?” he said.
She pulled the gun from beneath her shirt and pointed it at his head.
His smile fell away. He got to his feet. She could see his thighs contracting as if he meant to jump at her, and she lowered the gun until it pointed at his penis. “Don’t make any fast moves,” she said. “I could shoot you accidentally.”
“Please tell me it’s not loaded.”
“It’s loaded,” Lucy said. “I checked, just like you showed me.” She could shoot him right now. She imagined him lying on the ground, his eyes clouding, saying It’s not your fault.
Jack’s mouth opened. He pointed to a pair of shorts hanging off the back of a chair. “Okay if I put those on?” he said, trying to smile again.
“No,” she said. “Just get into the closet.”
He opened the closet door. The closet was crammed with papers, clothes, model cars, letters—hundreds of things. Jack had to climb on top of a crate of laundry in order to fit inside. He crouched in the semi-dark, staring at Lucy. “It’s you I love,” he said. “I made a mistake.”
“Bullshit,” Lucy said.
“I mean it. I told Melissa everything.”
“Right,” Lucy said. “After you fucked her.”
“Please, Lucy. Give me the gun.”
Lucy closed the closet door. She took the desk chair and wedged it underneath the doorknob the way she’d seen it done in movies. It seemed to work; he pushed on the door from inside but it didn’t open. She wedged the chair in even tighter. “Stop pushing,” she said, “or I’ll shoot right through this door.”
He stopped pushing.
“You are one greasy motherfucker,” she told him. “Anyone can see it.”
“But I love you.”
“I’ll shoot your ass off,” she said, pointing the gun at the closet door.
“You know, it’s dark in here, Lucy. And it smells bad.”
“It’s your closet, not mine.”
There was a scream. Melissa stood in the doorway, a towel clutched to her chest.
“Be quiet,” Lucy said, and pointed the gun at her. “Jack’s mom is sleeping.”
“The gun,” she said.
“Get your stuff,” Lucy said. “Hurry up.”
“Oh, shit, Lucy, don’t point that thing at me. I mean it.”
“We’re going home,” Lucy told her. “Get some clothes on.”
“I’m not going home.”
“Yes you are,” Lucy said.
“What are you going to do, shoot me?”
“Is that a dare?”
“This is ridiculous, Lucy.”
“No it isn’t. You’re getting your stuff, and we’re going home.” Lucy picked up Melissa’s bag and threw it at her, trying to remember if she’d ever once before told Melissa what to do. It felt clean and right. “Pack your clothes,” she said. She had to get them out of there, because in another minute she was going to start to freak.
Melissa struggled into her black crocheted dress and high heels. She stuffed the thigh-highs into her overnight bag and looked up at Lucy.
“Stand up,” Lucy said. By this time the gun felt as if it were part of her hand, a magic finger she could point to make things happen. Meliss
a stood. Lucy took her by the arm and led her out into the hall.
“All right, all right,” Melissa said, twisting her arm away from Lucy. “You don’t have to pinch me like that.”
Jack rattled the closet door again. Lucy let him do it. It was time to go now, down the hall, past the door of Jack’s mom’s bedroom and the photographs of Jack as a little kid, and then down the stairs to the scroll-and-rose living room and out the front door and into the yard. All along the street the sad Tudor houses were jaundiced with morning sun. Melissa stumbled down the front walk, the black bag bumping against her hip.
“Come on,” Lucy said, and took her around to the passenger side of the car. Lucy got in on the driver’s side, throwing their clothes into the back seat. When she started the car, the roar of the engine felt sweet and strong. She pulled out and drove toward the highway, cranking DJ Mellow B on WLUX. He was playing Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On?” The gun was in Lucy’s lap, within plain sight of anyone who wanted to look into the car. She tucked it into the waistband of her skirt. Melissa sat huddled against the passenger-side door and stared through the windshield, unblinking.
The sounds of Motown followed them, the Supremes and the Four Tops and the Marvelettes crooning them all the way onto the open highway. After a few miles Melissa reached for a cigarette and lit it, rolling down the window to blow smoke.
“Jack told me about going to see you,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “He told me everything you did.”
Lucy squinted at the road. “He did?”
“Yeah.” She made a short harsh sound in her throat, half laughter, half disgust, and tapped a bit of ash out the window. “He said he didn’t want any secrets between us. But it sounded more like he was bragging about how great you thought he was.”
“He wasn’t so great.”
“God, what an asshole. Who knows who else he would have fucked before we made it to LA?”
“He tried to have sex with me this morning,” Lucy said. “After he took a shower. That’s why I put him in the closet.”
“I’m not surprised,” Melissa said. “He’s got a serious dick problem. He’s got hyperdickia.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “He’s terminal.”
Melissa put an elbow against the window and stared out at the passing rows of corn. “I feel sorry for our parents,” she said. “They have no idea what goes on.”
“At least you’re not running away to California.”
“Not this week.”
Five minutes from Lucy’s neighborhood, they stopped at a gas station and changed into jeans in the restroom. They fixed their makeup in the mirror and brushed their teeth. Lucy extracted the gun from the waistband of her skirt, where it had pressed painfully against her side. She and Melissa wrapped it in a paper towel and buried it in the garbage can. Silent and exhausted, they drove toward Lucy’s house. As they rounded the corner of her street, Lucy could already imagine the way the house would smell when she opened the door: clean and dry, like fresh laundry. She could enter that house and go upstairs. She could take a shower. She could crawl into bed.
When they pulled up in front, her parents were planting flats of marigolds in the flower beds along the driveway. They wore gardening clogs and Michigan visors, and her mother had on her I DIG GARDENING T-shirt. Seeing them made Lucy want to cry with relief. Her mother lifted her trowel and waved.
Lucy touched Melissa’s arm. “Go straight home,” she said.
“I will,” Melissa said. “I’ll call you when I get there.”
Lucy got out of the car and took her bag from the back seat. She slammed the door and watched the long white Cadillac ease away from the curb. After the car had turned the corner, she kissed her mother and father and went upstairs to her room. She threw her overnight bag into the closet. She turned down the covers of her bed, where Jack Jacob had touched her but would never touch her again. Then she went to the bathroom to take a shower, and when she took off her clothes she could still see the outline of the gun, plain as a photograph, against her skin.
What We Save
From the monorail Helena could see topiary cut into the shapes of giraffes and elephants and birds. Her sister Margot pressed her nose against the glass, watching, but their mother didn’t even look out the window. Instead she sat with her chin on her hands, staring into the empty aisle. They shot past a lake full of flamingoes, then threaded their way through what seemed like an endless parking lot. Near the ticket gates, a voice announced that they had reached their final stop. Helena had to touch her mother’s shoulder to bring her back from wherever she’d gone in her mind. They stood and moved toward the monorail doors with all the other families. The doors slid open to admit a blast of thick wet heat, and Helena and her mother and sister stepped out into it.
It was nine o’clock already. By now the Sewalds would be waiting for them at the landscaped Mickey Mouse head, but there was a long line at the ticket counter. As they joined the back of the line, Helena’s mother straightened her wig and looked at her watch, and Margot jumped in place, her brown curls flapping against her neck. Blood thrummed in the backs of Helena’s legs. She wished she were back in the hotel with her father, listening to him prepare his lecture on T-cells. The last thing she felt like doing right now was walking around a theme park with her mother’s high school boyfriend and his family. Her mother had been in love with Brian Sewald and had gone to the prom with him nineteen years earlier. Every year at Christmas they received a postcard from the Sewald family: blond Brian, his wife, and their twin sons, in bathing suits on the beach, with the caption Holiday greetings from Florida!
This past winter, Helena’s mother had studied the postcard for a long moment before putting it up on the refrigerator. In the photo Brian was almost bald. “He used to have such beautiful hair,” she said to Helena.
Helena sat quiet and looked at her mother’s own hair, sparse and feathery as the down of a baby bird.
“It’s always nice to get a postcard,” her mother said, staring out into the frozen garden. In high school, when Brian was failing History, Helena’s mother had tutored him so he could stay on the swim team. His grades improved, he led the team to a state championship, and after dinner one night he asked Helena’s mother to the prom. She tried to hide her surprise, but then she overturned her plate of blackberry pie into the lap of her yellow dress. Helena had seen the dress with its faded blue stain. Her mother kept it in the attic, packed away in mothballs.
Now Brian was an engineering professor at the University of Miami and had a small boat he sailed on the weekends with his family. The postcard showed the two Sewald boys, tanned and wearing turquoise bathing trunks, sitting on the edge of the beached sailboat, holding its rudder and ropes. They were sixteen now, two years older than Helena. She liked their sharp looks—their flat slim muscles and high cheekbones and the near-white hair hanging blunt against their foreheads. One of the boys grinned into the camera, his eyes narrowed by the sun. The other boy’s eyes were shadowed beneath the fall of his hair, and his upper lip was curled. He seemed about to say something mean to his mother, who was crouched in the hollow of the boat. Nora Sewald, a slim brunette in a red tank suit, rested her hands on her sons’ shoulders and laughed. Brian stood in front of the boat, one foot planted before him in the sand, his body angled slightly toward his family as if to say proudly, This is what I’ve done.
By the time they received the Sewalds’ holiday card, the cancer had already moved into Helena’s mother’s liver. There had been talk for a while about a bone marrow transplant, but her doctors had ruled it out; her body was already too weak. Now Helena’s mother took Taxol twice a month, a thin red chemo made from Pacific yew trees. Every other Wednesday she would come home pale and speechless from the hospital and make casseroles, riding out the last few hours before the drugs hit her full-force. Helena and her sister and father would eat the casseroles for the next three days while her mother lay in bed or on the bathroom floor, in alternate states
of retching, fever, and cold. The medical conference in Orlando fell during one of her mother’s chemo-free weeks, and they decided that a family trip—this normal thing, something other families did—would be good for all of them. But a family trip wasn’t supposed to include seeing your high school boyfriend. That should have seemed obvious to everyone, Helena thought, particularly to her father. It frightened her that he hadn’t objected, though she could not have explained why.
They could see the gray spires of Cinderella’s Castle in the distance, a sight that had once filled Helena’s chest with a glad ache. Now, as she watched her mother pull at the collar of her shirt and check her brown shoulder-length wig in a tiny compact mirror, the spires seemed like an obstacle, like mountains they’d have to cross.
“Does it look all right?” her mother asked, frowning into the mirror and pulling a few bangs toward the center of her forehead. “To me it doesn’t look any better than the other ones.”
“It looks natural,” Helena said. “It’s much better than the other ones.” It was the truth, but she hated the wig anyway. Her mother’s hair had been curly and long, a dark red-brown. Her friend Maya Kearn, a painter, had once portrayed her wearing nothing but that hair. Maya was an old college room-mate of her mother’s, disabled in a car crash, and Helena stretched canvases and ran errands for her on the weekends. Six years earlier, Maya had painted Helena’s mother nursing Margot in a red velvet chair. In the painting Helena’s mother was nude, and her hair fell around her body in loose waves.