As soon as Charlotte hung up on Lucy, her whole body began shaking. Lucy had called her. Lucy was coming home. Charlotte wiped her eyes, torn with grief, gratitude, and anger, too. Lucy had demanded that Charlotte pick her up, as if it were a done deal, as if Charlotte would just drop everything to come and get her, make things right the way she always had. Lucy hadn’t asked about Iris, and Charlotte had gotten so agitated she had slammed down the phone, and as soon as she did, she was horrified.
Of course she tried to call back, but she didn’t have the number. She called the operator, who told her there was no listing for Lucy or for William. “Charlotte, please don’t use the office phone for personal calls,” Dr. Bronstein said as he whisked past her, carrying an iguana in both hands. Charlotte hung up the phone. Lucy would call back. And in any case, Charlotte had scribbled down the address. She would go as soon as she could.
She glanced at her watch. She thought about calling Iris and telling her but then decided against it. Better to just bring Lucy home, the prodigal daughter, the happy surprise.
She couldn’t leave early—they were short staffed that day. She had already seen Dr. Bronstein fire someone because he came in half an hour late. He was not a man who tolerated excuses. She couldn’t risk losing her internship, not after her professor had pulled strings for her, not when her grade depended on her doing a good job, not when it was her income. She told herself that it was only a matter of a few hours before she could drive to get Lucy. Lucy could wait just a few more hours.
WHEN THE DAY was over, after watching an operation on a dog who had swallowed six pairs of socks and a whistle, she rushed out and got into the car, glancing at herself if the rearview mirror. Her eyes were red rimmed, her clothes rumpled, and her bangs had grown out now, so that she had to tuck them behind her ears to keep them out of her eyes. She knew she’d be driving all night, but at least it was Friday and she didn’t work weekends, so she’d have time to recuperate. Pennsylvania was the last place she’d ever expected to find her sister. Who would want to live there? She had figured Lucy had run off to San Francisco, seduced by all that Summer of Love stuff. Instead, Lucy was with William. A teacher. What was she thinking? And what was he?
Oh, she remembered him. Everyone at Waltham High used to talk about William. How he was the coolest teacher on the planet. You could learn things that were really important from him, things other teachers wouldn’t tell you. How to make yourself grilled cheese by wrapping the sandwich in aluminum foil and ironing it. How the boys could resist the draft by burning their draft cards. Plus, even though he was old, there was still something sexy about him. The way he strode the corridors, his sleeves pushed up, his hair falling nearly to his collar. The way he looked at you when you asked him a question, moving closer to you, making you feel that there was no one else in the world at that moment but you.
Charlotte had been so thrilled when she had gotten into his advanced class. She sat in the front, like all the other swoony girls. Every day, he wore a tie that was like a painting, a shirt that was drenched in color. Sometimes he wore a purple T-shirt that poked out under his collar. “I’m here to challenge you,” he said, and her heart did a shimmy. One day, when the principal came in to tell William he couldn’t show a film on the war, Charlotte had blurted out, “Why not? Isn’t there such a thing as free speech?” The principal had stopped talking and turned to her. “Your name is?” he said.
“Charlotte Gold.”
“I see,” he said. He walked out without answering her, but Charlotte had felt William looking at her, and when she looked up, he was smiling at her. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the class, “a shining example from Miss Charlotte Gold of civil disobedience and free speech.” Charlotte’s cheeks flushed. She was so happy she couldn’t even concentrate on the movie he showed.
After that, William made a point to talk to her either before or after class. She liked that, at first. He wanted to know what she was reading, what movies she liked. He agreed with her that Truffaut was a master of French New Wave cinema, that Simon and Garfunkel were poets as well as songwriters. He gave her a list of other films she should see, Godard and Bresson, and music she should listen to, especially jazz.
She definitely had a crush on him. She saw him at the supermarket buying ice cream and she was too nervous to go talk to him. She spotted him coming out of the movies, but she was rooted in place. Whenever he appeared, she weakened with desire. She told no one how she felt, but in class she’d daydream about how it would feel to walk up to him and kiss him. How his hand might feel on her waist, her breast.
She was a junior then and terrified about the SATs. She had to do well in order to get into college, to get a scholarship. She was sure William would help her; maybe he’d sit with her after class and go over those tricky analogies. She imagined the two of them, their heads tipped together. She could bring in a thermos of cocoa. Or coffee—that would be more adult.
But when she went to ask him, he just gave her a mild smile. “Why do you want help with analogies?”
“Well, not just analogies. I want to learn more vocabulary, too. And I think my writing could use some work.”
“You get your vocabulary from reading. Just read more. You want to learn to write great essays? Read them.”
“But I could use some help. Analogies are hard.”
“That’s the trouble with our educational system. When are you ever going to need to know how to do an analogy in life? Do you think anyone is ever going to come up to you and say, Book is to school as needle is to what?”
“The SAT will,” she said, and he scoffed. “So that’s it,” he said. “The SAT. I don’t believe in the SAT, Charlotte. How does that tell how smart a student is? How well he or she will do in the world? I’m surprised at you.”
Because it does matter, she thought, because how can I make it in the world if I can’t get into college? But he was fired up now, waving his hands as he talked, and while she used to love that, now it made her feel as if she were standing on the edge of the building, two stories up, with no railing, and he was about to give her a push. She said nothing, but she was angry and more than a little disappointed. He didn’t seem so cute to her anymore, and her desire began to fade.
She ended up buying a vocabulary book, What You Need to Know for the SATs, and began studying nights on her own. When she realized how much of it he wasn’t teaching, she studied harder, assigning herself five pages a night, and then six, staying up until she was bleary-eyed.
She still sat in the front row of William’s class, but he didn’t look at her anymore. One day, when they were talking about the changes that went on when books became films, Charlotte raised her hand because she wanted to talk about how disappointed she had been in the film of Jane Eyre. He looked past her. She turned around to see what he was looking at, who he would call on ahead of her. No one else had their hand up except for her, and he was ignoring her. She stretched her hand up higher. The other kids in the class stared at her.
She left his class unsettled, but when it happened the next day, she went to the office and requested a transfer into the other accelerated English class, because this one wasn’t rigorous enough for her. Because she was an honors student, they made the change. The first day she was in her new class, when they had to pull out their vocabulary books, she was the only one who didn’t groan. She looked at the list of all those words in her Manter Hall book as if she were a starving person reading an all-you-can-eat menu.
A week after she left the class, she saw William standing in the hallway. She had never told him she was leaving, she had just vanished one day, and she figured he would get the paperwork. He barely looked at her. She walked right past him without saying a word.
A year later, Lucy was in one of his classes, but Lucy never talked about him. But then, she never talked about anything to Charlotte anymore. Still, how was it possible Charlotte didn’t know that William and Lucy were together? How did Charlotte know so little about her sister? When had they stopped telling each other everything? Was Lucy having sex already? She must be—William was an adult. But had Charlotte known, she would have told Iris, the principal, the police. And Lucy would have known that she would have. Charlotte exhaled. Of course, that’s why Lucy stopped confiding in her.
CHARLOTTE STOPPED AT a pay phone to check in on Iris. She wouldn’t tell her about going to get Lucy, not until she knew how things were going to play out.
Iris talked about the tuna casserole for lunch, about the two women who didn’t think she knew Yiddish and called her a shiksa until Iris said in Yiddish that she wasn’t.
“So you became friends then?” Charlotte said hopefully.
“Not this time,” Iris said.
“It will get better,” Charlotte said. “Maybe you can go to one of the activities today. Or maybe someone new and unexpected will show up. Sooner than you think, too.”
“Well, that would be so nice,” Iris said.
Charlotte hung up the phone, shaking her head. Wait until Iris saw Lucy. Charlotte felt her eyes pooling with tears. She’d missed her, her crazy diamond of a baby sister. Lucy was an irresponsible pain in the ass, but her absence could still make Charlotte ache like nothing else.
SHE DROVE FOR HOURS. The city gave way to country. The light to dusk. She stopped at a rest area and slept in the car. Just for an hour, she told herself, but when she woke up it was already dawn. Well, Lucy was probably sleeping, too.
Tioga. What a name for a town, she thought, and what a place, so deep in the woods she felt like looking over her shoulder. Still, she was surprised how pretty it was. The trees were lush, the grass was this vivid green. You could hear birds, and she even saw a deer leaping across the road. She had written out directions to the town, but she had no real idea how to get to Lucy’s, so she stopped at a gas station to ask, scribbling it all down on a piece of paper.
Every once in a while, she would see a farmhouse. A couple sitting on the porch. Children riding their bikes. It all made her think of how she had felt Iris’s house was home, how some days she couldn’t wait to run through the door and see Iris. Charlotte hadn’t thought she would care when the house was sold, but the day she had moved Iris out, she had stood on the edge of the lawn, biting back tears.
Maybe Lucy would move in with her when they got back. How strange and wonderful that would be. She’d be the big sister again, helping Lucy get back into school. And thank God she had that little sublet, and some money and a job. Maybe she could work something out so she could rent something bigger during the next year. Maybe Lucy could get a part-time job to keep herself out of trouble. Maybe Lucy could help Iris out, do some of her shopping. Or they could do it together.
Charlotte turned down a dirt road. There were no houses here, no people. How could Lucy be living here? She wondered whether Lucy would look different. God, she’d better not see William. Just thinking about him made her want to throttle him, to see him behind bars. The only reason she hadn’t called the cops yet was that she wanted to come get Lucy herself.
There it was. A little brown clapboard that needed a paint job, surrounded by trees. There were chickens running around a pen, scratching at the dirt, a big red rooster strutting around them. Imagine. Lucy had chickens? The grass wasn’t really cut, and there were dandelions dotting the lawn, an overgrown hydrangea bush by the front steps.
She glanced at her watch. Six in the morning. A little early, but Lucy had wanted her to come as soon as she could, and here she was. No one answered the bell, so she knocked loudly. “Lucy!” she called, but there was no answer. Charlotte felt a ripple of irritation. She tried the door, and to her surprise it opened.
“Lucy,” she called, “I’m here.” She glanced at her watch. It was a long drive back. Maybe they could stop for dinner. “Lucy.” The house smelled funny. Not mustiness, but something else. She rounded the corner from the foyer, and then she saw her.
Lucy was sprawled in a pool of blood on the floor, her face turned to the side. There was a dime-size hole in her temple, a bigger chunk punched out from the back of her head. Her skin was blueish and blotchy on her face, her bare arms, as if she were bruised, and it grew paler farther away from the floor. Her eyes were open, but the whites were gray, glazed over, and her shirt was riding up. There was a ring of what looked like soot burned onto one of her hands.
A lamp was shattered on the floor. A cup and plate were overturned and the cup had rolled to a corner. The upper wall behind her was spattered with blood, darker in color, almost brown, leading to the high ceiling, where it fanned out.
Charlotte started screaming.
HANDS SHAKING, SHE called the operator. She was sobbing so hard the woman on the line had to ask her to repeat herself, but how could Charlotte say again that Lucy was dead? She stammered out the address and, trembling, went outside to wait. The world felt like shards of glass.
Can you come get me? That’s what Lucy had said. I’m leaving him. Come get me. Come get me. Lucy had been in trouble and Charlotte hadn’t gotten there fast enough to save her sister. Charlotte jerked to her knees, vomiting onto the ground. She fell back against the porch, dizzy, wiping her mouth. Had William done this? And where was he? And what if he hadn’t done this? What if he didn’t even know? And if he hadn’t done this, who had? And why?
She heard sirens, and two police cruisers pulled up. She waited for the cops to get out, three of them, older, puffy faced. She saw how they had their hands on their holsters, how they were watching her. “I’m Charlotte—I called—” she blurted out. “My sister was shot!”
“Let’s slow down here. Who are you?”
“I called, I told you. I’m her sister—Charlotte Gold.” She looked toward the house.
“And she is?”
“Lucy Gold—”
“Where is she?”
“In the living room—”
“Is there anyone else inside?” one cop asked, nodding at the house.
“I don’t think so—but her boyfriend also lives here—”
“Go sit in the cruiser. Ed will stay with you.”
One of the cops drew his gun and went inside. The other headed for the back of the house, his hand on his holster. She sat in the front seat beside Ed, who smelled like cigar smoke and gum. “Who is she?” Ed asked. He wanted to know Lucy’s full name and their relationship, he asked Lucy’s age, and when Charlotte said seventeen, he stopped writing. “Seventeen? What was she doing here?” he asked. She told him how Lucy had run away from Boston but no one knew where or why or with whom, since she’d left only a vague note. How they had filed a missing persons bulletin on her. How Lucy had sent only one postcard, but it was from a vast rural area and made it hard to trace her. And then Lucy had finally called and asked Charlotte to come get her.
“What’s the boyfriend’s name?”
“William Lallo. He was her high school teacher.”
He paused and studied her. “Where does he work?”
“I don’t know.”
Another car pulled up, followed by an ambulance, which made her flinch. Two plainclothes detectives got out and glanced her way before walking into the house.
“When’s the last time you saw Lallo?” Ed asked. He kept asking her questions, all of them simple, but he didn’t seem happy with any of her answers. He kept frowning or shaking his head, and then after a while the door opened again, and one of the detectives came out and walked over to her. “You her sister?” he said, and when she nodded, he said, “Detective Harry Mosser. Could you step out of the car, please?” She got out.
“What did you see?” he asked. He made her describe it. She heard the scratch of his pen on the paper, but she couldn’t see what he was writing.
“What did you do then?”
“I called you.”
He asked the same questions Ed had. He wanted to know when the call from Lucy had come and what time Charlotte had gotten here. Where had she been before, and could she prove it?
Charlotte looked at him as if he were speaking a foreign language she didn’t understand. Her mouth felt full of metal. She looked at the house, and it felt as if her eyes were covered by thorns. “I had to work,” she said. “Call Fur Friends in Waltham. They have Saturday hours. My boss will tell you.”
He raised one brow at the name, but he wrote it down. She heard a noise, and two paramedics came out carrying Lucy’s body, wrapped in a white cloth, paper bags over her hands and feet. Charlotte looked down at her own hands, her fingers knotted so tightly they were white. She wrapped her arms around her body to stop herself from shaking.
“Did you bump into anything in the room?” he asked. She thought of the smashed lamp, the cup rolled into a corner. She shook her head.
“Did you see or hear any cars when you got here?” he asked.
“No cars. No people.”
“What do you know about the box of shells?”
“What shells?” she said.
“There’s a box in the bedroom, in one of the drawers.”
“I didn’t go in the bedroom.”
“Did you see a gun in the house?”
The room flashed in her mind. The cup on its side. The bloody walls. Her sister.
“There was no gun. Maybe he took it with him—”
“What was their relationship like?” the detective asked. “Had she seemed unhappy?”
“I didn’t even know they were together. I hadn’t talked to Lucy for over a year—since they ran off.”
He wanted to know more about William, whether he was violent, whether he ever hit Lucy or raised his voice. “I don’t know anything. But she wanted to leave in a hurry,” Charlotte said.
“Did he have any friends around here? Did your sister? Did she work?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “To all of it. I don’t know.”
“What time did she call?”
Charlotte remembered how she had felt, called to the phone at work. “I came as soon as I could.” But was that really true? She hadn’t even tried to ask Dr. Bronstein whether she could leave early.
He wrote something down. Someone came out of the house. Another car arrived, and a man jumped out with a camera. She heard one of the officers say to him, “Look, I’ll give you something later. I can’t talk to you now. We’ll get to you when we get to you.”
“Is that a reporter?”
Harry shrugged. “Small town. There’s always someone whose job is just to sit listening to the police radio. You might want to get out of here before they realize who you are.”
Charlotte felt her legs turning to water, her air siphoning from her. As she fell, she grabbed onto the jacket of the detective. A button popped loose in her hand, and her fingers curled around it. He scooped her up by her elbows. “I’ve got you,” he said, and for the first time his voice was sympathetic.
“We’ll call the vet’s office, corroborate your story,” he said. “We’ll look for this guy. Stick around town until we tell you otherwise. You have a place to stay?”
She shook her head, and he mentioned a hotel, and then he nodded toward the guy with the camera, the flash of his camera. “Do us all a favor and don’t talk to the press.”
THAT NIGHT, CHARLOTTE got a cheap room in the hotel. She knew she had to tell Iris now. She had wanted to surprise her with news of Lucy’s return. Instead, all she could tell her was this. How would she even find the words? She glanced at her watch. Ten at night. Iris might be asleep. But Charlotte couldn’t put this off. She reached for the phone, took a breath, and dialed.
“Hello?” Iris’s voice was full of sleep, and Charlotte began crying again.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” Iris said.
Charlotte wished that she could rest her head against Iris’s. She wished Iris would hold her and rock her the way she sometimes had when Charlotte was little. She wanted Iris to stroke her hair, to tell her everything was going to be all right. She drew herself up.
“Lucy—” Her voice cracked. “Lucy—” She swallowed. “I’m in Pennsylvania.”
“What about Lucy? And you’re in Pennsylvania? Why?”
She tried to keep it as spare as possible, but she felt as if she were standing outside herself, listening to this other person explaining something so horrific that it couldn’t possibly be true. As soon as she said that Lucy was dead, Iris began to scream. Charlotte held the receiver away from her. “Lucy! My Lucy!” Iris cried. “What kind of person would do this? What kind of monster?” Charlotte shuddered.
“Why didn’t you tell me she had called? Why didn’t you tell me you were going down there? Did you know she was with that man?” Iris shouted.
Charlotte looked out her window, across the parking lot. There wasn’t a person in sight. The road was silent and empty. “I was going to bring her home today,” she said.
“Why didn’t she call me?” Iris wept. “Why didn’t she let me know she was all right?”
“She did call you. At the Waltham house, but that line was disconnected.”
“Thank God she found you!”
Charlotte explained that the police wanted her to stay in town, that she’d call Iris in the morning. She’d tell her what the police said, what new information there was. “My poor baby,” Iris said. “My poor Lucy.”
“I love you,” Charlotte said, but Iris was sobbing so hard Charlotte couldn’t tell whether Iris had heard her.
“I’m coming down there,” Iris said. “I need to be there with you, with Lucy—I’ll figure out a way to come.”
“No, no, please—stay where you are. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Charlotte said. “I promise.” She hung up the phone and stared out at the sky and thought of all the ways she would never be all right.
IN THE MORNING, Charlotte called her boss and told him what had happened, digging her fingers into her thigh so she wouldn’t sob. She heard the silence on the line, and then he cleared his throat.
“You take as long as you need,” he said, and Charlotte started to cry.
She called Iris to tell her that she’d call her later that evening. “I’ll be here,” Iris told her. When Charlotte hung up, she drove to the police station. She hadn’t slept and she was in the same clothes, her T-shirt and jeans. The world seemed to have changed, the air felt rough against her skin. Colors seemed bleached. She didn’t see many people, but the ones she spotted, driving, walking, seemed to be sleepwalking, staring into space, their movements robotic.
She walked into the station and saw Harry talking to two officers. She could tell by the way he was looking at her, his head tilted as if he was listening for something, waiting for her, that something had happened.
“The bullet matched the rest of them in Lallo’s drawer,” he said.
She braced a hand along his desk. Her legs were like shoelaces. She thought of the first day she had walked into William’s class, the way he had smiled at her. She remembered how all the girls scribbled his name on their notebooks. “Where is he?” Her mouth dried. Her hands shook. She wanted to claw him apart with her hands.
“Sit down,” the detective told her. She didn’t move. “Sit,” he ordered, pointing to a wood bench, and then she did.
“We found Lallo’s car parked by the Ben Franklin Bridge near Philly. The keys in it. There was blood on the seat, a match for Lucy’s. And a different blood type, same as the type we found listed on a blood donor card in Lallo’s house.”
She stared at him, waiting.
“A couple was on the bridge last night, looking at the water. They saw a man standing on the edge of the bridge. The girl yelled to him to be careful, and then she said they heard a splash. The description they gave matches.”
“They found him?”
He shook his head. “It’s the Delaware River. It feeds into the ocean. We’re not going to find anything.”
Charlotte thought she was crying. She was sure of it because of the way her chest was heaving, the way her air seemed funneled into a tight band. But when she lifted up her hand, her cheeks were dry.
“What happens now?”
“Without the body, we still have to keep the case open. Maybe there was an accomplice. Maybe someone else did it, and Lallo was so upset about it that he jumped.”
Charlotte’s whole body began to shake. “You know someone else didn’t do it.”
“The Boston police contacted his old school. They’re talking to his mother. They’ll watch her house, her phone records for a while.”
“His mother?” Charlotte couldn’t picture William having a mother.
“She’s by herself in a house in Belmont. His father passed away years ago.”
“What about his things?”
“What things? You saw the place. There was just about nothing there. And frankly, sometimes it’s easier for family just not to come look.”
“I want my sister’s things.”
“You can go get them. The scene’s been processed.” He handed her a card from a local funeral home. She stared at it. Brown and Sons.
“We’re releasing your sister’s body from the morgue. You’ll want to call them.” He hesitated. “You may want to wait until someone’s cleaned the place. Your sister’s name wasn’t on the lease, so you aren’t responsible for that. But Lallo’s name was. Misspelled, too. His mother will have to call a special cleaning service to take care of it. Sometimes funeral homes can send someone. Sometimes local butchers do it.”
Charlotte looked at him, stunned. She tried to imagine a cleaning service washing away her sister’s blood, handling her clothes, her books, the things she had loved. None of this would have happened if she had gotten there earlier. Her boss had been kind when she called him. Why hadn’t she thought to tell him the truth when Lucy first called? Why hadn’t she put her sister first? Lucy was murdered, and she had had a hand in it. “No, I’ll do it,” she said.
“You? Are you sure?” When she nodded, he sighed and put his hands in his pockets. “It’s a nasty business. You want to think twice about this. It’s not your responsibility.”
“Yes, it is.”
She had heard about Sharon Tate’s father cleaning up Cielo Drive after the Manson murders. She thought of how people used to wash the bodies of their dead, hand-sewing them into shrouds. “I want to do it myself,” she said.
He shrugged and then reached for a sheet of paper and drew a little map. “Make sure you wear gloves,” he said. “Get the really thick kind. And get lots of bleach.” He handed the paper to her, and she saw the store, the arrows pointing her there. “Thrift-T-Mart. They’ll have what you need,” he told her. “Mops, pails. The works.” Then he handed her his card and told her that if anything occurred to her, any new information, she should call him. “If we find anything out, we’ll call you,” he said. “And if you change your mind about the cleaning, no one will think less of you.”
When Charlotte left the station, it was hot out again, the sun nearly blinding. She turned the funeral home card over in her hand. She tried to think what to do, but her mind was roiling. Lucy would never want to be buried. Neither of them had ever even been to the cemetery where their parents were. “It won’t be them in the ground,” Lucy had said, but Charlotte knew it was because Lucy was afraid. Charlotte would cremate her sister and keep the ashes until she figured out what to do with them.
She got into the car and went to the supermarket. Muzak was playing “Grazing in the Grass.” A woman was bopping as she wheeled her cart, tapping her manicured fingernails on the handle. Families were wandering around. A couple was smooching by the ice cream. Charlotte wanted to shake all of them. She shoved items into her cart, everything the detective had told her to buy: Bleach, sponges, rubber gloves, a bucket, and a mop. A box of heavy-duty trash bags. A face mask. She also found a package of T-shirts and underwear, which would get her through a few days, and a pair of black sweatpants. When she got to the checkout, the girl, wearing a brown smock, smiled ruefully. “Spring cleaning, huh?” she said. The cashier’s face was open and friendly when Charlotte handed over her credit card, the one Iris had insisted she have “for emergencies.” She gave Charlotte the once-over. “You painting?” the girl said.
“No,” Charlotte said.
The girl looked at her funny, then kept quiet while ringing up Charlotte’s remaining items.
When she got to the house, the crime tape was gone. The chickens screeched, as if they knew what had happened. What was she supposed to do with them? She hadn’t seen any neighbors for miles around and she couldn’t just let them go free.
She stood outside and tried to take a step forward, but she couldn’t breathe. The pounding in her head grew louder. The house seemed farther and farther away. She never thought of turning around, getting back in her car, and letting William’s mother take care of all of this.
She inched her way up the stairs, and the screaming of the chickens seemed to fill her head, and then she pushed open the door and she was inside.
The house looked ransacked. Every drawer was open, contents scattered everywhere. Muddy boot prints crisscrossed the floor. Lucy’s body was gone, but her blood was still there, pooled and sticky, and when Charlotte looked at it she felt her stomach rising. She walked through the house. All the clothes from the closet were flung on the floor, the drawers were open, the sheets pulled back. Folders were spread across the floor, containing bills, it looked like, receipts, papers. In the kitchen, the cops had even emptied a box of cereal, as if they expected something might be hidden, leaving the whole mess on the table. The ants had already found it.
She started in the living room. She put on the mask, the protective glasses so that the bleach wouldn’t sting her eyes, and the gloves. Shaking, she mixed bleach in water and began to scrub the floor, pressing down, breathing hard and fast. She would have cleaned a thousand houses like this if it would bring Lucy back. Death was too easy for a fucking scumbag like him, slipping under the water, not having to face what he did. She wanted him in jail, stripped of everything, afraid for his life. She wanted him never paroled. Never forgiven.
Just as she would never forgive herself.
Blood had seeped into the wood, into the joints, but she got it out of the surface, taking away the finish, leaving a lighter area that looked like a map. The bleach freckled her jeans white.
The walls were the hardest, spattered with blood. Some of it was still wet, and that came off easily, but a lot of it was now rusty and hard. She scrubbed with a brush, but the blood didn’t want to come out. She took a kitchen knife to the dried blood and scraped. The trick was not to think about what you were doing, to simply do it.
By the time she had finished, it was dark, only a few fingers of light ascending on the floor. She had gone through three packages of garbage bags and four pairs of gloves. She still had to go through Lucy’s things. She moved automatically from room to room. This is where her sister had lived. This is where Lucy had been alive. She could be breathing in the same air Lucy had breathed.
Whatever she touched felt like a burning ember. When she got to the bedroom, she found a contract for William to teach at some school, the name Billy Lalo on it.
She didn’t start crying again until she saw Lucy’s clothes, thrown on the floor. Lucy used to wear a riot of color. Tiny tube tops and skirts so short she could grip the hems with her fingers, but here were faded, drab T-shirts and jeans. There were William’s clothes, his jackets, his shirts. There, in the corner, was a paisley minidress. She pulled it out and put it to her face. This had been Lucy’s “grown up” dress in Boston, the thing she wore when Iris took them out to a nice place for dinner. She pulled the dress off the hanger and threw it over her arm, and then she noticed her own red silk scarf, hanging on a hook.
She had spent a whole month’s allowance on this, buying it at Truc in Harvard Square. It had been her lucky scarf, and she had worn it every day, until one day she reached for it and it was gone. Frantic, she had combed her whole room for it, had gone everywhere in school where she might have left it, but it had never turned up.
But Lucy had taken it, something of Charlotte’s. Hands trembling, she wrapped the scarf around her shoulders.
She left the room and was heading around to the front again when she noticed something blue poking out under a shelf, as if someone had thrown it there. She pulled out a notebook and opened it and saw her sister’s scrawl. I have to leave. Lucy had written this, maybe in this room. It was another part of her sister that was here. She found a spot on the floor that wasn’t wet and slid down.
She opened the journal to the first page, dated two weeks before Lucy had vanished, and as soon as she saw the tiny heart Lucy had drawn in the margins, Charlotte felt sick.
I am the only one up, as usual. It’s just my same crummy room, but tonight it feels like everything is made of silver. One hour ago, William kissed my eyelids and told me we see the world through each other’s eyes. We are the same person. Falling in love is like being cotton candy, pink, light, and sweet. Sometimes when I’m with him, I feel sad, because Iris never had this. I know she didn’t or her mouth couldn’t circle shut like a change purse and she wouldn’t always be worried about the future instead of today. And Charlotte, does she ever even have a date? Everything with her is tangled up with grades, her school, her future, like life is a blank check and she can fill in any number she wants. If I tried to tell either of them about this, they wouldn’t get it at all. Oh, I love them. But I’m talking about Love, with a capital L, how I feel just when I say his name in my head.
Charlotte turned the page, and there was a scribbled list, like the ones Charlotte herself made all the time. Me in two years:
I will have a job I love. (A writer!)
I will be with a person I love. (William!)
I will be living in a place I love. (A big city!)
I will love myself (finally).
All that night, Charlotte read Lucy’s journal, her sister’s life rising from the page, her voice sounding on Charlotte’s tongue as if she herself were saying the words. The journal was jubilant in the beginning, all about how Lucy and William had fallen in love, how they were going to go and make their own brave new world. Lucy had been happy, really happy, at least for a while. He’s my oxygen. I breathe in and he breathes out.
But then, halfway in, the writing began to change. The funny drawings Lucy made in the margins stopped altogether. Charlotte read about how Lucy began to hide her journal in a small space behind a bookshelf, how the freedom they were supposed to have in Pennsylvania had ended up being so isolating she thought she was losing her mind. She wrote about the empty, dark skies, about her fear of the Manson girls, and then she wrote about William’s teaching her to shoot, making her do it. I’m not in love with him anymore. I don’t know what he wants from me. Charlotte turned a page, chilled, and then a new name popped up.
Patrick really listens. He’s so kind. I think I love him. Who was Patrick? She turned another page, and Lucy wrote about how she worked at his farm stand, keeping it secret from William. How she had finally told Patrick everything because she knew he’d help her. I slept with him. Sort of. Charlotte suddenly felt dizzy. What did that mean? How did you sort of sleep with someone? He’s so beautiful that it hurts.
It was still all so confusing. She had thought her sister was living this wild and happy life, and instead she was miserable and alone and scared and in love with some farmer. She had thought Lucy wasn’t really good at anything, and maybe she had even thought her sister wasn’t that smart. She had worried over her, but the writing in the journal was raw and touching.
Wednesday, May 18. William and I eat the same thing just about every night, but Patrick serves me a dazzle of flavors. Cheese with peppercorns and mustard in it. And homemade rhubarb ice cream. “Cooking for guests is supposed to be a blessing,” he says, and all I can think about is how William never wants people over, not for dinner or any other reason, how he’d probably put me under a veil if he could. The first time I ate a piece of chocolate cake at Patrick’s, I thought, William will know. William says he can tell who eats sugar just by their skin tone or the smell of their breath. “Live a little,” Patrick said, giving me a plate, and I lived a lot because I had seconds, and when I got home, William didn’t notice a thing. But Patrick has a secret, too. I found a photo of this woman in his house. A beautiful young woman in a white dress laughing at the camera, but he wouldn’t tell me about her, and that was okay because God knows there are things I don’t talk about either. So we both have secrets. So we are both the same, and isn’t that what binds people together? Yesterday, Patrick had a motorcycle he borrowed from a friend and I asked if I could have a ride. He said yes. He always says yes to me. I sat behind him, my hands around his waist, the wind whipping against us, the smell of exhaust and oil and the leather of his jacket so strong I leaned forward and put my mouth to it like I’m kissing him through it and all I could think was, Keep going. Don’t stop. Take me into a whole other world with you and we will never look back.
Charlotte blinked hard, the words swimming on the page. The police hadn’t mentioned Patrick to her. Had William found out, and was that why he had killed her? She took a spare piece of paper from the table beside the couch and wrote down, Patrick. She’d ask the police tomorrow about him. She riffled the pages back to the beginning to see if there was more.
Monday, June 15. It was so hot and we have no air-conditioning, no fan, nothing but windows, and when we open them, it just lets in the flies and the dust and the mosquitoes. I’m jeweled with itchy bites. I was so miserable that William suggested we go to whatever movie was playing, just so we could sit in the air-conditioning, but it wasn’t enough for me. “Can we go to a lake?” I said, and William grimaced, but I begged him and he finally said all right. We drove, and the lake was big and beautiful, and no one else was there for some reason, but as soon as he got out of the car, William began to act weird. Dragging back. Not even looking at the water. “I’m not going in,” he said. “Then why did we come?” I said, and he said, “For you.” He wouldn’t even get into a bathing suit, wouldn’t even look at the water, how pretty it was, how shining. There I was, stripped down to my bikini, and William was in a T-shirt and shorts and sneakers, sitting on the grass, looking worried. “Why don’t you come in and cool off? Why can’t you wade?” I kept asking him and asking him, and he said, “I don’t want to.”
“We don’t have secrets,” I said, even though of course we did, including Patrick, and of course this journal is my biggest secret of all. His face softened when he heard me say that, and he moved closer to me. “All right, I’ll tell you,” he said. He said when he was little, just four, his dad tried to teach him to swim. He didn’t think William needed lessons. He was sure he could do it himself. His father took him to the penny pool on a day when it wasn’t crowded, and William was all excited, all feeling like he was a big boy or something. Plus, he was so proud to be with his big, strapping dad, so surprised to have time with him because his father usually just ignored him. And then his dad lifted him up and carried him to the deep end, William’s legs keeping time to a song he had in his head. He thought his dad would set him down, that maybe he would get to use one of those big inner tubes the pool had, or water wings. But instead, William’s father threw him into the middle of the deep end, into a shock of cold. William went under, his mouth and nose filling with water, everything tasting like chlorine. Every time he came up, gulping at the air, grabbing for something solid that might help him, he saw his father waving his arms. “Swim!” his father shouted to him. “Move your arms! Kick those legs! What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid?” William tried to shout help, he was drowning, help, he was going under, help, but when he opened his mouth, the water flooded in, and he was going under again, deeper and deeper, his feet brushing the bottom. The world went blue and cool, humming around him, narrowing into a cone. Then hands found him. Hands pulled him up. Daddy. He would be mad, but he had saved him. Hands placed him on the cement around the pool, and he looked up, wanting to see that his father wasn’t angry, but instead there was a stranger’s face peering down into his. A man with inky black hair and eyes like raisins, who was pushing on William’s chest, until a flood of water poured out and the full choking feeling was gone. William coughed and sat up, startled that he was breathing air instead of water. “You’re all right then,” the man said, and he got up and walked over to William’s father, who was shaking his head in disgust, and that strange man punched him in the face. “You don’t deserve to have a son,” he said, and he stalked off. William didn’t know what to do, so he sat there, and then his father, one hand cradling his face, looked at him. “Get up,” his father said. “I’m ashamed of you.” And William stood, and they walked to the car, not talking. His father took him home after that, and when his mother asked, “How did it go?” they both said, “Fine.” William’s father grew a black eye the next day, which he told everyone came from walking into a door. He never tried to teach William to swim again or do anything again. That was it. He lost interest. William’s one chance. From that day forward, William was terrified of both his father and the water. He wouldn’t go near either, especially water. Wouldn’t even sit in a bath or a hot tub. Just looking at water bothered him. “It’s a little bit like dying again,” he said to me. And I knew what he meant: I will do this because I want you to be happy.
“You go in,” he said to me. “I’ll watch you.” So I did, swimming out, so that he was a dot in the distance, and I couldn’t help it, I kept thinking, All I have to do is keep swimming and he won’t be able to come after me. He won’t be able to find me. I made my strokes longer. I covered ground. I don’t know why I came back. Maybe because of the way he was standing, pacing on the grass. For a minute he looked like the old William. Like he needed me to save him. Like I was really worth something. I could have kept swimming. I could have swum all the way to another town, found a job and a new life, but instead I felt that tug of love, like a rope around my ankles as if I was a fish, caught on his line. I swam back. I took his arm and I could see he was trembling. “Come on, honey, let’s go home,” I said. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.” I told myself, and then him, that I’d never ask him to take me to water again. I’d never do that to him.
“Well, now that’s a relief,” he said.
And sometimes, too, I told myself: I know his weak spot now. Besides me, I mean.
Charlotte felt something prickling along her spine. William was afraid of water. If he was so terrified, how could he have jumped into the river even if he wanted to die? Why hadn’t he just killed himself with the gun after he murdered Lucy?
She went back to the journal, feeling sicker and sicker. Lucy was biking the roads now, trying to find rescue. Charlotte turned to the last page. I am so lost. She closed the journal and held it to her chest.
There was still so much night left. She needed to get back to the motel. The house was now dark, except for the lamp she had turned on to read, and she began to feel frightened.
She packaged everything up—the rags, the brushes, the mop—and put it into bags. She went into the bathroom and ran the shower as hot as she could and scrubbed her hands, her face. She bent so the water ran over her hair. Then she changed into the clothes she had bought and threw her old ones into another bag. She brought all the bags outside, setting them by the side of the house.
She came back inside. One last time. She left the lamp on, as if her sister might need it. Then she left the house, all the while thinking, Oh, Lucy. I’m so lost, too.