CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Kate cowers stiff-necked in front of the monitor as Lucy’s words and her own imagination drag her down dark halls and sharp corners she’d never known existed. After reading the latest entry, she rams the keyboard tray back under the desk and the wireless mouse tumbles to the floor. Her entire body shudders in the damp, sub-floor air.

She’d spent the night inside an archive of self-loathing, the family having risen and fed themselves. Erik had come down to have her sign tax forms for Taken4Granite. Eyes mostly trained on pixels, she’d grunted through a couple brief conversations.

So now she knows for sure how Lucy feels about her. But the rest? The ugly rest? The abuse, the neglect, the guilt, the cancer? There’s no room for satisfaction here. Little Katie Andirons had been a respite. But in the end, she’d betrayed Lucy too.

Kate rubs her eyes, fingertips digging in harder than they should. It’s nearly ten on a Saturday morning. The family must continue to make do without her. She takes the stairs two at a time, showers, and dresses quickly.

She is out the door and in the minivan when Erik emerges from the garage, wiping grease from a wrench.

THE VEGETABLE AND flower garden on the south lawn of the Gainsborough estate is nearly the size of the home’s footprint. The air is fresh and clear up here beyond the traffic. Kate crosses the grounds and draws a calming breath. She grinds crumbs from her eyes, wondering if she looks as exhausted as she feels.

Lucy has clearly been in the garden for a while for she has passed the kneeling phase and sits cross-legged in the turned black soil, trying to untangle delicate netting. She’s wearing a bill cap, tight T-shirt, and hospital scrubs pants, but also wearing what looks like a black compression sock midway up her left arm and a gardening glove on just that hand.

Lucy pushes back the brim of her cap and squints up. “Well, hey thar, stranger.” She tosses aside the netting with a sigh. “I’m starting to despise cute fuzzy bunnies.” She wipes the side of her face with the back of her wrist. “What’s up?”

Kate searches Lucy’s face for recent signs of torment but Lucy grins, flushed and glistening with perspiration. The mink brown hair at her temples curls in wisps same as it did back in high school when girls’ P.E. played softball—except now a few silvery strands have made inroads.

Lucy stands and shakes dirt from her scrubs. “Something wrong? Is it Jamie?”

“No, I—” Kate had planned a moving speech for a woman standing with razor blades hovering over wrists, not for a woman perfectly contented to be frustrated by rabbits. “What is that? Did you get hurt?”

Lucy’s face goes pale. “Oh! This?” She pulls off the glove, rolls the arm sock down her wrist. “Nah, it just aches sometimes. Are you okay? You look kinda tired.” She cocks her chin to the house. “How about some coffee?”

Kate follows as Lucy crosses the broad lawn and heads toward the back door of the ominous three-story, butter-colored Queen Anne. She breathes in the air of sweat and nitrogen-rich soil emanating from Lucy. Like spring water tastes. And something else, the same intangible scent from the night of the Christmas concert and years before at the First Avenue concert. Like India ink. Earthy. Mossy. Pungent. Nature condensed.

“Oh, yeh?” Lucy starts walking again. “Spilled a whole vial of it in my suitcase a long time ago. Mom’s going bananas trying to get it out of all my stuff. Says the house smells like a hippie den.”

Kate walks a step behind and to Lucy’s side. After all these years, Lucy’s body remains lithe. Her arms and legs are long, her shoulders and hips evenly broad, her short torso slim. The cropped sleeves of the T are mere triangles off her sculpted shoulders. When they were kids, Katie had only seen Lucy completely nude in the daytime from behind; once in the locker room shower, wet hair snaking down the curve of her back in dark tributaries, her buttocks glossy with soap. Her breasts—Are they new? Were they taken from her?—sit high and firm, though there’s no relief of a bra strap under the shirt. Why does it feel so forbidden to simply stop and hug this woman?

Kate straightens her posture, growing self-conscious of her own body, which is—though technically younger and randomly attended to with yoga—something less than a masterpiece by today’s impossible standards.

“I keep forgetting soda’s called pop ’round here.” Lucy wipes hands on her already dirty scrubs and leaves stripes of newer, darker mud on the hips. “And hot dish? All my friends out west call it casserole. Guess my language changed too.” She opens the storm door and the scent of fabric softener whooshes from the house, Springtime Breeze erasing its namesake.

They enter the upward sloping back porch, an all-purpose room off the kitchen. The tumbling sound of a clothes dryer and chamber music leak out from deeper within the house. A black-cherry colored cat basks on the arm of a sagging couch. It melts into Lucy’s touch and shuts its eyes. Next to the couch leans a TV table, topped with tomato seedlings in plastic containers. A battered, tweed guitar case peeks out from under the couch slip.

Lucy hurries through a vigorous hand rinse in an iron washtub basin and shuffles over to a stumpy, retro fridge with a chrome lever handle. She throws an arm over it and gazes in for an agonizing amount of time, as long as Samantha does before Erik yells to “stop air conditioning the house!”

“So how about you? Do you and Erik travel much?” Lucy extracts two cans of Diet Coke Lime and whispers with a pinch of the cheek, “Goes well with Mom’s joy juice.”

Kate smirks, nods. “Oh, just trips to Florida. You know, Orlando.” She cracks the can, takes a sip. A little rum wouldn’t hurt right now, actually. “Okay—I know, I know—Epcot is not France,” she says with a drawl.

Bridget ambles in, eyes aimed over her glasses at Kate and a half-smile pasted on. “Well, I’ve still got that breathing problem.”

“I have, three already. They can’t find anything. Quacks. Lucy’s driving me to Mayo . . .”

Ah, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, every Midwestern baby boomer’s rite of passage. As Bridget chants her litany of ailments, Kate sneaks a glance at Lucy.

Lucy’s eyes slowly cross and it’s all Kate can do to maintain her mask of intense concern for the older Van Buren. Lucy tucks hands in pockets. She rocks back and forth on her track sneakers and, in the melon incandescence of the sun through bamboo window shades, looks about seventeen again. “Mom, we’re gonna sit out front.”

“Uh, no.” Bridget walks between them with her clothesbasket, forcing them to take a step back. “Thank you, Katie. We know you’ve got your own home to attend to.”

Lucy rolls her eyes, thumbs at the door to the kitchen. Kate follows the invisible trajectory. They make their way past the French Country ideal she’d been fantasizing about at the Gonzo Fox. Ooh, check out the ginormous brass and iron stove! Her mouth waters. Oh, the breads she could bake, the roasts, the parties.

And then there’s the dining room, floor-to-ceiling oak paneling and glittering crystal. The table is set for eight with china that speaks nothing of Lucy save for small painted roses, which resemble those on the trellis at the side of the house, the ones she likely pricks her fingers on.

Kate grows dizzy as they walk. The floors are not level. Either that or she’s having an attack of vertigo. In Lucy’s presence, anything is possible.

Beneath its stately veneer, the Gainsborough exudes something un-house-like and unmoored. From the moment Kate had stepped into the back porch, it was as if she’d boarded a vessel. Not because of anything as tacky as sailing décor, no. It was the questing jut of the foundation high on the bluff, the leaded windows shuddering against a swift breeze, this floor creaking beneath her feet. And perhaps, the ghost of a young sailor.

Kate looks down as she passes over a yard-long rectangle of lighter oak. Where the heating grate had been.

“Sorry about Mom.” Lucy walks over to a green velvet settee, picks up the acoustic guitar lying across it, and sets it in its stand by the fireplace. She plucks a letter opener from a nearby writing desk.

“Might as well have.” Lucy sighs. “You know though, I think this venture is really bringing her out of her shell. She’s drinking a lot less. Getting up early, out shopping and chattin’ with the locals.”

“Well, that’s good.” Kate shakes her head. “Every time I see Bridget, I think about the time our parents got together in the principal’s office.”

Lucy halts at the door. “After all this time, that’s all you think about when you see her?”

“Actually, I don’t see her that much.” Kate grips the soft drink can tight enough for the aluminum to pop. “But it was an unforgettable day, you have to admit.”

“I try not to think about it.” Lucy opens the door to the porch all the way and takes in a deep breath of bluff air.

Kate stops at the door with a short gasp. When she’d arrived, she’d gotten out of the minivan, marched up the yard, and hadn’t even thought to look behind herself.

If this home is a ship, here at the high front porch stands the prow. It’s actually set a bit higher than the Leap itself. Across the bluff on the Wisconsin side, farmland stretches for miles, some of the same wheat fields her father had once owned. Clouds above and the river below fling rippling shards of light into her eyes, makes them water, makes her yawn.

“Sorry. Didn’t get much sleep last night.” She looks back into the house and murmurs, “Lucy, this house is a genuine treasure.”

“We’ll see.” Lucy leans against the doorframe, digging at soil beneath her fingernails with the letter opener. She cocks her head toward the parlor. “I tried shabby chic, but Mom thought everything looked a wreck. She bought me The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Running a Bed and Breakfast. Wasn’t that sweet?”

“Well how hard can it be?” Kate gazes at the expanse of it. “I’d love to do this.”

“Yeah?” Lucy taps her chin with the letter opener. “Hey, maybe you can help me with it after the kids graduate. Do you have a plan?”

“It would drive me crazy not to have a plan. How can you not have a plan? Why don’t you go back to school?”

“Katie, you’ve been too old since the day you were born. Stop doing that to yourself. Unless you are physically unable, you go for it. Always.”

“I’m not sure Erik would—Okay, I see your point,” Kate says. “But you’re one to talk. Don’t know if you still care about your coolness level, but um, Sojourn dropped it by a factor of five.” This was a lie, of course, and they both knew it. Any forty-year-old who could hang with school kids and it not look ridiculous was, well, cool enough.

Kate gapes at a pony hair wingback across the room. “Is that—the quilt I made you?”

Lucy digs the letter opener under her thumbnail. “Mom took it off. Says it’s too nice for me to actually use, thought we should display it. You know like a contribution from a local artist.” She raises a hopeful smile.

“All righty.” Lucy shuffles back in, takes the quilt, unfolds it. She capes it over her head and wraps the remainder around her body, looking like a refugee from a children’s fable. She roams the front room covered like that, adjusting picture frames, inching vases one way, then the other. “Maybe you could make us some more for the guest rooms. We’d pay well.”

Bridget walks through with a stack of folded sheets on her way to the grand staircase.

Kate’s cellphone buzzes at her groin. “Oh, crap, that’s probably Erik. Sorta left him in the lurch.” She pulls the phone out and nods. “I should go.”

Kate chews at her lip. Is there time to bring up the blog? The cancer? It would take all day. Why splinter all this good humor? “Oh, I just wanted to see how you were. We hadn’t spoken much since . . .”

“Yeah. That.” Kate rolls eyes. “I feel like there’s a few things we could straighten out. I feel like—”

“Yeah, that sounds great.” Kate sways a little. A breeze blows in from the bluff. Tubular chimes ring out on from the porch, the harmonics playful in their randomness.

Music has forever been an opportunist. It’s always there, ready for an ear, waiting for the energy of release.

Lucy grins—the trickster. As if she knows. Everything. As if she planted the thoughts and was just waiting for them to sprout. She looks Kate up and down. Just like she used to. “I’ll see you around noon.”

“Yep.” Kate rushes down the steep front steps, blood pounding at her temples. “Later.” She feels Lucy’s eyes on her, a tingling down her back, as she crosses the lawn to her car.

ON THE WINDING drive down the bluff, she drums her fingers on the steering wheel, leans into every turn. If that was the old knowing in Lucy’s eyes, it was certainly in her own. Must she swear Samantha to continued secrecy? Making an accomplice of her own daughter is something Anita Funk-Abel would do. But if Erik finds out about the blog, he’s going to tighten the reins. Do I have a fucking bit in my mouth? Still, it’s only a matter of time before everyone finds out. At the very least, she’s got to ask Lucy to stop, to take it down. But how can she? It’s Lucy’s only voice.

Kate yawns deep and long. The van rocks back and forth from switchback to switchback. The backyard hammock is definitely calling.

The stoplight on Main stays red for longer than usual. And Kate pulls away out of habit, engrossed in the remembrance of Lucy standing there grinning goofily beneath her quilt.

But Kate is wrong. The stoplight always stays red this long from the Bluff Road direction, a direction she rarely drives. She only has time to realize the gravity of her mistake and trade the fond smile for a flinch before a broad flash of white t-bones her van. The world slides sideways and then spins like the view from a Tilt-A-Whirl.

My last week at Sojourn was filled with prayer services and dances, social engagements for men and women reborn into a world that would soon be transformed into God’s kingdom.

And what a party it was. The strangest I’d ever been to. And I’ve been to some doozies. Imagine a meeting hall filled with bright fluorescent light, the slap of laughter against aluminum walls, the smell of cheap cologne co-mingling with onion dip. Desperately sober, we faced each other smiling blind and clutched onto our one conjoining happiness: the fact that we had made it without cracking.

And we had made it under the wire, just in time for the rapture. God was sure to come any day. After all, the towers of Babylon had been brought down in New York and a smooth-talking Anti-Christ from Illinois had his sights set on the White House. It was time to release the new believers into the world.

Fly! Fly my pretties, FLY!

Praise Jesus

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