Lucy Read online

  Amanda looked out the window. The snow was blowing sideways, impenetrable in the glare of the streetlights. “Wow, this is bad.”

  “Bad?” Lucy thought it was miraculous.

  “It’s a blizzard.”

  “Yes, but it’s beautiful. It makes me think of Dr. Zhivago.”

  “Think again, my little rutabaga. It’s Dr. Chicago.”

  Lucy wasn’t sure what it meant to be in a blizzard until they set out on the walk home from the el station. The snow was already up to her calves, and walking was slow and wearying. She could feel herself getting colder and colder as they went. Her fingers hurt, and her toes had gone numb. It seemed that no matter which way they turned, the wind was directly in her face. The snowflakes were made of steel. About halfway home, Lucy stopped, and Amanda turned on her almost angrily.

  “Don’t stop.”

  “Where are we going? I can’t remember.”

  “Come on!”

  Lucy didn’t understand why she was shouting. “I think I’m going to sit down for a while and rest.”

  Then Amanda began screaming and pulling on her, saying, “No! No, Lucy! Keep moving.”

  “Why?” She felt warm now and knew how good it would be to take a nap.

  Amanda shook her shoulders and looked right into her face. “Because you’ll never get up if you do that. Come on. It’s only a few more blocks.”

  “I’m really okay. I’m warm now. I’m going to take off my coat.”

  Amanda grabbed her lapels and shook her. “No! No, you’re not. Keep moving.”

  Lucy could no longer talk by the time they reached the house. Jenny was getting up to greet them as they opened the door. “Do you have a sleeping bag? Lucy’s got hypothermia.”

  “Oh, my God,” Jenny said. “I knew I should have driven you downtown.”

  As Lucy stared at them, a blank and puzzled expression on her face, her knees buckled. She sat heavily in the front hall without even taking off her coat. Jenny returned a moment later with a sleeping bag. Amanda was undressing, saying, “Get her clothes off. We have to warm her up.”

  Lucy felt like a rag doll as Jenny took off her coat and sweater and stripped her down to long underwear. Amanda stuffed her into the sleeping bag with Jenny’s help. Then Amanda stripped and climbed in with Lucy, saying, “Zip it up. This is going to warm her up. Make something hot to drink.”

  Lucy was laughing.

  “What’s so bleeping funny?”

  “Mom, I wanted to buy you a wedding ring.”

  Amanda held Lucy against her and said, “She did. She wanted to buy you a rug and a watch, too.”

  “God,” Jenny said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I think I like blizzards.”

  “I’m an idiot,” Amanda said. “I should never have taken her out there. Growing up in Africa, Jesus.”

  “Stop biting your cuticles,” Lucy said.

  Amanda laughed. “Come on, wrestling girl. Let’s see you get out of this hold. You’re in the zipperlock now.”

  An hour later they were sitting in front of the fire drinking hot chocolate. Lucy had a big down comforter wrapped around her and they were laughing about it.

  “I knew I should have driven you girls,” Jenny said again. “Thank you, Amanda. For knowing what to do.”

  “Oh, I’ve always been good at this rescue shit,” Amanda said. “I practiced on my mother.”

  Jenny looked confused, but Lucy knew what Amanda was talking about.

  16

  LUCY MET WESTON TEMPLE every afternoon for practice. She liked the boy. The messages she received from him in The Stream were gentle. He didn’t even realize that he was sending them, and she didn’t want to embarrass him by mentioning it. She could tell that he was shy. Lucy had the impression that his father had put him up to wrestling as a way of making more of a man of him. What a silly concept. He was man enough.

  Lucy thought that wrestling was such an odd pursuit: To take someone off his feet. It was all about status. For millions of years people had walked upright. It was one of their special gifts. To take a person down to the ground was so elemental. She understood why the crowds reacted as they did. At the wrestling meets everyone entered The Stream and received the powerful messages that the players sent by way of their actions on the mat. The triumph of one human over another. To turn a person into a beast. And she saw that sports provided a means for those lonely humans to communicate more deeply.

  Wes had taught her how to take someone down, taught her the good positions for gaining points, and the pin. She had to be careful not to hurt him, and she had gradually learned how to conceal her strength. Then she learned to use those skills in the contests with other schools. She would take down a wrestler, and everyone would chant, “Lew-See! Lew-See!” Whenever Lucy received a big gold trophy, Coach Barnacle put it in a vitrine in the school hallway near the gym.

  They traveled in buses and stayed in hotels. Lucy saw the countryside, which was mostly crops, then the yellow stubble of corn, the snow in the winter. Every time they passed through a stretch of forest, she felt a yearning to leap into it and fly through the crowns of the glorious trees.

  By the end of the season, Lucy stood nearly undefeated. No one could explain how she could take down opponents so efficiently. She was interviewed in all the newspapers. When asked where she came by her uncommon agility and strength she attributed it to an active life growing up in the jungle. Someone had started a Jungle Girl blog to track her performance. And one Sunday, a headline in the Chicago Tribune read “Jungle Girl Goes to State.” Jenny winced when she read that, thinking, If only they knew the truth.

  Lucy had come to Jenny in tears after a big meet when she’d brought home the first of her trophies. As Jenny held her, Lucy had said, “It’s not fair. I’m cheating. I had to lose to one of their wrestlers just to make it look like I wasn’t some freak of nature.”

  She was right. But Jenny didn’t know what to do about that. Her status as a star athlete served to hide Lucy in plain sight. Jenny told her that she could quit if she wanted. But Lucy said that she didn’t want to disappoint her team and her coach and especially Wes. Moreover, Lucy’s high-profile participation in sports had gotten Dr. Mayer off her back. No one argues with athletic success.

  One night in winter, they built a fire in the fireplace and Lucy fed the first of the orange notebooks into it. They watched it curl and blacken and vanish into ash. But then Lucy said, “I can’t do it.”

  “But what if someone finds them?”

  “Mom, it’s all I have left. That one photograph and these.”

  “Okay,” Jenny could see how torn Lucy was. And anyway, who would ever know to look for them?

  After the last big meet in Indiana, the wrestling team had checked in to a drab hotel of poured concrete, set at the intersection of two highways that roared and hissed like battling boa constrictors. There had been a big banquet after the matches. Then the players had dispersed, and Wes and Lucy were standing out in the parking lot under a snowy moon. The air was chilled and the moon looked like a glowing boat in a fairy tale. Lucy could tell that Wes was nervous, trying to get something off his chest.

  “What is it, Wes? What do you want to tell me?”

  “I’m sorry, Lucy. I know I’m not supposed to think things like this about a teammate, but you’re just so beautiful.”

  “Why, thank you, Weston. That’s so sweet of you to say. You’re not bad yourself.”

  “Thanks. Okay. I can do this.” He took a deep breath. “Lucy, will you go to the prom with me?”

  “Of course I will. You’re really nice, Wes. Perhaps one day we’ll mate.”

  She saw him flush crimson and recognized her blunder.

  “Oops. My bad. I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I?”

  “It’s okay. I know you meant it in a nice way.”

  On a weekend in April, they celebrated Lucy’s fifteenth birthday with Amanda and a few friends from school. The temperat
ure went up to almost 70 degrees and the wind picked up. The warm air, the saturated colors of the leaves, barely open, and a new kind of smell announced spring with great fanfare. Lucy and the other kids played on the front lawn in shorts.

  Harry came over and made pizza from scratch, and Jenny tossed a salad. Harry and Jenny watched the children, now almost adults, as they laughed and talked with music blaring out the open front windows of the house. Amanda’s boyfriend, Matt, threw a football to Lucy in the bright April air. With simian grace and improbably long arms, he’d launch the ball at the sky. But no matter where he put it, Lucy was there when it fell. Jenny looked at Harry and saw him smiling to himself in some private reverie.

  He shook his head. “How does she do that?” he asked. Then he shouted, “Way to go, Luce the Goose!”

  Lucy turned and beamed at him, then caught another one of Matt’s passes.

  Jenny watched Harry and saw the love for Lucy in his eyes. She thought, I really should tell him. Of all the people in all the world, Harry would completely get it. He and Lucy had bonded. Lucy lit up when Harry turned those eyes on her. If anything, Harry would love Lucy even more once he knew the truth. And the secret would always be safe with him.

  One warm and rainy day in May, Jenny made Lucy a cake with “Happy Mother’s Day, Leda” stenciled on it in icing. It was waiting when Lucy came home from school. She had unexpectedly brought Amanda. Lucy wept and hugged Jenny when she saw the cake.

  “What is it?” Amanda asked. “Who’s Leda?”

  “My mother.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I should let you guys be alone.”

  “No, don’t go,” Lucy said.

  “Have dinner with us,” Jenny said.

  “No. I should probably go be with my mom.” But Jenny and Lucy could tell how sad it had made her. And Jenny thought, I should tell Amanda, too. Or Lucy should. Here was this dear girl, Lucy’s best friend, who didn’t know the most basic thing about her. But then where would it all end? Where would they draw the line? And Jenny saw that their need to keep the secret was cutting them off from the people they loved the most. After Amanda went home, Lucy and Jenny had a quiet dinner and went to bed.

  Yes, the secret had served them well so far. As the school year drew to an end, Jenny felt almost as if she and Lucy were home free. No one knew, and it seemed that there was no way for anyone to find out. Jenny began to feel that they had cast a protective web around themselves that could repel the busybodies and mischief makers of the world.

  Lucy and Amanda had become inseparable. Amanda slept over almost every weekend. Jenny would make a big pot of vegetable soup or a casserole. Sometimes Harry would come over and grill fish and vegetables on the patio. They’d all eat together and then watch a movie or play Scrabble. Amanda was on the high school chess team and was teaching Lucy to play. Sometimes the girls stayed up late playing, and Jenny would go to bed to the sound of them whacking the clock and giggling as they practiced swearing in French. She was feeling domestic for the first time in her life. And she couldn’t imagine how Lucy would have managed without Amanda. Jenny recalled the first time that she found a box of Tampax in Lucy’s bathroom and realized that she’d neglected one of her primary duties in Lucy’s socialization. Thank heaven for Amanda, she thought.

  At the end of the school year in a big auditorium, with mortarboards flying in the air, Jenny heaved a sigh of relief. The girls both graduated with honors. Lucy seemed the picture of normalcy. And that was all that Jenny wanted for her.

  Amanda had helped Lucy study the college catalogs online. Their scores on the entrance exams were good, and by April they’d both been accepted to half a dozen schools. But Lucy wanted to live at home and go to Jenny’s school. She said it so simply: “Mom, I can get the same education anywhere. I mean, look what I learned in the jungle. I want to be with you.”

  17

  THE GIRLS WERE SO EXCITED that they couldn’t settle down. They lay in bed together, talking for hours and enjoying the relief of having finished school. As they were nuzzling each other, trying to find sleep, Amanda buried her face in Lucy’s shoulder and inhaled.

  “You smell so different from other people. It’s nice. Like the forest.”

  “That’s cuz I’m the Jungle Girl.”

  “My friends at school think I’ve dumped them for you.”

  “I’m sorry. You should spend more time with them.”

  “No. I’m fine the way things are. They’re just not as interesting anymore now that I know you. Matt asked me if you and I are lesbians.”

  Lucy felt a thrill go through her at Amanda’s closeness, the way she used to feel playing with her brothers and sisters. But this was deeper, more urgent. She wasn’t sure how to approach the subject with Amanda. “Go to sleep,” Lucy said. And before she could think of what to do next, she had fallen asleep herself.

  In the morning, the girls were yawning as Jenny pulled the car onto the highway. Amanda kept a continuous selection of CDs going into the car stereo, and the girls danced as best they could, rocking in their seats and waving their hands in the air. Even Jenny joined in, swaying from side to side. She yawned and said, “Lucy, we have to get you driving. We could take turns and then I could take a nap.”

  “I got my permit.”

  “Yeah, but I’m afraid to be in the car with you.”

  “And I’m afraid to drive on the highway.”

  “I’ll drive,” Amanda said.”

  “That would be great.”

  Amanda drove and let Jenny doze in the front seat while Lucy slept in back. They woke just south of Duluth. They spent the night in a little town called Superior. In the morning they stopped at the grocery store in Duluth to stock up for the week.

  They drove up the north shore of Lake Superior, passing along the orange basalt lava flows and the gabbro on which the waves crashed and shot twenty feet into the air. An hour later they entered the old forest, and Amanda gazed out the window, saying, “Ooh, this looks like Hansel and Gretel country.” It was Jenny’s graduation present to the girls: A trip to the Boundary Waters. They had wanted Harry to come, but he was on call at the hospital.

  In another hour, Jenny was in the kitchen unpacking groceries, as Lucy rushed through the cabin showing it off to Amanda. “Little house on the prairie,” Amanda said.

  “Mom, can we have this bedroom?”

  “Take whichever one you like, girls.”

  Amanda and Lucy spent the first few days in lazy contentment, while Jenny chopped wood and paddled around the lake. Then in the long late yellow light, Jenny would lounge on the shore reading while Amanda and Lucy splashed in the water or explored the forest. The girls took the canoe out at night while Jenny built a bonfire on the beach. They paddled to the end of the lake beneath a chalky moon that was gathering light for its journey through the night. There in a small lagoon, they caught walleye. Lucy held one in the net and studied it. “I’m sorry, Wally. I’m sorry I have to eat you.”

  “You talk to animals?”

  “Yeah. And they talk to me.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “That if he’d been big enough he’d have eaten me, too. Fish’ll eat anything.”

  The girls found their way back to the cabin by the squirming orange light of the fire. They drew the boat up onto the beach and fried the fish. They ate them with steamed rice and the vegetables that Jenny had roasted while they were out.

  Early one morning Amanda and Lucy put on their backpacks, said goodbye to Jenny, and set out on a hike that would take them to the cliffs at Saganaga Lake five miles to the north. They made their way along the shore of Flour Lake, then turned north up the forest trail, skirting Hungry Jack. As they turned east, the sun was in their eyes, filtering through the dense woods. The scent of pine rose up, and Lucy inhaled it, feeling at one with the forest. She heard the ravens calling, and once, in a clearing, she and Amanda watched an eagle circle overhead.

  They passed Bearskin and hiked up the northeast shore
of Daniels Lake. In real wilderness now, amid the low and heavily forested hills of the Boundary Waters, Lucy stopped and put out her hand to Amanda. They stood still as Lucy sniffed the air.

  “Wanna see a moose?” Lucy whispered.

  “Sure.”

  They crept softly through the forest until they reached a rise above a swampy area. The cow was immense and dark, her antlers decked with weeds. Her calf was cute as she dipped her head into the water and made lowing noises. Amanda took a camera from her pack and snapped a photo. Then the girls slipped away unnoticed and hiked back to the trail.

  At lunchtime they ascended the low hills behind Rose Lake. Lucy could smell Amanda’s sweet summer sweat. They found a flat rock and ate lunch on a high perch overlooking Canada. Lucy held up a finger and said, “Listen.” A spring litter of wolf pups barked faintly in the distance.

  They spent the afternoon exploring the forest floor below. Lucy showed Amanda the imprint of a deer’s hoof, the burrow made by a vole, and unearthed the skull of a red fox. Then Lucy heard something and told Amanda, “Don’t move.” Lucy put her hand out on the earth, palm upward. Amanda watched and waited for what seemed a long time. But at last, a rabbit crept out of the underbrush and made its way cautiously toward them. It approached Lucy’s outstretched hand, sniffed, and then crawled into her palm. Lucy lifted the small creature up to her face and began to stroke its fur.

  “How the hell do you do that?”

  “I just learned how to communicate with animals. You know, in the jungle.”

  “Can I touch him?”

  “I don’t know. You can try. It’s a her.”

  Amanda reached out to pet the rabbit, but it bolted, arcing high in the air and vanishing into the brush. The rabbit’s claws left a scratch on Lucy’s arm.

  “Oh, you’re bleeding. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s nothing. I heal fast.”

  Lucy caught walleye at dusk as the fish began to feed. They made a fire on a high rock and threw in some potatoes that they’d brought from the cabin. They roasted the fish on hot stone. The stars overhead made it taste that much sweeter. And when they were done, Amanda opened her backpack and brought out a plastic bag. She handed it to Lucy with a smirk.