Lucy Read online

  Lucy was afraid, not knowing how Amanda would react. She felt as if Amanda should have known long ago. But even when she had tried to tell her in the forest, she saw that Amanda could not believe her. Not yet. Not then.

  “The world is going to know what?” Amanda asked as they plunged on through the darkening woods. A truck thundered past, going north, its headlights on. The sky had taken on an angry cast.

  “That I’m half human. My mother was a bonobo.”

  “What’s a bonobo?”

  “It’s a great ape,” Jenny said. “Kind of like a chimpanzee. It used to be called the pygmy chimpanzee, but it’s actually a separate species, very closely related to humans.”

  Amanda sat thinking for a while. “You two are putting me on, right?”

  “No,” Jenny said. “What she’s telling you is true. That’s why you won’t get sick. I didn’t want to tell you at the hospital. She caught the disease because she’s genetically part bonobo. Her father was a primatologist studying bonobos in Congo. He decided to breed a female bonobo with a human male. Himself. Lucy was born from the female ape.”

  Amanda’s hand came up to her mouth and she said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This is so not funny. That’s impossible, right? Tell me you guys are joking, okay?”

  “I’m sorry, Amanda,” Lucy said. A cold gust came down from the dark clouds, and drops of rain began to tick onto the windshield. The smell of wet dust and oil rose from the road.

  Jenny said, “It’s not a joke, Amanda. It’s real and Lucy is here. And with a sample of her blood they’re going to realize that she’s genetically part bonobo. That doctor already knew before we left, and he’s going to tell others. So we have to figure out what to do.”

  “Oh, my God. Stop the car.”

  Jenny pulled to the side of the road and Amanda leapt out before the car had come to a stop. She stood by the side of the road in the hissing rain, her chest heaving, her face pale with fear.

  “Are you going to be sick?” Jenny asked through the open door.

  “I don’t know. I just need air. You guys’re really scaring me. If you’re joking, this is really mean.”

  But Lucy knew that Amanda didn’t believe that anymore. Not the way Jenny had said it, so flat and factual. Now Amanda was going through all the clues that she had been unable to put together and that now made so much sense—Lucy’s smell, her strength, her strangeness. The way Amanda’s dog Cody had reacted.

  Lucy waited, worried about what her response would be. She was Lucy’s best friend, her only real friend. And now she knew that Lucy had been living a lie.

  The rain increased, and thunder murmured in the distance. Lucy stepped out of the car and crossed to stand beside Amanda. “Please don’t hate me, Amanda. I tried to tell you the truth.”

  Amanda turned slowly around in a complete circle, looking at a world that had changed forever. As she came around to face Lucy, their eyes met. She stared at Lucy for a moment, then burst into tears. Lucy held her tight, saying, “I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you.” Amanda wept in her arms as the cars and trucks ripped past on the gleaming highway. A long V of Canada geese undulated across the purple sky behind them, their faint voices reaching them on the wind, as lightning stitched the clouds. Amanda straightened up, sniffing. Jenny had come from the car to stand beside the girls.

  At last Amanda said, “Will they take you away?”

  “Honey,” Jenny said. “We don’t know what will happen yet. But I’m not going to let them take Lucy away. Not ever.”

  Amanda stared at Lucy with tears in her eyes. “Didn’t you think you could trust me?”

  Then Lucy was weeping, too. “Yes, yes, of course, I trust you. I wanted to tell you so many times. I tried to tell you in the woods.”

  “I know. You did, didn’t you?”

  “You don’t hate me?”

  “No, I love you. I love you and I’m really scared for you. What are they going to do to you now?” Amanda gave Lucy a sharp look, as if she could stare right through her, all the way back to her conception. She saw clearly what Lucy represented now. “Why did he do this to you? Didn’t he love you?”

  And for the first time, Lucy began to see something that she had avoided all along. Amanda didn’t even have to say who she was talking about. Lucy saw it clearly in her eyes. Amanda knew about these things. Most parents have children because they love them. Or they love children because they have them. But why, Lucy wondered, why did Papa have me? He saw his grand design, but did he really see the person he was creating? Amanda knew what it was like to have a parent who couldn’t see her. And Lucy felt sick now. Sick for herself and sick for Amanda. They held each other tighter in the rain.

  “Come on,” Jenny said. “It’s not safe here. You’re getting soaked. Let’s go home.”

  Amanda took a big shuddering breath and slipped from Lucy’s arms. She returned to the car and Lucy followed, taking the backseat. Jenny quickly put the car in gear and joined the flow of traffic. Yellow headlights swept the streaming pavement beneath the troubled sky. They rode on with only the sound of the highway, the smell of the rain, the windshield wipers slapping back and forth.

  “I love you, too, Amanda,” Lucy said. “I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

  “I know that. I know that.”

  Amanda had played music constantly on the way up to the Boundary Waters. But there had been no music since they left the hospital. Lucy knew: It had been something in The Stream that Amanda could read, a feeling that something was coming. And now it had come.

  Lucy watched her. Amanda was a survivor, annealed by adversity. Lucy could tell that she was thinking intently, finding another strategy in a life that had demanded many ad hoc strategies. Amanda bit her fingernails, frowning. Lightning flickered through the heavy clouds. A moment later they heard a concussion, a rumbling. Amanda took up her folder of disks and flipped through them in a leisurely way, as if waiting for one of them to speak to her. Lucy could feel her in The Stream. Amanda picked a Tom Petty disk and put it into the machine. She turned the volume up loud, and the guitars began in jangling sheets of sound. The drums hammered out an insistent rhythm. Then Tom Petty’s voice: “Well, she was an American girl …” No one swayed or danced. Amanda sat nodding in agreement, it seemed, listening through the choruses until the guitars faded out at the end. Then there was only the ripping noise of tires, the sucking boom of big trucks passing. The rattling of the rain.

  “I know what to do,” Amanda said.

  “What?” Jenny asked.

  “Take control of the information. Don’t let them set the agenda.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy asked.

  “That’s how politicians do it. That’s how corporations do it. Remember in African American history class? After centuries of oppression the black people took control of their own heritage. James Brown? I’m black and I’m proud? That’s what you need to do. Don’t let them be the ones to tell on you. Don’t let them define you. You have to be the one to tell the world.”

  “God, she’s right,” Jenny said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Now as Lucy sat in the kitchen licking peanut butter from her fingers, Jenny explained what was going to happen with the doctors and the CDC, the new blood sample. “Okay,” Lucy said. “Then it’s time.”

  “Yes, it’s time.” And they both understood what she meant: that it was time to tell the world.

  Amanda had talked excitedly on the way home, mapping out how they would do it: The Internet. It was the new language of the culture. Everyone was on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. It was The Stream of the global age. Amanda had been helping Lucy to prepare her own pages. Lucy had yet to put them up because, well, how do you tell people all about yourself when you’re living a lie? Now she knew who she wanted to be: Herself. Her true self. It would all happen in a flash, at the speed of light. The moment their YouTube video was up and her Facebook page went live, the world would know. Amanda had a
ssured Lucy of it: It would roll around the globe like lightning.

  Lucy picked up her phone and sent a text message to Amanda. “Dude,” it said. “Fasten your seat belt. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

  Amanda came right back: “Is it time?”

  “It’s time.”

  “OMG. B right ovr.”

  Roberta Dyson, the phlebotomist, came in the afternoon. She was a polite young lady with her hair in a bob and a butterfly tattooed on her collarbone. She had trouble meeting the eyes of other people. She didn’t know why she was taking the blood sample. She was just doing a job.

  Amanda and Lucy had set up a video camera and were taping in the bedroom when Roberta Dyson arrived. Amanda, who was operating the camera, said, “Lucy, this is perfect. Proof that we’re not playing some prank on the world.” And she fell to blocking the scene and positioning the phlebotomist beside Lucy’s chair. “Rolling,” she said. “Go ahead, Miss Dyson. Lucy, say what’s happening.” Lucy stuck out her arm and made a fist, narrating, as the puzzled woman took two vials of blood. When she had left, Amanda and Lucy were laughing.

  “That poor woman,” Lucy said. “She didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

  “She’s about to have her fifteen minutes of fame.”

  Jenny felt a rush of love and hope as she watched the girls work excitedly on their project. She wanted to leave them alone, to let this be their event, but she found it difficult to sit still and kept poking her head into the bedroom to see what they were doing. Then she’d pace the house, puttering, straightening up. At midday she brought the girls sandwiches. In mid-afternoon, Lucy called from upstairs.

  “Hey, Mom. Do you want to be on our YouTube video?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Well, will you get Papa’s notebooks?”

  Jenny climbed the stairs. “What do you want those for?”

  Amanda and Lucy looked so excited, their eyes bright. Jenny hadn’t seen them look that happy since prom night.

  Amanda said, “We’re going to show some of the passages in the notebooks to prove that this isn’t a hoax.” Then she caught herself and said, “I can’t believe this is real.”

  “Yeah,” Jenny said. “I know exactly how you feel, Amanda.” She went to the cabinet where she kept the backpack and brought it to the girls. Lucy began sorting through the notebooks.

  “Girls. I can’t stand the suspense. I’m going out. Anyway, I have to tell Harry. I’d like to do it in person.”

  “Okay, Mom.”

  “Take your time,” Amanda said. “We’ll probably be up all night.”

  “Is there any way that I can help?”

  “Yeah, Mom, could you pick up some Cool Blue Gatorade?” Lucy asked. “We’re going to order pizza later, but Piero’s doesn’t have Gatorade.”

  • • •

  Jenny and Harry met at a Thai restaurant that had been their favorite place in the days when they’d had a favorite place. It had an outdoor deck on the second story that overlooked a quaint row of shops in the old part of town. The sun had gone down and the lights were on in the hippie shops. They sat under an awning as a soft summer rain fell. The pavement gleamed with streetlights and headlights, and people hurried along the sidewalk beneath umbrellas.

  Jenny laid out the story as simply as she could. His calm in the face of amazing news didn’t surprise her. It was one of the reasons that she had always been drawn to Harry. She could have told him that her throat had been slit and her hair was on fire and he would have said, Hmm … Let’s have a closer look, then.

  Once Harry had digested the information, he said, “I actually had a thought like that. Not that first night when I examined her. But you were so tight-lipped about why you wanted her blood back that I kept trying to think of possible explanations. And her strangeness had struck me from the first. I thought, Is this some kind of Joseph Conrad nightmare? Then I said, Naw. That couldn’t happen. Just didn’t allow myself to believe it.”

  “I always said you were one of the world’s great diagnosticians.”

  “It’s a sixth sense. Not something they can teach you in med school.”

  “Yeah. You’re in The Stream.”

  “The Stream?”

  “It’s a subtle system of communication that Lucy uses. All animals use it.”

  “Yes, I’ve read about this,” Harry said. “Nonverbal communication. Paul Ekman. Elaine Hatfield. Emotional contagion and micro-expressions. What’s her name? That pheromone gal at your school?”

  “Martha McClintock.”

  “Yeah. All the senses. Mostly people just ignore it.”

  “Lucy’s taught me a lot. Amanda, too.” They fell into silence for a time, staring at their drinks. “Anyway, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “I’d have done the same thing. For Lucy’s sake.” He rubbed his five-o’clock shadow and shook his head. “What on earth was that man thinking?”

  “That’s exactly what I asked myself when I first found out.”

  “Was he just completely mad, you think?”

  “I don’t think so. He was young, passionate, and pretty goddamned unusual. Lucy was just a concept at first. But when she started walking and talking I think he realized what he’d done. It’s in his notes. His guilt and remorse. His worry over what would become of her if he wasn’t there to protect her. Or even if he was. He loved her. He really did. And he saw what a grave mistake he’d made.”

  “That poor girl. They’re going to eat her alive.”

  “Not if I can help it. We’re hoping that the bright light of publicity will serve to protect her. Anyway, there’s no turning back now.”

  “Have you considered going to another country? One that’s not such a police state as the U.S. has become?”

  “She doesn’t want to run.”

  “She’s only fifteen. You’re her mother. Stepmother. Whatever. Christ, Jenny, when you get into trouble, you don’t go halfway, do you?” Then, after a pause, “So how can I help? Come to the house anytime. You know where the key is hidden. I have my place up in Wisconsin, too. You’re welcome up there, of course.”

  “Thanks, we may take you up on that.”

  “I’ll be on call. I always have my beeper. Just let me know.”

  “Thanks.”

  He shook his head again. “That poor girl. She’s very lucky to have you.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess we’ll see about that.”

  22

  JENNY JERKED UPRIGHT out of a deep sleep, thinking that something was wrong. But when the girls came into focus, they were giddy with excitement. “Come on, Mom,” Lucy said. “It’s ready. You’ve got to see it.”

  Jenny looked at the clock. “It’s two in the morning.”

  “Not in Japan,” Amanda said. “Come on. The Internet never sleeps.”

  They led her downstairs and sat on the couch, one girl on either side of her. Lucy put the computer in Jenny’s lap. Jenny yawned, and Lucy pressed the space bar. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” began over a black screen. The image dissolved to a Google Earth zoom from outer space right down into the green jungle of Congo. Then the song faded out and Lucy appeared on the screen.

  “Hi, everybody. My name is Lucy Lowe and I’m only half human. You may think this is some kind of YouTube joke but it’s not, as you’ll all find out soon enough. Today is Wednesday, June twenty-fifth, two thousand and seven, and the Centers for Disease Control just took a sample of my blood.” The image flipped, and Roberta Dyson appeared, applying a tourniquet to Lucy’s arm as she continued to narrate, voice-over.

  “They’re doing a genetic analysis and it’s going to prove what I’m about to tell you: That my mother was a bonobo.” Lucy’s face returned to the screen. “I’m here to tell you my story because I’d prefer that you hear it from me rather than from some government agency. So that’s why my friend Amanda and I are making this video. Say hello, Amanda.”

  Tears came to Jenny’s eyes as she wa
tched. Tears of all sorts, from joy and pride for the girls to fear of what was ahead. Right now they were as delighted as if they’d just played the biggest prank imaginable on the world. But not everyone would be amused. Amanda came into the frame and sat beside Lucy. “Hi, world. I’m Lucy’s best friend, Amanda Mather. And Lucy is sooo telling you the truth. I’m going to let her tell you how it all happened.”

  Jenny watched with her heart in her throat as Lucy narrated her life story. She took her audience through it, from an explanation of what bonobos were to her father’s dream. She showed pages from Stone’s notebooks, and the girls took turns reading. “I know there’s going to be a pretty big ick factor in this for some of you,” Lucy said. “I’m just telling you what happened.” She showed the photograph that Jenny had salvaged from the ruined camp and narrated their escape from the civil war and the trip upriver. She recounted her first day of school, her wild impressions, and how Amanda had helped her.

  Then Amanda followed Lucy around with the camera so that people could see her room. “This is my so-called room,” she said. She had made it her own in the year that she’d lived there. She had a love seat with flowered upholstery and a collection of stuffed animals. She had posters on the walls from movies and music groups and some photos of her and Amanda and the other kids at school. As Amanda swung the camera around to the bookshelves, Lucy grabbed one of her wrestling trophies. “Oh, and I almost forgot. Some of you will remember that I’m the Illinois state wrestling champion.”

  “Go, Lucy,” Amanda called in the background. Then Amanda put her face in front of the camera. “And Lucy’s awesome at speed-cubing, too. Show ’em, Luce.” The camera turned and showed Lucy standing in the center of her room. Amanda’s arm reached into the frame and handed her a scrambled Rubik’s Cube puzzle. Lucy turned it this way and that so that she could see all the sides. Then in a flurry of clicking movements too rapid to follow, she unscrambled it so that all of the sides were solid colors once more.

  “Awesome,” Amanda said.

  There was a cut, and then Amanda and Lucy appeared, seated on the love seat among her stuffed animals. Lucy gazed into the camera and said, “So now you all know the truth about Lucy Lowe.”