Lucy Read online

  “Do you mind my asking what you and your husband do?” Amanda asked. “I hope you don’t mind that I’m curious. I’ve never been in a private jet before. I thought you had to be, like, a movie star or something.”

  “I don’t mind at all, dear. We have a chain of retail stores. I say ‘we.’ Luke founded it. I didn’t do much. You’ve heard of them. You may have shopped in them. They’re everywhere now. Denton’s?”

  “Oh, my God,” Amanda said. “You guys own Denton’s?”

  Ruth smiled modestly and bit her lip. “Well, dear, it’s a publicly traded company now, but yes, we do. Luke is a modest man and doesn’t like to show off. Frugal to a fault. Or as my mother used to say, he can pinch a penny until it squeals.”

  They were taxiing now, moving away from the terminal buildings and along the side of the runway. Jenny watched Ruth as she spoke and sensed her strength. She wore a necklace of misshapen freshwater pearls and a thin gold chain that disappeared below the neckline of her pale blue shift. The way her head tilted and her shoulders moved gave an intimate and inviting impression. Her face was mobile and lively, and a half smile played upon her lips, even when the corners were turned down. Every now and then as she spoke, she would pause for a moment and bite her lower lip while thinking.

  “Take this airplane, for example,” Ruth continued. “Our accountant told Luke to buy one of those fifty-million-dollar Gulf-stream jets. They have beds and bathrooms, can you imagine that? Luke wouldn’t hear of it. He had to have some sort of transportation, because he visits all the stores in person every year. He’s like that. He bought the cheapest, most practical thing he could find. This airplane is almost forty years old. Refurbished, of course.”

  “May I ask you a question, Ruth?” Lucy said.

  “Certainly.”

  “If you don’t want to spend a lot of money, what’s the point in having it? I hope I’m not being rude.”

  “No, not at all. It’s a legitimate question.” Ruth looked off in the distance as if she could see the past somewhere out there. “We didn’t really plan to get rich. Luke was simply, well, I guess you’d have to say that he was obsessed. Obsessed with the minutiae of retail operations. His father and grandfather were retailers. And Luke wanted to perfect all the operations, all the details, like one of these people who build great and intricate ships in bottles. The point wasn’t the end, it was the process.” She pursed her lips, and wrinkles caressed her mouth and eyes. “The money was a side effect of his obsession. I travel with him now, because otherwise I’d scarcely see him at all.”

  “So what do you do with the money?” Lucy asked.

  Ruth laughed sadly. “I started a foundation. I give it away. That’s our little joke. He makes the money, and I give it away.”

  “Why are your stores called Denton’s?” Jenny asked.

  “They’re named after our son,” Ruth said, and glanced down into her lap, where her hands were worrying each other.

  “That’s nice,” Amanda said.

  Ruth lifted a sad smile and played her watery eyes back and forth from Amanda to Lucy and back again. Then she seemed to remember something and busied herself fishing in a pouch attached to the wall beside her. “I almost forgot. When we have guests on the airplane, I’m supposed to give the safety briefing. I feel silly doing it, but it’s a federal law.” She withdrew a card of printed instructions in case of emergency. “There’s not much to it, really. One door. And a small window in the cockpit that pops out. I doubt if I could get through it. Keep your seatbelts fastened, and all that. There are oxygen masks if the cabin loses pressure, which it won’t do, because this airplane is built like a tank. Oh, and unlike the airliners, we provide smoke hoods in case of fire. They’re under your seats. I think that’s it.”

  The plane was accelerating down the runway. Less than a minute later, Lucy was being shoved back into her seat as the airplane angled away from the earth. As it climbed away from New York, Ruth smiled at her guests and said, “Do you like tuna salad?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lucy said. Amanda and Jenny smiled and nodded.

  Ruth looked at her watch. “It’s way past my lunchtime. I get low blood sugar. Makes me feel faint.” She lifted a telephone from its cradle beside her. “Dear, it’s me.” A pause as she bit her lip. “Well, who else would it be?” Another pause. “Do you mind leveling off for a bit while I get some sandwiches? All right, will you and Roy have one?” She listened, smiling at Lucy. “Very well. Love you, too.” She hung up the phone and smiled at Jenny. “It’ll just be a minute. All the air traffic controllers know him. They delight in giving him special treatment. It doesn’t hurt that Luke gives them a twenty percent discount at the stores.”

  After climbing for a few more minutes, the plane leveled off. Ruth flipped the catch on her seatbelt and rose to go aft, where she rummaged in a locker. She came back with sandwiches in plastic wrap, obviously homemade, and cans of apple and cranberry juice and bags of potato chips, all bearing the Denton’s logo. She set them on the tables and went back for more. She brought lunch to the cockpit. When she was seated and had fastened her seatbelt again, she looked over the sandwiches. “I hope you like it. I made the tuna salad myself this moring. The other stuff is from the store.” And the engines spooled up as the aircraft continued its climb.

  “Papa said there’d be some good ones.”

  “Good whats?” Ruth asked.

  “Good humans.”

  Ruth’s eyes sparkled as she laughed and unwrapped her sandwich. Lucy liked her easy laugh and the way she would sometimes purse her lips and frown to get her words just right. She was not concealing anything. She was in The Stream.

  The tuna salad was creamy with crunchy bits of celery in it and the sharp tang of lemon juice and mustard. As they ate, Lucy watched the world out the window, so oddly transformed by distance. In the jungle, there were no such vast distances. Everything was always close at hand.

  An hour later, Ruth was sleeping, and the plane had begun its descent. Lucy kept her vigil at the window as the mysterious puzzle of the ground gradually solved itself. And when the wheels barked onto the pavement in Chicago, Ruth startled awake, saying, groggily, “Did I miss my stop?”

  They could see the crowd behind the high chain-link fence as the plane taxied to the ramp: Throngs of television and press reporters, along with protesters carrying signs behind police barricades. A number of the signs said things like, “Welcome, Lucy!” or “Down with TSA” and “Smash the Police State.” But many of them bore biblical references like “Ezekiel 16:50” and “Leviticus 18:23” and “Jude 1:7.”

  “This is crazy,” Lucy said. “How did they find out?”

  “The Internet,” Amanda said. “You use it. It uses you.”

  Ruth asked, “What’s your friend’s name? Harry? Is that who’s meeting you?”

  “Yes, I see his car,” Jenny said. “Oh, dear. We have to get through all that.”

  The plane was parked, and Luke came back from the cockpit. “What’s going on out there? Who are those lunatics?”

  He pulled a handle and the door opened. The stairs unfolded and rested on the ramp. The noise grew abruptly louder. Someone was speaking through a bullhorn, a man’s voice: “Leviticus chapter twenty, verse sixteen: ‘And if a woman approach unto any beast and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’”

  “Who are these creeps?” Amanda asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “It makes me ashamed to be a Christian sometimes, the way these people act.”

  As they looked out the windows toward the fence, they saw Harry gesturing and talking to a group of policemen, who turned and followed him to the gate. One of the officers unlocked the gate, and the group moved toward the plane.

  Watching from the window, Jenny said, “Good work, Harry.”

  Luke had already descended the stairs to greet him. They were talking now. He poked his head back into the cab
in and said, “It’s all right. These officers will get you to your car.”

  Ruth was standing, pressing a business card into Jenny’s hand. She gave one to Lucy and Amanda as well. “This is our office in Albuquerque. If you ever need anything, anything at all, don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’m quite serious about this.”

  “Thank you so much,” Lucy said. “You’ve been ever so kind.”

  “Goodbye, dear. Excuse me for not coming down. Be careful out there.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, Harry embraced Jenny, then Lucy and Amanda. Luke said goodbye, as the police urged them forward, surrounding them. As they hurried toward the gate, something in the crowd caught Lucy’s eye. It was a lone protester. He was a young man with a buzz cut and a drooping handlebar moustache, dark tattoos on his arms, standing off to one side of the main group. He held a sign. Scrawled on a piece of poster board was the word “Euthanasia,” followed by the number fourteen. That was all, but the word and his sinister appearance had an effect on Lucy. He was different from the other people in the crowd. He was creating a disturbance in The Stream. Lucy knew: He was really dangerous.

  The reporters began shouting questions through the gate. The police pushed on through the crowd toward Harry’s car.

  “Lucy, what do you think of the new Senate bill?”

  “We haven’t heard about it,” Jenny called out.

  “Please just get in the car, ma’am,” one of the officers said.

  Just as Lucy was nearing the car, a woman broke from the crowd and shouldered between two of the police officers. She leaned forward and spit in Lucy’s face. As the police were wrestling her to the ground, she shouted at Jenny, “Shame on you! For shame!” She was trying to grab a crucifix that dangled at her neck, but the police had already snapped on handcuffs and were dragging her away. Lucy stared after her with a forlorn expression.

  “Come on!” Amanda shouted as a police officer pushed Lucy into the car. Harry took a white handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to Lucy. She wiped the spit from her cheek.

  As Harry sped away, quiet fell once more. Jenny asked, “What bill were they talking about, Harry?”

  Harry sighed. “Steven Rhodes, the Republican from Utah, introduced a bill this morning defining a human being as having the genetic profile that was decoded from the human genome by the National Institutes of Health in 2003. It’s Senate Bill 5251. They’re calling it the Lucy Bill, because if it passes, she’ll officially be a nonhuman animal and won’t have human rights.”

  “Jesus wept,” Jenny said.

  Amanda and Lucy just looked at each other. Lucy felt tears well up in her eyes. She thought, Why do they hate me? She knew. She knew. The darkness of the jungle will always remain like sand and gravel beneath our feet. And the peril of cat and cobra will follow us even into this bright place that people have created. Lucy looked over at Jenny, then Amanda, who were both staring at her. She saw it in their eyes. The lost knowledge of what had been. The three stared at one another, their eyes flicking first to one, then the other, and they felt the love flowing back and forth in their shared understanding. Harry sensed it and turned around as they waited at a stoplight. Then four sets of eyes passed their silent messages back and forth. Lucy saw. They all saw: They had become a tribe.

  24

  “DEAR LUCY,” the letter began. “My name is Jeremy Levin. I am a thirty-five-year-old attorney from Philadelphia. I am generous, caring, intelligent, and have a good sense of humor. I like walks on the beach, ethnic cuisine, fine wines, and opera. I am especially interested in the environment, world peace, and global warming. I also like snowboarding and have a condo in Snowmass. I hope that when you turn 18, you will take my offer of marriage seriously, as I think I could give you the best possible life in this world. I would like to have the honor of helping to create the new race of people that your father envisioned. Please consider my offer seriously and write to me soon. I’m enclosing a photograph of myself so you can see that I’m not too hard on the eyes and that I like to keep in shape.”

  It was signed, “Sincerely, Jeremy.”

  Lucy sighed and put it on the pile. Jenny sat across from her and Amanda at the dining-room table opening another stack of mail. Amanda had the laptop open and was going through the messages and comments on Facebook and MySpace.

  “Yuck,” she said. “Not that again.”

  Jenny stood and looked over her shoulder.

  “Don’t read it, Jenny.”

  “Dear Lucy,” it began. “How RU? I wud rully luv 2 cam with U. Hit me up on Yahoo! 549Bigtoad. I have cam 2. Usually on Friday and Saturday nights & I have an honest 9 inches.”

  “Yuck, indeed,” Jenny said.

  They had stayed at Harry’s off and on since the world had discovered Lucy. But after their whirlwind tour, Jenny had brought the girls home, hoping for some semblance of normalcy.

  Lucy picked up another letter. Jenny watched her as she read it. She saw Lucy’s face change and knew that it was one of the bad ones.

  Jenny received her share of mail, too. Even Amanda was getting mail. “Dear Dr. Lowe,” one of Jenny’s fan letters began. “I’m a 59 year old widower in Toronto and believe that I could provide the missing ingredient in young Lucy’s life: A father. A young girl needs to be taken firmly in hand …” And so on.

  Jenny had also received a letter that began, “You Evil Whore. I don’t believe there ever was a Dr. Stone. May you burn in hell for the sin of bestiality. You not only lay with a monkey, you allowed that demon child, spawn of Satan, to fester in your womb and then to enter our sacred nation when you could have left it to die in the jungle where you both belong.”

  They made a separate pile for those kinds of letters. Another category of letter that she received was from teenage boys asking if they could date Lucy. Some asked if they could come and live with them and be Lucy’s brother.

  “We have to stop reading all this mail,” Jenny said. “It’s not good for us.” Lucy handed her the letter she’d been reading.

  “Do you know the 14 words?” it began. “Robert Matthews died a hero and a martyr to our Race. God rest his soul. If we can rob an armored car of $3.8 million and bring down the Alfred P. Murrah, then we can certainly find you. When we do, we have a quick and simple solution to your problem: Euthanasia.” It was signed, simply, “The Order.”

  “Do you remember that guy? When we arrived at the airport?”

  “What guy?” Jenny asked.

  “Yeah, I saw him,” Amanda said. “Really spooky-looking guy. Tattoos and a moustache?”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said. “And he had that sign that said Euthanasia and the number fourteen.”

  “What does it mean?” Jenny asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said.

  “I’ll Google it.” Amanda typed in the phrase. “Wikipedia says the Fourteen Words is a saying frequently used by White nationalists, Neo-nazis, and White Pride supporters. The slogan was coined by David Lane, an imprisoned member of The Order. The fourteen words are: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.’ The slogan was inspired by a statement in Volume 1, Chapter 8 of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf: ‘What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.’ Blah-blah-blah.”

  “Jesus, they’re Nazis,” Jenny said.

  “Wow, listen to this. Sometimes the slogan is combined with 88, as in 1488 or 8814. The ‘88’ stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet twice, or HH, which means Heil Hitler.”

  Jenny said, “This would be comic if it weren’t so sick.” She glanced at Lucy and caught a look in her eye that she’d seen a number of times. It was a very brief glimpse into the world of the jungle and the true powers of her lineage. In that brief flash, Jenny saw that in a real figh
t—if she thought that she or Jenny or Amanda were in danger—Lucy could and would kill.

  “Is this real?” Lucy asked.

  Jenny tossed the letter on the pile of hate mail. “I think it’s possible. But I think it’s fair warning that we have to be careful from now on.”

  Lucy passed her an invitation: Meet the provost at the university, where Lucy would be going in the fall. It appeared to be a chance for Lucy to meet some of her future faculty and classmates.

  The phone rang, and Jenny reached for it. The caller ID displayed a number in New Mexico. Jenny pressed the button and said, “Hello?”

  “Is this Jenny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jenny, it’s Ruth. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “No, not at all. Hi, Ruth.”

  “Fine then. That’s good. I just wanted to ring you up and tell you how delightful it was to meet you and the girls. I really have been thinking about you ever since.”

  “Well, thank you, Ruth. The pleasure was all ours, I’m sure.”

  “I took the liberty—I hope you don’t mind this—of having our lawyer put in a call to TSA. I think you’ll be getting a letter of apology for what happened at LaGuardia.”

  “How did your lawyer do that?”

  “Well, the man who refused to let you board wasn’t acting on any official policy. Evidently they’d had trouble with him before. Profiling or something. I think they knew that the incident was already an embarrassment and could wind up being costly if you decided to sue.”

  “That’s so kind of you. Thank you.”

  “I’m glad you don’t mind that I did that. I was very angry with them, and I acted a bit impulsively, I’m afraid. But I think it’s for the best. Anyway, I don’t think you’ll be having any more incidents now.”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “Good. Well, then. I got to thinking about that scene at the airport when we landed. And it occurred to me that you and the girls might like to get away someplace where you can be left alone. So I thought I’d invite you all out to the ranch.”