B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (20 page)

I saw her eyes open slowly. She sniffed, swallowed, cleared her throat. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably right.” Turning over toward me, she pushed the blanket away.

“Lucy, I have to pee.”

“So, go.”

“I can’t go like
this.”

“Well, put your clothes on, then.”

“But it’s still dark out there.”

“Oh.” She didn’t make fun of me. She just said, “Okay.”

Silently we sorted through our clothing. I took out the fresh things I’d brought and Lucy put on one of my shirts; it was too small for her, but at least it was dry. Our pants and shoes were still damp, but there was nothing to be done about it; we slipped into them. My eyes stung, my mouth tasted bad. My neck still throbbed slightly from the accident. My shoulder hurt from sleeping on the hard floor.

Finally we emerged from the van, the predawn breeze cold in our faces.

“Do you think we can still drive it?” I asked, looking at the big dent at the back of the vehicle. One of the taillights had been crushed.

“We don’t have any gas, Fran. Remember?”

“Well,” I said, “what are we going to do? We can’t stay here. People are bound to come soon. The person who owns this snack booth will come.”

“How do I know what we’re gonna do? You think of something. You’re smart.”

“Well—I have to
go
first,” I said.

“Yeah. So do I, actually. Do we have any toilet paper?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got a couple of paper napkins.”

“Well, that’ll have to do.”

We tromped through the sand, toward one of the ominous-looking dunes. When I looked back I realized that I couldn’t see the van anymore. I was suddenly frightened and took Lucy’s hand.

“It’s okay, Fran,” she said.

We found a place.  I gave her one of the napkins. When each of us was finished we stood and zipped up. But as we moved toward the van again I thought I heard a faint sound.

“Lucy—wait. Listen.”

We stood completely still. The ocean rumbled. For a moment I wasn’t sure; then I was. It was a car.

We looked at each other. Then we hustled behind a small pile of sand, a kind of mini-dune. We peered up over the top.

There was a pickup truck pulling into the parking lot. It drove straight over to the snack stand, stopped, and a Hispanic-looking man with a mustache got out. He looked at the van, looked at the side of his building.

“Shit,” we heard him say.

He moved to the van, to
our
van. He studied the damage in the rear and then peered through the windows. Then he looked around quizzically. We saw him shake his head. He moved to the little stand then, unlocked the door at the rear. We could see him standing in there in the darkness, picking up a phone.

“Crap,” Lucy said. “He’s calling the cops, I bet.”

“Maybe we could make a run for it,” I suggested. “Jump into the van and take off before he knows what’s happening. We must have enough gas to get us a
little
ways.”

“Then what?” She dropped down behind the little dune. We hid against the wall of sand. “No, we need to get farther away. Up there.” She pointed to a larger dune somewhat further back which had some scrubby bushes at its top. She grabbed my hand. “C’mon, while he’s in there!”

We ran, the sand sucking at our shoes. I was out of breath by the time we reached the dune, ran around to its far side, and began climbing it. Finally we reached the top, peered over between the bushes.

In a few minutes a police car rolled into the parking lot. I’d thought it might come at top speed, with lights flashing and siren blaring, but it didn’t. It pulled easily up to the snack shack and a big cop got out. The Hispanic-looking man greeted him. The breeze took their words, but it was obvious what they were saying to each other as they looked at the damage to the building, looked at the van. The cop surveyed the area carefully, as if through his sheer power of vision he would root out the evildoers.

We dropped behind the dune.

“What now?” I asked, shaking sand out of my shoes. I was thirsty.

“Maybe,” she said, “we could head off past the dunes into those hills.” She pointed.

I looked. “And go where? Do you know where we are?”

“No,” she admitted. “Not really.”

We sat there glumly. We could hear the cop’s car radio squawking as he spoke into it. Dawn began to glow on the horizon, past the dunes. The brown sky slowly turned a deep red and then began to lighten to a soft pink. Soon it was morning, a beautiful early-spring morning. We didn’t move except to brush sand off ourselves and to occasionally look over the rise of the dune. I wished we could go walking on the beach, barefoot, splashing each other with the water. I wished we could walk up to the snack bar and ask the man for two hot dogs and two ice-cold Cokes. I wished we could punch the tetherball at each other at Soames Elementary. I wished we could do anything but sit here motionlessly, waiting for doom to come.

“What are we going to
do,
Lucy?”

“I
don’t know.
Stop asking me.”

After a time there was the sound of more cars coming into the parking lot: another police car and a car I recognized immediately. It belonged to Frank and Louise.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Look.”

We looked. Two cops were in the police car, but we hardly noticed them. Instead we both watched the other car as it pulled in and Frank and Louise stepped out of the front. Ms. Sparrow came out from the back.

“Oh crap,” Lucy whispered.

Again we watched the discussion in pantomime: showing them the van, looking inside (we hadn’t locked the doors—they just opened it and looked, which made me feel somehow abused,
violated
), studying the damage at the back and on the building. When the breeze changed direction we could hear scraps of their words:
Where did they. How. Must be around. Run away?

“Frances?” my aunt called.
“Fran
ces!”

“Lucy?” shouted Ms. Sparrow. “Where are you, Punk?
Lucy
?”

“Frances!
Frances
!”

Everyone there peered in different directions, stepping tentatively this way and that. The cops joined in: “
Lucy? Frances
?”
called their rough, unfamiliar voices.

After a minute or two of this they gathered together again. I saw one of the cops gesturing down toward the beach and two of them moved off toward the shore. The rest stood there talking.
Haven’t gone far. Couldn’t just. Stuff still here.

The sun rose in the sky, bright and hot on my face. A headache had begun to pulse behind my eyes. I was itchy and sore, hungry and thirsty. Lucy sat close to me, morose, not meeting my eyes. At last, frustrated, frightened, I started to cry.

“Aw, crap,” Lucy said disgustedly. “Fran, shut the hell up.”

“
You
shut up. You’re the one who got us into this.”

“Nobody forced you to come.”

“You said we were going to Malibu. To
Hollywood.
”

“Yeah, well, that didn’t work out, did it? Sorry. Excuse me for
living.
”

“Lucy,” I said through my tears, “we have to give up. You know we do.”

“Give up, nothin’. We can hide in these dunes for a long time.”

“And eat what? And drink what? Where do we go when it rains?”

She chuckled sadly. “Maybe we’ll find a cave.”

I chuckled too. I would have loved to find a cave to stay in with Lucy. Just to stay there together, forever and ever.

“Just…stop crying, okay?” she said.

I wiped my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Maybe,” she said flatly, “you shouldn’t have thrown away my razor. You know?”

I glanced at her. “Maybe.”

“Do you think,” she asked, a speculative look in her eyes, “they’ll let us go home?”

“I don’t know. We stole a
car.
And we wrecked it.”

“Yeah, but we’re, like, little kids. We’re not even teenagers. Well, I
almost
am.”

“I don’t know, Lucy.” Home or jail cell or cold dank dungeon, I wanted to say, I didn’t care, as long as we could be together. But we had to leave here.

“Okay,” she sighed.

It was mid-morning, the sun high in the sky now. We stood.

“I’m afraid,” I said.

“Don’t be. It’ll be okay.”

I sniffed, nearly began crying again, but managed to hold it back.

“Lucy—”

“Look,” she said impatiently, “if we’re gonna go, let’s
go,
okay?”

I swallowed, nodded. “Okay.”

With that, we climbed down the dune and walked, separately, hands in pockets, toward the waiting cars.

We weren’t allowed to go home—at least not right away. In fact, we were arrested, and for a few moments one of the cops dangled a deadly-looking pair of handcuffs in front of my eyes. They glinted in the morning sun, terrifying me, yet, staring at them, I couldn’t help but wonder if they could actually hold my wrists. They were so big that it looked as if they might fall off completely.

No one really seemed to know how to proceed. There was talk of putting us in one of the police cruisers, but Ms. Sparrow said, “For God’s sake, officers, we can take them to the station in our car. These aren’t hardened criminals here.”

Discussion. Much radio communication. At last it was agreed that we would follow the police cruiser directly to the station.

Lucy and Ms. Sparrow sat in the back; I was in front, between Frank and Louise. The drive was slow, miserable, like a funeral procession. Not a single word was spoken during the ride. I hoped I wouldn’t start crying, and I didn’t. What was happening seemed bigger than tears.

Lucy and I were put into a waiting room at the station while the adults in our lives went off to talk to the police. I could hear Ms. Sparrow’s raised voice at one point, though I couldn’t make out the words. Lucy and I sat on either end of a long wooden bench. There was a policewoman sitting just outside the doorway, at a desk, but no one else was actually in the room with us. Yet somehow it seemed impossible to slide over to Lucy now, to whisper in her ear, to gossip or giggle or to do so much as to say a word. We didn’t even look at each other. It felt as if we’d been caught doing something dirty, not simply committing a wrong like taking a van for a joyride (I learned the word “joyride” by overhearing some cops talking in the corridor). I didn’t feel like a criminal, but I felt embarrassed, ashamed of myself, as I had once when Lucy and I had gazed at the copy of
Playgirl
in the toilet stall
.
I wanted to take a bath.

I don’t know how long we were left there. It seemed like hours. Will they put us in a jail cell? I wondered. Will we be separate or together? Will other people be in there—grown-up rapists, murderers? Will we get food? What if I have to go to the bathroom—do they have bathrooms in jail cells? When will they let us out? Will there be a trial, like on the old
Perry Mason
TV show? Will lawyers put us on the stand and shout at us, try to break us down, admit our crimes? Will we turn on each other then, like criminals in movies always do?

Lucy talked me into it, Your Honor. I didn’t want to do it.

No, it was Fran’s idea. I only did the driving ’cuz I knew how. Hell, she was the one who shifted it into third.

She had a razor, Your Honor. I was scared.

Fran would always cry if she didn’t get her way. I knew what we were doing was wrong, Mr. Judge, but I felt sorry for her—I mean, look at her. She’s such a spaz.

No: no, we couldn’t, mustn’t. We couldn’t lie about each other or accuse each other. We’d done it together; we both knew that. We had to tell the truth, face whatever happened together. We were blood sisters, after all.

I looked over at her. She was leaning forward, hands clasped before her, staring at the floor. Her hair obscured her face.

“Lucy?”

She didn’t look at me. “What?”

“Lucy, I—”

Just then fast footsteps came up the corridor and we both turned. Ms. Sparrow appeared before the policewoman’s desk, spoke to her briefly. Then the policewoman looked back into the room where Lucy and I were seated.

“Lucille Sparrow!” she called.

Lucy jumped up and moved to the corridor. I could see her talking to her mother, but couldn’t hear their words. A moment later I saw Frank and Louise. The policewoman looked back into the room again.

“Frances Pastan!”

I walked toward the doorway. My uncle was signing some papers. Lucy stood with her back to me, not speaking. We all rode home together in perfect silence.

I’d feared that the storm would burst when I was alone with my aunt and uncle in the house, but it didn’t. In fact, at first, nothing happened at all.