B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (28 page)

“It’s okay,” I said, calmly confident. “It’s okay to stop, Lucy. We’ll stop, that’s all. Can you pull it in here?”

She tried, but she took the tight turn at the exit too fast and the van scraped against the guardrail, veered back and forth in the lane, felt as if it was going to tip over. And yet I felt calm: I was where I should be, where I was supposed to be.

Finally she brought it under control and pulled jerkily into the empty parking lot. She put on the brake to stop, but I saw immediately we were directly under a streetlamp. I knew I was thinking more clearly than she was.

“No,” I said. “Lucy, pull it over there, where it’s dark. In fact, pull it past the parking lot. Can you drive it to the bushes at the end?”

Wordlessly she obeyed, and when we stopped the vehicle was hidden in darkness and obscured by brush. We were safe.

Lucy jumped from the van and ran partway onto the beach. She was making a strange, high-pitched wailing sound, almost like a howl, clutching herself tightly. The ocean’s roar filled my ears.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but not to me: to the sky, to the water. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for…for...whatever I did, whatever…I don’t know what I did…Oh my God…”

She dropped onto her knees.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again.

I sat carefully next to her, saying nothing, somehow knowing that there was nothing to say. I knew I just had to be there, to not leave her, to stay with her no matter what.

After a time she seemed to calm. I looked around. The scene was otherworldly, spooky, surreal. Dark shapes surrounded us—sand dunes, I knew, darkness upon deeper darkness, but in the night they could be almost anything: giants, monsters. The waves moved relentlessly forward, relentlessly back.

She stood finally. “I wanna go swimming.”

“The water’ll be cold.”

“I don’t care.”

She began to strip off her clothes. I had never seen her naked. Her nipples were large, like a grown-up woman’s, and she had a shock of pubic hair between her legs. I nearly began to cry: She was so beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

“C’mon,” she said. “Do you want to?”

I stood and pulled off my shirt, embarrassed despite everything at my flat child’s chest, then my pants, exposing my scrawny, bare child’s body. This was something I would never have dreamed of doing in front of anyone but Lucy. She did not laugh at me, call me Scarecrow or Concentration Camp. In fact, she studied me for a moment, then said, “You’re pretty, Fran,” something no one had ever said to me before, something no one would say again for years. “Don’t forget that.” Then she turned to the sea. 

I followed her joyously. The water was liquid ice, salty and breathtaking. She swam powerfully into the waves, farther and farther, easily outdistancing me, until she was a distant white speck bobbing up and down, until I could hardly see her, until I felt I was alone, set adrift in the universe, naked and lost.

“Lucy?” I whispered. “Lucy? Come back. Please come back. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me all alone.”

Darkness, the waves crashing, the salt cold, and no voice, no living thing anywhere in the world.

“Lucy,” I whispered again. “Please. Lucy.”

I shut my eyes, resolved to sink into the waves, vanish into the deep, disappear.

Then, after a while, beside me, came her voice.

“Hi, Franny-Fran.”

I turned. She was there, her hair plastered to her head and shoulders, skin glistening palely in the night, and I was all right again, we were all right.

“I thought you’d left me alone,” I said.

“I almost did,” she admitted. “But—nah.”

“I’m glad you came back.”

“So am I. But can I tell you a secret?”

“What, Lucy?”

She grinned. “I’m cold as shit!”

I giggled. “So am I!”

We made our way back to the beach and discovered to our horror that we’d left our clothes too near the sea: everything was soaked.

“Never mind,” Lucy said, “let’s just get back into the car!”

Sodden things bundled in our arms, we rushed back to the van. We brushed off the sand sticking to us and huddled together under the blankets, shivering for a while, warming slowly. This time there was no
Mystery Theater
to hear, only the sounds of our own breathing and the ocean beyond. We calmed, we relaxed. We ate stale crackers, drank warm Coke; they were delicious. I had no brush, but I touched her wet hair tenderly, pulling gently at the tangles, separating the strands, smoothing them with my palm. We said nothing to each other, nothing at all.

After a while it began to rain. My consciousness drifting, I saw visions of unicorns, of fairies and angels in a weightless blue paradise, saw dimly that Lucy was there, floating, an angel herself, I was too, we were both angels in a world of angels, a skyscape of them, a matrix of angels, all of them ourselves and no one else. We fell asleep together, as warm and safe as either of us had ever been, or ever would be again.

We had both dressed and were out in the bushes peeing the next morning when we saw a police car pull up near the van. We looked at each other, and it crossed my mind that we might run, made one final dash over the sand dunes or straight into the sea. But it was over, we knew. Finished.

3

LUCY AND I sat together for the last time on a cold bench in the local police station. Her mother and my aunt were in the office there, talking to someone, there were raised words; but I could make out what they were. I was too shocked, too horrified to cry. Instead I shivered, shivered violently, holding my arms as tightly to myself as I could. I wanted Lucy to tell me that it would be okay, to make a joke, to pretend to be the arresting cop (
You got a license to drive this thing, young lady?
), anything. But she was silent, unblinking, unmoving. My aunt came out first, grabbing my hand and pulling me up off the bench. I had a wild impulse to pull free, to press myself into Lucy’s arms, to say
I love you! I love you!
to her forever, but I did none of those things. I allowed myself to be led down the corridor and out of the station. I did not look back. For thirty years I’ve wished I had, that I’d made that final glimpse, said that silent goodbye.

The rest is a blur of raised voices, telephone calls, indignation.
Wild
and
out of control
and
delinquent
and
criminal record
were words I heard again and again, some directed at me, some shouted into the phone at my parents.
Liar. Crazy.
I never returned to the school. I spent two days under virtual house arrest, imposed by Frank and Louise, hardly able to leave my room. I slept a great deal. Again and again I ran to the toilet and vomited, my body seemingly ripping itself to pieces from the inside. At night I entertained a vague hope that Lucy would tap at my window again, that we would try running away again, maybe on foot this time—running to the ocean, to the dunes, the sea. Living on our own. Stealing food, sleeping under the stars, far from adults and their poisonous lives.
Please come, Lucy. Please come.
But she didn’t, and I certainly couldn’t; it was not in my personality to lead.

On the third morning, my bags packed, Uncle Frank impatiently warming up the car in the driveway to take me back to the bus station, to my parents whom I no longer wanted to see or know (and who would soon be serving sentences for narcotics possession with intent to distribute and various tax evasion charges while I languished in a series of foster homes), I saw the headline.

LOCAL GIRL MISSING. Below it, a photograph of Lucy.

Much later, when I learned the truth, I thought:
She went without me.

She left me alone.

Lucy, I said to myself thousands of times, why didn’t you ask me? Why didn’t you tap on my window? I would have gone with you there. To his basement. I would. I would have gone anywhere with you, Lucy, anywhere and forever, Lucy, Lucy.

Nightmares then, sometimes even now. Screaming. Darkness. Sounds of drills and saws, wet sounds. Horrible bloody violations.

The remainder of my adolescence lost in blackout. Not thinking of Lucy, not thinking of anything. My mother released when I was eighteen, my father two years later. Occasional calls. Telephones slammed down. I never heard from Frank or Louise again, and have never returned to that town, never driven on that freeway, never gone to that beach. I live on the other side of the country. I will die without ever seeing those things again; they are hardly even part of my memory now. They inhabit my dream world, drifting meaninglessly among all things that never were, and could not be.

And yet, at some point, light. Breath. Life, continuing.

The Riverbed Killer lives, though he is dead. He inhabits cyberspace now, immortalized in word and image, floating everywhere, all around us, never to be escaped forever. And Lucy too, trapped there with him, in the silent interstices between bits of what we choose to call the world. And discovering her, them: impulsively typing in
Lucy Sparrow,
a name I had not thought of in years, not expecting to locate anything yet instantaneously finding her face, a face I once touched softly in darkness, now frozen behind the glowing glass of a computer monitor. Present even when I click out of the website, she is there, here, with him, all around us, always. Once they were both only locked away in files, on yellowing newsprint and police reports, buried.

Now…

I hear a car pull up in the driveway and rush from my study. I see them there, the two of them. My husband and daughter. I run to her, pull her to me, frightening her with my intensity but I cannot seem to hold back. I whisper, “You’re home, you’re home, thank God you’re
home
,” and my daughter, twelve-going-on-thirteen, returns the embrace, looking up at me, asking breathlessly, “Mom, what is it? Did I do something wrong? Why are you crying? Mom?”

About
the Author

CHRISTOPHER CONLON is the author of a previous novel,
Midnight on Mourn Street,
which he recently adapted for the stage. His poetry has been published widely and collected in four books, the most recent of which is
Starkweather Dreams.
As an editor his credits include
Poe’s Lighthouse, The Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl,
and the Bram Stoker Award-winning
He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson.
Conlon lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. Visit him online at

www.christopherconlon.com