How to Breathe Underwater (15 page)

“I mean
swear.
Not your parents, not my parents, not the police. Even if they torture you.”

“Okay, I swear! Just tell me!”

“Jack and I are getting married,” said Melissa. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning to drive out to California, and on the way we’re getting married in Vegas. And then we’re getting an apartment in LA and he’s going to introduce me to this magazine guy he knows. I’m going to get this job working at the magazine. I’ll be a model at first, but later on they’re going to teach me how to do design and layout.”

Lucy stared. A semi blasted by, rocking the car.

“We don’t care what people say about us being too young,” Melissa said. “We’re in love. Plus I have a fake birth certificate saying I’m eighteen.”

“But you can’t
marry
him. You’re not even going out with him.”

“We are,” Melissa said. “We hooked up a couple of times before he went out west, and he’s been writing to me. We didn’t want to broadcast our relationship to the whole world.”

Lucy thought of how he’d gone into her, deliberate and quiet. He’d waited forever, just on the verge. Then she’d raised her hips and they were rocking together.

“It won’t be easy at first,” Melissa said. “But I had to get away from home. I couldn’t stand it anymore, with my step-mom treating me like I’m in elementary school. And always making me baby-sit for her own kids, those brats. And acting like she owns my dad. And everyone pretending like
my
mom doesn’t exist anymore.” Melissa paused, giving Lucy the dare-you-to-pity-me look that came on whenever she mentioned her mother, who’d left the family three years earlier for a Minneapolis real-estate entrepreneur. “I can get my GED out there, and when I start learning graphic design I can make some money. This magazine guy Jack knows, he’s very artistic. He does films, too. The modeling’s just for a while, anyhow, before I get into the design side.”

“What modeling?” Lucy said.

“You know, artistic modeling.”

“You mean nude.”

“It’s not
porn,
” Melissa spat. “Most of it’s just partial nudity, and you don’t even have to touch anyone. You’d never understand, though. No offense, Lucy, but you’re so immature. I never should have told you.”

Outside, trees flashed lean and dark against the distant glow of Detroit. The corn was shoulder-high in the fields, its tassels ghostly silver. “Ha-ha,” Lucy said. “Right? You’re completely shitting me.”

“I am so not shitting you,” said Melissa. “I’m so serious I could fucking kill myself for telling you. You’ll run home and tell your mom and everything will be ruined.” She stared ahead at the highway.

Lucy couldn’t believe it. She kept waiting for Melissa to give her a cross-eyed look and then start laughing. But Melissa was fierce and determined, her face flushed, her hands tight on the steering wheel. “I knew you’d be a baby about it,” she said. “But you’ve got to get your shit together because you’re going to help us. That’s why you’re on this trip.”

“No, it’s not,” Lucy said.

“You’re going to be our accomplice,” Melissa said. “We’re going to take his car, and you’re going to drive this one back to my mom’s and leave it in the driveway.”

“Like fuck I am.”

“You have to. It’s part of the plan.”

“There’s no plan,” Lucy said. “You’re completely lying.”

“I’m not lying,” said Melissa. “Look.” She opened the pearl-gray box. Lucy took it from her and switched on the dome light. Inside was a plain gold band with a Tiffany-style setting. The diamond was clear and fiery and small enough to be convincing. Lucy took it out and turned it over and over in her fingers, feeling the chill of the gold.

“Okay,” Melissa said. “Give it back.”

Lucy put the ring back into the box, handed it to Melissa, and turned off the dome light. She looked down at her own hands, which were bare. “If you’re really engaged,” she said, “why don’t you wear your ring?”

“Are you joking? It’s not exactly stealth.”

Melissa changed the radio station. On all the presets there were commercials. Lucy wondered what Melissa would do if she grabbed the ring box and threw it out the window.

“He gave me something else, too,” Melissa said, “but I can’t tell you what it is.”

“Why not?”

“Because look at yourself. Everything I tell you, you’re like, Oh, my God!”

“Fine,” Lucy said. “I don’t care.”

Melissa pulled off the highway toward a gas station, where a red-and-blue sign advertised Icees. She drove up beside a vacant pump and turned to Lucy.

“Do you have any money?” she asked.

“For what?”

“I’ll give you a hint: This is a
gas
station, where they sell
gas.
”

“I’m not giving you money.”

“I’m engaged,” Melissa said. “This can be your engagement present to me.” She grabbed Lucy’s purse and fished out a twenty, then went to pump the gas. Lucy watched her as she stood against the gas pump and fiddled with the elastic of her stocking. She did a little hip grind to the bass thrumming from a low-slung Crown Vic. The two boys inside, their hair shaved close and their teeth flashing with gold, watched her like zombies. When the tank was full, Melissa went into the convenience store.

Lucy looked through her purse for quarters. She could call someone from the shelter to come get her—her friend Lynette, maybe. Or she could just grab her bag and hitch a ride home. She imagined herself standing beside the highway in her short white skirt. It seemed like an image from a slasher movie. When she looked through the window, trying to see Melissa inside the store, one of the boys in the Crown Vic waved.

The pearl-gray box was still on the seat where Melissa had left it. Lucy picked it up and shook the ring out onto her palm. Something else was rattling around inside the box, something heavier than the ring. She pried out the velvet insert and a key fell into her lap. It was a Cadillac key but with a round head: a glove compartment key. Turning it over in her hand, she looked toward the convenience store with its racks of chips and magazines. Melissa was nowhere in sight. She fitted the key into the glove compartment lock. It turned, and the compartment fell open. There, on top of the maps and old Midas receipts, was Jack’s gun.

Before, in Jack’s car, it had frightened her. Now she wanted to hold it in her hand. It was cold and heavy and small enough to fit her palm. The muzzle was clean and oiled, and there was the trigger, a smooth place for an index finger. She pulled back the slide like Jack had showed her. The gun was still loaded. She pointed it into the foot well and said, “Freeze!”

She could do anything now. Not that she’d
do
anything. But here she was, no longer a virgin, and in her hand she had this gun. They were going to Detroit. They were going to see Jack Jacob. She put the gun back into the glove compartment and waited for Melissa to come out.

The rest of the way to Detroit, Lucy didn’t say a word. She knew Melissa wanted her to ask questions, to act interested in what was going to happen, but she refused to do it. Beside her on the Cadillac seat, Melissa tried to act like she didn’t care. She sang along with the radio as the suburbs of Detroit rushed by, their shopping malls and car showrooms and soaring Methodist churches glowing alongside the highway. They passed the eighty-foot-high Uniroyal tire and the old New Silver Rolladium of Southfield, with its spotlit fake palm trees and its mural of a freestyle skater in silhouette. Then they pulled off the highway into Royal Oak. The houses there were cramped little castles of white or pink brick, each with its green cropped lawn. Jack’s house was a small Tudor in a row of Tudor houses. It was shabbier than the others, somehow—its shutters peeling, its plaster lawn gnome missing the peak of his cap. But the lawn had been mowed recently, and a pair of Jack’s grassy sneakers stood beside the door.

“You have to promise you won’t do anything stupid,” Melissa said as she killed the motor. “You’ve got to stop freaking right now. Think of yourself as my maid of honor. Your job is to help me stay calm before my wedding.”

“Okay,” Lucy said. She felt prickly-skinned and powerful, ready to commit reckless deeds. She’d replaced the key in the pearl-gray box but left the glove compartment unlocked.

They got out of the car with their things and went to the door, and Melissa rang the bell. She made an attempt at door-waiting nonchalance, smacking her gum and twirling the keys, but it didn’t last long. After a minute she got up on her toes and tried to look through the tiny sheer-curtained window at the top of the door.

“Where is he?” she said. “He’d better be here.”

Then he was there, opening the door for them, welcoming them into the living room, with its slipcovered gold couches and its smell of old chicken soup. Melissa jumped at him and he picked her up, swinging her. One of her black shoes fell off. Lucy tried to get him to look at her, but he kept avoiding her eyes. Her stomach lurched and she had to sit down on a couch. A curl of torn plastic bit into her thigh. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Jack was saying. “Look at you two.” Lucy adjusted her thigh-highs and crossed her legs. She told herself to relax. She stared at the carpet with its pattern of gold scrolls and turquoise roses, a terrible carpet, perhaps the world’s worst.

“Don’t sit there,” Jack said. “Come upstairs. See my room.”

He started up the stairs and Melissa followed. “Come on,” she called to Lucy.

Lucy went, dragging her overnight bag. She followed Jack and Melissa down the hall, down a strip of olive-colored carpet, past the pictures of Jack’s family and Jack himself as a kid with dark eyes and pin-straight black hair. They passed a closed bedroom door. Inside, someone was snoring loudly.

“My mom,” Jack said. “Out cold.”

In his room, white Christmas lights blinked around the ceiling and Pink Floyd’s
Delicate Sound of Thunder
played on the stereo. There was a ratty football-helmet rug half covered by an air mattress, which smelled new, as if purchased for the occasion. The air mattress was made up in black sheets. A TV sat near it on the rug. Beside the TV, on a boy-sized desk, stood a glossy black ice bucket, three glasses, and bottles of gin and peach schnapps and tonic water and vodka. On a bookshelf were some dusty baseball trophies and a framed bar mitzvah certificate. The air was heavy with the smells of vinyl and sandalwood incense.

“The luxury lounge,” Jack said.

Melissa threw her bag onto the floor. “Let’s go out,” she said. “There must be a party or something.”

“A party?” Jack said. He seemed disappointed.

“It’s early. I want to go out. Lucy does too, don’t you, Lucy?”

“Sure,” Lucy said. Anything to get away from that room, with its terrible smell and its giant mattress.

“This town’s dead,” Jack said. “The party’s right here tonight.”

“I know what we should do!” Melissa said. “The Silver Rolladium. We passed it on the way here. We
have
to go.”

“I don’t skate,” Jack said. “As a rule.”

“We have to,” Melissa said. “Please, please. We can leave if it sucks.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jack said, holding the back of his neck with one hand. “Okay. But just for a little while. I don’t want to spend all night there.”

Melissa gave Lucy a look of triumph. Then she took her tiny makeup bag and disappeared into the bathroom, down the hall. Lucy stood on the football-helmet rug and looked at Jack.

“What?” Jack said.

When Lucy didn’t respond, he said, “Let’s go downstairs. Let’s have a talk.” He took her hand and led her downstairs to the kitchen, where Lucy sat on a yellow stool at the breakfast bar. Jack opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of orange juice. He opened it, sniffed it, put it away. He took out a can of Fanta Grape. “You want a Fanta Grape?” he said.

Lucy shook her head.

“How about a real drink? I know I could use one.” Jack went into another room and came back with a cut-glass decanter. “This is Scotch,” he said. “Is Scotch okay?”

“I don’t care,” Lucy said. It was hard to make her voice sound the way she wanted it to, steady and glacier-cold. Maybe a drink would help.

Jack put ice cubes into a glass and poured Lucy an inch of Scotch. He set the glass before her. It smelled like sweetened nail polish remover. She lifted the glass and drank. It was horrible, bitter, burning. She coughed and wiped her mouth.

“Shit,” Jack said. “That’s some drinking.” He took the empty glass and poured some for himself. “You look hot in that skirt,” he said. “You really do.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

Jack took a drink of Scotch. “Lucy,” he said, “I have to explain a few things.”

“No need. Melissa told me everything.”

“You don’t understand, though.”

“What’s to understand? You’re engaged. Congratulations.”

He gave her a moist smile. “Let’s not worry about all that tonight. We should just have a good time. We know how to have a good time together, don’t we?” He put a hand on her arm and rubbed the inside of her wrist with his thumb.

Lucy pulled away. “I’m going to tell Melissa about last weekend.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I think it’s a fabulous idea.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Tell her. I’ll say it’s not true. Who do you think she’s going to believe?” He tilted his head at her and smiled.

Lucy sat back, feeling the heat of the Scotch in her blood. A hum like bees filled her head. Now Melissa was coming down the stairs, crossing one foot in front of the other like a Miss America contestant, singing “Ready for skating, ready to go roller skating” to the tune of “Getting to Know You.” In the kitchen she leaned over the bar to give them a look down her shirt. Lucy could see the black bow at the center of her bra.

“Ouch, baby,” Jack said. “Put those away.”

“Are we going?” said Melissa.

They were.

At the skating rink the air was thick with smoke-machine smoke, and the skaters shot through beams of flashing light. The floor was packed. All the girls were dressed in small tight clothes, their hair done in elaborate braids or ponytails. It was house night, and Lucy could feel the drums at the center of her chest. Jack draped one arm around her shoulders and the other around Melissa’s. He steered them through the crowd toward the skate-rental booth, looking as if he were loving this.