Lost Voices (5 page)

But you know that’s not sufficient excuse for how I acted. Not enough to repair Peter’s feelings, anyway.”

“It’s none of Peter’s business!” Luce was starting to get angry; she didn’t like hearing her father blame himself that way.

“Mom
loved
you.”

“She did,” her father agreed. “She did do that. Gave me more and truer love than any human being can hope for in this life.” He was looking away, and Luce knew he didn’t want her to see the tears in his eyes. “But the truth is that it would have been a whole lot better for her if she hadn’t.” He was so upset that Luce didn’t try to talk him out of his plan to move back to Pittley, Alaska, where he’d grown up. If she had only argued with him then, screamed, threatened to kill herself, then maybe he never would have gone out on the
High and Mighty
at all . . .

He’s dead,
Luce thought. She couldn’t have said why she was suddenly so sure of this; she only knew that it was inescapably true.
Drowned
.
He won’t ever come back.
And then she felt the sticky wooden table under her hands. There was a sudden crash. She looked over to see Peter splayed on the floor with a barstool 30 i LOST VOICES

tipped across his stomach, his arms swinging heavily as he tried, and failed, to right himself.

The bartender rushed around the counter and helped Peter up to a sitting position. His face was blotchy and swollen on one side. “You okay there?” the bartender asked.

Maybe Peter was trying to answer him in words, but it came out more like a growl. He managed to drag himself onto his feet, but Luce wasn’t sure how long he’d be able to stay upright.

He was clinging to the edge of the bar for balance.

“I’ll get you a cup of black coffee,” the bartender said after a minute. “Shouldn’t have let you drink so much. Coffee, and then you better get your niece on home. It’s a school night.” He looked at Luce, and she got up and walked over. “Can you get home okay?”

“It’s almost two miles,” Luce told him. “And that’s if we take the shortcut. Along the cliffs.” The bartender tipped his head sideways.

“Maybe you should wait till I can get somebody to drive you, then. Don’t want Peter too close to any
cliffs,
his condition being like this.” It was the wrong thing to say. Peter pulled himself straighter and raised his eyebrows in a way that was probably supposed to seem dignified.

“I’m not in need of any coffee,” her uncle said with an exaggerated effort to enunciate clearly. It didn’t quite work. “And I’m perfectly capable of escorting my niece back home. The way you talk to her, it seems like you don’t recall who’s the
adult
in this family.”

“I didn’t mean anything like that, Peter,” the bartender soothed. He gave Luce a funny look, as if she were a fellow con-spirator. “Just two miles is pretty far to be walking in the cold, i 31

and once my son’s off work he’ll be happy to give you a ride. Sit down and have a coffee while you wait for him.” The bartender checked his watch. “It’s twenty past eight now, and he’s off most nights by eight thirty.” Luce was amazed that it wasn’t at least midnight. The day had already dragged on for such a horribly long time. An image of the dead girl’s milky greenish face flashed in her mind again.

Peter shook his head. “Get your things, Luce.” She stared down; there was nothing to get. The bar was cold enough that she hadn’t even taken off her jacket. “When we get home,” her uncle said laboriously, “I’ll check to see you’ve done all your homework properly, and if you have you can watch half an hour of TV before bed.” Of course Luce knew he was only saying that to impress the bartender. Her uncle had never checked her homework once, and Luce didn’t think he was about to start now. He locked one thick hand on the back of her neck and shoved her out through the bar’s dirty glass door. He didn’t even say good night to the bartender. Luce peered back to see the bartender watching them from the door. His forehead was wrinkled with worry, but when he saw Luce looking he smiled at her and waved. Luce didn’t dare to wave back, though. It would only make her uncle angrier, and she was already afraid of what he might do once they reached the house.

The sky above was vast and dark, but the clouds had thinned enough that a yellowish blot showed where the moon must be.

Her uncle steered them toward the cliff path while the cold wind buffeted their faces. Neither of them spoke, and the only sounds were the wind in their ears and Luce’s fast soft steps alongside her uncle’s, which came slower and heavier, grinding the pebbles like 32 i LOST VOICES

teeth. He didn’t let go of Luce’s neck, and she didn’t look at him. Below them a few beacon lights bobbed on the midnight blue harbor.

After a while her uncle wasn’t walking beside her anymore, but behind her. He still had his left hand in a hard grip on her neck, and now his right hand curled around her shoulder and stroked her awkwardly. Luce didn’t know what to think. Her uncle never touched her except to slap her. She wanted to pull away, but she couldn’t take the risk of enraging him.

The path turned and led upward, and the harbor was behind them. Now the cloud- dulled moonlight cast its faint haze on crashing waves some eighty yards below.

They were still walking, but much more slowly. The dreamlike darkness filled Luce’s eyes, and then she felt her uncle’s hands slide down to grab her hips. He pulled her back so she was pressing on his body and rolled himself against her.

She tried to cry out, then. She tried to beg him to stop. Her voice was stuck deep inside her, and the night filled her mouth like a choking gas and she couldn’t make a sound, not even when she heard the zipper of her jeans sliding down and felt his thick fingers groping hungrily under the fabric. Her legs shuddered the way glass does in the moment just before it breaks.

He pushed her down on the grass and she started to crawl away, but his hands were on her, pulling her back, digging inside her clothes. She could taste the long grass, feel the jagged stones slicing at her palms. His breath was loud and fast, and Luce gathered all her strength; she was going to at least try to fight, even though he was so much bigger than her. She would rake his eyes out, hurt him as much as she possibly could. Sud-i 33

denly she didn’t care how angry she made him. She didn’t even care if he threw her off the cliff. What reason could there be for her to stay alive when everyone who’d ever cared about her was dead, lost forever, and she was so utterly alone? With a desperate wrench of her torso she managed to flip herself over and he grappled with her, throwing one heavy knee onto her stomach.

One leaden hand cracked across her face so hard that her head crunched into the stones, and she heard something pop in her neck. Pain swelled in so many parts of her body that she couldn’t keep track of it all: a dark confusion of aches.

The clouds tore back from the moon, and golden light spilled across Luce’s face. Her uncle Peter had his back to the moon so that all she could see was the black silhouette of his head and shoulders looming over her. His knee was still crushing into her gut, pinning her down, but after a second she realized that he had stopped yanking at her jeans. Luce’s heart was racing and her breath sounded like tearing paper. They stayed like that for so long that Luce thought it couldn’t be real, that she must have fallen into some other world.

“Alyssa?” her uncle finally whimpered. He sounded baby-ish, weak. “Alyssa, I didn’t
mean
it.” He staggered up onto his feet and stood there for a minute staring down at Luce sprawled on the grass, his giant’s body wavering as if he wasn’t sure what to do.

“I’m not
her,
” Luce rasped. She barely registered her own voice, but her uncle obviously heard her; something shifted in the way he held himself. “I’m still I’m just a kid.” She could almost feel the dream ripping away from him, leaving something dull and resentful behind.

34 i LOST VOICES

“You don’t need to be coming back to the house, then. Do you?” His voice squeezed out in a hostile croak. “Unless . . .” Then he turned away from her and ran, veering crazily up the path.

As soon as he was gone Luce’s voice came back in force. She shrieked and wailed, ripping up clumps of grass. No one heard her, no one came to help. She screamed until her throat was raw, and then the tears poured out. But they couldn’t wash anything away.

i 35

3

Changing

For a long time Luce sprawled there sobbing, feeling the long sharp grass cutting at her cheeks, the icy wind pounding against her trembling back. She could still feel the sore places under her clothes where Peter’s fingers had dug into her like hooks piercing a struggling fish. She didn’t want to understand what had just happened to her. As long as she didn’t let herself understand all the implications of it, maybe she wouldn’t have to completely feel them either. But what she couldn’t help understanding was that her uncle, the only family she had left, had tried to rape her and then had run off and left her there all alone in this desolate spot high on the cliffs. He’d run away home, but he didn’t care that she had nowhere left to run to. The icy night rattled its long grass in her ears until it sounded like the air was full of bones. The cold sank into her body in a way it never had 36 i

before, not even in the deepest snow. The cold took over her skin, her muscles, her brain, and then at last, with a tiny sigh like something breaking, it took over her heart.

It frightened her to feel the cold bite right through her center that way, but once it was over, and her heart had truly become as chilled and bitter as the night all around her, she knew it was easier that way. The freezing wind didn’t bother her anymore, and a peculiar looseness and freedom began to spread through all her limbs. She started to feel like a wild, shapeless thing: a stray piece of starlight curled up on the grass like a glowing snake or a puddle of rainwater with human eyes. She was liquid, unbound by skin. Suddenly it all seemed funny to her. Maybe she was going to die, maybe this feeling was death, but that didn’t matter so much. Why hadn’t she understood before? She didn’t have to be the strange girl no one wanted, trying to disappear into the corners of her schoolrooms, trying to keep from getting hit by her uncle at home. No one would miss her. She could be a free thing, and spill into places where nobody would ever find her again.

Just for a second Luce knew she did still have a choice. She could go back. Gum would miss her; he was almost as alone as she was. If she only
chose
it, she could pull her body back together, make it into arms and legs again, and go running home to huddle in her tiny bedroom with her heart pounding. Her uncle wouldn’t actually lock her out of the house, although he probably wouldn’t speak to her either. He was expecting her to come home, in fact, sooner or later. She could still be a regular girl. In a sudden flash she realized that he might even be just the smallest bit sorry.

i 37

She could be a girl, but then she’d spend the whole night, and the next night, and the next, sick with dread. Soon enough the time would come when greed or bitterness would overwhelm Peter’s shame again. He’d practically told her so. Every night she’d wrap herself in her blankets and wait shuddering for the moment when her door would creak open and his rough hands would crawl all over her, crushing her face against the pillow.

No, Luce said. She didn’t have a voice anymore to say it with, but she knew the night heard her anyway. NO! And with that cry she poured herself out on the darkness. She had a sensation of falling very rapidly, and for just a second she realized that she must have somehow slipped over the edge of the cliff.

It was hundreds of feet, here, down to the knife- sharp rocks and then the sea. Nobody could survive a fall like that. It just wasn’t possible.

So then it only made sense that the absolute violet black-ness all around her
must
be death. It was cold and silky, and it went nowhere, and it lasted for a very long time.

* * *

After a while, though, she began to realize that the perfect darkness was moving. It was moving faster than she ever could have imagined possible, swirling past her at amazing speed. If it could rush past her that way, did that mean that she was somehow still alive? Whatever the movement was, she could feel that it was strong and rippling. The darkness wasn’t quite so solid anymore either. Once or twice she saw specks of living light like twisting scarlet threads. The lights pirouetted closer and then, with a blink, they were far behind her.
Behind
her, 38 i LOST VOICES

Luce suddenly thought, and she was so astonished that she almost stopped. Then it wasn’t actually the darkness that was moving so quickly.
She
was the one who was moving through the darkness! She gave a kind of squirm, and found that she could control the direction of the movement. She could curve in long, dizzy swoops, shoot up, and even let herself roll over and over. Mostly, though, she kept moving forward. Nothing felt as good as knowing that she could send the darkness streaking out and away at her back, traveling faster than any car she’d ever been in.

One of the red lights swam close to her and opened its hollow mouth as if it wanted to blow her a kiss. Then it was gone.

Just a shining little worm.

It wasn’t so dark here, really, or anyway the darkness didn’t stop her from seeing things in the way it used to. It was a living, leaping darkness, full of shapes that were just as free as she was.

Luce knew at that moment that she’d never experienced anything nearly as beautiful as this power and this gracefulness. All of it was hers, a marvelous gift. And at this moment of deepest joy, Luce began to hear the sound.

The closest word for it was music, but it was better than any music. Every molecule shook with soft, sweet excitement.

Every note washed around her and covered her in a bath of dancing silk. She thought that the beauty of it must be more than she could bear, but somehow she went racing on and on inside the sound.