One Year Earlier

Part Six -

Lucy was no longer surprised at how quickly was could adapt to change around her. Within the blink of an eye she was a New Yorker. Brash, and Pushy. She sat at the tiny wooden tables in Starbucks coffee houses and read The Village Voice, and the New York Times, finding inspiration, and educative conclusions in both.

She studied hard, which was in line with her former self, and she didn’t go out and party like the other kids in her dorm. She quickly realized that they were all wealthy, and she kept mostly to herself. Preferring the company of library books to shot glasses.

She also had a new cell phone, and a new phone number, which she was still trying to memorize. One of the first things she did upon arriving was throw her old one in the trash at the airport. There were several messages on them already. From her mother, her sister, and one from Rob, though there were none from Emmy. She chose not to listen to any of them. And, purchasing her new phone she called Alice, to let her know she had landed safely and gave her the new number in case there were any problems. In the months that followed neither Leslie, or her mother contacted her.

The words that all of them had said to each other hung in the air like forget-me-knots. They had been etched onto the bibliography of their lives so staunchly. Lucy wanted to call her mother. She wanted to hear her sisters voice more then anything, but the weight of what they had done hung on her like shroud. It draped around her, clogging her mind to anything besides her contempt for them.

****

Leslie flat out stopped giving a shit about everything, and everyone, with the solid exception of Rob. Her mother and her grandmother walked around the house like ghosts, diaphanous in their silence. It didn’t matter though!

She went to school as long as she could stand it. Cutting class came as naturally to her as breathing, and then she stopped going all together. No one could teach her more about life then she had already learned: People leave! Shit happens! No one is worth a damn! And those things, at least as Leslie saw it, were not covered in high school. Those life lessons can not be graded on a scale of A-F, it has to become something bred into you. It has to flow through your veins like ice until your core is as solid as rock.

Rob followed her around like a lost lap dog, which she loved.

The whole rest of the summer he meandered around the house, fixing things that were broken, or coming over to watch a movie in the living room, where the three remaining women of the house gathered as though no part were missing. He replaced Lucy, in more ways then one.

Once school started he shadowed her still, and he became a welcome presence.

When he kissed her for the first time in the back of the music department she began to feel the shell she had built up crumble, as though an earthquake had erupted inside her bones. Things shifted inside her. And, when he held her hand while walking home in the middle of the day after another successful break from school she felt so calm she could have performed heart surgeries, or conducted symphonies.

“You‘re not like her at all, you know,” he complemented her one day while he was lying on top of her on the bed.

She giggled, pulling his face toward hers with cupped palms: “I love you,” she whispered.

Rob’s face was buried deep in the curve of her neck, where her collar bone met the bulb of her shoulder. She could not see the shadow behind his eyes when he whispered back the catch-phrase that made her change from solid to liquid: “Yeah… I love you too.”

Leslie had never made out with a boy before Rob, let alone sleep with one. Everything she knew about it had come from Emmy first hand, and a porn video that they had all watched about a year ago.

It was Emmy who told her to treat a guys penis like an ice cream cone when giving a blow job, so when she bent down to put her mouth to his organ she lapped at it sloppily as though it were milting soft-serve. Rob moaned, wrapping his hand around the back of her head, guiding her. She realized quickly what Emmy had meant when she told her that she liked the way a guy moaned. It made her feel thicker between her legs.

Going faster and faster against him she remembered a scene from the porn where the girl hummed with the man’s penis inside her mouth. Curling both her lips around his groin, and taking it as deep as she could she began to hum. First just a long solid note, then she stopped and started, forming a make shift tune, her register passing along the scales she had learned in elementary school choir. Rob’s hand felt so tight around her head that it hurt and he let out the harshest, most loveliest yelps before climaxing. She had taken her mouth away by then and it squirted out over her chin and shirt.

Rob pulled her up to his chest, falling onto the bed with her on top of him. “Oh my god!” He said, his tone made her smile proudly.

****

For Colleen hate was an emotion that she did not find difficult to accumulate. People always told her: Never say never! Although she was adamant every time she used that word, and to the best of her ability she kept that promise.

She kept hearing Lucy’s words over and over in her head: “I hate this family, and I hate what both of you are becoming.”

She had hated her mother for leaving her as a child. Hated the vapid loneliness that accompanied her sister’s marriage, and her role as babysitter to her own nieces and nephews when they came along. She hated her husband for dying. For leaving her alone with two children. She hated how difficult a child was to raise, and how no one teaches you growing up that from the moment they’re born they follow every step you take in succession until you’re watching your own wasted life play out over again and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Even more then any of that she hated her daughter. Lucy was everything that she was not. Leaving, like her own mother. Moving on from everything that might otherwise trap her. Free of everything.

It is a sad fate to hate your own child, but Colleen could never imagine loving her again.

****

Alice has ricochet back and forth too many times to choose sides. She loves Colleen for her stick-to-adivness. And Leslie for her nurturing nature, and Lucy for her passion. She cannot find a balance in her heart for the loss of Lucy’s presence in the house. Or the loss of her families sense of completeness when they were all together.

She believes that nothing is permanent. In the windows of this new house of change they have constructed around themselves, there will always be hope.

****

Thirty-Thousand feet up in the air was higher then time, Emmy realized, although time could not touch her, the altitude still made her sick. Like she had so often during her trip with her mother she had hastily excused herself and ran awkwardly to the bathroom.

She had vomited before, easily when she had too much to drink, and then a few times in junior high by sticking her finger down her throat, but it never felt like this. Her stomach had become an ocean filled with currents and jagged edges, and no matter what she ate, or didn’t eat, she couldn’t keep anything down.

Her mother called it stress, and Emmy believed her.

Cupping her hand under the faucet and bring tepid water up to her mouth she took it as philosophy that she was exercising Rob’s crime out of her system. That this was just her body’s way of releasing her pain. A part of her didn’t believe that though. As she pulled paper towels loose from their metal case, drying her hands, she still felt bloated with pain.