Page 15 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Fourteen

Rachel

R achel kept track of all the names that began to bubble up in conversations with her daughter, writing them carefully in her notebook, the kind she’d carted around since graduate school.

Lucy joked that Rachel’s notebooks were an extension of her brain, a repository for all the to-do lists, reminders, and observations that buzzed ceaselessly in her head like swarms of delirious flies.

New GP? Submit Lucy’s ID to Woodward. DMV—Monday.

Advanced copies—when? Hieroglyphs, Rachel thought; symbolic notations that pointed to every important moment of her adult life, and plenty of the spaces in between.

The year before, she’d been tracking Lucy’s meals.

The margins were packed with terms such as cognitive distortion and control mechanisms , remnant wisdom from their endless parade of therapy appointments.

She’d filled pages and pages with a careful timeline of Lucy’s developing compulsions: showering, plucking, scratching her skin with scissors. Not cutting, not quite. But close.

She’d been glad to shelve that notebook.

Now Rachel found a clean sheet of paper and made careful note: Akash Sandhu—good kid. Alex Spinnaker—coding club. Olivia Howard—works at PetSmart .

In Lansing she hadn’t known any of Lucy’s friends.

She thought she had. There was sweet little Erica with braces and spotty skin, and Dhara, who was some kind of chess genius—girls whom Lucy had known since fifth grade.

She hadn’t thought much of it when they stopped showing up for monthly sleepovers and Erica’s mother turned frosty, cold, when they occasionally bumped into each other at parent-teacher events.

She’d been so busy—distracted with work, with the clamor surrounding her second book, with the slow, catastrophic fallout of Alan’s affair.

Lucy was fine, she thought. Too much on her phone, yes.

Too often locked up in her bedroom alone.

But fine, dependable. Grounded. Wise, in some ways, for her age.

She was the one who’d told Rachel, You don’t need Alan.

Alan needs you. That’s why he resents you.

And she was right; Rachel was sure that Lucy was correct.

Rachel had loved Alan. But she had never needed him.

Alan was just a familiar feature of her life, like the comfortable reading chair she’d had since her twenties, the one whose cushions retained the permanent impression of her thighs.

For years they had simply lived their lives in parallel, coming together less and less frequently for sex, rising and sleeping at different hours.

But always saying I love you. Touching hands, briefly, when they passed in the hall—Rachel on the way to her desk, Alan on his way .

.. somewhere. Rachel hadn’t thought to ask.

She hadn’t thought to worry about his frequent absences from home.

She hadn’t thought much about Alan at all, if she were honest about it. Or about Lucy. She had taken them both for granted.

Then she began finding all those eyelashes, and Lucy’s dinner balled up in her napkin and discarded with the trash. It was then she realized that something had gone terribly wrong.

On the afternoon she sent Lucy off to her first party in Indiana, Rachel finally made it up to the attic.

The house felt strange in Lucy’s absence.

When Rachel imagined the move, she’d always envisioned the two of them cocooned inside this project—transforming this notorious, long-neglected house, revitalizing it together.

She’d imagined Lucy selecting wallpaper, or hanging curtains.

She’d imagined skating down the wide, sleek hallways in their socks.

Making pancakes on Sunday mornings. Watching horror movies while the winter rain rattled the old windows.

But already, after only ten days, Lucy was ebbing away, drawn back into the world of her peers.

Well. That was as it should be.

Still, Rachel was afraid.

In the quiet, with the shafts of sun pinwheeling through the windows, the first words of a book fell into her head.

At first, everyone agreed that Nina Faraday was a good girl. Later, they began to have doubts.

As if on cue, her phone trilled in her back pocket. Her agent, Marc.

“How’s my favorite client?” he said when she answered.

“How often do you say those words per day?” Rachel said. She had to lean her shoulder hard against the attic door so it didn’t pop open like a cork released from a bottle. Up here the heat was sweltering. It smelled like wet mice.

“Depends on how many clients I call,” Marc said easily.

Rachel had known Marc since she was twenty-five, fresh out of graduate school and freelancing for Vice Magazine while toggling two jobs.

They’d met at an industry conference in Chicago, and he’d recognized her name from an article about a sex scandal at a local Catholic school.

He was only two years older than her but already wearing a suit, looking pressed and sleek and adult, as if someone had run him across an ironing board.

He carried business cards in a silver case.

She disliked him, at first. She didn’t take him seriously when he asked if she’d thought of writing a book. Lucy was a toddler. She and Alan, then a law student, survived mostly on ramen. She’d earned fifty bucks for the article that went viral.

But Marc had persisted. He’d monitored her bylines, sent her flowers when she got a job at the Chicago Tribune . He helped her shape her first book proposal. He even selected her pen name—a necessity, Rachel had decided, given the subjects she chose, and the attention that could follow.

“How’s the heartland?” he asked. “Plant any corn yet?”

“I’m mostly worried about un planting things,” Rachel said. From this height, the garage below buoyed up on a single tapestry of green, disrupted only by the narrow river of gravel running down to the back gate. “You should see this place. It’s like the Amazon.”

“How’s Lucy doing?” Marc’s voice softened a bit.

“Lucy,” Rachel said, “is at a party. Not that kind of party,” she added quickly.

“A barbecue for someone’s birthday. The kids around here seem nice.

” There were initials etched into the windowpane.

She had to crouch and position herself at the right angle to make them out.

NF + TS . Nina Faraday and Tommy Swift. Her heart gave a small thrill.

“That’s great,” Marc said. The weight of what had happened at Lucy’s old school hung temporarily between them. Then Marc cleared his throat. “I’ve got an update on those ARCs. Good news is, they’ll be ready in time for sales conference ...”

They chatted a bit and then said their goodbyes, leaving the topic of Rachel’s next book untouched.

After they hung up, she stood for a while, running a finger over the trace impression cut into the glass.

Someone had gouged several hard lines through the initials, as if in regret for putting them there.

Was it Nina? Her mother? Or Tommy himself?

She roused and turned her attention to the miscellany of junk that had been left undisturbed in the attic for God knows how long.

She doubted any of it had belonged to the Faradays, the last legal tenants, so far as she knew.

More likely a generation of squatters and trespassers, junkies and ghost hunters, had wound their way up these stairs.

At least there was no graffiti disturbing the old wooden beams and the rafters, mossy with spiderwebs.

It would be a handsome room—an aerie of sorts—once it was scrubbed and sanitized.

She put on a mask and a pair of old gloves and began filling trash bags.

The floor was covered in old newspaper, all of it hopelessly spotted with mouse turds.

A festering mattress was gutting springs onto the floor.

There were cardboard boxes, too, stacked around the room, slowly disintegrating into pulp.

She opened one and saw more mouse turds covering a haphazard pile of old paperbacks.

All of it would have to go down to the dumpster.

Up and down the stairs she went, sweating freely in her mask until it felt clammy on her skin.

The whole time her mind kept pinging between Lucy at her first social event and Nina Faraday standing at the attic window, holding a penknife in her hand, eking out the initials of the boy she loved—then, at some point, furiously crossing them out.

It’s always the same story with a few modern updates, Marc had said when Rachel told him about Lucy and her old school, all her problems the previous year. It always comes down to a boy.

A simple, and not entirely accurate, assessment. But there was some truth to it.

Rachel wondered whether there had been some truth to it for Nina Faraday too.