Page 52 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Two

Rachel

E very Sunday, Noah brought Rachel flowers when he picked up Lucy for church. Rachel couldn’t believe that her daughter was regularly attending services.

“What about becoming a Wiccan?” she teased. “I thought you said that organized religion was a tool to brainwash the masses.”

Lucy looked a little embarrassed. “It’s important to Noah,” she said.

It was a phrase that Rachel heard a lot that spring.

Mom, can you drive me to Wabash on Thursday for Noah’s all-around?

It’s important to Noah. Mom, can I go to Noah’s house for dinner after practice?

It’s practically the only time we’ll have together this week.

Please. It’s important to Noah. “Besides, I like the music.”

“I just don’t want you feeling like you have to become someone else,” Rachel said, reaching out to ruffle her daughter’s hair.

Lucy jerked away. “I’m not becoming someone else,” she said. They were driving. She flipped down the passenger-side mirror to check her reflection. “I’m becoming someone better.”

Rachel almost said, “According to who?” But she stopped herself.

For the most part, Lucy seemed happy. Noah was nice to her, she said.

Respectful. Not like her last “boyfriend,” thank God.

He’d tormented Lucy with those photos. He’d spread them around to his high school friends.

Gossip had reached the middle school quickly. That’s when Lucy’s real torment began.

Noah Landry was different. Everyone liked him, according to Lucy—with the possible exception of Akash. Everyone knew him as a nice guy.

Still, Rachel worried. Noah had grown into Lucy’s life fast and completely, in the way of young, early romances.

His presence, his preferences, his swim schedule, his opinions seemed to invade their house, growing stalactite-like at the center of every conversation, every weekend plan, every thought for the future.

Rachel found herself tracking Noah’s schedule along with her daughter’s, able to recite the dates and locations of his upcoming meets with the club team, aware of his swim times and the records he was trying to beat.

She even knew what he ate, how many calories he needed to consume.

Lucy seemed to absorb Noah through a process of diffusion. Or maybe Noah had absorbed Lucy. And Rachel lay awake at night, fretting, trying to keep them distinct in her head.

And there were problems. Minor blowups. Nights when Lucy went to bed with her eyes puffy from crying because of something Noah had said, because he hadn’t called after practice, or because he had called but sounded “weird.” There was the time that Lucy came home fuming because she’d had her phone confiscated by Administration after texting in class.

“Why were you texting in class?” Rachel wanted to know.

“Noah had a question,” she responded.

“Couldn’t it wait?” she asked. “He knows you’re not supposed to be on your phone in school.”

“It was important,” Lucy said. It was always important when Noah texted because Noah himself was important—not just to Lucy but to everyone at Woodward. My boyfriend is basically our national hero, Lucy told her mother once.

When Rachel asked her what that made Lucy, Lucy shrugged and said, Lucky.

Whenever Rachel worried that Noah and Lucy spent too much time together, she reminded herself that Lucy seemed healthy.

Her grades hadn’t slipped. Noah was a good student and cared about his schoolwork.

( He actually does his own homework, Lucy had said, as if that were something to be especially proud of.)

The ground thawed early; it had been a mild winter with barely any snow.

In early March, the Friskes had helped Rachel bag the fallen leaves and winter detritus from her two acres, carting away more than fifty bags to the dump.

In the mornings after Lucy went off to school, Rachel wrote, made notes, made phone calls, and sent emails.

In the afternoons, she gardened—yanking dandelions from between the paving stones, uprooting a sea of ferns that hemmed close to the front porch, clearing the rose beds and then reseeding.

It was a season of planting and sowing. Of ideas that barely sparked to life, then flowered into questions, hypotheses, leads to pursue.

Slowly the veil of the new book fell over her, including ideas for the structure.

She would write not about Nina first but about her mother.

About the lawsuit and the claims she’d made about a cover-up.

About her mysterious death. Then about Nina and Tommy Swift, about their volatile romance—the volumes of text messages, the obsession, the fiery arguments, the breakups.

She’d begun to track down Nina’s old friends—former cheerleaders, many of them still in town with young children of their own—and encountered the same haze of contradictions in their memories.

Yes, Tommy and Nina had broken up and gotten back together more times than they could count. Neither Coach Steeler nor Nina’s mom wanted them to date.

True, Tommy Swift had a temper. But he would never have hurt Nina.

And Nina had changed in the weeks before her disappearance. That last time, it was Nina who’d ended things with Tommy. That last time, something was different. Something was truly broken. She was missing cheer practices. She withdrew. She seemed nervous about something.

Her grades slipped. Coach Steeler was worried.

He was trying to help her. It was surprising perhaps that Coach Steeler had stepped in, given that he’d disapproved of Nina and Tommy’s relationship.

But it dovetailed with what Rachel knew about him: he was a man who liked to fix , to take control, to be at the center of things.

Even now, several years after his death, Coach Steeler was, in a way, at the center of Rockland County life.

But not in her book. No, in her book Nina was the mystery at the center.

Rachel would weave the narrative around the impenetrability of her final days, crystallize her through the stories people told about her.

And slowly, through the fractal accumulation of viewpoints, of recollections and theories, she might assemble some splintered vision, some final insight, some truth.

And she would leave her own memories, her own experience, out of it. It didn’t matter that she’d briefly encountered Nina in the dark all those years ago, watched her flying birdlike and barefoot across the lawn to greet Coach Steeler.

It didn’t matter that Rachel had accepted a ride home from Jay Steeler that night, bored and flattered, heartsick over her ex-boyfriend.

Young. Just barely twenty-two. Half-excited and half-sickened when the married father of two slid a rough hand up her bare legs and found her underwear with his fingers.

It was a brief affair. They’d met again only twice.

Both times Rachel was nervous and drank too much at dinner.

Both times they had sex in a motel room near I-69.

Rachel could hear the 18-wheelers rattling the windows as Steeler grunted on top of her.

She didn’t come and didn’t remember enjoying it.

What she remembered was a desperate feeling of embarrassment, of having done something wrong, of having displeased him in some way.

She remembered calling his phone again and again on and off that winter, hoping to recapture some sense of power, some proof that he’d really meant it when he’d told her how beautiful she was.

She’d been stupid and naive without knowing it. She’d been desperate to be special.

But none of that belonged in the book. It would remain Rachel’s secret—the small, tangled episode that had lived inside her for so long, it had grown roots and become its own source of strength.

All spring, Rachel knelt in the dirt, planted seeds, and sorted through the layers of the book taking shape in her head.

Lucy was rarely home. Too busy.

There was no rain at all.