Page 62 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Four

Rachel

A few days before Thanksgiving, Rachel came home from the grocery store to find her daughter, face pulpy from crying, huddled on the couch among a scrum of wadded-up tissues.

She was so alarmed, she nearly dropped the bag with the eggs.

“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Lucy blew her nose. It was like the toot of a mournful trumpet. “I broke up with Noah,” she said. Her voice was thick with mucus.

“ You did?” Rachel asked.

Lucy glared at her. “Yes, I did. Is that so fucking hard to believe?”

“ Lucy. ” Rachel deposited the bags on the coffee table and took a seat next to her daughter on the couch.

“Sorry,” Lucy grumbled. She blew her nose again, extravagantly. “It was so sad. But I had to. He’s been so weird ever since—”

She broke off abruptly. Her hands spasmed in her lap.

“Ever since what, sweetheart?” Rachel reached out to stroke Lucy’s hair back from her forehead.

Lucy’s skin felt warm, clammy. She recalled then the time that Lucy had gotten strep throat and a fever that had briefly touched 105.

Rachel had stayed up all night monitoring Lucy’s fever and her agonized thrashing as she shivered under mounds of blankets in the June heat.

Rachel remembered the smell of the bedroom—ripe, fruity, almost exotic, as if some strange fungal organism had taken over her daughter’s body.

Lucy fidgeted. “He knows about what happened in Michigan,” she said finally. “He saw the photos.”

Instantly Rachel’s blood pressure spiked. Her thoughts splintered into a whirl of alarms. “What? How? ”

“I don’t know. Someone found them.”

“ Who found them?” Rachel got up and began to pace.

Or more like prowl. She was suddenly enraged.

Lucy had been only thirteen when she’d sent those photos to the boy she believed cared about her, a seventeen-year-old junior she’d been talking with over Snapchat.

Soon everyone in the high school had seen them, and Lucy, already struggling in middle school, was the subject of bathroom graffiti and physical assaults in the hall.

People started spreading rumors: Lucy gave out hand jobs for twenty dollars; Lucy had lost her virginity to everyone on the basketball team.

Rachel had fought to hold everyone who’d circulated the photographs accountable, and eventually two seniors, both over eighteen, were charged with trafficking child sex materials and forced to register as sex offenders.

But it had taken close to a year, and by then Lucy was ninety pounds, wizened like an old lady and picking at her skin until it bled.

“I said I don’t know .” Lucy was close to tears again. “See? This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I knew you’d freak out.”

“Of course I’m freaking out.” Rachel forced herself to sit down again. “When did this happen?”

“Forever ago,” Lucy said. “Like in September. Before Casino Night even.”

Now it made sense to Rachel—that time she’d found a clump of hair in the shower drain, those nights when she’d heard panicked whispering and muffled sobs from Lucy’s room. She’d been dealing with the fallout of those photographs—again. Noah must have seen them. Everyone must have seen them.

She couldn’t believe that Lucy hadn’t told her. They’d sworn they would have no secrets.

“Casino Night,” Rachel repeated. “When you and Noah had a big fight? When you came home in tears?”

Lucy looked away. She was silent for a bit. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said finally, almost ferociously. “So what? So now everyone knows what I am.”

“Those photos,” Rachel said, “are not who you are.”

She reached out to place a hand on Lucy’s knee.

Lucy squirmed away. “Just forget I said anything,” she said. “Please.”

Rachel shook her head. “If those photos are still out there, still circulating—”

Suddenly Lucy clapped both hands over her ears, squeezing as if she could cave in her head. “Mom, please. Please. I just broke up with my boyfriend .” Her voice pitched to a desperate wail. “Noah’s like the only person who ever even loved me.”

“Noah’s not the only person who ever loved you,” Rachel said.

She ached to put her arms around Lucy, to hold her like she would have when Lucy was a child awoken by a bad dream.

To rock her until the billows of feeling rolled through, until the dream was fully dispelled.

“I love you. Alan loves you. Your friends love you.”

“You know what I mean,” Lucy said.

They sat in quiet for a bit—Lucy still sniffling, shrunken into her oversize hoodie, turtle-like. The winter sun was dwindling on the floorboards even though it was barely four o’clock. The radiators hissed at the cold that blew through the gaps in the window frames.

“How did Noah take it?” Rachel asked once Lucy’s breathing had settled. “Was he angry?”

Lucy’s laugh was mangled. “Noah’s never angry,” she said bitterly. “Noah’s just disappointed .”

Rachel knew the type. Greg, her college boyfriend, had been like that: withdrawing into wounded silence when he felt Rachel had slighted him, punishing her with small cutting comments about her writing or her friends or her hairstyle.

He had even used his warmth as a weapon, turning it on their friends and even on strangers so that Rachel could detect it landing on someone else.

“Do you think you’ll stay friends?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure that I want to,” Lucy said. “I love Noah. But ...”

“But what?” Rachel prompted.

“I don’t think he’s that nice to me,” Lucy said.

Rachel felt a surge of love for Lucy that was almost overwhelming. There were so many ways to learn about parenting—so many books and websites and experts to consult. But no one could prepare you for the love, and how often it felt just like pain.

“I’m proud of you, sweetheart,” she said. This time, Lucy let Rachel kiss her on the forehead.

Later, when Lucy went upstairs to nap, Rachel finished unloading the groceries.

She felt unaccountably light, almost exuberant.

Without realizing it, she’d been carrying around a weight about Noah and Lucy’s relationship, about how it was reshaping Lucy’s goals, attention, even her selection of a summer job.

Lucy had initially pondered volunteer work, possibly for the Indiana chapter of Planned Parenthood.

But working at the ice-cream store near Byron Lake had been convenient for seeing Noah—and Rachel sensed, although Lucy had never said so, that Noah and his family might be pro-life.

Unconsciously she had feared that Lucy might continue to wrap her interests and schedule around Noah’s, especially when it came time to apply to college.

Lucy still hadn’t totally found herself academically.

On any given week, she might profess a thousand interests or none at all.

In some ways, Noah had been the ultimate distraction—a way of defining herself without actually finding herself.

But now it was over, and Lucy herself had made the choice. Rachel had little fear that she would change her mind. Lucy often hesitated, waffled, and even agonized before making a decision. But once she did, she stuck to it. She was a committer.

The thought flashed: Lucy wasn’t like poor Nina Faraday. Lucy would never linger in a toxic relationship like the one Nina had with Tommy Swift.

Just as quickly, she chased the comparison away, ashamed by it.

It was ridiculous to hold Lucy up to Nina and to judge Nina unfavorably for it.

Whatever had happened to Nina Faraday, it was something that had happened to her .

It wasn’t Nina’s fault or her responsibility.

It wasn’t the result of a character flaw—at least not her character flaw, like so many people in Rockland County had implied or assumed.

Besides, she was troubled by the idea that Lucy and Nina had followed parallel paths, even briefly.

This, too, was yet another source of worry that she had been trying to ignore for many months.

It was over now, Rachel told herself in a singsong. She would have to deal with the photographs, of course. Lucy might wish to forget the whole episode. But if someone at Woodward had distributed them, they would have to be identified and punished.

But not yet. First Rachel would make Lucy something yummy.

Something she could eat in bed with a broken heart.

Maybe mac and cheese—Rachel was getting pretty good—or an egg and cheese sandwich.

Tomorrow they would again do a double Thanksgiving, first at Rachel’s aunt and uncle’s, then at the Sandhus’.

But at least they wouldn’t have to make a stop at the Landrys’, where all the conversation, like the decor, was belabored with references to Noah’s swim career.

She turned on the tap and began to fill a stockpot, encouraged by the cheerful drum of water against copper.

She thought of her daughter lying upstairs, surrounded by a fleecy pile of tissues, probably torturing herself with old photos and social media posts.

She thought of the slow and fitful way that broken hearts repaired, straightened out, and pointed you in new directions.

She thought they had much to be thankful for that year.