Page 64 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Six

Rachel

L ater Rachel would obsessively replay the night in her mind, wondering where she had been, what she’d been doing when her daughter was staggering into a downstairs bedroom, leaning on her ex-boyfriend’s best friend.

Trusting him. What had Rachel been doing when Lucy woke up in flashes, in brief snapshots, to find Noah on top of her and his friends watching them from the corner, egging him on?

Had she been brushing her teeth or on the phone with her cousin while Lucy was slipping in and out of consciousness?

Where was she at the exact moment that her daughter was being raped?

For some reason this felt important—critical even—in the brutal early days of the new year.

If she could only think her way back to the precise moment when her daughter’s life was slipping off its tracks, shoved in an entirely new direction, she might somehow avert it, might rivet Lucy back to herself as she puttered obliviously around the house, enjoying one of the few New Year’s Eves she’d ever spent at home as a single woman.

Rachel was sick afterward, remembering how much she’d enjoyed herself—how pleased she’d been, even, that Lucy had had plans with her friends.

A sleepover at Mia’s house, Lucy had told her. Just the girls.

And Rachel had believed her.

Idiot.

She had suspected something was wrong, something was off, when Lucy had texted at eleven o’clock to say that she was going to bed as soon as she and her friends were done watching a movie.

The message was full of typos; Rachel had asked point-blank whether she was drinking and then demanded that Lucy call.

Lucy wouldn’t. But her subsequent texts seemed more lucid, and she’d promised to call as soon as the movie was over. Rachel suspected now that one of Lucy’s friends had taken her phone, concerned that Lucy might tip off her mother about the party.

Lucy herself didn’t remember; she didn’t remember texting her mother at all. Whole portions of the night, she said, were missing as if they’d been removed with a gigantic ice-cream scoop. Instead she had only fragments. Feelings.

A sore throat, raw feeling, possibly from throwing up. Mysterious bruises on her arms and thighs.

Pain between her legs.

And Rachel had been—where? Surfing Netflix, trying to decide on a movie to watch.

Texting with friends from graduate school.

Spooning ice cream into the little glass cups she and Lucy had found at a yard sale over the summer and wondering why pharmacies had once doubled as soda shops, what the connection was.

She had stayed up to watch the ball drop in Times Square, counting down with the crowd and blowing a kiss to the TV screen at midnight. Goodbye and hello.

She texted Lucy again. Are you asleep? And then: Be honest. Have you been drinking?

She checked the last message she’d sent to Bailey.

Can you please have Lucy call me? No response.

But she still wasn’t too worried about it.

Mia’s parents weren’t her favorite people—country-club types, disengaged—and she couldn’t imagine that they would have stayed home to supervise the girls on New Year’s Eve.

But even if Lucy and her friends were drinking, Rachel had no reason to think they were in danger—not with the four of them together, not at a girls’ sleepover.

So she turned off the lights. She treated herself to a face mask, a Korean clay treatment that Lucy had insisted they buy after hearing about it on TikTok.

She thought she would read for a bit—one of her old colleagues from Vice had written a new book about the Murdaugh case—and she was just preparing to climb in bed when her phone lit up.

She lurched for it, assuming it was her daughter at last.

She felt her first real pull of anxiety when she saw Noah Landry’s number.

“Noah? Is everything okay?” Right away she could tell that Noah was in a car. She checked the time: 12:35 a.m. As far as she knew, Noah had a strict curfew. Something must have gone wrong.

“Um, I think so?” Noah’s voice—so familiar, so casual—was instantly reassuring. “But, um, Lucy’s pretty wasted ...”

“Where is she? Where are you?”

“I have her in the car. I’m on my way to your house right now. I just thought you should know. She keeps saying she has to puke ...”

“But where was she? Where’s Bailey?”

Noah hesitated. “They’re still at Ryan’s house,” Noah said finally.

It finally clicked. “What is it? Some kind of party?”

“I wasn’t there,” Noah said quickly, all but confirming it. “I only went because JJ called me about Lucy. He said she was passed out.”

Now Rachel felt a spike of anger. So Lucy had simply lied to her from the beginning.

Mentally she cycled through a list of appropriate punishments.

She would take Lucy’s phone. She would ground her for a month.

“Well, just pull over if she has to puke. And Noah—please drive safely. The roads are icy.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Noah said. Rachel had never convinced Noah to call her anything else, even after months of seeing him almost as much as she did Lucy.

She’d always felt that it was somehow retrogressive—gendered, of course, and so old-fashioned.

The way he lilted the syllables brought to mind southern belles and statues of Confederate heroes.

But right then she experienced a rush of real fondness for Noah, for his manners and his strict moral code.

He was bringing Lucy back home, where she would sleep off whatever she’d consumed in her own bed, safe.

She briefly wondered how Noah must be feeling, coming to Lucy’s rescue so soon after she’d dumped him.

She sympathized with him, felt sorry for him even.

He was a good guy. And Lucy ...

Well. Lucy had her own issues to work out.

When Rachel saw headlights through the kitchen windows, she slipped on a ski jacket over her pajamas and shoved her bare feet into Lucy’s UGGs.

Outside the air razored through her lungs.

The sky was clear, pristine with stars hanging like shards of ice against the black.

She crunched down the driveway toward the garage, where Noah was just coaxing Lucy out of the back seat.

“Come on, Luce,” he was saying. “Almost there.”

“Did you talk to my mom?” Lucy’s voice was still thick with alcohol.

She could barely keep her head up. She didn’t seem to register Rachel approaching.

Her eyes slid from Rachel’s, bounced over the house, rolled back toward the sky.

She reeked of liquor, and something else; Rachel saw vomit on her sweatshirt, which engulfed her all the way to her bare thighs.

“I don’t know what happened to her jacket,” Noah said apologetically as Rachel took Lucy’s arm and helped steer her back toward the house, half-relieved and half-furious.

Lucy still had her bag at least, but she was wearing flip-flops.

Underneath the sweatshirt, a ridiculously short skirt was twisted around backward. What the hell had she been thinking?

Noah helped Rachel maneuver Lucy up the stairs to the back door. Lucy stirred into sudden motion when he reached for the door handle, swatting away his hand.

“Go away,” she slurred. “I don’t need you.”

Noah took a step back, looking wounded. Again Rachel felt sorry for him and furious with Lucy—the chunks of vomit tangled in her hair, the acerbic breath.

“I’m sorry, Noah,” she said. “You should get home. It’s late. Your parents will be worried.”

Noah nodded. Still, he lingered, shoulders hunched to his ears, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The porch light threw his shadow, huge, almost back to the garage. “Is she gonna be okay?” he asked uncertainly as Rachel wrestled with Lucy at the door, trying to get it open.

“She’ll be fine,” Rachel said.

Lucy dropped her head on Rachel’s shoulder. She said, “Mom. Mom, I don’t feel good.”

Noah said, “I bet she won’t remember anything, though.” At the time Rachel didn’t think much of it.

Then Noah turned and headed back to his car, which was still running, spitting exhaust into the cold. Rachel got Lucy to the kitchen and made her drink some water. She guided Lucy up the stairs and into her bedroom. Lucy belly flopped onto the mattress.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said into the pillow. “I didn’t mean to.”

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Rachel said. She sat Lucy up to get her out of the filthy sweatshirt. For a moment Lucy, now wearing only her bra, clung to her mother.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. Her skin felt cold and slick like something left out in a storm drain.

“Just go to sleep,” Rachel said. She leaned Lucy back onto the pillows. Even after Lucy was asleep—or passed out—Rachel got a comb and spray bottle from the bathroom and tried to tease out some of the vomit in her hair. She couldn’t sleep anyway.

She wondered what on earth had happened to Lucy’s shirt.