Chapter 2 Lucy’s Game
Lucy’s Game
Two important facts about today: Four months have passed since Lucy left this world, and my grandfather’s turning seventy-eight.
It feels almost ironic, as if each of them was on one side of a scale, and fate decided to play with them for its own amusement.
Grandpa has lived fifty-four summers more than his oldest granddaughter, though I know he’d happily have given those years if this were a world where we could buy and sell time.
But then, Lucy might never have existed.
I keep turning this over in my head while Taylor kisses me.
“Come back to earth, Greta. What are you thinking?”
About fate and death, I think, but I know Taylor doesn’t want to hear anything like that.
If we’re honest, the only thing he wants is to take off his clothes and mine.
I have no idea why I keep seeing him, and I can’t easily explain why we even started hooking up.
Boredom. To take the edge off this loneliness that never leaves me.
To stop thinking about Lucy. Because the line between sex and love is thin, and I always hope I can jump from one to the other.
Any of the above options might be valid.
But who cares? Could there possibly be anyone who cares?
“I’m thinking about how much I like you,” I lie.
Taylor smiles, satisfied, and stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray before bending over and running his hands up my shirt.
I try to let myself go with his caresses once he gets on top of me, but then I get distracted again with the word that’s been stuck in my head for weeks: nepheloid, which means of or related to clouds.
That’s what I want to do: dwell in the cottony clouds far from everyone and everything.
I stare at the bedroom ceiling while Taylor sinks inside me.
The feeling isn’t new; we’ve been seeing each other intermittently for a while now.
At school, he was three years ahead of me and was the stereotypical bad boy: He rode a motorcycle, fooled around with drugs, and hooked up with a different girl every night.
Eight years later, at twenty-six, he hasn’t changed a bit.
I’ve never had an interesting conversation with him, and I doubt that deep down he even knows anything about me beyond the size of my tits, but we do have one essential thing in common: His life and mine are both at a standstill.
We met each other stranded in the middle of nowhere.
When he’s done, he pulls out. I didn’t even come.
“Hey, Greta?”
“Yeah?”
“Take out the trash when you leave?”
“Fuck you.”
But I don’t get mad. It’s impossible to get mad at a person you don’t care about. Taylor tries to hold me back, grabbing me around the waist, but I pull away and dress hastily. He asks if I’m coming over tomorrow. I give him the finger. But we both know we’ll probably talk again in a few days.
I left my bike locked to a streetlight next to the house Taylor shares with two friends.
I get on it and pedal hard through the wide, tree-lined streets in their spring splendor, but the truth is, I’ve always liked autumn landscapes better, when the golden-brown leaves form a carpet over the sidewalk.
It’s a small city but not so small that you don’t feel surrounded by strangers.
Except where we live. There, everyone knows we’re the family of the girl who died.
Lots of neighbors came to the funeral and our usually half-empty fridge was filled with dishes they brought over that ended up rotting.
Ink Lake may just be another town lost in the middle of Nebraska, but the people are nice here—that’s part of their charm.
If you take a bird’s-eye view, the city is round, but it has a spur sticking out at one edge, so it really looks more like a snail.
Downtown there are stores, coffee shops, restaurants and bars, family businesses, and a pharmacy that survived mainly on the medications we ordered for Lucy.
There’s also a movie theater, so small and so old that if you sit in one of the seats, you run the risk of never getting back up.
It’s best not to think about why they’re so sticky.
On the edge of town, there’s a poor area with RVs, but my favorite burger place is there too, and the house specialty’s to die for.
When I was in high school, almost all my friends dreamed of going somewhere else.
I knew about their fantasies my whole life, but I never seriously considered that for myself.
I’ve never even been out of the state. Because of Lucy’s illness, we went often to Omaha, but then they sent her to another specialist in Lincoln, which is closer.
Back then, when I wanted to go see her in the hospital, I could catch the number nine bus and listen to music for an hour and fifteen minutes.
That was best because cars have always freaked me out.
When I reached her bedside, my existence would have meaning again. There I was—the invisible heroine. The silent redeemer. The bearer of indestructible cells.
“Can you imagine what it would be like to go to college, Greta?” Lucy asked me one rainy spring afternoon. “Studying something you’re crazy about in a place where you can start from zero without anyone assuming anything about you.”
“I don’t think it would be so great.”
“You could do it. Go to New York, dress crazy, eat a hot dog in front of some fancy shop window. Who knows? Maybe you’d wind up being a famous figure skater and I could visit you in the summer and stay in the guest room of your sophisticated, minimalist apartment.”
“You watch too many movies, Lucy.”
“Dreaming’s free.”
I grabbed the board game she had on the nightstand, opened it, and set out the pieces.
The evening wore on with throws of the dice until she fell asleep and one of the nurses came in to give her another dose of medicine.
After that, silence was our only companion.
Mom had taken advantage of my visit to go home and shower, but she’d be back soon.
I looked at my sister’s face and tried to make out the part of her that was separate from her illness.
What would her life be like if she were healthy?
And still more complicated: What would the Peterson family’s life have been like?
One time, when I was little and was looking at the trunk of a tree that grew in Grandpa’s yard, I realized that it was the perfect simile for existence.
First of all, it needed water and nutrients to survive.
Second, it started off straight, but soon it divided, branches grew off it, and that was like having to start to make decisions.
Life stops being a straight line and turns into a labyrinth.
Each path you take means leaving another behind—that’s the terrifying thing.
So sure, there’s another life where I have friends and talk to them about getting far away from Ink Lake.
I fulfill my dreams, become successful, meet interesting men, fall in love, break a few hearts, and eat ice cream with my roommates when they’re in the mood to play along.
I travel to Europe, celebrate New Year’s Eve in style, drink white wine in crystal goblets.
I take vacations home to see my parents and hug my sister when I come in the door.
She’s got rosy cheeks, bright eyes, silky hair, and intact cells.
She introduces me to her boyfriend, and after a family dinner, we stay there, talking and laughing on the roof until the wee hours, when Mom sticks her head out the attic window and tells us to quiet down.
It’s so ridiculously perfect that I get sick to my stomach as I pedal faster and faster and squeeze the handlebars like I wanted to strangle them.
Anyway, let’s rewind.
The path we took was a different one. That’s why I’m trapped in a small town I’ve never bothered to think about escaping.
Idleness has something attractive to it that’s hard to explain.
Imagine a dark well: The water doesn’t move; it doesn’t flow; everything’s silent, immobile, calm.
And if you cover your nose, you don’t notice the rotten scent it gives off.
That’s me, here, anchored to the gray present, with the word nepheloid floating around me.
I haven’t ice-skated in years, I’m not sure if I have even a single real friend, I think my father’s hiding something, and in a minute I’m going to turn left to enter my grandfather’s house, celebrate his birthday, and pretend life goes on and that mine still has some meaning.
The table’s set in the living room, and it smells like lemon cake, which is his favorite.
It seems like a miracle that my mother took the time to make it.
I guess it’s because it’s a special occasion.
When we sit down around the stuffed chicken, I notice how the silverware is lined up over the blue napkins.
In theory, everything is perfect, but the silence is dense.
Mom cuts and serves the food while Dad concentrates on a thread hanging from the tablecloth and Grandpa is as serious and quiet as always.
I wish I could scream. Or start dancing. Or do something completely unexpected, like stand on my head by the wall or pretend I’m a pissed-off orangutan.
“This is delicious, Rosie,” my father says. “Perfectly cooked.”
“Thanks, Jacob.” She doesn’t even bother to look at him.
They might as well be two actors who just met, reading lines from a script around a table so the producers can decide whether or not there’s chemistry.
The verdict: no way.
The meal passes in trivial conversations and pauses that take too long, as if it is an effort just to pronounce each word.
No one asks me where I spent the night. Most likely, no one even noticed my absence.
The only person who tried to keep me in line, years ago, was my grandfather, and even he couldn’t keep up once I became an adult.
“I’ll get the cake.” Mom gets up.