5

And Lucy awoke and it was all a bad dream.

She was dreaming that she was still trapped in her old life, still in a classroom in high school, and she couldn’t open her eyes even though she knew that there was an asshole boy in the desk behind her who was flicking stuff into her hair—boogers, or possibly tiny rolled-up pellets of chewing gum—but she couldn’t wake up even though someone was knocking at the door, a secretary was at the door with a note that said, Lucy Lattimore, please report to the principal’s office. Your parents have been in a terrible accident—

But no. She opened her eyes, and it was merely an early evening in June, still sunny outside, and she was asleep in front of the television in the alcove room in George Orson’s parents’ house, and an old black-and-white movie was playing, a videotape she had found in a stack next to the ancient cabinet television set—

“Why don’t you stay here awhile and rest, and listen to the sea?” said the lady in the movie.

She could hear George Orson chopping on the cutting board in the kitchen—an intent tapping rhythm that had woven its way into her dream.

“It’s so soothing,” said the woman in the movie. “Listen to it. Listen to the sea….”

It took Lucy awhile to realize that the tapping had stopped, and she lifted her head and there was George Orson standing in the doorway in his red cook’s apron, holding the silver vegetable knife loosely at his side.

“Lucy?” George Orson said.

She sat up, trying to recalibrate, as George Orson tilted his head.

He was handsome, she thought, handsome in a collared-shirt-and-sweater intellectual way that you hardly ever saw back in Pompey, Ohio, with close-cropped brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard and an expression that could be both sympathetic and intense. His teeth were perfect, his body trim and even secretly athletic, though in fact he was, he said, “a little over thirty.”

His eyes were a stunning sea-green, a color so unusual that at first she’d assumed it was artificial, some fancy colored contacts.

He blinked as if he could feel her thinking about his eyes.

“Lucy? Are you okay?” he said.

Not really. But she sat up, straightened her back, smiled.

“You look like you’ve been hypnotized,” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said. She put her palms against her hair, smoothing it down.

She paused; George Orson gazed at her with that mind reader look he had.

“I’m fine,” she said.

She and George Orson were going to be living in the old house behind the motel, just for a short time, just until they got things figured out. Just until “the heat” was off a bit, he told her. She couldn’t tell how much of this was a joke. He often spoke ironically. He could do imitations and accents and quotations from movies and books.

We can pretend we are “fugitives on the lam,” he said, wryly, as they sat in a parlor or sitting room, with fancy lamps and wingback chairs that had been draped with sheets, and he put his hand on her thigh, petting her leg with a slow, reassuring stroke. She put her Diet Coke onto a doily on the old coffee table, and a bead of perspiration ran down the side of the can.

She didn’t see why they couldn’t be fugitives in Monaco or the Bahamas or even the Riviera Maya area of Mexico.

But—“Be patient,” George Orson said, and gave her one of his looks, somewhere between teasing and tender, bending his head to look into her eyes when she glanced away. “Trust me,” he said in that confiding voice he had.

And so, okay, she had to admit that things could be worse. She could still be in Pompey, Ohio.

She had believed—had been led to believe—that they were going to be rich, and yes of course that was one of the things that she wanted. “A lot of money,” George Orson had told her, lowering his voice, lowering his eyes sidelong in that shy conspiratorial way. “Let’s just say that I made some … investments,” he said, as if the word were a code that they both understood.

That was the day that they left. They were traveling down Interstate 80 toward this piece of property that George Orson had inherited from his mother. “The Lighthouse,” he said. The Lighthouse Motel.

They’d been on the road for an hour or so, and George Orson was in a playful mood. He had once known how to say hello in one hundred different languages, and he was trying to see if he could remember them all.

“Zdravstvuite,” George Orson said. “Ni hao.”

“Bonjour,” said Lucy, who had loathed her two required years of French, her teacher, the gently unforgiving Mme Fournier, repeating those unpronounceable vowels over and over.

“Päivää,” George Orson said. “Konichiwa. Kehro haal aahei.”

“Hola,” Lucy said, in the deadpan voice that George Orson found so funny.

“You know, Lucy,” George Orson said cheerfully. “If we’re going to be world travelers, you’re going to have to learn new languages. You don’t want to be one of those American tourist types who assume that everyone speaks English.”

“I don’t?”

“Not unless you want everyone to hate you.” And he smiled his sad, lopsided grin. He let his hand rest lightly on her knee. “You’re going to be so cosmopolitan,” he said tenderly.

This had always been one of the big things that she liked about him. He had a great vocabulary, and even from the beginning, he’d treated her as if she knew what he was talking about. As if they had a secret, the two of them.

“You’re a remarkable person, Lucy.” This was one of the first things that he’d ever said to her.

They were sitting in his classroom after school, she had ostensibly come to talk about the test for the next week, but that had faded away fairly quickly. “I honestly don’t think you have anything to worry about,” he’d told her, and then he waited. That smile, those green eyes.

“You’re different from other people around here,” he said.

Which was, she thought, true. But how did he know? No one else in her school thought so. Even though she did better than anyone else in the entire school on the SAT, even though she earned A’s in nearly all her classes, no one, neither teachers nor students, acted as if she were “remarkable.” Most of the teachers resented her, they didn’t really like ambitious students, she thought, students who wanted to leave Pompey behind, and the other students thought that she was a freak—possibly crazy. She hadn’t been aware that she had the habit of muttering sarcastic things under her breath until she discovered that quite a number of people in her school thought that she had Tourette’s syndrome. She didn’t have any idea where or when such a rumor had started, though she suspected that it might have originated with her honors English teacher, Mrs. Lovejoy, whose interpretations of literature were so insipid that Lucy could barely contain—or apparently had failed to contain—her scorn.

But George Orson, on the other hand, actually liked to hear what she had to say. He encouraged her ironic view of the great figures of American history, actually chuckled appreciatively at some of her comments while the other students stared at her with stern boredom. “It’s clear that you have a brilliant mind,” he wrote on one of her papers, and then when she came to see him after class to talk about the upcoming exam he told her that he knew what it was like to be different—misunderstood—

“You know what I’m talking about, Lucy,” he said. “I know you feel it.”

Perhaps she did. She sat there, and let him turn his intense green eyes on her, an intimate, oddly probing look, both ironic and heartfelt at the same time, and she drew in a small breath. She was well aware that she was not regarded as pretty—not in the conventional world of Pompey High School, at least. Her hair was thick and wavy, and she could not afford to have it cut in a way that made it more manageable, and her mouth was too small and her face was too long. Though maybe in a different context, she’d imagined hopefully, in a different time period, she might have been beautiful. A girl in a Modigliani painting.

Still, she wasn’t used to being looked in the eye. She fingered the silk scarf she was wearing, an item she’d found in a thrift store, which she thought might have a slight Modigliani quality, and George Orson regarded her thoughtfully.

“Have you ever heard the term ‘sui generis’?” he said.

Her lips parted—as if this were a test, a vocabulary word, a spelling bee. On the wall were various inspirational social studies posters. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, 1884–1962: “NO ONE CAN MAKE YOU FEEL INFERIOR WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT.” She shook her head, slightly uncomfortable.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Not really.”

“That’s what you are, I think,” George Orson said. “Sui generis. It means ‘one of a kind.’ But not in the phony, feel-good, self-help way—everyone is an individual, blah, blah, blah, just to boost the self-esteem of the mediocre.

“No, no,” he said. “It means that we invent ourselves. It means that you’re beyond categories—beyond standardized test scores, beyond the petty sociology of where you’re from and what your dad does and what college you get into. You’re outside of that. That’s what I recognized about you right away. You invent yourself,” he said. “Do you know what I mean?”

They looked at each other for a long time. Eleanor Roosevelt waved down at them, smiling, and a hope tightened inside her, like a warm, soft fist. “Yes,” she said.

Yes. She liked that idea: You invent yourself.

They were making a clean break. A new life. Wasn’t that what she’d always wanted? Maybe they could even change their names, George Orson said.

“I get a little tired of being George Orson,” he told her conversationally. They were driving through the middle of Illinois in his Maserati with the top down and her unmanageable hair was rippling behind her and she was wearing sunglasses. She was gazing critically at herself in the side mirror. “How about you?” George Orson said.

“How about me, what?” Lucy said. She lifted her head.

“What would you be if you weren’t Lucy?” George Orson said.

Which was a good question.

She hadn’t answered him, though she found herself thinking about it, imagining—for example—that she would like to be the type of girl who had the name of a famous city. Vienna, she thought, that would be pretty. Or London, which would be wry and vaguely mysterious, in a tomboyish way. Alexandria: proud and regal.

“Lucy,” on the other hand, was the name of a mousy girl. A comical name. People thought of the television actress, with her slapstick ineptitude, or the bossy girl in the Peanuts comic strip. They thought of the horrible old country song that her father used to sing: “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.”

She would be glad to be rid of her name, if she could think of a good replacement.

Anastasia, she thought. Eleanor?

But she didn’t say anything because a part of her thought that such names might sound a little vulgar and schoolgirl-ish. Names that a low-class girl from Pompey, Ohio, would think were elegant.

One of the nice things about George Orson was that he didn’t know much about her past.

They didn’t talk, for example, about Lucy’s mother and father, the car wreck the summer before her senior year, an old man running a stoplight while the two of them were on their way to the Home Depot to buy some tomato plants that were on sale. Killed, both of them, though her mother had lingered for a day in a coma.

The fact that people at school had known about it had always felt like an invasion of privacy. A secretary had given Lucy condolences, and Lucy had nodded, graciously she thought, though actually she found it kind of repulsive that this stranger should know her business. How dare you, Lucy thought later.

But George Orson had never said a word of condolence, though she guessed that probably he knew. He knew the basics, anyway.

He knew, for example, that she lived with her sister, Patricia, though Lucy was relieved that he had never actually seen her sister. Patricia, herself only twenty-two, not very bright, Patricia who worked at the Circle K Convenient Mart most nights and with whom, since the funeral, Lucy had less and less contact.

Patricia was one of those girls that people had been making fun of for almost all the years of her life. She had a thick, spittley lisp, easily imitated and cartoonish, a bungler’s speech impediment. She wasn’t fat exactly, but lumpy in the wrong places, already middle-aged-looking in junior high, with an unfortunately broad, hen-like figure.

Once, in grade school, they were walking to school together and some boys chased them, throwing pebbles.

the boys sang.

And that had been the last time that Lucy had walked with Patricia. After that, they had begun to go their separate ways once they left for school, and Patricia had never said anything; she had just accepted the fact that even her sister wouldn’t want to walk with her.

After their parents died, Patricia had become Lucy’s guardian—perhaps officially still was? Though now Lucy was almost nineteen. Not that it mattered in any case, because Patricia had no idea where she was.

She did feel a pang about that.

She had the image of Patricia and her pet rats—the rats’ cages stacked in the eaves, and her sister coming home late from her job at the Circle K, kneeling there in that red and blue vest with the name tag that said PATARCIA, talking to the rats in that crooning voice, the one rat, Mr. Niffler, with an enormous tumor coming out of its stomach that it was dragging around and her sister had paid to have the veterinarian remove it and then it grew back, the tumor, and still Patricia persisted. Showering the dying creature with love, buying it plastic toys, talking baby talk, making another appointment at the vet.

Lucy was glad that she had never told George Orson about Mr. Niffler, just as she was glad that he’d never seen the house she had grown up in, where she and Patricia had continued to live. Her father used to call it “the shack,” affectionately. “I’ll meet you back here at the shack,” he’d say when he left for work in the morning.

It didn’t occur to her until later that it was basically a shack. Ramshackle, haphazard, a living room and kitchen that bled into each other, the bathroom so cramped that your legs touched the edge of the bathtub when you sat on the toilet. A garage stuffed with car parts, bags of beer cans that her father never took to the recycling center, the hole in the plasterboard wall of the living room through which you could see the bare two-by-fours, the carpet that looked like the fur of a worn-out stuffed animal. Some stairs led up to an attic, where the girls, Lucy and Patricia, had their beds. The ceiling of the bedroom was the roof, which slanted sharply over them while they slept. If George Orson had seen it, she imagined, he would have been embarrassed for her; she would have felt dirty.

Though—she couldn’t say that she was particularly happy to be here, either.

In the middle of the night, she found herself wide awake. They were in the old bed of George Orson’s parents, a king-size expanse, and she was aware of the other rooms in the house—the other empty bedrooms on the second floor, the trickle of a pipe in the bathroom, the toothy rows of bookshelves in the “library,” the flutter of birds in the dead trees of the high-fenced backyard. A “Japanese garden,” George Orson called it. She could picture the small wooden bridge, the bed of stunted, un-flowering irises choked with weeds. A miniature weeping cherry tree, still barely alive. A granite Kotoji lantern statue. George Orson’s mother had had an “artistic bent,” he’d told Lucy.

By which he meant, Lucy assumed, that his mother had been a little crazy. Or so Lucy gathered. The place—the motel and the house—seemed as if it had been put together by someone with multiple personality disorder. A lighthouse. A Japanese garden. The living room with its gruesome old sheet-covered upholstery, and the room with the television and the big picture window that looked out onto the backyard. The kitchen with its 1970s colors, the avocado-green stove and refrigerator, the mustard-colored tile floor, drawers and cabinets full of dishes and utensils, an old wooden butcher block and an almost obscenely large collection of knives—George Orson’s mother had apparently been obsessed with them, since they could be found in almost every shape and length a person could imagine, from tiny filet blades to enormous cleavers. Very disturbing, thought Lucy. In a pantry, she found three boxes of china dishes and some disturbing canning jars, still full of dark goop.

On the second floor, there was the bathroom and three bedrooms, including this one she was in right now, the very room, the very bed where his parents had slept, where his elderly mother had continued to sleep, Lucy imagined, after the husband had died. Even now, many years later, there was still a vague hint of old-lady powder about it. A few hangers still in the closet, and the empty dresser sitting darkly against the wall, and then the stairs that led up to the third floor—to the turret, a small octagon-shaped room with a single window, which looked out away from the lake, out onto the cone of the faux lighthouse, and the courtyard of motel rooms. And the highway. And the alfalfa fields. And the far distant horizon.

And so—she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t sleep, and she lay there staring up at the swimmy darkness that her brain couldn’t quite process. The door was closed, the window shade was pulled, so there wasn’t even moonlight or stars.

Suggestions of shapes floated across the surface of the dark like protozoa seen through a microscope, but there wasn’t too much for the optic mechanisms to actually hold on to.

She slid her hand beneath the covers until she came up against the shoreline of George Orson’s body. His shoulder, his chest, the ribs rising and falling underneath his skin, his warm belly, which she pressed against—until at last he turned over and put his arm over her, and she felt her way along the length of it until she found his wrist, his hand, his pinkie finger. Which she held.

Okay.

Everything would be fine, she thought.

At the very least, she wasn’t in Pompey any longer.