I felt like I was watching TV.
Lacey’s mother was crying. Somewhere beyond me, a baby echoed her.
She tried to stand, but the Bastard pressed two fingers to her shoulder and shook his head. Her knees returned to the tile.
The baby was screaming.
“He needs me,” Lacey’s mother said.
“Should’ve thought of that before.” The Bastard’s voice was so reasonable, as if they were sitting across the table from each other discussing a credit card bill. He was even dressed like an accountant, a pocket protector tucked neatly into his starched white shirt.
“You won’t do with my son what you’ve done with your daughter,” he said.
She nodded.
“Say it.”
“I’ll do better with James Junior.”
“You’ll have some respect for yourself.”
“I’ll have respect.”
“No more of this garbage.”
“No more,” she whispered.
The baby cried.
There was a touch on my shoulder, just gentle enough not to startle, or maybe I wasn’t startled because I knew, of course, Lacey would be there.
“There’s a back way out through the kitchen,” Lacey whispered, though she didn’t have to: Our houses shared the same floor plan, escape route and all. I went first, sliding through the dark, any noise covered up by the baby’s increasingly unhinged screams. I had to tamp down an impulse to turn back for him, carry him and Lacey away, but of course he wasn’t my brother and Lacey was the one with car and license. I wasn’t in a position to rescue anyone.
She eased the door shut behind us, and said nothing as we got into the car and peeled away. There was no music.
“You want to go home,” she said finally, and I knew if I said yes, that’s what it would be. Final.
I understood now: This was a test. Maybe the whole night had been a test. With Lacey, it was hard to tell whether events were unspooling of their own accord or under her behind-the-scenes machinations, but, I reminded myself, it was always safest to assume the latter.
I was good at tests. I reached over to the Barbie recorder and hit play, feinting a head slam with each of Kurt’s downbeats. “Let’s go to the lake.”
THE LAKE IN FEBRUARY, IN sleet and starshine. We had it to ourselves. Wind and water and sky and Lacey. Everything I needed.
“Parents are bullshit,” I said.
She shrugged.
“Everyone’s bullshit but us,” I said.
We called it our lake, but it was only ours the way everything was ours: because the world we created between the two of us was secret and wholly owned.
We were creatures of water, she told me, and those don’t belong in the woods. It was the only explanation she ever offered for why we needed to stay away. Never the forest, always the lake, and that was fine with me. I couldn’t wait for it to get warmer, to watch her swim.
She breathed water, she told me, and I could almost believe it was true.
The sleet was light and oil slick, the kind that made you wonder about acid rain. Lacey preferred storms. A death-black sky, a sizzle in the air, that waiting, breath-holding feeling, like something was about to break. Sometimes we made it to the lake before the storm’s first bellow. We raised our faces to the rain, timed the gap between light and sound, one Mississippi and two and three. Until we knew the storm well enough to breathe with it, to beat with its rhythm, to know after the sky burned white how long to wait before opening our mouths and screaming into the thunder’s roar.
But that was Lacey’s time. I liked it better in the quiet. The storm was like another person between us, angrier and more interesting than I could hope to be. It was best when we were alone.
Lacey watched the water. It was different, in the dark. Fathomless. I imagined eyes glowing in the deep, teeth sharp, hunger and need. Things lurking. I imagined a siren song, a call in the night, Lacey and I answering, wading into icy waters, sucked down into the black.
She scooped up a rock and threw it into the lake. “Fuck.”
“Fuck,” I said, like I agreed, because whatever she meant by it, I did.
I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter what her mother and her stepfather did with each other, that I understood they weren’t a part of Lacey, and Lacey was no part of them, had sprung fully grown, goddess-style, blooming in a field or melting from the sun. That other people were irrelevant to us; that they existed only for the pleasure of dismissing them, simulacra of consciousness, walking and talking and pretending at an inner life but hollow inside. Nothing like us. Lacey herself had taught me that, when she read us Descartes. You can only know your own insides, Lacey said. The only real, certified and confirmed, is you and me. I wanted to remind her what she’d taught me, that we could leave together, that life was only as cruel as you allowed it to be, that Battle Creek belonged to us by choice and we could choose to abandon it.
I wanted to tell her that nothing I’d seen had scared me, that nothing had changed, but she already knew me well enough to hear a lie in my voice.
I wanted, most of me wanted, to save her.
Beneath that, though, there was a cold, shameful relief. I had come to need Lacey so much that it scared me. But if her life was this broken, if there was nothing beyond our closed circle but ugly mess, then it opened up the unthinkable possibility that Lacey needed something, too. That if I passed her tests, shaped myself to fit against her edges, that something could be me.
“My father loved the water.” She found another rock and fired it hard at the lake. “He liked to take me to Atlantic City, when we lived in Jersey. There was this mechanical pony thing by the casino, and he’d leave me with, like, a bucket of quarters. Enough to ride all day.”
“That’s a lot of pony riding.”
“Seemed like heaven to me. You know what they say about girls and horses.” I could hear a little of the Lacey I knew peeking through, winking at me. “Also, I was an idiot.”
“All six-year-olds are idiots.”
“He promised one day he’d take me to ride a real pony. I guess there are these beaches in Virginia where they run wild in the sand? Just ponies everywhere, like you’re back in time or something.”
“Chincoteague,” I said. I’d read Misty of Chincoteague eleven times.
“Whatever. I don’t know, because we never went.”
I could have told her that my father was the king of broken promises, that I knew all about disappointment, but I was afraid she’d tell me I knew fuck-all about anything, and she’d be right. “I’ve never been to the ocean,” I told her, and these were the magic words that brought her back.
Lacey squealed. “Unacceptable!” She pointed at the car. “In.”
For six hours, we drove. The Buick bumped and wheezed, the cassette player ate Lacey’s third-favorite bootleg, the crumpled AAA maps beaconed our way, and while I hovered over a suspiciously discolored toilet seat and then washed my hands with sickly gray soap, examining myself in the mirror for some clue that I’d become the kind of girl who lit out for the territories, some trucker tried to feel up Lacey in the Roy Rogers parking lot. We drove until the car swerved off the highway and into a parking lot gritty with sand, and there we were.
The ocean was endless.
The ocean beat and beat and beat against the shore.
We held hands and let the Atlantic wash over our bare feet. We breathed in salt and spray under the dawning sky.
It was the biggest thing I had ever seen. Lacey gave that to me.
“This is how I’d do it,” Lacey said, almost too quiet to hear under the surf. “I’d come out here at night, when the beach was empty, and I’d take an inflatable raft into the water. Then I’d hold on, and let it carry me out. Far enough that no one would ever find me. That I couldn’t change my mind. I’d bring my mother’s sleeping pills, and my Walkman, and a safety pin. And when I was out far enough that I couldn’t hear the waves breaking anymore, that the raft was just bobbing on the water and there was nothing but me and the stars? I’d do it. In order. The order matters. Pills first, then the safety pin, just a tiny hole in the raft, small enough that it would take some time. Then I’d put on the headphones, and lie down on the raft so I could see the stars and feel the water in my hair, and I’d let Kurt sing me home.”