Lost Voices (4 page)

i 21

Maybe the right thing to do would have been to leave her in the sea.

The policeman had the phone in his hand again. “Wish your damned uncle would answer sometime.” He was shaking his head.

“You could let me walk home by myself,” Luce told him.

“My clothes are mostly dry, even.” It was almost true. Her silvery jacket was draped over the radiator, and tufts of matted down had started leaking from the rip in its sleeve. “I am fourteen.” He stared at her. “You come across younger than that. But I guess you’re on the tall side, even for a fourteen- year- old.” He considered her for a minute. “All right. But I’m driving you home.

Just give me a sec, here.” They headed out into the station’s main room, with its wheezing coffee machine and gray benches, while the policeman found his coat.

“What do you mean, there was no water in her lungs!” Someone was yelling at Luce’s back, and she jumped around. “Baby washes up on the beach, no injuries anywhere, dead an hour or two at
most
. She
must
have drowned. Only explanation there is. There’s got to be water in her lungs!” It was the other, younger policeman shouting into his phone. “Would just one little thing about this
please
make some kind of sense?”

The gray- faced man glanced at him nervously and caught Luce’s elbow, tugging her out onto the street. Once they pulled up at her uncle’s house, Luce ran to the door and turned to wave back at the gray man. He didn’t leave, though. He was watching to make sure she went inside.

Luce slipped through the door as quietly as she could and waited just inside the kitchen until she heard the car pulling 22 i LOST VOICES

away. Maybe Peter wasn’t even home, but Luce didn’t feel like chancing it. He’d wake up with a blasting hangover, and then the last thing she wanted to do was explain why she wasn’t in school. The kitchen was warm and dirty, and there was a bottle out on the table that hadn’t been there when Luce had left.

After a moment she skimmed silently out the door. Her clothes were still dank and stiff with salt, but it seemed too risky to change them. She’d walk around until after school let out and then try to sneak back to her room unheard.

* * *

Luce followed the path along the cliffs, looking down at the crashing sea; she kept imagining tiny pale faces gazing up at her from the waves, sadness so deep you could drown in it yawning in their wide gray eyes. She sat watching the swirling patterns of foam around the rocks for a few hours, picturing drifting faces and sometimes scanning the horizon for whales, until she felt cold and sore enough that it drove her to walk on.

After a while the open sea bent back and there was the harbor below her instead, its sandbars crowded with lounging sea lions. She reached the town’s biggest street, lined with small wooden houses whose overhanging upper stories were supported on posts. There were a few stores here that sold odd foods like sugar- cured salmon and smoked elk meat alongside the canned beans and chips. Everything was made of the same wooden boards, everything was painted dark brown or tan, and the hills were crossed by the same flimsy stairs as the slopes behind her own house. The whole town seemed to be trying to crawl away from the sea. In one spot there was a two- room shack that hadn’t i 23

managed to escape in time: the shore had eroded beneath it, and now it stood at an awkward slant, abandoned to the gray waves that pawed again and again through its single glassless window.

“If you think you can get away with crawling out of school, I’ll teach you to think different!” The voice was bellowing but slurred, and it made Luce stumble a little from shock as it broke through her daydream. She’d come to the stretch with the town’s two bars and one ramshackle church, all lined up against the hard ascent of the mountains behind. Her uncle Peter had just slumped out of the Dark Water Inn, and his breath smelled of sour drink and decay as he glared wearily down at her. “If you’re too damned lazy for school, we’ll see how lazy you can be gutting fish all day! Up to your elbows in the slime of their in-nards. And you’ll see how easy it is for the knife to slip, too.”

“They let us out early,” Luce said, shrinking back a little.

As long as the policeman didn’t keep calling him, she could probably get away with the lie. Her uncle would never get around to checking up on her himself.

“Maybe that’s all right, then.” He looked at her skeptically.

“I heard something awfully strange, though. Heard
you
were the one went and found that dead baby on the beach? At dawn today?” Luce was appalled; of course, she thought, of course she should have realized that the news would get back to him.

“What kind of business you think you have, sneaking out of the house like that? You think people don’t talk when they hear that? Saying I don’t keep enough of an eye on you.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Luce whispered. She could tell by the way her uncle glared at her that this wasn’t good enough. “I just went for a little walk?”

24 i LOST VOICES

“Not trustworthy enough to be left alone,” he muttered.

“You go getting into trouble all the time, and I have to hear about it from who- knows- who running their damned mouths.” Of course he didn’t even mention the fact that she could have drowned, Luce thought. Peter had his hand on the back of her neck, and he steered her into the bar. “You’re going to sit right down and not cause any more disturbance until I’m ready to go home.”

“I can go home by myself ! I promise. I’ll just go home and do homework.”

“You’ll do your homework right here,” Peter snapped; he apparently hadn’t noticed that she didn’t have her book bag with her. Luce realized that she couldn’t argue with him, not while he was in such a foul mood. He shoved her down at an out- of- the- way table back in the corner next to the broken juke-box. Someone had left a tattered romance novel on a chair, and Luce picked it up just to look like she was doing something.

Maybe Peter would get so drunk that he’d forget all about her, and she could slip away. The bartender watched her curiously.

“Didn’t know you had one of those, Peter,” he observed while Luce’s uncle swayed across the dim space toward the bar.

Peter slung his heavy thighs up onto his stool and knocked back the trace of whiskey that was left at the bottom of his glass.

Daylight floated in through the dusty windows, but most of the bar was already just as dark as it would be late at night.

“Not mine. She’s not mine. Just the pain in the ass my no- good brother left me. Leave it to Andrew to keep causing problems even
after
he’s dead.” The bartender didn’t laugh at this the way he was supposed to; his mouth pinched and he shot i 25

her uncle Peter a critical look. “She’s not mine, that is,” her uncle snarled defensively. “But she
should
have been.” Luce hunched down as far as she could, hearing that. The tightness came back in her stomach, because things always went badly when her uncle started talking this way. He’d definitely beat her once they were alone.

“How should it be,” the bartender asked, “that the girl
should
belong to anybody? Excepting to the ones who made her?” He had his back to Luce now, fetching out the whiskey to pour her uncle a new shot. He thought of something. “Where’s her mother?”

“You remember Alyssa Gray?” her uncle asked. The bartender looked at him sharply.

“Who doesn’t remember her? Sweet, bright, funny girl like that. Could make anybody laugh like crazy. And so beautiful, too.” The bartender glanced at Luce again, but she kept her head down over her book, even though she couldn’t read it very well in the dimness. It was something about the bronze hair and oddly violet eyes of the heroine. The dead girl’s eyelids had had a pearly iridescence to them, Luce remembered, almost a shimmer. “You don’t mean
that’s
Alyssa’s daughter?”

“And Alyssa, you seem not to recall, was
my
girl. Talking about marrying me, even, before Andrew dragged her off from here. He just fooled her with all his crazy talk. And he made her a sidekick to his messed- up life of rip- offs and split towns. It was like some kind of obstacle course for them, what with all the places they couldn’t go back to.” The bartender didn’t seem particularly interested in what Peter was telling him now, though. Luce didn’t let herself look, but she knew he was still gazing her way.

26 i LOST VOICES

“I guess that girl
does
look a lot like her mother. Almost as pretty. You just don’t see it too easy because the personality’s so different. Alyssa would have had everybody cracking up by now.” Luce wished they would talk about something else. There was no chance her uncle would stop looking over at her as long as he kept thinking about her mother. “Andrew he was one of the guys lost with the
High and Mighty,
wasn’t he?”

“Andrew’s whole damn life was a shipwreck. The
High and
Mighty
was just the finishing touch for him.” Her uncle’s voice sounded different now: smeary and vicious, yes, but also choked.

“Everybody who got near him went down with his own personal disaster. Killed Alyssa, just by not getting her to the hospital in time. And now you can see what’s left of him.” Luce knew, without looking, that her uncle was nodding in her direction. “Flotsam spinning around on the waves.”

“And you don’t think, if Alyssa was alive,” the bartender challenged, “she’d appreciate you speaking more kindly of her child?” Peter didn’t answer that. He’d turned to gaze off at a spot on the floor, and Luce thought he might be about to start sobbing. The silence felt thick and somehow sticky. After ten minutes of quiet she tried to slip out of her chair, but her uncle’s gaze pivoted to fix on her at once.

The afternoon wouldn’t end, and Luce couldn’t leave. Every time she tried moving even slightly her uncle swung his bleary face and glowered at her. He kept drinking, and every time he looked her way his face seemed bigger and messier, less like a human face and more like a pile of wet garbage, or a plastic bag wobbling around on the sea. She let her head drop on the table and closed her eyes.

i 27

* * *

She was lying propped on her elbows on a cheap motel bed. They’d stopped on the outskirts of Minneapolis, and the window was white with falling snow. She was half daydreaming and half watching a dance contest on TV while her father paced around the room talking on his cell phone. Sometimes he’d wander back toward the bathroom, like there was something he didn’t want Luce to overhear. On the TV a woman in black sequins kicked her leg high and arched her back until her long hair brushed the floor. Luce’s own dark hair had just been cropped, short and spiky: what her father called a pixie cut. “It suits your otherworldly beauty,” he’d told her, which made it hard for Luce to argue with him. “And besides, this way we won’t have to keep messing with trying to get the tangles out.”

Now she knew he was talking to his brother, Peter, far away in Alaska. It was one of the few states Luce had never been to, and she’d never met Peter, but she knew talking to him usually put her father into a glum mood. “No, you do have a point there, Peter,” Luce heard her father say. “You absolutely do.” There was silence for a while. “You think I ever stop thinking about that! Look, I’m well aware that I could have done better by her mother. I’m well aware. We were a
hundred
miles from the nearest town when the van broke down. You think I should have tried to operate on her myself?” Luce barely remembered her mother, but it hurt her to hear the ache in her father’s voice. She rolled onto her side and watched the dancing snow, how the white swirls almost canceled out the 28 i LOST VOICES

world behind. She could just make out the cloudy shape of the motel’s big blue sign.

“No, I am not determined to live my whole life repeating the same mistakes!” There was another silence. “School’s a waste for some kids,” he snapped. “You should see how fine a job Luce is doing educating her own self. The books that girl reads!” Her father was pacing faster, smacking the mustard- colored walls with his free hand. “Peter, you’ve made your point. You’ve already made it. You can stop now, all right? Yeah, and thank you for your offer. It’s appreciated.”

Luce was relieved to hear the phone snapping shut, but when she looked over at her father she could see how he was still struggling to calm himself. His head hung, and he clutched at the wall. As Luce watched he sighed, carefully straightened himself, and forced his mouth into a big smile. Only when the smile was in place did he turn to look at her. “Baby doll?” he said to her. He was trying hard to sound cheerful, but Luce could hear the crack in his voice. “You ever think it might be time for you and me to try settling down somewhere?” Luce shook her head. “I like traveling with you.” Her father sat down next to her and ruffled her spiky hair.

“Oh, I like it too, doll. And you’re a real trooper. But I can’t help thinking sometimes that maybe it’s not the best life for you.” He couldn’t keep the smile together anymore, and his voice was so mournful that Luce sat up and threw her arms around him.

“Peter’s saying he can find me work on the boats this spring.

Pays good. And we can live at his place until we save enough to get our own. You know you’ve never even seen my hometown.” He gave Luce a sad smile. “We’ll get you going to school as a regu-i 29

lar thing. And you should maybe have more of a normal social life than just hanging around with your old dad all the time.”

“You hate Peter!” Luce objected. “And he’s always so horrible to you.”

“I do
not
hate him! He’s my brother. That kind of bond goes deeper than, you know, whatever trouble we’ve had. Just more like there’s a personality conflict.” He looked at the snow. “He’s doing his best to help us, Lucette. It’s generous of him. More than I’ve got any right to expect, after everything.” He tried to smile again, but it came out slanted and strange. “Not that any man in his correct mind
wouldn’t
have tried to steal your mother.