Chapter Five: Lucy

CHAPTER FIVELUCY

The house on Clover Street is the same house I grew up in. I sit in my rental car, parked on the street in front of the house, for several minutes and just stare at it.

They’ve painted it a new color—a subtle shade of peach that’s an odd choice for the exterior of the house—but otherwise it’s the same. There are bushels of purple flowers planted along the porch. A nicely trimmed lawn. A front porch swing that you can’t sit on six months out of the year because it’s too damn hot.

I finally muster the strength to step out of the car. It’s six o’clock in the evening, still light out, and still hot as balls. The heat’s relentless this time of year. It was a real dick move on Grandma’s part to be born in August.

I grab my bag and trudge across the grass to the front door.

Dad opens it before I can knock. His smile is wide, friendly. Dad’s so good at that Texas thing where you act polite to people’s face and then talk shit behind their back.

“Lucy!” He steps forward and embraces me briefly.

“Hi, Dad.”

“I’m so glad you’re home, finally. Come in!” He steps back, sweeping his arm out dramatically.

I step inside. It’s cold and dark inside, as always. The house has never gotten good light downstairs.

He shuts the door behind me. His dark hair is grayer than last time I saw him. Dad’s eyes are deeply set, giving him a soulful appearance that is always more pronounced when he looks at me. There’s disappointment in every line of his face.

“How was your flight?” His gaze is on my suitcase.

“Fine.” Lies. I ate too much chocolate, we hit turbulence, and I almost puked. I spent the last fifteen minutes of the flight clutching the vomit bag.

He nods, briefly meeting my eyes, and then quickly looks away. He still can’t look at me, apparently.

I turn away and survey the living room. The furniture is mostly new. Or new to me, anyway. There’s a plushy brown sofa, and an uncomfortable-looking chair with ugly pink-and-orange-striped upholstery. The frame of the chair looks old, but the upholstery brand-new, like someone recently did that to the chair on purpose. Mom has always had questionable design taste.

On the table next to this awful chair is a picture of me and Savvy, with a few other women. It was taken at a wedding, not long after I moved back to town. We look like a photo shoot for Southern Living, a bunch of white ladies in pastel dresses with perfectly wavy hair.

The picture seems in incredibly poor taste to me for two reasons—one, most people think I murdered Savvy, and maybe they have a point; and two, she died after going to a wedding. Not that wedding, but people who come over don’t know that. Do they react with horror and say, “My god, was this taken the day she died?” And then Mom has to launch into the whole story.

Actually, I just realized exactly why she chose that picture. Most people wouldn’t want to talk about their maybe-murderer daughter, but not Mom. She knows how to work a room, and there is no better way to command attention than to tell the worst fucking story in the world.

“Your mother is in her bedroom. I think she was taking a nap, but she’s probably up now.” Dad smiles and takes a step back so there’s a wide swath of space between us. “Why don’t you go on up and say hi?”

The lamp on the table next to the sofa isn’t new. We’ve had it for as long as I can remember. It’s a long cylinder, solid ceramic, and heavy. But not too heavy. I could lift it, and swing it, and bash it right into his head. Maybe the lamp wouldn’t even break. It’s quite sturdy. Mom would appreciate that. She must like that lamp, considering how long she’s had it.

She would not appreciate the mess, though. Blood would spurt out of his mouth and splatter across the walls. Maybe on the sofa too, and it does not look like the kind of sofa that’s easy to get blood out of.

Not that I know which sofas are easy to get blood out of.

Maybe it would be less messy if I hit him in the back of the head. That would also be convenient, because now he’s turned away from me. He wouldn’t even see it coming.

Not in the moment, anyway. I don’t think anyone—least of all my father—would be surprised by my murdering someone.

“You okay?”

Dad’s words startle me, because he’s turned back around while I was killing him, and now he’s staring at me.

“You have a weird expression,” he says. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m just tired from the flight.”

I start to push the murder thoughts away, but every therapist I’ve been to (and I’ve been to several) has wanted me to deal with the violent fantasies instead of just trying to make them stop.

I recently admitted to my latest therapist that trying to avoid murdering people in my head has just resulted in me murdering even more people in my head. She was very supportive of my idea to just let the thoughts fly and see what happens.

So, I imagine Dad’s brains splattering across the couch again and head upstairs to see Mom.