Chapter 10
June 27, 1997 · Gone Nineteen Hours
LUCE WAS IN THE DARK.Deep dark, like a cave, like the inside of a closed mouth, that's what she imagined. Teeth clamped shut. There was a sound floating in from somewhere far off—her own voice, as a child. Whispering something into the phone. Whispering to Gem, whose ear was unbloodied on the other side, but it would only remain that way if she said the right words, if she told her—
Luce woke with a gasp. She was here, in her bedroom, with light coming in through the window—bright sun having already heated the plants limp. The madrone out the window still had the very last of their red berries, shriveled, puckered wounds.
She got up quickly, sure that her mother had come home. She had been here every other morning since they'd moved to the Red Grove—asleep or cooking or working or angry or harvesting or humming, but here. Quietly she slipped out of her bedroom and began a careful walk through the house. Into the kitchen, where the coffeepot dripped no liquid. She checked the living room, walking slowly past the table and futon and piano, rubbing her fingers along the dusty ears of the snake plant.
She checked the bathroom. Knocked gently on her mother's office, no reply, and then tried the door handle. Locked. No surprise. Her mother had a key, and she locked the office from the hallway whenever she left the house. She must've locked it when they left for the lions.
Luce peeked into Roo's room, but he was alone and still asleep, and then into Gem's, where no twin filled the empty space. Just Gem. Half of the whole. Luce shut the door and then leaned back against the wall.
There was one room left to check. There had never been much in her mother's bedroom, small and dark, the one window shadowed by a clump of trees. Nobody here. She stood above the makeup table and opened each lipstick, French Kiss and Firecracker and Coral Sea, and stabbed them down onto a crumpled tissue. Blunted the tip. A yellowed bra strewn over the back of a chair, a clay mug with a broken handle holding dried lavender from last year's garden, a few photographs stuck together and half tucked beneath a carved stone hand. She pulled them out, cycled through quickly: Gem and Gloria when they were young, in matching sombreros. Gloria with Luce and Roo, before they'd moved here to the Red Grove, looking happy and light in a way they probably hadn't since. She set them down. Nothing to indicate where she'd gone. Something was wrong. She swallowed it down.
She wanted to hear the sound of her mother's car pulling up the steep driveway. To the deck, then, with Moose trotting alongside her, tensed. She sat on the top step of the deck stairs, listening. "Where's Gloria?" she asked Moose, who scanned the trees in response. "Don't think she's up there, bud," Luce said, untangling foxtails from his fur as he leaned into her, trying to listen down the road, over the redwood and bay and madrone, for that certain pitch of her mother's hum. It was a hum she could hear from her bedroom when she was younger, in the early years in this house, when business was good and Gem was improving and Gloria said she'd found her calling—finally, fully herself, she said. Luce would hear the hum coming from the kitchen, waking her in the morning in her little cold bed, redwood-shadowed, damp. Pulling on her sweatpants and T-shirt, she'd rush into the kitchen, and there Gloria would be, smiling that shark grin when she came in, winking like they were in on something together. Gloria brewing herbs on the stove for tea and tinctures, frying eggs, humming her hum, and Luce would cut slices of bread for toast, hoist herself onto the counter, legs dangling, and begin the careful toasting and buttering—her best job. Sometimes Gloria had the radio on and would drum on Luce's legs in rhythm when she passed. Sometimes she'd be humming her own song, and then she'd pick Luce up—too big for this, but still—hoist her onto her hip, hold their arms out straight, clasping their hands and sticking a sprig of rosemary in Luce's mouth like a rose, and then they'd tango back and forth across the kitchen floor and Luce would laugh and laugh, and Gloria would too, and it lit something new in Luce, this woman directing all her attention, all her love, the vastness of her starbright universe, onto Luce.
Now, out on the deck, she listened for her mother's hum, made a pile of freed foxtails, Moose's nose twitching in the breeze, handsomely deweeded. They willed Gloria's car to approach. Come on. The poison oak growing up the edges of the deck and through the slatted boards turned over in the wind, green leaves that would go red in the fall, turn to sticks in the winter. They willed it, but there was nothing.
Luce jimmied a bobby pin into the lock on her mother's office door. This felt like the best place to start.
"What're you doing?" Roo asked, marching out of his bedroom in his pajamas. He licked his hands to smooth his cowlicks. "Mom'll be mad."
"Let her come scold me then," Luce said.
Roo considered this, a little startled frown on his face. "She'll kill you if you go in there."
She would, Luce knew. It was about the only thing she might get in real trouble for. They were encouraged to explore their desires, to learn their own boundaries. She'd heard that some teenagers outside the Red Grove, even as close as the next town fifteen miles away, weren't allowed to swear or cut their hair as they liked or have sex when they wanted to. Occasionally one of those teenagers would take a liking to someone in the Red Grove, and for a short time Luce and her friends would get an influx of information about life outside the community, but it never took long before the adults squashed it or, more often, the Red Grove teenagers called it off themselves—it was pretty easy to imagine how a relationship might play out with someone from outside.
The bobby pin wasn't working. She rattled and angled, but no luck. And beneath the shaking of her hand, trying to jam the bobby pin in—her pulse, growing faster. Where was her mom?
Una lived down the road from Heartwood in one of the newer cottages, with morning glory vines climbing the shingles and six-foot sunflowers along the driveway. A twenty-minute bike ride down the big hill and then along the main flat road through the valley's center brought Luce to Una, who, when Luce wound around back, was submerged up to her mouth in her wooden hot tub.
Roo had gone down the hill to play with a friend, and Luce thought to see for herself if her mom was here and, if not, to ask Una a question she somehow couldn't fathom asking over the phone. Una would know. Seeing Luce, Una sat up on the edge of the tub, her skin steaming. Over the years, Una had urged Luce to confide in her about her disagreements with her mom, about the canyon she felt was ever-present between them. Oh, Goose, Una would say, chin low and nodding as Luce recounted those early years. She wanted to see Una's face when she told her that Gloria hadn't come home, before Una had a chance to reason and rationalize and say everything was fine. She wanted to see if Una thought that Gloria had decided to move on.
"Have you seen my mom?" Her voice cracked on the first word.
"Your mama? Of course—I see her all the time. Gorgeous, wild creature that she is," Una said, sliding out of the water and fanning her red face with her hand.
"Is she here?"
Una stopped smiling, looked at Luce. "What do you mean?" she asked. "Has she not been home this morning?"
Luce shook her head. Said her mother had been gone since yesterday afternoon, and that no, she didn't know where she'd gone, that's what she was hoping Una would know. Luce watched her face—sweaty, red, and yes, there it was, some alarm. Una reached her arm out for Luce to come close, wrapped it around Luce's waist, hot and steaming. They stared at each other for a moment, silent.
"Luce," Una said, squeezing the top of Luce's arm tightly. "Do you think—"
"What?"
"Well, I'm sure there's no connection, but that man who keeps calling?"
A drop deep down in Luce's stomach. "How do you know about him?" she asked.
"Oh honey, there are no secrets here," Una said, squeezing Luce's bicep. "I've been worried that your mama would decide to go meet him somewhere outside the Grove."
Luce swallowed a glob of spit that almost choked her. She hadn't even considered this yet. Idiot. All she'd been thinking about was her own potential abandonment. "He hasn't called since yesterday, just before we left for the lions," Luce said, and as she said it, she heard the terrible matchup of timing—no call from him since Gloria had been gone.
There was something strange happening in Una's face, a tightening of the brows. She was worried. The worry dropped deeper into Luce, too. The first seventy-two hours are the most crucial in any missing person case. Was her mother a missing person? Technically yes, but—missing missing? She didn't know. After twenty-four hours, clues get harder to find: witnesses forget, physical evidence deteriorates. Time is a bully, hell-bent on keeping information buried. She knew the things men did to women's bodies, and a hazy slideshow began looping in the back of her mind: hairy knuckles around her mother's throat. A kick to the kneecaps.
She told Una about the note. How much she was trying to help. How much worse it made everything.
"We'll figure out where she is," Una said, tucking her chin before kissing Luce quickly on the forehead. She needed to take a breath, a step back. "Follow me inside. I'm sending you home with banana bread, but go see the kids down the hall first."
Most of Luce's friends had been born in the Red Grove, and it gave them a kind of ease with one another that Luce always felt she was watching from another planet.
When Gloria moved them here, she had baby Roo and a newly everdreaming twinnie to care for, plus she was setting up her business, and so sent Luce out into the woods most days. Despite her shyness, Luce's life quickly became enmeshed in those of the other kids, a ragtag crew who roamed the woods. Some days, one or many of the kids' moms stayed in bed with their heads beneath pillows, remembering what had come before the Red Grove. The kids played outside while the mothers burrowed. Some of the moms were quick to trust their new home, and some kept their eyes scanning the horizon until the day they moved away. Some days the moms went into the paint store, where many of them worked, a business outside the Red Grove but very close to the boundary and therefore deemed safe-ish, where they rang up gallons for customers to transform their lives—cerulean, mauve, taupe—nodding yes, magenta reorients the energies, and sometimes one or a few of the kids would be taken to the paint store with the moms so they could be kept under a watchful eye. Luce went a few times with the paint store kids. They would strut the aisles pretending not to be the kids of their skittish moms but instead of Hulk Hogan—best wrestler—and they blew air into the tips of their thumbs like they were inflating themselves. They walked around all puffed up. They were never afraid.
But the kids who had been born and raised in the Red Grove had something that Luce didn't, never would—they'd never lived in a world where terrible things could happen to them. When she was twelve or so, lounging in the massive stump of a redwood tree that had been smoothed over time into seats and benches, her friends had decided to play truth or dare, and suddenly people were kissing one another, were being dared to enter a tree's wound in the dark with a boy for thirty seconds to get felt up, and she left.
She knew what happened next. Getting a boyfriend was what had happened to Gem.
Luce had been told plenty of times since then that there were good men, that not all relationships ended with violence, especially not in the Red Grove. But the idea of a boy's hand sliding up her shirt summoned bile.
She'd wandered out of the woods, saying she had to go home, but she didn't walk home. She wove between the trees until she was suddenly behind Heartwood. Reached into a redwood wound where she stored the first book she'd found about the killer who stalked women for weeks, broke into their homes at night. The sentences were hard to read, but she could not help how much she needed to read them.
And Una, somehow spotting her out there, had come to meet her and had not been horrified by the book, as her mother had been. They'd taken a few walks together by that point. And for reasons Luce had never been able to get totally clear on, she spoke the truth to Una then, about her mother having left her, about what had happened to her aunt Gem. Una sat beside her on a log in the woods, nodding, listening with a pure concentration Luce had never experienced. It felt like stepping out of the shadows into the sunshine. Una, she knew, was very busy. Running this place. But Una, chin down and nodding, made it clear there was nothing more important than what Luce was saying at that very moment.
A few days later, Luce found herself back again, having wandered off from a game of soccer, and again Una left whatever important task she was completing in Heartwood to come outside and talk. And again. Luce did not tell her mother about it, because she knew her mother would ruin it. You're a special girl, Una told her. Luce did not say, I will do anything, forever, to hear someone say that to me.
It set her apart from her friends, this tightness with Una that grew into more time at Heartwood, into helping Una chop carrots for community dinners, into watering the saplings, into having someone to whom Luce could recount the chapter she'd just finished about the murderer who hid the bodies of his female victims throughout his London home, or Ruby Wells's latest news story of the serial rapist. Una would listen, nodding, and squeeze Luce's hand.
A brownnoser, Forrest said when they were younger and Luce was so often with his mother, but she had pretended not to hear. She could be both. She could have her role with Una and also, still, have friends. Of course she could.
Forrest was slumped on his bed with a half-pint of vodka in his hand. Aya, Tangerine, and Sam lay in various states of recline on his futon and the floor, nymphs sunbathing after a dip in a cold, clear pool, like Luce had seen in Renaissance paintings, entirely at home inside their own flopped bodies. Aya threw a peace sign in the air when Luce walked in, Tangerine's hands were busy tying her T-shirt into a knot just below her breasts, and Sam, the new girl, gave her a quick smile—Luce hadn't seen her since her walk through the dark.
"Hey," Luce said, trying hard to look casual as she made her way inside, to press the violence out of her head and be a little normal—See, Mom, look how normal, you can come back. Forrest swigged his bottle and blinked hard to try to keep his eyes from watering. "Breakfast of champions," he said, gulping from a carton of orange juice. Luce reached for the vodka. She plopped onto the futon beside Sam, who was spreading aluminum foil across her fingernails. "I thought your parents didn't want you drinking this hard stuff," Luce said to Forrest. "Where'd you find it?"
"In the closet where my dad hides his tax returns," Forrest said.
"Ew, he pays taxes?" Aya said, sitting straight up from the floor. "Traitor."
"He doesn't want anyone to know," Forrest said.
"Capitalist," Tangerine said with disgust. It sparked a moment of curiosity for Luce, this idea—she'd always wondered how Una and her partner had money. Running Heartwood wasn't cheap—Luce had seen bills in the office, and the money collected from tithes couldn't come close to funding it. But Una had never taken Luce up on her offer to help manage the books, as she did for her mother's business, so she didn't know how it all worked.
"So how's it going so far, Sam?" Luce asked, passing the vodka to Tangerine and trying to catch a glimpse of Sam's face.
"Okay I guess," Sam said, brushing back her hair. "My mom said we were moving to protected space, and I thought that meant, like, a national park or something."
"There is a shitload of open land all around," Forrest said. "Sick mountain biking."
"Yeah, but that's not what she means, dufus," Aya said, smearing her finger into a tub of lip gloss. There was a tiny star sticker perfectly spaced beside the outside of each of her eyes, and her T-shirt, worn and web-thin in some places, had been cut into a tank top that hung low in the front and showed off a dark crease of her perfect grapefruit boobs. Luce tried not to stare, wasn't even sure why she was staring—if she wanted them herself or wanted to touch them. To Luce, her friends sometimes looked like the girls in glossy magazines like Seventeen or Allure that they were able to sneak into the Red Grove occasionally and illicitly pass around, sliding them into and out of math textbooks or keeping them rolled tight and shoved inside a small tree hole. When they were sure no adults were around, they'd look at them together, talking about who looked anorexic and how fucked up the advice inside was—nineteen ways to pleasure your man; quiz: are you overreacting; Madonna's workout routine—toxic, all of it, they said, so stupid, all the while trying on the faces they saw the girls in there making, altering their clothes to match, telling each other who was a tomboy, Luce, who was a pixie, Tangerine, who was a vixen, Aya. They ran toward what they should look like with ferocity even though they mostly tried to hide it. They knew they shouldn't chase it. That it was bullshit. Capitalistic. Meant to destroy burgeoning female self-confidence. They knew it and couldn't help themselves, because they wanted to be beautiful, who didn't, and things were different from the way they'd been when their mothers were teenagers, it was 1997, almost the millennium—they could be badass feminist bitch goddesses and also wear bras.
The vodka had smoothed over some of Luce's worries, enough to loose her tongue and tell them that her mom hadn't come home since yesterday afternoon, when they'd gone to see the lions, and then, because it was so much easier to keep talking than to start, and her hand was clasped by Tangerine, and Sam was looking at her with concern, she told them too that there was an angry man who wouldn't stop calling them, and the terrible way the timing of it all lined up.
"So call the guy and demand to talk to your mom," Forrest said. Luce nodded. He made it sound so simple. There was no way she'd tell them about the note, or what she'd done when he came by. She did what she had to do to keep herself safe, she repeated to herself. She didn't have a choice.
"I don't have his number. I don't even know his name," Luce said.
"If there's one bad bitch out of anyone I know, it's your auntie Gem," Aya said. "Shouldn't she be able to tell you where your mom is, like, psychically?"
"I'm not like that," Luce said, knowing she sounded defensive as soon as it came out of her mouth, but it was true, she hadn't been able to communicate with Gem. But—and here the pillow of vodka spread a little further around her head—Aya was right. Why hadn't she already been thinking this? She needed to go home. The only person who would actually know where her mother was right now was Gem.