Lucy stood and looked around the room for the car keys. Nicole had put her hands over her mouth. It was what she had done when Lucy had to tell her that Piggy had called and that Jane was dead. She saw the keys on the corner of the mantel and ran out the door without saying anything to Les.
“What do you want to take crap from that guy for?” Nicole said through her tears as Lucy pushed the key into the ignition. She had left the windows down and the car was full of flies. They flew forward and sideways and Lucy and Nicole had to bat them away from their faces so they could see.
“You know, I’m in this with you now,” Nicole said, “and I don’t want you to sit around and take crap off some guy.”
“It’s complicated,” Lucy said. She was driving slowly, looking right and left for St. Francis. She hoped that Nicole would call for him, because she thought if she spoke, she would cry harder.
Nicole had already stopped crying. “St. Francis!” she called.
Only a little farther down the road, he heard her and shot up. He had been wriggling on his back, rolling in carrion. He gave a last mighty shake and ran toward the car.
To her surprise, Les was still at the house. He was sitting on the hood of his car, looking down the road, when they returned.
Nicole got out of the car and walked past him with St. Francis at her side without saying anything, like a princess and her consort cutting through a crowd. St. Francis stank and seemed a most ignoble escort. Nicole put him on his lead and began to talk to him earnestly.
“Who is she?” Les said.
“Jane’s daugher, Nicole,” Lucy said. “Jane is dead.”
He cocked his head. “What do you mean?” he said.
“She lives here now. Jane died. She married some jerk who put her on the back of his motorcycle and drove it off a cliff.”
“A car must have forced them off the road,” he said. His voice was very quiet. “Oh my God,” he said. “Jane’s dead?”
“I was in L.A. for the funeral when you were calling me.”
“She was on a motorcycle?” Les said.
Lucy nodded. Les was doing what she sometimes did herself. The incredulity was real, but the theory was silly: that if you could just repeat facts, stall for time, you might not have to hear the same ending to the story.
28
LUCY was in Hildon’s car, parked at a scenic overlook. A baby was sweeping the grass with a broom — a child about three years old, whose hands choked up on the handle as if he held a baseball bat. He tapped the broom against the ground, looked straight forward, then decided to sweep instead of bunt. All the while, the child was singing a song. The mother and father and an obese cocker spaniel were sitting on a tablecloth spread out near a willow tree.
Les Whitehall’s visit had made it possible for Lucy and Nicole to have the talk both had been avoiding. Maybe, Lucy thought, it was because Nicole had seen her vulnerability that she was willing to talk about her own. She wanted to star on Passionate Intensity. She would stay with Piggy Proctor and his wife, but she wanted Lucy to fly to L.A. and visit whenever she could. When the filming was over, Nicole would come back to Vermont.
So Les’s visit had been for the best, but of course he couldn’t have known that, and it wasn’t why he had come. He had come assuming that Lucy knew that Hildon was resigning as editor of Country Daze. The day of Les’s visit, Hildon had been in New York talking to an agent about a book he might write. The agent was also Les Whitehall’s agent. Les had found out about Hildon’s plans by coincidence — and, actually, Lucy had too. Les had come to ask her if she would put in a good word for him with Matt Smith, the publisher, and if she would also ask Hildon not to let his bad feelings for him get in the way of his possibly getting the job.
“When did you intend to tell me?” Lucy said to Hildon.
Hildon had driven to her house, after getting her message, and had found Lucy going up the walk with a bag of groceries. She was resolute: whatever happened, she was going to proceed. None of them was going to hurt her so much that she stopped in her tracks. As though to strengthen her resolve, she had gone out and bought food. Now, the bag was wedged between them, unpacked. She had gotten into Hildon’s car still carrying the bag. That was like Hildon: to do things in his own way, in his own time, and then to expect that she’d stop the clock when he felt like talking. Lucy doubted whether he even felt like talking — whether he wasn’t discussing this purely because she had forced him to.
“I thought you’d make fun of me,” Hildon said. “You’re always talking about how the whole world wants to write. Look at what a fraud Les Whitehall was. I didn’t want you to think of me as another Les Whitehall.”
“You’re changing the subject,” Lucy said.
“I wasn’t going to quit unless my agent thought the proposal would work,” he said. “It all happened in a hurry. How could I know that my agent was also Les Whitehall’s agent, and that she was going to run off at the mouth?”
“That isn’t what I asked,” Lucy said.
Hildon was holding the wheel at the bottom, tightly, as if he were driving fast. Lucy had thrown her door open to let what breeze there was circulate through the car. His door was shut, as if they were in motion.
Lucy had had so many bad times in cars. Her father had played games with her — turned off the headlights, said “Whoa!” as though a simple horse had galloped out of control, and accelerated through seconds of danger before he pulled the headlight switch back on. He had also teased her when she was a child by driving and closing the eye closest to her, squinting at the road through the other, saying, “Daddy’s gone blind! Daddy’s blind! Is the light ahead green or red?” She would describe everything nervously and thoroughly, begging him all the while to open his eyes, afraid to pull his arm or jump in her seat because it might cause him to veer off the road. It was not until years later, when she was telling the story to a school friend in front of him, that he closed his eye closest to where she and her friend sat and then turned his head, revealing the open eye that had been watching the road all along.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said. “It wasn’t a sure thing, and you were going through so much in California. I wasn’t going to pack a suitcase and leave town before sunrise, you know.”
“I don’t know what I know,” Lucy said.
“Well,” Hildon said. “I wasn’t.”
The child was sweeping its father’s back. The mother was rubbing the dog’s stomach. From where Lucy sat, she couldn’t see the trickle of muddy river below. The farmhouse with the blue roof she had always loved was visible on the hillside, and people hardly larger than dots were moving around it — people and cows — more of those mysterious people who thought something and felt some way Lucy couldn’t fathom. People who lived in a house in the valley.
“I would have told you from the first if it had seemed real to me,” Hildon said.
She started to calm down. She was being a little irrational. Of course he wouldn’t have just disappeared without saying anything. He had every right to quit as editor of Country Daze and do something — as he had said on the ride to the overlook—“serious.” It was just a big change, another unexpected adjustment.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“I’m going to Boston for a while,” he said.
She turned and looked at him, startled.
“Lucy,” he said. “I need a change. I’m sick of the work I’ve been doing. I’m under a lot of pressure from Maureen’s lawyers. I can’t take any more phone calls from Matt Smith.”