Spooky Little Girl (3 page)

Martin had lived his life the way that good men do. Lucy knew that the moment she met him, and she also knew that as far as men went, she had never done any better. She felt safe with him, and taken care of. She knew she would never have to worry about anything as long as Martin was around. He wasn’t a yahoo with an on-again, off-again job, a gaggle of kids stringing behind him, or a probation officer he had to visit once a week. He didn’t start drinking beer at noon on a Wednesday, and there was not one crazy ex-girlfriend who would crank call him at midnight or drive by the house. He was a guy who washed cucumbers, smiled at every customer, and answered whatever question anyone might have about a radish. His nails were always clean, and his flattop was always neatly trimmed at a precise length. He wasn’t unnecessarily tall; he simply rose to an average height. And he had a full, friendly face, ruddy cheeks, and light blue eyes that twinkled when he smiled, which was frequently. Looking at Martin, no one would ever say he was ruggedly handsome or of model pedigree, but he could have easily been an archetype for the nice, friendly guy.

Although he was kind to Lucy—he would always offer the popcorn bowl to her first on the Friday nights when he rented movies on his way home—he wasn’t fanatical about her. It sometimes seemed to her that Martin had figured one day that the time had come to find himself a companion, and instead of going to the pound, he’d looked around the produce department and had seen an average-height lady with pretty brown eyes, in her late twenties and dressed in white scrubs with her regular everyday curly light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail with a plain rubber band, about to take down a display of Granny Smith apples by pulling at the ones on the bottom. And so he’d smiled.

Martin smiled often. He was a big smiler. But after some time, Lucy began to notice that he rarely grinned, never beamed, and
hardly laughed the way she loved to laugh. He chuckled, might snicker at a silly joke, but Martin never seemed to let go with a hearty guffaw or even so much as a chortle.

Sometimes in a moment of furious impatience, Lucy would look at Martin and wonder when he was going to
start
. When he might surprise her and go faster than thirty-five miles per hour. He never did. He coasted. A smooth, even coast, no bumps, no jolts, no sudden turns. It seemed as if there was a spark inside Martin that was never going to thrive into anything bigger; a spark that could just never go off, catch fire, and blaze madly. When he proposed to her, he simply came home from work, put his car keys on the hall table, held a ring out in the palm of his hand, and asked, “What do you think about that?”

Lucy thought maybe it was her, maybe she was the one who was keeping that spark from roaring into a fire, but she wasn’t sure what else she could do to fuel it, and besides, she already knew that Martin had never set a fire inside of her, either. She loved his sensibility, his kindness, his stability, but as far as electrical current went, the bathroom lightbulb burned brighter. Certainly, they weren’t on fire, but they were warm enough. And there was Martin and Lucy, small sparks going off on either end of the couch, with a popcorn bowl between them. And Tulip snoring on her dog bed at their feet.

Remarkably, they had really only been in one argument, very early in their relationship, for the whole three years they had been a couple. It was a ridiculous explosion about fried chicken; Martin had brought home original style, and Lucy liked the skinless extra crispy kind. She hated the flop and rubbery texture of chicken skin. She could barely stand to touch it, let alone pull a sheet of it off her dinner. In an instant, Lucy became angry, and when Martin simply shrugged, said he was sorry, and that he would make it a point to get skinless extra crispy next time, she became furious. As Martin
looked at her blankly, Lucy fought the chicken skin fight alone, stoking her own fire that Martin refused to fan, building it into an inferno that led to her storming out of the house and hitting the Round About, the bar where she knew Jilly and Warren would be enjoying happy hour as it evolved into double-vision hour.

She spent that night laughing and talking to people she hadn’t seen in a while, old drinking buddies that had wondered where she’d vanished to. When she made it back to Jilly and Warren’s booth after another trip to the bar, Warren was laughing with an oily-looking guy Lucy had never met, and Jilly was rolling her eyes in disgust. “Pay no attention to him,” Jilly whispered. “We call him Icky Ricky. I’m just nice to him because I have to be, but you don’t.”

“And who is this fine young filly?” the newcomer said as he turned his mustached face toward Lucy, shooting a wave of cigarette and beer breath at her. “I’d like to buy you a drink, miss!”

“I’d like to buy you a toothbrush,” Lucy replied.

Lucy did her fair share of ignoring Icky Ricky and danced, laughed, joked with old friends, forgetting about her fight with Martin. The next morning, before Lucy even opened her eyes, she smelled something terrible, the scent of stale beer, Taco Bell, neglected trash, and dirty socks. She knew right away that waking up with “eau de single guy’s apartment” was not a positive sign by any means. She breathed a tremendous sign of relief when she swung her legs around the side of the futon she was on and saw her jeans still intact on her lower body. Even her boots were still on, but that was about all she knew.

Beside her she saw the back of a head with shaggy brown hair that was clearly not Martin’s neat flattop. The shaggy head rolled over, and in its place was a nasty, oily little mustache.

Oh, my God!
a little voice in her head gasped.
Icky Ricky!

“Where’s my stuff?” Lucy demanded, kicking blankets and sheets
patterned with a rainbow on them that were crumpled on the floor, not daring to pick them up with her hands to look under them.

“And a good morning to you, too, little lady,” he said, seeming offended. “All your stuff’s in the living room—on the couch, maybe, I dunno where you put it. Are you usually this nasty in the morning?”

“Only on the mornings that I wreck my life,” she replied. Lucy found her purse and jacket by the front door on a chair and immediately rifled through her purse to find her keys. She heard shuffling from the bedroom.

“Hey, how ’bout we go grab something to eat?” Icky Ricky said as he emerged from the bedroom, his hair homelessly askew.

Lucy gave him a disgusted look. “No. I’m going home,” she replied, finally finding her keys at the very bottom.

“Okay, then,” Icky Ricky said, looking puzzled. “We could do a drive-through at McDonald’s, get a little breakfast burr-eeto?”

“Are you kidding me?” Lucy said as she turned and faced him. “Don’t read anything into anything, all right? Nothing happened here. Nothing. I don’t know what I’m doing here, but I am leaving and going home.”

“Good luck with that, unless you know how to fly!” he said with a laugh that came close to a snort as he reached across his chest and scratched his armpit. “Your car ain’t here. You car’s still at the Round About. You got sorta liquored up, miss, so much you couldn’t drive. You could barely walk all by yourself, so I put you in my car and started to take you home, but you passed out cold before I even hit the corner. I don’t know where you live, so I brought you back here and put you to bed. Like a gentleman. That’s what I am. A
gentleman.”

Lucy felt a churning ball of sickness develop in her stomach. It suddenly hit her. She didn’t remember anything past saying
goodbye to Jilly and Warren when the jukebox began playing one of her favorite songs. What had she done? A fight over
chicken skin
. And now here she was, waking up on a dirty rainbow, standing in the middle of Icky Ricky’s stinky apartment, about to ask him for a ride back to the bar.

“Let me find my keys,” he said, more than a little discouraged. “Come on, not even just a quick run-through for a burrito? How about if just I get one?”

When Lucy pulled into the driveway, Martin was at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. He looked up to see her as she opened the door and walked into the house.

“I saw your car at the Round About this morning,” Martin said plainly. “You spend the night at Jilly’s?”

Lucy shook her head.

Martin paused for a moment and just looked at her.

“I made a mistake, Martin, but I swear to you nothing happened,” she began. “I woke up someplace I didn’t plan on waking up, but nothing happened. I drank too much, and then I drank more and someone tried to take me home but didn’t know where I lived, so …”

“This person, Lucy,” he said quietly. “This person was a man?”

Lucy nodded. “I swear to you nothing happened, Martin. I promise. I would not lie to you. I made a mistake, I acted foolishly. But not one thing happened.”

Martin looked away and then looked back at her.

“All right,” he said slowly. “I’m going to choose to trust you, Lucy. But if this happens again, I’ll know I’ve been made a fool of, and I won’t ask any questions. I’ll just call it a day. Do you understand?”

“Completely,” Lucy replied immediately. “Absolutely.”

That was three years ago. It had been the biggest event in their
relationship, and when it was over, it was almost forgotten. Since then, they had developed a full Lucy and Martin history: holidays, vacations, birthdays, favorite television shows, inside jokes, photo albums, their own side of the bed, who got which drawer in the dresser.

No matter how mundane, or regular or sparkless, they had built a life.

A Lucy and Martin life.

And she could never look at chicken again, alive, dead, fried, or roasted, without feeling her head spin.

By the time Jilly and Warren pulled up in their truck, Lucy had managed to squeeze just about everything into the bed of her truck, except for her grandmother’s rocking chair and the television. After helping Jilly and Warren load those up in their truck, she walked back to the front door to a waiting Tulip, who she could barely see anymore. It was getting dark and there were no lights on in the house.

“I love you, my good girl,” Lucy said as she put her hand up to the glass, to which the dog reciprocated with raising her big, clunky paw. “I will come back for you, okay? Okay? I will see you soon, sweetheart. I promise.”

Tulip looked at Lucy steadily and blinked. Then she emitted a tiny, almost inaudible little whimper.

Lucy’s eyes burned.

“No, no, no, I’m coming back,” Lucy said softly. “No crying, okay? Be a big girl.”

With that, Tulip dropped her paw and tilted her head slightly.

“That’s my girl,” Lucy said. “We will get this figured out. We will find out what’s going on. I will see you soon, I promise.”

Jilly and Warren were waiting for her. She had to go. She was saying her last goodbye to Tulip when she saw something move back
in the shadows, in the kitchen past the living room. Something moved. She saw it. It was slight, but it was there.

“Martin,” Lucy said, and squinted her eyes to get a better look, but it was getting dark and all she could really see was a jumble of unidentifiable shadows.

“Martin!” she called this time. “Martin! Please talk to me. Tell me what’s going on! Is that you? Is that you in there?
Is that you? Why are you doing this? Goddamn it! Why are you doing this? Talk to me!”

There was no answer. She stood as still as she could, staring, watching the stillness in the kitchen, a kitchen she thought she’d be drinking a cold Pepsi in by now. Then she saw movement again, just as slight, and instantly felt foolish. The oscillating fan in the kitchen, she realized. It moved the blinds on the sliding glass door when it turned.

Lucy walked backward to her truck, waving to Tulip continuously, until she reached the driveway and could no longer see her.

“Lucy,” Warren called out from the driver’s side of his truck. “There’s one last box on the lawn. You can toss it in the back here.”

Lucy shook her head. “Those are my wedding invitations.” She shrugged as she opened the door of her truck. “I don’t think I’ll be needing them.”

From the corner of her eye, Lucy saw something white flutter out of the cab and onto the concrete of the driveway below. It was an envelope. She picked it up. She saw right away that it was Martin’s quick scrawl that had written her name on the front.

Inside, the letter said simply:

Lucy had just pulled in behind Warren’s truck in the driveway of her best friend’s house when Jilly walked over to her.

“Do you know what happened?” Jilly said, her hands in the front pockets of her jeans. “Why would Martin do something like this?”

Lucy shook her head. “I have no idea, I really don’t,” she said honestly. “He won’t answer his phone. This note he left me says absolutely nothing. Nothing happened. We didn’t have a fight, we didn’t have words. Jilly, it’s just impossible. How can everything be fine one minute and then completely upside down the next?”

“Lucy, well, maybe everything wasn’t fine,” Jilly said reluctantly. “Did you ever get any feeling that Martin was … I don’t know, that maybe he was messing around?”

“Three hours ago I would have said no,” Lucy replied, her voice rising. “But now that I’m homeless, I suppose anything is possible. I would never expect Martin to do this, so I guess, sure. He could have been messing around with a cashier or the girl in the bakery
who makes birthday cakes. Sure, why not? It makes about as much sense as anything else. Because he didn’t just throw me out—he blasted me out like a rocket! I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Well, you know you can stay here until this all gets figured out,” Jilly reassured her. “But in the meantime, I have to tell you something, and I know you’ve had to deal with big stuff today, and if this could wait, believe me, I wouldn’t be telling you now. Nola called. There was a problem with the deposit from the office for the day before we left for Hawaii.”