They’d once been in love. Even they themselves admitted that much. That’s how Vrable came to be. But things change, feelings fade, and eyes begin to wander. So, Vrable remained an only child to the soon-to-be former Mr. and Mrs. Tambor.
Moving to the city was his mother’s idea. His father, well, he’d keep the house. After all, it’s been in his family for generations—going all the way back to the turn of the last century. It just wouldn’t seem right kicking him out of what rightfully belongs to him. Still, the idea of leaving country living for New York City gave the boy anxiety.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” his mother assured him.
“Not afraid,” he promised—though that was a lie.
Vrable’s mother lived in the city while in college. She never graduated, though. She met Mr. Tambor, and after a night of too much wine and equal measures of passion, the former Betty Stanton found herself pregnant and in love—though now she refers to it as poor judgment brought on by infatuation. Nevertheless, the two young lovebirds married and settled down on the Tambor family farm. Vrable arrived some months later.
But after ten years of marriage, one of them strayed. Vrable hadn’t been able to decipher which parent had transgressed, but he’s almost certain it was his mother. It’s that guilty nature she’s nurtured the entire time he’s known her.
They downsized into a small two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Nothing at all like the stately four-bedroom farmhouse in which he’d spent his entire nearly ten years of life. Wide open spaces and giant barns had been his daily living. And his pony called Ghost. He’ll miss Ghost more than he’ll miss his father. He loves his dad, to be sure. But, well, being caught in the middle of both parents left Vrable wanting—needing—time apart from one or the other.
He’d seen her sitting on the front stoop that first day they arrived. A small girl, most likely the same age as Vrable—nine or ten, give or take a few months. Dark hair framed a cute face. A trail of freckles lay across her tiny nose, as if God Himself sprinkled them there—just as an afterthought. She sported a pair of yellow shorts and a white T-shirt that read Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute.
“Girls are different creatures,” his father liked to tell him. “Once they get their claws deep under the skin, you’ll be a goner.”
This one, the girl on the front stoop, made eye contact with Vrable. Held the boy’s gaze until that twinge of fear forced his eyes to the cement sidewalk in front of his new home.
“Just be nice and say hello to the girl,” his mother prompted, once they were safe behind closed doors. “She’s a darling little thing.”
Two days later he saw her again, through the peephole in the door.
“She lives across the hall,” his mother told him. “Stays with her grandmother, she does. She lost both parents, the poor dear.”
How did they die? He didn’t ask the question out loud, where anybody in the hallway might hear and become offended at his trespass into private matters that never will be any of his business. Was it a car wreck? Maybe they were both drug addicts who overdosed together. Perhaps they caught rabies from fruit bats that hide in the city, waiting to feed on the locals.
The next time Vrable saw the girl, she had returned to her perch on the front stoop. This time she wore a short red skirt that gave up a peek of her underwear—white, with little pink flowers.
“How come you’re always staring at me?” she demanded from the boy.
Vrable stammered and stumbled over his own tongue, as if the thing had grown twelve feet in just the last minute. “I’m not staring at you,” he protested.
“Liar, liar . . . I’m sure you know the rest.”
His attempt to extract himself from the situation caught a snag when she asked his name.
“Vrable,” he said.
“Vrable?” Indignation took up residence on her face. “What the heck kind of name is Vrable?”
“I’m named after an uncle,” is all he could manage. “A great uncle, really; he died in Vietnam.”
“Named after a dead man you never met, huh?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
The girl ignored his question, remained in control of this conversation. “Your mom says you have a pony somewhere.”
Vrable’s head tipped forward. Girls like horses—or so he’d heard from Tommy Terwilliger. Tommy had been his best friend since they were both in kindergarten together. “His name is Ghost,” he told the girl.
“What’s up with you and the dead?”
Her question missed its mark, left him pondering her meaning.
She gained her feet, smoothed a wrinkle from her skirt, and clarified her curiosity. “You’re named after a dead uncle—great uncle—and you have a pony called Ghost, which is a spirit of something that happens to be dead.”
Vrable finally worked up enough nerve to ask the girl’s name.
“Gotta go,” is all she gave up.
It wasn’t until their fourth encounter that she let slip the fact that she could still hear her mother’s voice saying, “Worry changes nothing, Lucy. So don’t waste time on such foolishness.”
Vrable’s laugh seemed misplaced.
“What’s so funny?” the girl demanded.
“Your name is Lucy.”
“And that’s funny how?”
“Lucy Goosey.” He only said it because it’s a favorite saying of his father. Everybody at the New Year’s party was all loosey goosey by midnight.
Lucy failed to see humor in the mocking of her name.
Vrable didn’t set eyes on the girl for three whole days after that mistake. And he only deemed it a mistake because he found himself missing their odd conversations.
“Just knock on her door,” his mother encouraged. “She most likely won’t bite.”
“Biting I can handle.” He found himself standing before the girl’s apartment. It wasn’t fear that kept him from laying knuckles to wood. It had more to do with curiosity. Like, wondering why he never saw Lucy’s grandmother. And how come the old woman’s voice didn’t leak out into the hallway, the way everybody else’s on that floor did?
“You come to make fun of me again?” Lucy had snuck up behind him. She wore red shorts and a pink T-shirt that said Girl Power in white letters across the front. “Wanna go down to the park?”
Did this constitute a date? No. They were just kids. But still, it would only be the two of them, alone, without parental guidance. Tommy Terwilliger would most certainly agree that this qualified as a legitimate date.
Lucy laid a squelch to those misguided thoughts. “And don’t go thinking this is some kind of a date. It ain’t.”
His mother’s voice invaded his head. Ain’t isn’t a word.
He’d let it slide this time.
The park really didn’t resemble the mental picture he’d sketched. A more accurate label might be empty lot—or maybe the neighborhood dumping ground. A battered old sofa found use among the homeless few that chose to congregate in that spot. A pile of old tires lay at the rear of the space.
“Back behind the tires is the river,” Lucy explained. “There’s a place where we can sit and throw rocks in the water if you want. Sometimes giant carp jump up, hoping what we’re throwing can be eaten.”
They found a place in a clearing. It was there that he picked up a scent on the girl—perfume of some sort. Did she splash it on because of him?
Side by side, they sat—close enough for their hips to touch. Stories of what brought each of them to this point in their lives found exchange like currency between them.
“Grandma really looks after me,” Lucy said, tossing a small stone into the river. “I’d be stuck in foster if not for her.”
“What’s foster?” Vrable asked.
Her look reminded him of his own shortcomings. “You can’t be that stupid,” is all she said.
“I’d like to meet your grandmother,” Vrable told her.
“Yeah, well, maybe. I don’t know. Grandma hasn’t been feeling well lately. She just needs her rest, is all.”
He worked up the courage to toss those few words at her. “How’d your parents die?”
A giggle of sorts leaked from the girl. “They ain’t really dead. I just told your mom that, so she wouldn’t keep asking after them. That’s what grown-ups do—they dig and pry until they know everything about every kid on the block.”
“Then where are they?” Vrable shot long glances from the side, hoped Lucy wasn’t the kind of girl to just up and slug a boy for asking too many questions.
Lucy left out the giggle this time. Her shoulders did that quick flinch common to kids who don’t have an answer for the question being asked. “Don’t know,” is all she said.
Once, way back when Vrable first got Ghost, he fell off the pony in mid trot. The air evacuated his lungs and left the boy gasping in the dirt, searching for his breath. Lucy’s confession struck him in the same way.
“Maybe you could ask the police to look for them,” he offered, hopeful that resolution of her loss might be found.
Darkness settle into her slate-gray eyes. Anger, it may have been. Or perhaps resignation. The girl gained her feet, stood over top of the boy, as if ready to pounce. “You ever mention my name to a cop, I’ll never talk to you again.”
* * *
An entire week slipped by before Vrable caught sight of the girl again. This time he found her in the neighborhood grocery store, tossing items into a hand basket. Cereal, milk, cans of ravioli, and a pack of bubble gum.
Vrable’s mom gave the boy a nudge, encouraged him to talk to the girl. “You don’t just get up and walk away from a thing like losing your parents,” Betty Tambor told her son. “A girl like her needs a friend.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I know more than you do.” He said it under his breath, knowing of a certainty he’d have to explain his meaning had he said it loud enough.
“Just grabbing some stuff,” Lucy said, eyeing the boy and his mother. “Grandma doesn’t get out much these days.”
Betty Tambor spoke up, said, “Maybe you’ll come to dinner at our place one of these evenings.”
It wasn’t really an invitation. It’s just the way Vrable’s mother speaks. She’s always mingled that sort of vagueness with her words. Just float an idea out there, but don’t ever really commit to it.
Lucy understood it, though. “Maybe,” she said, injecting her own brand of vagueness into the breach. Her gaze fell to Vrable. “Wanna come over tonight?”
A shrug lifted off his shoulders like a spooked bird taking flight.
“Oh, go on over,” his mother ordered. “It’s Friday night. You may as well have some fun.”
* * *
Lucy yanked her door wide open after only the first knock—as if she’d been there all day, just waiting for his visit.
The suddenness of it all gave Vrable a startle.
“Awful jumpy,” she teased, inviting him inside. She wore that same red skirt again, the one offering free looks at her underwear whenever she sat on the front stoop.
Vrable wanted to see them again.
“It’s all in reverse,” he said, absorbing the apartment’s interior. “It’s identical to ours, just in reverse.”
“Then it’s not identical,” said Lucy, mingling a sort of sarcasm into her choice of words.
“Whatever.” Vrable’s backside found rest on a sofa that could have been there since the Reagan years. “Where’s your grandma?”
“Out.”
“Thought she didn’t—”
“Leave it be, boy.”
A bedroom door remained closed during his visit. Maybe that’s where the old lady took her rest. The place lacked a television—though an outdated stereo occupied a shelf above the fake fireplace in the living room.
Lucy dropped beside the boy, leaving a few inches between them. Her scent hinted at something subtle, like a grown woman’s perfume—one of those expensive brands his father used to buy his mother for Christmas or birthdays or anniversaries.
“What if I was a vampire,” Lucy pondered, her gaze attached to his, “and I only invited you over to drain you?”
Vrable offered his neck to the girl. “Go ahead,” he dared. “With my parents splitting up, there’s not much left to look forward to.”
The girl moved in closer. She didn’t bite him, though; she just sniffed at his neck—as if determining whether or not he might be worth the effort.
“They’ll get back together,” she whispered into his ear. “And you’ll move back to your home.”
“No, they won’t. You should see the way he looks at her now. He hates her.”
“You’re too young to appreciate real heartbreak, Vrable. Your father is more hurt than angry—don’t ever confuse hurt with hatred.”
Vrable fixed on her. “You’re no older than me.”
“Old enough to have seen more than you’ve seen.”
It resembled a strawberry-colored butterfly, the birthmark adorning her left shoulder. His fingertips dared a touch. “Looks like a tattoo,” he said, surprised by the sturdiness of his own voice.
Lucy’s kiss came soft and lingering, sweetened by bubble gum. An unexpected thing, to be certain—not that the boy had it in mind to be offended by this sudden act. Even Tommy Terwilliger would be impressed—and Tommy isn’t the easily impressed type.
“Why’d you do that?” he asked.
“Just felt like it,” she replied.
The invitation leapt from his tongue before his wits had a chance to return. “Wanna come with me when I visit my dad this weekend?”
* * *
Vrable’s mother gave him grief over not checking with her before asking Lucy to join him. “It’s just common courtesy,” she told him.
Mr. Tambor, he saw things through a different lens. “Got you a girlfriend, huh?” he asked, eyeing the girl climbing into the back of his car.
Vrable denied such a concept—though Lucy’s kiss remained on his lips these many days later. “She’s just a friend,” he claimed, not truly believing his own words.
“Different creatures,” said Mr. Tambor, wiggling his fingers at his son. “Claws, I tell ya.”
Small talk filled the car ride out of Brooklyn. Mr. Tambor spoke of goings on out in the country. He brought Vrable up to date on news about neighbors and other locals. Lucy, she kept mostly quiet in the backseat, though every so often she’d toss in a stray word or two where a subject stood neutral, not wrapped around people and places of which she knew nothing.
“This is all yours?” she asked, eyeing the expanse of fields surrounding the Tambor home.
“Two hundred acres,” Vrable proclaimed with pride.
His father tucked a few words into the seams of the moment, said, “And it’s all going to be yours one day, Son.”
They wasted little time getting to the old barn, Vrable and Lucy.
“It’s over a hundred years old,” Vrable said, meaning the barn. “My great grandfather built it—with the help of some Amish people.”
The smell of hay and manure mingled around them. It didn’t seem to bother Lucy—not the way it often bothered other girls he’d known from school. But then again, there weren’t any girls like Lucy at Vrable’s old school.
“What’s that for?” she asked, eyeing the brood lamp in the corner.
“It’s for when we have baby chicks,” he explained. “It keeps them warm during cold nights.”
A fascination, he’d call it, the girl’s interest in such a normal thing like a brood lamp.
She turned it on, turned it off, turned it back on again. “I thought the mother is supposed to keep them warm.”
“Sometimes she needs help.”
And just that quick, Lucy lost interest. “Where’s Ghost?”
They found the pony grazing in the pasture behind the barn. Ghost let go a whinny and trotted toward the boy. It’s joy that passed between the two—an honest and certain thing. They’d been separated by time and miles, sure, but still retained the familiarity of old friends or even family.
“Can we ride him?” Lucy asked.
Saddle and bridle found the animal more than willing. Vrable mounted first, before pulling his guest up behind him. A gentle kick set Ghost on a steady walk toward an open field.
Lucy’s arms went easily around Vrable. She hugged tight to the boy, as if she might fall off at any moment. It’s a thing like comfort—that feeling he got being so close to her. He could imagine her living there with him. After all, the farm would be his one day, thus securing his right to choose who could stay there with him.
For dinner, Mr. Tambor made hot dogs and macaroni and cheese—a long-time favorite of Vrable’s. Plans were discussed as to what father and son might do with their limited time together. Both opted for fishing in the small lake just down the road.
“Fishing?” Lucy’s nose crinkled at the notion.
Mr. Tambor asked, “Ever been?”
“Nope.” The girl scratched at that strawberry butterfly on her arm. “Can’t I just stay here with Ghost?”
“Girls like horses,” Vrable offered, hoping to sound as wise as Tommy Terwilliger. “Ghost will keep her company.”
* * *
“I hate the city,” Vrable confessed to his father after casting his line into the lake. “It’s loud and dirty and just not home.”
“Well…” Mr. Tambor couldn’t furnish a ready solution—and Vrable hadn’t really expected one. “Things get complicated, Son. But they always have a way of untangling themselves if we just remain patient.”
Neither caught any fish worth keeping. They rarely did. But that’s never been the purpose of lazy afternoons on the lake.
“Think you’ll ever forgive her?” It was a bold move on Vrable’s part, asking such a question. But his father, well, he wasn’t given to flying off the handle over things his boy did or said.
Mr. Tambor retrieved a handkerchief from his back pocket, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and settled his gaze on Vrable. “How’d you ever get to be so darn smart?”
That’s all he said.
There wouldn’t be any deep conversations regarding infidelity in marriage or the pain of a broken heart. Those were the things adults kept for themselves, like secrets saved in a box, visited only on rare occasions, when the one feeling the pain is certain he’s all alone. A kid, well, he never knows what happened until after the family splinters, its members falling into different places in the world.
It wasn’t until the sun dipped beneath the horizon that Vrable noticed the orange glow painting the sky toward home.
“What’s that?” he asked.
* * *
Vrable saw it first. Flames from the barn licked the evening sky, became visible a mile away.
Ghost became an afterthought.
“Lucy!” the boy screamed, jumping from his father’s car before the thing had a chance to become motionless. He bolted toward the conflagration.
Mr. Tambor tackled him in the space between the house and barn. “If she’s in there, it’s too late, Vrable.”
Kicking, fighting, and growling did little to break his father’s hold. All he could do was watch.
Ancient timbers gave way beneath the heat, dropping the roof upon the wreckage. Within minutes the walls folded, no longer willing or able to do what they’d been doing for over a hundred years.
Movement beyond the smoke put Ghost safely in the pasture.
The girl, she failed to show.
Even a desperate search of the house and surrounding fields couldn’t locate her.
Fire trucks lined the long driveway, hoses lay here and there across the lawn. Only a pile of rubble remained once the flames were extinguished.
Vrable’s mother arrived as the firemen sifted the remains in their search for Lucy. The usual harsh tone between both parents had gone soft in the shadow of current events.
“You’ll stay out here tonight?” Mr. Tambor asked his estranged wife.
Her head tipped a reluctant nod.
* * *
“She wasn’t in the barn,” a firefighter reported.
Vrable saw a positive in this finding. “Maybe she got scared and ran to catch the train back home.”
Mr. Tambor, relieved to know this, asked, “Any idea what started this thing?”
“Too soon to be certain,” the fireman explained, “but it’s looking like your brood lamp got things going.”
Attitudes changed that night—at least where Vrable’s parents were concerned. Anger and mistrust gave way to feelings neither parent had given much thought to in recent years. At dawn’s first light, Betty Tambor found her kitchen just as she’d left it months earlier. Morning put the family back together at the breakfast table.
“We have to go find Lucy,” Vrable demanded, refusing the plate of scrambled eggs set before him.
His father said, “The police—”
“Lucy doesn’t want the police to even know her name,” Vrable argued. “Can’t we just go to Brooklyn and see if she made it home?”
They drove to the city together, as a family—for the first time in a long while.
* * *
Vrable darted up the front walk, hoping he just might find the girl at her usual perch atop the steps.
No such luck.
The boy bolted up the stairs to their floor, well ahead of his parents. His frantic banging at the door belonging to Lucy and her grandmother brought out the curious from the other apartments on the floor.
The building super opened the door, demanded to know just what Vrable thought he was doing making such a ruckus.
“Is she here?” Vrable asked, gulping at the air for needed breath.
The super eyed the boy like he’d gone soft in the head. “Is who here?”
“Lucy!”
“There’s no Lucy staying here.”
“Then what about her grandma?”
Mr. and Mrs. Tambor entered the scene, attempted to calm the boy.
“She’s not here,” Vrable told them through words thickened by with emotion.
Betty Tambor offered her input. “A small girl,” she explained, “dark hair, freckles. She stays here with her grandmother.”
The super’s head wagged left to right. “There’s nobody staying in this unit.”
Betty said, “But surely her grandmother would—”
“As I said, this one is vacant. Has been for more than two months.” He pushed the door open, showed off an empty space under remodel.
* * *
Vrable and his mother settled back on the farm just in time for the start of the new school year. Anger had subsided, the hurt his father endured softened. Bitterness became sweetened by the news that Vrable would have a younger sibling by the following spring.
Prenatal doctor visits took place in Brooklyn, a few short blocks from the apartment. Vrable referred to that chapter in time as the separation. He did what he could to leave those unfortunate few months in the past, rarely recalling them aloud—unless Tommy Terwilliger pestered the boy with questions. Tommy hadn’t spent much time in the city. He appreciated details—mostly those concerning Lucy.
“I can’t tell you what happened to her because I just don’t know,” Vrable often told his friend.
“Just vanished, huh? Like a ghost?”
But then Vrable saw her again, a few days before Christmas, outside Dr. Rudcliff’s office. She’d changed considerably, this one. Taller. Older—by more than a few years. Twenty—if she were a day. Same face, though. That strawberry butterfly on her left shoulder capped it. Who wears short sleeves in a New York winter?
“Hey!” Vrable called to her.
Her eyes fixed on him, like maybe she really didn’t recognize the boy she now towered over. She said, “What do you want, kid?”
Vrable lost his words behind an emotion he fought to keep in check.
“So. . . ,” she said, drifting into his orbit. “Cat got. . . well, you know the rest.”
“You’re Lucy.” The boy’s voice carried the heavy weight of a tremble behind it.
“And you’re Vrable. Named after a dead great-uncle.” In a moment, buried in a piece of time thin as a slip of paper, Lucy stood as the ten-year-old girl she’d previously been. “You want me like this, do you? Easier for you to relate to?”
A thing like that could startle a boy, make him question his own eyes—if not his very sanity.
He grasped at words, managed to string a few together. “What are you?”
She leaned in close to the boy, her lips brushed his ear. Warmth filled her tone. “I’m just a friend, Vrable.”
The salt of tears stung his eyes. “Then why did you leave?”
“I didn’t.” Her arms went easily around him, pulled him close in a hug. “You just stopped seeing me.”
“I don’t understand.”
Lucy backed away. Her fingers caressed the boy’s cheek. “I told you they’d get back together,” she said.
The girl disappeared from the very spot on which she stood. She didn’t walk away, didn’t run off. She simply ceased to be there in front of him.
“You’re going to have a sister,” Vrable’s mother said, finding him out front of Dr. Rudcliff’s office.
Though Lucy had vanished, Vrable could still feel her near him—her warmth, her scent lingering as if she’d just stepped behind him. “Do you believe in angel’s?” he asked his mother.
The woman pondered her son, considered his question. “I suppose I do—though I sometimes wonder where they are when so many people seem to need them.”
“Maybe they’re not meant to be like superheroes,” he countered, following his mother back to the car. “Maybe they show up just to sort of untangle things.” He climbed into the passenger seat, clicked his seatbelt, said, “Can we name her Lucy?”
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Looking for Lucy is a short story taken from my collection entitled Strange Hwy: Short Stories. It can be found by clicking the Amazon logo below!
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