Page 39 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
“There was a fight, wasn’t there?” Rachel had seen reference to a scrape among members of the boys’ swim team and some of their rivals in a recent police blotter. She’d been curious about the swim team and all the rumors attached to it over the years. Tommy Swift had been suspected of relying on a regimen of performance enhancers; Coach Steeler of encouraging him. A boy named Will King had dodged accusations of sexual assault. Several boys had been arrested for drunk driving. Only two years earlier, team captain Alec Nye’s name had come up in connection with an interesting case of revenge porn. But nothing ever stuck; nothing was ever proven. Woodward’s star swimmers remained, it seemed, impervious to legal trouble.
Now, sandwiched between cars festooned with team colors, shark decals, and swim team bumper stickers, Rachel thought she knew why. She had seen this kind of devotion once before, when she’d attended a University of Michigan football game with her college boyfriend. They’d been squaring off against Ohio State, their sworn rivals. At certain moments, Rachel had truly feared a crowd riot.
Inside the lobby, the air was heady with the smell of bleach. They funneled in through the first glass doors, past a life-size bust of Jay Steeler that startled Rachel with its cold, bald gaze. She noticed people touching it as they passed, skimming its forehead lightly, almost reflexively, as if in religious deference. Sweat gathered at Rachel’s neck, but there was no space even to remove her jacket. She had the sudden urge to escape, to run back into the fresh October air, away from this crowd and its worship.
But it was too late. Seconds later they were inside, pummeled through the lobby doors and into a long hallway jostling with student greeters with sharks painted on their faces and narrowed by folding tables filled with baked goods. Rachel thought she recognized ReeseSteeler-Cox leaning on a pair of crutches and directing a small handful of acolytes to deliver welcome brochures.
Then they were swept down the hall, shuffling after the crowd past elaborate displays of trophies, ribbons, and photographs of the boys’ swim team through the years—from early-nineties photographs of the original Granger Club Team clustered at the edge of the old YMCA pool to newspaper articles about the early wins and triumphs at counties; the original blueprints of the Aquatics Center, framed next to a headline announcing the beginning of construction; dust-colored images of the construction site and a small army of bulldozers and excavators mowing the ground, raising their steel jaws to the sky. Rachel checked the date engraved on a silver plaque beneath the frame. That, Rachel thought, must have been right around the time Nina Faraday disappeared.
The whole walk, Rachel felt, had the feeling of a religious pilgrimage. She caught sight of a framed photograph of Coach Jay Steeler, then in his early 50s, tan and relaxed, giving a thumbs-up to the camera from inside the gigantic dirt pit where the pool would soon take shape. Further on, the modern Aquatics Center rose out of the dust of sepia-toned photographs, ending with a full-color image of Coach Steeler getting tossed into the deep end by the boys’ team just after opening, permanently frozen in midair just before hitting the water.
To Rachel, Coach Steeler’s smile looked more like a grimace.
Finally she noticed a framed memorial plaque dedicated to Tommy Swift, the protégé who’d placed the Granger Club Team, Woodward Sharks, and Coach Steeler’s methods firmly on the map of American swimming. Nina Faraday, on the other hand, seemed to exist only in her absence, even here, in the gaps between the visual story lines.
It occurred to Rachel again,There is no crime without a victim.Somehow, in the sixteen years since Nina Faraday had disappeared, even the notion of her victimhood had vanished.
Just past the boys’ locker room, they wheeled left, flowing onto the pool deck. The air was soupy with humidity. Already the bleachers were filling up. To Rachel, the crowd was an undifferentiated mass,an amoeba-like blob of constituent black-and-yellow components. But Lucy, with that teenager’s finely tuned instinct for social particularities, easily picked out her classmates from the throng.
“There’s Akash and Nate Stern. See? Oh. They’ve gotSpinnakerwith them. He’s kind of tragic. And look. There are my friends in the front row, right across from the team bench.” She said this with a certain amount of pride, waving furiously at Bailey, Savannah, and Mia.
“Do you wish you were sitting with them?” Rachel asked.
“Mom, no,” Lucy said. “I sit with the Strut Girls every day.”
“The what girls?”
Lucy giggled. “That’s what everyone calls us. It’s from one of Bailey’s videos. I’ll show you.”
Lucy pulled out her phone and began swiping. It was dizzying, the way Lucy toggled back and forth between therealand thevirtual; Rachel thought of long invisible tendrils growing from one to the other, enmeshing the two worlds permanently.
As if sensing what Rachel was thinking, Lucy glanced up. “I’ll show you later,” she said. Unexpectedly she put her phone in her back pocket and reached for Rachel’s hand, intertwining their fingers.
It had been Lucy’s idea to attend First Meet together—an olive branch, Rachel thought, after a stormy argument several days earlier about Lucy’s social media use. Lucy had accused her mother of toxic narcissism, of invading her privacy, of denying herright to even exist as a separate human—language she had picked up, undoubtedly, from the same sources that Rachel had tried very hard to monitor. Later Rachel found Lucy in the attic, sobbing piteously into her pillow. She sat down and placed a hand on Lucy’s back, felt her spine rise and fall like the ravaged mast of some shipwreck on a swell.
If you really want a TikTok account again, you can have one,Rachel had said.But you know the rules. No challenges. And I’m going to need the password.
Abruptly, Lucy stopped crying. For a long second she lay so still that Rachel might have worried she’d stopped breathing except forthe continued motion of her back, warm under Rachel’s palm. Rachel remembered then when Lucy was a little girl and used to climb in her bed whenever Alan was traveling. In the middle of the night, Rachel would wake up and find her daughter so motionless, curved like a small parenthesis in the darkness, that she would feel spikes of sudden terror. Only when she touched her Lucy, felt her small body expand and relax with every breath, could she sleep again.
I’m just trying to keep you safe,Rachel had said then, a little desperately. And finally Lucy answered, her voice still muffled by the pillow,I know, Mom. But you can’t.
She had prepared as best she could to be a mother. But she hadn’t prepared for the love. Nothing could have prepared her.
People kept streaming in. The stands were soon so packed, Rachel felt like a grain of sand in a swell of dunes. Every time someone moved in the bleachers, the whole crowd seemed to move with them, spitting out a single body, then rapidly filling the gap from the overflow of spectators waiting at the open doors. Rachel was glad she’d used the bathroom before they’d left the house.
Her eyes landed on an older couple seated in the first row of the observation deck, tucked among knots of college recruiters and scouts. They stood out for their formal, almost somber dress, and for how they waved stoically down to the stands, like royalty greeting fans during a funeral procession. She heard the woman on her left point out “the Swifts” to her husband, and then she understood. Tommy Swift’s parents were both thin and stooped, haggard before their time.
Rachel wondered why they’d come.
Moments later, she had her answer. The pool was cleared of swimmers. Finally they were ready to begin. People were still jostling for seats, a crowd pressing in from the hallway.
“Is it always this crowded?” Rachel wondered out loud.
“God, no.” It was the woman on her left, her cheeks painted with Sharks colors. “We’re all here for Noah Landry.”
It was the first time Rachel ever heard the name.
Three
