Page 90 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Do you remember saying no to your boyfriend? Sorry, to your ex-boyfriend?
Were you already in the bed when Noah arrived?
Do you think maybe he might have had the wrong impression?
Was this your first time being sexually active with your boyfriend?
Sorry. Ex-boyfriend.
Rachel wanted to stop it somehow. She wanted to scream. But it was as if she were paralyzed, frozen inside that room with her daughter, watching every question chip away at some facet of her story, whittle it all down to nothing.
They would speak to Noah Landry and the other boys who’d been there, Sergeant Erickson told her. But it would likely come down to a classic case of he said, she said.
At least, Rachel thought, Erickson sounded apologetic.
After the interview, Rachel waited while Lucy lingered in the restroom, dousing her face and hands in ice-cold water—a calming trick her old therapist had encouraged for when Lucy was in danger of dissociating. The interview had ended with Lucy in tears, practically hysterical, demanding to know why the police were treating her as ifshe’ddone something wrong.
He raped me,Lucy had choked out.I don’t care what he says. I don’t care what you think. He raped me, and his friends stood there and watched.
Coming out of the interview room, Rachel and Lucy had passed by a whiteboard hung with grainy photographs of Nina and Lydia Faraday. Rachel could hardly stand to look at them. For a second, she’d imagined Lucy’s image hanging next to theirs—her daughter reduced to a handful of pixels, shrunk down forever inside the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
She’d imagined Lydia Faraday’s voice like the whisper of paper in the wind.
I told you so.
For the first time since moving to Indiana, she dreaded going back to that house.
Rachel began to have dreams that she was hurting Noah Landry. In one she was elbow-deep in his entrails, which were made of metal ducts and insulation like the walls of a house. In another she was bludgeoning him with a shovel in the middle of a construction site she recognized, even in the dream, as lifted from photos of the first expansion of the Aquatics Center. She kept swinging and swinging, and Noah’s head kept gettingsmaller, shrinking to the size of a fly until he was a fly and he buzzed off, and she turned to see an animal carcass baking in the sun.
She called Lucy’s old therapist and left a message. Lucy started sleeping in Rachel’s bed again. She began complaining about phantom symptoms—stomach aches, vision problems, numbness in her hands and feet. She begged to stay home from school.
Rachel didn’t argue. She felt helpless, even ashamed. She was sure that this was somehow her fault. She hadn’t protected Lucy in Michigan; now again, here in Indiana, she had failed to keep her safe. Once might be an accident. But twice was a pattern. Twice was negligence.
She was haunted anew by what her mother had told her after discovering Rachel was pregnant.You can’t take care of a child. You can barely take care of yourself.
Maybe her mother had been right all along. Rachel was too selfish, too career-focused, and her life was too unstable. She’d never even been married.
She called Alan from the parking lot of the local Kroger, practically hyperventilating after spotting Noah Landry’s mom in the produce aisle. Rachel had turned around and walked out—abandoning her cart already half-full of food she was hoping to tempt Lucy to eat—to keep from walking right up to the bitch and punching her.
Alan sounded worried. His girlfriend was in the car; Rachel heard her kids in the background. He pulled the phone from his ear to conference with her briefly. Then he was back, volunteering to come down to Indiana for a night or two.
“I just have to be back by Wednesday,” he said. “Katie has knee surgery.”
Katie. The way Alan said her name cracked Rachel’s heart all over again. She imagined the girlfriend, whom she’d seen only once and from a distance, graciously giving Alan consent. Permitting him a short pit stop back in his old life, a quick tour of the damage he’d left behind. Lucy had once twirled her fingers in Alan’s beard and called him DaddyAl. Rachel had inched her fingers over his back, examining his moles one by one for signs of melanoma.
And now he could slide in and out of her life like a parenthetical remark. For the first time in a long while, Rachel realized she was about to lose it. Not just cry but lose it—scream, curse at him, drive her car into a lamppost, something.
“Don’t worry about it,” she heard herself say. “We’re fine.”
“Are you sure? I’d really like to see Lucy—”
“I said we’re fine.” Rachel was shouting without intending to. “Lucy doesn’t want to see you. She hates you, remember?”
Immediately she regretted it. She couldn’t breathe. She was sweating in her car while outside a winter darkness fell on the afternoon like judgment.
There was a long sluice of silence.
“Call me anytime, Rachel,” Alan said. He sounded sad. She hung up.
