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But my disappointment in the tree had magnified out of proportion. They’d focused on me to assuage their grief. It was easier to chastise me because of their disappointment than to look at the horror of losing a child.
Chapter 3
When I was in high school, I wasn’t the baby of the family. Lucy was. Twenty minutes younger than me, beautiful and brilliant, Lucy was the daughter every parent dreamed about. She was smarter than the other three of us, and we knew it and praised her. Rocko, Margo, and me. Lucy was the dream sister, the rock star, the one sure to succeed. She was also my twin.
For fifteen years, we slept side by side, sometimes holding hands all night long. I felt pain when she broke her arm; she said she knew I had an abscessed tooth before the dentist even diagnosed it.
When we were seniors in high school, she already had four years of college chemistry and mathematics under her belt. When we were freshmen, the verdict was made for her to continue in high school even though she could skip it and move right on to college.
“You might as well keep her enrolled,” her academic counselor told George and Lillian. “Socially, she’s fifteen, but intellectually, well, I don’t need to tell you.”
“We knew when she was an infant that we were going to have our hands full,” Lillian announced proudly. “And we were right!”
Lucy’s brain was bizarrely wired, though. Mathematics and chemistry came naturally to her. But everything else was a struggle.
“I hate history,” she’d scream when her report card made that fact clear.
“Chill,” I told her. “No one will expect you to know squat about history where you’re headed.”
I was right. University people in high places were already on her trail. TheDetroit Newshad written a story about her when she was nine.Detroit Fourth Grader Takes Quantum Physics at Wayne State. After that, it was a well-known fact in the community that concrete guy George Roman and his wife had a kid who was a savant. She wasn’t a savant, though who often have a low IQ; cognitively, she was a genius.
The three of us siblings helped her with memorization, the only way she retained any social studies or history or literature. We fought with our parents, asking them to reconsider keeping her in school. She should have been homeschooled.
The odd fact was that she liked school, loved her friends, the classroom setting, lunchtime in the cafeteria, and it wasn’t good for her. She was a troublemaker, too, skipping school and getting caught smoking cigarettes in the school parking lot. The nuns acted like they hated her, and Lucy was the scapegoat nine times out of ten when there was trouble. But she didn’t care.
We worshiped her. Lucy was the center of our universe. Until Christmas, the year she and I turned seventeen.
The loss was an incomprehensible nightmare that left Lillian and George in agony. They’d never recover. I saw the change immediately. Strapping, mighty, larger-than-life Big George. He’d lost muscle mass, his hair, his exuberance for living. The man who ran after me the night of Flynn’s accident, crumpling at my feet—that was the new George.
Lillian went in the opposite direction. Her nose was in everyone’s business. She spent every waking minute hounding us kids. I didn’t know until a year or so later that her friends were on the verge of disowning her because of her constant interference in their lives. A woman I referred to as Aunt June confided that it was only because of my mother’s great loss that she was compelled to be more compassionate with her, to be patient. None of them would have survived the pain as graciously as Lillian did.
I ran into June at the market on a Sunday afternoon. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her familiar outdated hair style—a twist held with plenty of hair spray—rummaging through the oranges. Trying to slip away, I didn’t move fast enough.
“Bella! Bella Roman, don’t move another inch.” She scurried over to me, pushing her cart. “I know you saw me. I’ve missed seeing you, but I haven’t been to the house.” She grabbed me and pulled me in for a hug, her pointy manicured nails digging into my skinny upper arms.
“Why not?” I asked, my voice muffled, my face pressed into the shellac of her hair. “My mother is suffering.”
“I’m sorry. It’s for my preservation. I loved Lucy like she was my own, you know that.”
“But she wasn’t yours, Aunt June. She was Lillian and George’s, and now you and the other Aqua Net Gang have abandoned them.”
Sputtering, she took the insult good naturedly, reaching up to pat her hair. “Yes, that is awful of us. I’ll get over there today, with dinner. Is she okay, though?”
“They’re okay, but she’s driving everyone nuts with her hovering. Please, give her something to do. What if Lucy had really been your daughter? Do you think my mother would have ghosted you?”
“No! I’m selfish. I promise, I’ll go today.”
Nothing more was said, and I noticed later that my mother wasn’t lamenting her friend’s silence.
After the tragedy, I went on to college, even though I had doubts about the outcome. The reason I did so well is that it was an attempt at blocking out everything else in my life. While I was safe at school, Margo and Rocko stayed nearby to make sure the parental units were safe. They never tried to make me feel guilty either.
“You need to distance yourself as far as possible from this,” they said. “You’ll never recover if you don’t.”
I know now they were right. I was the closest to Lucy. Despite growing up in her shadow, I thought of Lucy as my best friend. I had the privilege of watching her blossom. I was the person who first saw that she was special, although I didn’t have the language for it. I was also the first to see that there was trouble on the horizon.
Living with her manipulation was exhausting. My parents kept her up on a pedestal, regardless of the warnings from teachers and psychologists and me.
I’d cautioned my parents for months that she was spiraling out of control. Lucy ended up dying furious with me because I’d betrayed her confidences, exposing to my parents that she was using drugs.
