If Nephys is the first main protagonist of the book introduced in Chapter One, Lucy is the second.
Lucy is the child of a necromancer, and the last necromancer of any significant power. Of course she doesn't know this until her mother dies in a car wreck.
Lucy goes through some very difficult challenges right from the start, not the least of which is the loss of her mother.
Fantasy stories often start with an orphaned child, and for good reason. Characters, especially fantasy characters, are often thrown into impossible environments that isolate them from everyone else and their environments. In many ways, they are like the reader. We are isolated, alone, in a challenging environment. Nothing is more isolating than being an orphan. Therefore the orphan becomes a trope, a symbol of our journey through the story. They become avatars for us, and like them, we are ioslated and on unfamiliar ground.
As a theme it began long before a young boy from Privet Drive met the Keeper of the Keys, or a teenage pilot from Tatooine encountered some droids, or a highschool freelance photographer got bit by a spider. Heck it was probably old even in the days when a lost boy was found by the Pharaoh's daughter amongst the bullrushes. So it's a trope, to be sure, but it's not a cliche. Its universal and speaks across many cultures.
Still, I noticed that a lot of these orphans are orphaned very young, before they could even remember their parents. We usually meet them for the first time, long after the tragic events have parted them from their mothers and and fathers. There is often a distance that separates the character, and therefore the reader, from the event that makes these characters such apt metaphors and vehicles for the conflicts they are about to find themselves in. The pain is still there, but not so new as to be crippling. The character has had time to reflect on his situation. He has come to accept it. His isolation is a dull ache, not an open chest wound.
Now I've always thought this was something of a cheat, though a perfectly reasonable and natural one. Even now in middle-age, married, living on my own, providing for my own children, I find the thought of losing a parent devastating. I can only imagine what it would have been like as a child. Placing the start of the story years after the separation of parent and child gives authors the much needed vantage point of the orphan, without traumatizing their character or their readers.
This make perfect sense for most stories. There is no need to rub the readers' face in the character's grief. Likewise, as a matter of plotting, starting the action too close to the death of the parent may reveal too much of the story, as in the example of our famous boy from Tatooine.
But my story is different. Half of the action takes place in the underworld. My characters pass back and forth between the afterlife and our own. They see the souls of the dead arrive in Limbo, and the dead return to the land of the living, and these events have grave consequences. The whole book is about death. And death is ultimately, for those of us who can't see the other side, about grief, raw and real, and it has to feel real in the book as well.
So when I made a decision early on that Lucy would be an orphan, I decided I simply couldn't meet her at twenty or even eleven years after the fact.
We meet Lucy for the first time, not years, not months, not days, but mere hours after her mother's death.
It's a difficult scene to read and even harder to write, but read on.
Chapter Three
Lucy
Lucy
“She’s
over there, doctor, they brought her up from the ICU a few hours ago.”
“She’s stable—no problems?”
“Yeah, bumps and bruises mostly. They were afraid she had a concussion, but the CAT scan was
clean. Miracle really, considering
the accident. She’s resting
comfortably; here’s the chart.”
Lucia Claire Miller was actually wide awake, laying on her
side with her back turned to the two female voices hovering in the door of her
hospital room. She was definitely not resting comfortably. She kept very still as if she were standing
on a precipice and was afraid any movement would threaten to throw her off
balance and tip her over the edge.
She was focusing intently on a water stain on the far wall, pouring all
her concentration into it. She was
trying very hard to clear her head and keep still, but the voices coming from
just beyond her doorway were distracting her.
“Poor kid, did you hear about her mother?” the doctor said
casually. Lucy could hear her
shuffling over papers in her chart.
“No, what?” the nurse replied.
A few hours ago, her mother and she had gotten into a
terrible fight. They were up late
restoring the old mish-mash farmhouse they had inherited from her grandmother
who had died a little over six years ago.
It was located on a country farm, several miles outside of Ephrata,
Pennsylvania. Lucy had knocked
over a ladder and spilled a gallon of dark purple paint all over the original
oak floor. The purple paint was
Lucy’s choice to replace the brown velvet wallpaper that was peeling on the
walls of the upstairs room. It was
her room. It was a terrible mess
to clean up. Her mother had been
upset already by something and yelled at her. Lucy got mad and screamed back.
Fights are like wildfires—it ultimately doesn’t matter where
they start or how. They just burn
wherever there is dry tinder and enough wind to carry them. The fight soon leapt from the spilled
paint to this lousy dump of a house and the recent move. From there it quickly ranged from the
friends she had left behind in Texas to how everyone had hated her in the new
school, and how the present solution of home-schooling was even worse because
she was trapped all day in this miserable house. The sparks flew in the direction of her mother and how she
never understood her. When the
fire reached why her dad had killed himself it finally burned itself out,
though her Mom had nearly slapped her by then.
Lucy had stormed outside and sulked on the dilapidated porch
for over an hour. Mom came out and
sat silently beside her and said nothing for a long time. Then they talked about the stars they
couldn’t see anymore, and about the endless stretches of green trees in
Pennsylvania compared to the open spaces of West Texas, and all the flowers her
Mom had planted in their new garden.
Eventually, the conversation came back to the fight. A few new ground-rules about fights
were established and some terse apologies were exchanged, followed by some
tears and some earnest “I love you”s and a lot of hugging. When that broke up, they got in the
car, and headed for some much-needed comfort food; an all-night diner at a
truck stop nearby that served shakes and breakfast 24 hours a day. They had never gotten there.
The voices outside the door continued.
“They airlifted her mom to Philly, right?” the nurse asked.
“Yeah, but I just got the call from the attending physician
in the ER. She didn’t make it…she
was declared dead on the scene.”
“Oh my…That’s just awful!”
Lucy didn’t react or flinch in the slightest. She just kept on staring at the water
stain, which was beginning to resemble something. Even though this was the first real
time she had heard the news, it was no surprise to her at all. She had known her mother was dead. She had known it in the emergency room,
she had known it in the ambulance ride over, she had known it while laying in
the grass looking up at the twisted wreck of the car caught sideways between
two vertical tree trunks. She
wasn’t sure how she had known—she had just known. Like those people on television who could hear a song on the
radio they’ve never heard before and then play it exactly right on a piano the
first time, or the way some people could shoot a basketball perfectly without
trying, she just knew it. Her
mother was gone, and she was never going to see her ever again with her own
eyes.
Even now, though, she could still see her mother in her
mind’s eye. Her mom was tall,
slender with short, chin-length dark brown hair, and chocolate-brown eyes and
olive skin. Some laugh lines
around the eyes and a stray lock of gray hair in her bangs were the only signs
that showed her full forty-two years.
Her mother was somewhat gangly and clumsy and a bit of a tomboy, always
mucking around in the dirt of the garden, or repairing something around the
house. She looked classy and
gorgeous in a dress and heels, but she could usually be found in blue jeans,
often topped by a baggy sweater, sweatshirt or plaid flannel shirt, a smudge of
dirt on her cheek, and a smirk on her face.
Maggie Miller never put on any pretension that she was
pretty, but Lucy had always thought her mother was very beautiful—lithe,
slender and lovely—and she wished that she looked more like her. Instead of dark brown hair, warm brown
eyes and olive skin, Lucy had sandy brown hair, green eyes, pale skin and
freckles. Instead of a tall
and slim figure with a svelte waist, she was short and somewhat stocky, nearly
the same width from her shoulders to her hips. “Pony-built” her mom had called it.
She always hated the way she looked, but her mom had always
tried to make her feel better about her figure.
“Well at least you’ll have breasts! Look at me, I’m flat as a surfboard!”
her mom had said once.
“MOM!” was Lucy’s
mortified reply.
She had been horrified and embarrassed when her mother said
stuff like that, but she had to admit, it did
make her feel better.
She could remember lots of things about her mom, but the one
thing she remembered most was something from just after the accident. It was a final image of her mother in
shades of gray and blue standing in a marsh on the edge of a distant, ruined
city. She was yelling
something, but she couldn’t tell what. She seemed so far away. There was more to it than that, but it was slipping away,
like a dream.
Of course it had never happened. It was something her mind had just invented immediately
after the accident. A subconscious
mental image that told her what her brain already knew—that her mother was
dead. She had had flashes of
visions and nightmares like that her whole life. Night terrors too.
Mostly images of zombies and vampires and other dead things, the usual
childhood fears. Her mother was
always interested to hear about them but insisted they meant nothing, they were
just manifestations of subconscious fears. Mom had studied a lot of childhood psychology in
college. Somehow her mom
could always make her feel better and banish the scary dreams. Soon she had learned to ignore the
nightmares entirely as idle chatter from her subconscious.
Yet, she had seen a lot of strange things from her
subconscious immediately after the accident. And not just monsters from late night B movies. Strange visions and people she had
never seen before, and somehow they were far more vivid than ever. They were all delusions too she told
herself, crafted from her own memories and fears, that’s all. She even saw a childhood memory where
she had been attacked by a duck at a pond, but the duck had been turned into
some bizarre monstrosity complete with back spines and a butcher knife.
Lucy shook her head and tried to think of something
else. Even now the water stain was
looking more like something, but she couldn’t tell what. The brain did funny things when under
stress, and that’s all that was she told herself. Mom had been practical and always wanted her to be practical
too, so that’s the way she was going to be. She wasn’t going to believe in nightmares or dead things. Now more than ever.
The voices just outside her door kept talking.
“And there’s no next of kin? She’s all alone?”
“We’re not certain, but it sure looks that way. She apparently had a grandmother that
died a while back, but there are no known living relations other than the
mother and now she’s gone.”
This was not news to Lucy either. Grandma Holveda had died six years ago. Lucy had only met
her a few times anyway. Most
kids had loving grandmothers that spoiled them. Nana Holveda was stern, dark-eyed, mysterious and
distant. Her grandmother had never
even hugged her once, so when she passed away when Lucy was seven, it was no
loss. Her father had passed
away three years before that. She
was only four when he had died. He
was shorter than her mother, stocky and sandy haired like Lucy. He was very fun, gave her
helicopter rides, and always made her mother laugh, but he was often moody and
distant himself. There had been no
suicide note, no indication it was anything but an accident, but everyone in
town gossiped about it. She had
always thought he had been happy, but looking back now it was almost impossible
to tell. She had been very
young. She didn’t know what she
thought was more tragic, that her dad’s death was a random accident, or that he
had killed himself intentionally and no one knew the reason why. Her mom didn’t even let Lucy see her
dad’s body, but had had him cremated almost immediately. Her mom was a bit weird like that. She never let Lucy get near any dead
animals or even touch raw meat when they made dinner. She may not have believed in God, but
she was practically phobic about dead things, even her husband’s body. So one day her dad was there, and then
he was gone. Maybe her mon thought
she was protecting Lucy somehow, but it always made Lucy sad that she never got
to see him one last time. In a way
it wasn’t like he had died at all.
It was more like he had left on a long trip and never come back.
Grandma Holveda had never approved of her mother’s choice to
marry him, and even after his death, never quite accepted the marriage. Because she had thought her daughter’s
choice was a mistake, Lucy guessed Grandma Holveda thought anything that came
from that choice was also mistake.
That meant that Lucy was a mistake too.
Lucy screwed up her concentration and stared at the water
stain some more. It did look like something. Maybe a face, she thought. The voices kept talking.
“Social services will be here to interview her in the
morning, we’re hoping that she can tell us something, maybe there’s some
distant relative we don’t know.”
The social worker is going to be disappointed then thought
Lucy. Both her father and mother
had been only children, just like her, and all the grandparents dead. She didn’t even have a cousin, let
alone a sibling or an aunt or an uncle.
“And the mother left no will? No instructions about who would be the guardian?”
“The state police went into the home but didn’t find
anything.”
“What happens if they can’t find a relation or a legal
guardian?”
“Then she becomes a ward of the state. She’ll stay here for the next couple of
days for observation, but then she’ll be released to Child Welfare Services.”
“Child Welfare Services.” The term was as cold as a dead fish to Lucy. This was no surprise to her
either. She had known kids from
foster homes. Some had great,
loving foster parents, some, to put it bluntly, did not. It was a crapshoot, and there was no
way to know which way it was going to turn out, like life itself. It was all so random. Some had
grandmothers that were all smiles and high-pitched voices of delight, who
bought them Happy Meals and cute, patterned dresses; others had grandmothers
with stern and disapproving cold looks and ugly old houses. Some had fathers to give them
helicopter rides until they were six or even seven, and some had their helicopter
rides cut short. And some had mothers…fun,
loving, pretty mothers that looked good in jeans and liked pancakes at eleven
at night and now…she just didn’t anymore.
That was all there was to it she told herself. It was unfair and cruel and capricious, but that was just
the way it was and you couldn’t think about it too much because if you did it
would just drive you crazy. You
just had to suck it up and take it the way it was and try not to be a mess for
the rest of your life—however long it lasted before death came for you and
finally ended it. That was what
her mother had always said at least.
“Because she’s a teenager they’ll start her at a halfway
home most likely and then, if she’s lucky, they’ll find a good foster family
for her…”
She pulled the pillow on her hospital bed tighter around her
ears and wished these women would just go
away. They were driving her crazy
and they never said anything she didn’t already know. She stared a little harder at the water stain on the wall.
“…but that’s not the worst of it,” the doctor continued.
Lucy’s eyes quavered and her concentration on the water
stain broke for a moment. The two
women’s voices went on.
“Not the worst of it?
What do you mean?”
The doctor gave a long sigh and paused before continuing,
“Her mother’s body is missing.”
The nurse gave a sharp intake of breath. So did Lucy. This was the first thing they had said that she didn’t
already instinctively know.
“Missing?!”
“Stolen actually.”
“Stolen! You’re
kidding!”
“I wish I was.”
Lucy’s resolve wavered. She bit her lip and tried to stop
her eyes from welling up but it wasn’t working. She tried staring at the water stain harder. A wildfire had started somewhere inside
of her. She thought about truck
stops and pancakes and chocolate shakes late at night.
Why would anyone want
to steal a body?!
The fire spread to purple paint and old houses.
“Do you remember that funeral home in New Jersey a while
back that was selling body parts to medical research firms overseas?”
“Ugh…that was horrible.”
“They think it might be something like that. Maybe junkies looking for a quick
profit to supply their habit.”
The sparks carried over to foster parents and no more
conversations on the porch. Lucy
choked back sobs.
“Why couldn’t these women just STOP talking and go away?!” she thought. The water stain
on the wall really did begin to resemble a face.
“Someone came in pretending to be a relative of the
deceased, and got access to the morgue. They think it was an inside job too. An orderly who worked there is missing
along with three bodies.”
The flames licked up the dry tinder of cold grandmothers and
helicopter rides and missing parents…missing mothers. The water
stain definitely resembled a face now—it looked familiar. Her mother’s face? No, it was a stranger’s, a woman with
long, black hair and cold eyes.
“That’s just terrible.”
“Just some random
thing…I guess.”
Random, meaningless, hopeless, pointless. That’s what it all was. That’s all it ever was. She swallowed the sobs, pushed back the
tears aching to break free from her and pulled the pillow tighter over her
head. The water stain was just a
water stain. That was all, it was
not a face and it did not mean anything. The dreams were meaningless. It was all meaningless.
She looked away for a second and out the window of her
hospital room. Outside her window,
she could see across the street.
There was a park along the riverfront, and a small stand of trees along
a river. By the edge of the trees
in the shadow just outside the glow of a lamppost, stood a small boy with a
baseball cap. He was spinning a
yo-yo up and down, up and down, over and over again, and it seemed like he was
looking right at her. It was the
same boy she had seen from the accident.
She thought she had imagined him.
She looked at him in disbelief for a second, blinked and turned her eyes
back to the wall.
The face in the water stain lunged at her.
Lucy screamed and stood up in the bed and tried to jump away
but the wires and tubes form the monitors and IV’s pulled her back. She
thrashed and yanked at them desperate to get away to no avail.
“OMIGOSH! She’s awake!!” The nurse ran to her and tried to restrain her. The doctor followed immediately.
Lucy flailed and fought them off and tried to get away. The nurse struggled to restrain
her. Two other nurses and a large
orderly came to their aid when they heard the commotion but none of them could
calm her. Finally, the doctor just
grabbed her in a bear hug and held her tightly against her as Lucy flailed her
arms and legs, kicking and hitting the young doctor all over. The doctor didn’t react but instead
just held Lucy tighter to her.
“It’s alright…it’s alright…you’re safe.” the doctor said
soothingly.
The nurse stroked her back while the doctor held her. Lucy relented and surrendered to the
doctor’s embrace. The doctor was
younger than her mother, but she was dark haired and thin like her mother. She gripped the doctor tightly,
grabbing fistfuls of her white lab coat and sobbed against her neck and
shoulder and cried harder and longer than she ever had before. The doctor sat on the edge of the bed
and rocked Lucy for more than fifteen minutes until she was calm.
As Lucy’s wails quieted to muffled sobs, the nurse asked the
doctor if she wanted a sedative for her, the doctor just shook her head
no.
Then the nurse said in a whisper, “Do you think she heard us
talking?”
The doctor said nothing but just sighed and continued to
rock Lucy as if she were not a thirteen-year-old, but a small child.
Lucy didn’t dare look up from the doctor’s shoulder for a
long time. She was afraid the face
would still be there. She braved a
peek. It was just a water stain
that didn’t look even remotely like a face. She had imagined it.
Then she turned her eyes to the window. The park, trees and lamppost were all there, but the boy
with the yo-yo was gone too.
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