Lucky(4)

“Why was this necklace so special to her? Why did she leave it behind for me to have? If she didn’t want anything to do with me, why did she leave anything behind for me at all?”

Lucky thought he might not answer. But then, “She attended St. Monica’s Parish,” her father allowed. “That necklace was a gift from a nun who lived there.”

“Parish?” Lucky repeated.

“Yeah, like a church.”

Lucky had never been inside a church. “What happens?” she asked. “At church?”

More silence. Then, “There’s a lot of talk about what it means to be a good person. About what God might do to you if you’re bad. Where he might send you. About hell.”

“Oh.” Lucky frowned. She’d heard of hell but hadn’t given the idea much thought. People sometimes told her father to go to hell.

She touched the necklace and gazed out the window again at the velvety-looking Adirondack Mountains coming into focus. As little as she knew about religion, about what made you good and what made you bad, she worried that she and her father were definitely bad. They lied, they stole, they snuck around. She had read enough books about heroes and villains to know which side they were on.

There were a dozen more questions she wanted to ask her father now, but perhaps she didn’t really want the answers. She picked up her book again as her father tuned the car radio to the Yankees game.

“Another hour or so, kiddo. Sit back and relax. We’re going to have a great week.”

Eventually they approached the elegant hotel, which sat on an island attached to the mainland by a short bridge. The island was surrounded by the glittery water of Lake George.

“Nixon stayed here,” her father said as they approached the Sagamore. This prompted a short lecture studded with facts. “Nixon actually did some good things,” he concluded as he pulled the car around a circular driveway and landed it in front of a stately white building. “But it got lost in all the bad. That’s usually what happens.”

Lucky admired the turrets and balconies and stained-glass windows of the hotel, then turned her focused attention on the people milling about.

“Between this and all your book reading, that’s school done for the day, kiddo.”

Lucky barely heard him. It was a long shot, she knew, but she was still looking for her mother, searching the faces of the guests and staff. She had another clue now: Her mother had gone to church. She’d had a friend who was a nun.

A valet approached. She unrolled the window and stuck her head out. The air was fresh. This was going to be a perfect week. Lucky could feel it.

Upstairs, inside their hotel room—which had a large window with a view of the mountains, lake, and resort grounds—Lucky’s father put down his battered suitcase, which was covered in stickers from all the places they’d been. He flopped down onto the bed closest to the window without taking off his shiny shoes, put his hands behind his head, sighed happily, and closed his eyes. Lucky put her smaller suitcase on the second bed, unzipped it, and began to unpack. She lifted out a yellow bathing suit and glanced at him.

“Can I go to the pool?”

“You’re on vacation, Lucky. You can do whatever the hell you want to.”

“What if kids my age aren’t allowed at the pool by themselves?”

Her father’s eyes were closed. “Then just lie about your age,” he said.

Outside, Lucky wandered the hotel grounds for a while. She bypassed the crowded pool and walked down to the edge of the lake—but when she stepped in to swim, a lifeguard blew his whistle at her and shouted, “You can’t swim there!”

Lucky turned and squinted. “Why not?”

The lifeguard pointed down the beach to a small area marked out by buoys. “That’s the swimming area!”

Lucky walked toward the swimming area. It was crowded. She stood by the water for a moment, surveying the writhing mass of bodies, the shouting adults and shrieking children. Then she turned and headed back toward the pool. There, she sat at the edge with her legs dangling in the water, in the quietest corner she could find—which wasn’t very quiet at all—and surveyed the children swimming, splashing, spitting, dunking. She watched one young boy swim to the edge and clutch the concrete, closing his eyes, rapt. A yellowish cloud bloomed in the water below him and she looked away, repulsed.

Then someone sat down beside her. It was a girl about her age with chestnut-brown hair that was as smooth and shiny as Lucky’s was coarse and corkscrew wild. The girl slid her legs into the water, too, and Lucky looked down at her feet. The girl had a toe ring and it glinted in the sun.

“Isn’t it ridiculous?” she said.

Lucky was startled. “Yes,” she managed to reply, wanting to agree with whatever it was this girl said.

“I mean, there’s this whole beautiful lake, and they expect us to swim in there.” She pointed toward the beach and the tiny swimming area, then turned back to Lucky and the pool. “Or in here. No thank you.”

Lucky tried to size the girl up, but she wasn’t used to sizing kids up. She got the sense that what you saw was what you got. “Yeah,” she said. “No thank you. That kid over there, I think he just peed.”

The girl hooted with laughter and pulled her legs out of the water. “Ew!”