Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)(34)

Now he looked at me from his chair across the room—he had been reading a book—and shrugged. “I’m not a physicist, Lucy.”

“I know, but what do you think?”

He shifted his legs. “I think they could be right. But so what.” Then he said, “It kind of explains your mother’s visions, though.”

“I know,” I said, “I thought the same thing. But what do you mean ‘So what’? Seriously, William, this is interesting to me. If everything is predetermined, then”—and I looked around the room—“what are we doing here?”

There was a small smile that came to half of his mouth, but he looked tired. “I know. I think that sometimes.”

“But what are we doing here?” I persisted.

“What I’m doing here, Lucy,” he said, “is I’m trying to save your life.” He paused and then said, “But think if you had gone to Italy and Germany for your book tour like you were supposed to. You might be dead. And you just didn’t go.”

“I know. For no reason,” I said.

“I know that.” He picked up his book again. “No past or present or future. It’s interesting, I agree with you.” But then he shrugged and said, “Who the hell knows anything, Lucy.” And he started to read again.





iii


I dyed my hair. I have had my hair colored with blond highlights for years, but now my hair was coming in brown—with only a few wisps of gray—and when my hair is brown I feel that I look like my mother, which is a thing I cannot bear. So I went to the drugstore and looked at the packages of color, and I chose one and came home and followed the directions, and within two hours my hair was back to being blond. It had come out perfectly!



* * *



—

And then my hair began to fall out.

The bathtub drain became plugged up, and I would stand in water above my ankles, and it would take hours for the water to drain. It was an old bathtub, and the drain was one that could not be removed. It could only open—about half an inch—and close. Each time I took a shower the water took longer to drain out of the tub, and after it did the tub was filthy.

And my hair! I kept tying it up, but it was so thin it was ghastly. A friend in New York suggested pills to order online to make it grow, and so I did, but the pills upset my stomach terrifically. After a while it stopped falling out, and it just lay limply against my neck.

I finally told William that we had to get a plumber in, and he said no plumber was coming into the house because of the virus. So he looked online and read that if you put half a box of baking soda into the drain and then a cup of white vinegar, it would solve the problem.

The next morning William lay half crunched up inside that bathtub on a dirty towel, trying to slip baking powder into the little half-inch opening. He kept swearing, and finally he was sticking the baking powder in with a knife down the little slit. It took him a really long time, and when he climbed out of the tub he said, wiping himself off, “It’s all yours now, Lucy.” So I poured in a cup of vinegar and it sort of sizzled a bit, but the water still did not go down.

William was disgusted and went for his walk.

I poured a gallon of the white vinegar down the drain then and listened to it gurgle more, and then I looked online and I poured a gallon of bleach in as well—

And it worked! I could not wait for William to get home, so I called him and said, “It worked.”

“It did?” he said, and when he came home, honestly we were as excited as kids who had succeeded in starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together. The drain worked perfectly and I was glad then to clean the tub.

My hair remained blond but very, very thin.



* * *



—

As time went by my hair became brown again and I told myself: Well, at least it is growing out, but it grew back in odd ways and wouldn’t lie flat on my head. Mom, I said silently to the nice mother I had made up, Mom, I look awful! And the nice mother I had made up said, It’s okay, Lucy. Your hair has gone through a shock.

And I understood that to be true. At first it was hard to look at myself in the mirror. But I got used to it. I thought: Who cares.

(But I cared.)





iv


We took the plexiglass off the porch and put up the screens that were leaning against the inside wall. We ate out there—the porch was large enough for the round dining room table with its flowered tablecloth and the pompoms on it, if we put one leaf down. And the ocean was immense; we could hear it at night now with the windows open. I learned this about the sound of the sea: There were two levels to it, there was a deep ongoing sound that was quietly massive, and there was also the sound of the water hitting the rocks; always this was thrilling to me. The light was astonishing, it would come every morning and it would be a pale white and then almost smash into a yellow, and then it seemed to get even more yellow as the day went by. When it rained it was not a really cold rain, although most nights the air would get colder.



* * *





A strange compatibility was taking place gradually between William and me. I had even forgotten about how I used to have to go down to the water and swear because he wasn’t listening to me when we had supper. I mean, we were essentially stuck together, and we sort of adapted to it. We would talk about the different people we met, and I told him one evening about a woman named Charlene Bibber that I had met that day at the food pantry—Margaret had asked me to fill in for a day when a volunteer couldn’t make it.