NOS4A2(3)

SHORTER WAY

1986–1989





Haverhill, Massachusetts


THE BRAT WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME SHE RODE OVER THE covered bridge that crossed the distance between Lost and Found.

It happened like this: They were only just back from The Lake, and the Brat was in her bedroom, putting up a poster of David Hasselhoff—black leather jacket, grinning in that way that made dimples in his cheeks, standing with his arms crossed in front of K.I.T.T.—when she heard a sobbing cry of shock in her parents’ bedroom.

The Brat had one foot up on the headboard of her bed and was holding the poster to the wall with her chest while she pinned down the corners with brown tape. She froze, tilted her head to listen, not with any alarm, just wondering what her mother was worked up about now. It sounded like she had lost something.

“—had it, I know I had it!” she cried.

“You think you took it off down by the water? Before you went in the lake?” asked Chris McQueen. “Yesterday afternoon?”

“I told you already I didn’t go swimming.”

“But maybe you took it off when you put on suntan lotion.”

They continued to go back and forth along these lines, but the Brat decided for the time being that she could tune them out. At the age of eight, the Brat—Victoria to her second-grade teacher, Vicki to her mother, but the Brat to her father and in her heart—was well beyond being alarmed by her mother’s outbursts. Linda McQueen’s gales of laughter and overwrought cries of disappointment were the soundtrack of the Brat’s everyday life and were only occasionally worth noticing.

She smoothed the poster flat, finished taping it, and stepped back to admire it. David Hasselhoff; so cool. She was frowning, trying to decide if it was crooked, when she heard a door slam and another anguished cry—her mother again—and then her father’s voice.

“Didn’t I know we were headed here?” he said. “Right on cue.”

“I asked if you checked the bathroom, and you said you did. You said you had everything. Did you check the bathroom or not?”

“I don’t know. No. Probably not. But it doesn’t matter ’cause you didn’t leave it in the bathroom, Linda. Do you know why I know you didn’t leave your bracelet in the bathroom? Because you left it on the beach yesterday. You and Regina Roeson had yourselves a bunch of sun and a bucketful of margaritas, and you got so relaxed you kind of forgot you had a daughter and dozed off. And then when you woke up and you realized you were going to be an hour late to pick her up from day camp—”

“I was not an hour late.”

“—you left in a panic. You forgot the suntan lotion, and you forgot your towel, and you forgot your bracelet, too, and now—”

“And I wasn’t drunk either, if that’s what you’re implying. I don’t drive our daughter drunk, Chris. That’s your specialty—”

“—and now you’re pulling your usual shit and making it someone else’s fault.”

The Brat was hardly aware she was moving, wandering into the dim front hall and toward her parents’ bedroom. The door was open about half a foot, revealing a slice of her parents’ bed and the suitcase lying on top of it. Clothes had been pulled out and scattered across the floor. The Brat knew that her mother had, in a spasm of strong feeling, started yanking things out and throwing them, looking for the lost bracelet: a golden hoop with a butterfly mounted upon it, made from glittering blue sapphires and ice-chip diamonds.

Her mother paced back and forth, so every few seconds she flicked into view, passing through the sliver that the Brat could see of the bedroom.

“This has nothing to do with yesterday. I told you I didn’t lose it at the beach. I didn’t. It was next to the sink this morning, right beside my earrings. If they don’t have it at the front desk, then one of the maids took it. That’s what they do, the way they supplement their incomes. They help themselves to whatever the summer people leave around.”

The Brat’s father was silent for a while, and then he said, “Jesus. What an ugly f*ckin’ person you are inside. And I had a kid with you.”

The Brat flinched. A prickling heat rose to the backs of her eyes, but she did not cry. Her teeth automatically went to her lip, sinking deep into it, producing a sharp twinge of pain that kept the tears at bay.

Her mother showed no such restraint and began to weep. She wandered into sight again, one hand pressed over her face, her shoulders hitching. The Brat didn’t want to be seen and retreated down the hallway.

She continued past her room, along the corridor, and out the front door. The thought of remaining indoors was suddenly intolerable. The air in the house was stale. The air conditioner had been off for a week. All the plants were dead and smelled it.

She didn’t know where she was going until she got there, although from the moment she heard her father dish out his worst—What an ugly f*ckin’ person you are inside—her destination was inevitable. She let herself through the side door of the garage and got her Raleigh.

Her Raleigh Tuff Burner had been her birthday gift in May and was also, quite simply, her favorite birthday gift of all time . . . then and forever. Even at thirty, if her own son asked her the nicest thing she had ever been given, she would think immediately of the Day-Glo blue Raleigh Tuff Burner with banana yellow rims and fat tires. It was her favorite thing she owned, better than her Magic 8 Ball, her KISS Colorforms set, even her ColecoVision.