Impossible (15 page)

CHAPTER 35

"Soledad?" Padraig Seeley stepped inside Soledad's office in the arrogant way he always did. "I want to talk to you about the Thanksgiving family program for the teen fathers." He closed the door behind him.

Soledad looked up from her computer and controlled her impatience. "I emailed you about that, Padraig. I don't have a lot of time right now. Actually, I was just working on a memo. I'll be working reduced hours for a while. Jacqueline is going to take over your programs."

Padraig sat down across from Soledad's desk and crossed his legs. "I'm disappointed. But I know how much pressure you're under at home." His beautiful voice dropped an octave. "I could help more than you realize. I have experience in administration. And I wouldn't at all mind coming to your home, say, once a week. That would make things so much easier for you."

His eyes were now fixed on Soledad's. And all at once she felt calmer, less harried. He was making sense, she thought fuzzily.

"I would so like to help you, Soledad," Padraig said. His voice was hypnotic.

"I do need help," Soledad found herself saying.

"Yes. If Lucinda were my daughter, I wouldn't be able to concentrate on work at all. I'd be so anxious about her and her pregnancy. And all the pressure she must be under. Isn't she back at school now? That must be hard for her. Senior year. All her friends around her, making plans for college and their futures, while her life has changed so much. I wonder if she's starting to feel isolated and alone. And probably a little scared. Is Lucinda feeling scared, Soledad?"

"Yes," said Soledad. "I think she is." Now she was feeling so comfortable, talking to Padraig. So warm, so reassured. There was no reason to be on guard with him. She could tell him anything. In fact, she ought to tell him everything … anything he wanted to know …

He smiled. "I thought so. Now, it's been a while since we've had a chance to talk about Lucinda. Is she showing?"

"A little, if you know how to look."

"I'll judge for myself, when I come over to your home and see her. Now, what's happening at school for her? Have you told her teachers, the principal, yet? The baby will be coming in February. They'll have to know."

"No, we haven't told them. Not officially. But Lucy has told her friends. They're being very supportive. Especially her friend Sarah. And Zach, of course. Though he's not at school with her anymore."

"Oh, yes. Zachary Greenfield. That college boy who was living with you this summer."

"Yes, that's Zach," said Soledad. "He and Lucy have always been like brother and sister. I think Lucy finds him a great comfort. I know that Leo and I do too. Zach's so smart and so solid."

Padraig frowned. "But Zachary has gone back to college, right?"

"Oh, no."

Padraig uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. "What do you mean?"

"Zach decided to take this semester off from college. He felt that he could be of use to us and to Lucy, so he's keeping his summer job into the fall and taking a couple of courses at U-Mass. He can transfer the credits to Williams later on."

Padraig sat straight up. "Just a minute. What exactly—"

There was a knock at the door, a loud one. It was immediately followed by the door opening and Jacqueline entering in a whirlwind. "Padraig? I thought I saw you go in here. I've got Tommy McClendon from the South Boston Teen Center on the line. If you could just finalize a time for you and me to meet with him, that would be great. Take the call at my desk."

Padraig said in his soothing voice, "No, Jacqueline, it would be better if I call him back after I talk with Soledad—"

Jacqueline gave Padraig a playful push. "That won't work. Tommy McClendon is almost impossible to get on the phone. You have to pin him down to a meeting right now." She laughed. "Do as I say, get up, there's a good boy. Soledad doesn't have any time for you right now anyway. She has another meeting."

"I do?" said Soledad vaguely.

"Case review. It starts in five minutes. You don't mind if I hang out with you for it? My office is like Grand Central Station today. Plus Padraig needs my phone to talk to Tommy." Jacqueline pushed Padraig again. Meanwhile, someone else looked in at the door and said, "Case review?"

"Yes, yes," said Jacqueline.

The fogginess began to recede from Soledad's mind. It was a virtual meeting that Jacqueline was talking about; she needed to log onto the meeting website on her computer. It was a good thing Jacqueline had come in to remind her. She had altogether too much to do today.

Padraig was still looking at Soledad. She shrugged at him. "Sorry, Padraig. Jacqueline's right, we have this meeting. Just go ahead and do what she says from now on."

"Yes," said Jacqueline. "Perfect." She sat down solidly in the chair Padraig had vacated. "Would you shut the door on your way out?"

CHAPTER 36

At seven a.m. on a Saturday at the beginning of October, when Lucy had been back at school for slightly over a month, Soledad knocked on her bedroom door and came in as soon as Lucy responded.

"I've got everything all set up for us in the dining room," Soledad said. "I've done so much experimenting with felting that I'm ready to scream. But I'm finally ready, so today's the day you're going to do it. Then we can check the seamless shirt off the list and move on to that piece of land thing. Between the salt water and the sea strand. Have you been thinking some more about how to solve that one? I know Zach and Leo have been working on it too."

"Yes," Lucy said. She sat up cautiously and swung her feet out of bed, the very movement reminding her, as always these days, of how rapidly her body was changing. It felt so different now even to shift physical positions. But at least she was no longer bothered by nausea. She had just learned it was wise to wait a minute or two in the morning between sitting up and standing. "I'm thinking about it."

She did not add:
And I'm going in circles.
She knew that Soledad was so excited by her promising seamless shirt research that she had not yet taken in the full illogical weirdness and difficulty of tasks two and three. Or two, three, and four, depending on how you counted.

Lucy had been sleepless for many nighttime hours, thinking the tasks over. Her mind would return to the same ruts even when she was so desperately tired it was almost unbelievable that she didn't simply keel over.

Find an acre of farm land located between the salt water and sea strand. The dictionary said the sea strand was the land at the edge of the water. Between the edge of the water and the water? Huh? Well, suppose Lucy could find an acre of land located next to the ocean on a peninsula. That would mean there was an edge of the sea on one side, and salt water on the other. Would that work? It seemed to fit the task on a literal level.

But was it cheating? Because you might say that the entire continent of North America was between the salt water and the sea strand, if you defined it that way. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't cheating. Maybe it was being clever. Was clever allowed?

Okay. Suppose she could locate a little seaside peninsula. Wasn't waterfront property very expensive? Lucy only had her personal college savings. She could borrow money from Soledad and Leo, of course, but was that, again, cheating? If so, it was a different kind of cheating from being clever about wording and definitions. It would sort of be like letting things be done for her. By someone else.

The ballad strongly implied that she was supposed to do everything herself. Even Soledad thought that, or she'd have already gone and made the seamless shirt on Lucy's behalf. Maybe, Lucy thought, she wasn't even supposed to have help in the form of advice. Maybe she was already doomed for that reason?

No. There was nothing in the ballad about that.

Supposing she could just find the seaside peninsula acre. Next, she would have to plow the land using a goat's horn. She'd locate a goat's horn someplace. That really ought to be possible, even if she had to buy a whole live goat and then, well, operate. Ugh. She made a mental note to search eBay first.

Lucy understood plowing, in principal. She could drag the horn along the ground, using the point to turn up the earth. It sounded quite possible, if potentially physically taxing.

But then came the sowing of the earth using one grain of corn. Sowing meant seeding. Would you grind up the tiny piece of corn into very fine bits? But then it wouldn't seed properly, right? Would it count if what you seeded could never grow? Or would the sowing alone satisfy the task in a literal way—again, being clever?

Zach wanted to sit down with her and go over every possibility, every nuance. Find the land. Find the goat. Whatever. And she did plan to talk with him about it. She couldn't go on avoiding Zach. All right, so she didn't have a clue what to say to him, or how to look at him, or how to respond to the way he now looked at her. But she had to get over it. And if she went to him and they talked, not about love, but about plowing and sowing. …

Except, if you wanted to be clever about plowing and sowing, not to mention the goat's horn, there was a bawdy interpretation that could mean—

Lucy felt herself blush. Would Zach have thought of this? Would her parents? Or was it just her?

She had talked to her parents about tasks two and three. Soledad said things like "do some more Googling" and "modern technology" and "once we talk to a couple of farmers." And Leo, the ballad expert, felt strongly that being "clever" was certainly not cheating. He had even put a query out to a rabbi friend about obtaining a shofar, a kind of musical instrument that was made out of a ram's horn and used on Yom Kippur. "Isn't a ram just a male goat?" he'd asked.

"No," Soledad said. "I can't believe you think that! A ram is a sheep. A goat is a goat."

"The males are billy goats," Lucy agreed.

Leo grimaced. "I might ask the rabbi anyway. Maybe a Jewish religious supply shop would have goats' horns too. Or know how to get them."

"Why would they? It's not the right thing to make a shofar with," Soledad said.

"It's worth asking," Leo said stubbornly.

This conversation had not exactly inspired Lucy with confidence on the goat horn issue. On the other hand, Soledad's certainty about the seamless shirt was reassuring.

"There's just no way that my plan can fail," Soledad was saying now, as she leaned against Lucy's bureau. "After all, that Elfin Knight wouldn't have known about washing machines!"

"Or duct tape." Actually, the duct tape was just incidental, used for making the dressmaker's dummy on which the actual seamless shirt, made of felt, would be formed. But Lucy liked saying the words
duct tape
. They were so reassuringly mundane.

"We can skip the duct tape part," said Soledad. "I've figured out another way."

"Oh." Lucy was somehow disappointed.

She began to get up, only to find Pierre lying on the floor in her way. She pressed one toe lightly to his side, and he shuffled over obligingly so that she had just enough floor space in which to stand. She felt Soledad's eyes on her, checking the small bulge at her stomach beneath the pajama top. She turned away to fumble into her bathrobe. "Okay, Mom, I just need fifteen minutes to shower and get dressed."

Soledad nodded. "Sure. But I want to get the whole shirt shaped by afternoon and in the washing machine as soon as possible afterward, so the fibers can set. Also, Padraig Seeley from work is coming by in the afternoon. He insisted he needs to talk to me personally."

"I can never tell if you like that guy or not," Lucy said idly.

Soledad smiled brightly. "I do, very much. But he's a huge time sink. Every time I turn around, he wants a meeting. And then suddenly two hours have disappeared on me, and I didn't get done whatever else it was that I planned to do, and I can't even remember much of what Padraig and I talked about. This happens at least once a week." Soledad sighed. "I suppose it doesn't hurt that he looks how he looks, though. Maybe I get lost in staring at him and that's where all the time goes."

Lucy nodded, although she could hardly remember what Padraig looked like. He was a peripheral element from that whole horrible prom night.

Soledad followed Lucy down the hall to the bathroom, and kept talking through the door at her, until Lucy turned on the shower.

The shower was a safe place to cry in. Nobody could hear, nobody could see, and there would be no signs afterward on her face. Lucy had been using the shower for that purpose fairly often. This morning, though, she found that she didn't need to. She was caught up in Soledad's optimism. She was eager to work on the seamless shirt.

Even if in the end all The Weird Stuff (which was what Zach called it) melted away and turned out to be nonsense—and despite the genealogical evidence Zach had found, despite the fear in her that simply would not go away, despite the way she went over and over the tasks in her mind, Lucy still sometimes tried to believe this—it still couldn't hurt anything or anyone for her to make the shirt.

And to figure out the other two puzzle pieces, if she could.

Or maybe, Lucy thought, as she immersed her face in the shower spray, maybe the insanity comes from simply trying to solve the puzzle.

CHAPTER 37

The dining room had been transformed into a work room, with the table shoved against the wall, half the chairs taken away, a stool from the kitchen brought in, and extra floor lamps toted in from other rooms to give more light. Lucy came in to find the table heaped with loose carded wool of various colors and thicknesses, several rolls of silver duct tape, two or three men's dress shirts pilfered from Leo's closet, a large pair of dressmaker's scissors and a few X-Acto knives, and also many small, flat pieces of homemade felt that Soledad had created from the sample wool during her experimental phase. There was also a large cardboard box filled with very fine, caramel-colored carded lambs' wool, which Soledad had bought for two dollars an ounce online. The wool had arrived by Federal Express two days ago. Lucy had known it was intended for the seamless shirt, and she had had a vague impression of beauty and softness when Soledad pulled one of the balls of wool from the box. The thought of working with it had, for some reason, scared her.

But the life-size plastic torso of a male mannequin now dominated the work room. Blinking at it, Lucy decided that she needed to adjust her idea of what was and wasn't creepy. The mannequin was bronze and had molded muscles. It was mounted on a rickety wooden end table that normally lived in the basement. It was headless and legless, but had arms, and on those arms, it also had hands with meticulously delineated fingers and fingernails. Somebody had put pale pink polish on the fingernails.

"Ick," Lucy said.

"My original idea was that you'd make a dummy using duct tape, and stuff it with cotton batting," Soledad said. "So I got all the duct tape and the batting. But now I've borrowed this mannequin from the thrift store on Moody Street. I can only have it for today, but that's long enough. I'm relieved, because making the duct tape dummy would have been a big job all by itself. And the shirt has to, you know, be shaped like a shirt, which means it has to be fitted on some kind of mannequin or dummy. I told you that already, right?"

"You did," Lucy said. "But it's okay to tell me again."

As she spoke, Zach came in, holding a glass of milk. He stood next to Lucy and also looked at the mannequin.

"Shut up," Lucy said without turning.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it."

"It's just that the nail polish is so special."

"That's my true love you're talking about," Lucy said. "I'm going to make him a seamless shirt. Without any seam or needlework."

"I know," said Zach.

Something in his voice. Lucy turned her head and looked at him. She didn't mean to, she didn't intend to, she just did it.

Zach had pulled on a pair of jeans before coming downstairs, but was wearing nothing else. Lucy recognized suddenly that the male mannequin torso's molded muscles were a preposterous imitation of the real thing. The real thing was smooth and corded and alive and warm under skin. The real thing moved in this incredible, connected way as Zach lifted the milk glass to his mouth and drank half of it. First the muscles in his neck stretched and shifted as he swallowed, and then the muscle movement flowed across his shoulders, and then there was some kind of bulging and flexing thing happening with his biceps and forearms that had to do with the lifting and lowering of the milk glass.

A glass of milk, she thought hazily. That's all he's doing. Drinking a glass of milk. No big deal. No big deal …

She swallowed.

"You want me to get you some milk too?" said Zach. Was she imagining a land of mockery in his voice? Mockery, mixed with something else—if she dared look at his face, in his eyes, she'd know what it was, but she couldn't. Not right now.

She couldn't look away from his body.

And she couldn't answer, though she tried. She tried to say something. Something light. A joke. Anything. But she couldn't form a thought, much less get one out. And she still could not look away from Zach's body. His shoulders, arms, chest, stomach … if you touched him, you would be able to trace how everything moved … all of him, so
connected
… under the skin …

Had Zach moved just the tiniest bit closer to her, or had she moved closer to him?

Lucy lurched away from Zach. She wrenched around to face Soledad, who had started to drag the end table and the mannequin into a different position on the floor.

She managed to speak. "Mom?"

"What?"

"I can't form the shirt on top of that—that mannequin thing."

"But—"

"It feels wrong," Lucy blurted. She was hardly aware of what she was saying or why. She was revolted by the mannequin. She would not touch it. She would not make a shirt for it.

"It's gross," Zach agreed. He had come up behind her again. Lucy imagined she could feel heat coming off his bare chest and pushing gently against her back. She could have stepped forward again, away from him, but she didn't.

"I liked what you thought of before," Zach was saying to Soledad. "About making a duct tape dummy using a human model, and then fitting the shirt on the dummy. I mean, here I am. A human model. So what if it takes longer? I have nothing but time. Lucy can just make a duct tape dummy using me."

"Lucy?" said Soledad doubtfully. "It'll take longer, but if Zach is willing?"

"Okay," Lucy said. "Just get that thing out of here."

"I'll put it in your car, Soledad," Zach offered.

"All right. And then put on a T-shirt, one you don't mind losing, because it's going to be ruined by duct tape. Lucy, you go get some breakfast."

After eating toast, scrambled eggs, and an orange, Lucy felt steadier, and also inexplicably happy. She even found herself humming the ballad as she did her breakfast dishes. Worried and anxious though she was, a feeling of well-being would occasionally come over her, a feeling completely at odds with the fear and anxiety she otherwise felt. This was suddenly one of those times.

She thought the feeling came from the baby. Or her hormones. Or both.

At twenty weeks, the baby was about halfway there, and Lucy had gained nine pounds. Growth was going to accelerate at this point, and Lucy had been told she could expect to gain a pound a week. Also, her doctor had readily confirmed that she was carrying a girl—news that, although expected, had ratcheted up the anxiety level for all of them.

But, whenever she was strongly aware of the baby, as she was at this moment, Lucy's own anxiety would abate. She would drift off into thinking about baby names or something like that. She wondered: Would there come a time when it would be impossible not to think of the baby constantly? Would she then be floating in a sea of nonstop soporific happiness?

Recently, Lucy had begun talking to the baby in her mind. She felt aware of her as a distinct presence. For example, right now, she felt as if the baby was awake, alert, and interested. The baby had liked breakfast, Lucy thought, and was looking forward now to a little activity and excitement.

We'll fight together, you and me, how about that? Lucy thought to the baby.

She imagined the baby punching one tiny fist upward.

So, what do you think of Zach Greenfield? Lucy asked the baby. He's not some skinny boy anymore. It's a good thing Mom's making him put on a T-shirt. Who'd have thought it? I mean, Zach Greenfield.

She imagined the baby giggled. She imagined the baby was glad, just as Lucy was glad, that they were not after all going to make a seamless shirt using that ugly mannequin. That they were going use Zach instead. Zach, who thought he was in love with Lucy. Or—who maybe really was in love with Lucy.

The thought made Lucy blush. For no reason, she found herself going upstairs to spray on a little perfume. Then she went back down to the dining room where she discovered, to her surprise, that Soledad was leaving.

"I don't think I should be here while you make the shirt," Soledad said. "I'd be too tempted to help or give advice. That might ruin everything. So I'm off to run errands and I'll leave you alone with Zach to work. Okay, Lucy?"

"Okay," said Lucy.