Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

'He hasn't spent the night here all week,' she cried, then went quiet. She said I could leave a message at Cleveland's. 'If anyone picks up the phone,' she added.

I tried to think. 'How you hanging?' I asked eventually.

'Shitty.'

That required no explanation. I told her I needed to see her, to say goodbye if nothing else, and we agreed to meet on Polk Street, where Lucy had an appointment that afternoon. After work, I crawled through the Saturday traffic, in an uneven mood. I had just made my farewells at After Dark. My days as a sci-fi columnist – the only line of work I'd ever felt any pride in – were now at an end. I'd hugged Harley Minx. He gave me a guidebook to Vancouver. Then I'd gone out the swinging back doors, with their rubber bumpers to protect against the damage done by the hand trucks, and left one more portion of my life behind me, knowing it was nothing I'd have chosen to do.

Polk Street was the usual florid scene. Hell's Angels, drag queens in cheap dresses, and leather cowpokes all paraded on the avenue, while shoppers ran between the cafes and exotics stores. A white-haired woman in a tight sweater stood on a comer with a pure-white cockatoo on her shoulder.

At the sight of Lucy, I brought the car to a squealing halt. She stood on the corner, looking dazedly into the sun, searching for me perhaps. Blood was streaming down her cheeks.

I leaned out the window, waving and yelling, and finally drew to the curb. By the time I'd pushed her through the passenger door, horns were sounding in a rough chorus behind me in the traffic. In my sideview, I saw a cop approaching and I jerked the Bug into the street, strangely frightened by the thought of an encounter with the police.

'Jesus,' I said, 'Jesus. What's going down? What happened to you?' I asked if she wanted to go to the hospital. She had popped her contacts into her open palms and sat with her head thrown back.

‘I do it all the time,' she said. ‘I forget I have my lenses in. I cry and then I rub my eyes and it cuts something. Just on the surface of the eyeball. I'll be all right. Oh God,' she said and began to cry again. The tears, now a milder pink, streaked her face. I drove around and finally parked up on Russian Hill.

She had seen a herbalist, someone she had heard about, a hippie with a tiny third-story shop. 'For what?'

She faltered. 'My skin.' Lucy was freckled but her complexion was otherwise unblemished.

'Your skin? What do you have, like a rash?'

She rolled her eyes at my dullness. One of her contacts was in her mouth, for cleaning, and she had to spit it out before she could speak.

'Two weeks ago Hobie got rid of the dog? He took it out to Campus Boul and tied it to a parking sign. He said he wasn't going to live with a big white animal.' She peered, waiting for me to understand. 'I heard they have something you chew? You know? For maybe a month? It like works gradually. It makes your skin darker. It like dyes you? It's pigment or something. I don't know. Anyway, the guy didn't have it. He said he'd heard of it, but he didn't have it and wasn't sure where I could get it. And I just came out of there, I had this feeling like "Oh, man, it's never going to work.'' I mean, my whole life is falling apart, Seth. What am I going to do?'

My reaction, of course, was that it was crazy. She had tiny prom-queen features – she'd look like a brown white-person, like someone who'd overdone it with Man-Tan. But she was obviously beyond the point of practicality. That Lucy's love, her need for Hobie, was that large – it touched me. It was such a dispiriting contrast to the way Sonny had responded to me.

I asked again about Hobie. She had no idea where he'd gone. She thought he'd been with Cleveland, but she'd called the police station and he hadn't been arrested. He had been appearing at home sporadically for weeks now, seemingly arriving only in order to tell her that he couldn't keep living with a white girl. The implication, which Lucy refused to acknowledge, was that he was coming back to find out if she'd left.

'What's he doing? Where do you think he is?' I asked.

‘I don't know. He still goes to school, but after that?'

'What about this bomb? At the ARC? Did he have anything to do with that?'

She turned quickly to the window. She said nothing at first.

'You know about that stuff, right?' she asked. 'That he bought?'

'Right.' The battery acid and sandbags. I knew about that stuff.

'I think he kind of figured out what it was for. Eventually. I mean, nobody told him. He just sort of added things up. I don't know, Seth. He didn't say much.'

'But he didn't plant the bomb, did he? He didn't help plan?'

'Hobie? No. God, no. He couldn't have, could he?'

I reconsidered June's warning. Perhaps she merely meant that if the dominoes fell, Hobie would be in trouble. One arrest would lead to another. I had some powerful vision of Hobie, but it left me as bitter as I was concerned. In the interval, Lucy had started crying once more.

'God, Seth,' she said again, 'what am I going to do?'

Lucy was raised in what used to be called a 'broken home.' Her parents had divorced when she was three. Her father, a well-known lawyer, sent lots of money but appeared infrequently. Her mother was a sort of airy socialite: a martini in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and usually a man nearby to light it. Lucy had come of age in an atmosphere of unfaltering politeness, which as a child left her baffled about whether the air of restraint she always sensed was refinement or indifference. As a teen, she'd tried to find out. She'd run away to a macrobiotic commune in Vermont when she was sixteen. Then, when she was supposed to have been back on track, she took up with Hobie. Lucy told her mother all about her boyfriend, except that he was black, news which my mother-in-law absorbed at once when she came home early one evening during a holiday break and found them fucking away in one of the living-room wing chairs, Lucy's slender freckled legs wrapped around Hobie's medium-brown behind.

In college, as a freshman, Lucy depended on Hobie helplessly. He picked her courses, approved her dresses, gave her books to read. And he relished her slavish attentions. Then every two or three months he would do her wrong. Some girl would take an interest and Hobie would disappear to her dorm room, often for days. Lucy would hang out with me, go to coffee, and beat me at two-handed bridge with an ease I found baffling, since I had not yet recognized the brainpower obscured behind her self-doubts. For the most part, however, she would simply pine incredibly until Hobie returned. There was even one occasion when she stood outside the dormitory where Hobie and the new girl had repaired and moaned for him, a gesture which Hobie was frank enough to admit he had found quite stimulating. Somehow Lucy never seemed to give a thought to saying enough was enough. She groaned even now at the thought of losing him.

'Look, my place will be empty in a few days. Why don't you move in there?'

'God,' she said, 'God, I don't want to be alone, Seth.' The one word, 'alone,' emerged in a tone I sometimes heard in the singing in temple during the High Holidays. An age-old lament, a permanent misery. I held her.

'Then move in today. You'll have company until Monday. That's my induction date. I have to take off for the great North then.' The recollection of June, their plan, the kidnapping recurred. A percussive feeling radiated through me as it had at many moments since the bombing of the ARC. I felt unmoored. The Eddgars' power seemed dominating, because they alone pointed unhesitatingly in a known direction.

'Maybe I'll come, too,' Lucy said. 'To Canada?'

'Sure,' I said. There was nothing else to say, but she took note of my tone, dead of enthusiasm. She stared desolately out the window, trying not to cry. Suddenly, I took hold of Lucy and spoke to her largely as I had spoken to myself since the morning.