John Irving - Until I Find You

“Call me from Halifax if you get in trouble, Jack.”

“I won’t get in any trouble,” he told her.

Dr. García took a good look at the sky-blue, businesslike letterhead on Michele’s stationery before handing the letter back to him. “Call me from Cambridge, Massachusetts, then,” she said. “I can almost guarantee you, Jack—you’re going to get in trouble there.”

At the time, in the chronological-order part of his life story as told to Dr. García, he was up to what Miss Wurtz called “the second time in Amsterdam.” Understandably, he was in no hurry to relate that part of his life story to the doctor. Jack thought that a little trip to Halifax, with a stopover in Boston on the way back, might do him a world of good.

When he came out into the waiting room, Jack was distracted by a woman—one of the young mothers who was a regular patient of Dr. García’s. She commenced to scream the second she saw him. (Jack hated it when that happened.)

The receptionist quickly led him to the Montana Avenue exit. Jack saw that another young mother, or the screaming woman’s friend or nanny, was trying to comfort the screamer, whose wailing had frightened the children; some of the kids were crying.

He got into his Audi and tucked Michele Maher’s letter under the sun visor on the driver’s side. He was approaching the intersection of Montana Avenue and Fourth Street when Lucy’s face appeared in his rearview mirror. Jack almost had an accident when she said, “I’m not well enough behaved to eat in a grown-up restaurant.”

He still didn’t get it. Jack knew only that he’d last seen her in Dr. García’s waiting room, but he didn’t know who she was. (The nanny with groupie potential, as he’d thought of her.)

“I usually sleep on the floor, if I think anyone can see me sleeping on the backseat,” the strange girl said. “I can’t believe you keep buying Audis, and they’re always silver !”

“Lucy?” Jack said.

“It took you long enough,” she told him, “but I didn’t have any tits when you met me. I guess it’s understandable that you didn’t recognize me.”

An unfortunate coincidence, he realized. Lucy wasn’t anyone’s nanny; like Jack, she was one of Dr. García’s patients. (One of the less stable ones, he would soon discover.)

It was hard to see what faint resemblance she still bore to the worried but courageous little four-year-old Jack had picked up in his arms at Stan’s. Some of her courage had remained, or it had hardened into something else. Now in her late teens, Lucy wasn’t worried about anything—not anymore.

She had dead-calm, unblinking eyes—suggesting the steely recklessness of a car thief. If you dared her to do it—or bet her five bucks that she couldn’t—she would drive foot-to-the-floor through every red light on Wilshire Boulevard, all the way from Santa Monica into Beverly Hills. Unless she got broadsided in Brentwood, or shot by a cop in Westwood Village, there’d be no stopping her—her bare left arm would be lolling out the window, giving everyone the finger the whole way.

Jack turned right on Ocean Avenue and pulled the Audi to the curb. “I think you better get out of the car, Lucy,” he said.

“I’ll take off all my clothes before you can get me out of the backseat,” the girl told him.

Jack held the steering wheel in both hands, looking at Lucy in his rearview mirror. She was wearing a pink tank top—barely more than a sports bra—and black Puma running shorts, like a jogger. Jack knew she could take off everything she was wearing in the time it would take him to get out of the driver’s seat and open the back door.

“What do you want, Lucy?” he asked her.

“Let’s go to your house,” she said. “I know where you live, and I got a helluva story to tell you.”

“You know where I live?” he asked the girl.

“My mom and I drive by your house all the time,” she told him. “But we never see you. I guess you’re not there much or something.”

“Let’s just talk in the car,” Jack suggested.

“It’s kind of a long story,” the girl explained. In the rearview mirror, he could see that she was wriggling her running shorts down over her hips. Her thong was pink; it didn’t look as if it would be comfortable to run in.

“Please pull your shorts up,” he said. “We’ll go to my house.”

She was wearing dirty running shoes with those short socks that all the kids seemed to like—the kind that didn’t even cover your ankles. She walked all over Jack’s house on the balls of her feet, as if she were imitating Mr. Ramsey—or else she was too restless to sit down. Jack followed her around like a dog; it was as if they were in Lucy’s house and she was in charge.

“When you head-butted my dad, that was a life-changing moment,” Lucy told him. “That was when my mom decided she’d had enough of him. I remember she screamed at him all the way home. They would’ve been divorced before breakfast the next morning, if my mom could’ve arranged it.”

“In my experience, you don’t remember things with much accuracy when you’re four years old,” he cautioned her.

“You were my mother’s fucking hero, ” Lucy said. “You think I wouldn’t remember that? When you got famous, we went to all your movies and my mom said, ‘There’s the guy who got me out of my miserable marriage.’ Of course my dad hated you. When they were divorced, I had to listen to him talk about you, too. ‘If I ever run into Jack Burns, he won’t know what hit him!’ my dad was always shouting.”

“Your dad didn’t handle himself too well the first time,” Jack pointed out to her.

“Let me tell you—if my mom ever ran into you, she’d fuck your brains out and then tell my dad all about it,” Lucy said. “All my life, you’ve been such a big fucking deal in my family.”

“I was just appalled that your mom and dad would leave a four-year-old in the back of their car—in Venice, ” he said.

Lucy was fingering the tattoo magnets Alice had given Jack for his fridge. Japanese flash —irezumi, Henk Schiffmacher had called them. There were half a dozen magnets the size of quarters. Jack had used them to hold the four photographs of his mom’s naked torso against the refrigerator door—four slightly different views of her Until I find you tattoo, which he saw Lucy looking at very closely.

But Lucy wouldn’t settle down. She went off to have a look at the stuff on Jack’s desk. The flat glass paperweight, which slightly magnified the photo of Emma naked at seventeen, was an eye-catcher. (He’d always thought that one day he would regret keeping one of those photographs, which Claudia had asked him to get rid of.)

“I gotta use your bathroom,” Lucy said. There were two other bathrooms in the house, but she waltzed right through Jack’s bedroom and went into his bathroom and closed the door.

Jack had converted Emma’s former bedroom into a small gym—two kinds of stationary bikes, a treadmill, an ab machine, some benches, and a lot of free weights. There were no mirrors on the walls—just some of his favorite movie posters, including a couple from films he’d been in. There was a mat on the floor for stretching and rolling around—a long rectangle, about a third of a regulation-size wrestling mat.

Jack sat down on the mat and hugged his knees to his chest, wondering what he should do about Lucy. He heard the toilet flush and the water running in the sink; he heard the girl come out of the bathroom and pick up the telephone on the night table next to his bed. Jack could tell by her automatic tone of voice that she was talking to an answering machine.

“Hi, Mom—it’s me,” he heard Lucy say. “I’m in Jack Burns’s house, I’m naked, I’m in his bed. Isn’t this what you always wanted? Sorry I beat you to it, but what’s it matter? The thought of you or me with Jack Burns is gonna drive Dad crazy. Love ya!”