Dear fellow writers: This adds to the “Lifeboat” segment I submitted last time, which now seems to be shaping up to be a novel rather than even a long story. This submission overlaps with the previous one. In response to your very helpful comments, I added a prologue that frames the story and (hopefully) gives the reader a better sense of the narrator, Chris, and her age/gender, time period, and voice. Chapter 1 has been revised, especially toward the beginning, and now takes us up to just before she and her mother attend their first Lifeboat meeting. Look forward to your comments and suggestions.

Prologue

February 1973

Val says writing a book is easy. “You just fill up one page, then you do another and another and

another until you’re done.”

“How do you know when you’re done?” I ask her.

“When it says ‘The End.’”

“I think that’s only for fairy tales,” I say.

“Then maybe you should write a fairy tale, Chris.” She uncrosses and recrosses her legs,

her way of saying that our conversation is over, and goes back to her magazine. Only now do I

notice that she’s reading a tattered copy of Highlights, which is for kids half our age.

We’re sitting opposite each other on our beds at Haven House, home for wayward girls.

How we landed here is the story I want to tell, need to tell. Maybe, if I put it all down in words,

you (whoever you are) can help me make sense of it. I’ve never written a book before (I’m only

fifteen and a half), and Val has barely even read one that wasn’t the Bible or someone’s feverish

interpretation of it—and those we were forced to read—but if anyone is going to write this story,

it’s going to have to be me.

UPDIKE / Lifeboat

Everything here is a different shade of white—the walls, the sheets, the blankets, the

furniture, the sliver of sky in the window that doesn’t open—and everyone is waiting for

something else to happen. Our roommates, Shannon and Alyssa, who are downstairs with their

social worker right now, are waiting for their mother to get out of the hospital. She was put there

by their father, who isn’t allowed to visit them or even know where they are. I’m waiting for my

dad—a man I haven’t seen in more than two years—to arrive and take me away. He’s driving all

the way out from Pennsylvania, so it could take days. And when he gets here, we’re going right

back so I can live with him in the same house that Mom and I left him in when we took to the

road.

Val won’t be coming back with us. Unlike Shannon and Alyssa, we’re not sisters, and

even though we’ve spent almost every hour of every day together for a couple of years now, that

doesn’t seem to count for anything in family court. There ought to be a different kind of court for

people like us. Or maybe this one should really live up to its name, as a place where we could

take our families to court for having failed us. What would my family’s sentence be? Could it be

any worse than what we’ve already put ourselves through? Val has a sister, a real one, but we

haven’t seen Rennie in over a month. Maybe she’ll land here one of these days. Then at least

they can have each other.

Sitting here in this sterile room, locked away from the world, I wait to be plucked out of

this story and dropped into another one. In that other story, Dad and I will be the main

characters, and Mom will be the one we left behind. But when I think about what that life looks

like, all I can see is the past and the little girl I was and can never be again. Also, there are no

heroes in this story, so I guess it can’t be a fairy tale.

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I can’t stand this waiting. It feels like everything is coming to an end—for real this time,

not like that other End that was promised but never came. The one that was going to change all

the rules so that we came out on top, the chosen few. The one where we were going to live

forever in a perfect world, while the others rotted in their graves. The one that got us on board

the Lifeboat and sent us on this mad journey only to land here, on the other side of the continent.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Everything is coming to an end, and I’m pissed that Val is acting as if nothing is

happening. It’s her way of coping, I know, to pretend it’s all going to be fine, is already fine, but

I need more from her right now. I need her to believe (like I do) that there was a reason. I need

her to say (because I can’t) that everything that happened was just to bring the two of us

together. I need to know that this matters, even if it’s about to be taken away from us. Especially

because it’s about to be taken away from us.

Seeing her there on the bed with her magazine in front of her, I think about the very first

time we met, back at Green Pond. Her mother, June, was picking me and my mom up to take us

to our first Lifeboat meeting, and there was Val sprawled on the backseat with a copy of Vogue

spread out on her lap. She wore that blank look that kids adopt when they’re afraid of something

or someone new, as we sat there slyly sizing each other up, neither willing to admit to any

curiosity. Even then, I had a feeling that this odd girl with the green cat-eyes and long cinnamon

hair could be my first real friend, if only she’d let me in. If only I knew how to let her in.

Meanwhile, our moms sat up front, plotting the course that would end here, with both of them in

jail and Val and I parked in this place for people who don’t belong anywhere at all.

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Someday soon I’m going to be the driver of my own life and go where I please. You

can’t rely on other people to get you there, or even take you in the right direction. You can’t rely

on other people, but you can’t do it alone either. This is something I am still working out.

“Val,” I say. She looks up from her magazine and gives me a little smile, and I can’t be

mad at her, not really. I have every right to be angry, but not at her. It’s going to be so much

worse for her. At least I know where I’m going, but she’ll probably end up with a family of

strangers—or worse, in a place like this—until she turns eighteen. Two and a half years—as long

as we’ve been on the run together. She’s doing her best, like I am, to cope. It’s just that she’s

learned to keep her best buried deep inside, while mine is right out in the open, hanging in the air

between us, a fragile thread waiting to be broken. At least that’s how it feels at the moment.

“Val,” I repeat. She tilts her head to the side, waits for me to speak. I take a deep breath,

and the question slithers up from my belly and crawls out to the end of my tongue, where it

perches, afraid to go any further. Afraid to enter the world, which has a way of beating

everything hopeful and beautiful down.

And then, without a word, Val gets up, crosses the room, and answers it for me.

The sisters return from their visit with the social worker, and we go back to being four girls

instead of two. When they enter the room, Val is sitting on the bed with her arm around me, my

head propped against her shoulder. If the sisters notice any change in us, they don’t let on.

Shannon glances in our direction, then quickly shepherds her sister to the bunk beds against the

far wall, their end of the room. Being the older of the two, and all of twelve, Shannon has

decided that she needs to play mother to nine-year-old Alyssa, and that part her job is to protect

them both from everyone, including us. Shannon gives her sister a nudge up the ladder to the top

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bunk, then takes her place below. I wonder what they talk about with the social worker, if they

say anything at all. The girls stick together and have been tight-lipped about their situation. I

guess that’s how they managed to survive at home, by tiptoeing around everything all the time.

I’d like to help them, but they don’t seem to want me to. Besides, I have plenty of problems of

my own. Val and I haven’t exactly been cooperative with the cops and the social workers, either.

Val kisses me on the cheek and then climbs off my bed and onto hers, where she flops

down and stares at the ceiling, her hands tucked behind her head. She seems happier now. I’m

still not sure how I feel—better in some ways, worse in others. It’s like we’ve just stepped

through a door only to discover that the next room has no floor.

The Lifeboat folks would say we’ve already fallen, but I don’t put much store in what

they have to say. They’ve been wrong about everything else, so why not this?

I pick up the notebook I stole from a Walgreen’s in Sioux City and have been carrying

around ever since. I’ve been saving it for the right time, and I guess now is as good a time as any.

I’ve decided to take Val’s advice, which seems good, if incomplete. I will fill up this

page, and then another and another and another, until “the End,” whatever it might be.

With my stubby little pencil I write:

Once upon a time there were two girls who got lost and, in getting lost together,

found each other.

I look at the line on the page, read it again, and already it feels like a lie. Or not a lie,

exactly, just too simple to be the truth. I don’t trust simple truths, not anymore. I will have to dig

deeper, try harder. It’s so important to start out the right way, but you can’t know if it’s the right

way until you get where you’re going. And you can’t know where you’re going until you start.

This is something I am still working out.

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1

August 1969

It was Val’s mother June who got to us first. She had driven the quarter mile down the dirt lane

to knock at the front door of our rented farmhouse. I opened it to find a plump woman in a light

blue long-sleeved blouse and a beige skirt that covered her knees. It was a brutally hot August

afternoon, and sweat stains bloomed beneath both of her arms. She clutched a big black book to

her chest, and beside her on the step sat a large canvas bag. I figured she must be selling

something, but I had no idea what it might be.

“Hello,” she said, beaming. “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

I conceded that maybe it was, though I hadn’t exactly made up my mind yet. I was, at

that time, a precociously obnoxious twelve-year-old girl who looked about nine. This

combination seemed to put off people of all ages.

“I’m out here talking to your neighbors today about the state of the world,” she

continued. It seemed an odd thing to say, especially to a kid.

“Which neighbors?” I asked. The closest family was the McGoldricks, whose farm was a

good half-mile away.

“Oh, all of them,” she said. “Is one of your parents home?” She peered around me, trying

to see if there might be someone else there that she’d have better luck with.

“Yes,” I said.

“And . . . might I speak with them?”

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By this time Mom was clomping down the stairs to the front hallway. “Who is it,

Chrissy?” she called.

“Some lady,” I said. “She’s here about the world.”

“The what?”

“Good afternoon,” the woman called over my shoulder, loud enough for Mom to hear.

“My name is June, and I’m talking to your neighbors about what the future holds in store for

your family.”

Mom nudged me aside. “Thanks, honey. I’ve got this.”

If my doorstep manners left something to be desired, it was also because visitors were

rare, and strangers even rarer, out where we lived. We got milk delivered by truck every

morning, and mail in the afternoon. Once in a while someone got lost and ended up turning down

our lane, which dead-ended into a cornfield. Other than that, we had rarely seen anyone all

summer long. In other words, I didn’t have a whole lot of practice with meeting and greeting.

I lingered in the hallway, listening as June delivered her rehearsed-sounding speech. “Do

you ever wonder why a righteous God would allow so much wickedness to exist?” she began.

Not waiting for an answer, she rattled off a list of what she called “tribulations”: wars, famines,

earthquakes, and something that sounded like “pustulance.” The world was bad and getting

worse. She said all of this with a pleasant smile.

I kept waiting for Mom to push back on this parade of horrors, but she just nodded her

head. If the woman had asked me, I probably would have said that the world was pretty good, or

at least good enough. In any case, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that things ought to be

any way other than what they were. Did we really need to worry about earthquakes in Green

Pond, Pennsylvania?

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Did we know, June continued, that all of this had been foretold, thousands of years ago?

She began flipping through the big black book, which turned out to be a leather-bound Bible. She

had different colors of paper clips everywhere to mark the pages she wanted to share. June read a

passage here and a passage there, stringing them together into an argument whose leaps I

couldn’t follow, but whose drift was that we were doomed. What did we think about that?

Mom responded by talking about the volunteer work she’d done back when we lived in

the city. She’d worked at a homeless shelter. She’d taught English to refugees. She’d collected

for hunger drives. This was all news to me—it must have been before I was born—but why was

she even bringing it up? “You have to try to fix the things you can,” she said, “leave the world a

better place than you found it.” This didn’t sound like my mom, who seemed to show very little

interest in the world beyond our little corner of it, and I remember the unsettling feeling that

maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did.

And then June asked her: “If you’re on a sinking ship, do you keep bailing or do you get

in a lifeboat?”

Later, Mom would say that this was the question that changed everything and altered the

course of our lives forever. At the time, she had no answer, so she just invited June in. I followed

them into the kitchen, where she poured two glasses of iced tea from the pitcher in the fridge and

handed one to our visitor. Then they settled in the living room, Mom on the sofa and June in the

chair where Dad usually sat when he watched TV at night. I stood awkwardly in the doorway.

“Chris, don’t you have something else to do?” asked Mom.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Why don’t you go outside for a while? Get some sun?”

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Sulking, I slipped out into the shimmering heat and walked up the lane, kicking at rocks

with my Chuck Taylors as I went. I stopped at the mulberry tree that grew alongside the fence

and picked berries from the branches I could reach while standing on the first rail. They were

bitter and full of seeds but I ate them anyway, staining my fingers purple. A chorus of cicadas

rose and fell in the cornfield beyond the fence. I looked back toward our house and saw the slate

roof and pointed attic window jutting out over the trees. I imagined I saw another girl pressed

against the panes, staring back at me, but I knew it was just a stack of boxes we never got around

to unpacking in the seven years since we’d come here.

June’s car was parked half in the lane and half in the yard, and on the way back I peered

inside. The passenger seat was piled high with books and papers, and a blue silk jacket hung

from a little hook in the back. A naked doll with a messy halo of blond hair was stretched out on

the backseat, eyes closed. The rear window was open, so I reached in and took the doll. Its big

blue eyes shot open as I lifted it. I carried the doll out to the edge of the yard, where the hedge

meets the field, and propped it in the arms of a stunted maple tree. I could feel it watching me as

I walked back toward the house.

June was just coming out, clutching the Bible to her chest. “What’s your daughter’s

name?” she asked, in that way adults have of talking to each other about you even when you’re

standing right there. “She’s so adorable. And smart.”

“Oh, that’s Christine,” said Mom from the doorway.

“Chris,” I said. “My name is Chris.”

“And how old are you?”

“Twelve.” I waited for the usual next question, about school, but she didn’t ask, maybe

because it was the middle of summer.

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“Well, good bye, Chris. I’ll see you again soon, I hope.” June set down her bag and gave

my head a little pat. Then she picked it up, strode out to her car and drove off down the lane,

raising a cloud of dust behind her. I wondered how long it would take her to notice the doll was

gone.

Dad got home at six, and we ate our dinner in silence at the kitchen table. Chicken legs with

mashed potatoes and broccoli, ice cream for dessert. Mom didn’t mention June’s visit, so I

figured this was just another secret between us. Like the bottle at the back of the laundry room

closet. Like the pond and Ted. After dinner, Dad changed into shorts and a white V-neck and

went out to cut the grass. Mom washed the dishes and then sat in the living room, reading. When

I came in, she quickly put it down. “Oh, I thought you were Dad,” she said. I was puzzled by

this, but didn’t say anything at the time. Instead, I retreated to my room to draw angels.

I don’t know how I got started with the angels. For as long as I could remember, I’d been

drawing girls and putting wings on them. The earliest ones were just crude crayon scrawls. When

they were more recognizable as figures, Mom asked me why my girls always had four arms, and

I explained to her about the wings. She said, “Oh, that’s cute,” and never mentioned it again.

When I turned ten, she bought me a metal case with forty-eight colored pencils and a big sketch

pad, and my angels multiplied. I started putting them in landscapes with trees and mountains and

streams. Sometimes I’d draw animals on the ground—foxes, wolves, bears—but my angels

always remained overhead, drifting across a turquoise sky hung with puffy white clouds. I gave

them names: Cynthia, Beatrix, Henrietta, Phoebe. They reappeared, in various groupings,

through the pages of my drawing pads, which by then numbered around eight or ten. I tried to

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think of stories for them, little adventures they could have, but I usually got stuck, so mostly they

just hovered over my imagined worlds.

Dad came in at dusk, covered in sweat, and got in the shower. A little while later, Mom

entered my room and looked over my shoulder at the latest drawing-in-progress, which featured

Phoebe and Beatrix soaring over a snow-capped purple mountain skirted by a forest of green

pines. I’d wanted to put goats on the mountainside but realized I hadn’t left any space for them.

“Very pretty,” she said. “Now it’s time for bed.”

“Mom,” I said, “that lady who came today, June, is she coming back?”

“I don’t know, probably,” she said.

“Do you really think the world is a bad place?”

She was quiet for a moment. “No, honey,” she said. “Not for you.”

“What about for you?”

She kissed me on the forehead. “Get some sleep, my dear,” she said.

June returned a few days later, in the morning. I was kneeling at the edge of the field, digging up

worms and putting them in an old coffee can, when I heard someone coming up the lane. When I

saw who it was, I remembered about the doll and felt a twinge of guilt. Had she come back to get

it? But she just retrieved her big canvas bag from the passenger seat and went up the walkway,

not even realizing that I was there. Mom opened the door before June had even knocked. She had

been expected.

I put the can of worms in the shade behind the garden shed, then visited with the doll in

the tree for a while. It had already acquired a coating of yellowish dirt, like everything did

around here. A slug was making its way across the dimpled cheek, leaving an S-shaped slime

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trail in its wake. I picked up the doll and flicked off the slug, then brushed off some of the dirt

with my t-shirt before propping it back in the crook of the maple. Her skin was peach pink, and

she had a ridiculous little hole drilled between her legs so she could pretend-pee. She looked

pathetic lying there naked, but I had no clothes to give her, so covered everything but her head

with handfuls of leaves.

I climbed over the fence and walked out into the cornfield. It was like entering another

world, with tunnels arranged in neat parallel rows that narrowed and converged in the distance.

The late-summer stalks were already taller than I was, and light seeped through the emerald

leaves and danced in swirling patterns at my feet. I zigzagged across the rows, looking for quartz

crystals in the dirt. Sometimes I’d find them jutting out of the earth like glass teeth. I had a

shoebox half full of them back in my room, but I didn’t see any that day.

When I emerged from the field into the bright sun, June’s car was gone. I went in and

found Mom sitting at the kitchen table, lost in thought. There was a brand-new Bible on the

table, just like the one June carried, and next to it was another little book with a plain green cloth

cover that said “The Truth Shall Set You Free” in raised gold lettering.

“Mom, are we going to the pond today?” I asked. She looked at me blankly, like she

didn’t know what I was talking about, or even who I was. I thought maybe she had been crying.

“The pond,” I repeated. “It’s Wednesday.”

“Oh, right, I forgot. We’ll go after lunch,” she answered.

We had peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, tomato soup, and potato chips for lunch.

After we cleaned up the dishes, I retrieved the can of worms and grabbed my fishing rod, tackle

box, and a bucket from the shed. Mom came out in navy shorts and a yellow-and-white striped

halter, her auburn hair tied back with a blue kerchief. She’d put on makeup, but her eyes still

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looked haggard and red. We walked together down the lane toward the main road. I wanted to

ask her about June’s visit, but she seemed distracted. She moved slowly, head down, like she was

carrying something heavy on her shoulders. When we reached the path that veered off into the

woods, our shortcut to the pond, I asked, “Is Ted going to be there?”

“I don’t know,” said Mom. “We’ll see.” She looked really sad.

When we got to the pond, Ted was there, seated on a blanket in the little clearing on the

opposite shore, where we usually met him. Ted was Mr. McGoldrick, our neighbor and father of

three kids who went to my school, Anna, Maggie, and little Patrick. His fishing pole was

propped against a nearby willow, unused. “Hi Susan,” he said to Mom, and then “Hey kiddo” to

me. He always called me that for some reason, like he couldn’t be bothered to remember my

name.

“Where’s Maggie?” I asked. The middle McGoldrick child was closest to my age, and

though we weren’t really friends, we still hung out sometimes.

“Maggie is with her mother,” he said, “in Virginia.”

“What’s in Virginia?” I asked.

“The in-laws. Maggie’s Gram and Pop.”

Mom sat down next to Ted on the blanket, and he poured some greenish liquid out of a

Thermos into a clear plastic cup and handed it to her.

“Want a root beer, kiddo?” he asked. “I brought one for you.”

“No thanks,” I said. I stood at the edge of the pond and baited my hook with a piece of

worm. It always fascinated me how you could tear them into little pieces, and yet they still

wriggled and squirmed as you stuck the hook through them. I cast my line into the water and

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waited. A pair of geese flew overhead and landed with a splash near the far shore, ruffling the

placid surface of the pond.

“Are you looking forward to school?” asked Mr. McGoldrick.

“No,” I said.

“Chrissy,” said Mom. “Be nice.”

“It’s the truth,” I said. “I hate it. And my name is Chris.” I’d been trying for at least a

year to get people to call me this, but had only succeeded so far in getting Laura Simmons, the

most popular girl in the grade, to brand me “Miss Piss” instead of her usual “Miss Pissy.”

“I didn’t care for school much either,” said Mr. McGoldrick. “Sometimes I wish I had.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, I dunno. Maybe I would have done something more with myself. Gotten out of this

shithole.” Mom punched him on the arm and he laughed. Mr. McGoldrick still lived on the farm

he’d grown up on, just on the other side of the woods. His elderly parents were still there too, in

a room at the back of the ramshackle house, amid piles of newspapers and a TV set that blared

all day long. The McGoldricks leased their land to other farmers, and Mrs. McGoldrick worked

as a nurses’ aide down at the hospital, but Mr. McGoldrick had never had a job in the time we’d

known him.

After a while, Mom stood up and said, “Ted and I are going to take a little walk. Are you

okay here?” She always asked this, and I wondered what she’d do if I said “No.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“OK, then. We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I stood at the water’s edge, catching bluegills. It was almost too easy. I would put a little

piece of worm on the end of my hook, drop it in the water, and watch the fish gather round. The

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challenge was steering the bait away from the little ones before they got themselves hooked. I

felt sort of sorry for them, but even after they’d just seen one of their kin get pulled out of the

water, they came right back for more. Dumb. Sometimes I didn’t even bother with the bait, just

dropped in the hook and watched them chase after the glinting metal. Fish that were bigger than

my hand went in the bucket; the smaller ones I tossed back. Once in a while, I’d cast my line out

a bit farther, hoping to lure a bass, but they were smarter and harder to catch.

By the time Ted and Mom came back, I already had nine bluegills in the bucket. I gave

three to Mr. McGoldrick to take home. The rest would be for our dinner.

Instead of the usual little kiss on the cheek, Mom offered Mr. McGoldrick her hand and

he shook it. I wondered what had passed between them on their “walk,” but Mom was silent all

the way back. I also wondered if she saw me the way everyone else seemed to—as a little kid,

too innocent to see what was right in front of my face.

At home, I spread some newspaper out on the old picnic table in the yard and emptied the

fish out of the bucket. A couple of them were still clinging to life, their gills working uselessly as

they struggled to breathe out of water. With the thin-bladed knife from the tackle box, I stabbed

them through the neck, then cut off their heads. After scaling them, I sliced down the belly and

pulled out the guts, piling them up alongside the heads. Then I cut the flesh away from the bone

into little filets, just like Dad had shown me when we went camping earlier in the summer. When

I was done, I dumped the heads, guts, and bones over the fence into the field and brought the

filets inside for Mom to coat with cornmeal and fry in butter.

At dinner, Dad asked me about the day’s fishing—what bait I’d used, whether I’d seen anything

bigger than these “pumpkinseeds” in the water. He grew up near the ocean and used to fish a lot.

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All the gear we had was his; he just let me use it. Sometimes he would take me to the pond on

the weekends, and once we drove to New Jersey so we could go deep sea fishing on a charter

boat. I think he liked it because you didn’t have to talk a lot while you’re doing it. Those were

my favorite times with him, sitting quietly by the water and waiting for the fish to bite.

“Was anybody else down at the pond?” he asked.

I could feel Mom’s eyes on me. “Nope,” I said. “Just us and the fish.”

Later that night, I awoke to the sound of a crash somewhere in the house. I lay under the covers

in the dark, listening.

“The hell you will!” yelled Dad. They were in the kitchen, arguing again. They seemed to

go right from silence to screaming, skipping over regular talking.

Mom said something I couldn’t make out.

“I don’t care,” said Dad. “I don’t want you going.”

Mom said something else that might have included my name.

“She’s fine,” said Dad.

I got out of bed and crept down the hallway, toward the light spilling out of the kitchen.

Mom was pleading with him. “She needs friends, Greg. She’s by herself all the time.”

“She’s fine. She likes doing stuff on her own.”

“It isn’t good for her. We’re stuck here all day long, while you’re at the office.”

“Well I’m stuck at the office all day long,” he said.

This was a well-worn argument. We only had one car, which Dad drove to work most

days. Mom said she felt like a prisoner; he said we couldn’t afford another one.

“At least you see other people,” said Mom.

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“What about Betsy McGoldrick and her kids? You can walk over there.”

A moment’s hesitation. “Betsy and I aren’t really that close these days.”

“Well, I can’t help that.”

Another silence. I imagined the two of them sitting there under the harsh overhead light,

staring at the kitchen table.

“This other thing, though. It’s crazy. It’s bullshit,” said Dad.

“I just want to see what it’s all about.”

“Well, leave me out of it.”

The next day I slept long past my usual time, and then I couldn’t seem to get myself out of bed.

It was almost eleven by the time I wandered into the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table. She

looked like she’d been crying again, and maybe drinking too. A glass in the sink with some ice

cubes melting at the bottom confirmed my suspicion.

“We’re going out tonight,” she said. “You and I.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“A meeting. Downtown.”

“What kind of meeting?”

“You’ll see.”

“How are we getting there?”

“Remember June? Who came by the other day? She’s taking us,” said Mom. “You’ll get

to meet her daughters, too.”

And that was how it all began.

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