Lucid Read online

Lucid

  Author: Brian Stillman

  Cover Artist: Jenny Dayton

  Copyright 2016

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Connect With Us

  Chapter 1

  The first hint of what was to come happened when I was 14, when we flew back from my older sister Maddy’s wedding.

  She’d been married at a mansion in Pacific Palisades. The bedroom I’d stayed in had a fountain on the balcony. If I walked past the naked baby angel and the burbling gush of water out to the balcony rail and looked west, I could see the Pacific Ocean stretching on out to the horizon.

  My new brother-in-law was one of the biggest box office draws in the world. He was barely taller than me. He had a strong handshake. He looked me in the eye when he spoke. The next time I visited them, when he wasn’t dealing with the 1000 wedding guests, Jack Ford promised I could take his Lamborghini for a test drive. He knew a guy with his own personal driving course. Speed limits didn’t apply there.

  Throughout her high school years, Dad had never approved of any of Maddy’s suitors. They were all going nowhere. He could tell. Jack’s movies had grossed over a billion dollars worldwide. He’d been nominated for a Golden Globe. He donated money to charities worldwide. He spoke out on international issues. Had shaken the hand of at least two presidents.

  Dad hadn’t liked Tate Ruchert, high school quarterback hero. Dad didn’t seem too taken with Jack either.

  Right after the pilot announced we were flying over Lake Tahoe it happened.

  At first I thought Dad pounding the armrest was something related to flight stress. Mom had said she’d have to spike his coffee before ever getting Senate McCall onto an airplane.

  A thin band of wet worked out the corner of his right eye. His lips puckered. The couple in the seats across from us were asleep.

  McCall men didn’t cry. We’d buried my grandma and grandpa and my mom’s stepbrother Clark. We’d buried Mom. Dad hadn’t cried. Uncle Bob hadn’t cried. I was still a kid all those burials. Only 11 when Mom died and I hadn’t cried either, at least not in front of anyone. There wasn’t shame in it for a girl, but Mom had told me I always looked like I’d bit into a sour apple when I cried. She’d smiled, one of the last times she did, admitted she was trying to keep me from sobbing at her hospital bed.

  It was giving away his daughter finally catching up to him I thought.

  “How could I let it happen,” he whispered.

  “Let what happen? Dad? Are you ok?”

  He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He sniffled. A flight attendant walked past us. It felt intrusive to look at Dad. I looked past him, out the window at the plane’s wing. It was the third flight I’d been on in my life. First being the Horizon flight between Ashmond and Seattle four days prior, second being Seattle to L.A. that same day.

  “Lucy.” Dad leaned his head near me but didn’t look at me. “That wasn’t Maddy. That wasn’t your sister. That wasn’t your mother’s daughter we just left behind.”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t hearing him right, I figured.

  “I didn’t recognize that girl. Maddy? No,” he said. “I don’t know that person we handed over to that…Man. Looked and sounded like Maddy, but not her. No. Not by a long shot.”

  The day before I’d been at what the press christened the wedding of the year if not the decade. A full orchestra played the wedding march. Dave Matthews performed solo at the reception. Queen Latifah had stood in line behind me to get some punch and I handed her the cup I’d poured for myself. She’d laughed and thanked me for the punch. Touched my arm and smiled and told me my sister was beautiful. Jack had introduced me to a prince from Spain. A prince with bodyguards. And Jack just called him Tony and told Tony this here was Lucy, his new sister-in-law. The prince kissed the back of my hand and smiled at sight of the blush breaking out all over me.

  Maddy and Jack were honeymooning in Buenos Aires. Then after that Maddy was going to start shooting her new movie. I’d met the director at the reception. He told me I should maybe think about acting, too. I looked like a young Sigourney Weaver he said, tall, athletic, a bit of a tomboy, but soft where it counted. Feminine. Later when Dave Matthews covered the song from Maddy’s high school prom I saw the director dancing by himself, wine glass in hand. It looked like the gopher dancing from Caddyshack.

  “We’ve got to help her,” said Dad. He rubbed at his chin like when he was trying to figure out how the washing machine had stopped working.

  He didn’t say anything else. It was sunset when we landed in Seattle. It was night when we landed in Ashmond. We drove home to Eaton in the same car Dad had owned since before Maddy was Maddy the movie star.

  Maddy looked the same and sounded the same. She actually seemed to like me more than when we lived under the same roof, but I took it that came from being trained by a publicist or maybe a side effect of being in the constant presence of Jack’s million-dollar smile.

  The thing bothering Dad was Maddy was now a member of Jack’s church - Lucentology. It didn’t play a huge part in the actual wedding ceremony. The man officiating hadn’t whipped out a copy of Forward, the church’s manual, and made the bride and groom swear upon it or chant or anything.

  But everyone who practiced, most everyone who attended meetings in L.A., wore a necklace with a blue ‘L’ pendant, or a bracelet. There were even earrings. The head of the church had been at the wedding. He had a ring with a big glittery blue ‘L’ inset in the band. Looking around the
reception, it seemed every fifth person in attendance sported a blue ‘L’ one way or another.

  When Maddy and Jack had started dating, she’d sent us all kinds of Lucentology material. Dad had trashed all of it. I’d salvaged a copy of Forward and the DVD series The Program – the primer for the believer ready to enter the ‘Becoming’ phase of church life.

  I thought it was all a little weird, but I didn’t see the threat so obvious to Dad’s eyes.

  When I went to bed, he was still pacing the house. I was exhausted. I slept easily and woke with a vague remembrance of Queen Latifah’s smile winking in and out of existence in my dreams like the Cheshire Cat’s in Alice’s trip through Wonderland.

  Chapter 2

  The phone rang minutes after Dad had left the house for work Tuesday.

  “It’s me,” he said, when I picked up. “Don’t worry about the woman. You’ll see her when you come out to wait for the bus. And I told her it’s all right to park in our driveway if she wants.”

  After a few moments of silence he asked, “You there, Luce?”

  “Yeah. Who…What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll see.” The smile in Dad’s voice audible. “She’s all right, okay?”

  I started to ask what that meant, but he’d hung up.

  Maddy’s new movie, Small Town Girl, premiered Friday. It didn’t officially open until the following weekend.

  The role seemed tailor-made for an actress born and raised in a small town. Someone at the studio publicity department had come up with the keen idea of doing the premiere in a small town and in fact, why not Maddy’s? Problem being, Eaton didn’t have a movie theater, but that was easily worked around.

  Ashmond was only 11 miles west of us and compared to Los Angeles, its population of 35,000 is still teeny tiny, still home-town values, know your neighbor, all that, at least if you discounted the semi-regular eruptions of gang violence.

  Maddy and company were slated to arrive on Thursday. Maddy and Jack, still in the upper echelon of world famous movie stars, were slated to stay in the house. There’d be an assistant or two and security outside at all times.

  It sounded like a logistical nightmare, but Jack and Maddy’s handlers had gotten the two in and out of famous international hot spots on a honeymoon and several vacations. Popping in and out of Hicksville, Eastern Washington ought to be a snap in comparison.

  I couldn’t figure out why Dad agreed to it. It was two years after the Hollywood wedding extravaganza, and he still held the opinion that Lucentology was damaging Maddy.

  Plus he’d told me we ought to plan for the fact that the house might get bugged. Every thing we said, on the phone or otherwise, or anything we did on the computer, it was all up for grabs surveillance wise until after the premiere. I understood the reason for his obliqueness on the phone that morning.

  I brushed back the living room curtains and looked out beyond the yard to East Jennings Road. A figure was just getting out of a sedan parked near the intersection of driveway and gravel county road.

  She’s all right.

  Whatever that meant.

  House locked, backpack over my shoulder, I walked down the driveway to the gravel road. Getting close I saw the sign resting at the woman’s feet and I got an inkling of what Dad had meant.

  The sign read ‘Kip Arnett Was Murdered’.

  Kip was one of the tens of thousands of hopeful actors and actresses who populate Los Angeles, looking for the break that catapults them from obscurity to the spotlight.

  She’d been found starved to death in a Hollywood apartment. She had been battling a drug addiction, but more interesting was the fact she was a practicing member of Lucentology.

  The press spin on the tragedy was that instead of going through detox or getting herself to a rehab facility, Kip had tried to tough it out using Lucentology methods to make herself clean and pure. According to the literature, Lucentology Centers were always available to help anyone – not just members – deal with addictions, but it could become costly. Just because anyone was welcome didn’t mean it was free.

  Kip had appeared on one of the videos for The Program, the series for people interested in becoming Lucentologists. Just a quick appearance, but the press had used it as fodder for stories after her death.

  The woman on the shoulder of the road was a cute, short blonde, almost a perfect copy of the relatively unknown comedienne who’d been found weighing 66 pounds, her face partially eaten away by a housecat.

  The woman waved at me. She wore sunglasses tipped up onto her scalp, a green jacket, and parachute pants with pockets up and down each leg.

  I waved back.

  She looked both ways and crossed the road, gravel crunching under her heel.

  “You must be Lucy,” she said. “Your dad said you’d be out here shortly.”

  She put her hand out.

  “I’m Ruth. Arnett. I know,” she said. “It’s a little weird. I’m not a zombie though, I swear. I’m Kip’s twin sister.”

  The protest sign leaned against her backpack on the road shoulder.

  Pointing back across the road she said, “You see I’ve obviously got something to get off my chest and I’ll tell you what I told your dad. I’m not trying to make trouble for you guys. I think you guys are in the same boat I am. You have a loved one involved in something that isn’t healthy. You want to make sure they’re all right. You know, Kip thought she knew what she was doing. She didn’t. And there’s gonna be people out here, there’s going to be church members out here, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to speak up for Kip. These people are trying to forget her, trying to make the world forget her, and it’s bullshit.”

  I nodded. I didn’t talk much mornings. Ruth rolled right on along.

  “Since the movement started, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there’s always been something nasty about it. These people aren’t saints, much as they think they are or much as they might make you think they can make you. There are a lot of spent shells, ok? Bodies at the roadside. Griffin Sharp. Selkie Rosenfeld, ok? Right out of the gate. Those two, waaaay back when. Most people don’t know who they are. Horace Walton does. You know who he is, right? Head of the church? Ok. Good. Oh, boy does Horace know. And people like my sister, well, she found out how nasty it can be, too.”

  She’d flung her hands about, making her points. She trembled slightly, the blood rolling around inside her short body.

  “And if you don’t know who Griffin is, if you don’t know who Selkie is, I could tell you. Horace Walton could tell you. Well, he could tell you his version. His version. I know what the real version is.”

  She smiled.

  “Sorry. I get worked up a little. Probably a little more in your face than you’re expecting just going to school, huh?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “But this. You know. This-”

  She angled her right arm up vertically, hand in front of her face, and laid her left arm flat so the tip of her fingers touched the right elbow.

  It was an ‘L’. Imperfect if she did it or if I did it, but the intros to all the Lucentology videos and the cover of Forward, the Lucentology guidebook, featured a slender, genderless figure whose arms were positioned so that the ‘L’ their arms made looked comfortable, not too bendy or painful, the way a normal person would manage the position, sockets and joints being what they are.

  That ‘L’, right hand hitting the head, left elbow near the heart, the only supplies you needed to change and move forward into the person you were meant to be. To become ‘lucid’.

  “I get sick. So sick of it. The last picture Kip took of herself she was doing this. This. The last goddamn picture.” Ruth dropped her arms. “I see someone do that I just go—“

  Momentarily she stuck her tongue out, both hands displaying an extended middle finger. She stared at t
he ground and then looked back at me. She smiled her tired smile.

  “All right. I’ll leave you alone. Oh. Hey.” She held her hand out. “Let’s make it official at least. Ruth.”

  “Lucy.”

  We shook.

  “You’re a big kid.” She smiled. “No offense meant.”

  “None taken.”

  “You must get asked this a lot, but you play basketball?”

  “Long distance.”

  “Ah. I can see that. You’ve got the legs. And I’ve got the legs of a munchkin. ‘What’s it like working at the North Pole?’ I get that a lot.”

  Walking back towards her side of the road she suddenly spun on heel, arms out from her side like she was going to throw laser bolts from her hands.

  “Let me ask one thing.”

  “Ok.”

  “Does your sister keep telling you she’s fine? Not fine like she’s hot, but fine like she’s ok? Nothing to worry about?”

  “Maddy usually complains when I talk to her.”

  Ruth laughed.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s ok.” I smiled. “It’s fine.” She nodded in appreciation of my using the term. I asked, “Why? I mean was that what your sister did?”

  “I’d ask if she was ok. Like right before she… And she’d say she had a really bad flu, that’s why she sounded so tired and so out of it. But she’d be fine. She emphasized that. ‘I’ll be fine, Ruthie. I promise. I swear. Fine tomorrow and fine the day after.’ And then she stopped taking my calls. And then they found her.”

  Just as she got back to her backpack and her sign the school bus swung around the corner and headed towards us.

  I usually rode in the row of seats behind the driver. After we picked up the one other rider beyond the house and came back headed for Eaton I made sure to look out the window and wave at Ruth. When we went by she was head down, fully engaged in texting.

  It was only upon entering town that I started wondering how long in advance Dad had known Ruth Arnett was coming to town.

  Chapter 3

  The drawing taped to my locker was done in black ink on a sheet of notebook paper. The fringe on the spine stood at sharp angles to the paper’s edge. Chunks of fallen-off fringe lay scattered on the hallway carpet below my locker.

  In the drawing a UFO was abducting a cow. The cow was levitating off the ground towards the UFO. The cow had udders. The cow said, “Moo.”