Saving Lucas Biggs Read Online Free Page A

guess was a state of shock, my brain numb and slow, my senses dulled, my eyelids heavy as lead. It wasn’t so bad really, to feel so cut off and out of it, kind of like being a turtle dozing on a rock in a terrarium. But as soon as we turned into our driveway and I saw our house, the one my dad would never be coming back to, the glass walls of my terrarium fell right down.
    Once we were inside, Dr. AJ led my mom upstairs, got her to lie down, and tried to give her a pill to help her relax and sleep.
    “I can’t,” my mom said, shaking her head. “Margaret needs me.”
    Dr. AJ and I exchanged a look.
    “You know what would help me, Mom?” I said gently. “If I could lie here next to you while you fell asleep. That would be perfect.”
    I could see my mom trying to muster up the energy to protest again, but finally, she sighed, nodded, and held out her palm for the pill.
    My mom wasn’t a weak woman, but we all hit our breaking points, and my mom had hit hers kind of gradually. The first cracks appeared right after my dad’s arrest—little hair-thin things, hardly cracks at all—and she got more and more broken as the weeks dragged on. By the time he was convicted, she wasn’t eating enough to keep a bird alive and was sleeping so little that she’d gotten to a weird place in her mind, a twitchy, broken, manic place where she cried all the time and couldn’t put thoughts together right. I’d been more or less mothering her for weeks, which felt strange, but I really didn’t mind. It gave me a reason to stay steady, and anyway, after all those years of her taking care of me, I guessed it was the least I could do.
    She went to sleep fast after her pill, and, after a few minutes of shifty restlessness, she looked as peaceful as she had in way too long. I almost cried then, at the sight of her, because she’d have to wake up sometime and everything would still be awful, but Dr. AJ was right beside me, and I knew that if I broke down, she’d insist on staying. What I wanted more than anything was to be alone, to sit in my own pocket of space and just breathe and feel , feel whatever there was to feel without worrying about anyone seeing me.
    Dr. AJ seemed to get it. She called Mr. Wise and asked if he could postpone his visit until the following day. She reminded me of her cell and home numbers, even though she knew I knew them as well as I knew my own, and reminded me that she was just around the corner, which I also knew, having been to her house a bazillion times, at least. Then she wrapped me in one of her good, big-woman hugs (Dr. AJ was six feet tall and hugged like a linebacker, or like I imagined linebackers hugged), and for a few seconds I just plain clung.
    “You will get through this, my girl,” she said. “I have no doubt of that. Just keep the faith, you hear me?”
    I nodded, even though I didn’t have one scrap of faith left to keep.
    As soon as she left, I realized I was starving. I opened the refrigerator, which was busting at the seams with casseroles; there must have been five or six of them, foil-covered, labeled, and stacked—and these were just from today. For months, when we weren’t home, people had taken to dropping food off with our neighbor Mrs. Darley, who had a key to our house and would periodically stick them in her red wagon and wheel them on over. They gave us way more than two people could ever eat, but I knew what the casseroles meant. Every dish was someone saying, “We’ve got your back.”
    I got as far as carving out and heating up a slab of Mrs. Alexandropoulos’s famous pastitsio, which is this awesome Greek lasagna, pouring myself a glass of milk, and sitting down at the kitchen table. But as I chewed the first bite, I remembered the first time I’d eaten Mrs. Alexandropoulos’s pastitsio. I was six and had just gone to my first funeral. I’m not even sure whose it was. It’s what people do in Victory: there’s a wedding or a funeral and the whole town shows