The Truth Lucy Saw (The Truth Turned Upside Down Book 1) Read online

  The Truth Lucy Saw

  Book one in a series of three

  Penelope J Bristol

  Copyright

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  •Copyright © 2020 by Penelope J Bristol

  •All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  For all the lost daughters, may you find many times over- the love they withheld, experience belonging if only to yourself, and the bravery to go out and seek your truths.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FREE GIFT

  Preface

  Prologue: THE TRUTH

  BOOK ONE

  1. Lucy

  2. Saturday

  3. Finn

  4. Not My Job

  5. Breakfast

  6. Anne

  7. Summer’s End

  8. Dianna

  9. John

  BOOK TWO

  10. Grandma’s House

  11. Alex

  Also by Penelope J Bristol

  Last Chance-FREE GIFT

  About the Author

  Lets Connect~My Blog, Social Media & Email Address

  FREE GIFT

  I am thrilled you are reading the first book in the series, The Truth Turned Upside Down. I want to give you an exclusive bonus chapter as a FREE gift and the opportunity to sign up for my mailing list. I would love for you to be in the know about my next novel, Red Rock Redemption, and connect with you via my blog, social media accounts or email. Enjoy!

  Bonus Chapter: A New Baby Girl

  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/d43g6ivam1

  Preface

  There have been moments in my life where I felt wholly disoriented, akin to a loose pebble tumbling wildly in choppy unforgiving waters cut off from and not fully aware of myself as being separate from the movings and beings of other people.

  Symbols often served me at times when my sense of direction and voice were as useless as music on the moon. Imperfect cut out hearts and bulky cable sweaters indicating the turn of a season when I could barely lift myself out of bed. Pregnant silences in conversations with people I love but can’t trust, tugging on my shirttails to warn me it’s not safe to say anything more.

  Symbols have helped me through the years make sense of what’s happening around me even when there is nothing tangible available, maybe I mean to call them signs more than symbols.

  I know hope as a feeling of weightlessness that rises inside of me when I feel safe and connected to the people around me. I recognize fear as a burning pain in my left hand that moves through my stomach as a banding panic. I have experienced the sensation of being pulled out of my body and submerged underwater in times of overwhelming sadness, wanting to scream but hearing my words as muffled and wasted.

  The symbol now is a bird and that bird is me. I am small and agile with tattered wings, dark eyes, and misaligned bones, a consequence of trying to make the world bend to my ideas. The bird is now without an original nest and can never go back into that first forest. It is on its own in a beautiful, expansive, unfolding world looking for clues and learning to explore.

  For a spell, I only remembered the fight, but with time and work- a beautiful story unfolded. The story is layered uncensored fantasy with greying, looping memories, both happy and sad, wandering over-familiar and unknown geography and decades.

  The bird begins to sing her song, weaving together the dark and light notes letting the weightlessness, burning pain and underwater screaming wash over her wings again and again for as long as it takes until she is free.

  Prologue: THE TRUTH

  Her bruised eyelids fluttered heavily and rapidly, but in the end, they could not find the strength to open and identify what was producing the bars of light right in front of her face.

  A broken body hung upside down quietly and without protest. The absence of noise except for a faint hissing sound created an eerie calming effect inside the automobile's crushed hull. If she could lift her hands to her face, then maybe she could pop her eyes open and use what she saw to make a plan.

  She thought intently about raising her arms, but she did not feel anything happening. Her raised arms might have been waiting for the next command, but she wondered what the following command was.

  She thought about him and his hands, how they were perfect, and how they felt inside her own. Where was he right now? Maybe it was dinner time, and he was watching television mindlessly, eating and waiting for someone to say it was time to hurry up and take a bath. What would he say if he knew she was hanging upside down in their car unable to cry out for help.

  She thought of them all and of the little things that she would miss most if tonight were the last night. Do people know when they are about to die, she wondered? There was no pain to suggest she was even hurt, but the car was upside down, and she could not make her body respond to her mind.

  Images began to project themselves all around her. She saw herself being small at the foot of a Christmas tree holding a doll with a painted-on face and short bouncing curls. She stood up and walked with this doll, taking it into the kitchen to get something to drink, placing it on the kitchen table. This image faded away. In its place appeared a high-school-aged version of herself talking excitedly to someone outside a brick building she faintly remembered, autumn leaves randomly spread about on the ground.

  One by one, these memories toppled over each other; her graduation day, a nurse placing a baby in her arms, a birthday party at home and one at work swirling in and out of consciousness. Was this her experience of dying? Her mind halted the flow of images and began to question and search for meaning in each final fleeting moment.

  And then the house was there in her mind, tangling up with a thousand memories that began to flood in involuntarily. She saw her bedroom, the kitchen, and watched herself opening the back-sliding glass door. She was there; they were all there, sacred ghosts of the past. Her whole world for much of her life danced with her as she forced her eyes into tiny slits.

  As her courageous eyes strained, still wanting to see the truth, to make sense of the world as it slowly began to take shape and focus, one eye obeyed, and then the other grudgingly followed suit.

  Interestingly, the bars of light she thought she saw was strands of her hair hanging down, cutting the glow of the car radio, which still flashed the long names of artists and their song titles.

  As her mind raced about with the new information, a simple observation surfaced into awareness - how different things appear when you can finally see things as they actually are, when you can finally see the truth.

  BOOK ONE

  THE

  TRUTH

  LUCY

  SAW

  Lucy

  Eight Years Earlier

  Running water from someone else’s bath echoed down the dim, narrow hallway and rhythmically lulled Lucy deeper into her soft cotton blanket and finally into a state of welcome weightlessness. Her spinning brain gradually slowed down as the
day’s words and happenings all gathered at a final curtain’s close. Her last fading thought, as she slowly dropped an open book to the floor, was that she was absolutely and undoubtedly, a bizarre kid.

  This last thought acted like a buoyant cloud pushing her up to the top of a jagged cliff where she dreamily surveyed the landscape of her life. Looking out across the vast expanse, she saw all the wrong things about herself from which she could not hide. When Lucy was awake, she carried this brown sack of mental rocks with her as she went, and inside her mind, a steady droning voice pointed to all the reasons why she was living an experience way different than most.

  Point number one; her general perspectives on life were intense and sometimes unpopular. For example, in second grade, she had been paddled at school for getting out of her wooden school desk without permission when the teacher left the classroom. As the thick paddle struck her behind, Lucy thought about the ancient record player chiming, indicating it was time for the page to turn while the student holding the book refused to comply. Why was it wrong to want to make things right? As an adult, her teacher should have seen the injustice in the situation. Still, somehow everything got mixed up, which meant Lucy had misread life again and reacted incorrectly while the unwilling page-turner got off scot-free.

  This otherness troubled her at home too, which prompted images of unwanted babies left on doorsteps as an explanation for her mismatched-ness inside her own family.

  “Lucy, it’s fine, we can buy more crayons, “Dianna said distractedly, scraping up the colorful, melted mess off their outdoor, glass patio table.

  “I’m saving these, mom, they barely melted, and I can use my fingers to reshape them well enough to color with,” Lucy said, looking up, pleased with herself.

  Dianna stared back at her, blankly, and unapologetically chucked Lucy’s to-be-saved pile right in the trash.

  Luckily, she was aware of her propensity to rub people the wrong way and adopted strategies to avoid attention, which decreased her anxiety-a problem, which would take over her life if she let it.

  Lucy also had unusual physical features. Strawberry blonde hair and freckles were not what she would have chosen for herself if she could select something different, and then there was the problem with her legs. They were very muscular and not at all, like a normal girl’s legs should be. Nonetheless, these things were all unchangeable, no matter how much she wished for or envied the straight, standard legs of other children with their average heads of brown or blonde hair. It was just this way for her, and that was only the outside of Lucy.

  The inside, too, was odd such that she thought endlessly about everything and all at once. If a television program came on, about recycling, she would watch it intensely, gather facts about the best ways to recycle, what happens when people don’t comply, and the efforts necessary to become an integral cog in the recycling movement. The awareness would turn into guilt feelings that meant inaction on her part would mean she was irresponsible. It did not matter that she was twelve and could not drive to the recycling center, call the county, ask for a recycling bin for her family without permission, or pay the extra twenty bucks a month to own the container. Lucy found herself pained by everything and, at the same time, incredibly scared to do anything. The feeling that she could change the world but was at the same time rather insignificant confused and paralyzed her. But as a child, she just chalked it up to being a bizarre kid and tried her best to get on with things.

  As far as disposition went, Lucy was okay spending time alone and frequently, actually preferred it. She was not an only child, but there was a considerable age distance between her and her older sister Anne who would rather not have Lucy hanging around. When necessary, she entertained herself by cooking, reading books, playing librarian, learning magic tricks, cleaning and rearranging the furniture in their house.

  She liked to know important details about people, places, and things, she liked knowing what was going to happen next, and she even liked telling people what to do. When she played librarian, she was delighted in pretending to stamp the books with the return date and telling the imaginary people they would be fined if they were even one day late.

  “Oh, I love this book too,” Lucy said to her imaginary patrons, using her strawberry scented ink stamp to place a pretend due date in the back. “There’s a dollar fee for each day it’s late, and after five days, we will just send you a bill for the original price of the book. Do you understand?”

  It was fair to be fined if you did not follow the rules she reasoned. Lucy held on to the ideas of fairness and justice, especially her brand of justice despite life repeatedly proving how chaotically swirling and lawlessly muddy it was. Somehow, Lucy couldn’t let go of her moral compass, although it often meant she rode solo, battered about by life’s inconsistency.

  Lucy had an older sister that was nothing like her. In fact, her sister was all the things that Lucy was not. She had brown hair like other ordinary people and a contagious personality. Whatever Anne said came out funny or smart or however, she intended it to be.

  “Mom, your hair looks like a football helmet, I am not going to Target with you like that, “Anne said, to which Dianna reacted favorably, automatically running her fingers through her hair to fluff and style it.

  Lucy herself was hit or miss with the things that she said. Sometimes what she spoke out into the world made people angry, upset, or indifferent to her. Lucy thought about this a lot and tried not to repeat her mistakes, which didn’t allow her always to say what she wanted. Anne, her older sister, never thought about what she said it seemed. Anne did what she wanted and said what she wanted, pretty much whenever she wanted. Somehow it seemed she knew a secret that Lucy did not seem to be privy.

  Lucy considered that maybe when she was older, it would be this way for her too, as she listened to her high school-aged sister inform their family she would be eating Thanksgiving dinner away with her boyfriend this year.

  “It’s not that big a deal, “Anne said, rolling her eyes and popping cheese puffs in her mouth, “His mom asked me, and I said, yes.”

  Of course, Anne had gotten her way, and their mother ate in mourning, silence, and sadness because the child she adored was not there to share turkey and the traditional pumpkin pie.

  If truth be told, even in the worst of times, Lucy adored Anne too. She often wondered how they could be related much less sisters and always wished them to be best friends. It was this wish to be best friends that blinded Lucy from exploring so much about herself. In her unusual way, Lucy decided that despite her shortcomings, she could work hard enough so that her sister would feel the same way about her, too, one day.

  Lucy’s mom seemed to like one of the girls much better than the other, and that girl was not Lucy. She did not remember the day or age when she first realized this fact, but over the years, it became clear that Anne was the better daughter. And Lucy, loving Anne too much to take offense, readily agreed.

  “Don’t overeat before dinner, or you’ll get fat like your sister,” Dianna said, snatching the bag of goldfish from Anne’s hands as both girls watched Oprah, seated side by side on the couch.

  Anne did not initially care about this golden favoritism and worked very hard to shake the honor by continually challenging their parents, always doing things her way. She walked through life as if in a cloud of glittery smoke, fury, and misdirection. It was all very intoxicating for Lucy, who never strayed very far off a well-lit path.

  The two girls danced this way through the years with one in a theatrical spotlight, and the other shadowed as the well-meaning stagehand. Still, there was much love between them, and this was, after all, all that they knew. Days led into weeks and weeks into years, and they shared secrets and holidays and bulky comforters in the back seat on road trips to their grandmother’s house. This way, it all seemed very ordinary and mundane with little to contemplate and nothing to resolve.

  Lucy’s mom was a lot more like Anne. The two seemed cut from the sam
e variegated fabric, but neither was willing to admit it. Lucy felt like an outsider in the world her sister and mother created in their home. They were like bookends, one young and one old needing the same things, neither having it to give away. Even with this constant tension, her mom and sister seemed connected in a tangled web that did not extend to Lucy. Lucy was attached to no one, free-floating, always wondering why the web had not ensnared her, too, as she was also her mother’s daughter after all.

  Dianna ran hot and cold unpredictably just like Anne and seemed not to know quite what she wanted as an adult. As a child, Lucy did not know exactly what she wanted either but knew it was essential to figure this out before she was much older, like twenty-five. Lucy liked timelines and knew all the things she wanted to do before certain ages arrived. Dianna had not had a timeline, or she did not like the timeline that she had created while looking back as a married woman with children. She talked about it all the time. This made Lucy even more aware of a right and a wrong way to do things, and she wanted to do things right.

  “Do everything you want to do before you have kids,” Dianna sighed, after that, you’re just a glorified maid.

  Once, when Lucy was in elementary school, her mom had received a phone call with what must have been upsetting news. Dianna had dropped to the floor, holding a cup of sugar, spilling it in thousand-lined directions. Lucy was afraid to ask about the news but instead chose to do something to help. She crossed the kitchen to get the broom in her socked feet and tried her best to sweep up the sugar. As Lucy grew up, she often thought about her mother sitting helplessly in that pile of sugar while she swept. For her, this pattern of not asking questions and cleaning up other people’s messes went on for years until the mess was someone dying, and then she learned how to stop.