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Overview
Hidden identities and changes to one’s past aren’t easy. Imagine the mental and emotional toll of such alterations, shoving it all down so no one can see. Nancy Tucker’s debut novel is an exquisite AND troubled unraveling. You won’t be able to stop looking — or reading, for that matter.
"A stunning debut...Suspenseful? You bet. Heart-rending? From beginning to end."—The Washington Post
“Gripping…The voices of Chrissie and Julia reside deep in your skull: visceral and wicked, sad and wonderful, all at the same time.” —The New York Times
“Fans of Lisa Jewell and smart psychological suspense will eagerly await Tucker’s next.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
“So that was all it took,” I thought. “That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world. One morning, one moment, one yellow-haired boy. It wasn't so much after all.”
Meet Chrissie...
Chrissie is eight and she has a secret: she has just killed a boy. The feeling made her belly fizz like soda pop. Her playmates are tearful and their mothers are terrified, keeping them locked indoors. But Chrissie rules the roost — she's the best at wall-walking, she knows how to get free candy, and now she has a feeling of power that she never gets at home, where food is scarce and attention scarcer.
Twenty years later, adult Chrissie is living in hiding under a changed name. A single mother, all she wants is for her daughter to have the childhood she herself was denied. That’s why the threatening phone calls are so terrifying. People are looking for them, the past is catching up, and Chrissie fears losing the only thing in this world she cares about, her child.
Nancy Tucker leaves the reader breathless as she inhabits her protagonist with a shocking authenticity that moves the reader from sympathy to humor to horror to heartbreak and back again.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780593191576 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2022 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 62,495 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chrissie
I killed a little boy today. Held my hands around his throat, felt his blood pump hard against my thumbs. He wriggled and kicked and one of his knees caught me in the belly, a sharp lasso of pain. I roared. I squeezed. Sweat made it slippy between our skins but I didn't let go, pressed and pressed until my nails were white. It was easier than I thought it would be. Didn't take long for him to stop kicking. When his face was the color of milk jelly I sat back on my heels and shook my hands. They had seized up. I put them on my own neck, above the place where the twin doorknob bones stuck out. Blood pumped hard against my thumbs. I am here, I am here, I am here.
I went to knock for Linda afterward, because it was hours before tea. We walked to the top of the hill and turned ourselves upside down against the handstand wall, gritting our palms with smoke ends and sparkles of glass. Our dresses fell over our faces. The wind blew cool on our legs. A woman ran past us, Donna's mammy, ran past with her fat breasts bumping up and down. Linda pushed herself off the wall to stand beside me, and we watched Donna's mammy run down the street together. She was making noises that sounded like cat howls. They ripped up the quiet of the afternoon.
"What's she crying for?" asked Linda.
"Don't know," I said. I knew.
Donna's mammy disappeared round the corner at the end of the street and we heard faraway gasps. When she came back there was a lump of mammies around her, all of them hurrying, brown shoes slapping the road in a thrum-thrum-thrum beat. Michael was with them but he couldn't keep up. By the time they passed us he was hanging a long way behind, panting in a crackling shudder, and his mammy tugged his hand and he fell. We saw the raspberry-ripple splash of blood, heard the yowl slice through the air. His mammy hauled him up and clamped him on her hip. She kept on running, running, running.
When the mammies were just past us, so we were looking at a herd of cardigan backs and wide, jiggling bottoms, I pulled Linda's arm and we followed. At the end of the road we saw Richard coming out of the shop with a toffee chew in one hand and Paula in the other. He saw us running with the mammies and he followed. Paula didn't like Richard pulling her, started grizzling, so Linda picked her up and clutched her round the middle. Her legs were striped where her fat folded in on itself. They hung out of a swollen nappy that dropped lower and lower with every step.
We heard the crowd before we saw it: a rumbling blanket of sighs and swears, wrinkled by women crying. Girls crying. Babies crying. Round the corner and there it was, a cloud of people standing around the blue house. Linda wasn't next to me anymore because Paula's nappy had fallen off at the end of Copley Street and she had stopped to try to put it back on her. I didn't wait. I ran forward, away from the lump of twittering mammies, into the cloud. When I got to the middle I had to squat down small and wind between the hot bodies, and when there were no more bodies to wind through I saw it. The great big man standing in the doorway, the little dead boy in his arms.
A noise came from the back of the crowd and I looked on the ground for a fox, because it was the noise a fox makes when a thorn gets stuck in its paw, the noise of something's insides coming out through its mouth. Then the cloud was breaking, disintegrating, people falling into one another. I got pushed over, and I watched through legs as Steven's mammy went to the man at the door. Her insides were coming out of her mouth in a howl. She took Steven from him and the howl turned to words: "My boy, my boy, my boy." Then she sat down on the ground, not caring that her skirt was around her middle and everyone could see her underpants. Steven was clutched against her, and I thought how it was a good job he was dead already, because if he hadn't already been dead he would have got suffocated by her rolls of breast and belly. I couldn't see his face under the rolls. Didn't matter. I already knew what it looked like-gray as gone-bad liver, eyes like staring marbles. He had stopped blinking. I had noticed that when I'd got done killing him. It had been strange to see someone not blink for so long. When I'd tried to do it my eyeballs had burned. His mammy stroked his hair and howled, and Donna's mammy broke through the crowd to kneel beside her, and Richard's mammy and Michael's mammy and all the other mammies swarmed and cried. I didn't know what they were crying for. Their kids weren't dead.
It took Linda and Paula a long time to catch up with the rest of us. When they arrived in the blue-house alley Linda was holding Paula's wet nappy.
"Do you know how to get this back on her?" Linda asked, holding it out to me. I didn't answer, just leaned round so I could carry on watching the heap of howling mammies. "What's going on?" she asked.
"Steven's there," I said.
"Was he in the blue house?" she asked.
"He was dead in the blue house," I said. "Now his mammy's got him, but he's still dead."
"How did he die?" she asked.
"Don't know," I said. I knew.
Paula sat down on the ground beside me, her bare bottom nestling into the dirt. She moved her chubby hands around until she found a little stone, which she ate carefully. Linda sat on my other side and watched the mammies. Paula ate three more stones. People muttered and whispered and cried and Steven's mammy stayed hidden under a shawl of breasts and pink cardigans. Susan was there. She was Steven's sister. She was standing away from the mammies, away from the crowd. No one seemed to see her except me. It was like she was a ghost.
When the sun started to go down Paula's mammy came over, picked her up, hooked a stone out of her mouth, and took her home. Linda had to go too, because she said her mammy would have tea on the table. She asked if I was coming but I said no. I stayed until a car purred up and two policemen got out, tall and smart with shiny buttons on their clothes. One of them crouched and talked to Steven's mammy in words I couldn't hear, even when I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, which usually helped me hear things grown-ups wanted to keep secret. The other one went into the blue house. I watched him slink through the downstairs rooms, and I thought about shouting, "I killed him upstairs. You need to look upstairs." I bit my lips shut. I couldn't give the game away.
I wanted to stay watching, at least until the policeman got to looking in the right place, but Mr. Higgs from number 35 told me to run along. When I stood I was patterned with lines and bumps from the ground. I could see Steven better from standing. His legs were flopped over his mammy's arm, and I could see that one of his shoes had come off, and that he had mud on his knees. Susan was the only other kid still there, because she didn't have anyone waiting for her at home anymore. Her arms were crossed over her chest and she was holding on to her shoulders, like she was hugging herself, or holding her pieces together. She looked thin and glowy. When she flicked her hair out of her face she saw me, and I was about to wave, but Mr. Higgs took me by the elbow.
"Come on, lass," he said. "Time to go now." I wriggled away. I thought he would just shoo me off, but he walked me all the way back to the street, close beside me the whole time. I could hear his breath: hard and panty. It felt like slugs leaving slime on my skin.
"Look at that sky," he said, pointing above our heads. I looked. It was all blue.
"Yeah," I said.
"First day of spring," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
"First day of spring and a little lad lying dead," he said. He made a tutting sound with his tongue on the roof of his mouth.
"Yeah," I said. "Dead."
"You're not scared are you, lass?" he asked. I climbed onto Mr. Warren's front garden wall. "The police'll sort this out, you know. There's nothing for you to be scared of."
"There's nothing I am scared of," I said.
When I got to the end of the wall I jumped down and ran all the way back to the house. I took the shortcut, the one where you had to squeeze through the gap in the car park fence. I couldn't take the shortcut when I was with Linda because she couldn't fit through the gap, but it was easy for me. People always said I was small for eight.
None of the lights were on in the house. I clicked the front door shut behind me and flicked the switch on the wall, but nothing happened. There was no more lectric. I hated when there was no more lectric. It meant the telly didn't work and the house was dark-dark-dark with no way of making it light, and I got scared of the things I couldn't see. For a while I stood still in the hallway, listening for Mam. I didn't think Da would be there, but I listened for him too, stretching my ears like I could magic up his noises just by listening hard enough. Everything was quiet. Mam's handbag was on the floor by the stairs and I found a packet of biscuits inside. They were my favorite kind-sand-colored, dotted with dead-fly raisins-and I ate them lying on my bed, remembering to chew on the side of my mouth without the rotten tooth in it. When they were all gone I held my hands up above my face and stretched out my fingers in starfish spikes. I waited until all the blood had drained away, then brought them down and stroked them across my face. They were so numb it was like they were someone else's, and it was strange, the feeling of someone else stroking my face. When they came back to life I put my palms on my cheeks and peered through my fingers in a hide-and-seek squint.
Bet you can't see me, bet you can't find me, bet you can't catch me.
That night I woke up when everything else was asleep. I lay still on my back. I thought Mam must have slammed the front door, because that was usually what woke me up in the night, or sometimes I woke myself by peeing the bed, but my sheets were dry and I couldnÕ t hear anyone downstairs. There were no growing pains in my legs. I touched my belly, my chest, my throat. I stopped at my throat. Remembering was butter hitting a hot pan. Foam and sizzle.
I killed a little boy today. I took him to the alleys and held my hands around his throat in the blue house. I kept on pressing even when our skins were slippy with sweat. He died underneath me and a hundred million people watched him be carried down to his mammy by a tall, strong man.
I had the belly-fizzing feeling I got whenever I remembered a delicious secret, like sherbet exploding in my guts. Underneath it there was something else, something tighter and more like metal. I ignored it. I concentrated on the fizzing. Whoosh and whirr.
Once I had remembered about killing Steven I was too excited to go back to sleep, so I tiptoed out of bed and onto the landing. Outside Mam's room I stopped and held my breath, but her door was shut and I couldn't hear anything through it. The floorboards were cold on the bottoms of my feet, and I felt hollow, pale-colored. The biscuits seemed a long time ago. There was never any food in the kitchen, even though the whole point of a kitchen was to have food in it, but I looked anyway. I climbed onto the worktop and opened all the cupboards, and in the one by the cooker I found a paper bag of sugar. I tucked it under my arm.
When I turned the front door handle I had to be extra careful, because it made a loud clicking sound if you moved it too fast, and if Mam was asleep in her room I didn't want to wake her. I slid the mat over the front step and pulled the door tight against it, so it stuck but didn't close. That was what Mam did to stop me knocking when I came back from school. The outside air gave me goose bumps where I was bare under my nightie, wind whistling up inside me. I stood at the front gate for a long time, looking up and down the empty street, feeling like I was the only person in the world.
Before, outside the blue house, I had heard one of the mammies say the streets would never be the same again. She had had her head on another mammy's shoulder, and had been making a wet patch on her cardigan with tears. "It'll never be the same again," she had said. "Not after this. Not after someone's gone and done something like this. How can we feel safe when we know there's evil like that in the streets? How can we ever trust the kids are safe when we've got the devil here? The devil among us?" Remembering it made me glow. The streets were never going to be the same again. They used to be safe and now they weren't, and all of it because of one person, one morning, one moment. All of it because of me.
The pavement was gritty and scrubbed at my feet, but I didn't care. I decided to walk to church, because church was at the top of the hill and from outside church you could see all the streets in the grid. I kept my eyes on the steeple as I walked: spiked in the sky like a winter tree. When I got to the top I climbed onto the wall next to the angel statue and looked back at the warren of matchbox houses. My belly squeezed and I licked my finger and stuck it into the bag of sugar and sucked it clean. I did that again and again, until my rotten tooth hummed, until prickly crystals sanded the insides of my lips. I felt like a ghost or an angel, standing on the wall in my white nightie, eating sugar from a paper bag. No one saw me but I was still there. I was basically God.
Reading Group Guide
1. The First Day of Spring centers on Julia, a young mother who as a child committed an unspeakable act that she must now live with and atone for. In what ways are Julia’s adult decisions affected by Chrissie’s childhood experiences and actions?
2. The narration oscillates between Chrissie’s mischievous past and Julia’s cautious present. How did this color your read of Chrissie/Julia’s story and your ability to piece together the events of the novel?
3. Chrissie’s living conditions are squalid, and she is constantly left feeling ravenously hungry. Consider the two instances when her mother tries to be rid of her: the scene at the adoption agency and the scene with the Smarties. In what ways is Chrissie a product of her environment? Talk about how environment and community influence our upbringing. Would things be different if Chrissie’s dad were the one raising her? If the Beautiful Woman had adopted her after all? Could any child have done what Chrissie did, or were the circumstances unique?
4. Instead of meeting Sasha from Child Services for their check-in after Molly’s accident, Julia makes a rather bold decision to return to her childhood home. Would you do the same if you were in Julia’s shoes? Do you understand her reasoning for doing so? What does she discover from this visit?
5. Many of Chrissie’s misguided beliefs about the easy nature of life and death are rooted in her father’s sudden disappearance and reappearance in her life. Do you think her belief is genuine, or is she less naive than she seems? Would you call either Chrissie or Julia a reliable narrator?
6. There are very different mother-daughter relationships on display in the novel: Chrissie and her mum, the Beautiful Woman and Ruthie, Steven and Susan and their mum, and so on. What do these relationships tell us about the English town in which Chrissie lived? How have the various parenting styles contributed to Julia and Molly’s relationship, either consciously or subconsciously?
7. Throughout the novel Chrissie refers to Linda as her best friend despite calling her “thick” and otherwise treating her poorly. Discuss Chrissie and Linda’s friendship. What does each girl get from it? Discuss their reunion. Does it turn out as you expected?
8. Of her release from Haverleigh, Julia says, “The people in charge had hidden me away, then thrown me into a life I hadn’t expected to have to live, in a world I hadn’t expected to have to understand” (43–44). Discuss Chrissie’s time at Haverleigh. What lessons does she learn there, and why do you think she feels unprepared for her reentry into society? Was Chrissie truly reformed?
9. Do you think Julia will ever tell Molly about her past and her time at Haverleigh? Why or why not? What do you think the novel is saying about redemption? Is redemption earned or obligatory for all?
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