A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (18 page)

“This is not funny. I bet those stupid dishes are going to cost me a mint. Most of them were her good ones, with those Italian chickens on them.”

But even as I said it, I started laughing, too. We stood crotch-deep in the shal ow end, giggling together like vicious little girls who have played a mean prank at a sleepover. I was glad our backs were turned to the window. When I final y got it tamped down, I said, “They are some ugly-ass dishes, though, Lord, and what kind of a dreadful girl are you, only perking up when we start smashing things that belong to my ex’s wife? What possessed you?”

Liza stopped laughing, instantly, when I asked that last question. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, but nothing came out. She tried again, her jaw unhinging and working like a word was caught in her throat and she was trying to maneuver it on out. Final y she said something that sounded like “soup.” We blinked at each other, both of us surprised. She shook her head no, then said, “Pick soup.” These weren’t the words she meant. I could see it in her scared eye, that she had heard herself, and whatever was inside, it wasn’t coming out properly. Her shoulders tensed, and she wagged her head back and forth, close to panicking.

“Don’t,” I said. “This is good. You’re talking, and that’s good. Even if the word isn’t right, it’s a word.” She kept wagging her head no at me, but I slapped the water, hard. I said, firm, “This wil help. We wil get there. Come on.”

I thrust the pool noodle at her, and we walked out farther and deeper, my hand steady on her back belt. I tried to forget Sandy and turn al my attention to repeating the exercises I’d seen the PTs do with Liza, first warming her up by walking back and forth across the pool, shortways. After a couple of laps, we went a little deeper. Liza spread her feet apart to get her shoulders lower and then lifted her arms up as if she were doing the top half of a jumping jack. I held steady to the back of her belt as she repeated the movement. We’d begun a series of careful squats when the kitchen door opened and Sandy came out.

She had changed into a swimsuit, too, a Lands’ End tank that held her body so rigidly it looked lined in whalebone. My eyes narrowed. It was the kind of suit I’d have to buy if Mosey got her way and started cal ing me her mee-maw, but Sandy didn’t have a bad figure. It was like she’d picked it so that anyone watching would know at once who was the wife and who was the mistress.

Sandy came to the edge of the pool and sat down, swinging her feet in the water. I felt Liza straightening, the good side of her mouth curling irrepressibly up. Wel , why not? With Sandy in the pool, she was back in the middle of an aborted catfight over an absent man. It was practical y her home territory. And whether she knew it or not, she’d been in the middle of this very fight before.

I’d been seeing Sandy’s husband for almost six months when Liza showed up on my doorstep, strung out six ways from Sunday and toting Mosey. I’d cal ed Lawrence and asked him to give me some space and some time. It wasn’t only because my hands were so instantly ful .

Lawrence was a cop, and even though Liza said she was off meth, she drank cough medicine like it was Coca-Cola, using it to wash down the brightly colored pil s that lined her pockets. I didn’t want to put Lawrence in the position of either arresting my kid or ignoring il egal substances. I spent my time researching rehab centers and waiting at legal aid so Liza could grant me a say in Mosey’s life before I checked her in. I burned al my vacation and sick leave in those weeks, forging a bond with the baby so she wouldn’t be scared while Liza was getting clean.

While I was in the middle of al that, Sandy came back home, Harry and Max in tow. I guess the sex had worn off enough for her to see that her shoe salesman was fatter and older and poorer than he’d seemed online.

“She wants to work it out,” Lawrence told me on the phone.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“You,” he said. But he said it soft, almost like it was an apology. I waited, holding my breath, and he said, “The boys are…they cling to me like a couple of freaked-out monkeys. Then they tear off and act like natural-born assholes, looking to see how I’l react. They are so relieved to be home, but they don’t trust it, you know? Not the way they used to. I want them back. I want their lives put back together.”

“But do you want
her
back?” I asked again, and in the long silence I had my answer, even before he spoke.

“The boys need us. Not me. Us,” he said, like it was exactly that simple. I had Mosey and Liza home, so I knew too wel that it was.

Stil , I said, “How can you ever trust her?”

He sighed. “I don’t trust her, but hel , I cheated, too, Ginny. That helps somehow. It’s like we’re even.”

It took me a second to realize that by cheating he meant me. There was silence on the phone between us. I was furious, and my heart was smashed, but inside I knew, if it was him or Liza and the baby? Wel , when they’d shown up, I’d cut him out immediately and thoroughly. So thoroughly I hadn’t even known that his dumb-slut stupid wife had come home. So I said, “Bye, Lawrence,” and I set the phone back careful on its cradle and went to read
Goodnight Moon
for the nineteenth time that day, trying not to feel anything except the magical way sleepiness made Mosey get heavier. I didn’t even cry until she was a limp string of trusting weight and heat, sleeping heartbeat to heartbeat on my chest.

Now here was the same dumb-slut stupid wife easing herself down into the pool with us, saying, “You looked like you could use some help.”

“How kind of you,” I said, terse. “Liza, you want to try some backward walking?”

Liza made her “yes” noise, “Yarrrrr,” long and growly like a pirate. I gave Sandy a nod, translating. Sandy got on Liza’s other side and kept pace with us. She wasn’t actual y touching Liza, which seemed wise to me, but I had to admit I was glad to have a person there. The real PTs had worked in pairs in the water, with Liza between them.

As we made our slow way, Sandy asked, “What’s happened to your daughter?”

“She had a stroke,” I said. “She can understand you, by the way. So don’t you talk around her like she’s a dog or a French person.”

We reached the other end of the pool in silence. Much as I appreciated how alive Liza felt with Sandy beside her, I didn’t want to talk to Liza in front of her, or make Liza try to talk. I didn’t want her to say “soup” to Sandy when the word she was looking for was “bitch.” We were already in our swimsuits. I didn’t want us to be that kind of naked, too.

“Now what?” Sandy said as we got to the end.

“Now we go sideways,” I said. We shifted around so we were al facing the deep in a line, me first, then Liza, and Sandy by the wal . We crabbed our way back across the pool, step together, step together. Liza led with her bad side, something that would be impossible on land. By the end of the second lap, Liza was tiring. We’d been at it more than half an hour. I said, “I think we should stop here.”

As soon as we were out of the pool, Sandy left us. I started packing up the gear and pul ing our dresses on over our wet suits. It seemed to take a long time to do everything backward. When we went back through the house, Sandy was sitting in the den, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She’d taken her hair down and brushed it, too, and put some color on her lips. She seemed different with her clothes on. Harder and sharper.

Liza was exhausted from the workout, and Sandy seemed to sense it. For the first time, it felt like the two of us were alone in a room.

“Thank you,” I said, and she nodded, acknowledging my words but not real y responding. I added, “Don’t blame Lawrence. He hasn’t been sneaking. He’s not sneaky. He didn’t know I was coming.”

“I know.” She smiled with a weird, sad triumph. “It’s strange, but it makes me like you more. Knowing he hasn’t cal ed you. Somehow it’s better for me, knowing he didn’t spend the last decade pining and suffering my presence.”

I said, “I don’t want to get into this. I only wanted to use your pool.” Liza was slumping with tired. I began helping her turn the walker, wishing I’d brought her chair.

Sandy cal ed after me, “Max—that’s our youngest—he took early admission at Georgetown last summer. Lawrence stuck it out for another year.

But we both knew it wasn’t any good. He moved out at the start of July.”

That stopped me dead. I turned to her. “Lawrence left you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I assumed he’d gone back with you. I know my husband, and that’s what I would have bet, real y, if anyone had been wil ing to lay odds.” She laughed, a bitter bark of sound. “If you want to work out in my pool again, you can. It’s funny, how much I don’t mind, now that I know that pool’s the only thing of mine you’ve used in recent days.”

An awful triumph shone in her eyes, and beside me, so soft only I could hear, a grumbling sound like a growl began in Liza’s throat. Tired or not, she was getting this.

I said, as evenly as I could, “Thanks, but I’m having my own put in.”

She nodded. “A fine idea. It’s always better to get your own.”

I wanted out of there, that very second, but al at once it was a battle to get Liza moving. I could smel intent al over her. Sandy was lucky my girl was caged in the walker. She would have lost an eye had Liza been herself. I felt an awful, unnamable something surging in me in a wave, but I ignored it and did what I could to get me and Liza the hel out, fast.

It wasn’t until I was driving home that I understood what I was feeling. Rage. He was free, and yet he’d never cal ed me. I would have put my money with Sandy’s. I would have bet that he would cal me, first thing.

“Oh, you bastard. Real y?” I said out loud to him, and Liza grunted in response. To her I said, “I’m glad you broke those dishes. I wish you’d broken more stuff.”

When I mentioned the dishes, Liza went dead stil , and then she started looking around, like I’d stopped existing. My anger was huge enough to keep me warm company anyway. I sped home, daring any yahoo in a Lawrence-style uniform to pul me over. Liza and me, we would take his face off.

Or
I
would anyway. Liza had disconnected, but not from Earth. Just from me. She was rooting around in the car, hunting something, fingers curling into the Malibu’s cup holders, one by one, and then she starting searching the center console.

My hands were wrapped around the steering wheel, squeezing like it was Sandy’s skinny throat. It had never occurred to me that if he was free, he wouldn’t come. Never. I’d believed he was stil mine in a place so deep that I’d never so much as thought it through. It was as basic as breathing, but it must have been in my head that way only. Who knows how many nice men I’d failed to notice or respond to because I’d held them up to what was turning out to be a whol y imaginary Lawrence and found them lacking?

I roared off the highway and forced myself to ease off the gas, lest I mow down some neighborhood children. Beside me Liza was stil twisting around hunting through the car. She bent at the waist, pressing her face almost to her knees, her good hand sweeping the floorboards in front of her.

“What?” I snapped.

She stayed in that position, digging in al the crap that seemed to pile up in my car, junk mail, crumpled Taco Bel bags, three or four paperback thril ers, a pair of Mosey’s socks.

As I pul ed in to our own driveway, Liza sat up, making a rooster crow of triumph. She had an old, empty to-go cup from Starbucks, lid stil on, clutched in one hand. She held it toward me.

“Okay…” I tried to take it, but she wouldn’t let it go. Her gaze met mine, her one eye so alive and fierce, in spite of how the pool work had tired her. Her jaw worked again, the way it had at Sandy’s when she’d lofted that water glass. When I’d talked about the broken dishes and she had told me to pick soup. Now she had a Starbucks cup.

“Liza, what?” My long-silent child was trying to tel me something, something important, her first real attempt at complicated communication since she’d come home from the hospital. “Something about a cup?”

The half of her face that worked burst into sunshine.

I said, “Cup?” and al the breath came out of Liza in a joyful whoop. “So yes, a cup, a cup, something with a cup? Is this about Sandy? Rehab?

Mosey?” The second I said Mosey’s name, Liza began making her “yes” noise, so sharp and hard it was like a bark. Three times, yes yes yes.

I looked from her face to the cup, my anger leaving in a flood of relief or hope, something, because if she was trying so hard, then there were things inside her head to say. That meant she was remembering. Not just listening and understanding but responding and making connections to her past, to the Liza that she used to be. I reached past the cup and grabbed her wrist and clung to it, tight.

My girl was talking in the only way she could, and with an urgency that told me this was a thing I needed to know. Now. “I’l figure it out,” I said.

I took the cup from her and clutched it tight. It was a letter from the real Liza mailed to me from somewhere far away, but written in a language I did not speak.

CHAPTER NINE

Liza