A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (37 page)

He’s late. He’s too ugly to be late, but she isn’t what she goddamn used to be, now, is she? She’s so skinny she can balance the salt shaker on her hipbone. She has to smile closemouthed to hide her teeth. She’s off it now. She quit. Again. But if the pocky guy stil feels okay about making her wait, what the hel good is being off it doing her?

Liza’s sick with the shakes, and there’s a hacking in her lungs she can’t get rid of, even on days like today, when she’s washed a Percocet down with half a bottle of Robitussin. The bookshelves and the furniture look like they’ve been constructed from plops of gray wal paper paste. The very air is lukewarm sludge. Meth is not her problem. Life sucking is her problem. The only reason she’s on a break right now is that Janel e has been tweaking bad for days and can’t remember to give Jane Grace a bath. Or dinner. Or the time of fucking day.

The pocky guy wil have something, though, maybe some Dilaudid. Liza finds herself cracking her knuckles. She’s been quit more than a week, when she came home from an overnight at some guy’s trailer and found Jane Grace crying in a diaper fil ed with two days’ worth of her own leaking waste. Liza doesn’t let that happen. Not usual y.

But the pocky guy, he’l have something. Maybe meth, which she’s off because Janel e is tweaking and so Liza can’t forget Jane Grace. But Liza could write herself a note, maybe? Then she wil remember. A note is al she needs.

“Dear Liza, pick up fruit and diapers, be home by six, and don’t blow the pocky guy in the stacks again, no matter how many boxes of expired
Sudafed he’s got for you.”

She goes to the bank of computers and logs in to her e-mail. It’s the old flirtybits e-mail address, the one she set up on Melissa’s home computer back when Hotmail was brand-new and they felt like the only real girls on the Internet. She hasn’t used it in the last couple of years, but she could start again. She logs on, waiting for the slow-grinding library computer to bring up her in-box. She could write herself notes every day. Never forget again.

When the screen loads, there is a letter for her already waiting. It was sent more than three months ago.

I need to see you. I wil come to you. Just say.

No signature, but Liza knows damn wel who [email protected] is. Who it has to be. She feels a mix of things, al in a jumble, but the loudest of the things sounds a lot like yes.

She sees the pocky guy’s Honda turning in to the lot, and so she quickly types, Montgomery, Alabama. Friday. 4 PM. Krispy Kreme donuts on the corner of Alabaster and Pine. She hits Send before she can talk herself out of it.

She doesn’t change her mind. Come Friday she’s stil quit, maybe a Vicodin and some Xanax here and there. She arrives at Krispy Kreme early, sitting at the counter facing the big plate-glass window. The machine glazes an army of doughnuts as they slide by in formation. She pours cream into her coffee, watching it bloom into surreal whipped cloud shapes in the oily black liquid. Melissa cal ed that “Dalí in my coffee,” back in the day.

As if thinking her name can conjure her, Melissa is there. She slides onto the stool by Liza. She’s wearing crisp linen slacks and a white blouse.

Immaculate. She’s barely got on any makeup, and her hair is long, so straight it looks ironed. She smiles, and her eyes are warm, but surprised, too. Not to see Liza, but at the Liza she is seeing. Liza can suddenly smel herself, a dank, unpleasant thing, and Melissa smel s like clean trees and lemon peel. Liza smiles back with her lips closed.

Melissa says, “We’re glad you came.”

The “we” tips Liza that the square-jawed guy is with her. He’s a couple of years older than them. Blond hair. Big shoulders. This must be Mcbob, and he’s Captain fucking America. He takes the stool by Melissa and smiles, too, very wide and white. “This is Liza?” It’s clear from his tone that Liza is not the girl that Melissa described.

Liza stares down into Dalí blooming in her coffee, not stirring. Melissa is talking and talking. She is—of al damn things—apologizing. But she uses a warm, pity-fil ed voice to do it. She’s catching Liza up, fil ing her in on what came after that bad day on the beach. She got to go straight home after the hospital. Her family lawyer had the cops at bay, for the moment. That night she paced her room, wanting to pul off sheets of her itching skin, wanting to bang her head into the wal until the thinking stopped. Just before dawn she left. Stepped out of her life as it if were a pair of too-tight shoes.

She ran off, just like Liza. Except first. She makes that very clear in her Melissa way.

“I was very self-destructive,” she says. “Drugs.” She lays her hand on Liza’s shoulder in such moist and cloying sympathy that Liza is dizzy with the urge to lean down and bite a chunk out of her forearm.

Captain F. America is the guy who has remade her life. Helped her get clean. Helped her change her name and start fresh.

“I’m here to make amends,” Melissa says. “My therapist says it was my dad who had the power in the relationship. Not you. For sure not me. It was easier to blame you.…”

Her buzzwords run together: Toxic environment. Atonement. Process.

Even so, Liza hears the message: Melissa landed on her feet. She kil ed that baby, same as Liza, maybe more than Liza, but she’s clean and blond and shiny and forgiven. She’s finishing her steps. She’s rehabbed and reborn, the girl with everything, version 2.0. There’s a modest diamond winking on her finger.

Captain America says, “Liza. Let us help. There’s a center where Melissa went…”

Liza smiles with her lips closed and her eyes dead. She rises. It is time to walk away. Melissa grabs her hand, and Liza would yank her own away, but she realizes that Melissa’s hand is pressing money into hers. The money and Melissa’s pity-soaked smile, they are nothing more than ways to say,
I Win.
The
I Win
is there, under every therapy-soaked platitude and patronizing kindness.

The worst part is, it’s true. Melissa is winning. Liza’s hand closes around the bil s, like she’s having a muscle spasm in her fingers. She wants to throw them in Melissa’s face, fol owed by a vol ey of her own slick spit, but she needs the bil s, needs what they wil buy, too much.

She walks out, with Melissa cal ing after, “Our door is always open. You know my e-mail!”

Liza does not look back. She hasn’t seen Melissa Richardson since.

She heads to Reg’s place. Reg is always holding. Half an hour later, Melissa doesn’t matter. She is Liza and beautiful and good, striding into Reg’s bedroom, confident, riding him and blind with the brightness of being happy.

She’s happy until she isn’t anymore. Until Reg and the money are al used up. She dozes, but Reg’s bed feels like it is made of cold oatmeal.

She’s half submerged in it. Melissa won. She should hitch down to Mobile, walk into the bay, and keep walking until it closes cool and blue over her and Melissa wil realize she has caused this, yes, sent a girl into the ocean once a-fucking-gain. It seems like a good idea until she remembers Jane Grace. She almost never forgets Jane Grace, but this is the third time now. No, fourth. Only the fourth, which isn’t so bad, not real y. Only the fourth time she forgot the baby.

She finds herself outside, and it is nighttime, and she doesn’t even know what night. She’s running for home, fast as she can, with the street feeling tacky and sticky under her feet. The road wants her to lie down and sink into the tar.

She pushes on, though. Janel e is worthless. She’s forgotten Jane Grace a thousand times. Liza has only forgotten her three. No, four. Liza is the one who remembers, who cuddles and cleans and makes jam sandwiches and who knows the words to Big’s old country lul abies. Liza has been in love with Jane Grace ever since the day in the laundry, when she got herself invited into Jane Grace’s life instead of stealing her; Liza doesn’t much like the rare days Janel e remembers that she has a kid and tries to reclaim territory, but now she desperately hopes Janel e is home. She tries to believe in a Janel e who is making mac-a-chee and running the fuzzy
Dora the Explorer
tapes over and over so Jane Grace won’t bug her.

The house is ablaze with light, but Janel e has gone out. Liza runs from room to empty room. Den, gal ey kitchen, Janel e’s bedroom, her own room, the walk-in closet where Jane Grace sleeps. Most nights Jane Grace gets up off her mattress and creeps past her mother’s bed to come climb in with Liza. It’s Liza she looks for every morning. Liza she cal s when her knee is skinned or the bad dreams come. Now Liza forgot her, and every room is empty.

The last place she looks is the bathroom, and her heart stops. The tub is ful of water, and Jane Grace is in the tub. A listing rubber ducky and three little black baby turds bob on the surface. The tub is an old-fashioned claw-foot kind, with wal s too high and slippy for Jane Grace to scale.

Jane Grace’s limbs are stil and pale, and the skin around her closed eyes looks swol en. The ends of her flossy hair float. Her face is half under the water. Her mouth is under. She is so stil .

A bad black is washing over Liza, the fast feel of her own heart bursting, when she sees a ripple on the water’s surface. Jane Grace’s snub nose is above the waterline, and the ripple is her breathing, in and out.

Liza runs to the tub. She snatches a dirty towel up off the floor as she goes, and as she bends and reaches, she is remembering a yel ow blanket, the baby who stopped breathing in the night. She kissed that little face a thousand times, her lips pushing warm air, two fingers pressing the tiny chest, but she couldn’t cal back the breath, couldn’t make the heart beat. At last Liza wrapped that baby tight and lowered her into the earth. Her arms have been so empty, she’s been so black and empty since that night. Now her arms fil as she is lifting Jane Grace out of the water, wrapping her chil ed body in the towel. Jane Grace moans and turns in her arms.

“This isn’t a place for babies,” Liza tel s her, and Jane Grace mutters and buries her wet, tear-swol en face into Liza’s chest. Jane Grace smel s faintly of urine, and her skin is clammy and wrinkled into prunes on every tip, but she is breathing and her hands fist themselves in Liza’s long, dirty hair. As she wakes, she smel s the bad smel that is Liza and she smiles.

Liza stands up, Jane Grace in her arms. She’s loved Jane Grace from the day she almost stole her at the laundry, but it isn’t love that comes now to save them. When she works the baby’s socks on, she’s thinking of Melissa, not love. She remembers how they met at Rich People VBS, when there were only two pairs of pink scissors and Melissa and Liza got them every day. She remembers Claire Richardson smacking the smiling Bible-times people onto the felt board, tel ing their black, violent stories in a perky voice.

Now Liza says to the sleepy-faced baby, “I’m going to name you Moses, because I pul ed you from the water. Only you.” She slots the baby’s arms into her outgrown jacket, thinking of a rattle-bel ied stuffed duck, how she and Melissa let the ocean take the one baby and so God took the other. She is taking this one. “I’m going to name you Wil ow, because a wil ow is a special tree.”

The baby says, “I Jane Grace!”

Liza says, “Yes. You are. You’re my Mosey Wil ow and everybody’s Jane Grace, too. But I have to go away now. You want to come home with your Liza?”

Mosey Wil ow Jane Grace clenches herself, arms and legs wrapping so tight around Liza that it’s a choke hold and an answer.

Love alone doesn’t make Liza head for the highway with Jane Grace stuffed in her old baby sling, looking for a ride out of town. It hasn’t been enough, not once, this whole damn year. Today love has Liza’s history, pushing her forward like a loaded gun pressed hard into her spine; she is Liza Slocumb. She is Big’s girl, and she’l be damned and dead before she’l let Melissa Richardson beat her.

Liza stares down into the empty tub in Big’s green-tiled bathroom. Today Liza cannot do the thing Melissa failed to do. There is no baby to pul from the water. Mosey is mostly grown now, and it isn’t so simple to stop her from sinking. Mosey is going under, and Liza doesn’t know how to stop it.

She turns her walker, and her feet fol ow, the good one, then the bad one, too. She turns the walker again, but the bathroom is so narrow. The walker’s legs knock hard against the bathroom trash can. The can dumps over, its contents spil ing out across the floor.

The stick rol s out last. It must have been buried down deep, hidden under crumpled tissue and mini–Dixie cups and dental flossers. It lands faceup.

Two pink lines. Liza knows what that means.

Liza’s mouth opens, and a loud and angry vowel comes out. A long
O
that rises up high in pitch and volume until it is an endless wail. Too late.

Too late. She saw Mosey drifting but was helpless, and Big saw nothing, and it is al too late. Now Mosey and Big come, crowding the doorway as Liza howls and howls, and then they see it.

“Oh, my God!” Mosey says. “But I didn’t even…I haven’t…They’re al under the floor!”

Big rushes forward, passing Mosey to take Liza in her arms. She presses awkwardly against the walker, leaning over it to squeeze Liza tight and shush her. “It isn’t Mosey. Mosey is not pregnant. It’s me. It’s me. It’s me.”

Liza’s voice cuts out. She looks over Big’s shoulder at Mosey. At Mosey’s stricken face. She stares from the stick to Big and back again.

Two pink lines.

“It’s a good thing, it’s the best thing,” Big croons, so happy.

But Mosey is rol ing away from them, away from Liza’s fear and Big’s accidental joy. Mosey turns and keeps on turning, turning away. Then she’s gone.