A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (6 page)

I leaned in close and cal ed, “Liza! Liza!” But her eyes were loose in their sockets, unfocused now.

“Umbay,” she said.
My baby.
“My” was a new word. Right after the stroke, Liza didn’t say much more than yes and no. Mostly no. Now she said

“Big” and “Mosey-baby” and a few more things, like “gimme” and “potty” and “hungry” and “help.” The doctors couldn’t tel me how much of Liza was left inside, and Liza couldn’t tel me either. Now this.
My
baby. It was the first time since the stroke I longed to take a word away from her.

I reared back and grabbed her chin in one hand, forcing her head to turn toward Mosey. Mosey was running toward us now, and my mean hands made Liza see our long-legged child with al her grace gone. Her usual gazel e-style leaping had been reduced to a stagger.

“There is your baby. There is Mosey. Look at Mosey,” I hissed in Liza’s ear, and I was looking, too, unable to stop cataloging al the thousand ways that Mosey wasn’t one of us. I took her in, from her long, skinny feet, toes like fingers where we had toes like peas, up to her wide milk-chocolate eyes. Liza had my eyes, tilted at the corners like a cat’s, so black I could barely see where her pupils started.

Liza final y focused on our girl, and her voice turned off like a wire had been cut. She went flat and limp under me. Her bad eye drooped al but shut, and her good one blinked. Both were streaming tears, and her nose was running.

It was enough to have her quiet. I was stil seeing only the edges of it. I couldn’t get anywhere from the hel ish here except into the next second of the hel ish, hel ish now. The silver footlocker was Pandora’s box, ful of a living darkness, and I would not look directly there. It was more important to take care of Mosey. Shutting up Liza and taking care of Mosey was as far as I could get.

I said to Mosey, “Help me get your mom inside?”—and I was proud at how calm I sounded.

“Is she okay?” Mosey asked.

Behind me, like a deep echo, Tyler said, “Ginny, what the hel ?”

“Language!” I said to Tyler.

“What should I do?” he cal ed.

Before I could even think, I’d snapped back, “Don’t you do a single, fucking thing,” like he’d played the word “hel ” in cussing poker and I was upping him, going al in by laying down the ugliest cuss there was. Mosey’s wide eyes went even wider to hear that word come out of my mouth. I made myself take a deep breath. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it pulsing in my eyes. The heap of pink fabric at Tyler’s feet pul ed at my attention. I had to force myself to look away.

Mosey and I tried to get Liza on her feet, but she’d gone floppy and unwieldy. Tyler took over, grabbing hold of the side of my daughter that was close to deadweight and pul ing her upright.

“Get the walker,” I told Mosey. It was lying tipped over in the yard on its side.

“Is this because of I cut down her tree?” Tyler asked as we started shuffling Liza forward. Mosey trailed along beside us, toting the walker and chewing her lower lip so hard I was worried she might nip a piece clean off.

I answered in a voice so fake cheery-ghastly that I sounded like the zombie version of June Cleaver. “Yeah. Liza surely does know how to throw a fit. She loved that wil ow like it was her own baby.” Mosey gave a little startle when I said the word “baby.” She’d understood Liza’s mangled shouts, al right. Tyler blinked at me, dumb as a sweet-faced cow; he hadn’t understood a word.

We walked her slow across the concrete patio. She was tractable now, faded once more to the Liza-less creature the stroke had made her. Her eyes were unfocused, and her feet shuffled in the direction we pointed her.

“Big,” Mosey whispered, while I pushed the back door open and let Tyler drag the heavy half of Liza in. “Big, those were bones!”

“Oh, yeah,” Tyler said, loud and excited.

“You may be right,” I said. I stil sounded ghastly. We walked Liza through the den and down the hal , and my mouth felt stretched into the Joker’s smile.

Tyler said, “There were al kinds of baby things in the box. Do you think someone kil ed a—”

I interrupted him with a loud
pish
noise. Liza echoed it with a sleepy, bubbling sound. I kicked Liza’s cracked bedroom door the rest of the way open. “For al we know, those bones could be hundreds of years old. Maybe the whole neighborhood is built over an old cemetery.”

“Like in
Poltergeist
!” Now Tyler sounded excited. He was easy to distract, but Mosey had her thinking face on.

We eased Liza down onto the side of the bed. She looked tired enough to tip over, and she was filthy and covered in grass stains. “Tyler, step out, if you don’t mind? We’re going to get Liza changed. Mosey, help me get your mother’s shoes off. Her socks are ful of yard dirt.”

I heard the click of the door closing behind Tyler as he skedaddled. Yet another thing that had changed; before the stroke he’d have stood on his head with his feet on fire for a glimpse of Liza with her clothes off.

Mosey knelt down to slip off her mother’s Keds, and I took Liza’s frail wrist, the good one, and looked at my watch. She slumped, staring at nothing, but her pulse told me that inside she was running like hot lava. Mosey went to the closet to put the shoes away, and I quickly leaned down so my face was close to Liza’s face and whispered, “Liza? Liza, is that you?” She didn’t so much as blink.

“Is her pulse bad high?” Mosey asked, and I made myself turn and smile at her.

“Don’t you worry. It’s down some already. We’l wait three minutes and take it again. If it doesn’t keep coming down, we’l go right to the hospital and figure al this mess out later.”

Mosey said, “Those bones can’t be
that
old. Unless the pioneers made terry-cloth rattle ducks.”

“People have been sewing since the caveman,” I said, sharp, but truthful y, I was relieved to see her ral ied enough to give me some sass mouth and her “get real” gaze.

I got a fresh pair of sweatpants and a soft cotton T-shirt out of Liza’s dresser, and together Mosey and I got her peeled out of her grass-stained clothes. I didn’t like to see how her bad leg looked withered, thinner than her right leg. She was so skinny her hipbones pressed at her skin.

Liza let us change her, drooping and limp as a home-sewn dol . By the time we got her new socks on and brushed her hair to get the dirt out, her pulse was down. Her head was nodding, and the wil ful, writhing flash of my missing daughter I had seen as we fought on the lawn was gone altogether. I couldn’t even be positive it had been there as Mosey and I muscled a hundred pounds of floppy Liza into the bed.

I said, “You sleep now, Little,” and I lowered her to her pil ow and tucked her in. Then I said quiet to Mosey, “Cal Mrs. Lynch. See if she can’t come on over now instead of after lunch.”

“Okay.”

Mosey stil looked in terrible danger of thinking, so I said, “Don’t imagine that just because your momma blew a gasket over that tree, I didn’t notice you were skipping school. That
will
be discussed.”

That gave her something more immediate to fret on, and she turned and walked out double-time to make the cal . Teenagers are like that. In a cave post–nuclear war, I bet I could distract any high-school kid stil living by peering at her chin and asking if she was getting a pimple.

I went back up the hal , hunting for Tyler. He wasn’t in the den. I went through the swinging doors into the kitchen and saw him standing framed in the open door to the backyard. He turned toward me, and I saw he had his cel phone clutched in his hand.

“Who did you cal ?” I asked, my voice too harsh, accusing.

“Rick Warfield?” he said, and in that moment I could have cheerful y shot Tyler and dumped his body directly into the hole the wil ow had left. I could not tel Rick Warfield a story about
Poltergeist
and archaeology. He was a brighter bulb than Tyler, by several thousand watts.

I heard my voice, at top volume, asking him, “On what planet does, ‘Don’t do an effing thing,’ mean, ‘Please cal the chief of police’?”

Tyler shook his head at me. “Aw, man, Ginny, we had to cal someone. He’s coming right over. Maybe we should back off and put up tape around that spot?”

“We don’t know it’s a crime scene, good Lord,” I said. “And it’s not like you travel with yel ow cop tape in your toolbox.”

“I got duct tape,” Tyler said, and now he sounded almost hopeful.

“We are not on
CSI: Miami
, Horatio,” I snapped, and his crest fel a little. The meanest piece of me thought,
Good
.

I pushed past Tyler onto the concrete slab that passed for a patio. I stopped there and stared across the yard toward the open silver keepsake chest. Rick Warfield was coming, to lay his rough hands on the bones wound up inside that yel ow blanket. I could not stop him. My gaze moved to the heap of streaked and faded knit cloth lying beside it.

My feet walked me toward the box like they’d had their own terrible idea and they didn’t feel like checking with my brain parts before putting it into action. I bent down and picked it up in both hands. It unfurled into a shape I recognized. A baby dress. I turned the dress in my hands until I had it by the shoulders and could see the tag. Kidworks. I found myself pinching the cloth so tight that my fingers cramped, but I could not let go.

I knew this dress. I knew it. I had bought it myself, for Mosey. For Liza’s little girl, along with a host of blankets and fuzzy socks and sleepers. That was fifteen years ago, and the dress was faded and striped with mud and some kind of green-gray moldy slime I didn’t want to think about, but I recognized the ruffles at the hem. I could not help remembering it. It was the last thing I saw my grandbaby wearing before she and Liza had disappeared.

I remembered putting Liza’s baby in that dress when she was only a couple of weeks old, bald as an egg with foldy legs she kept frogged up against her bel y. Liza sat in a heap on the sofa, plumb wore out. The baby was fretting, but this baby’s brand of fret was nothing. I’d gotten through Liza Slocumb’s screamfest of a babyhood without ever once throwing her off a train trestle or eating her like a hamster momma would have. I could handle a little gritching. The baby seemed mel ow to me. That’s how I thought of her then: sweet, not weak.

I said, “Liza-Little, I got this. You can take the second shift.”

Liza said, “You got work tomorrow, Big.”

“Wel , so do you. You have to momma al day and get enough brainpower to final y give this child a name. We keep cal ing her The Baby like no one ever made one before. If you don’t decide soon, I’m going to saddle this poor child with Gretchen, just to spite you.”

When the baby fel asleep, I moved her to her bassinet in Liza’s room without bothering to change her into pajamas, because the pink knit dress was so soft. Liza was sleeping more deeply than the baby, flat on her back with arms thrown up over her head like a child herself. The skin around her eyes was peachy-colored, smooth and tight.

Hours later I stirred, hearing Liza up in the night, rattling around. I didn’t hear the baby, but her gritchy cry was always so quiet that this didn’t set off any worry bel s. I rol ed over and closed my eyes.

The next morning the door to Liza’s room was shut and the house was quiet. I figured they were sleeping in. I knew how it could be with babies, day and night mixed up. I crept around dressing, eating oatmeal and a banana on the quiet.

When I got home from the bank that evening, the house had a dead-aired, empty feeling. I went to Liza’s room and saw the closet standing open.

There were a few empty hangers in the center. Both pairs of her favorite jeans were gone. The big red backpack she’d planned to use as a diaper bag was gone, too. I opened her drawers and saw gaps in the stacks of socks and underpants and T-shirts. The baby’s yel ow blankie was no longer in the bassinet, and neither was her stuffed duck with the bel in his gut that slept beside her teeny feet.

I dropped to my knees by the square of carpet that used to hold Liza’s silver footlocker. Al her keepsakes had been dumped out of it and left in a heap on the floor: notes from school friends, pressed flowers, the birth certificate that said “Baby Girl Slocumb,” with “Liza Slocumb” typed in the space for the momma’s name and nothing at al typed in the space for the daddy. Liza’d said it was a tal , pretty boy who’d run the Ferris wheel at a weekend carnival she’d gone to with her so-cal ed friend Melissa Richardson. Liza said she couldn’t remember his name, but I found I slept easier if I pretended that only meant she wasn’t tel ing it.

I didn’t know Baby Girl Slocumb’s name for more than two years, not until Liza showed back up, her red-gold hair dul ed down and flat with filth and her tilty eyes so tired. She had a long, skinny-legged girl child with a round bel y and an earnest gaze slung up on her hip. That little critter clung tight to Liza like a solemn monkey baby. Liza looked like she’d already dialed herself to four past desperate. She had meth sores al around her mouth, her cheekbones so sharp I thought any second they would split and let her tired skul peek through. But the baby—a toddler now—was relatively clean and didn’t look underfed. She had one hand fisted up in Liza’s hair and was resting easy in her arms.

Liza said, “Big, can I please come home?”

I stared, hope and sick warring at the heart of me, while my angry brain was yel ing that before they crossed my threshold, there would have to be a deal. If Liza wanted home, there would be rules, and there would sure as hel be rehab, and I would have to have a legal stake in this child’s life, because if rehab didn’t work and Liza fel back off the world, I could not lose this child again. She wasn’t safe with Liza; I could read more than two years of a hard-road life with drugs and men and God-knew-what-al in the defeated downtilt of Liza’s once-mighty mouth and the paper frailty of her skin.

I said, “I don’t even know her name. You left here, and her birth certificate stil says Baby Girl.”

Liza said, “This here is Mosey Wil ow Jane Grace Slocumb, and, Big, I’m so tired. We are both so tired. Can I please, Momma, please, please come home?”