Such a Pretty Girl (13 page)

Ms. Mues and Nigel are talking, but I’m caught up in the fantasy of my father’s permanent absence. It’s a siren song that promises peace and remains maddeningly out of reach.

“His kind live forever,” Nigel mutters.

His words snatch the dream right out from under me.

Ms. Mues pats me. “Don’t fret, honey. God works in mysterious ways.”

I don’t even have the strength left to deny her words. To open my mouth and agree with Nigel, because as hope dissolves it gives me a glimpse of what my life is going to be like with my father and without Andy. I run my thumb along the outline of the knife in my pocket and wonder why I just don’t use it.

Maybe because my mother would have heart failure at the sight of blood splattering her shiny white whirlpool tub and I don’t want irritation to be her last memory of me. Or maybe I’m afraid my father will be the one to find me, and if I’m dead or dying, I won’t be able to fight off his last invasion.

I don’t know. I’ve learned too much today and can’t hold myself steady. I have no balance left. I should have taken my vitamins.

“Meredith?” Andy calls. “Can you come here a minute?”

“Yes,” I say and go to him because it might be the last time.

The silence in the kitchen follows me down the hall.

Andy’s face is swollen and blotchy. He has a key ring in one hand, his bottle in the other. The giant oak Madonna lies across his lap. Stray wisps of hair escape his braid and cling to his cheeks.

I perch on the bed. Memorize his face so when I close my eyes I can still find him. My wonderful, three-year vacation is over. The pressure in my chest cracks my ribs and floods my bloodstream, swelling my arteries to capacity.

“We’ll be out of here early tomorrow morning.” He places the ring in my palm and closes my fingers over it. “I’m leaving you my keys, just in case.”

“In case of what?” I ask numbly.

“I don’t know, anything,” he says, shrugging and avoiding my gaze. “In case you need a place to hole up.”

“You’re not coming back.” My head pounds as I pocket the keys. “That’s why you’re taking her with you.” My fingertips burn against the Blessed Virgin’s smooth, wooden face. If she had working eyelids, I would close them. This is no time for witnesses.

“I’m coming back,” he says, but his color deepens as he hurriedly hefts her onto my lap. “I was just gonna leave her with you in case you…I don’t know.” His fingers intertwine with mine. “Need her, I guess.”

I want to ask if he still loves me, but I’m not sure I can deal with either answer. The patchouli incense has gone out and the rose scent is fading. The CD has stopped. The weight of the Virgin Mother rests heavy across my thighs, and I don’t know what to do about any of it. These are four dark omens.

“Thank you.” The girl in the mirror stares back at me with no expression. “I didn’t take my vitamins today.” So many loose ends to share before it’s over. Who will I talk to after this? “Did I tell you that the first present my father ever gave my mother was a baseball shirt?” I glance at his pained expression. “No, I guess I didn’t. Well, it was. Funny, huh?” I dig my lighter from my pocket and hold the trembling flame to the tip of the incense stick. “He’s the one who wants the new baby, you know. She doesn’t. She’ll just do anything to keep him. Probably even look the other way the next time he comes after me.” I get down on my hands and knees and sniff the edges of the room, searching for the failing air freshener that isn’t giving me my roses. “I
know
she won’t take me to the hospital again because then he’ll be arrested.”

“Meredith, please get up,” he says, wheeling closer to me.

“I can’t.” I crawl along the base moldings. “You should play the Dino CD some more, Andy. I think that song is starting to grow on me.” I spy an outlet and for one brief flash see myself sticking the tip of the knife into one of the slots. But I don’t, because frying will make me smell awful. “Do you know that I’ve never had a pet? Not even a gold-fish. Isn’t that sad?” I sit up on my haunches and sniff the air. Patchouli but no roses. “Are you really coming back on Wednesday?”

“Yes,” he says after a heartbeat.

“But it’s not gonna be the same.” I brush a dust bunny from my overalls.

“I can’t live near him, Meredith,” he says quietly. “I know my mother has this grand plan about haunting him for the rest of her life, but that’s
her
atonement, not mine. If he disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow I’d stay here forever, but he won’t, so
I
have to. Move, I mean.”

I find another dust bunny and add it to the first. Roll them together into a ball.

“You want to come with me?” he asks, gliding over to me.

No. I want him to stay here. “If I leave he’ll target some other kid and I can’t deal with that. Knowing that I just let it happen.” He doesn’t ask how I’m going to stop it from happening, though, and my heart curls in on itself. My father has stolen Andy’s soul and broken all his defenses except flight. “And besides, my grandmother would pull every string she could to find me and then you’d get in trouble for harboring a runaway and end up going to jail for twenty years.”

“Yeah, I thought of that.” He strokes my hair and I wilt against his chair, listening to the familiar gurgle as he upends the bottle of Jim Beam. “I’d risk it if you were closer to eighteen, but three years is a long time to lay low.”

“Mm-hmm.” I tug up his pant leg and inspect the pale flesh. Puffy, plum-purple bruises are already forming beneath the fine, brown leg hair. I touch each stormy splotch and wonder if the victim soul in Iowa will heal these for him, too, or if they’ll stay as souvenirs, aging to a sickly greenish yellow by Wednesday.

“Good thing I can’t feel them, huh?” he jokes, but his voice hitches and dies.

I wonder if he’s scared of losing this shield that protects him from physical pain and what Ms. Mues will do with her life when my father is back in prison for good. I wonder if Nigel will be able to claim the role of arresting officer again, even though he’s retired, and if my mother will ever grow sick of the taste of shame and seek a divorce.

And I wonder if she will ever forgive me for what I’m about to set into motion.

“I have to go now,” I say and release Andy as my anchor.

The Blessed Mother watches as we kiss good-bye, as he crushes the air from my lungs, releases me, and wheels away, hobbled by his own fear-born failure.

We exchange glances, the icon and I, but we don’t weep.

There is no place here for miracles.

N
igel and Ms. Mues go quiet as I enter the kitchen.

I hug her good-bye and wish her luck in Iowa. I hope for both their sakes that the trip spurs Andy’s recovery. I don’t say it, but I really don’t expect to see her again. She’ll come home on Wednesday, but by then it’ll all be over and I have no idea where or
if
I will even be.

Nigel watches hard as I shake the curtain closed over my face. He sees something before I disappear, though, and says roughly, “Don’t push for an end here, kid. Trust me, I’ve been around this block before and it’ll all play out. You just hang in there a little longer, okay? Don’t go doing anything stupid.”

“I won’t,” I say and step out the door into the oven.

The sun is slinking off to the west but the heat remains, shimmying up from the baked macadam and drawing the moisture from my skin. The Dumpster court reeks.

I force myself up the side lawn and around the front. Stop with my hand on the doorknob and wonder if I should knock before entering or somehow slip unnoticed back into my room. I don’t know how to engineer my own destruction.

The knob twists beneath my fingers and the door flies open. My mother jerks to a halt. “Oh! There you are.” She gives the Madonna icon a quick frown, grabs my arm, and says, “Go inside right now and change. We’re going out to dinner.”

I wait for mention of our last confrontation, but she’s already calling my father’s condo to report my return.

“I don’t want to go,” I say as she hangs up the phone. “Why don’t you two just go have dinner without me?”

“Because this is our first time out together as a family and your father wants you with us,” my mother says, brushing a speck of lint from her pink linen dress. “Now go get ready. I bought you an outfit. Put it on.”

“I don’t want to,” I say, setting down the Blessed Virgin and beginning my vitamin ritual. I swallow my lifesaving pills in lots of four, but the number denies me its usual comfort, leaving me sloshing with V8 and slightly nauseous.

Her fingernails tap the countertop. “Do you have to argue with everything I say? Can’t you just say ‘okay, Mom’ one time? Is that too much to ask?”

“If I have to go I want to wear my own stuff,” I say, stifling a burp.

She takes my empty glass and sets it in the sink. “Meredith, so help me, I’ve just about had it with you today. Now, go into your room and put on the outfit I bought you or we’re going to have a serious problem. And take that thing with you,” she adds irritably, gesturing to the Madonna. “It’s getting on my nerves.” She waits but I don’t move. “Well? What’re you waiting for?”

“Your face makeup’s cracking,” I say, motioning to the frown lines in her forehead. “I think it’s on too thick.”

I watch as my mother slides the shimmering, pink lipstick across her lips. She swishes on blush and bends down, touching the soft brush to my cheeks. “Ooh, you’re so beautiful now, Meredith. Just like a grown-up lady.”

“Like Cinderella?” I say, staring up into her beloved face.

“Better than Cinderella,” she says, laughing because she knows what’s coming next.

“Like you?” I say, beaming.

“Oh, better than me,” she says, lightly pinching my cheek.

“Nobody’s better than you, Mommy,” I say, seizing and smooching the back of her slim, perfumed hand….

Hurt creases her face and she runs for the bedroom.

Slowly, I cap the last vitamin bottle and put it back into the cabinet. Any satisfaction I feel in besting my mother is tempered by the ghostly sweep of a blusher brush against my hot cheek. The memory shakes something loose inside of me and it rattles in my hollow chest.

“You’d better get moving,” she calls from the bedroom.

“Okay, Mom.” I put the icon on my nightstand and head for the shower. Emerge minutes later and slip into my bedroom. Lock the door.

The outfit my mother laid out for me is big, awful, and beige. A boxy cotton jacket, a baggy white blouse, and of all things, tailored, knee-length walking shorts. Good thing I shaved my legs at Leah Louisa’s.

I don the clothes. Study myself in the mirror.

With the exception of my tangled bed head, I blend right into the walls.

I slip my knife in my pocket, my cigarettes, and the remotes in my purse.

When I enter the kitchen, my mother hides a swift, satisfied smile. “You look very nice,” she says, smoothing her own dress. “Let’s go.”

“Thanks.” I know she’s lying, but I don’t mind looking ugly if it will repel my father for a few more hours.

I follow her out to the car, climb into the backseat, and swelter until the air-conditioning reaches me. The leather makes my butt sweat and if this keeps up my shorts will be dripping by the time we get to the restaurant. Lucky me, I’ll be more repugnant than even my mother could have hoped for.

We cruise through the complex to my father’s. Nigel’s car is back in his own parking lot and I can see Gilly watching the world go by from the picture window.

My mother pulls into a spot and toots the horn.

My father, handsome and respectable in Gap khakis and a button-down plaid, comes out onto the porch.

“Aren’t you even a little glad he’s back, Mer?” my mother says softly, watching him follow the sidewalk toward us.

I look at him and the only answer is
if.
If he hadn’t. If he didn’t. If.

Andy says he stole our power, but that’s just part of it.

He taught me how to wish him gone forever.

He opens the front passenger door and a gust of hot, gritty air sweeps in.

“This must be my lucky day,” he says, sliding into the seat. “Dining out with my beautiful wife and daughter; who could ask for more than that?”

“You’re so silly,” my mother simpers, leaning over for a kiss. “But I love you.”

He ignores me—punishment, I guess, for running away a second time—and spends the ride charming my mother instead.

And Andy’s right; each word my father speaks is a shove, a mocking reminder that I am small and weak enough to be used without regard, and that I was.

My mother turns up the CD player. “When a Man Loves a Woman” grates out.

My father flips down his vanity mirror under the pretense of checking his clean-shaven chin for stubble, but he is actually looking at me.

I know this because I can feel the force of his gaze probing my curtain for cracks. I don’t move, so he finally gives up and closes the mirror.

“That is
such
a good song,” my mother says, sighing as it ends.

I don’t ask if she’s completely delusional when she pulls into Steakhouse Sam’s crowded parking lot. I don’t remind her that Sam had a son in the Boys’ League who missed my father’s coaching by a month, or that Sam is an ex-marine with a low boiling point.

“Steakhouse Sam’s,” my father muses. “I’ve missed this place.”

“I haven’t been here since you left,” my mother says. “We used to have such good times here so I figured what better place to begin again?”

They
are
delusional, I decide as I follow them across the parking lot, up the steps, and into the foyer. They don’t notice the whiplash double takes we’re receiving or hear the bass rumble beneath the restaurant’s cheerful clatter.

“Sam!” my mother cries, swinging up to the front desk. “How are you?”

The stocky guy goes still. His gaze flickers past my sparkling mother and settles, hardening, on my father. Slowly, he reaches up and removes the pen tucked behind his ear. “Sorry. We’re full up tonight.”

“Oh, we don’t mind waiting,” my mother burbles, glancing over her shoulder at my father. “We’ve been dreaming of your steaks for—”

“I’m sorry,” Sam says expressionlessly. “You’ll have to go somewhere else.”

My mother’s smile turns bewildered. “What?” She cocks her head as if to hear him better. “I mean, do you take reservations now or—”

“We’re full up tonight,” Sam says.

My mother turns to my father. “Charles?”

He steps forward and the air around us buzzes like hornets. “C’mon, Sam,” he says but his heartiness is forced. “You sure you couldn’t squeeze us in?”

“I’m asking you to vacate the premises,” Sam says, holding my father’s glittering gaze. He raps the pen against the desk. Once. Twice. Three times. “If you don’t leave right now, I’ll get the cops to escort you out of here.”

I edge closer to the door.

“Fine.” My father grabs my mother’s arm. Wheels and stalks out.

I scurry after them into the humid night.

My father mutters a stream of curses through the parking lot and as we’re pulling out, he gives the crowd lingering on the steps both middle fingers.

“Charles,” my mother warns, glancing in her rearview mirror.

“Don’t lecture me, Sharon,” he says, staring out his window. “What the hell is wrong with this town, anyway? Christ, they used to
love
me. I was the only one who could get their kids to play decent ball. I led them to
three
winning seasons and now, what? I’m some kind of freak?” A muscle ties in his jaw. “I never should have come back here.”

“Don’t say that,” my mother says.

“I mean it,” he says. “I’m not staying here any longer than I have to.”

The air in the car is suddenly heavy and still.

“What are you saying?” my mother asks.

He shoots her an irritated look. “What am I, not speaking English? I’m saying I’m not spending the rest of my life in this dump, that’s what. We’re going to have to move.”

“Move?” my mother says, exhaling in a rush. He has used the “we” word and now she knows she’s not being abandoned. “Hmm, that might not be a bad idea. Then we really
could
make a new start.”

I sink low in the backseat, wrinkling my frumpy outfit, but it doesn’t matter. I’m being buried alive in my parents’ mass grave and now all bets are off.

We dine at the new Olive Garden up on the highway where no one knows us.

I eat salad and get dressing in my hair.

My father hisses in revulsion when I wipe it from the strands, but as we’re walking to the car afterward and my mother is searching her purse for her keys, he lags behind and presses briefly against me.

“I love watching you walk,” he whispers and his breath crisps the hair at the back of my neck.

My adrenaline spikes and my fingers close around the knife in my pocket.

He winks and ambles past to catch up with my mother. She smiles and slips her arm through his. Her tread is light and bouncy and I can almost see the ghost of her cheer-leader’s ponytail bobbing at the back of her head.

Slowly, I uncurl my fingers from around the knife. I keep my hands buried in my pockets, though, because the shaking will give me away.

He didn’t choke on his lasagna and there isn’t a drunk driver in sight.

There are only the three of us and our dark, burgeoning desires.

I am so afraid of what comes next.