A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  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

  LIZA IS SO tired that the now is a great gray wash around her. The now is Liza alone in her room, alone with her damn leg and her half a face, swaying in her walker. She pul s pictures from the vast sea of memory that washes inside her, whole and huge, the only piece of her that feels unbroken. She finds that row of girls from the TV Christmas. Radio City girls, beautiful long legs made of shapely muscle clicking open and shut like scissors. Charlie Brown at Thanksgiving, driving a mighty kick toward a footbal that Lucy has already pul ed away. The Karate Kid, dangling his broken foot in space and then lifting straight up like a weird bird to knock someone’s teeth out with his other leg.

  She shoves at her own dead leg with these pictures, straining for high and mighty and bold. Her right foot twitches, shuffles forward. Then the left one goes, thoughtless, p
erfect, unfairly easy. She’s sore and tired from the pool, but she won’t stop. She gathers them again: high-kicking Rockettes, determined Charlie Brown, unstoppable Karate Kid. She thrusts these things in a roaring wash of power down into her body. But they diffuse as they go, easing to a stream and then a dribble. By the time they reach the leg, they are nothing but an old man’s painful shuffle.

  She accepts. Breathes in. Goes again.

  Big has washed the chlorine out, and she feels her wet hair as a weight, dampening the back of her pajamas. This last step has brought her to the bed, and she wants nothing more than to ease herself down into it. Big has the cup. She got the cup to Big, and doesn’t this earn her a rest?

  The answer is no, and it comes to her in salt smel of her own effort-fil ed sweat. Salt air. The beach. That baby. Melissa. The second-worst day of Liza’s whole and bloody history has resurrected itself. The past is alive, and it’s coming to eat Mosey.

  The cup is not enough. Big needs more, and she begins the long, inching process of turning the walker, readying it to go back across her room.

  Rockettes. Charlie Brown. Karate Kid. She creeps forward, lost inside herself now, kept company by the babies, al the babies that she didn’t steal.

  The first at a grocery store in Alabama, two days after crib death took her own child in the night, and she put her keepsake trunk deep in the earth near the wil ow. She’s come in to steal fruit or maybe crackers, not a baby, but she hears it crying three aisles away, and instantly her breasts gush milk. It cries and cries, and its mother should fix it. Liza would fix it, if only it were hers. She should go and get it now and put it to her aching breast and hush it, walk away with it into the black night.

  She leaves the grocery at a run, leaves whatever town she’s in, crosses another state line.

  There has to be a place far enough from the wil ow. A desert place. Not like home. A place where the air is so dry it wil suck the milk out and parch her eyes and bake her slick sweat off her skin as fast as she can loose it. She heads west, hoping Nevada can cook her until she is as light as a leaf blown along the road.

  The carnival she joins has excel ent pot. In the day she sleeps without dreaming, and at night she stares into a crystal bal and tel s lies. She looks good in the Gypsy clothes, saying futures when she can’t see any future at al .

  Then a bearded lady joins. She has a baby. Fat legs, a shock of dark hair. Her very first night after the midway closes, the sword swal ower gets the lady on her back. The baby sleeps in an empty dresser drawer in the front room of his trailer. Liza stares at it through the window. “Oh, oh, oh!”

  the lady hol ers through her beard. She would never hear the creak of the door if Liza slipped inside and lifted up that drowsy bundle.

  Liza turns away as the bearded lady finishes and walks until she finds an on-ramp. She climbs up into the first big rig that stops for her.

  She likes the truckers. Some have pot, and they al have speed. She sleeps in the day, so she can tel more lies and help them stay awake at night. The headlights wash the black road, and if she swal ows enough Christmas Trees, it feels like flying, high up in the cab. The truckers seem uncomplicated, or at least unkinky. She has sex and conversation, they have drugs and forward movement, and this trade is the closest thing to love that she can stand.

  The seasons change, and she keeps moving. It’s very simple; no one brings babies to truck stops, so Liza doesn’t steal any.

  Then she meets Buck. He’s closer to fifty than forty, and she cal s him Sugardads. Buck is sweet, likes holding her hand, and the two of them take runs al the way back and across the country, California to Vermont, Vermont to California. She’s with him six months. It’s good until he thinks that he’s in love. He wants to buy her a little fat steak wrapped in bacon from a place he knows off the highway in the smack-ass middle of the country.

  At the table next to them, there’s a family. Mommy, Daddy, Susie, Tommy, baby, and it’s al Liza can do not to put her steak knife in the mother and grab the infant, so desperately do her empty arms want fil ing.

  She smiles and excuses herself to go pee, and once she’s out of his sight, she goes out the front door instead. Her red backpack is in the truck, and it’s locked, so she leaves it. She runs to the highway and then puts out her thumb. Liza has a halter top and long red-gold dirty curls and no visible baggage—what’s not to stop for? The second truck she sees pul s over. The driver is a bald white guy, maybe forty, with kind, tired eyes.

  Kind and tired, but not fatherly.

  “Hey,” Liza says, smiling. “You got anything? I want to stay awake. I can be pretty good company.” He has a little something, and the truck rol s off into the black.

  Two months later she’s back in Alabama, the closest she has come to home in however long it’s been. She’s wearing nothing but a filthy sundress, sitting by the washing machine with every other article of clothing that she’s col ected spinning inside it, when a twitchy little momma comes in wearing sweatpants. She’s got a crying baby in footie pajamas stuffed in a sling, and she’s dragging her laundry in a basket. She has brown circles under her eyes, and she sniffles and picks at her skin as she loads the clothes in. The baby whimpers. She doesn’t seem to notice it’s close to crying. Maybe she doesn’t even like it.

  Her name is Janel e, and she can’t be much older than Liza. They talk some while the laundry swishes. They both like Björk. They both like Mustangs. They both like Pixie Stix.

  “Listen,” Janel e says, “can you maybe watch the baby for a sec? Make sure no one takes my clothes? I have a errand.”

  The baby is loaded into Liza’s arms, fil ing them. Liza looks at the baby. The baby looks back, solemn. It smel s like cigarettes and old milk, and under that it smel s like perfect baby.

  “Do you want to come with me?” Liza asks. The baby doesn’t seem to have any objections.

  Stil , she stays in the chair. She has no underpants; they are al in the washer. A mother shouldn’t be sitting in a laundry in nothing but a sundress.

  If her panties were dry, she’d have walked with the baby already.

  She looks at the baby, and the baby looks back.

  “Thanks,” Janel e says when she returns. The twitch is gone; she obviously scored.

  Fucking junkie. Liza should have taken it.

  Liza moves her clothes to a dryer, goes to the bathroom. She leans on the sink, trying not to cry. Handing the baby back felt about as easy as pul ing out her own lung, passing that over. She gave it to a fucking junkie mother who likes Björk and Mustangs and Pixie Stix.

  She should go out there, offer to watch it again when her panties are dry. Steal it this time. But she meets her own eyes in the mirror. She has no diapers, no bassinet, no little cotton sleepers from Kidworks, and it strikes her that these are greater obstacles than a simple lack of underthings. In the mirror she is looking at another fucking junkie who likes Björk and Mustangs and Pixie Stix.

  Babies need a Big, and she’s a Little whose own baby stopped breathing in the night and turned quietly blue and died for no reason other than karma and Melissa. No reason except that Liza deserved it.

  Back in the laundry, Janel e has some Jol y Ranchers. She gives Liza a cherry one. It’s both their favorite.

  “Liza,” Big says. “What on earth? You have to rest. You have to stop.”

  Liza blinks. Rockettes. The leg shuffles forward.

  Then Big is by her being Big. Being the thing that babies need. Putting Liza to bed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mosey

  WHEN ROGER GOT TO The Real Pit to pick me up, it was pouring rain, but he stil puled in to his regular place instead of driving up to the door. His car was a jet-black Volvo station wagon, like ten years old, because his mom had Googled around til she found out that this make and year had never had a driver’s-side fatality in the whole history of Earth. Safety first, or whatev, but it didn’t have a port for his iPod. He’d had to burn his playlist to CD. I could hear Cage t
he Elephant, and he was headbanging al oblivious while I ran across the lot to his car, getting soaked. When I pul ed open the door, the front seat was ful of crap, and I couldn’t even get in.

  I hurled a pile of blankets and two pairs of his mom’s gardening gloves into the back. Under al that I found some big-ass wire clippers with wicked-looking blades, thick and curved like Toucan Sam’s face if he went serial kil er.

  I slammed the door and dripped at him, glaring and holding up the clippers I’d almost sat on, giving him “WTH?” eyebrows.

  He total y missed the point, saying, “In case we have to go through one of those fences.” He was so excited about this spy-vs.-Duckins outing he was practical y vibrating as he drove out of The Real Pit lot.

  I put the wire clippers down on the floorboards, rol ing my eyes. It was true that big pieces of Ducktown had chain-link fencing as high as my chest, some even with lines of barbed wire over the top, but we weren’t going to crouch in the weeds and try to hack through the links at three in the afternoon on a school day.

  “We’re not ninjas,” I said, sour.

  He laughed and said, “I swear, Mosey, you could suck the fun out of a puppy.”

  “Anyway, we don’t need to be ninjas. I have a plan,” I said. I rummaged in my backpack and unearthed a textbook covered by a homemade grocery-store-bag cover. “Behold. Patti Duckins’s remedial math book. She misplaced it today. You and I are so very sweetly going to return it to her.”

  “How convenient. For us,” Roger said. He gave me a sideways smile. “Did she misplace it down your pants?”

  “Something like that,” I said. I’d spent half my day ghosting around behind Patti, waiting for her to take her eyes off her army-surplus duffel. Final y, at lunch, she dropped it by an empty table in the cafeteria and went to pee. When I’d unzipped it, this weird, dry smel had puffed out at me, like if a bear used to live inside there a long time ago. A bear who liked pimento cheese. I’d grabbed the top book, my heart booming in my chest like it was made of a thousand firecrackers, but not scared. It was more like when I was little and used to run everywhere for the sheer fun of fast moving.