We All Love the Beautiful Girls

by Joanne Proulx

  The dancer lurches to a sudden stop—a counter-point to the music—and, panting, tosses away the coat. It becomes a nothing cast-off, a shabby thrift-shop disguise. Arms wide, shoulders thrown back, she struts across the stage, long legged and high breasted, wild haired and crazed make-up, all awkwardness gone. She’s swaggered into a fuck-you goddess, a warrior with no need for weapon or chainmail, a fifty-foot queen no one would dare jerk around.

  When the song crashes to an end, the crowd whoops, but Mia is left breathless, heart banging, as if she’s just sprinted a hundred miles into the heat of revelation. My god, if she stripped down now in David’s bathroom, she’d do so joyfully. Put on some music—something fast and reckless—and shake her breasts at the mirror. Give her ass a happy slap. Worship the flesh that’s blessed her with a child, pleasured her and a couple dozen men—Michael only one of the lucky.

  When the house lights come up, the girl beside her is beaming. “Wasn’t that amaze!” She takes Mia’s hand and swings her arm gleefully. “Come meet my friends,” she says, and starts leading her toward the back of the bar.

  They’re not even off the dance floor when Mia’s cell phone shivers. She slips it out of her back pocket, the screen lit with the news that she has three new texts from Finn. She tells the girl she’ll catch up with her, and standing in a jostle of people starts scrolling through her messages. Can you pick me up? Twenty minutes ago. mom? Six minutes ago. can you come get me. Fifty-seven seconds ago.

  Mia keys in a reply. Where are you?

  Finn’s answer is immediate. downtown corner of bank and powell

  You okay?

  No

  No? Finn is hardly one for dramatics. What’s up?

  please just come get me please

  Hunched over the screen, Mia’s face is cast in a lunar glow. Stay put. Im coming. And just like that, she’s back in it, the thick of her life.

  —

  WHEN MIA PICKS Finn up, his jeans are wet to the knees. His mouth swollen, his lip split, he has blood on his face and on the front of someone else’s shirt. When he tells her what happened his voice is flat. She thinks he might be in shock. She thinks he still might be in shock when she gives him a bag of ice and he lies down on his bed and, instead of the ice, puts his arm across his face and tells her he wants to be alone for a while. She says all right, honey, she says, you rest, I’ll come check on you in a while, and she quietly closes his door.

  The hall closet was one of the first she cleaned out so it’s easy to find the bat. Propped in the back corner, beside a pair of tall yellow rain boots. She’s relieved Michael hasn’t taken it. She would have had to pillage the house for something else—a golf club, maybe. Or a hammer.

  She tosses the bat onto the Jetta’s passenger seat. Slides behind the wheel and backs fast out of the driveway. She is not in shock. She is thinking straight. At least she thinks she’s thinking straight. She’s got the bat. She’s not driving recklessly. She’s using her brakes and her blinkers.

  She parks a neat six inches from the curb in front of the Kellys’. It isn’t until she smashes out the red rocket lights on the fins of the Cadillac, Beyoncé-style, that she even starts breathing hard. There’s a pop when each taillight breaks, a plasticky tinkle as the pieces fall onto the driveway: two scatterplots of red, small and dull against the asphalt.

  She waits for something to happen. For a light to snap on in the house. For someone to shout. For someone to come running. The croak of frogs rises from the river across the street and a barely-there bass thuds like a faraway heartbeat, but otherwise the night remains calm. Mia moves to bash off the mirrors, but the sides of the Cadillac are clean. And bookending the toothy chrome grille, the headlights are small, sunken things; they lack the power to either amplify or dissipate—nothing will be changed with them gone.

  She leaves the driveway and walks the path along the side of the house. Mia has not been in the backyard since the fall, the night of Eli’s seventeenth birthday. Don had been pouring, and like most of the guests, she and Michael ended up drinking too much. At home they’d had clumsy sex, and Mia had woken next morning with her brain throbbing inside a freshly shrunken skull. That was the last time she’d been to the Kellys’. She’d seen no point in journeying back to the scene of Finn’s accident. She’d wanted only to move forward, felt no need to look for someone to blame. But things are different now.

  Now the grass is green and the trees are leafy and the pool is sparkling blue. Though the backyard is empty, all the loungers on the pool deck are empty, every light is on. The floods at the base of the biggest oaks, the small pots sunken in the pool’s concrete perimeter, and of course at each corner of the cabana, tucked beneath the eaves, a spotlight, bright enough to save any boy, in any kind of weather.

  Seeing them now, Mia is nearly overcome by the cruelty of what Eli has done. At the cabana, she stares up into the hot white glare until she is blind to everything beyond the light. She could be staring into the face of God or bearing witness to the end of the world as, two-handed, she raises the bat. Rage rises along with it, but also sorrow, so as she swings it is not a scream that escapes her but a sob.

  The light explodes above her, loud and sharp. She tucks her chin to her shoulder to protect herself from her own violence and the place where she is standing falls dim.

  “It was the other one.”

  She turns toward the voice, but the light has seared her retinas, made a negative of the world. Where there should be a man, there is only a black hole, fuzzy around the edges. “The other corner,” Eli says. Eli at the centre. Footsteps pad across the wooden deck, barefoot and nearly soundless once he steps onto the grass. Mia blinks, trying to clear her vision. Eli becomes a stocky mass, featureless and faceless as he moves toward her, his one arm raised. “It was that one.” He points behind her, at the far corner of the cabana. He is ten feet from her when she swings the bat in a wide, graceless arc.

  “Stay away from me,” she says. “I swear to God, Eli, you stay back.”

  “He was lying right where you are.” He steps closer. Mia’s ankle rolls when he presses the grass beside her foot. “His head was here, and his body was that way, by the wall.”

  Eli isn’t even hurt. He has a tiny scratch on his face. A fight? It doesn’t look like Finn even hit him.

  “He was pretty deep in the snow,” Eli says. He says, “It was cold…minus thirty, minus thirty-five that night.”

  This time Mia screams as she smashes the light. Severed filaments, like broken spider legs, shudder from the neck of the bulb.

  Eli brushes shards of glass from his shoulder. “Someone would have seen him. If I hadn’t turned it off.” He looks empty. Mia goes empty, too.

  “He was your best friend.” Her voice icy. Minus thirty, minus thirty-five.

  Eli is very close now, standing barefoot in a glitter of glass. She has known him most of his life. Photographed him, fed him, taken him on family vacations. She turns her head away. On the far side of the yard, the big oak is a lacework of leaves and branches. Furrowed by light. Gushing green. Horrible with beauty. Like the shimmering scrap of pool.

  In front of her, Eli widens his stance. His arms hang loose at his sides. His hands are open. His whole body open to her.

  “You hurt my son.” She takes one step back, a crunch of glass, and brings the bat to her shoulder.

  —

  I COULDN’T SEE HER. My arm was over my face, but she sounded weird. I’ll come check on you in a while, she said. Kind of flat but fake flat. Like she was lying. Like it was doomsday outside my bedroom and she had no plans for getting back. When the front door slammed I got up and went into her room, watched her back out of the driveway, the Jetta bouncing and jerking and then gliding smooth and slow up the street so I thought maybe she’d changed her mind and had decided not to be crazy. Thought it, but wasn’t convinced.

  It’s the primal scream that gets me running, past my mom’s car, along the side of Eli’s house. They’re by the sh
ed. Under a busted light, standing in a patch of darkness. My mom’s got a baseball bat on her shoulder, lined up with Eli’s head. The weird thing is I’m not even that surprised. My life is that fucked up, everyone an inch away from killing each other.

  I step into the backyard slowly, in case speed is the thing that trips the switch tonight. Not anger or jealousy or madness, just one body moving too fast toward another. When my mom sees me, her face softens. I watch her come back into herself, sane again, but spent.

  When I’m close enough, she hands me the bat. I whip it away, a pathetic, wrong-handed toss. The bat wobbles through the air like a shot and falling bird, skids along the concrete. Barely a splash and it’s floating quiet on the water, my father’s Louisville Slugger in Eli Kelly’s pool.

  I sway on my feet for a second, trying to understand what’s happening, what anything is about. Eli and my mom stare back at me, like stun-gunned children, like I’m the one who caused all the harm.

  It’s okay, I say. We’re all right. But my eye’s swollen shut and my face is kind of throbbing on the side where Eli hit me and my mother was going to hit him with my father’s baseball bat and my hand is gone. My hand is gone and Jess is gone and Eli saw me, and he turned off the light.

  We’re okay, I say again. But I wonder. I wonder if in a moment of dying, or expanding into the universe, it’s possible to be wrong. Like completely and totally wrong.

  And I’m not sure why I do it but I have to do something so I step between Eli and my mom and I reach out and I put my stump on his forehead.

  He leans back against the shed and closes his eyes.

  I forgive you, I say. And I tap one of my Frankenstein knobs against his brow bone a couple of times. Harder, maybe, than either of us expected. More a knock than a tap. I forgive you, I tell him as I drag the brutal red hack of it around his face, the way my father dragged it around the sink. I slide my stump down his cheek like Eric slid the box across the bar, like Jess slid her hand into my pyjama pants the very first time.

  Fuck sake, Finn. It’s practically in his mouth. He looks like he’s going to cry. I’m sorry, he says. Sounds like he’s going to cry.

  I’ve only cried once since it happened. Once in five fucking months. That time I was out here having a barbecue for one because I can’t use a fork and a knife. I’ve taken my anguish out on a map. Told myself that what happened to me was worth losing a piece of myself. Knowing everything strips back to beautiful. Knowing everyone melts down to love.

  I’m sorry, Eli says, and this time I put some weight into it, really press my stump into his forehead and kind of pin him against the shed.

  I understand I fucked up that night with Frankie. And I understand Eli was drunk and he was mad. But I was practically dead when my father found me. It took the medics something like five minutes to find a fucking pulse.

  Finn. My mom puts her hand on my shoulder. Hey. Finn.

  I watch the bat bobbing around in the water, bumping against the side of the pool. I could go get it. I could go get it right now and I could smack Eli with it, turn his head to pulp. I could give it to Frankie, let her club me for being that kind of guy. I could admit that what happened to me out here was probably just a combination of insane jealousy and wicked weather, helped along by booze and drugs. That it didn’t really mean anything, and I don’t know shit about fearlessness or love. That Jess doesn’t love me, never loved me, will never love me and I lost my hand because Eli and I both want girls we cannot have, we’re all just cavemen like Cleopatra said.

  Finn.

  I could go get the bat. My father wanted to teach me the game he grew up playing. He wanted me to be just like him.

  My whole body a shake and my stump pressing into Eli’s forehead and tears running down his face and my mom holding tight to my shoulder. I almost died. Do you get that? You almost killed me. I spit the words at him.

  Finn. Come on. Let’s go home.

  I forgive you, okay? I forgive you, you stupid fucking prick.

  We leave him there, bawling under the busted-out light. We leave the bat floating on the water, by the steps, in the shallow end of the pool.

  —

  “YOU WANT SOME PIZZA?” Mia lifts up a flap and peers into a Domino’s box at two waxy-looking slices, their edges curling away from the oil-stained cardboard.

  “Do we have steak?”

  “Really?” Mia straightens up out of the fridge. “Steak?”

  Finn is sitting at the kitchen table, a family-sized bag of Green Giant peas covering one side of his face. When he lowers the bag, water drips onto the table. His top lip is split. His one nostril dark with dried blood. A smudged crescent of purplish black floats beneath his right eye.

  She touches her fingers to her own mouth. “Will that even be, okay?”

  “I want steak.” Finn lifts the bag of peas back to his face, so his voice is muffled by plastic. “And a baked potato.”

  She finds a frost-fringed package of sirloins at the bottom of the freezer and thaws them in the microwave. The meal will take a bit of work, but at least she doesn’t have to come up with a menu. After the surreal drive home from Eli’s, Finn wanted to go straight to his room. She told him she’d make him something to eat, just to keep him downstairs.

  From a bottom cupboard, she unearths a ten-pound bag of PEI potatoes. Uses a small paring knife to gouge the eyes out of a couple of the firmer ones. Gleams their yellow skins with softened butter. She pours olive oil into a copper-bottomed fry pan, adds a mash of garlic and salt, a few slices of onion. The steaks sizzle when they hit the pan.

  She turns on the CBC. Instrumental music, long breaks between the announcer. Big band swings into the kitchen, then a flute solo of all things, Etude No. 5, a French composer she’s never heard of. The music swells into her, like a hollow wind opening in her chest.

  “Remember that scene in Anchorman with Will Ferrell?” Finn looks over from behind the frozen peas. “Would everybody love to hear Ron Burgundy play some yazz flute?” she says, in her best Latino accent.

  “Mom…Please don’t.”

  She plates the food and carries it to the table. Goes back for the butter dish and the salt and pepper. “I hope you’re hungry,” she says lightly, sitting down next to Finn, “because you know I hate cooking.”

  He smiles, barely, and she rests her hand on the side of his face, cold from the bag of peas, which now lies collapsed on the table in a pink-hued puddle of condensate. She runs her thumb across his eyebrow, the swollen corner of his lips. “Your beautiful face,” she says, and his eyes flicker to the windows.

  The outside lights are on. Tonight the world presses in. Wisteria hangs thick on the trellis, although its mauve chandeliers have fallen, as they should have by mid-July. A cloud of rusty red leaves hides the fruit ripening on the branches of the crabapple tree, and on the far side of their gap-toothed fence, the triplex’s windows are dark. Unlike Michael, Mia’s never really minded the added-on fire escape; she appreciates its light lines and the geometry of its structure, the fact it might save somebody’s life.

  The arm Finn’s been hiding for months now lies undisguised on the table. Healed, but the end cap of skin still slicker and redder than the rest. It’s better than the last time Mia got a good look at it, but it will never look great.

  “Guess Eli’s seen it now,” she says.

  “Yeah. And Dad’s baseball bat.” She feels Finn watching as she slices open a potato. “What if I hadn’t shown up?”

  Mia pauses, her knife and fork pointed into opposite corners of the room. “I don’t know.”

  She’d taken the bat over to the Kellys’ for a reason. Had she planned only on destroying property or had the property owners also been in play? Would she have clubbed Don if he’d staggered into the backyard? Would she have hit Eli if Finn hadn’t shown up when he did? Eli wanted her to—maybe that’s what saved him.

  She’d like to think she had no intention of hurting anyone, but she can’t deny the rush that cl
aimed her when she smashed out the first spotlight. Just to hit something. To break one fucking light. The release she’d felt, the relief, the shameful satisfaction. Why, then, had she sobbed?

  When Eli stood before her, eager for punishment, she’d thought of the dancer shedding her leopard print coat, stepping out as an emboldened goddess, her peace sign gleaming. She’d thought of Michael at the birthday party, the intimacy of their kiss. She’d seen Finn creeping across the lawn and a great relief had flooded through her. To see him alive in the place he might have died.

  The crabapple’s branches sway, and the fluttery leaves of the wisteria align with the breeze that’s blowing in through the garden-room windows. Mia hadn’t even realized she was hot until the night air reached her. It’s late. After two in the morning. The coolest hour of summer.

  “I wouldn’t have hit him.” Even before Finn got there, even empty, hostile to beauty, with a bat grown heavy on her shoulder, she’d been loath to hurt him. And when Finn pressed his stump to Eli’s forehead—that had been hard to watch. When she gripped his shoulder, she’d felt his rage, how it shook him. How he had to battle back. Fight down his arm. Walk away one-handed.

  My god—what Eli’s done. What he has to live with. He’s lucky, though. Lucky Michael wasn’t the one holding the bat; man’s been practising his swing all summer.

  Mia slices into the meat and the juices run.

  “You know that night, when I was out there in the snow?”

  “Yeah.” She cuts Finn’s steak into bite-sized pieces, just doing what she’s doing, so he can stare off into their backyard and tell her how the colder he got that night the more beautiful things got around him. The more connected. How it felt like maybe he was dying but also melting into something bigger. And love was everywhere and everything. Love. His voice tremors when he says the word; if her hand were still on his shoulder, Mia thinks she might feel a current.