Pretty Is: A Novel

by Maggie Mitchell

  Yes, she thought. There does.

  They noticed other changes, too, as the summer wore on. He left the house less often. He spent more time sitting on the porch with his gun. He asked fewer questions. Every now and then, when one of the girls appeared unexpectedly, he’d look at her blankly, as if just for one unbearable instant he no longer recognized her.

  The change was gradual, though; gradual enough so that they didn’t think about it much. Besides, there was always the chance that this was normal, and the early weeks had been an aberration. How could they know?

  * * *

  They had been working their way through the detective novels from the storage room for weeks when he tossed a book at them one day, one of the old, serious-looking, plainly bound hardcovers from the shelves in the main room. He’d been reading it himself for a day or two, but he was clearly not the first to crack its spine; it was a much-read volume, worn and dog-eared. “You read too many novels,” he said, as the book landed on the couch between them. “It’s lazy. You should mix in some poetry. This might appeal to your ghoulish tastes.”

  It was a volume of Robert Browning’s poems, and for the most part he was wrong: they were not ready for Browning’s dark, driven dramatic monologues, the voices of renaissance dukes and painters and dissolute priests. They struggled through a few of them because they didn’t want to let him down. But they were bored, and a little confused, and resentful. They missed their gloomy country houses, genteel suspects, politely but relentlessly mounting body counts.

  But one poem did please them; one poem was short and straightforward enough to capture their imaginations: “Porphyria’s Lover,” in which the speaker’s beloved ventures through rain and wind to pay an illicit nighttime visit to his cottage; puzzled as to how he might keep her, preserve her, possess her most perfectly, he settles upon the only action possible. While she rests her pretty head against his shoulder, he takes her yellow hair and wraps it around her pretty neck—and yes, strangles her, and there they sit, in perfect companionship, as the night wears on.

  “Oh my God,” said Callie. She was truly shocked, for once—Callie, who prided herself on keeping her cool, her languid aura of boredom. The last line, which she had just read aloud, still hung in the air, the one about how God had not said a word—not as the murderer sat with the dead woman all through the night. “That’s seriously messed up.”

  “He’s a madman,” Hannah remarked uneasily. She felt a need to counter the narrator’s strange confidence in his own logic—not just in her own mind but aloud, on the record in some way.

  “Crazy. Obviously,” Callie agreed.

  Only then did they see Zed in the doorway. Leaning against the door frame, arms crossed in front of his chest. “Don’t stop on my account,” he said when he realized that they had turned their attention to him. And then retreated, began tidying the immaculate kitchen.

  * * *

  That was the night he touched Callie’s hair.

  Her yellow hair. Like Porphyria’s.

  Always Callie. Hannah suffered. Full of nameless sorrow, she thought she might die of longing that night—of the candlelight, soft and beautiful and full of all the things she could not have or be. Or of something darker, something she didn’t understand.

  Callie’s fault. Callie wanted to dress up; she was obsessed with the femmes fatales in the detective novels and wanted to try the role for herself. She wrapped her top sheet strategically around herself like a kind of demented Grecian evening gown, and she constructed an elaborate updo out of her golden curls with an old rubber band, a safety pin, a scrap of ribbon, and a couple of sticks. She stuck some daisies in it to complete the effect. (He brought little bouquets of wildflowers in sometimes, to make up for their not being able to go outside. He put them in drinking glasses on the kitchen table. It was sweet, they thought.) She rigged up some jewelry out of the shiniest objects she could find in the storage room. Inclined to be critical, Hannah forced herself to be fair: Callie was just playing, really. Dressing up was her favorite form of play; she loved to decorate herself. She was a tremendous narcissist, even for a twelve-year-old. But she was also a born actress. She required costume changes.

  Although Callie should have looked completely ridiculous, Hannah had to concede that somehow she made the makeshift ensemble work. She adopted a sultry accent and a languid way of moving, and it was as if she had cast a spell on herself, Cinderella-like, transforming rags to finery. Maybe it was the candlelight. To Hannah it seemed like magic, and not white magic, either. She was dizzy with jealousy.

  And Zed was furious. All the vague humor and improbable kindness drained from his after-dinner face as Callie descended the stairs, staging a grand entrance. Hannah put down the dish towel and moved away from him instinctively, away from the charged field that suddenly rearranged the air around him. As Callie swayed past him, batting her eyelashes, his arm shot out as if it had a life of its own. He grasped the twisted nest of curls that was falling from the top of her head where she had tried to pin it. He pulled it all down, and not gently. The pins and sticks and daisies fell to the floor. He twisted the long coil of Callie’s beautiful hair around his hand and wrist, almost absently. His eyes were dark and strange, and Hannah couldn’t really look at them; she hardly even breathed. Callie raised her eyes to his, and some current seemed to dart between them. He pulled her hair. Just a little, then a little more.

  “Stop it!” Hannah was half-dismayed to hear her own voice; she had hardly known that she was going to speak, hadn’t realized she was crying. Zed dropped Callie’s hair as if it were on fire, and Hannah turned and ran, wrenching the door open and fleeing into the cool dark night, knowing he would follow, knowing it was up to her to break the spell.

  That was near the end.

  * * *

  “I imagine you girls would like to go swimming,” he said after dinner one night, entirely out of the blue. It was a particularly warm, muggy night and very still. Moths flung themselves at the lantern that hissed on the table.

  It was true: swimming had always been a part of summer, for both of them, and they had missed it, all those hot days at the lodge. But by way of idle conversation the remark seemed uncharacteristically pointless, even a little mean. It wasn’t as if he could conjure a lake or a pool in the backyard. They said nothing, waiting to see where he was going with this. They were wary; they were on their guard by then.

  But he was serious. He looked from one of them to the other, blue eyes frowning. “I’m not wrong, am I? I warn you, I will think you are very strange children if you don’t want to go swimming. Hurry up and get your things if you want to go. It’s a perfect night for it.”

  “Things?” Callie said suspiciously. “What things? It’s not like we have bathing suits.”

  “You’ll think of something,” he said, unperturbed. “It’ll be dark, after all. Just grab towels, then.”

  Still baffled, they did as he said, and stood waiting. Wordlessly he led them out the door, into the night—straight to the car. They hadn’t been in it since their arrival. It was saturated with the memory of the road trip. Their abduction.

  “Get in the back,” he said. “And lie down until I tell you otherwise.”

  After ten minutes or so the car turned off the comparatively smooth road they’d been winding along and headed sharply downhill on a pitted dirt surface. Losing her balance, Hannah tumbled from the seat to the floor of the car, and Callie barely avoided following her. Hannah crouched where she was, rather than attempting to scramble back up, clenching her teeth to make sure she wouldn’t bite her tongue when they hit the potholes.

  Then, quite suddenly, they stopped.

  “Follow me,” he said. “Watch your step.”

  They followed the bobbing white circle his flashlight threw across the rough ground, everything else black. At first they could only smell the water and hear its gentle lapping, and then the light splashed across it.

  “Here,” he said magnanimously, as if
he’d created this body of water just for them. “This is a good place to swim.”

  They kicked off their sneakers, and he averted his eyes as they turned their backs on him in the dark and pulled their dresses over their heads. Along with towels they had also each brought an extra pair of panties. This was Callie’s idea. They used them to improvise bikini tops, thrusting their arms and shoulders through the leg holes, smoothing the seats across their chests—Hannah’s entirely, boyishly flat, Callie’s boasting two tiny swollen buds—and attempting to hook the hips over their bony shoulders enough to anchor them a little. It wasn’t especially successful, but it served its purpose, more or less. Meanwhile Zed shone the flashlight away from them, across the water, elaborately respecting their modesty. When the girls were ready, he aimed the light at the water near their feet to guide them in.

  The air was chilly, and they shivered a little in their underwear. When they ventured to dip toes in the water, though, they found it surprisingly warm. Even then they edged forward cautiously, their feet settling into the silty lakeshore bottom with each step. Hannah pictured dozens of tiny fish swarming around their unexpected ankles and was glad she could not see them. All they could see was the small disk of light that lay before them—nothing else, not each other, not their own outstretched arms, not the shore, not the dimensions of the lake or the woods that must have surrounded it, not the mountains that surely rose in the distance. Not the man himself, who directed the light and controlled what they saw, who could never have been far away. Nothing but the pale circle of light that beckoned them deeper into the lake, and in it, the faint waves they made themselves. That must have been what he meant when he said it was a perfect night: there was no moon, no stars. The sky was blank.

  Callie was the first to plunge, naturally, when the water had reached their waists, and after that Hannah had no choice but to throw herself forward. They splashed into deeper water, flipped on their backs, and floated, eyes unfocused. They flung water toward each other and attempted blind, dizzying somersaults. They looked in his direction, sometimes, wondering if he could see them, if he was watching, but they saw nothing outside the halo of the flashlight. The water was soft and warm and seemed to hold them gently. They could hear fish jumping not far away and no longer minded; they were fish, too. They flickered through the water like mermaids, inventing strokes they’d never learned in swimming lessons. Sometimes they brushed against each other, inadvertently—their bare arms and legs soft and similar. Their unruly imaginations tried to conjure up a sense of what the man’s limbs would feel like in the water, hard and male and unclothed. They felt embarrassed, as if their thoughts could travel through the air, as if he could intercept them.

  But he did not join them. Did they expect him to? They weren’t sure; the episode seemed so very strange, so unscripted, that it was nearly impossible to form expectations.

  It is possible, though, that they had formed a hope—collectively, echoed silently between them. In any case, they let it go, gave themselves up to the pure pleasure of being enveloped by the water. He did not speak, and that was fine. He simply held the light. He gave them the lake, piece by piece.

  And then suddenly he turned off the light. They heard the click of the plastic switch. They lifted their heads from the water, opened their eyes and closed them again, and saw no difference. Instinctively, they fell silent, treaded water. They could pinpoint each other’s location because they could hear each other’s breath, but Zed seemed to have vanished. “Where are you?” Callie asked after a moment, her voice harsh but also vulnerable. Hannah could tell that her mood had changed: Callie was angry now.

  After a few seconds his calm voice carried across the water. “Why does it matter?” He was as blind as they were.

  “How can you say that?” Callie demanded. Outrage vibrated in her voice.

  Because it doesn’t, Hannah thought, not even knowing what she meant. It doesn’t matter, not anymore. This time Zed didn’t answer. Would it be a happy ending, Hannah wondered, if he just left them there? They would huddle all night beside the lake, shivering and mosquito bitten. When dawn came they would make their way back to the road, bedraggled. Eventually someone would find them, and it would all be over. Zed would escape, perhaps. He would never be found.

  No, of course he won’t leave us, she thought peacefully. He still needs us. For what? asked a treacherous voice in her mind. How can you be so sure? What if he brought his gun? What if he slips into the water, places his hand on your head and presses it down, down beneath the surface, and eventually you don’t struggle anymore, and— Appalled, she silenced the voice, flipped onto her back, and stretched her arms out to the sides, scissoring her feet slightly to keep her balance, feeling her peace return. As she stared up at the blank sky she saw that, as her eyes adjusted, it became less perfectly dark. Low clouds captured stray light from below—maybe from towns miles away, she thought, or houses they couldn’t see—and reflected it back to the water. She could discern the outlines of the clouds, the place where the lake met the trees, a shape a few feet away that must be Callie. She had the irrational thought that the light was coming from her own gaze, that if she looked long and hard enough she could light up the woods. She sensed that Callie, out of sync with her mood, had stopped floating and righted herself, anchored her feet on the bottom of the lake, waiting impatiently. She tried to project her strange sense of calm in Callie’s direction, wanting to share it, but she could tell that Callie had become unreceptive. She tried to turn her attention inward, blocking Callie out, but her awareness of Callie’s unhappiness created a tension she couldn’t ignore, and she felt drawn in two directions: it was as if she had to be two people, herself and Callie. She grew conscious, meanwhile, that the part of her that was exposed to the air was getting chilled. But she didn’t want to stop floating.

  Finally Zed said, quietly, “Enough.” His voice had moved. They turned in its direction. Hannah, obedient, swam toward him, but she felt Callie’s resentment collect itself and tremble though the water. “What if we’re not done?” Callie called out, defiant, though she was more than done with this invisible lake. As usual, Hannah admired Callie’s courage at the same time that she was annoyed by it. Why does she have to try to ruin everything?

  “Then stay,” Zed said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. “Hannah and I will go.”

  Hannah heard Callie behind her, plowing through the water toward the shore. She wondered if he had meant it; she suspected not. He had simply known that Callie would come. Somehow this knowledge made her feel both safe and sad.

  As they emerged from the water onto the chilly shore, clutching their towels around themselves, teeth chattering, they saw that there was an extra light, hovering precisely where his face should be, and they smelled his familiar pipe. Wordlessly he tapped the base, tipped out the glowing ember, and ground it out beneath his heel, turning as he did so and shining the flashlight at the car. Dripping and shivering, they piled in. No one spoke.

  They couldn’t have been far from the lodge when a car appeared behind them, its headlights boring into the backseat, bouncing off the rearview mirror. “Stay down,” Zed ordered, straining to make out a shape, a face behind the dark windshield. He didn’t alter his speed, but they could feel his sudden alertness, as if something newly rigid in his body communicated itself to them through the car itself, entering their own bodies through the rough fabric of the backseat, against which they had pressed their cheeks. They lay still and quiet, the tension between them suddenly gone. The other car kept up with them, pressing. Someone who knew the roads, perhaps, and wanted to go faster. Someone in a hurry, late for something they couldn’t even imagine. Someone looking for two missing girls, traced to this area. Zed kept driving, long enough that they were sure they must have gone well past the turnoff to the lodge. At last they came to a stop, and the girls listened breathlessly to the tick-tock of the turn signal, the headlights bearing down on them. They veered right. The light
s swept along the left side of Zed’s car, picking up speed, and vanished.

  They had turned, and the other car had stayed straight.

  Silence returned. They drove on for another minute before Zed swung an efficient U-turn and headed back the way they had come. He killed the lights as they rolled down the long driveway, approaching the lodge in utter darkness.

  No one had been following them. But people were looking, surely. They had to be.

  Back at the lodge, he sent them off to bed as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But he was unusually quiet, and they couldn’t help feeling that something had shifted, that things were not quite the same. It made them nervous.

  * * *

  The next day was cloudy, humid, oppressive, and Hannah and Callie’s sense of unease held on. Hannah walked softly, looked over her shoulder, startled at trifles: a branch striking the roof, the hiss of the water heater, the squawk of an unfamiliar bird. Callie, on the other hand, grew reckless, restless, couldn’t be still. While Zed circled the perimeter of the clearing in which the cabin was set—head down, round and round, unreachable—Callie played pageant: tried to entertain Hannah by reenacting bits of her routine, spoofing imaginary competitors. As she demonstrated her pageant walk, Hannah played judge, pretending to scribble seriously in her notebook. Callie crossed the room with strong, graceful strides, her head angled in Hannah’s direction, her lips shaping a huge smile. Pausing in front of the window she turned slightly, hand on hip, flashing her imaginary audience another dazzling grin. Even without stage makeup and a fancy dress, she conveyed something of the bewitching presence that had already won her so many crowns.

  They didn’t know he was in the doorway until he had lunged across the room, almost catlike, grabbing the arm perched on Callie’s hip and wrenching it around in front of her. Hannah had been lounging on the couch, laughing; when she saw him—or sensed him, really—she curled into a ball, clasping her hands around her knees. Callie turned red, and Hannah saw, for the first time, tears in her eyes. But she didn’t struggle—she looked him right in the face, anger blazing, and her tears didn’t fall.