Pretty Is: A Novel

by Maggie Mitchell

  “God, would you stop staring at me, Chloe?” He laughes self-consciously. He’s one of those people who says your name all the time, practically every time he addresses you. Most people don’t; in fact lots of people almost never call you by your name at all. It feels weirdly personal when someone does, like your name is a cozy secret you share, or a little pat on the ass.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was just spacing out, I guess,” I say.

  “Oh, so you weren’t actually admiring my chiseled beauty?” He pretends to be crestfallen, breaking the spell. Zed didn’t laugh much. His emotions were almost as dramatic and visible as Billy’s, but they occupied a much lower, darker register. When Billy laughs and sparkles, he bears only a ghost of a resemblance to him. A manageable ghost. Endearing, even.

  “Chiseled is what you call that look, is it? I’d say more like craggy-mountain-man, myself.” I’m chattering to cover up my stare and whatever inappropriate expression might have accompanied it; I hardly know what I’m saying.

  “I was just thinking,” he interrupts, to my relief. He’s turned serious again. “Seriously, I was just thinking: imagine what it would have been like to be those girls. Especially the first one, the Nebraska one. I mean, she rode across the whole freaking country with this guy. What could that have been like? What would they have talked about? Or would he have, like, played the radio? She could have been gagged or something, I guess, but I doubt it. They must’ve stopped for fast food, had hamburgers together. I mean, that’s fucked-up, right? But it’s also just fascinating. God, I love this part!” He strikes his fist against the steering wheel and then, without warning, slams on the brakes. “Damn! Sorry. Almost missed the turn. Getting carried away.” Generally I find his self-deprecating reversals endearing, but I’m still too busy grappling with his little flight of fancy to appreciate this one. I’m still gripping the door handle as he takes a ridiculously sharp turn—and then, with no warning, there it is.

  There it fucking is.

  And then again, there it isn’t.

  It’s set well back from the road in a small clearing in the woods, but you have a good view of it from the driveway. It’s roughly the same size as Zed’s lodge, maybe a little smaller. The line of the roof is subtly different—the angle isn’t as sharp, maybe. I realize as I study the building that the truth is I almost never saw Zed’s lodge from the outside, not in daylight, anyway. Its outlines are pretty vague in my memory. This cabin can easily step in and become the cabin; almost any cabin could.

  Yes, that’s me, Miss Rationality. Forget that my hands are shaking, my breath has gone shallow, and a viselike pain has locked around my forehead. This is just a cabin. A fake. A movie set. In western Canada. It should have no emotional value whatsoever. That would be ridiculous.

  Right.

  I find that I have something to say to Billy, even though technically the moment when it would have been natural and appropriate to respond to his remark about the Nebraska girl passed a few seconds ago. “I think she would have felt—I mean, even if he was being nice to her, treating her well—she never would have known what was next, right? Even if they were having a fine old time and eating hamburgers one minute, for all she knew, the next minute he could chop her up and throw her in the woods, right? Because what else do psychos do? I think that even if they felt safe, the girls, there always would have been this doubt—this fear that just around the corner … you know?” My garbled words sound strangely urgent, even to me. Billy gives me a quick look with a little bit of surprise in it, and then he nods slowly.

  Thank God he hasn’t picked up on anything; he just thinks I’ve used my actorly intuition to get inside Nebraska-girl’s head. Callie, she’s called in the movie and in the book. I imagine Lois choosing a name so close to mine, imagine what she would have been thinking. She changed her own name completely, made herself a Hannah. It’s like the name Lois in the sense that it’s a little old-fashioned, a little plain—but it’s also becoming popular again, which Lois isn’t; there’s a slight connection but not an obvious one. Me, on the other hand? Carly, Callie. Please. She was keeping me close.

  We get out of the Range Rover, walk around. The ground is damp and soft with pine needles. My heels sink in. There are a few workmen around, but no one bothers us.

  The Adirondack chairs on the porch are wrong, I’m glad to see. They look old and worn. The real ones were freshly painted. Dark green. Zed must have painted them when he was getting the place ready for us.

  Everything is different here. And I am not Callie or Carly May. Or Chloe, even. I am Mandy, the police detective. I should look at this place with the eye of a cop—looking for places to hide, unlocked windows, places the kidnapper could be watching me from. I’m wearing sensible shoes—cross trainers—not heels. I’m out of uniform, plainclothes, jeans and a T-shirt. I have a light jacket back in my car, which is a little Toyota, not a Range Rover.

  I’m working. There are no ghosts. And before long (I check my watch) it’ll be time for a drink.

  Lois

  One evening at the diner, a conversation at the bar catches my attention, breaking through the cloud of dark thoughts that usually preserves my solitude even when the diner is at its busiest. “Upstate New York, this time,” a man is saying, eliciting a few laughs from other patrons. “Maybe British Columbia will win an Oscar one of these days,” says the woman behind the counter, refilling the first man’s coffee. “We’re so versatile, aren’t we? We can be anyplace you want us to be—New York, California, Ireland for God’s sake.” This sounds like a conversation they’ve had before, I think; a curious fact of their existence, now that BC is such a popular filming location.

  “There’s only one big-name actor in this one,” another man remarks. “That Billy Pearson, you know him? Looks like a movie star, that’s for sure, but I never thought much of him as an actor.” Someone else starts listing Billy Pearson films, and they all contribute.

  Billy Pearson is playing Zed, of course. I have focused so intently on Chloe Savage that I’ve spared little thought for him. I try to conjure up his face, transposing it gingerly onto the one I remember. It might work—physically, at least, it might work. I have just begun trying to frame my doubts, to explain to myself what it is that I think Billy Pearson might have trouble capturing, when I hear the woman behind the counter pipe up again. She’s wiping the counter down with a rag. Her thin dark hair lies limply against her neck, her jaw. I try to imagine a more flattering cut. “He’s here already, you know. I heard it this morning. He’s been seen driving around with a blond woman. One of the actresses, most likely.”

  “He’s married, isn’t he?” This from the man who seems to be the best informed. He must watch entertainment shows or read some celebrity magazine. “Could be the wife.”

  “Nope,” says the thin-haired waitress. “The wife has red hair. This was definitely not the wife.” Her news hangs in the air, generating suspicion. I wonder why it would please them to know that Billy Pearson was up to no good.

  But I’m also thinking: Some blond woman? One of the actresses?

  Chloe has arrived. It could be anyone, but it’s not. It’s Chloe.

  Chloe

  The actresses playing the little girls are complete unknowns. I approve of that decision. I’ve met a lot of child actors, and most of them seem too knowing, too old-before-their-time. No wonder. But it taints them a little bit. Lois and I were precocious in our own ways, no doubt about it, but we were still essentially children, and sheltered ones at that. To start out with. We were different by the time we got back.

  When I first see them, though, I’m not so sure. I’m having breakfast in the pub, where a faint cocktail-y aroma seems to me to linger teasingly even in the daylight. Billy has joined me—this has become our routine on the days when I don’t slink off to the local diner I’ve become attached to, though he says his wife and kid arrive next week, so that’ll be that, I assume. Neither of us is very chatty in the morning, which is the on
ly reason I’m willing to share a table with him at that time of day. Especially because I’m not stupid, and I know it looks bad. Stories will get back to the wife, and suddenly sitting at a table drinking coffee and reading random Canadian newspapers will seem like evidence of a torrid affair. Which we are definitely not having.

  Anyway, I hear the girls before I see them. They sail into the quiet room with their entourage: Parents, small siblings, God knows who else. Coaches? Nannies? Shrinks? The girls’ clear high voices rise above everyone else’s. They may not be seasoned professionals, but they sure as hell aren’t lacking in confidence or presence. Strike one against them, I think, since Lois and I were just stupid small-town kids. I had hoped they would have a little of that quality, just a glimmer, even, and now I’m doubtful.

  Billy raises his head, too, and puts his paper down. “It’s the girls!” he says, with a little too much excitement in his voice, as if he’s been getting bored and welcomes a new form of stimulation.

  “Looks like it. Noisy little wenches, aren’t they?” I sip my coffee. I don’t put my newspaper down, though I haven’t really read a word of it the entire time; it mostly seems concerned with various environmental measures in western Canada and minor crimes committed in the area, and I think it might be the most boring paper I’ve read since I left Nebraska.

  “Be nice,” says Billy. “Let’s go introduce ourselves.”

  “You go. I’m not ready.”

  He gives me a funny look—a well-deserved one, I guess. “You’re very strange sometimes, Chloe Savage,” he says, standing up. “But I am going to go introduce my charming self to the lovely young actresses we’re going to be working with in the middle of the woods all summer, with you or without you.” He pauses, as if he assumes I’ll change my mind.

  “Without,” I say, pretending to be absorbed in the sports section.

  And then he is preening (really, there’s no other word for it) before the girls and their clucking companions: They are so excited to meet a real movie star! They want his autograph! They can’t believe this! He’s even cuter in person!

  Meanwhile, I slip out. I’ll meet the lovely young “actresses” (my ass!) on my own terms.

  * * *

  From then on Billy tends to spend his days with the girls—doing God knows what, hiking in the woods or something. He joins me in the pub in the evening, sparing me the awkwardness of drinking alone.

  I don’t mean to imply that I’ve been completely antisocial. The movie people have been arriving throughout the week; I’ve met the director, some cast members, and the costume designer, who apologizes in advance for what she’s going to make me wear. “You’re going to fucking hate me,” she says. “Seriously, you’ll be lucky if you ever work again.” She’s joking, but I wonder how funny that really is.

  “Maybe you’ll get an award,” I suggest. “If the clothes are so ugly.”

  “Nah.” She scowls. She’s tall, cadaverous, zombie-esque. The slightest twist of genetic fate would have made her a model. Instead she’s practically hideous. Her mouth is fouler than mine, which I appreciate. “For awards you’ve got to do period. Doublets and hose–type shit.”

  “Well, the nineties must be damned near ‘period’ by now, right?”

  “Depends on the film. We’re not really working the period angle here; it’s a pretty shitty decade, style-wise. Which means,” she says, flashing a rare and terrifying smile, “no baggy jeans. No gigantic shoes. At least you have that to thank me for.”

  Then she wanders off. I like that about her. She comes and goes downright stealthily, which is kind of a relief when you’re surrounded by so many people who have made an art form of entering and exiting rooms.

  I still spend a lot of time reading; the detective novels and gothic romances continue to distract me. I hang out at my little diner downtown sometimes. It’s a bit of a drive, but there are never any film people there, and I can sit in a booth and try to think Mandy-thoughts. I don’t tell anyone at the diner who I am, but I’m pretty sure they know I’m from the cast. Whenever I walk in I feel like the conversation that slams to a halt was probably way more interesting than anything they’re willing to say while I’m there. I keep hoping they’ll get used to me and go back to acting naturally when I’m around, but I guess that would take longer than a few days. But maybe people wouldn’t talk freely in front of someone like Mandy, either. She’s a cop, after all, and also a woman. Maybe you would have a harder time trusting her than you would some local good old boy. Maybe you wouldn’t want her poking her nose into your business. The script makes it clear that when Mandy is trying to dig up information about the quiet man living alone at the old hunting lodge, the locals aren’t much help. She’s not from the area—not from the point of view of the locals. She’s from Albany. It’s not much of a drive, but it’s the city.

  I’m having coffee and eggs at the diner when this hits me. I’ve been thinking of Mandy as a hick, more or less (and my childhood in Arrow earns me the right to use the word). But she’s a city girl, relatively speaking, and an outsider herself. The novel gives her more backstory than the movie has time for; you know that her grandparents are from the Adirondacks, and that her father returned to the mountains after he left her mother. She has one foot in the world of small towns like this one and another in Albany, an anxious, self-important city midway between New York City and the rural wilderness called the North Country.

  I wonder again what Lois was thinking when she invented Mandy. Did she just want to distinguish her book from the real story in a few concrete ways? Did she think the story needed an adult female character in order to attract the right kind of readers? (Which would have been smart, I admit.) Or is it more than that: does Mandy have some significance of her own, some coded meaning, at least in Lois’s (obviously) fucked-up mind?

  I can ask her, if I really want to know. She’ll be here in three days. I find it really hard to imagine this meeting—for some reason I haven’t allowed myself to think about it much—but I do believe it will happen. Lois. In three days.

  Suddenly my plate blurs, and I think for a second that I might actually be sick. But no, it’s just emotion, real and raw and weirdly anonymous. There’s anger in it, and loss, but that’s not all. Its intensity reminds me of the kind of feelings you have when you’re a kid, so powerful they really can knock you out, make you puke, cause you to see red. It’s been a long, long time, I realize, since I’ve felt anything like that. Am I not a cold-hearted, unfeeling bitch after all? Or is it a question of repression?

  Shut up, Chloe, I tell myself.

  I throw money on the table, and the queasy feeling passes. The regulars nod formally to me as I go, their curiosity politely suppressed.

  Only one of us can be batshit crazy, I tell myself. I have a sneaking sort of feeling that Lois—rational, orderly Lois—might have claimed that role. That means I need to keep it together.

  You too, Carly May. My old self seems nearer than usual. As if she wants something. But that thought has a distinct scent of crazy, which I have just sworn to avoid.

  * * *

  When I get back to the guesthouse, one of the girls is sitting on my doorstep. By now I’ve met them, but only in passing. They don’t seem all that interested in me, and I don’t blame them. We don’t even have that much screen time together, naturally, since I spend most of the movie trying to find them and then figure out how to rescue them.

  The one on my porch is the dark-haired one—the Lois girl, Natasha in real life and Hannah in the movie.

  I raise my eyebrows at her and then lower them quickly, thinking of wrinkles. I wait for her to say something, since I assume that’s what she’s here for. She’s sitting on my little step, pulling the red petals off a perfectly good flower from the garden. (My father would have known the name of it.) The woods stretch out behind the little row of carefully spaced guesthouses, so thick that they’re dead dark even in the middle of the day. I haven’t so much as set foot in the forest.


  “Sorry,” Natasha says when she sees me, looking up but not getting up. “You don’t really like us much, do you.”

  I find myself laughing. “If that’s your idea of small talk, maybe I do. But no, seriously, why would you say that? I don’t like you or not like you. I don’t know you, do I? It’s not personal.”

  “Really?” She narrows her pretty blue eyes at me, and I feel as if she’s trying to look inside my head. “It feels kind of personal. I see you watching us sometimes with a really weird look on your face. Like you can’t stand us.”

  God, is she right? I hope not. “Seriously, kid, that’s just my normal expression. Ask Billy, he’ll tell you. Get used to it.”

  “Actually it’s Billy that told me maybe I should come talk to you,” she says. Then, on a totally different note: “Did you just call me kid? That’s, like, so old-fashioned, isn’t it? Like from some old movie? You know, like”—she scrunches up her face and drops her voice, becoming a weird cross-dressing caricature of some old male movie star—“See ya around, kid.” She winks. “Or, you know, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’”

  “God, please, stop. I did say it. I don’t know why. So what do you want, anyway?” Conceited little monster.

  “Acting advice.”

  My heart warms ever so slightly. “Is this your first film?”

  She lifts her sharp little shoulders in a show of modesty. “I’ve done some made-for-TV stuff and commercials. But yeah, pretty much. How old were you when you started acting?”

  “Older than you,” I say, and my heart is cold again. “So? What is it?”