Pretend We Are Lovely

by Noley Reid

  27

  Enid

  When the Plymouth turns up the driveway, Floey and the new dog still haven’t come out of the bush. I bust out crying again and run barefooted out onto the rocks. Sunlight hits the windshield and bounces straight at me. The rocks carve their shapes into my feet.

  “Daddy!” I call.

  The car’s side door swings open and he gets out. He runs to me and scoops me up into the sky. “You!” he says.

  The bite pounds harder in the towel. Sharp and hotter. This is how blood feels dropping out the holes in my skin.

  “My girl.”

  “Daddy.” I hold tight around his neck, squeezing the towel behind his back, making it hurt much worse. I shut my eyes so tight maybe I can forget how it burns.

  “Vivvy, she’s—”

  “At Dawn’s,” I say.

  He squeezes me to him. All I see is the heat of his skin and the wet curls dark on his neck. He smells like Floey wet from rain.

  Now we’re both crying and our faces are nasty with goop from our noses and sticky-cheek and sticky-beard tears.

  “I don’t even want to be a pirate anymore,” I say.

  He bristles his beard against me. Goose bumps prickle my shoulder and chin.

  Now Daddy lets go and I’m sideways in the gravel. On my knees and one elbow, one foot over Daddy’s shoulder, and he’s down on all fours. The sounds we make are no sounds, like only emptiness where we used to hold air.

  There is someone else. A driver, someone gets out of the Plymouth fast.

  “Tate!” she yells, running to us.

  She kneels down and she seems like she doesn’t know which one of us to talk to first. She reaches for Daddy’s back. She bends down and a long orange braid slips past her shoulder to hang between us. “Are you okay?” she says and tries to make a smile. She looks back at Daddy. “Are you?”

  I know who she is.

  I look at her cheeks, all those freckles like she needs to wash up. There is ribbon strung through her blouse at the neckline: baby-blue satin. Its ends hang down her front where the shirt could tie to close itself up. There’s a snag on one of the ends so a blue string of it hangs down.

  “Baby girl,” he says to me, standing up, brushing off his palms. “And Vivvy’s all right? What happened, then?”

  Behind my back, I peel down the sleeve of my sweatshirt, fit it gently over the towel.

  “Tate,” says the girl, “she’s bleeding.”

  “Am not,” I say, keeping my right arm behind my back. I tug my sleeve over the cloth and over my entire hand and repinch the cuff and hold it between two of the stiff, curled fingers inside. I squeeze my right hand, squeeze the towel and feel a slow, cold trickling down through my knuckles.

  “Right there,” she says to him.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  “Oh honey,” says Daddy but he is looking at my leg and so is she. He kneels down. He works one of his giant fingers in through a new rip in the knee of my jeans. Seeing the fresh color coming up there makes it sting, though he is careful. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I nod.

  “How did you do that? Did you fall from the tree?” He stands up now. He looks at our tree and out into the yard, where the forsythia is all snap-branched and mangled on one side and in the middle. “What’s that?” he says. The dogs don’t move.

  I shrug my shoulders.

  “So when are you going to show me what’s behind your back?”

  My eyes go wet. All at once there is new lightning in my hand. Feels like it cuts itself open all over again. I squeeze the blue towel hard, harder into the torn V between my thumb and hand.

  “You need to let me see,” he says.

  He pushes up my sleeve and he is gentle but when he sees the stained towel, his hands go more slowly.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  “What on earth for?” He is unwinding the layers of towel until finally he sees it. A half-inch-long slit runs along the side of my hand. It is sticky with dried and drying blood and now, without the towel to soak it up, new blood dribbles from the cut. There are no tooth marks, no fur or dog slobber.

  “Looks like that hurts,” he says.

  I nod.

  He holds my wrist in place, watching my hand bleed. “It’s not too bad. We just need to clean it up properly. Where’s your ma? Did she wash it? Did she give you this towel?”

  “No and she’ll be so mad at me,” I say. “It’s ruined.”

  He looks to the driveway where only the Plymouth sits. “She isn’t here?”

  “I think so?”

  He holds my chin, tips my face up into the bright sun. “Please don’t worry,” he says and rewinds the towel loosely. “Can you do something? I know I have no right to ask.”

  He isn’t talking to me, he’s talking to her.

  “Right,” she says. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not,” he says.

  “I know, yet here I am.”

  He blows his bangs up out of his eyes.

  •

  We hear knocking upstairs. He’s looking for Ma. She’s not here, but what if she does answer? What if she tells him I cried for her at first but then I stopped? What if she tells him I didn’t go to her at all or that I screamed “I hate you” or any other thing she could say? He knows her car is not in the driveway, but he keeps knocking.

  Holly is looking around and we haven’t turned on the light in the eating room but the kitchen’s is on so she is looking at the sink and after I called Daddy’s office, I didn’t want to but I kept thinking about that butter hiding behind the cabbage and Ma used to make me fold-over bread-and-butters when I was little, I think, so I made three—one right after the next even though I knew it was wrong.

  After that I wiped Shelly’s door and covered where I dripped in the rug so no one will see until the washcloths have soaked it all up. I sat at the top of the stairs in case Ma came out of Shelly’s room or any other hidey-hole, and I picked at the dried blood on the top of my arm.

  And now Holly is here, looking over the crumbly countertop and the butter knife holding over the edge of the sink.

  “Those aren’t mine,” I say. “They’re my ma’s.”

  She kind of shrugs her head to the side and says, “Fine with me either way.”

  “Well, you can’t go in there,” I call. “Ma wouldn’t like it.”

  “Oh?” she says. “Okay.”

  Daddy pounds and the whole house rattles, even my hand and it burns when it does. He’s talking so loud now at Ma that I start to go to the front of the house, to the stairs.

  “Hey now,” says Holly. “Hey, Enid. Come on back in here with me, please.” She follows me, so when I get to the dining room, I turn back.

  In the eating room’s bathroom, she flicks on the fan.

  “We don’t need that,” I say, flicking the switch off, “because I’m not pooping with you in here and if you start to poop, I’ll leave.”

  Her eyes go big but she kind of half giggles, then gets all serious again, then half giggles. “Thanks for the warning,” she says. “I’ll be sure to warn you before I suddenly poop in front of you.”

  I mash my lips together hard to keep from smiling. She sees.

  “No matter who’s pooping or not. I do have to warn you, though,” she says and leans in almost close enough to kiss me. She whispers, “Sometimes I don’t know when it’s going to happen.”

  “Sick!”

  “Gotcha,” she says.

  I roll my eyes like Vivvy would. She smirks.

  And so I decide to ask her: “You’re a grown-up, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she says. “In most ways.”

  “Do you have to do everything my dad says?”

  “Definitely not. Well, that all depends, I guess,” she says. She reaches underhand behind her back with both arms now. When she moves just a tiny bit to the side, I can see why. She’s holding the end of her braid, using the first and second fingers of both hands, st
raight like the scissors in Rock, Paper, Scissors, only she clamps the hair between her fingers and slides them down to the end of the braid. Over and over again, left hand, right hand, left hand, right.

  “That’s kind of weird. When you do that, it’s kind of like you’re petting yourself.”

  “Oh,” she says and stops.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “That’s okay. Sorry I was being weird.”

  “It’s not a bad weird. You can still do it,” I say. “It’s fine.”

  “Okay, maybe another time.”

  She turns on the faucet and takes the little fringed towel off its ring. “Do you think your mother will mind?”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  “Hmm,” she says. She goes out to look at the kitchen again. There are cleaning cloths in here under the sink and I don’t tell her.

  When she comes back, she has paper towels. The water is steamy on the bottom of the mirror. She turns both knobs and tests the temperature with her fingers. Now she tears off paper towels and crumples each one into a wad under the faucet, letting them get really soppy-wet, then wringing them out. She wets each one until she has a pile of wet, wadded towels on the counter.

  “Hop up,” she says. She pats the other side of the counter. Ma calls it the vanity because those are the kinds of words she’s good at.

  I scoot my butt up to the sink but with only one hand, all I can do is try to lean myself up onto it.

  “Hold on,” she says.

  Her arms go around my middle and now I’m in the air and plopped right onto the counter. She doesn’t say, Oh my god, you weigh a ton! Oh my god, what have you been eating?

  I move my legs out of the way and tell her the stuff’s down below me. She opens the cupboard and brings up Ma’s box of first aid supplies. It’s not an official box like the ones teachers have on the walls over their sinks at the back of the classrooms. It is an old shoe box with Ma’s neat, black writing on one short edge of the lid: Tan Peep-Toe.

  She opens it, looks over the tidy rows of bandage boxes arranged by size and shape, the cotton balls, Q-tips, gauze pads, and white tapes.

  There are little bottles that sting so I say, “Ma never uses those.”

  She pushes at one side of a bottle and it spins to show the back label. “You have an awful lot, don’t you?”

  “Ma likes to be prepared.”

  “I guess so.”

  She pushes that bottle’s side, slowly, purposefully spinning it back to face right side up again. Now she pushes the side of the next bottle and, when it first begins to spin, the bottles clink against each other. That’s a Ma-sound; I’ve only ever heard it when Ma spins on the bottles to spin them—her baking extracts, too.

  “We’ll start small, shall we? The easy ones first.” She rolls up the leg of my jeans just a bit. “You got really scraped up down here, didn’t you?” She squeezes a little water out on my shin. One line is deeper, darker. She presses the towel to it and the blood turns the water pink. She wipes at it, soaks a cotton ball in one of the bottles, and daubs that on. “Sorry,” she says. “Does it hurt?”

  I shake my head but hold my breath through the burning. At least it makes me feel my hand less.

  She cuts lengths of tape and makes a rectangle of gauze to cover the scratches. She tapes it down on all the edges and makes an X across the rectangle, too.

  “Okay,” she says. “Let’s look at that knee.” She rolls my jeans up over my knee, being careful not to touch the skinned and clawed part where four straight lines are scratched into me. She washes it and cleans it just the same but uses the biggest Band-Aid we have because it’s special for knees. She checks my other leg but it’s not bloody, just has a few white scuff marks on the knee. She blots at them with a clean, wet paper towel. The towels aren’t warm anymore but I don’t tell her.

  “Look up,” she says and daubs at something under my chin.

  “Is it bleeding?” I say.

  “No,” she says, smearing it between two sides of the paper towel when she’s done. “I think it’s . . . spaghetti sauce?”

  “Oh,” I say, rubbing the spot away on the topside of my left hand. “Pizza.”

  “It’s okay. Look.” She lifts part of her skirt and hunts amid the blue-and-white paisleys and flowers of the fabric. “See?” She holds it out to me and there’s a faint orange stain. “Everyone makes a mess every once in a while. Your dad on the other hand, well . . .” she says but that’s all.

  She takes my good hand, gently pushes up the sleeve. She turns it and lifts it up to inspect my whole arm. Now she holds it twisted so she can work on the elbow. When that’s clean and bandaged, she says, “Last but definitely not least,” and touches the cuff of the sweatshirt.

  I nod.

  She squats down, trying to replace some of the bandage boxes in the right spots of the jigsaw puzzle as Ma can always do super-speedily. There is a loud noise upstairs, like dropping Ma’s double-volume dictionary flat to the linoleum. Maybe louder.

  Holly’s head spins from the box to look right at me. “It’s okay. It will be okay.”

  “Now to your hand,” she says. She gets her face down close to my hand and begins touching the end of the sleeve.

  I take a deep breath and look away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “am I hurting you?”

  I pinch my lips between my front teeth. I watch the loose blue thread snagged from her ribbon bend one way, then fold back at the kink in its middle and stand straight up. She moves out of focus and back in focus, bends over my hand again, and I notice she has the very end of her braid in her mouth.

  Her hands stop moving. So I look down. My hand is still here and deep inside the towel, still looks like a hand. On the tops of my knuckles are circles of dried blood. My fingers stick together. I try to loosen them.

  “Um, don’t go anywhere, okay? Just sit tight. And don’t pull anything apart just yet. Just give it a minute.”

  When she comes back, she brings trays of ice—all of them—and twists the cubes right into the sink. Now she runs cold water on the ice and stoppers the sink. The cubes crack, some breaking themselves apart.

  “We’re going to put that hand in here, soak it a bit, then unwrap it and soak it some more. Sound like a plan?”

  I shrug. It’s a plan but I don’t know if it’s a good one.

  “You ready?” she says.

  I nod.

  Together, we lower my hand down in. The ice and water take on a faint pink cloud I know used to be in me. It’s all so cold that, for a second, I can’t even feel it. Until I do and now there is a new kind of pain I can’t do anything about. She holds my arm just below the elbow and lifts it up from the water. The towel drips a steady stream of water. She undoes the towel from around my hand and it’s okay. It comes off and I’m okay.

  “It was the dogs,” I say.

  “Your dogs? Dogs you know?”

  I nod.

  “Ouch,” says Holly. She moves my hand closer to inspect the cut. “It’s not so bad, though you might get a little scar but that’s okay, I’ve got a few of my own.” She points to a white line across her elbow. “Glass window,” she says.

  Now she holds my hand again and together we move it back and forth in the water. There is a flap of skin where fresh blood swims from it like a fancy fish’s tail. It isn’t long or wide.

  She is quiet.

  We keep stirring. Side to side, front to back, in circles, then bobbing up and down.

  “It’s kind of like stirring a witch’s cauldron, isn’t it?” she says.

  “It’s Halloween,” I say.

  “I know. I guess I’d forgotten but yes, it sure is.”

  We stir. I look down at the water but also, I can see out the corners of her eyes she is looking at me. My cheeks feel hot and I look back at the water only.

  “What are you going as tonight?”

  I shrug.

  “Haven’t decided?” she asks.

  “Don’t
know.”

  She lifts my hand out of the water and I try not to but I cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It will probably hurt awhile longer and maybe even worse for a little bit while you thaw out.” She presses a wad of gauze to the V between my thumb and hand. “I’m really, really, really sorry,” she says. She positions my hand in the air and has me hold it there. She pours the bubbling liquid over and tells me to scream “Yayayayayaya!” while it burns and she shouts it with me, shaking her head back and forth. Now she blots my arm dry and starts winding the spool of gauze around my hand, around my wrist, around and around, then tapes down where it could get loose.

  “Now we have to keep it upright,” she says. “What’s your favorite place in your house?”

  “Basement?” I say. My voice squeaks in the back of my throat.

  “Lead the way.”

  Downstairs she has me lie on the sofa with my arm up in the air. She sits down next to my head and I can’t get comfy without a pillow so I put my head on her lap and look at her to make sure it’s okay.

  “Do you like anyone special at school?” she asks, looking down at me.

  I shake my head, ask, “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No,” she says. “Not anymore.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Me neither.”

  She smiles down at me, says, “It’s okay if you want to shut your eyes.”

  She begins to hum. I don’t know if she knows it’s out loud or not. Her right hand touches my hair and strokes my forehead. I stretch my pinky finger and tuck it into Holly’s silky braid.

  Vivvy

  It is a free country. Dawn can’t make me go home. She can say whatever she wants but the parking lot of Pizza Inn is public property, so there is nothing either one of them can do to make me leave. She and Andy aren’t even eating and it’s 4:10—big date, heavy, heavy! So what is the big deal?

  His bike rests against a lamppost by the curb, not chained or anything. I straddle mine, which is really Dawn’s, even though I have on a dress. Our dress, which we planned on the phone last night. Mine is just like Dawn’s: a green alligator shirtdress with the drop waist so gathers of the skirt-part begin at our hips. Hers is Izod. Mine is not because Dad doesn’t know anything. But also we both have on our penny loafers—mine are black, which Dawn says is so much cooler than her regular ones. We keep dimes in the penny slots and that is how one can see just how in the know a person really is.