Pretty Is

by Mitchell, Maggie

  The first fat raindrops spattered against the windows, like the ticking of a mad clock. Zed held on to Callie’s arm. Every muscle in his body seemed tensed, his face stretched taut across bone and sinew. “Don’t do that here. Not here. Do you understand me?” He pulled her a little closer and repeated: “You understand? You’ve left that behind. It’s over.” He pushed her away, gently enough, but with such visible control that it suggested a tremendous current of power flowing beneath the surface. Callie reeled a little—more from her sense of that power than from the push itself. “Never. You hear? Never. You won’t be that girl anymore.” Then he turned and strode out of the lodge, closing the door hard behind him.

  “Well.” Callie dropped onto the couch beside Hannah and crossed her legs gracefully. “So I guess he doesn’t approve of pageants.”

  “But why—” Hannah sat up straight, folded her legs beneath her. She was afraid Callie would be offended, but she had to go on: “Why did he pick you, then?”

  Callie twisted a long golden curl around her index finger. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” She tugged sharply at the coiled hair—once, twice; Hannah felt the twinge in her own follicles. “Maybe he meant to save me,” Callie said. She made her voice sound flippant, but Hannah knew Callie was serious. And perhaps she was also right.

  Later that night Hannah awoke with a pressing feeling that something was wrong. The rain had ended almost as soon as it began, and the sky was clear again; a glimmer of moonlight revealed Callie’s bedding, twisted into its customary nest. Empty. She told herself that Callie must simply have gotten up to go to the bathroom. Unconvinced, she bolted upright, trying to ward off panic. Only then did she realize that she could hear voices downstairs, quiet and serious.

  Hannah slipped out of the room and crept to the head of the stairs. Crouching on the first step, she eased her head forward until she could just see them, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. At first, blood pulsed so hard in her ears that it was all she could hear, but their conversation became intelligible as she listened.

  “I don’t understand,” Callie was saying, a sulky edge in her voice. “I thought you picked us because of who we are.” Hannah caught her breath. This was what they never spoke of, not to him.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  “Well, then?”

  He leaned forward, and Hannah drew her head sharply back, afraid he might be able to glimpse her. She could hear just as well without seeing—better, if she concentrated.

  “It’s a waste.” He sounded very calm; there was no trace of the latent violence that had shocked the girls earlier. “A perversion. That’s why you needed me. Maybe you’ll understand someday. But listen,” he began.

  “I’m listening,” Callie said. A rare subdued note had crept into her voice.

  “I want you to promise me that you won’t do it anymore. The pageants. Cheapening yourself like that.”

  A mosquito buzzed in Hannah’s ear, and she raised a hand to crush it. Missed. She could feel the tension in the air like a sudden chill, or a storm coming. Callie felt it too, on the other side of the wall.

  When Callie finally spoke, her voice was low and steady. “Are we going home, then?” They had lived each day, as much as they could, without speaking of later. They might sketch fantasies of glamorous adulthood, but they avoided talk of their actual lives: starting a new school year, buying new clothes, listening to the newest songs on the radio, meeting new people. Later had become a hazy concept; back was unmentionable. But Callie was asking, as if it were the most normal question in the world, “Are we going back?” Hannah grabbed the railing; Callie gripped the edge of the table.

  “Do you promise?” Zed said.

  A strange, growing pressure inside Hannah’s head produced surges of dark, muddy colors before her eyes, and a band of sharp pain locked around her forehead.

  The whole house waited.

  “I promise,” Callie said, her voice oddly robotic, and so low Hannah hardly heard it.

  “Say it again.”

  “I promise,” Callie whispered. Hannah wasn’t even sure she had really heard it, but she felt it, as clearly as if Callie’s voice were coming from somewhere inside her own body. She felt it under her skin, in the pit of her stomach.

  Did that mean they were going home? Callie believed she had made a deal, that was clear to Hannah. But had she?

  Instinctively Hannah believed that if Zed had made a promise, he would not break it. But he had been careful, it seemed to her, not to promise. Not in so many words.

  Hannah released her sweaty palm from the railing, straightened her cramped legs, glided swiftly back into the bedroom. Slipping between her sheets, she curled up on her side and began to breathe the long, even breaths of sleep. Callie returned, tiptoeing across the room to her bed to avoid waking Hannah.

  For once, Hannah noticed, Callie didn’t drop off to sleep immediately. Lulled by the deceptive calm of her own steady breathing, she listened to Callie, whose unaccustomed stillness meant she was lying awake. If they were really to go home, how soon it would be? Had Callie meant what she said? Was Callie a girl who kept her promises? She had been willing Callie to promise, willing Zed to reciprocate. But in the back of Hannah’s mind, an unacknowledged voice was asking another question: Did she want to go home? And if she didn’t yet, what did that mean?

  When she finally slipped from feigned sleep to real, she dreamed of Zed turned into a tree outside her window, while she cried because he could never come in. There was a word she could say, a magic word that would free him, but she didn’t know what it was. In the dream this was because she wasn’t good enough.

  The next day and afterward, she kept waiting for Callie to tell her what had happened, since ostensibly she knew nothing. Hannah wanted to talk about it, to examine what he had said and what he had implied. You needed me, he had told Callie. Did he think Hannah needed him too?

  But Callie said nothing.

  * * *

  The next night he allowed them to go outside, and they played hide-and-seek. By this time he seldom joined their games. He was outside, too, but they weren’t sure where. They had already discovered that playing two-person hide-and-seek outside in the dark was a tricky undertaking: there was really no excuse for being found unless you wanted to be, because the person who was It could only blunder in the darkness. The real contest was with yourself: to see how long you could bear to stay hidden. It was challenging: first you started to get bored; then cold; and finally the silence grew eerie, and you began to fight off the temptation to give yourself up. The silence in the woods was actually full of sounds: even raccoons and opossums snapped small twigs under their shuffling feet, and there were bigger animals, too. If you ventured into the woods even a little way, a tree could easily hide the cabin and its reassuring lights, if only for a moment.

  Hannah was It; Callie was hiding. Hannah heard Callie run off while she counted—and Callie ran too loudly, too obviously; Hannah listened hard to confirm her suspicion that she then doubled back stealthily and headed off in another direction. It’s what she herself would have done. She thought she did hear Callie creeping back, in fact, though she wouldn’t have sworn it. After intoning “ready or not,” Hannah set off in the direction from which she thought she’d heard a telltale rustle. The best you could hope for by way of guidance in this game was an occasional shiver of branches, a quick intake of breath. A sneeze, if you were very lucky. Once she was moving, Hannah heard nothing. She skirted the edge of the woods, her steps graceful and nearly silent; she listened intently. She heard an owl, another bird she didn’t recognize, crickets, frogs. She heard the wind rush through the upper branches of the trees, though the air was perfectly still down below. She crept along and didn’t hear Callie. She circled the house, returned to her original spot, moved off in the other direction, listening. Once she heard a distinct crackle of branches a little way into the woods, farther than they ordinarily went. “Callie!” she whispered
triumphantly; this was about as close as you could get to catching the hider. But no one answered, and somehow in the silence that followed she knew it wasn’t Callie but something else: a deer, maybe. She leaned against a tree for a while, listening. If Callie were in motion, Hannah reasoned, she would have a better chance of intercepting her if she stayed still.

  Nothing. The owl again. Bats. She was chilled; her feet were damp; her legs scratched and stinging. The house no longer looked comforting; it was far enough away that it was cold, instead, and impenetrable. She felt somehow that it didn’t want her back, not without Callie. She had never, ever been more alone, more lonely. She felt tears at the back of her eyes, willed them away.

  Hannah abandoned her spot beneath the tree and closed in on the house, wanting suddenly to touch it and make sure that it was real. She tried not to look at the glowing windows because they blinded her even more when she looked back toward the woods. She closed her eyes, reasoning that depriving herself of sight (which was useless anyway) might sharpen her hearing, and she circled the house slowly, trailing one hand along the rough wood to orient herself. Every now and then she would stop. She wasn’t even trying to be especially quiet anymore. Who would hear her? Everyone had vanished.

  Soft, insinuating tendrils of panic crept into her mind, her veins. She picked up speed. Halfway down the fourth and final side of the house she walked straight into an obstacle. Warm, cotton, breathing, flat up against her entire body, since she’d had no warning. “Callie?” she gasped—absurdly happy, not even hiding it. But even in the split second before her eyes flew open she knew that it could not be Callie. Didn’t smell right; was too tall. She had walked smack into Zed. He put his arms around her as she burst into tears. She sobbed as if the world were coming to an end. She thought maybe it was. He hugged her tightly and stroked her hair. My hair too, she thought. Not just Callie’s. No one had ever hugged her so tightly. It’s okay, he kept saying. It’s okay, little Hannah. My poor little Hannah, it’s okay. Over and over he chanted it, until it became true. And even in the perfect darkness she felt wholly seen, as if her mind were inside out and all of her deepest secrets glittered like fireflies. Seen and understood, wanted in the only ways that mattered. Loved.

  But in the morning he hardly looked at them and didn’t speak at all.

  * * *

  “Something’s wrong,” Hannah said. She and Callie were in their beds, whispering even though they knew he had not come upstairs, in fact seldom came upstairs anymore. They did not think he slept much at this point.

  “I know.”

  “Do you think there’s anything we can do?”

  “I can’t think of anything,” Callie said grudgingly. It was true; Hannah couldn’t either. She had tried. He was drifting away from them. Not physically—they were still all cooped up in a hunting lodge together—but in his mind; they were sure of it. They couldn’t follow him, and he didn’t want them to.

  “What do you think is the matter?” Callie asked. “You always have a theory.”

  Hannah thought for a minute, flattered that Callie wanted to know what she thought, wanting to be sure her answer was as clear and true as she could make it. A mosquito had gotten in the room, and she heard it buzz. “I think…” she began quietly. “I think he thought we would make him happy.”

  “And? So?”

  “We don’t.” She swatted at the mosquito in the dark.

  “Did you get him?”

  “Her,” Hannah corrected, having learned somewhere that only female mosquitoes bite. “Not him. No, I didn’t.” She could already hear it buzzing again.

  “What do we do?” She could hear a panicky edge in Callie’s voice, not even disguised. This was significant. Hannah and Callie obsessively hid their weaknesses from each other. It was pointless, because by then they knew each other’s flaws as well as they knew their own; but it was a matter of pride. Their pride was one of the things they had in common.

  Hannah didn’t know what to say. She was thinking.

  They weren’t exactly afraid, even then, but they did feel uneasy. They felt decidedly uneasy, and they couldn’t reason themselves—or each other—out of it.

  * * *

  On the last full day the sky was a strange color: a sick yellowish gray with a hint of green, not grass green but bile green, swamp green. A swamp sky hanging low and deathly heavy over the mountains. A tornado sky, said Callie, adding that her entire town had once been wiped out by a tornado—before she was born, she added, as if this didn’t interest her much. She was mopey that day, restless and bored. She wanted to go outside. “Certainly not,” Zed said, adding that in fact he would appreciate it if they stayed away from the windows. They wondered if he knew something they didn’t. In retrospect, they thought he must have; perhaps he had heard or seen something in town. At the very least, he’d had a premonition. He prowled from window to window. Callie and Hannah sprawled on the couch, sweaty skin sticking to the cracked leather, trying to finish No More Dying Then, the Ruth Rendell mystery they were reading.

  They had spaghetti and jarred sauce for dinner and still it didn’t rain, although the air felt as if it might explode. After dinner, when the sun had set, he let them sit on the porch with him, though he forbade them the yard. He turned off the lights, and they sat in pure darkness, looking at the now-familiar patterns of stars emerging above them. Bats swooped and dove. There was no wind at all. Hannah imagined that they were ghosts, visible only to others of their kind; that they belonged somehow to the darkness. He sat in his usual Adirondack chair, and Callie and Hannah shared the other, quietly tolerating each other’s sharp angles—jutting elbows, hipbones. An opossum came out of the woods and stared at them, or seemed to. Then it turned and plodded away, neither disturbed by nor interested in their presence. Thunder rumbled all around them, too far away to give them much hope, and every now and then heat lightning flickered in the distance. Every now and then, too, he said something. Hannah understood for the first time the phrase “breaking the silence,” as the quiet seemed to fall in shards around him when he spoke: his voice like a rock hurled through a window. He said there was no such thing as heat lightning. He said some people will tell you that opossums are blind, but that it isn’t true. He said they should never let anyone stand in their way if there was something they really wanted to do. He said the cabin wasn’t his, that it belonged to an uncle who only used it in the winter, that he had visited it a few times as a boy. They tried to picture him as a boy. He said that they should learn to shoot, because you never knew. He said his older sister had run away to New York City when she was sixteen. He said her life was unspeakable. He told them that he was sorry. “You know that, right, Hannah, Callie?”

  They didn’t know. How could they have known? Sorry for what? But they said they did, because it was what he wanted to hear.

  * * *

  He came to their doorway that night. For the last time. Hannah was awake, and for once she stared right back at him, her eyes wide in the dark. She didn’t know if he could tell; he gave no sign of it. He stood there for a moment, as always, then moved softly away.

  On the last morning he didn’t sit down to breakfast with them. From the start, the day felt wrong. He was out on the porch early, sitting there, staring into space. He wandered in while the girls were clearing their dishes and crossed straight to the other side of the house, moving the curtains aside and peering out. They wanted to ask what was up but sensed that it would be better if they pretended not to notice anything.

  “We should probably do laundry today,” said Callie, grumbling a little, and Hannah could tell she wanted her to say no, let’s wait till tomorrow.

  He spoke up instead, surprising them, turning almost cheerfully to the room. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Do something fun today. Build a fort in the storage room, turn one of your books into a play. Or something.” For just a second he put a hand on each of their heads, and they stood still, as if some kind of paralyzing force had shot throug
h the palms of his hands into their skulls and through their bodies, rooting them to the floor, to the earth beneath it. As if they were extensions of him somehow. Then he removed his hands and headed back to the door. “Stay away from the windows,” he warned again, as he had the day before. But they thought they heard him humming something lilting and unfamiliar under his breath as he stepped outside.

  They left their dishes in the sink; it felt like the kind of day when that was acceptable. They went upstairs and raided the storage room for new costumes. They found an old trench coat, some ugly hats. They tried to style themselves as detectives and began cooking up a mystery. Hannah tossed out ideas for the murder plot, and Callie, even though she was playing a detective for once and not a femme fatale, tried to figure out what she could use for lipstick. Something food-related? Tomato paste? Grape juice? They would be rival detectives. Callie would be connected to the household in which there had been a murder—a family friend, perhaps. “We’ll make it seem like you’re the murderer,” Hannah proposed. “And you won’t be, but I won’t realize that until it’s too late. And by then you’ll be dead.” Hannah scribbled this down, conscious that it wasn’t her best effort; Callie nodded listlessly. “Look, why don’t you dig through the boxes and see if you can find—”

  “Shh,” Callie said. “I thought I heard something.”

  Hannah stopped, and then she heard it too—though it was more as if she had felt something, somehow. As if the ground had shifted a little. They listened. There was a strangely loaded silence and then a gunshot. There was no doubting that it was a gunshot. Not in the distance—not somewhere off in the woods, not someone hunting out of season. Nearby. Home. It cracked through the humid air and ricocheted off the mountains. Hannah and Callie kept hearing it long after it had stopped.

  They flew downstairs, their feet hardly touching the floorboards. Hannah paused when they got to the bottom and then veered toward one of the front windows, but Callie kept going, across the room, straight out the door, knowing something but not knowing yet what it was that she knew.