Such a Pretty Girl

by Laura Wiess

  “My daddy,” I whisper, staring up at the four big white ceiling tiles framed within the curtain track. “I don’t want him to get in trouble. I just want him to stop.”

  “Shhh, it’s all right.” The lady with the velvet eyes warms my frigid hands. “You’re safe now. We’re not going to let anything happen to you.” Her voice is soothing, but she’s wearing rubber gloves and the smell turns my stomach.

  I gulp and concentrate on the ceiling. One two three four, my gaze travels from corner to corner, over and over again. The tiles are white, the curtain is white. The sheets on this bed are white, too, just like the ones at home were before…. My breath hitches. “He’s gonna be mad. I wasn’t supposed to tell.”

  “Tell what, sweetie?” the lady says softly, exchanging glances with the quieter lady on the other side of the bed who is doing something prickly to my arm.

  I shake my head and think of white. Clouds are white, cotton is white. I need two more to make four. I need to cry but I can’t. Oh. Snow and eggs. Am I still bleeding? I don’t think so. There were doctors here, but now they’re out talking to my mother. The look in her eyes as they took her out said, “Quiet, be quiet.” I tried, I will tell her. I tried, but I couldn’t.

  I’m up and moving again, running headlong into the smothering heat.

  I won’t bleed for him anymore.

  Parking lot pebbles gouge my heels, sweat streams from my pores.

  My mother’s giving him another baby.

  “What did you tell them?” my mother whispers, stepping back in and bending over me after the velvet-eyed lady leaves, and she and I are now alone behind the rippling white curtain. “You didn’t mention Daddy, did you?”

  The drugs stretch me see-through and I drift above myself, touching the four tiles, wondering why she needs me to talk when she can see the answer in my head.

  “You didn’t blame him, did you?” Her breath is sour in my nostrils. “You know he didn’t mean it, he loves you, he really does. It was a mistake, Meredith, so nobody’s really to blame. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I told them,” I mumble, floating like a wispy, white cloud.

  “You told them?” She isn’t whispering anymore. “How could you do that? Don’t you know what’s going to happen?” Her fingers yank me down from the peaceful place. “We’re supposed to stick together, family is supposed to stick together. He made a mistake! Lots of people make mistakes and no one tells on them! How could you?”

  The curtain swishes open. “Mrs. Shale? Your daughter needs rest.”

  “Don’t touch me,” my mother growls, clinging to my arm. “Meredith, tell them you were wrong, tell them you lied. Go ahead, tell them.”

  “Here she is, guys,” the nurse says grimly. “Be my guest.”

  My mother yelps and walkie-talkies squawk and the bed pitches and jerks, but everything is smudgy and distant and dark as I float away….

  I pound across the burning macadam, an eighteen-wheeler running at full throttle, past Andy’s and then right back up the hot, metal steps to his door. The curtains twitch and I find myself returning Nigel’s gaze.

  “You arrested my father that day,” I say as he lets me in. My eyes don’t adjust to the darkness quickly enough and the air-conditioning makes my head spin. I stumble and Nigel steers me into a seat. “Tell me again what you saw and this time I want details. No more of that ‘we got the call, arrested him, and that was it’ crap. I was in the middle of it, remember? If that didn’t kill me, this won’t, either.” I smear sweat from my forehead and drain the glass of water Ms. Mues offers.

  “Now?” Clearly uncomfortable, Nigel runs a ham-size hand over his hair and trudges back to the table. He sits and the cushioned chair wheezes beneath him.

  “What’s going on with you, Mer?” Andy asks and his hands close tight around the Jim Beam bottle. He looks like he wishes he were already in Iowa.

  And that pisses me off because I can’t run away to Iowa or to Leah Louisa’s or drown myself in alcohol. I have to stay to protect others and keep my wits sharp to protect myself. “My father and mother are trying to have another baby.”

  Andy hoists his bottle and drinks.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There’s more.” I go to the sink and wash my hands. Push the words out over the sound of the water. “He touched my…above the waist. Over my shirt. The camera was on.” I cringe at the thought of everyone seeing my humiliation.

  “Camera?” Ms. Mues asks.

  Nigel explains the nanny cams while I rinse the soap away.

  “When I got home before, my mother was in the living room. He told me to wait in my room while they messed around.” I scrape myself with paper towels. My hands and wrists are clean, but the rest of me still feels filthy.

  Nigel’s brows hang low over his eyes. “You’re telling me he groped you and now that kinky son of a bowlegged hamster and your mother are going at it in the living room?” He shoves his chair from the table and his footsteps rattle the dishes in the cabinets. “Will somebody tell me what the hell it’s gonna take to get this guy a one-way ticket out of here?”

  “Nothing, because nobody cares,” Andy says, staring at the ceiling. “No matter what he does or how many kids he ruins, he’s still a human being and he still has rights under the law. He’s sick, and because he is, we’re screwed.” His fingers are busy twisting the bottle cap off and on, off and on. “God sure does work in mysterious ways, huh, Ma?”

  “Please,” Ms. Mues says, distressed. “The unjust shall be punished, if not in this world, then in the next.”

  Andy snorts. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  “My grandmother was hoping he’d be murdered in prison,” I say to get him to look at me. It doesn’t work and I feel like kicking him. I probably would if his mother and Nigel weren’t there.

  Ms. Mues stares worriedly at Andy. “Please don’t start questioning your faith. Not now, when you’re so close to a cure.” She glances at Nigel. “There must be something we can do. Touching Meredith must have violated the terms of Charles’s probation—”

  “No offense, Paula, but how about joining us in the real world for a minute?” He shakes his head, looks us over, and heaves a resigned sigh. “Oh, all right. Little girl goes to the ER. The mother doesn’t want her kid talking to the doctors. The cops are called in. The kid talks to the rape counselor while they’re swabbing up DNA samples.”

  Andy sets the bottle on the table and leans forward in his chair, plants his elbows on his knees, and stares at the floor. His T-shirt is dark with sweat.

  I wish he would look at me.

  “The detectives question the mother, who’s looking to lawyer right up, while me and my partner head over to the house to grab this…” His face twists. “To grab up old Chuckie. He doesn’t answer the door, so we kick it in and find him stuffing bloody sheets into the washing machine. ‘Course that’s not gonna do nothing about the blood smeared all over his shorts and legs, though, is it?”

  Ms. Mues makes a low, wounded-animal sound and glances at Andy, who is staring stonily at his feet.

  I didn’t know about the washing machine. I wasn’t in court for the entire case and know nothing of the others’ testimony. All I know is that shame and shock sealed my throat when the most sordid details of the story needed telling.

  “When I read him his rights and ask what he’s doing, he says he’s trying to save his daughter the embarrassment of seeing how heavy her first period was.” Sarcasm shreds his words. “Seems it caught her by surprise.”

  “He said that?” I blurt, stung and weirdly embarrassed. “What a liar.”

  “Yeah, well, it goes with the territory. Anyhow, he isn’t exactly cooperative, so now we have to use a little reasonable force,” Nigel says with a grim smile. “I’m kneeling on his back and my partner’s cuffing him and he’s cursing away, but by the time we hit the squad car he’s bawling, telling us how sick he is and how much he hates himself.”

  “I can�
�t deal with this,” Andy says abruptly. He jams the bottle between his legs, wheels, and whips out of the room.

  Slowly, cheeks burning, I untuck my hair and dip my head.

  “I’m sorry, Meredith,” Ms. Mues says, touching my clenched hands.

  “Feel sorry for him.” I say loudly. “The details are real and if he won’t face them, then what’s the difference between him and my mother? She won’t deal with what really happened, either.”

  “Fuck you, Meredith!” Andy shouts from his room.

  I’m up and out of my chair before his voice fades, down the hall and into his bedroom, lashing out and kicking him, bruising numb flesh that doesn’t even flinch. The sound of the vicious blows fuels my frenzy because I want him to feel it, all of it, and he won’t. He can’t.

  But I don’t want to be the only one.

  “Don’t ever say that again,” he says, fumbling with his wheels. “You think you know, Meredith, but you don’t.” He spins away from me, his knuckles skeleton white on the metal rims. “Christ, I wish I was in Iowa!”

  I reach out, grab his braid, and jerk him to a brutal halt. See my own clenched fist yanking taut the woven rope. Drop it and step back.

  “I can’t stay here, Mer. Don’t you get that yet?” he says hoarsely, reaching around and rubbing his scalp. “I’m useless. I know what he did to you and to me and to all those other kids and I still don’t have the balls to do anything about it!” His voice cracks. “I see him walking around out there all free and cocky and I swear to Christ, I want to rip his heart out. But I can’t.” His chin sinks to his chest. “I can’t even look at him.”

  Our backs are to the mirror and we’re temporarily blessed with no reflections. I can see the oak Madonna, though, and smell the scent of roses mingled with the fear seeping from Andy’s skin. I put my fingertips against his temples and feel his pulse jittering beneath them.

  “I begged him not to do it and it didn’t matter,” he whispers. “I trusted him and he screwed me. Told me I could call him Dad in private…he called me Buddy and I thought it was so cool that he’d given me a nickname, you know? I thought it meant he really liked me.” A shudder rips through him. “And then he got me. He took my power and when he went to prison I thought I had it back, but I don’t. I don’t.” He breaks and weeps like a little boy.

  I look to the Blessed Virgin, but she keeps her counsel. I stroke Andy’s back and bowed neck. There’s nothing I can say to comfort him because he’s right. My father trapped us in time and we will always be small around him.

  “Meredith?” Ms. Mues fills the doorway. Her face sags like bread dough. She motions me out of the room and toward the kitchen.

  I rest my cheek against Andy for a moment, then step away.

  He doesn’t ask me to stay. Maybe doesn’t even know I’m gone.

  I follow her back to the kitchen and take my seat. I can still hear him crying.

  Ms. Mues and Nigel sit across from me like mourners at a wake.

  “When Andy started getting hurt, I thought he was just at the awkward age little boys go through. All arms and legs and no coordination,” Ms. Mues says, staring down at her fingers. “I figured he’d outgrow it. You know how kids are. One day, he was climbing a tree behind the old house and I was doing the dishes and watching him out the window. He kept going higher and higher. I got nervous because he was accident-prone and if he fell from that height…. Well, I was just about to call him when he inched out onto a limb and just…let go.”

  I light a cigarette.

  “I begged God to spare him and miraculously he survived the fall with only two broken ribs and a broken collarbone. I didn’t tell the doctors what I’d seen. Maybe I should have, but all I wanted to do was protect him. His father was dead, the man I had brought into our home was pulling away from us, and I thought Andy was heartbroken at losing him. I didn’t know what was going on, I swear.”

  The curling smoke makes my eyes water.

  “When Andy got out of the hospital he begged me not to leave him alone,” she says, voice faint. “He said he couldn’t breathe while I was gone. When I finally had to go back to work he went hysterical and told me about your father.”

  Nigel curses under his breath.

  “I could have killed Charles with my bare hands. I’d trusted him, given him carte blanche to my son. He’d lied to me about everything.” Her voice fades and she resurrects it. “I wanted to have him arrested, but Andy begged me not to. He didn’t want anybody to know. He said if the kids at school found out they’d call him a ‘gay boy’ and a ‘faggot’ and nobody would hang around with him anymore.”

  “Kids are great, huh?” Nigel mutters.

  “What about counseling? I thought you took him to a psychologist or something,” I say, crushing out my cigarette in the brimming ashtray.

  “I did.” Ms. Mues sounds exhausted. “We went after I told Charles that if I ever heard even a whisper of his touching another child I would see him in hell.”

  “Fat lot of good that did.” The malice in my voice shocks me. Am I mad at her, too? Do I blame everyone for not protecting me?

  “We had a saying in the army,” she whispers, staring down at her hands. “ ‘God hates a coward.’ ” Her chin trembles. “I pray every night for the opportunity to redeem myself.” She meets my gaze. “And now this.”

  “Which kind of brings me back to my original point,” Nigel says. “Four years ago we had a traumatized little girl and a confession from her father. We had a couple of other kids swearing on a stack of Bibles that he’d wronged them, too. We had bloody sheets and DNA evidence. Medical records on Meredith’s injuries. We had everything to make this an open-and-shut case.”

  I pick up the saltshaker. Chip a spot of dried tomato sauce from Mary’s painted robe. Set her down.

  “The lawyers start blowing smoke. We get character witnesses for old Chuck stretching all the way back to when he was a high school baseball star. We get ‘expert testimony’ from a two-thousand-dollar-a-

  day rent-a-shrink hired by the defense. We get two little boys who go hysterical when they’re asked to point to who did this to them.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I interrupt. Two boys crumble on the stand while I, the daughter, the one with everything to lose, finger him without a hiccup.

  “Yeah, it was a circus.” Nigel’s face creases with disgust. “The town wanted it over fast on account of your granny being mayor and all, but your mother didn’t. She gave the paper some big sob story about false accusations and how sad it was that the mayor’s daughter had to sell her house to pay for the defense.”

  So that was why we moved into the condo. Not to spare me bad memories, but to save my father from prison.

  Nigel stabs out his cigarette and squints fiercely through the lingering smoke. “The point being, Paula, is that praying is all well and good, but it doesn’t do squat for us right now. We need hard evidence because if we had him dead to rights last time—and we did—and he was sentenced to nine years and he still got out in three, then what the hell do you think he’s gonna get for groping one teenager on video, even if she is his daughter?”

  I stare down at my hands. Hear Andy’s chair moving over the bare wood floors of his room and the faint strains of “Little Green Apples.” I don’t know what to say or do now that Nigel has banished our illusions and Andy has bailed out.

  “So that’s it?” Ms. Mues says.

  “I’m afraid so,” Nigel says. “There’s nothing we can do except wait until that lying sack of llama turds gets serious—”

  “No!” Ms. Mues is on her feet and the chair goes over backward, landing with a crash. “What does he have to do, attack Meredith again?”

  “Do you really think I want to see that happen?” Nigel says, glaring at her from beneath his brows. “Christ, Paula, the point is to nail this guy once and for all.” He rises and lumbers, swearing, about the room.

  “I wish he would just die,” I hear myself say and draw back as
they stop and stare at me. “What?” I burn under the heat of their combined gazes. “Oh, come on. Like nobody’s really wishing that but me.”

  Ms. Mues and Nigel exchange looks. Something dark passes between them.

  “Meredith, he’s your father,” she says. “You don’t really wish he was dead.”

  A sharp, sudden thrill of fear makes the hair on my arms rise. We are three and three is the number of initial completion, the first stage achieved. We need only harness our dark, unspoken desires to become four—

  “Yeah, well, get the idea of your old man croaking right out of your head because it ain’t gonna happen,” Nigel says, hitching up his baggy pants. “I saw him running around out there, remember? He’s as healthy as a damn ox.”

  I blink. Shrug. Okay, I can play along. Pretend I’m the only one hoping for a permanent solution. “So maybe he’ll get hit by a car, or swallow wrong and choke.” I knew I shouldn’t have thrown away those steaks. Whenever somebody chokes, it’s always on a hunk of steak.

  Ms. Mues and Nigel are talking, but I’m caught up in the fantasy of my father’s permanent absence. It’s a siren song that promises peace and remains maddeningly out of reach.

  “His kind live forever,” Nigel mutters.

  His words snatch the dream right out from under me.

  Ms. Mues pats me. “Don’t fret, honey. God works in mysterious ways.”

  I don’t even have the strength left to deny her words. To open my mouth and agree with Nigel, because as hope dissolves it gives me a glimpse of what my life is going to be like with my father and without Andy. I run my thumb along the outline of the knife in my pocket and wonder why I just don’t use it.

  Maybe because my mother would have heart failure at the sight of blood splattering her shiny white whirlpool tub and I don’t want irritation to be her last memory of me. Or maybe I’m afraid my father will be the one to find me, and if I’m dead or dying, I won’t be able to fight off his last invasion.

  I don’t know. I’ve learned too much today and can’t hold myself steady. I have no balance left. I should have taken my vitamins.