A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  So there I was walking Liza, four o’clock on a Wednesday morning, and my mother looked at me with such sad eyes that I thought I recognized pity there. I was too tired to be proud about wanting it. I was plain starved for a little mercy. Liza wailed unending on my shoulder, and I said, again,

  “What, Momma?”

  She shrugged and blinked and sighed at me. She folded her arms around herself, and I could see she was as tired as me. Her gaze settled on my howling baby, and final y she spoke.

  “We’re going to need to charge you rent.”

  Then she went in her bedroom and closed the door. That was when I’d final y understood that she’d never forgive me for making it so the ladies in the Mary-Martha Club at Faith First Baptist could cut their eyes at her and tut. Those women I’d known al my life hadn’t even given me a shower, as if shameful babies didn’t need teethers or warm blankets. The pastor made my daddy step down as deacon, tel ing him a man who couldn’t run his own family couldn’t be trusted to run the church. I looked at Liza, so beautiful and loud, so fierce, and I thought that word again. Mine. I wasn’t one to make a fuss, but Liza deserved one. No one was going to help me. Not my family, not God, and not my church.

  That morning I cal ed in sick for my shift and went instead to the office of a lady lawyer, new in town, who wasn’t getting a lot of business. My daddy said it was because she had “hair like a lesbian.” Turned out she had a girlfriend like a lesbian, too. She took me on, pro bono, and within six months me and Liza were camping in her guest room, emancipated. Three weeks after that, she poured out plastic cups of sparkling cider and we toasted the Westons. Then we cashed the big-ass check I’d gotten in return for not demanding a paternity test, shutting up like a good little girl, and moving at least a hundred miles away.

  I’d have gone farther, except I ran out of Mississippi. I dropped most of the Weston cash on my little house in Immita, five miles from the Gulf. I spent the rest on tuition to Clayton Career Training Center in Pascagoula, learning to be a bank tel er. It was just me and Liza, who never for a breathless second got a single speck easier to live with. I spent her toddler days with my heart lodged in my esophagus, because al she wanted to do was lick the electrical outlets and then wander into traffic. By the time she was school age and took to scrapping with any boy who said he could whoop her, there hadn’t been a day got by me where I hadn’t wanted at some point to sel her to Gypsies.

  On the darkest days, when I was so tired I thought it might be better to go lie in the road and pray for heavy traffic, I could forget for a minute that this wil ful child was mine. In the bottom blackest corner of my sorry heart, where I was stil scared of snakes and what might be under the bed, I sometimes felt a pinprick of belief that the pointy-nosed asshole doctor who couldn’t find Liza’s heartbeat had been right: My good and reasonable baby must have died. Maybe fairies stole out a Little Dead It right from my bel y. In return they loaned me something magical and half cussed.

  Something beautiful but flawed, whose brain broke in half when she was barely thirty. A changeling with an early expiration date, my Liza-Little, and I’d been wrestling her for two-thirds of my life.

  I was wrestling her for real today, sliding across my lawn, my skirt rucking up over my thighs while she thrashed like a mad pony, doing her best to throw me off her. “Liza, Liza, Liza,” I crooned, trying to calm her down and make her listen, al to no avail. So this is nothing new, I thought. But inside I was soaring, because maybe it wasn’t new, but this wild thing that bucked, wil ful and mighty, had been blankly, blackly absent from Liza’s body since the stroke. This was my real Liza trying to throw off my hands, half girl, half hurricane. She might stil be in there.

  Al the hope I’d banked flooded me, sweet enough to mute even the roared thunder of mother guilt, saying I had done this to her for a swimming pool. I’d eat this guilt and kil a thousand more wil ows, twice each, for a speck of hope that Liza was stil alive inside this broken body.

  “Liza,” I said, too loud to be soothing, “Liza, you need to breathe.”

  She writhed like half a bag of snakes, kicking and one-hand-clawing her inchy way across the yard on her bel y, her voice cutting into my ears like an air-raid siren.

  “Be stil ,” I said in hard, commanding tones, which had never worked on my old Liza. It did not work now. I tried it softer—“Shush, baby”—but she only shrieked again, a desperate cawing noise. I grabbed her arms and felt her heartbeat in her skin. It was like a reverb pounding through every inch of her. That scared me, the thought of al that racing blood moving thick and fast, launching an assault on her broken brains. Liza hol ered something that sounded like words, too garbled to understand over my own shushing and my rising fear as I felt the machine-gun desperation of her pulse.

  It was too much even for the old Liza, even over this tree. This wasn’t temper or brass, this was crazy-desperate, pressing toward suicide. She squirmed and shrieked like I wasn’t there, her good eye fixed on Tyler Baines. She scrambled toward him like he was a finish line. I lurched after her, rearing up on my knees and grabbing her around the waist.

  Tyler was holding what looked like curly bits of old ivory in his hands. Liza shoved herself forward again, repeating those wordlike sounds, pul ing me with her. As I toppled forward across her back, sunlight flashed off a silver box at Tyler’s feet. I took my weight off Liza but then froze like I was about to knock out ten push-ups, because the shape of that box was so damn familiar. It was filthy, clearly dragged up out of the earth under the downed tree, but there was something about the domed top and the splotches of hot pink on it that struck me as haunting and familiar. Liza was writhing her way out from under me, and I let her go, staring.

  There was a scrap of fabric on the ground by Tyler’s boot, and in the same buried way I knew that shade of pink. It was like that French word where you wake up in a strange house but you somehow know exactly where they keep the coffee filters. That splotch of pink flared and went blue-hot, becoming a bright, bad thing that would take my eyes if I looked at it directly. I made myself look away, fast, and I saw Mosey at the back of the yard, scrambling down out of her tree house. At once the mother in me took dry, distant note that Miss Mosey was skipping school.

  I was almost glad to notice. Skipping school was regular. I had this unaccountable longing to get up and take Mosey’s arm and go inside and have an After School Special–style talk about responsibility. I wanted to let this whole nightmare backyard landscape sink into hel , to no longer hear Liza howling like the damned, to never again look at that silver box, to never, never study on the little heap of pink cloth at Tyler’s feet. Mosey stared at me with her eyes and mouth al gone into big, round O shapes, and now I could understand the words that Liza was saying over and over as she kicked and shoved her way toward Tyler.

  “Umbay! Umbay! Geem, gee!” Liza wailed. My baby! My baby! Give me, give!

  I looked again at the box, lying open in the churned earth, and could no longer stop myself from recognizing it. It was Liza’s old silver footlocker.

  The splotches were its pink daisy hinges. I sat up on my knees, my hands slack by my sides, palms pressing the grass as if to make sure the world was stil spinning underneath me. When she was fifteen and took baby Mosey and disappeared for two years, four months, and eleven god-awful endless days, I’d thought the box had gone with her.

  Liza screamed again. My baby! Give! Give! Her words clanged and rattled in my head, and there was our Mosey, standing white with shock under the oak tree. Mosey’s pretty hands were holding each other, twisting hard at her own fingers, and so I flat refused to wonder what the treasure box was doing here, buried under Liza’s wil ow tree. I snapped back into movement, dropping onto al fours, crawling fast after Liza. I scrambled right up over her and wrapped my arm around her front, pressing my palm over her mouth to make her quiet. I bent close to Liza’s ear to hiss, “Liza?

  Liza-Little? Mosey is here. Shut the fucking fuck up.”

  S
he kept yel ing through my hand. I could feel the flat fronts of her teeth pressing my palm as her lips snarled. My hands were weak. They shook and couldn’t hold back even her words. My gaze darted to Mosey, my little pitcher, big-earing another step toward us across the lawn.

  Tyler cal ed, “Ginny? Ginny?” and now I understood the little pieces in his hands, and they were not old ivory at al . He held them up, fitting them together, and a thought was bouncing about in al the nerve endings in his hands, hopping finger to finger. He looked at the pieces, puzzling, then down to the open footlocker. I looked, too.

  I saw a ruined yel ow baby blanket with more little ivory-colored bits of bone resting in its folds. Some of the bits were like sticks, some like dice.

  No skul , just some curved pieces like little dishes, and I thought, She was so young her skull bones hadn’t fused yet, calm and cool and distant. On the ground by his boot lay that heap of disturbingly familiar pink cloth and the rotted-out remains of a rattle-bel ied duck.

  The thought found its way up Tyler’s arms to his spine, where I watched it rise as slow as a bubble trapped in gel shampoo, until he came to know what I already understood: He was holding the pieces of a tiny, tiny dead person. His fingers twitched open, and he dropped those frail bones down into the dirt, and it was a mercy, a mercy, that my hands were busy trying to stil Liza’s flailing, or I’d have stepped calmly to him and ripped him clean in half.

  My dead voice said, “You pick that up, Tyler. Respectful like.” He only blinked, then shook his head at me and used his empty hands to touch his ears. He hadn’t heard me clearly over Liza’s howls.

  “Big?” Mosey cal ed. She was chalk-colored. She took another step toward me, and I saw from her face she’d understood Liza’s words. Her lips pursed to form a word, the first word in a question I did not want asked, because al at once I was scared that I might know the answer.

  Then I couldn’t stop looking from the box of bones to Mosey, couldn’t help seeing al the ways I’d pegged her as her mystery daddy’s girl. She was tal and had a lanky string-bean body, while Liza and I were built smal and as curvy as that famous road in San Francisco. We had fat, round mouths like plums, while Mosey had a wide smile; Liza used to cal her “Hot Lips Houlihan.” Now that mouth was making words, asking things I could not or would not hear over Liza, and my body regained its strength.

  I tore my gaze away and put my hands on Liza’s good side and turned her, turned her whole body, pushing so her weak arm and leg rol ed under her and then she was on her back, helpless as a turtle. I straddled her body with one knee pinning her good arm and the other pressing into the grass by her bad arm, my palms touching down on either side of her head.

  I leaned in close and cal ed, “Liza! Liza!” But her eyes were loose in their sockets, unfocused now.

  “Umbay,” she said. My baby. “My” was a new word. Right after the stroke, Liza didn’t say much more than yes and no. Mostly no. Now she said

  “Big” and “Mosey-baby” and a few more things, like “gimme” and “potty” and “hungry” and “help.” The doctors couldn’t tel me how much of Liza was left inside, and Liza couldn’t tel me either. Now this. My baby. It was the first time since the stroke I longed to take a word away from her.

  I reared back and grabbed her chin in one hand, forcing her head to turn toward Mosey. Mosey was running toward us now, and my mean hands made Liza see our long-legged child with al her grace gone. Her usual gazel e-style leaping had been reduced to a stagger.

  “There is your baby. There is Mosey. Look at Mosey,” I hissed in Liza’s ear, and I was looking, too, unable to stop cataloging al the thousand ways that Mosey wasn’t one of us. I took her in, from her long, skinny feet, toes like fingers where we had toes like peas, up to her wide milk-chocolate eyes. Liza had my eyes, tilted at the corners like a cat’s, so black I could barely see where her pupils started.

  Liza final y focused on our girl, and her voice turned off like a wire had been cut. She went flat and limp under me. Her bad eye drooped al but shut, and her good one blinked. Both were streaming tears, and her nose was running.

  It was enough to have her quiet. I was stil seeing only the edges of it. I couldn’t get anywhere from the hel ish here except into the next second of the hel ish, hel ish now. The silver footlocker was Pandora’s box, ful of a living darkness, and I would not look directly there. It was more important to take care of Mosey. Shutting up Liza and taking care of Mosey was as far as I could get.

  I said to Mosey, “Help me get your mom inside?”—and I was proud at how calm I sounded.

  “Is she okay?” Mosey asked.

  Behind me, like a deep echo, Tyler said, “Ginny, what the hel ?”

  “Language!” I said to Tyler.

  “What should I do?” he cal ed.

  Before I could even think, I’d snapped back, “Don’t you do a single, fucking thing,” like he’d played the word “hel ” in cussing poker and I was upping him, going al in by laying down the ugliest cuss there was. Mosey’s wide eyes went even wider to hear that word come out of my mouth. I made myself take a deep breath. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it pulsing in my eyes. The heap of pink fabric at Tyler’s feet pul ed at my attention. I had to force myself to look away.

  Mosey and I tried to get Liza on her feet, but she’d gone floppy and unwieldy. Tyler took over, grabbing hold of the side of my daughter that was close to deadweight and pul ing her upright.

  “Get the walker,” I told Mosey. It was lying tipped over in the yard on its side.

  “Is this because of I cut down her tree?” Tyler asked as we started shuffling Liza forward. Mosey trailed along beside us, toting the walker and chewing her lower lip so hard I was worried she might nip a piece clean off.

  I answered in a voice so fake cheery-ghastly that I sounded like the zombie version of June Cleaver. “Yeah. Liza surely does know how to throw a fit. She loved that wil ow like it was her own baby.” Mosey gave a little startle when I said the word “baby.” She’d understood Liza’s mangled shouts, al right. Tyler blinked at me, dumb as a sweet-faced cow; he hadn’t understood a word.

  We walked her slow across the concrete patio. She was tractable now, faded once more to the Liza-less creature the stroke had made her. Her eyes were unfocused, and her feet shuffled in the direction we pointed her.

  “Big,” Mosey whispered, while I pushed the back door open and let Tyler drag the heavy half of Liza in. “Big, those were bones!”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tyler said, loud and excited.

  “You may be right,” I said. I stil sounded ghastly. We walked Liza through the den and down the hal , and my mouth felt stretched into the Joker’s smile.

  Tyler said, “There were al kinds of baby things in the box. Do you think someone kil ed a—”

  I interrupted him with a loud pish noise. Liza echoed it with a sleepy, bubbling sound. I kicked Liza’s cracked bedroom door the rest of the way open. “For al we know, those bones could be hundreds of years old. Maybe the whole neighborhood is built over an old cemetery.”

  “Like in Poltergeist!” Now Tyler sounded excited. He was easy to distract, but Mosey had her thinking face on.

  We eased Liza down onto the side of the bed. She looked tired enough to tip over, and she was filthy and covered in grass stains. “Tyler, step out, if you don’t mind? We’re going to get Liza changed. Mosey, help me get your mother’s shoes off. Her socks are ful of yard dirt.”

  I heard the click of the door closing behind Tyler as he skedaddled. Yet another thing that had changed; before the stroke he’d have stood on his head with his feet on fire for a glimpse of Liza with her clothes off.

  Mosey knelt down to slip off her mother’s Keds, and I took Liza’s frail wrist, the good one, and looked at my watch. She slumped, staring at nothing, but her pulse told me that inside she was running like hot lava. Mosey went to the closet to put the shoes away, and I quickly leaned down so my face was close to Liza’s face and whispered, “L
iza? Liza, is that you?” She didn’t so much as blink.

  “Is her pulse bad high?” Mosey asked, and I made myself turn and smile at her.

  “Don’t you worry. It’s down some already. We’l wait three minutes and take it again. If it doesn’t keep coming down, we’l go right to the hospital and figure al this mess out later.”

  Mosey said, “Those bones can’t be that old. Unless the pioneers made terry-cloth rattle ducks.”

  “People have been sewing since the caveman,” I said, sharp, but truthful y, I was relieved to see her ral ied enough to give me some sass mouth and her “get real” gaze.

  I got a fresh pair of sweatpants and a soft cotton T-shirt out of Liza’s dresser, and together Mosey and I got her peeled out of her grass-stained clothes. I didn’t like to see how her bad leg looked withered, thinner than her right leg. She was so skinny her hipbones pressed at her skin.

  Liza let us change her, drooping and limp as a home-sewn dol . By the time we got her new socks on and brushed her hair to get the dirt out, her pulse was down. Her head was nodding, and the wil ful, writhing flash of my missing daughter I had seen as we fought on the lawn was gone altogether. I couldn’t even be positive it had been there as Mosey and I muscled a hundred pounds of floppy Liza into the bed.

  I said, “You sleep now, Little,” and I lowered her to her pil ow and tucked her in. Then I said quiet to Mosey, “Cal Mrs. Lynch. See if she can’t come on over now instead of after lunch.”

  “Okay.”

  Mosey stil looked in terrible danger of thinking, so I said, “Don’t imagine that just because your momma blew a gasket over that tree, I didn’t notice you were skipping school. That will be discussed.”

  That gave her something more immediate to fret on, and she turned and walked out double-time to make the cal . Teenagers are like that. In a cave post–nuclear war, I bet I could distract any high-school kid stil living by peering at her chin and asking if she was getting a pimple.