A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
Page 5
I went back up the hal , hunting for Tyler. He wasn’t in the den. I went through the swinging doors into the kitchen and saw him standing framed in the open door to the backyard. He turned toward me, and I saw he had his cel phone clutched in his hand.
“Who did you cal ?” I asked, my voice too harsh, accusing.
“Rick Warfield?” he said, and in that moment I could have cheerful y shot Tyler and dumped his body directly into the hole the wil ow had left. I could not tel Rick Warfield a story about Poltergeist and archaeology. He was a brighter bulb than Tyler, by several thousand watts.
I heard my voice, at top volume, asking him, “On what planet does, ‘Don’t do an effing thing,’ mean, ‘Please cal the chief of police’?”
Tyler shook his head at me. “Aw, man, Ginny, we had to cal someone. He’s coming right over. Maybe we should back off and put up tape around that spot?”
“We don’t know it’s a crime scene, good Lord,” I said. “And it’s not like you travel with yel ow cop tape in your toolbox.”
“I got duct tape,” Tyler said, and now he sounded almost hopeful.
“We are not on CSI: Miami, Horatio,” I snapped, and his crest fel a little. The meanest piece of me thought, Good.
I pushed past Tyler onto the concrete slab that passed for a patio. I stopped there and stared across the yard toward the open silver keepsake chest. Rick Warfield was coming, to lay his rough hands on the bones wound up inside that yel ow blanket. I could not stop him. My gaze moved to the heap of streaked and faded knit cloth lying beside it.
My feet walked me toward the box like they’d had their own terrible idea and they didn’t feel like checking with my brain parts before putting it into action. I bent down and picked it up in both hands. It unfurled into a shape I recognized. A baby dress. I turned the dress in my hands until I had it by the shoulders and could see the tag. Kidworks. I found myself pinching the cloth so tight that my fingers cramped, but I could not let go.
I knew this dress. I knew it. I had bought it myself, for Mosey. For Liza’s little girl, along with a host of blankets and fuzzy socks and sleepers. That was fifteen years ago, and the dress was faded and striped with mud and some kind of green-gray moldy slime I didn’t want to think about, but I recognized the ruffles at the hem. I could not help remembering it. It was the last thing I saw my grandbaby wearing before she and Liza had disappeared.
I remembered putting Liza’s baby in that dress when she was only a couple of weeks old, bald as an egg with foldy legs she kept frogged up against her bel y. Liza sat in a heap on the sofa, plumb wore out. The baby was fretting, but this baby’s brand of fret was nothing. I’d gotten through Liza Slocumb’s screamfest of a babyhood without ever once throwing her off a train trestle or eating her like a hamster momma would have. I could handle a little gritching. The baby seemed mel ow to me. That’s how I thought of her then: sweet, not weak.
I said, “Liza-Little, I got this. You can take the second shift.”
Liza said, “You got work tomorrow, Big.”
“Wel , so do you. You have to momma al day and get enough brainpower to final y give this child a name. We keep cal ing her The Baby like no one ever made one before. If you don’t decide soon, I’m going to saddle this poor child with Gretchen, just to spite you.”
When the baby fel asleep, I moved her to her bassinet in Liza’s room without bothering to change her into pajamas, because the pink knit dress was so soft. Liza was sleeping more deeply than the baby, flat on her back with arms thrown up over her head like a child herself. The skin around her eyes was peachy-colored, smooth and tight.
Hours later I stirred, hearing Liza up in the night, rattling around. I didn’t hear the baby, but her gritchy cry was always so quiet that this didn’t set off any worry bel s. I rol ed over and closed my eyes.
The next morning the door to Liza’s room was shut and the house was quiet. I figured they were sleeping in. I knew how it could be with babies, day and night mixed up. I crept around dressing, eating oatmeal and a banana on the quiet.
When I got home from the bank that evening, the house had a dead-aired, empty feeling. I went to Liza’s room and saw the closet standing open.
There were a few empty hangers in the center. Both pairs of her favorite jeans were gone. The big red backpack she’d planned to use as a diaper bag was gone, too. I opened her drawers and saw gaps in the stacks of socks and underpants and T-shirts. The baby’s yel ow blankie was no longer in the bassinet, and neither was her stuffed duck with the bel in his gut that slept beside her teeny feet.
I dropped to my knees by the square of carpet that used to hold Liza’s silver footlocker. Al her keepsakes had been dumped out of it and left in a heap on the floor: notes from school friends, pressed flowers, the birth certificate that said “Baby Girl Slocumb,” with “Liza Slocumb” typed in the space for the momma’s name and nothing at al typed in the space for the daddy. Liza’d said it was a tal , pretty boy who’d run the Ferris wheel at a weekend carnival she’d gone to with her so-cal ed friend Melissa Richardson. Liza said she couldn’t remember his name, but I found I slept easier if I pretended that only meant she wasn’t tel ing it.
I didn’t know Baby Girl Slocumb’s name for more than two years, not until Liza showed back up, her red-gold hair dul ed down and flat with filth and her tilty eyes so tired. She had a long, skinny-legged girl child with a round bel y and an earnest gaze slung up on her hip. That little critter clung tight to Liza like a solemn monkey baby. Liza looked like she’d already dialed herself to four past desperate. She had meth sores al around her mouth, her cheekbones so sharp I thought any second they would split and let her tired skul peek through. But the baby—a toddler now—was relatively clean and didn’t look underfed. She had one hand fisted up in Liza’s hair and was resting easy in her arms.
Liza said, “Big, can I please come home?”
I stared, hope and sick warring at the heart of me, while my angry brain was yel ing that before they crossed my threshold, there would have to be a deal. If Liza wanted home, there would be rules, and there would sure as hel be rehab, and I would have to have a legal stake in this child’s life, because if rehab didn’t work and Liza fel back off the world, I could not lose this child again. She wasn’t safe with Liza; I could read more than two years of a hard-road life with drugs and men and God-knew-what-al in the defeated downtilt of Liza’s once-mighty mouth and the paper frailty of her skin.
I said, “I don’t even know her name. You left here, and her birth certificate stil says Baby Girl.”
Liza said, “This here is Mosey Wil ow Jane Grace Slocumb, and, Big, I’m so tired. We are both so tired. Can I please, Momma, please, please come home?”
Mosey Wil ow Jane Grace Slocumb stuffed a thumb into her mouth, and her lids dropped in a sleepy blink. I was lost in such a rush of pent-up love that my vision pinholed and al the rest of the world grew dark around her. Deals and details could come later. I swung the door wide open for them, right then, because it was al that I could do.
Now I was looking at the keepsake box, ful of bones. The baby dress. The old stuffed duck. I knelt down and laid the dress down over the bones like they were cold and it was their smal blanket. I couldn’t keep myself from understanding. I tried to stand up, but my legs were al atremble. I rocked back on my heels.
“You okay?” Tyler asked. He’d come up behind me with Rick Warfield. I looked over my shoulder. Officer Joel, Immita’s only other cop, was with them. Rick was taking this serious, and I had no idea how long I’d been kneeling in the churned earth where the wil ow used to stand, clutching the sad rag of dress. Warfield squatted down beside me and made a thoughtful hmm noise.
“I’m fine, Tyler,” I said. I was watching Rick’s hands. He kept his nails short and plain, very masculine. I hoped they could be kind hands, as they reached toward the dress. I let him take it and stood up abruptly, turned my face away. I didn’t want to watch Rick Warfield touch the bones.
“Uh-oh,” Rick said behind me. “See the tag? The Kidworks in Moss Point opened less than twenty years ago, and this dress is stil in decent shape. This isn’t some old cemetery, Tyler.”
But I knew that already.
This was the remains of Baby Girl Slocumb, wrapped tenderly in her yel ow blanket and buried with her crib duck for company. Had to be.
I knew, and Liza knew, too. My baby! Liza had screamed, over and over as she’d wormed her desperate way across the back lawn. Wel , of course she knew. Liza was the one who had buried her. I recoiled a step. Couldn’t help but.
Joel and Rick were talking, but none of the words they said made any sense to me. I kept backing up.
“Ginny?” Rick said, and I wondered what dreadful shape my face must be making to have him sound so worried. My arms went to gooseflesh; he could be acting worried to cover up suspicious.
I said, “I’m fine. It’s just so sad and strange.” I tried to imagine a huge, cold stone rol ing across me and flattening my grimace back into a plain, closed mouth, cool-ironing away the lines that wanted to map grief around my eyes. I turned and walked as straight as I could with the world tilting and rocking and whirling under me to the concrete slab we cal ed a patio. I sank down into one of my stripy plastic lawn chairs.
A word came into my head then, and it was a fairy-tale word, Grimm variety, like “bad wolf” or “wicked witch.” Those kinds of words don’t hold power over adults. A wolf for a grown woman is just a date who has the grab hands. A witch is the nicest word you cal the snappy lady who needs two hundred in cash back, al in fives. The one who rol s her eyes and taps her foot at your careful counting, then says she wants twenties after al while the line rustles angrily behind her in the bright noon rush of lunch hour at the bank on a paycheck Friday. The word was “changeling,” and this word had been dug up, ivory-colored and frail, from my own backyard.
I was teetering on the brink of something, and any push could tip me over. I held myself stil in the chair, so stil , as Officer Joel cal ed in a scientist from the junior col ege. I didn’t even offer coffee, barely breathing. I watched the first scientist cal in someone smarter. Tyler spit brown juice on my grass, and Rick made him back away from the hole and the box. It al seemed far and sil y and nothing to do with me as I held my balance, a breath away from tipping. I’d have teetered there til the sun winked out, if Mosey hadn’t pushed me over. I heard her voice behind me saying, “Big?”
She came and squatted by my chair, her arms looped around her own self in a comfortless hug. I stared at her, blinking. Changeling.
“Mrs. Lynch is with Mom. Big, are you okay?” Mosey asked.
I looked at her and I fel , sliding over the lip, down to find what was waiting for me in the dark-lined box they’d dug up from my yard.
Liza’s baby had not been given back to her, like mine was when Katrina and the Waves had asked and asked if it felt good; and oh, but it had. It had felt so good to hold my magic, living baby that I hardly remembered labor.
But Liza’s baby had real y died. I didn’t know how. I couldn’t even consider that yet. Al I knew was that Mosey was the stolen child and Liza was the nixie, trading a loss for something lovely and alive. She’d found Mosey somewhere out in the black span of two and a half lost years, when she was grieving and strung out on every drug she could find to gobble, crazy on the road.
My first thought was that Mosey couldn’t know. It would break her heart and could derail her at this crucial time. This was our trouble year. A thing like this could send her careening for comfort into the arms of some boy. Then my vision widened, and I realized that nobody could know. Mosey wasn’t ours, and if Rick Warfield figured that out, the state would take her. No one is al owed to keep a child they kidnapped, no matter how many years have passed. They would come and take Mosey.
With that thought, two louder words came in, burying every other living thought. Beautiful came first, as I looked at Mosey’s damp, dark lashes.
She’d been crying, and her mouth had scrunched into a worried wad. Then I thought, Mine.
They were the only two words that mattered.
CHAPTER THREE
Liza
THERE IS A true thing that Liza never let go, even in the black, when there was no hum, no breath, no light, no self. This is what she knew: The baby is under the ground, the baby is safe, the baby is safe underground.
It’s changed, though. Big is cal ing for her to come and fight and fix it. “Liza? Liza, is that you?” Big sounds desperate.
The tide rol s Liza back and forth, trying to take her anywhere but now. She spins, so caught in her past that she can’t tel where Big’s voice is coming from. There is no sandy bed defining the bottom, and she’s too deep for light to get down. There is no up. There is nothing but the tide that turns and spins her through the dark. Sometimes in her sleep she sees pale white fish go by, sleek and muscular. They make their own glow, and they have mouths ful of needle teeth and bumps where their eyes should be. She isn’t afraid of them. Why should she be? She is like them; she belongs here. She deserves it.
She feels a hand that is Big’s hand petting her hair. She wishes she could send a message in a bottle, float it up. Liza can imagine herself writing the message with a yel ow thing, black point on one tip, the other end squared off and rubbery pink. She has no word for it. She has no word for paper or bottle or message either, no word for under, no word for ocean or fishes or up. Liza knows things and needs things anyway, without the words. Most of al she knows that the baby is no longer safe and she needs to get a message out.
“…the pioneers made terry-cloth rattle ducks,” Mosey says, from very far away, and Liza tries to ask Mosey what the ever-lovin’ fuck they are teaching her at that Baptist school. She can’t find the words for this either, but Mosey’s voice is up. Mosey is the real true now; Liza struggles and heaves herself toward Mosey, but when she surfaces, the only face she sees is Big’s.
“You sleep now, Little,” Big says, hands on Liza’s shoulders, lowering her backward into the water. The water closes over her, and the tides catch her, rol ing her backward through time, tumbling her through her own memories. Hands are pul ing her up now, and they belong to Pastor John at Calvary. She knows these hands, this place, this time; she is thirteen years old, and this is the day she pretended to get saved.
Liza comes up sputtering, waist-deep in pale blue water that smel s of chlorine. Pastor John turns her to face forward and drapes one arm across her shoulder, grinning down from the baptismal pool to the church below. Liza scrubs at her eyes. Most of the pews are empty, but the middle rows are ful of Calvary Baptist youth-group kids and their chaperones. The kids are hooting, and everyone is clapping for her.
Liza aims a wide smile at Melissa’s mother, the only person frowning, the only one whose hands are resting quietly in her lap. A shame she’s not enjoying this more, Liza thinks. It’s for her, after all. Mrs. Richardson told Melissa no more hanging out with Liza. There’s a Scripture, something about not being yoked up with non-Baptists. So here is Liza, getting dunked at Youth Ral y Weekend, and Melissa gets points for the save. Liza’s only prayer is that Big won’t find out. She doesn’t know what would make Big madder, the thought of Liza going Baptist for real or Liza being dishonest enough to go Baptist in name only.
Melissa stands by her mother, her electric blue eyeliner drawn so thick that Liza sees it flash as Melissa tips her a wink. She glances down to see if the red bra Melissa loaned her is showing through the white, and yes, it looks like she has a pair of Claymation Rudolphs pressing their noses through the wet cotton. The bra belongs to Melissa’s mother, because Liza couldn’t fit in Melissa’s A+ cups, even if Melissa owned a red bra. Liza wonders if Mrs. Richardson wil recognize by color or cup shape the crimson glow of Liza’s boobies, shining through the white.
Liza presses her lips together, trying to look solemn. If she meets Melissa’s eyes now, they wil both bust out laughing and the whole thing wil be ruined.
He has no idea that as he turned her profile to the audience and began to lower her, she snaked one hand beneath his armpit and held it up behind his back. As her head went under, Liza made sure to keep her fingertips above the surface of the water. Melissa said it doesn’t real y count if you don’t go al the way under, and Liza doesn’t want it to count.
She doesn’t want to be fresh and sinless this afternoon, when she meets Melissa and Danny Deerfield and Carter Mac up in the tree house.
Danny wil bring warm beers and some applejack, and she wil make out with him. Carter wil bring nothing and make out with Melissa, but he’l peek at Liza even as he tries to worm his hand up under Melissa’s shirt. If she had let it al be washed away, if she’d let herself be scrubbed clean, returned to the girl she was in middle school—that girl would not do any of the things Liza wil do this afternoon. Back in eighth grade, guys like Danny and Carter wouldn’t have noticed she was breathing, and she wouldn’t have cared. Last year she was a baby who had never been in love.
Now? She’s so in love it eats away her oxygen. It’s the one thing she doesn’t share with Melissa; loving him is something that’s only hers. He kissed her once, pul ing her into the AV closet after fourth period, but he isn’t taking her seriously. He’s too cool and beautiful to screw around with fumbling virgins, so she’s learning off of throwaways like Danny and Carter Mac. She needs to know everything, so she keeps two fingers in the air behind the pastor’s back, curled in a hook to hold her hard-won sins.
Pastor John is stil droning on about redemption, and Liza knows what wil happen next. She has lived this before, and though she can’t make her own body obey or find words or stay grounded in the present, her memories are stil her own. She is alive when she can get herself inside them.