They had another boy who had asthma and a huge brain, so he went to Calvary. He was a junior the year I was there, so Mrs. Richardson had been around a lot, running boosters and the science fair. Every time she saw me, she looked at me with her thin, pale lip curled up like she was smel ing poo. She’d always made it a point to come over to me to say hel o, but not to be nice. It was so she could lean in too close, sniff-checking my breath for booze and peering real y hard at my pupils. Liza said it was because she’d been tight with Mrs. Richardson’s oldest daughter, Melissa, back in the day, and Mrs. Richardson stil part-blamed my mom for getting Melissa into drugs and al the bad stuff that happened with Melissa later.
The Mercedes slowed to a turtle creep, and for a second I thought she might actual y stop and get out, let her pink-frosted toenails touch Slocumb soil, but a state highway patrol car turned on our street and came along behind her. Mrs. Richardson sped up and cruised on by. I guess three cop cars was one too tacky for her.
I dropped the blind slat into place and turned around and sat on the sofa back. I couldn’t stand to see who would come gawk at us next. My phone vibrated again, Roger texting, Starving. Pls put in a fridge. Also a toilet.
He wasn’t the only one wanting a safe place to take a pee. I had one more pee stick in my backpack, and I would so literal y have kil ed for three minutes alone in a gas-station ladies’ room watching the white window stay blank and pure and tel me this was going to somehow, somehow be okay.
I texted back, O wah, suckitup. U have that Coke bottle. Boys can P anyplace.
Just then I heard Chief Warfield’s voice, coming from the kitchen. Big answered him. I couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like they were heading my way. I knew that Big would crap if she caught me standing on the cushions— My furniture is not a jungle gym, Mosey—but I paused. If they saw me, they would only send me away. I was flat done trying to pinch Liza awake and getting shushed by Big before I could even ask a question. I stuffed my phone in my hip pocket and clambered over the back of the sofa. I lay across it, then tipped and slid down the wal and landed behind it. There was a narrow crack of space there, just big enough for me to lie sideways with my nose smel ing under-the-sofa dust bunnies and my butt pressed hard against the wal .
As the swinging door opened, Chief Warfield was saying, “…lived in this house how long? Thirty years, about?”
“A little less. Since Liza was a baby,” Big said.
He said, “That bone doc out there guesstimates the box has been down there more than ten years and less than twenty-five. So you would have had the house then.”
There was silence, and it stretched and kept right on stretching. I found myself smiling, proud. Big and me, we watch a lot of The Closer and Law
& Order reruns, and she knew he was fishing. She wasn’t going to say an answer until he asked a question.
So he did. “You have any idea who buried that box in your yard?”
“No,” Big said. She sounded near.
“No?” he said back, fast. “It’s your yard. You must have a thought on the topic.”
Big landed on the sofa right in front of my face. It creaked as she settled. “The yard wasn’t fenced when I got the house, and we didn’t have the patio. It was al woods. Anyone could have come up through the trees.”
I breathed through my mouth, trying to be super quiet.
“When did you fence it?”
“Soon after Mosey and Liza came home. So maybe ten or twelve years ago?”
She wasn’t giving him a thing he didn’t ask for. After another waiting pause, he said, “Why?”
Right then stupid Roger texted me. My butt was pressed hard into the wal , and the vibration made a little buzz of sound against it. I sucked in my stomach and tried to press my hips forward. There was a pause, and then Big cleared her throat in this careful way that usual y meant I was about to get grounded. Al she said, though, was, “Liza started working with the dog rescue, fostering. She needed a fenced yard.”
“So you don’t know anything about the remains?” Warfield asked.
Big answered, calm and sure, “I told you, no.”
I blinked. I never thought she would tel him what my mom had said, about it being her baby, but I also never had a clue that Big was such a super liar.
Warfield said, “Al right, then. I need a minute now to talk to Mosey.”
My heart stuttered. When I try to lie, I can feel my eyes opening too wide, and my mouth goes funny. Big busts me out every time. But I would have to lie, and at least as good as Big. Right now my mom didn’t have enough consonants to defend herself if Chief Warfield took it in his head that she’d snuck-pregnanted a baby and somehow hurt it. That was so unpossible, though. I knew it wasn’t true al through my whole body before my head even realized that the police or even Big might think it. My mom would never, and that was al .
But Chief Warfield didn’t know Liza like I did. To him she was some ex-druggie bartender with a crazy, made-up religion. He hadn’t seen her spend months slow-coaxing brokenhearted dogs back to trust, some of them so cagey and bad-habited that anyone else would have put them to sleep. He didn’t know that if a person had hurt Liza’s little helpless baby, we would have dug up that person’s bones from under the wil ow, too, and most of them would have been busted.
Big wasn’t having it anyway. “You leave that child be. Mosey’s home from school il today, and she does not need any kind of stress while trying to fight off a flu.” She knew I was skipping and not any kind of sick, but she’d already told such a pile of big fat lies that I guess she felt she might as wel be damned for a hundred as for one. “And what can she tel you anyway? If that box is at least ten years old, Mosey would have been a kindergartner at most when it was buried.”
“Al righty. It can wait. I’l go ahead and talk to Liza, then.”
Big snorted. “I wish you luck with that.”
He said, “Tyler says she seems to understand most of what people say?”
Big said, “Seems to, yeah. But it doesn’t mean that she can answer you. She’l say yes or no if you ask her whether she wants to watch TV. She can point to the kind of fruit juice she wants.”
Warfield said, “Stil .”
“Fine. You’l have to come back, though. She was so upset over her wil ow, and she hasn’t got a lot of reserves these days. She’s sleeping hard.”
I heard Chief Warfield stand up, and he said, “Al righty. When?”
There was a thinking pause, and I guess Big didn’t see a way to stop him.
“I’m free most evenings,” Big said. “Cal first.”
His voice was going away, like he was walking back toward the kitchen as he said, “Let the ME through when he comes.”
I heard the swinging door swoosh open and closed. A bare second after it stopped swinging, Big said, “Mosey,” so soft that it was plain she knew I was there somewhere. I poked my head up over the sofa behind her.
“Big,” I said, and she jumped and craned herself around to look at me.
“I thought you were in the foyer,” she said. That’s what she cal ed the teeny cube of hal way that hooked so people at the front door couldn’t see right into our den.
I said, real quiet, because I didn’t want her to shush me again, “When did Liza have another baby?”
Big looked genuinely surprised, and then she said, “Do what, now?”
I scrambled back over the sofa and hopped down and sat in the chair closest to her. The second I did, the phone in my pocket vibrated; Roger was sending another text, silent this time, because my butt was pressing on a cop-warmed cushion instead of a wal .
I said, “She said those bones were her baby. You heard her.”
Big shook her head. Her eyebrows came together, and she said, “Mosey, honey, I know she was saying something, but I’m not sure you understood her right.”
I shook my head. “I understood her fine. You did, too.”
Big said, “Okay. But, Mosey, I would ha
ve known if she’d ever had another baby. She didn’t. You know her brain is very, very hurt. My best guess is, somewhere in her memories she knows something about whose baby that is. You know how your mother is about strays. Maybe she helped some girl along the way, some girl whose baby died, who didn’t have anyone.” Big seemed so sure and calm, and I could total y see my mom helping out some runaway. She had a thing for strays that would surely stretch to a sad, lost stranger girl whose baby’d died. I felt the weirdest feeling of unpinching then. It was like I’d had a hundred awful crab claws clutched onto my spine without me knowing, and al at once a good half of them had let me go.
I said, “Did you know our whole front yard is ful of rubberneckers? Not like just our neighbors, but Olive and some others who live al the way across town.”
“Good Lord, how did they— Oh. Mrs. Lynch.” I nodded, and Big turned to look toward the bedrooms, where Mrs. Lynch was pretending to watch my mother while burning through her phone minutes. Big turned back to me and blew exhausted air out her nose. “Okay, Mosey. I am going to go sweetly as I can tel Mrs. Lynch everything I know so she is at least spreading the truth. Then I am sending her right home, and I’l tel her daughter and any other yahoos on our lawn to move it on along. Don’t fret.”
She went down the hal to talk to Mrs. Lynch, and I got up, too, and went to the kitchen, needing to move. On the way I checked my phone and saw I had two more texts from Roger.
The first one said, Time for Occam’s razor.
I felt my heart speed up a bump as the swinging door flapped like a wing behind me. I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and braced my elbows on the table. Occam was one of Roger’s heroes, although who beyond Roger has a medieval friar as a hero, I do not know. Occam’s razor was a theory that said to find the simplest explanation, because it is almost always true.
His next text said, If the baby is yer moms, but she was only pregnant once, what’s the simplest explanation? I knew he wouldn’t be asking me Occam-style if he hadn’t already applied it and had what he thought was the answer. The way Roger liked to use the razor was to cal his explanation for anything the simplest and insist that Occam proved he was right.
I chewed my lip, thinking, and then, final y, I got it. I texted back, Holy shit!
He texted, I no rite? So who are you, then?
I thumbed in, A twin? I’m a twin and she buried another twin.
I waited. After a minute he texted, Secret dead twin is not simple, U tard. Stil , I could kinda see it. Somehow my twin wasn’t alive, and my mom maybe had crazy-bad postpartum and buried him in the yard and then grabbed me and took off hitchhiking to not think about him al dead and buried there. Stil , Roger wasn’t texting anything, and that sounded more Days of Our Lives than simple. Anyway, there was a picture of my sonogram on the mantel, and I sure looked to be floating around al by myself in there.
I prodded him. OK I am not a twin. WTH then.
There was a long pause again, like more than a minute, and then final y a message came: I need 2 do some research. Distract the backyard people?
How???
Just make them look @ U for a sec.
I can’t.
Yes U can. You wil . I am coming down.
He would do it, because he was Roger and he never got caught. So I jumped up and slammed open the back door and dumped myself out into the yard yel ing, “Hey! Hey! Everyone, lookit! Look here at me!”
I must have sounded genuinely desperate, because they al looked: Chief Warfield and Officer Joel and Tyler and both bone professors, the dinosaur one and the real one. I didn’t have a single durn thing to tel them. Worse, Chief Warfield was standing toward the rear of the yard; he’d stil see if Roger came down.
So I kept on hol ering. “I need you al to come here to the patio! Now!”
Tyler hopped down from his truck bed, saying, “Mosey? Is Liza okay?”
That got them moving toward me, and immediately I saw Roger’s feet come out of the hole in the floor of the tree house. I yel ed even louder, “My mom is okay, but I am not okay! I am not okay!”
It sounded very, very true when I heard me say it, and Roger had said that the simplest explanation would be true. I could see Occam, with that weird shaved ring of hair like friars have and a brown robe, standing stern and barefoot in my mind’s eye, asking me, If the bones are your mom’s baby and she only had one baby…then who the hell are you?
“What do you mean, you aren’t okay?” Tyler said, trotting toward me with worry lines mapping across his forehead.
The look on his face made me realize that he’d been around my whole life, practical y, cleaning our gutters and changing the filters in our furnace; he must by now real y like me to look so worried. You have a person around for years, maybe you get fond of them even if they aren’t real y anything to you, and that struck me as huge and important in some way I couldn’t get a good hold on. Everyone else sped up, too, coming toward me, and behind them I saw Roger drop the last two feet, stumble, and then he righted himself and swarmed straight up the fence and across like a big-head monkey. He dropped over the top and was gone.
I guess I should have stopped then and said never mind, but I found myself stil yel ing anyway, desperate like. “I want you al to get out of my yard, is what. Y’al need to go away now, please.” My voice was rising and getting louder and louder, and I couldn’t make it stop getting louder even though Roger was already gone. My voice yel ed, “I am so tired of this, and it is time for you to go away! I want you out, and plus, you are al bastards! You are al al al al bastards!”
The back door had opened behind me while I was yel ing, and Big came up beside me. Her cheeks were bright red, and her eyes looked red, too, almost swol en. Her mouth dropped open in surprise. She gaped at me and didn’t even say, “Mosey! Language!” so I knew then I must look like a total freak. I started up crying, and Big turned to al the adults who were looking at me, some worried and some just surprised.
Big said, “Okay, you are done here.”
Chief Warfield said, “But the medical examin—”
“Rick, please,” Big said. “Al you people are making my kid a dead mess.”
“I can’t leave,” Chief Warfield said. “The medical ex—”
Big interrupted, almost yel ing, “Fine! You stay, but you don’t need this whole herd of mammals mil ing on my grass.”
She sounded close to going as hysterical as I was, and Chief Warfield took over, saying, “You heard the lady. Let’s move it out, everybody. No, Joel, don’t troop through the house, use the side gate. Tyler, move that truck.”
While Chief Warfield rounded them al up, Big put one arm around me and turned me away and pul ed me into our own kitchen. She kicked the door shut behind us with a great whamming slap of sound. I couldn’t stop crying, because I’d gotten it by then, what Occam and Roger thought was the simplest explanation.
That baby in the yard. My mother said that was her baby, and so I was what? A little something picked wild in Nevada or California, unwanted or stolen or maybe abandoned someplace and rescued like a foster dog? I wasn’t Liza’s. That meant I wasn’t anything to Big either, and Big didn’t know. Big’s real grandbaby was the baby in the yard. I couldn’t hardly be stil thinking this, and my arms started flailing and my head went whipping back and forth and my whole middle churned.
Big stayed so calm, gathering al my flailing pieces one by one and tucking them into herself, like my body was made up of fifty different upset ducklings. Once she got me stil , she held me while I wailed it out. It seemed like it took a long time. But final y I couldn’t keep listening to myself, and I stopped. I snuffled against her shoulder, soaked with al my gross snot and tears. I stayed anyway. When I’d been stil for what seemed like a long time again, she sat me down in the kitchen chair and said, “I think we need hot chocolate.”
I sat like a tumor while Big got out the milk and a saucepan and the powdered cocoa and the sugar bowl, making me cocoa the same way she had the day I
realized Briony Hutchins had ditched me, or when I got that D on the algebra midterm I’d studied so hard for. Big didn’t have a Roger.
She didn’t know Occam. She didn’t know. I part wanted to tel her, but I couldn’t stand for her to know I wasn’t real y hers. I pul ed my phone out and texted Roger instead.
That’s Mosey Slocumb, buried in that box.
I waited for him to say that I was crazy. I waited for him to say anything.
Final y his answer came: Occam? Is that you?
Maybe. I could be Occam. I could be NE1, since the real Mosey is bones.
Big said, “Who is texting you? I thought you kids couldn’t text from school.”
“Roger must have study hal ,” I said. “He can text from there.”
“Mm-hm,” said Big in a skeptical voice, stirring.
I sat there holding my phone, waiting for it to buzz. Waiting for Roger to give me any kind of answer. It was weird, though. Now that I’d decided not to tel Big, I felt clear and light, and I felt little bubbles forming everywhere inside of me, just under my skin. Like when you pour a Sprite and forget about it and al the carbonation sticks to the inside of the glass.
When he final y did, I lifted the phone and read five words: Yes. You could be anybody.
I nodded like he was there to see me, and I felt a couple of the little bubbles launch off the sides of me and rise.
There was another Mosey Slocumb. If she had lived, no doubt she would be scared to move, because every step took her closer to what everyone already knew she would become. Mosey Slocumb would have to be perfect every second, or else she’d slip and land on her back only to stand up pregnant, or she’d gobble drugs and worship trees like a freak, or she’d end up a bank tel er in ugly uniforms so no one noticed she was stil cute and she’d live for her kid and her kid’s kids and probably their kids, and she’d never so much as have a date. But I wasn’t that girl.
I was something stolen from someplace so foreign it sounded made up: Miss No One from Nevada. Anonymous from Arizona. My phone buzzed again, but I ignored it. Outside, I held my body stil , and the lady who had raised me stirred my cocoa, and the big world turned. But inside, the bubbles went running up through me, more and more, until I was fairly popping with them.
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty Page 7
