A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “Not real y. But on the other hand, and sorry to say it, she was smokin’ hot.”

  “Ew,” I said. “Unrelevant.”

  “Not at al . If any of the yearbook-club photo geeks were guys that year, there should be plenty of pictures of her. Do you know who any of her friends were?”

  “Just one, but only because she’s such a major player in Liza’s Just Say No stories. And she can’t help us.” I flipped a few more pages and came to a photo spread cal ed “Best Friends Forever,” with al these pics of girls posing in pairs. Right at the top, there was my mom, grinning up at me from the top of the page, her bright hair real y long and crazy with curls. She had one arm slung over the shoulder of a blond, fox-faced girl who was rockin’ that skeevy Seattle grunge look and wearing way too much electric-blue eyeliner. I leaned over and showed the photo to Roger. “You know who that is, right?” He looked at the picture and shook his head. “Melissa Richardson?” He stil looked blank. “Claire Richardson and Coach Creeper’s oldest daughter?”

  His eyes widened. “Holy shit! The one that ate the bad X and thought her baby sister was a roast or something? I heard she baked her.” He did an elaborate shudder.

  I said, “I heard it was acid, and she drowned her baby sister.”

  “Either way, your mom was besties with the Beast of Immita. How cool is that?”

  I said, “It’s not going to help us. The way Liza tel s it, Melissa ditched her sophomore year because Liza got pregnant and couldn’t party anymore.

  Liza’s moral was ‘Druggie friends aren’t real friends,’ but I bet Melissa was just a typical asshole Richardson.”

  Roger’s brow furrowed. “It’s a chicken-egg thing. Like, was Melissa Richardson a baby baker because her parents are assholes, or did they become assholes because she baked their baby?”

  “Drowned their baby. But stil , if my mom sent any postcards from the road, they total y did not go to that house.”

  “I’m pretty sure she baked her,” Roger said, studying the photo. “They look real y tight. Maybe they made up.”

  “I doubt it, and anyhow, there’s no way we can find out.” After Melissa drowned the baby sister, she got charged with fifty mil ion different kinds of crime. Claire Richardson and Coach Creeper bailed her out and took her home, but she never showed up for court. Either she ran away or maybe her parents sent Melissa off to rehab in Switzerland or someplace, because Richardsons don’t go to tacky places like prison. Now people acted to their faces like Claire-n-Coach had only ever had their herd of boys, like the oldest and youngest girl kids had never happened.

  “I bet her parents stil have a bunch of Melissa’s shit tucked away in the attic,” Roger said, speculative.

  I snorted. “You want to break into the Richardsons’ house? You are going to so end up expel ed, you moron.”

  But Roger wasn’t listening. He’d kept flipping through my mom’s sophomore year and said, “So after Melissa dumped her, who did your mom hang with?”

  “How would I know?” I said. “Who did your mom hang with in high school? I bet unless one of her friends turned out to be an infamous baby drowner, you can’t list a one.”

  “True fact,” Roger said, and then he froze. He let a whistle out between his teeth.

  “What?” I said, but he stared down for a good long thirty seconds before final y flipping his book around so I could see, too. It was open to a big spread of pictures from Fal Formal. I did some quick math. My mom would have been pregnant by then, but not very. I found her in a photo on the edge of the right page. She was leaning back-to-back on a bushy-haired girl, who was pretty in a wiry, slouchy way.

  “Holy shit, is that…a Duckins?”

  Roger pointed at the bottom of the page, where the names of everyone in the pictures was listed. He ran his finger across the line and stopped when it hit “Liza Slocumb, Noveen Duckins.”

  “Ew. On what planet is anyone tight with a Duckins?” I said. “They al seem part retarded and practical y feral.”

  Roger’s eyes were total y, suspiciously overbright. He said, “Look real y close, though, Mosey. I mean real y close.”

  He ran his finger down the length of Noveen Duckins. She was super skinny, but under her crossed arms I could see how her bel y pooched out as Roger’s finger ran along the curve of it.

  I exhaled. “Is she knocked up? My mom bonded with a Duckins because they were both knocked up?”

  “Right,” Roger said. “And if a Duckins baby went missing, maybe it never got reported.…”

  Al at once I saw where he was going. “You think I’m a Duckins?” I said. “Zomgah, how inbred do I seem to you, exactly?”

  Roger shrugged. “Maybe Noveen did it with a physicist or something and his genes evened you out?”

  “I am so not a Duckins,” I said. “Anyway, it’s the angle of the picture. She probably isn’t even pregnant. Maybe she just has that Third World bloat.”

  “But we have to go find out,” Roger said.

  “Yeah, right. Let’s head over there and get shot by some shirtless, old, fat, scraggle-bearded man Duckins who has Deliverance coveral s and bigger boobs than me,” I said darkly.

  “And the worst part is, he’l turn out to be your uncle.”

  “Gah!” I said, and punched him in the arm. I didn’t think I was a Duckins for a single red second, because even a Duckins would notice a whole baby going missing, probably. But in the picture my mom peeked slyly over her shoulder at Noveen, who was peeking right back. They grinned at each other like girls who shared a secret. I super wanted to talk to Noveen Duckins if she stil was around.

  I said, “I’m in.”

  Roger grinned. “I’l pick you up at The Real Pit tomorrow after school. You and me? We’re busting into Ducktown.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Big

  I MET LAWRENCE ON my granddaughter’s birthday, a couple of weeks before the second anniversary of the day Liza and her baby disappeared. I was speeding down I-10, weeping my guts out, thinking that somewhere out in the bigness of America my grandchild had learned to walk and was stumping around in that stiff-legged toddler way. She would be saying words now, maybe sentences, exploring the dangerous world with only my pot-smoking boy magnet of a runaway daughter to keep her safe from cliff edges and mean dogs and traffic-heavy roadways.

  Almost two years. I thought I’d gotten a handle on it: the never knowing, at al , at al , where my child was, where her child was, if they were safe or warm or fed. But that morning, when I should have been baking a pink cake and blowing up bal oons, it reared up and bit me hard in both my eyes and deep down in my gut. I’d been downright foul at work. At closing, Doris, my branch manager, told me to get my crap together and come back sweeter tomorrow, or else I might not be coming back at al . Then she’d shoved an enormous pile of three-ring binders ful of loan data at me and told me she needed me to drive al the way to Pascagoula and drop them off at the regional manager’s office there. It felt like a punishment because it was one.

  I muttered cusses the whole way there and dropped the things off. As soon as I got back into my car, I busted out in a riot of crying. I headed home anyway, sobbing and dripping snot. I was thinking that at least the day could not get worse, and of course right then the flashing lights of Lawrence’s cop car came on behind me. I looked at the speedometer and saw I was speeding by exactly fifteen miles an hour—that God-cursed number, wrecking me again—and that made me cry harder.

  I pul ed over and then dropped my face down on the wheel with my chest heaving and tried to put a stopper in it before he tapped on my window.

  A quick glance in the rearview showed me piggy-puff eyes, a swol en nose, and splotchy red cheeks streaked with chocolate brown mascara. I wasn’t even having a good hair day.

  I rol ed the window down, hitching and streaming, and wordlessly held my driver’s license and insurance card up to him. I saw a broad, craggy-faced fel ow, about my age. His mouth was set into the standard trooper slash, but h
e had kind eyes, deep-set and hound-dog brown. His eyebrows lifted a fraction when he saw me.

  As he took my ID, I said, “I was going to try and flirt my way out of the ticket, but…wel , you see the problem.” I waved a hand at my ruined face.

  His lips twitched into a surprised smile, and he dipped his head to hide it. He looked down at my license for a good five seconds. He turned it around to face me right quick. “This is you?”

  “Yes, but that’s a terrible picture. I’m cuter than that, I swear,” I said. I wiped at my nose with my sleeve.

  “Real y?” he said. He looked at the license again. “It’s a shame, then. Flirting probably would have worked.”

  He’d almost made me smile back. I pressed my hands against my swol en eyes and sniffed hard and swal owed. I was final y drying up. “I’m not crying because you pul ed me over, by the way. I’m not a crazy ticket weeper. I had a bad day.”

  Stil , he didn’t head over to his car to write me up. He hesitated by the window and final y said, “Since the flirting is out, did you want to try another tactic?”

  A huh noise that might have been the start of a laugh got out of me, and then I was actual y smiling. I shook my head. “I got nothing. I think it’s bad karma to pretend I have a dying mother or that I’m rushing to unendanger some whales. Especial y since I was speeding because I’m purely desperate to get home and take these pinchy shoes off and pour myself a huge Jack and ginger.”

  He looked down at me for another twenty seconds, and then he said, “This is an official warning. Don’t drive when you’re that upset. It’s not safe.”

  He held my license and my card out to me.

  “That’s it? Real y?” I blinked at my things, surprised, then reached out and took them. “Why?”

  He spread his hands, as if letting me off the hook had puzzled him, too. “My shoes pinch, too. Go home.” He touched the brim of his hat to me, and this simple gesture undid me. It was so kind and unexpected.

  I burst into a fresh squal .

  He rocked a half step back, and I saw a flash of that hopeless look that nice men get around bawling women.

  He said, “Now, don’t do that. If you drive and cry, you won’t pay attention to how fast you’re going. I’l be pul ing you right back over.” He leaned in toward the window and handed me a real cloth handkerchief, soft with age but very clean. I gulped against the tears and got myself tamped down. I mopped at myself, streaking his white hankie with makeup and worse. I folded the ugly side in and tried to hand the hankie back through the window, but he didn’t take it. He looked down at me, very grave, and then he bent at the waist and added, quickly, almost embarrassed, “In completely unrelated news, I finish work at eight. I plan to get some dinner at the Panda Garden off Exit 69. Real y good moo shu. You could swing by, if you felt like it. Not because I didn’t give you a ticket. Nothing like that. It’s good moo shu, is al . Maybe good company.” He shrugged. I opened my mouth, and he held one hand up and said, “No worries. You can just show up. Or not.”

  “Good Lord, why would you want me to?” I checked the rearview again, and I looked as bad as I’d thought.

  “Damsel, distress, the whole thing makes me want to buy you MSG. Common cop problem.” He hesitated, then added, “Also, if that’s a bad photo, I’d like to see you on a good day.” He straightened up, and off he went.

  It was so impossibly cute and awkward that I wondered if it was a backroad route into smooth. If it was, I was wil ing to bet it worked. A lot. He had a kind of craggy, long-faced attractiveness, like a younger version of Briscoe on Law & Order. But I wasn’t in the mood.

  I drove home, a careful four miles above the limit, with no intention of showing up at Panda Garden. I kicked my shoes across the room the second I got the door shut behind me. I poured my drink and plopped onto my sofa. Then I sat there and watched the ice melting, my throat too swol en up to swal ow. The very air felt bloated with al the absent Liza-and-baby sounds that should have been breaking it. Not ten minutes later, I was hopping in the shower. I washed the weeping off my face and went rummaging in my closet for the brown-and-gold wrap dress that brought out the red in my dark hair. I didn’t have any damn thing better to do, I told myself as I headed right back down the highway to meet him.

  I was driving down that same highway now, toward Lawrence’s house. Liza was strapped in the passenger seat beside me with her face tilted toward the window. She’d seemed tucked way down deep inside herself al morning. She hadn’t even seemed curious about why I’d put a swimsuit on her under her dress or why I’d packed al her water weights and floaties up in my old beach bag. The woman with war in her eyes had disappeared again. I hoped she was only resting.

  “You want to get back to working in a pool again?” I asked her. She didn’t look my way or respond, but the rehab doc had said it was important to keep asking her things, so her brain would search for a new pathway to answer me. Listening to myself trying to sound perky about a pool, it struck me that if Liza was whole and herself, she would have snorted and ignored that. The answer was so obvious.

  Thinking back, I realized I’d been asking her for months how she wanted her eggs cooked, if she wanted to wear her white Keds or her blue ones, as if her stroke had set her back to age two. Nothing that interested her, real y. Nothing that would make her brain care enough to forge new paths. Mosey and our lost girl buried in the yard—those were things she cared about. Yesterday that had woken her. I tried to think what else might cal to my Liza, the Liza she’d been before. Men, I thought. Men and making trouble. Here I was, on my way to both and leaving her out of it.

  “The guy who owns this pool we’re going to? He’s a cop.” Liza’s head twitched at that. She knew how deep my cop thing ran. “He used to be my cop, and I’m banking he stil has some warm feelings that run my way. We’re going to ask to use his pool, but real y I’m going to get him to tel us what Rick Warfield and them are thinking, what directions they’re investigating. See if we need to be worried.” I couldn’t afford to wait either. I already had a message on my answering machine from Rick, wanting to set a date when he could come by and question Mosey and Liza.

  Now Liza was looking at me at least. I couldn’t tel what she was thinking or even if she was thinking at al . That was the hardest part. Her face was so familiar, and I used to be able to read every blink and lip quirk. Now half of it didn’t work right, and the other half seemed to have gone stil er, too, so I couldn’t tel if what I was saying was getting the whole way through. But this time it seemed to me there was an energy coiling up in her, like she was listening closer.

  “I cal ed Doris this morning to ask for the day off and ended up tel ing her al about Tyler taking out the tree and what he found. It made me feel cheap, trading something so personal to get a stupid day off. I hope you don’t think il of me for doing that. I wouldn’t have, for a pool. We’l have our own pool soon enough, anyway, if Rick wil ever take the damn yel ow tape out of our yard. I did it because Lawrence—that’s his name—he knows things we need to know to keep Mosey safe.”

  I could feel Liza’s interest, so I kept talking. “Doris said it was like an episode of Cold Case come to life in my backyard. She couldn’t wait to get off the phone with me so she could cal someone else and talk about me. It made me want to drive to the bank and hit her with my stapler. But she gave me the day—as a sick day, too, not a personal day, so my pay won’t get docked.”

  We were getting close now. We’d left Immita and driven through places where very few people knew me or my history or my family. Now Immita was far behind, and we were on the far side of Moss Point, nearing Pascagoula. I didn’t know any of the neighborhoods or even what grocery stores or fast-food places might be off these exits. It was like a weight lifting from me. No one would see me or care what I did here. No one would cal everyone they knew to chew it over.

  I was driving deep into Lawrence’s territory. I felt my foot get heavy on the wheel, like I could cal him to me by speeding
. Lawrence wouldn’t know the Malibu; I’d only had it for six years. I wondered what he would do if he did pul me over, when I rol ed down the window and said, “Hey, Lawrence.

  How are your shoes fitting these days?”

  I made myself ease up on the gas. Lawrence, never a morning person, had always worked the later shifts. Right about now his wife would be opening up her junktique store and he would likely stil be dragging around in his bathrobe, drinking the bitterest black coffee alive and wishing he stil smoked.

  We exited the highway, and I found myself driving straight to his subdivision like a homing pigeon. I said to Liza, “Weird, isn’t it? I haven’t been here in more than a decade, but I didn’t have to think about it. I remembered every turn.” I found I was much more wil ing to trade Lawrence stories to connect Liza to the earth than I had been to trade the story of the wil ow for the day off. I peeked at Liza sideways, and sure enough both her black eyes were fixed on me. “Yes,” I said, like she’d asked out loud. “He’s married. You see? I have my secrets, too, Miss Little.”

  Lawrence had a four-bedroom ranch on a cul-de-sac. I drove directly to it as wel , even though every other house in the neighborhood looked exactly like it.

  I pul ed in to his driveway, then sat there, engine idling. His closed front door and al the windows with the blinds down made the whole house look like it was buttoned up tight from the inside. I’d never felt quite comfortable in there, behind his wife’s ugly eyelet window treatments. We’d spent most of our time at my place, where the sounds of us being happy together had broken the awful quiet of the Liza-and-baby-less air. His house felt overempty, too, but not in the same way. An absent wife makes her own kind of quiet. It’s harder to break that silence with another woman. At my place he wasn’t taking up anyone else’s room.

  The old swing set was rusting away in the side yard, and Liza lifted her good hand and pointed at it. “Yep, two boys,” I said, knowing the question.

  “Don’t blame him too bad. I knew he was married from the very start.”