A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “I told you he was great at this,” Mosey said, beaming at Raymond like she had invented him.

  “Great job,” I said, smiling, trying not to seem impatient to get them gone. “Mosey, I want to keep working with Liza some, since it’s going so wel .

  Can you kids throw the lasagna in the oven and go ahead with supper?”

  “Sure,” Mosey said. She headed for the kitchen.

  Raymond Knotwood stood and went after her, saying over his shoulder, “Cal me if you get stumped again.”

  Patti stayed a second longer. I smiled up at her and said, “Good for you! I didn’t even know poison ivy had a flower.” She flushed even darker and ran after her friends. I shook my head. Bogo wasn’t the only stray that Mosey had adopted for us al recently.

  As soon as she was gone, I walked fast on my knees to Liza. “Someone put poison in a cup? A cup of poison?”

  “Cup poison,” Liza repeated, slurry but firm. Her good eye blazed with a bright and fervent triumph.

  I lowered my voice to a bare whisper. “Is this something to do with Mosey? You poisoned someone to get Mosey?”

  Liza’s mouth worked, silent, and I knew there were a thousand other thoughts washing around in her brain, but al she could do was say it again.

  “Cup poison!”

  I shook my head, and she pushed al the air out of herself in a frustrated gobble of sound.

  “No, no. I can get this. You were trying to lead me someplace, weren’t you? When you left the house. A place that has something to do with a cup and poison…”

  “Cup poison,” Liza said, stil slurry, but she had those words now, and she wanted me on point.

  “Who?” I said. “Who did the cup poison?”

  Her eyes fil ed up with tears, the good one faster, and I wasn’t sure if it was relief or sorrow, if I was asking the right question or the exact wrong one. Her good hand lifted off Bogo’s head and opened, and she placed her palm flat on her chest, patting at herself. She patted three times, tears spil ing over now and running in two thin rivulets down her cheeks. One plopped onto Bogo, and he looked up and whined, worried and sorrowful.

  “You?” I said. “You?” She kept patting. “Someone poisoned you?”

  I had a thousand more questions then. Where and when and how and what did this have to do with Mosey, but then, like an audible click in my head, part of it came clear for me. A cup, poison, and the walk toward Woodland. Woodland was the first turn Mosey used to take back when she was walking to Calvary every day.

  “The night you got sick. That godforsaken Calvary End-of-School Luau. Are you tel ing me…?” My hand went to her weak hand, ran up her wasted arm to touch the sagging side of her lovely face. “You can’t be saying someone did this to you? On purpose?”

  Tears spil ed down Liza’s face. Her relief was confirmation. “Cup poison,” she said, weeping, but triumphant. She owned these two words in this moment, whether she would keep them or not.

  “Who?” I said. “Who?”

  I grabbed the tops of her arms, watched her face close as she went inside herself, trying to find her way to the name. My mind was racing now, my heartbeat speeding up to match it. That night, at Calvary, she’d been going to meet someone, I’d felt certain. She’d been so dol ed up, not saying exactly that she had the money for Mosey’s tuition but implying that she was about to have it. Liza always played her man cards close, usual y because she was with the wrong man. Sneaking and sex were welded in her head, and I’d worried she was suckering some married man into paying.

  But maybe “suckering” was too nice a word? If Liza was seeing a married fel ow on the sly, she could have asked him to pay Mosey’s tuition.

  That was more like blackmail than suckering.

  I read mysteries and thril ers, and I’d read my share of true crime, too; this was the exact kind of thing that drove the quiet, never-hurt-a-fly guy next door to murder. A married fel ow, a pil ar of the community, he might trade Liza’s life to keep his own on course.

  “Was it Steve Mason?” I asked. She’d been climbing him like he was her own personal oak tree when she col apsed.

  Liza blinked at me. Made her “no” noise. She closed her eyes, sinking down into herself, maybe seeking the right name, maybe too exhausted to keep going.

  Every second of the next part of that awful night was seared into my brain. I remembered her dropping her cup, the dregs of one of those Virgin Coladas splashing the legs of the woman in metal ic sandals. That foamy drink looked so much more sinister in my memory now. I’d shoved my way through the crowd toward her and picked up that cup. I’d smel ed it, thinking Liza had been drinking, but I’d smel ed only the suntan-oil stink of coconut and pineapple. Al that sugar, had it masked the taste of something bitter and unwholesome? What had happened to the cup?

  After Liza col apsed, my memory decayed into a blur of panic. The ambulance ride. The hospital. Had I thrown the cup away? Dropped it on the ground?

  I remembered those cheerleaders in their hula-girl costumes, weird fleshy leotards under the coconut bras. I guess Claire Richardson thought it was better to look deformed than slutty. They had passed around the drinks and macadamia-nut cookies and big wicker bags ful of fruit-snack samples and coupons for 10 percent off backpacks for next year at Target. I’d been carrying my good clutch, and I’d put it down inside that wicker bag. I remembered holding the wicker bag in my lap like it was a baby, unthinking, al the time we waited at the hospital. I was pretty sure I’d taken it home. Then what? Had I thrown out a bag ful of free samples and coupons? It didn’t seem like me.

  “Stay here,” I said to Liza, which was crazy. It wasn’t as if she was about to leap up, trit-trot out of the house, maybe go dancing.

  I could hear Mosey and her friends laughing in the kitchen as I tore down the hal . I ran into my bedroom and threw open the door to my closet, which was a cataclysmic mess. My good clutch was back on the high shelf, gathering dust, waiting for me to have someplace special to go. So much crap was piled on the floor. I started digging through it, hurling shoe boxes and laundry out until my room looked near as bad as Liza’s.

  Then I saw it. The gift bag from the luau. It was in the bottom back corner, so crumpled that the cheap wicker had sprung into twigs down one whole side.

  Al the air came out of me in a rush. I hoped. I hoped so hard it almost stooped to praying. I pul ed the bag open, peering down. I saw the cup at once. It was crushed in on itself but present, nestled between a sample-size fruit rol -up and a brochure about the Jump Rope for Heart program.

  I’d read enough cop books to know not to touch it. There was a pencil in the bag with an ad for the Knotwoods’ car dealership on it, and I grabbed it and threaded it into the crumpled opening of the cup.

  I lifted it out, holding it up high, and inside I could see a faint crust of dried white along the seam at the bottom. I carried the cup to my dresser and set it down, stil careful not to touch it with my hand. Then my knees got weak and I had to sit.

  Hope warred for room with an equal share of leg-shaking rage. Hope because, if she’d been poisoned, maybe there could be a better kind of help for Liza, and at the same time some bastard had tried to kil my kid. Under al of that, I was shaking with strange relief; I’d always thought the stroke was a late gift from Liza’s drug abuse, and the drugs were mostly my fault. If I’d been tougher, more diligent, less naïve…But this cup could hold proof that Liza was hurt for a reason other than my failures as a mother.

  I sat trembling on the bed, wishing that hope and rage and weird relief were al I felt.

  But there was more. I couldn’t help it. Inside me, under al my skin, sex was lighting me up. It flexed and pul ed in a shivery, whole-body clench.

  The cup, the dried white seam of Virgin Colada, these things were physical evidence. A cop problem, and I knew only one cop who would help me on the quiet. My blood sped up, zinging through my body, heart pounding to the rhythm of his stupid name.

  I left the cup where
it was for now. I needed to get a ziplock bag from the kitchen and seal it up, but first I went back to Liza’s room to get her off the floor. She was slumped there, exactly where I’d left her, and no Bogo. He’d been seduced away by the smel of Stouffer’s drifting from the kitchen.

  Liza didn’t react when I came in. I had to lift her mostly on my own steam. As I settled her into her wheelchair, I tried to get her to focus on me.

  “Liza, I need to know who did this. I need a name.”

  Liza’s eyes widened, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring past me, at something so far away it must be through the wal , outside the house, maybe on the other side of the world.

  Her breath sounded shaped. I put my ear close to her mouth and said, “Please, baby, say it. Say a name.”

  She inhaled, and when the air came back out, it had a name on it. A name from long ago. The last word in the world I expected to hear.

  “Melissa.”

  My own breath stopped. I grabbed her shoulders. “When did you see Melissa Richardson? Liza? Liza?”

  She didn’t answer me.

  I gave her a little shake, asked again, “Who poisoned you?”

  Her eyes closed, but her good hand came up and clenched my forearm.

  She said it again, louder, clearer. “Melissa.”

  No mistake.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Liza

  LIZA’S ROOM IS a sea of photographs, and they rise and fal around her, wavering as she sways and sinks. Her memory is an ocean, but there is only one tide, one current, one place to wash up. Liza finds herself again being driven to those white sands. Melissa Richardson waits there, on a sunless day too gusty and cold for September in Mississippi.

  Noveen is driving. They are both so pregnant that they barely have room for breathing. She herself is stretched to a thin shel . The eyes of boys, something she has always owned, slide away from her now, fearful or sniggery. She can’t sneak a beer, or six beers, or light up, or drop ’cid, because there isn’t enough of her. She is a husk, and anything she puts in wil go straight to her chewy center. She wonders if after the baby is out she wil ever be Liza again, or only someone’s mother, like Big.

  Noveen has driven them in loops, through town and then up to the Ducktown woods, back through town, and now down the beach road. They are happy simply to be in motion, driving away from place after place but not toward anything in particular.

  At least until she sees Melissa’s red Eclipse pul ed over on the sandy shoulder.

  “Stop,” she tel s Noveen, pointing. Noveen obeys. The primer-painted Chevy, pul ed up close to the Eclipse’s shiny bumper, looks like something that the nicer car has crapped out. “I need a sec.” Noveen shrugs, her best quality her ability to rol with it, but she leaves the engine running. Liza jacks her unwieldy body up and out, lumbers down the path between the dunes.

  She hasn’t been alone with Melissa since that awful day at the Richardson house. The day Liza fel out of love. Melissa is constantly surrounded by the cadre of fol owers who used to be Liza’s, too. They whisper and point and glare, and whatever story Melissa has invented for them, it’s clear that Liza is the bitch in it. She supposes that’s fair.

  The ocean is a dark army green, no sun to spark its colors. If it were ten degrees warmer, if the charcoal humps of clouds weren’t rol ing toward them, this place would be packed. But now it is only Liza and Melissa and Melissa’s baby sister in a pink bucket seat. Melissa sits in a beach chair, close to the water. This is the second-to-the-last time they wil ever speak.

  The coming storm sends wind that cuts through Liza’s T-shirt, but she is only the thin, chil ed outside wal . She is built around a furnace, and the cold can’t touch her. Nothing can touch her.

  Melissa watches the waves rol in, barely glancing up when Liza comes to stand beside her. She lifts two fingers in a lazy salute, like this was old days. With no witnesses, Melissa accepts Liza in her old place as if it were normal, or at least inevitable. They watch the waves together as the baby in the bucket sleeps, and the baby inside Liza is stil and sleeping, too. It is as if both little girls are pretending not to be here, giving Liza and Melissa this moment alone.

  Liza remembers being Liza. She remembers being Melissa-and-Liza.

  From the outside it may have looked like Liza was charity. Melissa had the clothes, the money, the big house, the concert tickets, al the good drugs. But they both know it was a potluck friendship. Stone soup. Liza had the body, the face, the confidence, al the good pick-me-up lines. Liza brought the boys. It was almost equal.

  “I miss you,” Liza says.

  Melissa answers instantly. “Then why did you fuck everything up.” She speaks calmly, not playing to an audience. It’s not even a question. It is a flat statement of blame that acknowledges her own loss.

  Liza squats by her ex-friend, trailing her fingers in the glass-hard grains of sand. The rain has packed down its usual powdery softness. “Big thinks the dad is that carny guy.”

  “My carny guy? That would have been a cute baby.” After a pause Melissa peeps slyly at Liza and adds, “I told everyone at school you screwed some old pervo you met at the arcade for five hundred dol ars.”

  Liza nods with more than a little admiration. It’s a good story. It accomplishes a lot, real y. “Thanks for at least making me expensive.”

  Melissa looks straight at Liza. “Just because I’m not scratching your eyes out, like, right this second, it doesn’t mean that I stil don’t fucking hate you.”

  Liza absorbs that, then says, “Just because of your dad and al , it doesn’t mean that I stil don’t fucking love you.”

  It’s a very grown-up line. Liza’s kind of proud of it. Before the baby she wouldn’t have even thought of it. It’s close to an apology, and that’s what Big says adults have to do when they righteously screw everything up. Be sorry, and do better next time. In this case the being sorry is the best Liza’s got. It’s not like Melissa has another dad that Liza can choose not to fuck.

  Melissa’s face twists, as if she is fighting the idea of crying. Liza feels like crying, too, but she isn’t sure how much that means. She cries at AT&T

  commercials these days. Melissa gets it tamped down, and they stay there quiet beside each other. The waves rol in. Liza should go. Noveen wil be getting impatient.

  Then Melissa pul s a joint out from behind her ear, her favorite hiding place. At school most days, she had one tucked there, masked by the fal of her long hair. She holds it up and says, “From a guy at the Phish concert. He handed it to me, said, ‘Christmas gift for the pretty girl.’” She smiles a tight-eyed smile, because Liza used to be the pretty girl. Her dart hits home, and as Liza flinches, as Liza’s hand goes to her swol en bel y, Melissa’s expression softens. “Oh, wel . Whatever.” She offers the unlit joint.

  It is more than a simple tube of herbs in paper. What Melissa is holding toward her is an invitation to once again be Melissa-and-Liza. To visit the Liza that she used to be. If they smoke it up, they wil start talking. They wil laugh. Old threads wil reach and spin together.

  The waves are hypnotic, and the baby inside is sleeping and stil . Liza’s out of love with Coach. He made sure of that. Al she has left of that imagined life is the baby, and here is Melissa, cracking open a door that leads back into her old one. What’s to stop her, real y? This baby inside her has finished making al its pieces. What’s one joint going to hurt, at this point?

  Melissa’s little sister wakes and starts to fuss.

  Liza stands and goes to the bucket seat. Rocks it. The baby’s eyes are open, a pale ice blue like Melissa’s. Like Coach’s. Her own baby might have eyes like that.

  It strikes Liza that this child in the bucket and the baby sleeping so stil inside her are half sisters. They wil be in the same grade. They may look alike. They might one day be friends. Melissa’s little sister screws her eyes shut and truly wails. Liza unclips the buckle and lifts her out. She holds the squirming baby against herself, shushi
ng, and inside, like an answer, her own girl wakes. Liza feels something connecting their movements like a guitar string, plucked and vibrating, running from the baby in her arms to the baby in her womb.

  In that moment she understands that what Big says is right. It is time—too early, but whose fault is that?—it is time to put away childish things.

  Liza waves off the joint. “You can’t be smoking that shit,” she tel s Melissa. “You have to look out for your sister.” She soothes the squirming outside baby, and inside, her baby spins and kicks an answer.

  Melissa snorts. “Jesus Christ, Liza, how many times have we baby-sat stoned?”

  Plenty, is the answer, but the difference is, now Liza knows they shouldn’t have. She has a real person in her, alive and whole, thumping its feet upward. The baby sister is a real person, too, thumping back, so that Liza is a talking drum, inside and out.

  Liza says, “Real y, don’t. You have to drive the baby home.”

  Melissa rol s the joint back and forth between her fingers, holds it under her nose, and sniffs with relish. The door slams shut between them. “I’m not stupid. I’l wait til I’m okay. Run along, now, Liza. I’m very busy and important.”

  Liza knows what she should do. She should pick up the bucket and walk away. She can move the car seat’s base out of the Eclipse, into the Chevy. This is her own baby’s sister. She shouldn’t leave it here. She should drive it home to its bitch of a mother, say, Your other daughter is smoking pot down at the beach, and I didn’t think I should let her drive the baby. That part wil be fun, and, more important, it’s what Big would do.

  It’s what anyone’s mother would do.

  Liza is almost someone’s mother.

  “Don’t make me cal Claire,” Liza says.

  Melissa’s face twists into a sneer, but her tone stays mild. “You’re pretty holy for a girl who fucked my daddy. You think my mother is going to take your cal ? Go away now, Liza. And next time I see you? When you aren’t pregnant? Rest assured I’m going to kick your big fat postpartum ass.”

  Liza hesitates. She should take the baby. She knows it. But instead she kneels and settles her back in the pink bucket. She tucks the blanket around the fat legs.