A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  She was me.

  I glanced at Roger, standing frozen with the bong lifted up in one arm, ready to hurl it like a round, glass javelin. He was staring at her, and his arm slowly lowered. I stared at her, too, but she was only looking at the big scary guy.

  She had a scratchy voice, clogged up with sleepy, and she croaked, “What is going on in my goddamn house? Huh? Huh? Now you made me shoot a gun, and my whore neighbor wil cal the cops if she is goddamn home. Chuck, you need to get the product and go out the back door.” She glanced at me and Roger, then said, “And who—”

  She saw me. Her creaky voice got stuck in her throat. She looked and looked at me with my own eyes. Her voice tried to make more words, but they petered out into panting. The gun wobbled, and her hands dropped so it was pointing at the floor. Final y she got words out. Two.

  She said, “Jane Grace?”

  I answered so fast, so loud. “No.”

  “Jane Grace,” she said again, but this time, there wasn’t a question sound to it.

  “No,” I said again. “No. I am just some girl.”

  “What’s up, Janel e?” the scary guy said.

  The woman didn’t take her eyes off me, not at al . She said, “Chuck, get the goddamn product out the back. And this, too.” She held out the SIG.

  “Oh, right,” he said, and he took it and headed down the hal way like this whole day with the attempted rape and the shooting and the plates coming at his head was a normal day in his life. I sat on my ass on the carpet with my boob burning from where he had touched it with his grossness, and I was looking at my mother.

  “You’re so pretty,” my mother said. “You’re so prettier than pictures.”

  I think I was crying. “I’m not her,” I said.

  We looked at each other for a long time, me crying and her standing there. She looked at me like she was drinking me. She looked at my nice skirt and my hair and my face, her eyes going place to place, and they were my shape, my color, except the whites were the color of dirty snow and her lids looked stretched out so far they’d gone saggy. She took one step toward me, and I scrabbled backward, and I would die and burn up into an ash pile if she touched me.

  I said so loud I was yel ing, “I’m just some girl! I’m just some girl!”

  She stopped. She didn’t step toward me again. She twisted her hands together in a worrying way. She looked at me for what seemed like a long time, with my ragged breathing the only sound in the room. In the pause I could see her deciding something, because she made my very own deciding face. Then she blinked and swal owed, and final y she spoke. “My neighbor real y might cal the cops. You kids better scoot.” It started out very plain and matter-of-fact, like she was talking to a mailman, but her voice cracked near the end, and I could tel she was close to crying.

  I felt a hand on me, and I almost came out of my skin, but it was Roger, helping me up. He’d dropped the bong on the floor, and we could hear the water gurgling out onto the carpet.

  That woman watched me with her ruined eyes stil al huge, like eating eyes, and Roger and I backed up and backed up. He got his hand on the door, and I heard that beautiful sound like a crow scraw. Sunlight came in behind us, so unkind, and lit up the gray-faced ghost that was my mother.

  She let us go. And I was crying stil , because it was so plain that this was mercy. She let me go.

  Roger slammed the door shut behind us, and we ran for his Volvo. We got inside and locked it, and his hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t get the key to go in. He laughed, kind of hysterical sounding, and said, “Do you see this?” nodding at how the keys wouldn’t go.

  I hadn’t stopped crying in a thousand years, but al at once it real y amped up. I was letting out these awful whooping cries.

  He said, “Mosey…” and he stopped trying to get the key in. “I think she…”

  But I couldn’t even think of her yet. I couldn’t stand to hear him say anything about her. She was too big and for later. I whooped out another huge sob, and I hol ered over him, “He touched me on my boob!” Roger shut up and looked at me al helpless, not sure what to do with that. “I didn’t want him to, and he did anyway, and then he complained about it! Like my boob wasn’t good enough!”

  This was the only place I could get to now; that big guy’s hand on me and how it shouldn’t be that way. It should be my first boyfriend, whoever that would be, and I should just like him so much. We should be in his car, in the dark, maybe behind the DQ with our mouths al cold from ice cream, but warming as we went on kissing and kissing for a long time, and I should be wondering if I was fal ing in love with him, and his hand should creep sweet up my waist al careful, waiting to see if I would stop him, and I wouldn’t. It should matter, and it should be like a present we would give each other, me and a boy I liked just so very much. I didn’t know how to say al that, but it was in my head, and al I could say was, “Like, seriously, he gets to complain?”

  Somehow Roger got it. I know he got it, because he put his keys down in his lap and he turned to me and his face was very serious. He reached out slow with his hand, and I knew what he would do, and I sat there, and he did it. He put his hand right over my boob, the one the scary guy had grabbed. He took it like he was meeting it, formal y, shaking hands. His pinkie was a little under, so his hand cupped it. I went stil , and his face washed into a blush, this bright tide of red coming up his neck and flushing his whole face. His breath changed, going short.

  He said, “Wel . It’s my first boob. And I think it’s goddamn perfect.”

  He never said “goddamn” because of being Baptist. But he said it now and meant it, and he sounded al strangled about it. Then I smiled at him, and it was like I felt myself going al clean under his hand. He was taking it away, what that scary guy did, because he so, so very meant it, and he was my best friend. It wasn’t at al romantic or anything like that. I didn’t want to kiss him now and be al , oh, yay, a boyfriend. He was only my best friend Roger, fixing my tit for me.

  Then someone banged the window with a fist, and he jerked his hand away. I screamed because I thought it was the cops or, worse, that the zombie mother who was me had changed her mind and come out after us. It was even worse than al that, though.

  Roger jerked his hand off my boob too slow, and I was outside my secret corpse-mother’s house, and glaring in the window at me, banging at it with her fist, was Big. Big in Montgomery. Big losing her total shit.

  It was the worst possible thing, but I was so glad to see her. I tore the door open, almost knocking her down with it. She came around it, and I spil ed out into her arms, already crying more.

  She clamped me to her, hard and said over my head to Roger, “You! Start your damn car and fol ow me. I want to see you in my rearview every second al the way home. I am going to get you safe back to your parents before I decide if I have to murder you. And if I ever see you with your hand where it just was? You wil be drawing back a nub. You hear me, mister?”

  My face was pressed hard into Big, the warm brown-sugar-and-vanil a smel of her. I heard Roger say, “Yes, ma’am.” Then the car door slammed.

  Big hauled me along the street to her Malibu, parked right behind us, and I hadn’t even noticed her coming. She pushed me against the side of the car and grabbed me by the shoulders, her eyes going up and down me. Al at once I felt how dirty and crumpled I was, my clothes al twisted up and filthy from the fight.

  “Are you hurt?” I didn’t answer, and she rattled me around by my shoulders. “Mosey. Are you hurt? Did anyone hurt you?”

  I shook my head. She dug her hands into me harder and stared into my eyes until I said, “No, real y. We got out okay. I’m okay.”

  Then her eyes sprang up ful of tears. She dashed them away, mad. She put me in the passenger seat like I was this limp little rag, and I was. I sat there snuffling as she came around and got in the car. She peeled away from the curb and drove toward the highway. I sat there thinking how the cops stil hadn’t come, which was the scariest part
of al . I had screamed and screamed, and a shot was fired, and that man could have done anything to me and taken the gun and shot us and buried us under the almost-dead azalea for plant food, and who would have ever known?

  That started me up again. I cried like a dork al the way to the interstate and for a few miles down it, until my eyes were so grainy and dry they couldn’t make tears.

  Big was so mad her lips were white, and her one hand was white on the wheel, too, like she was strangling it, but she put her other hand on me, soft on my leg. She squeezed me gentle and sweet, her palm warm through the thin material of my crumply skirt.

  When I could talk, I said, “How did you find me?”

  “Patti cal ed this morning while I was getting ready for work. And don’t you be mad,” she said. “That girl is a good friend to you. Tattling was the smartest thing any of the three of you has ever done in your whole lives.”

  I wasn’t even a speck mad at Patti. I wanted to kiss Patti on the face, because it was so good to be in the car with Big driving away from that place with that woman in it saying, “Jane Grace?” like a question and then, worse, “Jane Grace.” Like she knew. When she said those last two of al my names, there was a sound to her voice, and a bel tol ed in me like an answer. The way she said that part of my name stirred a pot ful of memories I couldn’t get to, old ones, alive in my underbrain, and they knew that name and answered to it.

  We went fast down 65, and I could see Roger’s Volvo in the rearview, obediently staying right behind us. We were quiet for a long time. I was thinking about that woman now, that house, the scary guy’s gray teeth and how my mom-monster was missing a bunch. Her mouth slacked open in the sunlight had been ful of gaps so that her lips crunched in like an old lady’s lips.

  Big drove, intense and quiet, her hand warm on me. I mostly didn’t want to think. I mostly wanted to go home and climb into Liza’s bed and press up beside her and sleep for a week with Big sitting in the chair beside to keep us safe.

  But Big didn’t leave it alone. “What was it like there? What were they like?”

  I didn’t know quite how to answer that. That man’s hand on me. Her eating-me-alive yel owy eyes. When I final y did answer, my voice was al trembly and high. “It’s not a good place. They were very bad.”

  Big breathed out, like relieved. Like this was a good answer.

  “I knew that Liza wouldn’t hook you from some happy little mommy at a McDonald’s. I mostly knew. But it’s Liza, and she doesn’t have the world’s best judgment, and she couldn’t tel me.…A tiny piece of me worried I was keeping you from something you deserved to have. That I was helping some good souls someplace stay broken.”

  My heart went bang in my chest. She was talking like she knew I wasn’t Liza’s real kid, like she knew that the real Mosey Slocumb had been under the wil ow al these years. I gulped and asked, “Did Patti tel you everything?”

  Big cocked an eyebrow. “Patti is a teenage girl, so I seriously doubt that. But she told me where you’d gone.” She took her hand off my leg long enough to poke an angry thumb back at the Volvo. “I should have known that kid would clue in. I watched him look at those pictures of Liza’s and come up with the word ‘poison’ in eleven seconds.” Her nostrils flared, and she shook her head.

  So she knew. She knew now. An awful thing reared up in me, an awful thing I had to ask, but I couldn’t say it out loud to her. So I asked instead,

  “Are you upset Liza stole me?”

  Big shook her head, immediately, but she kept her eyes on the road. “It’s done. Looking at that place, looking at you now, I can guess enough to understand why she did it. How long were you inside?”

  “Hardly any time at al ,” I said, and that was true. It seemed like we were in there forever and I came out the door fifty years old, but real y we hadn’t been in there more than five minutes. I couldn’t ask stil , not the only thing that mattered, but I sidled up a little closer to it.

  “Were you upset when Patti told you?”

  She snorted again, even louder. “‘Upset’ does not cover it. I was so scared and furious al at once. I drove here like a crazy woman. I cal ed your cel phone a thousand times.”

  I said, “Patti had it. So me and Roger could text her what happened.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Big said, on a long exhale. “You al three need to be spanked and then grounded until you are past thirty and have some sense. I might let Patti off the hook at twenty-five.”

  I peeped sideways at her. She was mad, but not al the way at me, I didn’t think. More mad at us as a group and just, like, everything. That was why I could final y say the hard thing I wasn’t sure I even wanted her to answer.

  “Don’t you care?”

  She shot me a glance. “Of course. I mean, what? About what?”

  My voice was al smal . “About what Patti told you. About I have another mom.”

  Big’s eyebrows came down, and she didn’t answer. She started scanning the road ahead. She pressed her foot on the gas to speed up, and then she took the next exit we came to. She turned and cruised into the parking lot of the closest gas station. Roger fol owed us in and then sat behind us idling, I guess too terrified of Big to get out and come see what was up. Probably a good cal .

  She shut off the engine and turned toward me. I was looking down at my hands, twisting them together in my lap, but she said, “Hey,” and then she said it again, twice more, until I looked at her. Her eyes were burning at me, al deadly serious. “Patti told me where you were, Mosey, and why.

  That’s al . She didn’t have to tel me anything more. I already knew who you were. I mean, who you weren’t. I already knew for a long time that the baby Liza gave birth to was under the wil ow.”

  That couldn’t be so. I said, “No, but how?” because Big didn’t have a Roger.

  Big said, “It was just one of those senseless, awful things, Mosey. Crib death, they cal it. Liza was so young, I think she panicked, and her heart was broken. She made some bad decisions. She buried that child, and she ran.”

  I shook my head. I was glad to know for sure, about my mom and the little bones, but she’d misunderstood me. “Not how did it happen. How did you know?”

  Big’s eyes softened, going al kinds of misty. “Liza’s silver box. The pink dress. The duck. I knew who owned those things.”

  I said, sounding real y slow and dumb, “So but then… but if you knew the whole time? Why didn’t you say?”

  “I was trying to keep you from knowing,” Big said, smiling a ghosty version of her own real smile. She shot an ire glance at the Volvo.

  But it stil couldn’t be so. Because nothing had changed. She had stayed her same Bigly self like always, no matter how awful I got at her after, as if I truly belonged to her. Nothing in her had changed. Not the way she kept her eyes on me, or her rules, or the way she talked to me or made my eggs. She had stayed al the same. So it couldn’t be true, and yet—I looked at her in her earnest eyes, and she was stil my Big. She had been, every minute, while I ran around learning kleptomania and ravaging Ducktown and toting guns in my Hel o Kitty backpack.

  I lay down across the hump between the seats then, and I was bawling my forty-mil ionth tears of the day with my head in her lap, and she put her soft hands on my head, saying, “Hush, hush, baby,” smoothing my hair like she used to back when I was little and had stomach flu a lot. “It’s al going to be okay.”

  Liza had stolen me, and a monster man had touched my boob, and we had found my real mother, and she was a nightmare, and now she’d seen me, and maybe she would try to find me, and Big was pregnant with some baby that could total y replace me and be her own true baby, and any bad thing could happen any second. Any bad thing was possible, and I knew that now, because I’d been in that house and so many bad things had been real and happened.

  But Big was stil exactly Big.

  She kept saying, over and over, “It wil al be okay, it wil al be okay.”

  I kept my head in her lap, her hands
soothing my hair. I stayed there, being Mosey, my ear pressed up against this new baby she was making, too tiny for it to even have ears and hear me or know me. Al at once I had this weird connecting feeling, unspooling like a thread between us. A nice thing. A good thing. That baby, I felt like it was al pressing toward me from inside while Big pressed me close to it from out, and both of us were so very, very Big’s.

  I was smart enough to understand that this was only a pause.

  This was a heartbeat in between a shit storm passed over and a thousand more coming. But it didn’t matter. Because this thing she kept saying?

  That it would al be okay? I knew as long as I had her and she had me, no matter what came next, her words would stay completely true.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Big

  I PUT A BRICK through the big stained-glass window at my parents’ church once. Not my finest moment, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was sixteen, and I’d deposited my settlement check and gotten a secondhand Civic so Liza and I could move the required hundred miles away from her bright-futured father.

  I hadn’t slept wel , and so we’d crept out to my packed-up car and left in the dark hour before the sun came up. The route to the highway took me past Faith First Baptist. I’d grown up in that church, been baptized in its font. My Girl Scout troop had met there, and Mrs. Finch, the organist, had given me piano lessons in the choir room. On the little playground behind the Sunday-school rooms, I’d shared my first dry-lipped, middle-school kiss with Bobby Bossi. I’d thought I would get married there someday and have a fel owship-hal reception with a shrimp tree and a poufy white cake and my mother’s sea-foam punch made of ginger ale and sherbet.

  After I was showing, I couldn’t stand the eyes there, peeking at me sideways with smug pity or staring me down with open outrage. They had an elder meeting to discuss limiting my “influence” on the other youth group girls, though at least three I knew were only baby-free because they knew their way around a condom better than I had. I quit going to services, and they blamed me for that, too. I was clearly lost, they told each other, and it was easier to let me stay like that. Not one church member so much as dropped by to present Liza with an unwrapped pack of diapers or a used receiving blanket. They didn’t want to receive her.