Pretty Is: A Novel

by Maggie Mitchell

  She put the brush back down on the dresser, straightened her white nightgown, and drifted out the door.

  He didn’t sleep in his room anymore, we knew that. So I wasn’t surprised to hear the stairs creak softly in the places where they always did. Although I couldn’t see her, I could almost feel each careful footstep. I knew when her hand brushed over the raised knot in the unvarnished wooden railing halfway down, the one your dress would catch on if you weren’t careful, and I knew exactly when she reached the bottom. And then I couldn’t hear her anymore, but I knew where she had gone. Five minutes, maybe. Ten at the absolute most. I heard a door slam. A minute later Lois was on the stairs again, moving quickly this time. She burst into the room, bringing cold night air with her. She thrust her tiny self into her bed—quietly, but I could feel the violence of her movements. She curled into a ball—don’t ask me how I knew—just in time to contain the first huge sob that shook her. I’ve cried like that once or twice. I know how much it hurts, really hurts, like someone is punching you in the gut. I almost forgot my own pain, I was so focused on hers. But Lois’s willpower was even stronger than her misery; she swallowed each sob before it escaped. All I could hear was a sharp little hiccough each time, and the sound of the sheets brushing against her skin as she shook. It was a long time before the number of seconds between sobs started to stretch out and her breathing got smoother.

  I didn’t have to ask what had happened. I knew, as surely as if I’d been there myself. Lois never mentioned what had happened that night, never suspected me of having seen anything, and I never brought it up. I felt guilty, as if I had been spying. But I also felt like I had something on her. Lois had a weakness, and I knew what it was.

  And there was another emotion, one I didn’t recognize at the time, or wouldn’t: rage. By the next morning, I was blindingly, dizzyingly furious with her.

  Because she broke the rules. Because she offered herself up, more completely than I ever had. Because she wasn’t supposed to be the brave one, the reckless one. Because it should have been me.

  Because she kept a secret from me, or thought she did.

  Because she brought on the end, somehow. She fucked up the balance, crossed the line.

  Something like that.

  Lois

  So much for the upper hand.

  I return to my motel and burrow into the cool darkness of my room like some tiny pointy-nosed mammal. Tomorrow I am supposed to check into my B&B, but for now I prefer the anonymity of this nondescript roadside pit stop. I try to sleep, so that I won’t have to face my own mind or submit to the torture of memory (your book is full of lies), but I can’t quite manage to leave consciousness behind. After a while I pull my notebook into bed with me, squinting at the scribbled pages, retracing Gary’s recent steps.

  Gary is frustrated. He had known the abductees would be adults now, but their maturity disturbs him: the women he has captured (he has them both, finally) are not exactly who he needs them to be. He feels thwarted. They are too old, too fucked-up, too different. They are not the pretty, flat-chested, bratty twelve-year-olds he imagined. He’s not sure what they have to offer him. He begins to think about children. Maybe what he requires is a more perfect reenactment of his father’s crime. But how would that satisfy his desire for revenge? Who would suffer? Who would understand? More than frustrated, he’s confused. And growing desperate. He has bought another knife, and he’s scoping out pretty twelve-year-old girls. He’s as lost as I am. Stay in character, Gary, I admonish him. Don’t stop making sense. But I don’t feel as if he listens to me anymore. I have a sudden urge to get him out of this elaborate mess I’ve entangled him in. Could he toss the knives off some bridge, free his captives, go back to his trailer and resume chopping wood? Would that be in character?

  I don’t manage to solve Gary’s problems, but, for the moment, he solves mine; I drift mercifully into a long sleep while squinting in the dark at my own wild handwriting. My unused laptop hums quietly in the corner of the room, endlessly charging. I feel as if Sean is watching me from it. This sense follows me into uneasy sleep.

  Chloe

  I spy Lois through the curtains in my sitting room tripping down the path to my guesthouse and am surprised by another stabbing thrust of guilt. She’s dressed very professionally, in a neat little suit and heels, and I understand this to mean that she is extremely hurt. That I have hurt her. Well, she caught me off guard; my claws shot out; I feel like shit. What else can I do? I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and I realize that I’ve chosen the opposite strategy: I’m showing her my exposed belly; she’s in full battle armor.

  She raps sharply at the door.

  And there she is: little Lois, twelve. Her body language says don’t fuck with me, but her big eyes are as sad and vulnerable as ever.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurt out as she pauses on the threshold. It’s what I had planned to say, but in the end it comes out spontaneously: I don’t have to act.

  And then, to my great relief, she reaches out her arms and hugs me; a short, sharp Lois hug, but real nevertheless. “I know,” she says, her voice muffled by my shoulder, then withdraws and steps past me into the room. She accepts a glass of wine and plunks herself down on my sofa. “So what did you mean, exactly,” she asks, “when you said my book was full of lies?”

  I was going to suggest that we go out on the porch, but suddenly it seems right that this part of the conversation take place in a small, enclosed space, where no one else can happen by, where it’s just Lois and me. And Zed. I arrange myself at the other end of the sofa.

  “Is it because of Mandy?” she continues, pressing, her poise slipping ever so slightly. “Because that’s—”

  “Nope. Not Mandy. I get Mandy, more or less. You needed someone outside, that makes sense to me.” She has stayed small, Lois; she can’t be more than five-three or -four. She’s thin, as always—too thin, maybe, though in my world there’s no such thing. Delicate. Her hands are clasped neatly in her lap. She used to sit just that way when he read to us.

  “It’s a bit of a time warp, isn’t it?” Lois breaks in. Psychic, as always. “I keep flashing back there, too. So. Full of lies, you said?”

  “I was awake that night,” I say. I keep my voice neutral. Not accusing, not judging. “That night toward the end. I heard you go to him. I heard you crying afterward.”

  Her head jerks up.

  “You went to him. And you never told me. And you didn’t put it in the book. It would have changed everything, if you had. It would have made Hannah a more interesting character in a way. Less innocent. It would have made Zed more complicated too. More sympathetic, maybe.”

  She reaches for her wine. I see her turn inward, as if her eyes have flipped around to examine the past, not the present. I tip my own wine back. I can wait. I can tell that she’s remembering—not stalling, not making shit up. It surprises me, how much I want to know what she’s going to say.

  “He was changing,” she says, leaning forward. “Things were different. I was … afraid. I hadn’t been afraid before, but I started to be afraid.” A sudden breeze sweeps through the little house, rustling curtains and magazines, smelling like rain, raising goosebumps despite the heat. A rumble of thunder follows. British Columbian thunder or Adirondack thunder? Both. Lois goes on. “I didn’t know what he wanted. We didn’t know what he wanted. Remember, Carly May?”

  It’s strange to hear that name. I wonder if that’s why she’s saying it. She is speaking to the ceiling, but I nod. Of course I remember.

  She tilts her head down, looks right at me without a warning. “I wanted him to be happy,” she says simply. “So that everything would be okay.” She takes another great gulp of wine, and somehow I know to stay silent and still.

  “And I wanted him to love me,” she adds, her voice very small but surprisingly steady and clear. “Didn’t you?” She glances toward the window. “But I couldn’t bring myself to put it in the book. I thought about having Callie do it instead,
but that felt wrong. So in the book I made Mandy love him, in her own way. It’s not a lie, it’s more like … a translation.”

  She pauses, and I see her face tighten slightly. Like she’s shifting from defense to offense. I wait.

  “And besides—” she begins quietly, not looking at me.

  “Besides what?” I think I know what’s coming.

  “Well, I’m not the only one hiding something, am I? You’ve read the book, I assume? So you know I heard you that night in the kitchen. I heard you promise.”

  “So? What was I supposed to say? I felt like he was saying that if I didn’t promise, he’d never let us go. So yeah, I promised. So what.” I’m surprised by how angry this makes me. This was the other thing that pissed me off about the book, I realize. That she gave me away and not herself.

  “Of course you had to promise,” Lois agrees. “But you could have kept it, and you didn’t. You betrayed him.”

  “Bullshit. He was dead by then. And besides…” Here’s the part she doesn’t know, the part I’ve tried to forget. “Besides, he didn’t believe me anyway,” I say flatly. I remember the way he looked at me. His eyes were so sad. So disappointed. He knew I was lying, and he was kind enough not to call me on it. “He knew I didn’t mean it, even at the time.”

  “We both let him down, then?” Lois’s voice sounds very small, almost childlike.

  “I guess we did. But not—”

  “Not overall. Not in the grand scheme of things. No, I think you’re right.”

  And there we sit for a long time. The storm rolls in and the shutters rattle and the lights flicker, and rain blows through the screens.

  Lois

  “You have to stay here with me,” Carly says later. “I won’t let you go back to that shitty little motel.” I explain about the bed-and-breakfast, but she talks me down. “That’s ridiculous. You can sleep on the sofa; it pulls out. Or I could. We could flip for it. I have more space than I need. You can meet everyone; they’ll love to meet the writer. You have to come. You’ll get a kick out of it. Besides, you’re a part of it. You should be here.” So I agree, finally, partly because that feels true, partly because I am not keen on drinking and driving and she is clearly not keen on sobriety. We drink more wine. We tell our lives. That part is strange: reduced to words, my life seems very small and far away (except for the Sean part, which I omit). As though it belongs to someone else. It gives me pause; should it be so easy to cast my life aside, shed it like old skin, reduce it to a tidy little blurb? Or might that in fact be the best way to extricate myself from the mess I’ve created?

  We move out to the porch in the aftermath of the storm and sit in the dark, the woods behind us full of night noises. We listen for a while. “It’s not the same, though, is it?” I know that she will know what I mean. “Similar, but … definitely not the same.”

  “Thank God,” she says, with fervor.

  Later: “Would I have read anything from the eighteenth century?” she asks languidly, trying to understand what I do for a living. “Keep in mind I didn’t graduate from high school.”

  “Maybe Gulliver’s Travels?” I venture.

  “Little people, right? Didn’t they make a movie of that?”

  “Lots of movies. What about The Rape of the Lock? Robinson Crusoe?”

  “Very faint bells might be ringing,” she says. “Or they might not. Dude on an island, that last one? What a funny century to pick.”

  I don’t bother to explain why that isn’t true; it doesn’t seem to matter. “Read Moll Flanders sometime,” I suggest, half-seriously. “She’s kind of an actress, in her own way. You might like it.”

  “Maybe I will,” she says. “Just to surprise you.”

  I tell her I’ve seen all of her movies. I tell her Brad watched them with me, and answer her unspoken question: “Brad? No, nothing like that.”

  Gradually it emerges that we are both perpetually single, unloved, unloving. I tell her about the teacher I seduced in college and then passionately avoided for three years, and the string of awkward, unrepeated dates that followed. She sketches her serial loveless flings. We contemplate each other for a while. “No,” she says eventually, although I have not spoken. “I don’t want to hear any crazy shrink shit about that. Don’t even start.” I’m glad enough not to start, because I don’t want to hear it either. However appropriate it might be to blame Zed for our romantic haplessness, I fail to see how it could be useful.

  At last Carly lurches to her feet, heads inside to find me a nightgown and sheets for the sofa. (She seems to have forgotten the bit about flipping for the bed.)

  Before trying to sleep, I check my phone for messages: There are several texts from Sean, which I uneasily ignore. A missed call from Brad, which surprises me a little, but no message. I can’t tell whether I’m relieved or oddly disappointed. And a call from a number that’s unfamiliar but from my area code. I hesitate for a moment, then play the message.

  “Lois. Delia here,” says a faraway voice. “I don’t know if you’re even in town, but there’s something I thought you should know. That kid, that student of yours, Sean McDougal—the cops are looking for him. It’s the stalking thing again, but worse this time. Apparently he showed up outside some high school girl’s bedroom window and showed her a knife—that’s what she says, he just showed it to her. She screamed, and he ran. This was two nights ago, and no one’s been able to find him since. The cops are thinking he might have split, somehow. So—well, he’s out there. Somewhere.” A pause. “Anyway. I thought you should know.” Click, and silence.

  Stalking? A knife? A high school girl? He’s out there. For a moment I am utterly disoriented: it’s Gary who’s stalking high school girls, right? Against my better judgment? The connection between the two plots eludes me for one confused moment. Sean isn’t a character in a story, Delia points out scornfully in my mind. And Brad stands beside her, shaking his head, disappointed.

  I check the time. If it’s 2:00 a.m. here, it’s 5:00 a.m. there. I’m not sure whether the wine is sharpening my senses or dulling them; my very uncertainty suggests the latter. There’s nothing to be done now, I tell myself sternly, and sink into the sofa for another night of troubled dreams.

  Chloe

  It takes me a minute, when I wake up, to remember Lois, and all that happened yesterday. My first instinct shocks me a little. Nice to see you, Lois! Good-bye, Lois! Slam the door. Leave it all behind, again. But when I stalk out of my bedroom to make coffee, I see Lois curled up on the sofa, absurdly enveloped in my nightgown, looking tiny and strangely peaceful. Too late to slam this door even if I wanted to. It feels weird, tiptoeing around so as not to wake her; I’m not used to bothering about anyone else. Not a judgment; just a thing I notice.

  I’m waiting for the coffee to start spurting from the machine, already feeling guilty about the noise it will make, when the phone rings again. The landline. This time I don’t hesitate before I grab it. “Yeah,” I say aggressively, sticking a coffee mug under the spout, and I listen for a few seconds to the expected silence. “Hey, asswipe. You called me; I answered. Say what you have to say, or I hang up, and then I make sure you can’t get through again. So if you have something to say, now’s your chance.”

  “She’s there, isn’t she?” The voice sounds like it’s underwater, and there’s a fairly obvious attempt at disguise. It sounds a lot like the percolating coffee.

  “You’re going to have to be a little more specific,” I say, glancing over at Lois. She’s flipping over; I can’t tell whether she’s awake.

  “She’s there. You can’t trust her, you know. Tell her I fucked up, and it’s her fault.”

  “Tell who? Who the fuck are you, is my question.”

  “She knows. Tell her I read the book she’s writing. Tell her it’s over.”

  “What’s over? Listen, if you’re going to talk in riddles—” He hangs up. I stare at the phone, trying to piece things together. What did he say last time? It was about me: I
know who you are. Maybe I should have paid more attention.

  Lois has pulled herself into a sitting position, clutching the sheet around herself, her face and hair peculiarly unruffled. Her voice sounds urgent, though. “Who was that, Carly?”

  “You’re going to have to call me Chloe.” I meant to say it last night. I can’t handle this Carly business.

  “I know, sorry. I’ll practice today. Nothing but Chloe, I swear. But—who was on the phone?” She’s looking at me with her funny little Lois-expression, like a very pretty and terrifyingly smart fox. She already had it when she was twelve. Her head tips slightly to one side and she looks as if she’s reading my mind. “It was a prank caller, wasn’t it? How many times has he called before? What did he say?”

  “Why don’t you tell me, if you know so much about it? Sounds to me like you know exactly who it is.” Hard to believe anything remains unconfessed after last night, but trust Lois to hold something back. I mentally replay the anonymous voice’s words in this new context, thinking they might make more sense. And they do, a little, but it’s a disturbing kind of sense. Lois’s expression is worrying me. It’s just a prank call, right? But she looks almost afraid.

  “It sounds like someone is taking a little too much of an interest in your life,” I suggest, which is putting it mildly. “And since he seems to have tracked me down somehow, which the front desk is definitely going to hear about, maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on.”