Wicked Beautiful

by J. T. Geissinger

  “Why? What’re you gonna do?”

  I look at her, and then at Darcy. I see their concern plainly on their faces, but all I care about now is finishing what I’ve started. And there’s only one person in the world who can help me with that.

  “I’m going to see my daughter.”

  Darcy’s mouth drops open. Tabby shakes her head and sighs.

  And I turn to go to my bedroom to pack.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When I giggle, Parker tries to shush me, but he’s giggling, too. He can’t help it; he loves it when I laugh.

  “Bel, we have to be quiet. My parents can’t know you’re here.”

  “It tickles!” I try to hold still, try to muffle the squeals of pleasure and happiness desperate to escape my throat.

  “Tickles!” Parker pretends to be offended. “It’s supposed to feel good!”

  He slowly drags the tip of the feather between my bare breasts, down my ribcage, and across my belly. When he whorls it around my belly button, I have to cover my mouth and bite my lip so I don’t shriek with laughter.

  “It does feel good. But it tickles, too.”

  He grins. He’s stretched out naked beside me, propped on an elbow, his golden hair mussed, his heavy leg thrown over both of mine. We’re in his bed in his parents’ house, the bed sheets tented around his head and shoulders, snug in our own lovely world. It’s eleven o’clock on a rainy school night, and—as I often do—I’ve snuck out of my house to visit him on the other side of town.

  My parents are deep sleepers, but I share a bedroom with my little brother. Parker, an only child, has a giant bedroom on the upper floor of his parents’ mansion, far away from the cocktail party going on in the great parlor downstairs.

  His parents like to throw cocktail parties. My parents like to eat frozen dinners in front of the TV.

  “The book says this is supposed to be super sexy. You’re supposed to be, like, all worked up right now.” He purses his lips, trying to act stern. “You don’t seem very worked up.”

  “If you count trying not to pee my pants because I’m laughing so hard, I’m very worked up.”

  Parker drags the feather lower down my belly, over my hipbone, across the slope of my upper thigh. When he flicks the feather between my legs and I shiver, he smiles.

  “You’re not wearing any pants,” he whispers, and leans down to kiss me.

  “Neither are you.” I brush my hand across his stiffness, which twitches restlessly against my leg.

  His grin, always at the ready, appears again. “How’d I get so lucky to be with the most observant girl in town?”

  It’s my turn to pretend to be offended. “Observant? So you’re saying you love me for my mind?”

  His grin fades. Into his eyes comes a look so warm I feel bathed in heat. “Yes, I love you for your mind. And for your heart. And for your soul and your eyes and your hair and your smile and the way I feel like I’m ten feet tall when you look at me. I love you because I’m more me around you. Around you, Bel, I’m the best me I’ll ever be.”

  Parker rests his hot cheek against my chest. My body hums with joy. I wind my arms around him and close my eyes, my heart so full it’s bursting.

  No one ever told me it could be like this. No one ever said it would be so easy to lose myself in a beautiful, brilliant boy. To lose myself and find myself, all at once.

  Without warning, Parker’s bedroom door flies open and hits the wall with a thunderous bang. Beneath the covers, we both jump.

  “Who you got there in your bed, boy?” booms Parker’s father. “Better not be that goddam wetback whore!”

  In a sudden move that leaves me gasping in shock, the covers are stripped away. Parker and I, naked in each other’s arms, stare up in horror at his father’s livid face. Parker jumps up, attempting to cover me with the sheet, but his father backhands him across the face and sends his son staggering. He stumbles into a chair, loses his balance, crashes against the dresser, and then tumbles to the floor. Bill Maxwell leers down at me as I cower on the bed, starting to cry.

  “I find you in this house again, you little Mexican slut, you’ll be spreadin’ your legs for both the Maxwell men.”

  Parker shoots to his feet. In a red-faced fury, he lunges at his father, but too late. The older man, a former quarterback, broad in the shoulders and strong as a bull, throws a punch to Parker’s solar plexus that knocks him right off his feet.

  I scream as Parker collides with the wall. All the windows shake with the force of the impact. He slides to the floor, clutching his stomach and gasping for breath.

  Before his father leaves the room, he looks at me cowering on the bed, at his son gulping air on the floor. He adjusts his tie, smooths a hand over his hair. He’s not even sweating.

  “No son of mine is gonna fraternize with the help. You gotta decision to make, boy. Keep your whore or keep your inheritance. You choose her, you’re cut off without a cent, you hear?” He looks at me, hatred shining in his eyes, and adds in a vicious hiss, “Don’t throw your whole life away on a worthless piece of brown pussy.”

  When he leaves, I crawl from the bed and fly to Parker’s side. I curl into a ball beside him, hiding, sobbing, listening to Parker wheeze and gasp, wishing with all my might that I was a different girl, good enough for someone like him, good enough for his parents and his future and all the things he was destined to do,

  In other words, wishing I were white.

  * * *

  The private jet touches down on the runway, and I awaken with a jolt.

  My heart pounds painfully fast. The back of my neck is drenched in sweat. I fumble in my handbag for my medicine, wash a pill down with a swig from the Evian bottle on the small table in front of me. Then I sit still for a moment, allowing my breathing to slow, letting the awful images and feelings from the dream begin to dissipate.

  Nightmares and self-hatred and old, bitter memories. This is always how it is when I come home. Which is why I so rarely do.

  I’m met on the tarmac by the private car Tabby has arranged for me. I’ve packed lightly—I’m not staying long—and quickly the silent driver and I are on the way to my mother’s house. He keeps glancing at me in the rearview mirror. I’m glad I’ve got my sunglasses on and have wound a scarf over my hair; the last thing I want is to be recognized. Here, of all places.

  Another reason I so rarely come home.

  The drive to the ranch isn’t long, but by the time I’m finally standing on my mother’s porch with my Louis Vuitton overnight bag in hand, I feel smaller than I have in years.

  I feel reduced.

  I look around at the plain yard, the chicken coop my mother refused to take down even after she could afford to buy her own eggs, the expanse of cultivated fields on one side of the road beyond the white clapboard house, and the wild acres of scrub and mesquite on the other.

  God, I hate this place.

  I ring the bell. My mother opens the door. We look at each other for a moment without speaking. She’s older. Thinner. There’s far more gray threaded through her jet-black hair.

  “Hola, mama,” I say softly.

  She looks at the duffel bag in my hand but doesn’t ask how long I’ll be staying. Her dark eyes flash up to mine. She examines my face for a moment, and then says in Spanish, “I just made pozole. Come on in. It’s still warm.”

  We go inside. The moment I cross the threshold, I’m assaulted with goblin memories, sour old ghosts that have long been waiting in cold graves for me to return.

  I’d forgotten how small this house is. Everything is exactly the same as it was the day I left for New York as a teenager, right down to the macramé hangers filled with dead ferns hanging from the corners of the popcorn ceiling, and the dusty stacks of National Geographic magazines crowding the two bookcases that flank the plain brick hearth.

  Inhaling a breath, I drop my bag on the sofa in the living room. The last time I was here it was fall, during the harvest, the air redolent with the rich sc
ent of upturned soil. Now it’s spring, cool and crisp, and the air reeks of fertilizer.

  That smell always depresses me.

  My mother sets a steaming bowl of pozole on the kitchen table. I step out of my heels, take off my glasses and scarf, pull out a chair at the round wooden table where I ate all my childhood meals, and sit.

  She sits across from me and watches as I begin to eat. She glances at the diamond-studded timepiece on my left wrist, the black pearl necklace around my throat, the matching pair of pearls in my ears. Her gaze has a weight to it, a palpable warmth, like the touch of a hand.

  “Five years. You look well, mija. Too thin, though.”

  I slurp the soup. It’s delicious, the one dish she makes perfectly. I’ve missed it, this hearty peasant soup. And, though I’m surprised to realize it, I’ve missed her, too.

  I care deeply for my mother, but being in her presence is akin to having a scab ripped off before the wound has had a chance to heal. Over and over again.

  “There’s not one decent Mexican restaurant in New York City.”

  “There’s not one decent anything in New York City.”

  We both know whom we’re talking about, but continue on as if we don’t.

  “The fields look good.”

  “Eh. The company you hired to work them is very good. Too good. I have nothing to do all day, just sit here and watch myself grow old. Hard to sit around and do nothing so much.” Her gaze, still warm but, God, so penetrating, never wavers from my face. “You know.”

  Yes, I do know. Seven months I sat around and did nothing inside this house. Seven months of enforced solitude, pacing and staring at the walls and trying not to go insane while Parker’s baby grew big inside me. My father wouldn’t allow me out of the house until after the pregnancy was over. Said the shame was too great. Said it was the shame that made him drink and drink and drink.

  Near the end, he couldn’t even bear to look at me, stopped coming home at all most nights. That’s when I first began writing, during those endless black nights when I could hear my mother crying softly in her room, when every second was an hour, every hour a lifetime, every tick of the clock pure torture to my ears.

  I started writing to escape the terrifying feeling that I was going mad.

  I take another swallow of my soup. “How’s church?”

  My mother shrugs and looks away. Lines radiate from the corners of her eyes, are etched in deep parentheses around her mouth. Her hair is gathered in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. A few rebel strands have escaped and curl around her face, glinting silver in the afternoon light.

  “I still go. But me and God, we have our differences. I don’t talk to Him so much anymore.”

  Somewhere outside in the distance, a dog barks. It’s the loneliest sound I’ve ever heard.

  “I keep telling you we can move you, mama. There’s no reason to stay in this house. There hasn’t been in years.”

  The hopeless shrug appears again. “And go where? And do what? Eh, I can’t start over, mija.”

  There’s a slight emphasis on “I.” It gets my hackles up. “And what would you have had me do? Stay here with you, after…”

  My mother reaches across the table and clasps my hand. “No. It was right that you left. At least one of us escaped this place.”

  We sit in silence as the dog continues to bark. Then, because she’s my mother, because she knows me so well, she knows without asking why I’ve come, and what it is I need to do.

  “She’s big. You won’t recognize her.”

  I stare at the bottom of my soup bowl, watch as it begins to slowly waver, and then blink rapidly to clear my eyes. “You still go by the school?”

  “Only on really bad days.” She pauses. “I went after I saw the picture of you and…him…in the newspaper.”

  She won’t say Parker’s name. She hasn’t since the day I read the letter he mailed me and didn’t stop screaming until the paramedics arrived and gave me a shot.

  When I glance up, there’s a new, harder edge to my mother’s mouth. A steely glint in her eyes. “So? What’s happening?”

  I don’t have to ask what she means. I sit back in my chair and push the bowl away, ready to give my report. “I’ve got him where I want him. I found his safe; I’ll get into it. Tabby’s working her angles, looking into him and his family. It won’t be long before we have something we can ruin him with.”

  With blistering vehemence, my mother says, “His father—look into that son of a whore! He’s as dirty as they come!”

  Startled, I stare at her. To the best of my knowledge, my mother’s never met Parker’s father. It was always made perfectly clear that my relationship with Parker was as much a shame to the elder Mr. Maxwell as my pregnancy was to my own father. We were the poor farmers with the wrong color skin; they were the privileged elite. My biggest crime was not knowing my place. Her reaction makes no sense to me.

  “Why do you say that? I mean, I agree with you, but…did you ever meet him?”

  A fleeting look of hatred disfigures her face. It’s gone almost as soon as it appears. She stands abruptly and goes to the sink. Over her shoulder, she says, “No. Of course not. But I hear things. The way he treats his workers, things like that. He has a reputation as a ruthless bastard.”

  She opens the cupboard, takes out a glass, fills it with water from the tap, and drinks the entire thing down without stopping for a breath.

  I watch her, noting the stiffness in her shoulders, the slight tremble in her hand.

  “Why are you so upset?”

  She turns from the sink, eyes glittering. “He’s the father of that puto bendejo who gave you a stroke, that’s why!”

  Suddenly exhausted, I blow out a hard breath. “It wasn’t a stroke, mama.”

  “Atrial fibrillation, heart disease, whatever! He’s the one who caused it! You’re healthy as a horse until he dumps you like a bad habit, and then you have to take medicine every day because your heart fell apart? It’s his fault!”

  In all likelihood, I’d had the heart condition from birth, but it went undetected. It took a “mitigating event,” as the doctor put it, to uncover the problem. But for my mother, the mitigating event was and will always be Parker Maxwell.

  Just one more mark to add to his tally of doom.

  “Either way, I’m looking into both of them. It’s only a matter of time before I dig something up.” I stand and go to her, wrapping my arms around her frail shoulders. “And then I’ll even the score. OK?”

  It takes a few long moments before the tension begins to fade from her body. Finally she sighs and pats my back. “I’m sorry, mija. I don’t mean to shout. I’m tired today.”

  “It’s OK,” I whisper, staring over her head through the window and out into the yard. “I’m tired, too.”

  She pats my back again, withdraws from my arms, goes over to the big pot on the stove and starts to ladle the rest of the soup into the freezer-safe plastic containers stacked ready on the counter. Keeping her back to me, she says, “We’ll go by the school tomorrow afternoon. Clean sheets and towels are in the hall closet. Truck’s got a full tank if you need it.”

  There’s more to be said—there’s always more—but I simply nod and push away from the counter. I wander through the living room and down the hall, pausing to look at the faded pictures of my brother and me, framed in cheap plastic frames and hung on tacks stuck through the wallpaper. In pictures, the progression of his disease is painfully clear: crutches, wheelchair, hospital bed with metal rails. I’d almost forgotten how angelic his smile was.

  So many old ghosts. I wonder if they’ll ever let me go.

  With a painful flutter in my chest, I turn away from the pictures. I take my duffel bag into the room I used to call my own, change into jeans and a T-shirt, shrug on a jacket, wind a scarf around my hair and don my big black sunglasses, and grab the keys to my mother’s truck.

  Then I go for a drive in the chilly Texas afternoon to revisit all the p
laces that still haunt me.

  * * *

  The next day at ten after three, my mother and I sit in a parking lot, watching the outpouring of students that bursts from the school doors after the end-of-day bell.

  The school is a good one—a private one—a sprawl of red brick and majestic white columns set on a lush, landscaped green hill on the good side of town. It looks like something out of a movie set. Like a spy, I’m peering at it through a pair of binoculars.

  “We’re too late! We missed her!”

  In the passenger seat, my mother squints into the bright afternoon sun. “No, she hasn’t come out—” Suddenly she clutches my arm and points. “There!”

  I follow the direction she’s pointing, and my heart stops dead in my chest.

  Emerging from the shadows of the building into the warm afternoon sunlight is a girl. She’s tall, honey-blonde, leggy, dressed in the school uniform of white shirt and navy plaid skirt, carrying a stack of books in one arm.

  My daughter—my beautiful daughter, the beautiful stranger—lifts her hand to shade her eyes from the sun.

  My voice choked, I say, “She’s so tall. When did she get so tall?”

  “Children grow like weeds. The last time you saw her she was, what? Ten? Now she’s fifteen. A young woman.”

  Fifteen. The age I was when I met Parker.

  Two years before my life imploded.

  I lift the binoculars and stare through them again. Viewed closer, Eva is even prettier. She has her father’s dimples, his easy, long-limbed grace. I watch breathlessly as she waves to a few friends, then skips down the steps, turns a corner, and disappears.

  It’s not until I take the binoculars from my eyes that I notice the wetness on my cheeks.

  My mother and I sit in stifling silence until I can compose myself. She politely keeps her gaze turned away. After most of the cars have left the parking lot and the doors to the school have been shut, she says quietly, “Robert died.”