The Beautiful-Ugly (The Beautiful-Ugly Trilogy)

by James Snyder

  Melissa knelt in front of them. “Okay, you two behave yourselves now. Like I told you, in the morning I’ll make some calls and see who has beds open. In the meantime, the Johnsons will watch you.”

  Then she hugged them both and went out the door, closing it behind her.

  Eunice sat down on the couch and spread out her dress on both sides of her. She said, “After I’ve finished my cigarette I’ll show you where you’ll sleep tonight.” She smoked it and rubbed one hand up and down her other arm as if she were petting herself. “Connelly, you’ll sleep in the girls’ room, and Eric will sleep with the boys.” She smoked again, looking over at her. “How old are you, baby?”

  “Six.”

  “What about you, Eric?”

  “Nine.”

  Connelly knew that was Eric’s voice when he didn’t want to talk.

  “You’re a little fellow,” Eunice said. “Ain’t he little, Arthur?”

  The man in the corner grunted.

  They both stood there, not knowing what to do.

  Eunice said, “You’re a real little beauty, girl. Got black hair like a horse’s tail. Ain’t she pretty, Arthur?”

  The man grunted again.

  Finally Eunice was through with her cigarette and showed them where they would sleep. She and Eric walked behind her, watching her entire body sway back and forth, moving down the hall.

  The house smelled all the same, and it was messy. Their mother would never have let them stay in such a messy, smelly house.

  After they put away their backpacks, Eric asked Eunice, “Can we go sit outside?”

  “Sure,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “Just don’t wander off somewhere.”

  The two of them went outside and sat down on the concrete step. She held Priscilla and watched the children playing loudly in the distance, while Eric stared down at the ground.

  “What’s gonna happen now, Eric?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Then how long do we have to stay here?”

  He shrugged again, saying nothing.

  “Do you think long?” she asked. “Like a whole year long?”

  “I don’t know, I told you. I don’t know anything about it. So stop asking me, okay?”

  She just sat there then, not saying a word about it.

  Finally Eric shifted beside her. “I just want to wake up, Con,” he said to her, his voice sounding different than she had ever hear it. “I just want to wake up and start everything all over again.”

  *

  There were others there. Connelly was surprised to discover that—other children, like themselves, with no place else to go. There were at least six or eight who seemed to appear out of nowhere when Eunice stood there, smoking and stirring something in a pot for dinner. And she grew dizzy with Eunice calling out their names, telling them to do this or that, and no one paying attention to her.

  “She ain’t my mama,” said one little black boy named Myron, until Eunice threatened him with nothing to eat, and he went off to do what he was told.

  Somehow Connelly found herself separated from Eric, and pulled down the hallway, and into the bedroom with some of the other girls, who questioned her. They seemed surprised that both her parents had died together. Listening to them talking, she realized most or all of them still had parents alive, but for some reason they couldn’t be with them now. These girls were different from any girls she had ever been around. The way they talked, the way they acted—she had never imagined children could be that way. And she knew her parents would never have allowed that, seeing, hearing everything happening around her all at once.

  “You had your own bedroom?” A girl named Maria seemed angry and excited at the same time. “Shit, I ain’t never had my own bedroom.”

  Another girl said, “Well, she won’t have her own bedroom anymore. We got four beds in this one, and you got to sleep with Cecelia—she a bed-wetter.”

  All the girls laughed.

  “What your daddy do?” Maria confronted her again.

  “What he did,” another girl corrected her.

  “He was a graphic artist and a painter. And my mother worked in a laboratory.”

  “A what?” someone said.

  “She a real princess, ain’t she,” said a girl who sat smoking before the window she had pried open.

  “Not any more she ain’t,” someone said.

  Two of the girls started fighting, pushing each other and saying bad words, about something she couldn’t understand. That seemed to divert everyone’s attention, for the moment, away from her. She heard Eunice screaming down the hallway for them to come eat. Another girl came into the room and asked if she could hold Priscilla. Everything seemed suddenly to be in movement around her, but none of it made any sense; everyone seemed to be going from one thing to the next without any thought or purpose. She thought of her home again (actually, she had never ever stopped thinking about it): the way the four of them were together, doing the things they did together, the things they loved.

  Everyone was rushing out of the room now, leaving her behind. She stood there, looking down at Priscilla where she had been thrown. One of her arms was torn from her and laid a little ways above her head, as if she was reaching for something she couldn’t see.

  A noise. She turned, and Eric stood in the doorway, looking at her and then her doll. He went over to the bed and picked Priscilla and her dangling arm up, guiding the arm back into the hole, before handing her back. And Connelly held her closely to her.

  *

  Later that night, after the awful din that was their supper, and the even worse din that followed until bedtime, she crept out of her bed before Cecelia could pee on her, and down the hallway to the front room. There, to her amazement, Eric was asleep on the couch, rolled up inside a blanket, and using a dirty cushion for a pillow.

  She made him move over and got inside the blanket with him, snuggling against him. She wanted to talk with him, ask him questions about what was going to happen to them now, but she didn’t. She knew he was upset, and he was probably tired from being upset, and so she lay there quietly against him, feeling him warm against her, and remembering how, evenings, the four of them sat around the table, talking and laughing, and eating their dinner. Then, while her mother did the dishes, her father held her in his lap, and helped Eric with his homework. When her mother joined them they sat there talking, or sometimes watching something on television until bedtime.

  Then she brushed her teeth and put on her pajamas and someone would read to her. When her mother read, she always read exactly what was there, saying everything exactly, not changing a word. But her father made things up, pretending to read the story, while making up a different story, sometimes funny, and sometimes scary, which she loved the most.

  Then when her mother caught him, she would said, “Darling, you’re going to give her nightmares again. Let’s just stay with the program, okay?”

  Then he would wink at her and began reading the book again, just like he was supposed to, except now with a sad face and a funny voice, talking very slowly and sadly, making her giggle still.

  Finally, alone, she would stare at her Littlest Mermaid nightlight and think about different things, until she fell asleep. She always tried to catch herself doing that—falling asleep—but she never could. She would wait and wait, hoping she could see what it was like, really like…falling asleep…

  Until suddenly it was morning again, with the gray light filtering through the dingy curtains, revealing the floating particles of air-dust. Now she lay there beside her brother, seeing the unfamiliar room, feeling everything around her unfamiliar now, and wondering all over again what had happened to them.

  Chapter 3

  Saying Good Bye

  The day they buried their parents, Melissa came early in the morning with their good clothes from the apartment. She brought Eric’s dark-blue suit, and her satin gray dress with the tiny red ribbons she wore with her mo
ther to Mass, and, once, when her father got an award for something.

  “Your parents have very nice friends,” Melissa said, driving there. “Apparently, once they found there were no close relatives, everyone got together and arranged things, the burial and things. People have even called me about taking you in, but all that has to be arranged through the courts. You’re both wards of the court now. That means the court will decide what to do with you.”

  Connelly was sitting beside Melissa, and looked over at her, and then back at Eric. He was looking out the window, and she could see the corner of his right eye where a boy had hit him, breaking his good glasses and bruising his cheek. After that happened, Eric had just looked at the boy, and then turned around and walked away. The others had teased him for being afraid. But she knew he wasn’t afraid. He just didn’t like to fight. He was quiet, like their mother, but he wasn’t afraid. In fact, she thought he was very brave sometimes.

  “I talked with the police detective,” Melissa said. “They’ve gone through your parents’ papers and talked with their attorney; it looks like they died intestate, or without a will, or any instructions for anything. Not that that matters to the courts, but it would still make things easier.” She hesitated and then said, “Anyway, there doesn’t appear to be much of an estate.”

  “What’s that?” Connelly asked her.

  Melissa smiled at her. “Your parents were very young and very much in love, but it seems they didn’t have much else. Not even life insurance. Of course, that’s pretty normal, I’m afraid. When you’re just starting out, starting a family and having a career, you don’t think about that, people don’t. They think they’ll live a long time, I guess.”

  She didn’t understand any of that. She thought: Our apartment in San Francisco is very small, and we are very happy. She had written that for Mrs. Dougherty and got an A, and they had pizza that night to celebrate.

  “Eric, wasn’t your mother twenty-nine?” Melissa asked him.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “And how old was your father?”

  Connelly saw him look quickly down at his hands, and back out the window. “Thirty.”

  She remembered her father’s birthday party, not long before. Her mother baked him a pink cake, which sagged on one side, with strawberries and blue candles on top. “Okay, kids,” she said, smiling, setting down the cake on their dinner table, “your daddy’s officially an old man now.”

  Their father winked at them and said, “That’s all right, darling. You’ll be an old woman soon. Your birthday’s right around the corner.”

  “Not me, sweetie” her mother teased him back. “I’m stopping the clock before my birthday.”

  Then they sang Happy Birthday to him, and her parents had kissed right beside her, and she thought about that now—their kiss, and how it looked with their lips together, and not wanting to separate.

  “Just remember,” Melissa interrupted her thoughts, “people might say things to you, make promises to you about taking you in, and wanting to take care of you.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to things like that. Grownups are just like kids. They say things all the time they don’t really mean.”

  *

  She didn’t cry when she entered the big church and saw her mommy and daddy there, or, rather, saw their closed coffins there, side by side. Melissa had already told them: “When the other car hit their car, there was a fire. Still, they’ll be right there with you, won’t they?” And they were. She didn’t cry when she and Eric held hands and walked down the aisle toward them. In fact, she felt almost happy, seeing them there. Oh—there you are! she wanted to tell them. You’ve been hiding from us, and now we’ve found you both! Almost happy, having them so near again.

  She stood there, holding Eric’s hand, staring at her mother’s photograph on top of the coffin, and then at her father’s. Between the coffins was another picture of them together. She knew that was their wedding picture that her mother had hanging on the wall in their bedroom. She wondered who had taken it down; then she remembered walking through their apartment, and how it felt knowing they were not there, and they would never be there again. She remembered that, and pulled her hand free from Eric’s hand, and stepped forward, slowly, carefully, and touched the hard edge of one of the coffins, and then the other. She heard the music playing somewhere. It was such strange music, oddly slow and sad; not at all like the music her parents listened to: her father’s jazz, or her mother’s classical.

  “Can’t we agree on anything?” she remembered her father teased her mother once.

  “Well, I don’t know how this whole thing happened,” her mother answered him. “This whole marriage thing. We have no points of commonality. You must have fixed my drink or something.”

  “Oh, we have points,” her father said, smiling.

  And the way he came behind her then, when he touched just the tiny point of her elbow, making her mother shiver.

  *

  She watched the other people crying and laughing. She sat there, leaning against Eric, and listened to them talking. She knew some of them—friends of their parents, people they worked with, that came to their house sometimes. Some she had never seen before: “I’ll never forget the time Michael and Emily drove up to the Valley of the Moon with us, and we stopped at that winery near Jack London’s Wolf House…”

  When everyone was through talking, Melissa drove them to the cemetery, behind the two long black cars that carried her parents. At the gravesides, while the priest talked some more and read from his Bible, Connelly thought about what the two of them would think about this. Her mother would have cried, like she always cried at the movies. Her father would have made a joke about it. Her mother was a serious Catholic, her father always said, a Catholic scientist. Her father wasn’t serious about much at all.

  “I think it’s all a setup, brat,” he said to her once, as they lay on the living room carpet, looking through magazines, and just talking about things. “I think everything they give you coming out the chute you got to give back when it’s over.”

  She still wasn’t sure what he meant by that.

  All she knew was that (like Melissa and Eric told her might happen) three different people, at three different moments, pulled them aside and whispered to them they wanted to do something for them, they were looking into that. They would soon come see them. And the way they looked at them, at her and Eric, with their smiling, sad faces.

  Then everyone got into their different cars and drove away.

  *

  A few days after the funeral, Melissa came and took them to another place. Connelly was glad to go, even though she and the girl named Maria had become sort of friends; that is, Maria, who was ten, let her hang around her sometimes, and they talked about things.

  “Little girl, you a real orphan,” Maria told her. “The rest of us here got at least one mommy or daddy, but you got both dead; so you need to watch out for your own self, you understand me?”

  Connelly nodded, trying to pat down Priscilla’s hair, which was beginning to get all tangled up in her new life. Her own hair, in fact, was getting tangled, as no one had combed it since the funeral, until Maria said, “C’mere, girl.” She took out her own comb, and sat behind her, combing it out.

  “You got you some pretty hair, girl,” Maria said, combing. “You could be in one of them hair commercials on TV—you cute as anything, and got long wavy hair like this—mmmm, mmmm.”

  “Is your mother alive?” Connelly asked her.

  “Oh—she alive all right.”

  Connelly hesitated. “Then why don’t you live with her?”

  “‘Cause she a crack-head like her no good boyfriend. And he don’t wanna do nothing but get inside my drawers.”

  She didn’t understand any of this. “What about your father?”

  “He in the same place your mommy and daddy is, ‘cept he been there a lot longer. That man was shot to death when I was two.”

  �
��Oh,” she said, unsure.

  She heard Maria sigh, as she worked on untangling a tangle. “Girl, you sure you ain’t got no aunt or uncle or no cousin even?”

  “Just my Uncle Boyd in the merchant marines. But he lives on ships.”

  “That’s a damn shame. But that’s all right, little doll face like you, some rich white folk gonna snap you up quick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Adoption, girl—don’t you know nothin’ about adoption?”

  “A little, I guess.” She was learning about that, and about something called fostering, listening to Melissa.

  “Well, that’s when some nice family come along and decide they want to take you in. And they go to the judge, and then he signs a paper, and you in a new family then.”

  “But, Maria, I want my old family back,” she said, swallowing, feeling the sudden ache rise up inside her again. “I want it like it was before.”

  “Shit,” Maria said. “Then you better start having a conversation with Jesus. He about the only one that can do something like that. You believe in Jesus, girl?”

  She told her she thought she did.

  *

  On the day Melissa came and took them away, they had visited their apartment one last time. When they arrived, Connelly was surprised to see men taking away all their things. She and Eric stood to one side and watched them carry away their sofa, and their table and chairs, and then her mother’s favorite stuffed chair she always sat in, making notes on her work papers with her blue pencil, or typing something on her laptop. She saw Melissa talking to one of the men, and then she came over by them.