The Beautiful-Ugly (The Beautiful-Ugly Trilogy)

by James Snyder

  “Melissa, what are they doing?” she asked.

  “Well, Connelly, they have to clear out the apartment so someone else can live here.”

  The three of them stood there watching.

  Eric said, “Where are they taking it?”

  Melissa looked back at him. “They’ll probably store it for a while. Then a judge will have them sell everything and pay off any bills, or expenses, or whatever. Then, if there’s anything left, they’ll put that into a trust for you and your sister, until you’re both eighteen.”

  “Everything?” Connelly asked, not wanting to believe it.

  Melissa nodded and said, “I told the supervisor we needed to get some more of your clothes. But we’ll have to use garbage bags to put them in, because they’ve already taken the suitcases. And we’ll have to hurry. There’s a painting crew arriving as soon as the movers are gone.”

  It was all very frightening and confusing to her, and it was all happening so fast. Melissa gave each of them a garbage bag from the kitchen and told them again they must hurry. When she was walking down the hallway to her bedroom, a man passed her carrying her red cow painting.

  She stopped and watched him carry it down the hall.

  “Hurry, Con!” Melissa called out to her, before taking another cell call.

  She sighed and went into her bedroom, which, she discovered, was torn apart as well. Her clothes were piled in one corner, and she saw her bed was already gone, and a man was pulling the drawers from her dresser to take it. Hurryingly, she ran over to him. In the top drawer, sitting now on the floor, she saw the gold locket and chain, with the tiny key inside that her parents told her was the key to their hearts. They had given it to her on her fifth birthday. And when she grabbed it up, the man looked at her and smiled. Then she turned away and went slowly back to the corner where her clothes were piled, and began putting what she could carry into the garbage bag.

  Afterward, she met Eric in the hallway.

  She said, “Did you get anything?”

  He held out the small gold medal, attached to the blue ribbon, he’d won at the science fair.

  “What about you?”

  She held out her hand, showing him her chain and locket, and he nodded.

  Then Melissa came and told them they had to get out now, because the painters were already there.

  Chapter 4

  Pilgrims Mercy

  Lying there day after day, seeing them come and go from her room, asking her the same questions she never would answer, she began to put together her own process of evaluation, her own cognitive behavioral therapy (as she had learned from them). Analyzing the tortuous pattern of her thoughts about who she was, or had become, and the world, or worlds, she had inhabited. Still did. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t really something she wanted to attempt. But her mind was so jangled and torn she was terrified of what would happen next, if she didn’t do something. And so it came—at first, in jarring splashes of time-dulled memory and fresh-hot, stabbing pain, all mixed together. Starting with the unconscionable fact that it had happened at all.

  Who decides that? How is anything like that decided? You have all the life in the world right there in your very hands, and the next instant it’s gone. It’s taken, or smashed, or ripped apart and thrown into that crazy-terrible wind and scattered into the nothingness of time and space, as if you never existed to begin with. That is, except for those still alive and bearing the burden of your memory. Because it wasn’t nice. Remembering who they were and what she had once but didn’t any longer wasn’t nice at all. It was the cruelest thing imaginable, asking someone to do that. Remembering. Going on with your life, and remembering, and knowing you’ll never know why. The cruelest thing.

  Then all of a sudden, when you’re still so young and barely able to peek over the kitchen counter, you’re given a blank slate. That is, concerning your own life now. So forget everything that happened before. Everything. That doesn’t matter now. Never did. So forget it. Wipe it clean from your mind like the blank slate you’re now holding and start over. Don’t worry about it. And don’t ask any questions. Just do it. You’re nothing now but a goddamned burden to everyone else, anyway, so just do it and don’t complain. Besides, you need a platform to complain—called a family—which you no longer have. Perhaps never did. So just shut the fuck up, Connelly Pierce, and go with the flow, okay? Just write down what we tell you on the slate and don’t worry about it, okay? There you are. There you go. You’re learning now. You’re doing better, aren’t you?

  So you see this is all about altering those unwanted behavior patterns you’ve developed along the way, those terrible mood swings you’re subject to. And after everything we’ve given you. Why, you should be as grateful as any starving dog given its bone, or pitiful, fur-mangled cat rescued from its tormentors. You should. Damn you, you should, as Richard would say. Instead, look what you’ve gone and done to yourself. What would your mother think? Your father? Your over-the-edge, fucked-up brother? Oh, that’s right. I forgot. Sorry. Still, you’ve made a mess of it, and you don’t have anyone to blame but yourself. And now that I think of it, maybe those behavior patterns, those mood swings, aren’t so far-fetched after all. Maybe they’re right in line with everything else scratched right there on that slate, for the whole wide world to see. To know what you’ve done. After all those lovely roads you’ve been down, all those wonderful choices you’ve made, and now this. Now this…

  That day, they drove a long way before they stopped. It was while they were driving that Melissa told them another woman had been assigned to their case. She reminded them that she was normally only an investigative caseworker; she started the ball rolling, she said, and then a conservatorship caseworker was assigned to handle them. But she told them not to worry, that whoever had them would take good care of them, and make sure everything went all right. This was just the way the system was set up.

  “And like it or not,” she said, “you’re both in the system now.”

  Connelly didn’t care. No, that wasn’t true, she thought, looking out her window, she did care. She liked Melissa a lot, and Eric liked her too. And they didn’t want to go with anyone else. They wanted her to stay with them, that’s all. They wanted things to stop changing for them, even for a moment. Everything was changing now, so fast, every day, every minute it was different, and they never knew what to expect next. Besides her mother and father being dead, that was the hardest thing. There was nothing they could depend on now, even little things, like what bed they would wake up in, or where they would brush their teeth next. It was all moving so fast, and she didn’t see why it had to be that way; but she knew it wouldn’t do any good to complain to Melissa. Eric knew that too. They just had to be quiet and do what strangers told them to do, because there was nothing else they could do. And she wanted to cry again, thinking about Melissa leaving them. But she knew if she cried every time something happened now she didn’t want to happen, she would be crying all the time. Anyway, she was becoming tired with that, like Eric said he was, just tired crying herself to sleep at night, sleeping out on the Johnsons’ dirty, smelly sofa, or listening to him crying in the dark beside her. So she sat there and stared silently out the window, watching everything pass by, and didn’t tell Melissa at all what she was really thinking: Please, please, don’t leave us again.

  They were in farm country now: flat and open. They stopped at a little restaurant beside the road and Melissa fed them lunch. Eric had a hamburger. He was beginning to eat again; at least, a little, Connelly noticed. She had half a tuna sandwich and a Coke and listened to Melissa talking with Brad on her cell. Oh, Brad! Oh—you’re just so awful, saying that! And she rolled her eyes, listening, and ate a French fry. She wondered if the food would be any better at the new place than at the Johnsons, which really had been just awful. She hoped it would.

  In the afternoon there was a little town called Rio Valero they drove through, small and dusty and hot-looking in the sun. Not far beyond th
e town, Melissa turned off the road, and they drove down a gravel road, passing under a big sign that stretched over the road, and read: Pilgrims Mercy, California State Children’s Home.

  “Well, we’re here,” Melissa said, trying to sound happy.

  There was an island of shade trees, Connelly saw in the distance, surrounded by endless fields and pastures. It was a small farm. They drove slowly up the crunching gravel driveway, past a pasture with several cows in it. One of the cows, the black and white one, raised its head and stared suspiciously at her as she went past. Next they passed a big white barn with the doors open like a big mouth, yawning. She saw two men inside, working on a tractor. The driveway made a circle before a two-story white wooden house, surrounded by white cottages. Melissa stopped the car before the house.

  A young woman in khakis and a white blouse and sandals came down the steps, holding a clipboard. She waved, smiling, and said, “Hey, you, I’ve been worried.”

  “We swung by their apartment for more clothes,” Melissa said, getting out of the car. Connelly looked back at Eric, exchanging glances, and then they got out as well. Melissa and the woman were hugging and talking, and then they both turned to them.

  “Anne Wright, this is Eric and Connelly Pierce,” Melissa said.

  “Well, hello there,” she said, shaking each of their hands. “We’re so glad you’ve come to stay with us for a while. I’m one of the residents here. That means I’m here to get you settled in, and make sure everything goes okay for you. Connelly, I’m actually your First Resident; so we’ll be seeing a lot of each other. Eric, you’ll be assigned one of the men residents—I think, Joe Hardy. He’s pretty cool. He used to work in a circus before he went back to school and finished his degree.”

  She stopped now, looking into both their eyes. Connelly was starting to get used to that. To strangers looking like that into her eyes, as if expecting something from her, which she could never understand. She stood there, waiting.

  “So,” said Ann, “are we ready to go inside?”

  The four of them carried backpacks and garbage bags up the steps into the house. They entered a large round room, with a high ceiling, and an old iron-hoop chandelier hanging down in its center. Below the fixture was a seating area—couches and stuffed chairs, facing each other around an enormous round wooden table that looked to Connelly like one of her mother’s thread spools. Along the left wall, a curving staircase ascended to the second floor, where the edges of other doorways could be seen.

  Anne said, “This is our great room where everyone sort of meets and greets, and we just hang out sometimes.”

  Connelly sat with Eric on one of the couches, while Anne and Melissa went into another room that, she saw, looked like an office, and shut the door. Occasionally, sitting there, they saw people pass by and look at them. Two residents, a man and a woman in the same khakis and white shirts Anne wore, passed by, smiling at them, and disappeared down a hallway. An older woman, plump and nervous in a white uniform and cap, came past them, smiling and saying, “Hello, children.” And they told her hello back as she went on. Then a short, squat, black man, with a towel hanging around his neck, passed by, pushing a mop bucket forward by the mop handle he was leaning on, humming a song. He had bright brown eyes that made him look ready to smile, and he stopped before them, just beyond the intimate seating area, and stared suspiciously at them. Then he chuckled and said in a low deep voice that sounded to her like her feet when she scuffed them over gravel: “Hey there, lil’ pilgrims, what you two got to say for yourselves?”

  When they both just stared at him, unsure what they did have to say, he chuckled again, shaking his head, and continued on past them out of the room.

  Finally, a girl passed them carrying a basket of folded clothes, and Connelly held her breath. The girl did not really look at them, going by—just a glance—but that was enough. In that instant Connelly saw something in her delicate, white face, her dark eyes like two pieces of round, bruised fruit, she had never seen before. She felt something inside herself, seeing her pass by, she had no idea what. But all the feelings of things good and warm and safe and familiar she had known growing up with her family seemed to disappear inside her at that moment. It was like a faint cold breeze came and pushed them away into some deeper, darker place where she could not get to them now. Could not reach them. Now she felt oddly cold and uneasy, sitting there, watching the girl go up the stairs, where she stopped near the top and looked back down at her; and they stared into each other’s eyes, before she turned away, and went on again out of sight.

  “Eric,” she whispered and stopped.

  “What?”

  The office door opened and Melissa and Anne came out.

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  Anne took both her and Eric’s pictures from the front, and then had them turn one way, and then the other. “We’ll attach these to the computer files we’ll build for you,” she explained. “Then, depending on how long you’re here, we’ll take new ones every six months or so, because you guys change so darn fast.”

  Connelly hardly heard what she said, still thinking about that girl.

  Melissa came and knelt before them. “Okay, you two, this is it for us, I’m afraid.” She stopped and wiped away a tear rolling down her face. “Here, give me a hug and I’m outta here.” They both hugged her, and she looked at them again. “You know, sometimes you meet someone special, in special circumstances, and it’s very hard. It’s harder than usual, you know.” She shook her head, then got up and went quickly across the floor and out the front door, closing it behind her, leaving them.

  “Okay then,” Connelly barely heard Anne say. “So why don’t we assign you a bed, clothes drawer, and some closet space; then I’ll help you put away your things, before the school buses get here and our afternoon onslaught begins.”

  *

  Anne told her there were eighty-six children at the home, counting her and Eric, but that number changed almost daily, depending on who came and went.

  “We’re like one enormous, unfixed family,” she said, “always changing, never the same. It’s something else you’ll have to get used to.”

  There were five boys’ cottages on one side of the main house, and five girls’ cottages on the other side. Each cottage had eight beds, and Anne assigned her to Cottage Six, Bed Eight, upon which she was sitting alone, holding Priscilla and looking around at stuffed animals atop pillows, and celebrity posters adorning walls, that first afternoon the other girls came storming through the door before her, talking and tiredly fussing, throwing down their green, Pilgrims Mercy backpacks on their beds, with one or two glaring suspiciously toward her, another glancing indifferently her direction and away, the rest seeming not to notice her at all.

  Fortunately Anne came through the door behind the girls, making them go sit on their respective beds, quieting them. As Anne introduced them, Connelly saw they were almost all older than her. Names flew in one ear and out the other, as Anne stood in the center of the room, pointing: “Kathy, Julie, Maribel, Martha, Yolanda, Camerina and Beatrice. And, everyone, this is Connelly Pierce from San Francisco. This is her first…outside home, so I want everyone to behave themselves and help her get settled in.”

  Everyone stared at her now, as if they expected something from her, or was slightly angry by her sudden presence among them.

  “All right then,” Anne said, “now let’s get settled ourselves, and get that homework done. And those of you on duty roster, make sure you’re on time, or it’s five points.”

  One of the girls groaned and fell back on the bed.

  Anne looked over at her. “Camerina, how many points do you need for a mall run?”

  “Ten,” said the girl glumly, staring at the ceiling.

  “Then I suggest you make a little better effort than you’ve been making.”

  “Yeah, Camerina,” said another girl, who Connelly saw was very fat, and had the bed next to hers.

  “Beatrice,�
� Anna said, now looking at her, “you’ve got that history makeup tomorrow, so I suggest you buckle down as well.”

  The other girls laughed.

  Now Anne came over and knelt before her. “Well, Connelly, I’m one of the early birds tomorrow, so I’m going home now.”

  Connelly looked back into her eyes. “You don’t live here?”

  “No, I live in Fresno. That’s about a half hour from here.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Now Anne squeezed her smaller hand inside her own, and suddenly Connelly recalled the moment Melissa had also squeezed her hands, telling her both her parents had been killed. Then something else flashed inside her mind, and she could see the shadowy policemen milling about Mrs. Bagleresi’s living room through the balcony door. “Tomorrow,” Anne was saying. “Tomorrow we’ll get you registered in school, okay?”

  She nodded.

  As soon as Anne was gone, some of the girls fell back on their beds, complaining about this or that; others began milling about the room. One girl ran to the bathroom, saying, “I’ve so got to pee.” Everyone was occupied and had already forgotten her.

  After a while Beatrice looked over at her from her bed. “That’s sure a pretty blouse you got on. Can I wear it sometimes?”

  Connelly saw she was much too large to fit inside her blouse, but she said, “I guess.”

  Beatrice smiled and then asked if she could hold Priscilla.

  “I don’t think so,” Connelly told her, remembering the girl that tore out Priscilla’s arm when she held her. “She doesn’t like anyone else to hold her.”

  Beatrice looked at her, still smiling. “But she’s just a fucking doll,” she said. “She doesn’t know who’s holding her.”

  Then she turned away from her, opening up her backpack and removing books. “Selfish little bitch,” Connelly heard her say.

  Another girl came and sat down beside her, hugging her. It was the black girl named Yolanda. She was also big like Beatrice, although she wasn’t fat. And she had her hair twisted into pigtails and said, “Oh, little biscuit, don’t you mind Miss Bea—she always trying to push everyone, trying to see how far she can go.”