Authors: Joshilyn Jackson

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Contemporary Women, #Mystery & Detective, #General

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (42 page)

Come after us. I wil ruin your life with this, and if it ruins mine, too, I do not care. Al I have to do is stal you less than three years, and then we win.

Do you real y want to spend the next three years of your life thinking of nothing but Liza and everything you’ve lost, every minute, every day, and hear your vilest secret business whispered through the hal s of your fine church every Sunday?”

Then I stopped talking. I was done. I spread my hands and shrugged.

Claire sank back down in her chair, looking at me like I was a stranger, someone or even something she’d never seen before. Maybe she hadn’t.

It was hard to read her, since the chemicals wiped a lot of whatever she was feeling from her face. Final y, though, I saw her throat shift, up and down, in a dry swal ow. I let loose a long, slow exhale.

The older lawyer started to speak, but Claire held up a single hand and stopped him.

“Okay, then,” I said. “You take care, now.”

I left the cup where I had set it, and I simply walked away.

I came out of that office into the warm September air. The smel of fal was rising in it, making it sweet and crisp along the edges. I breathed it in, and it was like drawing my first breath. Claire Richardson would do whatever she would do. It was out of my hands. I would take whatever came, but only when it came. If not Claire, then another kind of trouble was sure to find us, one day, always, so there was no sense cowering around and worrying. Today was a good day, and I wasn’t going to waste it.

While I was here, I might as wel stop and get myself a membership at the Pascagoula YMCA. They had an indoor pool. Then I’d go through Moss Point on my way home, and I would stop at Lawrence’s apartment. November be damned. This baby wouldn’t stop knitting itself together to appease the paperwork and make it more convenient for us. Right now, today, this baby needed at least one parent who hadn’t committed any felonies.

I would tel Lawrence to take a sick day and bring him home with me, fix him lunch in my kitchen. We could use the netbook Mosey had unearthed to research ways to rehab Liza. There would be time for al the big confessions later, when I had a ring on my finger and Lawrence couldn’t be held liable or be compel ed to testify against me. After we were married, it would be safe to hand him even my worst secrets, and I knew he would help me carry them. But today would be simpler. Today I only had to tel him I was pregnant.

He would be shocked. Scared, maybe. Probably a little disbelieving. That was okay. Men take longer to process these things. I would hold him, put his hands on me, and his shock would fade into surprise. After that, there would be joy. I would watch the joy rise in his face, and I would take him back to the people I loved best in the world, and we would al be together.

Nothing else mattered. I’d hold my family to me, al of them, as hard and as long and as close as I could. I would take today’s joy, and tomorrow’s.

I would take it with both hands, anywhere it came.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Liza

LIZA IS WEIGHTLESS in the water, but she is no longer adrift.

It is free swim at the Pascagoula YMCA, and the pool is churning with rowdy children. Liza, Big, and Mosey have a clear slice of water where they can work, though. The staff and the regulars are used to seeing them. They say, “Here’s the girls,” and “Go, Liza!” and make space for them each day. They are rooting for her.

“Let’s try some squats!” Big says. She is on Liza’s weaker side, her hand firm on the belt around her waist.

“You squat,” Liza says, bitter, and Big chuckles in her ear, delighted at how clearly the muttered words come out.

“You’re not tired!” Everything Big says when they work at the Y comes with a perky exclamation point.

Liza isn’t fooled. Underneath her lip gloss and her rah-rah cheer, Big is rock-hard and implacable. She forces ceaseless rounds in the heated pool, unending streams of picture cards, questions and answers that go on until Liza’s brain is pulsing like a tired jel yfish. Big reads therapy books and watches YouTube videos and is wil ing to try anything. She is never satisfied. There must be one more step, one more word, one more squeeze from her weak fingers. Liza wants to bite her, would bite her, except that her routine is working.

Liza squats, so tired that even her good knee is atremble. She dips down low into the water, sinking into it, and Mosey, already in a half squat, goes deeper to stay with her.

Mosey says, “That’s great! You are so great! Keep going!” She is as fraught with hope and exclamation points as Big, as wil ful as Liza, and this damn sincere on her own, because she is Mosey.

Liza, tired and grumpy as she is, leans sideways into her to catch a whiff of her orange-zest shampoo. Mosey’s tucked under Liza’s stronger arm.

She has a good four inches on Liza, so she has to bend into a slim, storky bird shape and mince along beside with her long legs folded. But she never misses an afternoon session.

“You squat,” Liza says again, exhaling it quietly, like it is a curse. Mosey’s presence makes her hold back several other suggestions for things, fouler than squatting, that Big should do.

She can practice those darker words on Big tomorrow morning, when Mosey is at school, along with regular ones like “soup” and “run” and

“grass” and “round.” The words come back slow and limping, but they come home to her al the same. Her noun-verb pairs are expanding, growing modifiers, budding into clauses.

Bogo comes…hopeful y. Liza walks…farther every day. Big demands…and needs a good, hard pinch.

In a few more months, when winter gives into spring, Lawrence wil fil their new backyard pool. They can work at home then, even longer sessions. For now they come to the Y every day, and when Big gets too unwieldy, Lawrence says he wil take her place. He wil hold Liza’s belt, and Big can cal instructions poolside, swishing her feet back and forth in the water with her rounded bel y resting on her lap.

It’s good. Al these things are good. Even so, Liza hasn’t forgotten that it wasn’t love that saved her.

Not that Liza’s putting love down. She’s grateful to it, even. Love has saved Mosey a thousand times already, and Big is using it to save her more, every day. Love is saving Big, too, though she and Lawrence are stil doing what Lawrence cal s “negotiating” and Big cal s “Jesus nagging”

about where or if or how they are going to church this boy child that Big is making.

Liza understands, but she understands it outside, looking in. Love has never been her currency, while Big and Mosey, both of them, are soaked in it. They have so much it spil s out and makes more. There is plenty for her, for Lawrence, for the little boy on the way, for Patti Duckins, who is there every other minute with Roger. Big’s teeny house is bulging with it, and Lawrence is converting the carport to more house and adding a bathroom. There is enough love even for Bogo, who takes it as his due now. Every day that passes, in that great mercy that God affords good dogs, Bogo forgets that he once had a different life.

Liza doesn’t forget. Love came for them and saved them, and they live so steeped in it that it blinds them. They don’t see the truth that Liza learned in Alabama, where Janel e stil sits in her rotting pink house, dying a little more every day, waiting for Liza to send the next photo of Mosey.

This is what Liza knows: People go under. They fal off the world, they go beneath and drown and die. Sometimes nothing saves you.

But fuck it, she’s stil here. She is a living thing, with twelve pins now pressed into the tree-house oak in the backyard and a thirteenth coming.

She wil earn more, and she wil push them into the oak for Ann, her lost child, named at last. Ann, by the quiet act of staying nameless in the world, is doing what big sisters do: She’s looking out for Mosey. Liza knows that Big hopes to someday safely claim her and give her a real funeral, but Liza remembers that first burial al too wel . Never again. Liza likes to think of Ann where she is, a tiny sentinel who keeps Mosey safe as long as her name stays secret. She is clean and cared for in a bright white place, above ground, that Liza imagines stays bathed in gold light.

Liza wil push the pins in for this foundling Moses girl, too, who is even now tucked close to her. And for Big and Lawrence and the new, smal person who is inventing himself inside of Big. But mostly she wil push the pins into the tree because she has to win. She has to rise and relearn her pleasure in the taste of apples, and swimming naked in salt water, and a man’s eyes appreciating her fine ass, and blowing farty noises into the coming baby’s round bel y, and good books, and French kissing. Liza wil reclaim the two-sided smile that Mosey remembers.

It’s coming. She can feel it coming as her face wakes up along with the rest of her, slowly, bit by bit. She wil push until she relearns it, and then she wil keep on pushing, because Liza knows how black the world is, how fast it spins, and how you have to take the taste of apples and the smel of your little girl’s orange-zest shampoo where you find them. You have to hold these things and strive, always, for one more word and one more step. You push forward and you fight, for as long as ever you can, until the black world spins and the moon pul s the tide and the water rises up and takes you.

Big says, “Super! Let’s get you out and changed. Then we can go home and do some flash cards.”

The three of them go forward, crossing the pool. The children part for them, splashing and yel ing with the joy of indoor swimming while, outside, the air is chil ed by a mild Mississippi winter. They wade out, Mosey, then Liza, then Big, in a chain. Big is on her weak side, where Big has always been, shoring her up. Mosey is tucked against her strong side, sheltered and balancing her. They come to the shal ows and mount the steps together, rising from the water. Liza steps onto the land, held between them in this moment, safe and whole.

Also by Joshilyn Jackson

gods in Alabama

Between, Georgia

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Backseat Saints

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Big

Chapter One: Mosey

Chapter Two: Big

Chapter Three: Liza

Chapter Four: Mosey

Chapter Five: Big

Chapter Six: Liza

Chapter Seven: Mosey

Chapter Eight: Big

Chapter Nine: Liza

Chapter Ten: Mosey

Chapter Eleven: Big

Chapter Twelve: Liza

Chapter Thirteen: Mosey

Chapter Fourteen: Big

Chapter Fifteen: Liza

Chapter Sixteen: Mosey

Chapter Seventeen: Big

Chapter Eighteen: Liza

Chapter Nineteen: Mosey

Chapter Twenty: Big

Chapter Twenty-One: Liza

Also by Joshilyn Jackson

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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First e-book edition: January 2012

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ISBN 978-0-446-57606-2

Table of Contents