Pretty Is (14 page)

“I know,” said my mother, and she, too, turned her greenish-gray eyes, sparkling with reflected electric lights, toward the tree. Her hand moved gently on my head. “You’re like me. We’re loners, you and I.”

The familiar furnishings retreated into the shadows: curving antique sofas, spindly-legged end tables, plush footstools. A gilt-framed mirror at the far end of the room caught the light of thousands of tiny bulbs, flung it back, made everything strange, disorienting. I tried to absorb my mother’s statement, to test it for the feel of truth.

“It doesn’t have to be sad, though.” She leaned forward to drop a light kiss on the top of my head and, rising to her feet, said, “I don’t think you have to worry.” With that she moved away as noiselessly as she had come, leaving behind her a trail of alcohol scent and a strange chill.

We’re loners, you and I.
Was this true? Pronouncements like that have considerable power. It was as if my mother had opened the door to a clean, orderly, pleasing room—sunlight streaming through pretty curtains, shelves well stocked with books. Small and plain, but comfortable. She had offered me an alluring idea to inhabit, an idea with a specific shape and precise dimensions. A definition.

The tree, with its mercilessly beautiful twinkling lights, offered no answers.

If I am a loner now, perhaps it’s my mother’s doing. Her magic: she gave me the word, and it became true.

Chloe

From
Deep in the Woods
, the screenplay:

INT.

A car, parked. It’s very clean and impersonal, with dark seats, fogged-up windows. A cup of coffee sits in the cup holder. The driver is wearing light-khaki pants, a white shirt, sensible shoes. A pair of binoculars is slung around her neck. She is not glamorous, though she looks pleasant enough, and as though she might—in other circumstances—be attractive.

This part intrigues me. I have never played dowdy before—or if not quite dowdy, then uptight lady-cop with potential to be sexy, sort of the modern version of the secretly sexy librarian. Later in the movie I’ll be softly pretty, sexy enough to win the heart of a nosy, hostile-at-first newspaper reporter. According to the script, he will win me over—save me from my unhealthy attraction to the kidnapper—and I will allow him to kiss me at the end of the film. Just one kiss, but the kind that implies a whole future, the kind that, as far as I know, doesn’t actually exist in real life. Anyway, my looks will never be the point.

For me, the key to understanding my character is that she’s obsessed with the kidnapper. She sees him once before she knows who he is. He’s shopping in a nearby town, and she is struck by him: his good looks, his seriousness, the intelligence in his eyes, an odd sense that he is different, set apart. There but not there. Only later does she realize who he was, how close she’d been. She keeps it to herself—it wouldn’t help the investigation, she tells herself. What’s more interesting, though, is that she feels that sharing this detail would be a kind of betrayal. She had smiled at him that day, tried to catch his eye. Now she carries old pictures of him around with her (in the movie, they figure out who the kidnapper is before they actually track him down), studies the photographs, tries to imagine her way into his head. She’s grateful when the newspaper reporter digs up some information about his childhood—casual neglect, a tragic runaway sister—humanizing him just enough that we feel a little sad when he dies. But I think what she feels is darker and more powerful than sympathy.

EXT.

A wooded road, with jagged mountains rising up on one side, a deep chasm opening up on the other. No houses are visible; no cars pass. The woods are dense; the road is shaded. The sun is shining. It’s very quiet. The car is parked in a little pull-off area, as if for a trailhead, although there is no trail marker.

I can see it so clearly! I keep reminding myself that we’ll be shooting in Canada, that it’ll be similar but definitely not the same. I can face the idea of reenacting this plot. I even get a kind of kick out of it, for some reason—like an inside joke, though it isn’t exactly funny. But the idea of being back in that place, smelling the mountain air, hearing the birds, always the distant growl of thunder—that terrifies me. I don’t want my memory jarred
too
violently, thank you very much. Objects may have shifted during flight? Exactly.

*   *   *

I’ve been reading the screenplay over and over. This is what I would normally do, up to a point, with a new project. But this time there’s something compulsive about it. Something that raises the red flag for
crazy.
I feel like I’m trying to find something I’ve lost—something that has to be there but so far seems to be pretty well hidden.

I haven’t tried to contact Lois. I don’t feel ready—I don’t know what I want to say. I honestly can’t tell whether I’m thrilled by all of this or outrageously pissed off. Maybe a little of both? I’m pretty sure I need to figure this out before I confront her. Otherwise she’ll be in total control of the situation. Lois likes to be in control.

Liked.

In fact, maybe that’s what writing the damned book was about: control. A way for her to decide who we were, what the whole thing meant. It makes a lot of sense that this would appeal to her.

She’s a college English professor in New York State; it was easy to learn that much from the Internet. The photo on the department Web site doesn’t give much away; she looks severe and unsmiling, very scholarly, not necessarily someone you would want to have a drink with. But I think she’s striking, with her sharply angled dark hair and her huge green eyes. Unlike me, she kept her old name. Lucy Ledger doesn’t appear anywhere in Dr. Lois Lonsdale’s online materials—no line in her curriculum vitae, no author page, no reviews, no nothing.

So she keeps her novel-writing career a secret. She has a double life. Why?

I have way too much time, these days, to wonder about things.

During this drifting period I get a phone call from an old friend of mine from my modeling days. Erica was once one of the most sought-after black models in the business. I was just a clothes hanger, as they say, but she had real style. She wore clothes like she was driving a really fast car; there was something reckless and maybe even violent about it. It’s hard to explain, but it worked. Erica still models, though less than she used to—she must be at least thirty, I calculate. She’s in town briefly and suggests going out—“out” like old times. I agree, though I have my doubts: “out” isn’t exactly my scene these days. But I’m starting to feel isolated—dangerously isolated, even. I’ve noticed before that if you go too long without anyone seeing you—really seeing you—it’s easy to start wondering if you’re really there. How have I gotten so disconnected from everyone?

On the other hand, going to clubs is maybe not the best possible way to confirm your existence if you have doubts. The morning after “going out,” I wake up draped across my bed, still wearing my dress and knee-high boots from the night before, hair tangled, sheets smeared with makeup, head too painful to move. For a few seconds I don’t remember a damn thing—and then my luck runs out, and my memory starts presenting me with little tidbits of the evening: depressing little short films, basically, with serious chronological gaps. In one I’m doing shots in a crowded bar with Erica and her friends. In the rest I’m very drunk. I dance, I stumble, I generally make an ass of myself. I run into Stephen the bastard writer, of all people, and spew insults at him. The girl in this short film obviously thinks she is very witty, but it’s clear to the audience that she makes no sense at all. Her friends, if that’s what they are, steer her away. She staggers, falls. Later she’s back on the dance floor, dancing like she thinks she is beautiful, when the sad truth is that she looks like hell. Someone drags her to the bathroom. One of the most depressing little vignettes takes place in a toilet stall, where she is indulging in a temper tantrum and trying, pathetically, to reapply her lipstick. This goes badly. Much later someone is putting her in a cab—a very blurry friend or maybe a stranger, it’s hard to tell—and the cab takes her home, where she sits for a while outside her door before she finds the strength to locate her key and turn it in the lock and haul her sorry, ugly ass to bed.

The phone rings a few times. I don’t answer it. I think I’ve come up with a plan, a plan that might save me, though my head still hurts too much to be sure. It involves getting the hell out of here, the sooner the better.

I like to drive. Not so much in LA, where it’s hell to get anywhere, but on the open road. If the highway is empty enough, the landscape deserted enough, I can almost feel like that little girl with the ugly wig and no idea where she’s going but damned glad to be going there. This is my brilliant idea: I could drive north, instead of flying. I could take all the time I want and just drift toward Canada, staying in cheap motels, having adventures, the star of my own road-trip movie. I keep thinking there must be a good reason not to do this, but I can’t figure out what it is.

I stumble into the kitchen, make a bloody Mary—which sounds awful but might just do the trick—and collapse on my soft gray couch with an old atlas. With a shaky finger I trace a rough northward route.

Head north. Stick to the coast. Why not.

Meanwhile, I settle down with Lois’s damned book. Again. It’s not the part about the lady cop that interests me most. It’s the parts about us. When I read the chapters that focus on the kidnapped girls, not the investigation, I hear Lois’s voice. I feel like she’s here in the room with me. I read these parts over and over, like I’m looking for clues. God knows, maybe I am. And I find one or two—mostly about Lois. It seems she knows something I wish she didn’t, something involving a very broken promise. A secret I thought was mine to drown. Eventually I start scribbling a chart. I try to break the book down—the plot, the characters, everything—into three categories: true, false, and somewhere in between.

In long, crooked columns, my chart looks something like this:

It’s harder than you would think. The trickiest part is the ending. She hasn’t changed the basic facts, I’ll give her that. But it’s a long goddamned way from the whole truth and nothing but.

Part Two

FROM

DEEP IN THE WOODS

by Lucy Ledger

“Here we are.” The kidnapper spoke, his voice low and sonorous. It made the girls feel sleepy and safe. Shouldn’t have, but it did. The car had left the main road an hour or so ago. Since then they had been curving through mountains, and now, as they jounced down a long unpaved driveway, the headlights carved out of the darkness a neat log cabin. A fairy-tale cabin. Midnight on the nose, according to the dashboard: the witching hour, the pumpkin hour. He cut the engine, and all went dark—car, cabin, woods, mountains. Still they were not afraid. They slid across vinyl seats and tumbled stiff-legged from the car, shuffled across soft pine needles in the direction of the little house they could no longer see. The sky was moonless, starless. Perhaps they could have run, but they did not think of running.

The two girls, pretty as princesses—one dark and one fair—were neither deprived of food nor cast into a dungeon. The kidnapper prepared hot chocolate on the old stove while they perched on the edges of their chairs at the long wooden kitchen table, legs swinging. He served it in chipped ceramic mugs with chocolate chip cookies straight out of a box. They ate and drank ravenously. Hannah let her chin-length dark hair fall forward to prevent the others from reading her face. She had no idea what it might tell them; her emotions were obscure to her, as if they belonged to someone else. She kept her eye on Callie, who seemed to be taking everything in stride; it made sense to take her cue from the girl who had been with the man two days longer than she had and seemed none the worse for it. As soon as they had entered the slightly musty, low-ceilinged cabin, Callie had removed her stiff dark wig to reveal the most impossibly perfect blond curls Hannah had ever seen. Right away Callie had felt lighter, more free; the wig had grown heavy and itchy. She felt herself expand to fill the room. She didn’t mind that the kidnapper and the other girl, Hannah, were looking at her. Callie never minded being looked at. Hannah, wiping a cookie crumb from her lower lip, thought about this. Wondered what it meant, that she and Callie were so different. Did it mean anything at all?

The man seldom met their eyes, but Hannah felt him watching them when he didn’t think they were looking. Attempting to gauge his expression, she decided that he looked contented. Peaceful. Pleased with himself; pleased with them. She didn’t think he looked dangerous—but then, how was she to judge?

What did he want with them?

During this time the kidnapper spoke little. He paced the long main room of the cabin, adjusting the blinds, peering into the darkness, taking stock of the cupboards. When the girls finished their snack he cleared the table and led them upstairs to a little room under the eaves. There were twin beds and on each a neatly folded white nightgown. He showed them the bathroom, where matching bags of toiletries had been set out. After they got ready for bed—brushing their teeth side by side at the sink like small children, an intimacy both forced and welcome—he came in and took their old clothes away. They didn’t ask why. They had not yet begun to ask questions, though they had plenty. That was the last they saw of their shorts and T-shirts. He watched them fold down their sheets and climb into their beds and then drew the door gently shut behind him. “You can keep the light on or turn it off,” he said, in his low, pleasant voice. “It’s up to you.” Hannah would have been inclined to choose light, but Callie promptly switched off the dusty lamp on the nightstand between them, and Hannah did not object. She didn’t want Callie to think she was afraid.