Pretty Is (19 page)

After a minute he peeled himself neatly off the ground and went inside without saying a word, without brushing the sticky wet pine needles from his back.

“What did you do that for?” Hannah asked Callie, already missing the moment they had lost.

Callie tossed a fistful of pine needles in the air, let them fall back on both her and Hannah. She missed him already. “I just wanted to know.” They stayed on the ground, hoping to wait out his mood. “Don’t you get sick of not knowing anything?”

“Well, you’re not going to find out anything important just by
asking
.” Hannah was annoyed that Callie could think even for a minute that it could be so simple, that the truth would yield so easily.

Callie didn’t think it was simple; she believed certain risks were worth taking. “Why the hell not?” she said. “You want everything to be so
complicated.
”

This was true, Hannah supposed. Then again, everything
was
complicated. Even Callie would have had to admit that.

*   *   *

Once they heard a dog bark. They were at the kitchen table eating Cheerios when they all heard it. They were accustomed to coyotes, owls, bats, loons, other animals the girls couldn’t even identify by their calls. Not dogs. It took them a minute to realize why this was significant, why Zed’s coffee sloshed over the rim of his mug as he shoved his chair back from the table.

Then they got it. Dogs mean people.

Zed was on his feet in no time, pulling the blinds aside to check out the invasion. Callie and Hannah sat frozen, spoons halfway to their mouths. The dog sounded happy, Hannah thought. Playful. Not lost, not angry, not afraid, but as if it were having a good time. Hikers? Picnickers?
Search dogs
?

Zed turned away from the window. Somehow his rifle was now in his hands, knuckles sharp and bloodless. “Upstairs,” he said. “In your room. Don’t make a sound. Don’t go near the window.”

They left their cereal bowls on the table and raced upstairs.

Hannah and Callie lay corpse-still on their beds for perhaps an hour, only daring to whisper, long after they had stopped being able to hear the dog. They were half-afraid, half-excited, though they could hardly have explained why.

But they never heard the dog again—that one or any other. Mystery unsolved. There’s really no such thing as the middle of nowhere, they were reminded. They were still in the world. A dog could wander onto their front porch and change everything. The world was looking for them. It had to be.

*   *   *

For the first couple of weeks or so Zed was always clean-shaven, and then gradually, as weeks stretched into a month, a dark shadow began to assume the definite contours of a full-fledged beard.

“Why are you growing a beard all of a sudden?” Callie asked (though she liked it), and he stroked it curiously with his fine, bony hands, as if half surprised to find it there.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Does there have to be a reason for everything?” His first words offered a nonanswer to Callie’s question, but when he posed his own question he turned to look at Hannah as if responding to some challenge she had not even dared to voice.

Yes,
she thought.
There does.

They noticed other changes, too, as the summer wore on. He left the house less often. He spent more time sitting on the porch with his gun. He asked fewer questions. Every now and then, when one of the girls appeared unexpectedly, he’d look at her blankly, as if just for one unbearable instant he no longer recognized her.

The change was gradual, though; gradual enough so that they didn’t think about it much. Besides, there was always the chance that
this
was normal, and the early weeks had been an aberration. How could they know?

*   *   *

They had been working their way through the detective novels from the storage room for weeks when he tossed a book at them one day, one of the old, serious-looking, plainly bound hardcovers from the shelves in the main room. He’d been reading it himself for a day or two, but he was clearly not the first to crack its spine; it was a much-read volume, worn and dog-eared. “You read too many novels,” he said, as the book landed on the couch between them. “It’s lazy. You should mix in some poetry. This might appeal to your ghoulish tastes.”

It was a volume of Robert Browning’s poems, and for the most part he was wrong: they were not ready for Browning’s dark, driven dramatic monologues, the voices of renaissance dukes and painters and dissolute priests. They struggled through a few of them because they didn’t want to let him down. But they were bored, and a little confused, and resentful. They missed their gloomy country houses, genteel suspects, politely but relentlessly mounting body counts.

But one poem did please them; one poem was short and straightforward enough to capture their imaginations: “Porphyria’s Lover,” in which the speaker’s beloved ventures through rain and wind to pay an illicit nighttime visit to his cottage; puzzled as to how he might keep her, preserve her, possess her most perfectly, he settles upon the only action possible. While she rests her pretty head against his shoulder, he takes her yellow hair and wraps it around her pretty neck—and yes, strangles her, and there they sit, in perfect companionship, as the night wears on.

“Oh my God,” said Callie. She was truly shocked, for once—Callie, who prided herself on keeping her cool, her languid aura of boredom. The last line, which she had just read aloud, still hung in the air, the one about how God had not said a word—not as the murderer sat with the dead woman all through the night. “That’s seriously messed up.”

“He’s a madman,” Hannah remarked uneasily. She felt a need to counter the narrator’s strange confidence in his own logic—not just in her own mind but aloud, on the record in some way.

“Crazy. Obviously,” Callie agreed.

Only then did they see Zed in the doorway. Leaning against the door frame, arms crossed in front of his chest. “Don’t stop on my account,” he said when he realized that they had turned their attention to him. And then retreated, began tidying the immaculate kitchen.

*   *   *

That was the night he touched Callie’s hair.

Her yellow hair. Like Porphyria’s.

Always Callie. Hannah suffered. Full of nameless sorrow, she thought she might die of longing that night—of the candlelight, soft and beautiful and full of all the things she could not have or be. Or of something darker, something she didn’t understand.

Callie’s fault. Callie wanted to dress up; she was obsessed with the femmes fatales in the detective novels and wanted to try the role for herself. She wrapped her top sheet strategically around herself like a kind of demented Grecian evening gown, and she constructed an elaborate updo out of her golden curls with an old rubber band, a safety pin, a scrap of ribbon, and a couple of sticks. She stuck some daisies in it to complete the effect. (He brought little bouquets of wildflowers in sometimes, to make up for their not being able to go outside. He put them in drinking glasses on the kitchen table. It was sweet, they thought.) She rigged up some jewelry out of the shiniest objects she could find in the storage room. Inclined to be critical, Hannah forced herself to be fair: Callie was just playing, really. Dressing up was her favorite form of play; she loved to decorate herself. She was a tremendous narcissist, even for a twelve-year-old. But she was also a born actress. She required costume changes.

Although Callie should have looked completely ridiculous, Hannah had to concede that somehow she made the makeshift ensemble work. She adopted a sultry accent and a languid way of moving, and it was as if she had cast a spell on herself, Cinderella-like, transforming rags to finery. Maybe it was the candlelight. To Hannah it seemed like magic, and not white magic, either. She was dizzy with jealousy.

And Zed was furious. All the vague humor and improbable kindness drained from his after-dinner face as Callie descended the stairs, staging a grand entrance. Hannah put down the dish towel and moved away from him instinctively, away from the charged field that suddenly rearranged the air around him. As Callie swayed past him, batting her eyelashes, his arm shot out as if it had a life of its own. He grasped the twisted nest of curls that was falling from the top of her head where she had tried to pin it. He pulled it all down, and not gently. The pins and sticks and daisies fell to the floor. He twisted the long coil of Callie’s beautiful hair around his hand and wrist, almost absently. His eyes were dark and strange, and Hannah couldn’t really look at them; she hardly even breathed. Callie raised her eyes to his, and some current seemed to dart between them. He pulled her hair. Just a little, then a little more.

“Stop it!”
Hannah was half-dismayed to hear her own voice; she had hardly known that she was going to speak, hadn’t realized she was crying. Zed dropped Callie’s hair as if it were on fire, and Hannah turned and ran, wrenching the door open and fleeing into the cool dark night, knowing he would follow, knowing it was up to her to break the spell.

That was near the end.

*   *   *

“I imagine you girls would like to go swimming,” he said after dinner one night, entirely out of the blue. It was a particularly warm, muggy night and very still. Moths flung themselves at the lantern that hissed on the table.

It was true: swimming had always been a part of summer, for both of them, and they had missed it, all those hot days at the lodge. But by way of idle conversation the remark seemed uncharacteristically pointless, even a little mean. It wasn’t as if he could conjure a lake or a pool in the backyard. They said nothing, waiting to see where he was going with this. They were wary; they were on their guard by then.

But he was serious. He looked from one of them to the other, blue eyes frowning. “I’m not wrong, am I? I warn you, I will think you are very strange children if you don’t want to go swimming. Hurry up and get your things if you want to go. It’s a perfect night for it.”

“Things?” Callie said suspiciously. “What things? It’s not like we have bathing suits.”

“You’ll think of something,” he said, unperturbed. “It’ll be dark, after all. Just grab towels, then.”

Still baffled, they did as he said, and stood waiting. Wordlessly he led them out the door, into the night—straight to the car. They hadn’t been in it since their arrival. It was saturated with the memory of the road trip. Their abduction.

“Get in the back,” he said. “And lie down until I tell you otherwise.”

After ten minutes or so the car turned off the comparatively smooth road they’d been winding along and headed sharply downhill on a pitted dirt surface. Losing her balance, Hannah tumbled from the seat to the floor of the car, and Callie barely avoided following her. Hannah crouched where she was, rather than attempting to scramble back up, clenching her teeth to make sure she wouldn’t bite her tongue when they hit the potholes.

Then, quite suddenly, they stopped.

“Follow me,” he said. “Watch your step.”

They followed the bobbing white circle his flashlight threw across the rough ground, everything else black. At first they could only smell the water and hear its gentle lapping, and then the light splashed across it.

“Here,” he said magnanimously, as if he’d created this body of water just for them. “This is a good place to swim.”

They kicked off their sneakers, and he averted his eyes as they turned their backs on him in the dark and pulled their dresses over their heads. Along with towels they had also each brought an extra pair of panties. This was Callie’s idea. They used them to improvise bikini tops, thrusting their arms and shoulders through the leg holes, smoothing the seats across their chests—Hannah’s entirely, boyishly flat, Callie’s boasting two tiny swollen buds—and attempting to hook the hips over their bony shoulders enough to anchor them a little. It wasn’t especially successful, but it served its purpose, more or less. Meanwhile Zed shone the flashlight away from them, across the water, elaborately respecting their modesty. When the girls were ready, he aimed the light at the water near their feet to guide them in.

The air was chilly, and they shivered a little in their underwear. When they ventured to dip toes in the water, though, they found it surprisingly warm. Even then they edged forward cautiously, their feet settling into the silty lakeshore bottom with each step. Hannah pictured dozens of tiny fish swarming around their unexpected ankles and was glad she could not see them. All they could see was the small disk of light that lay before them—nothing else, not each other, not their own outstretched arms, not the shore, not the dimensions of the lake or the woods that must have surrounded it, not the mountains that surely rose in the distance. Not the man himself, who directed the light and controlled what they saw, who could never have been far away. Nothing but the pale circle of light that beckoned them deeper into the lake, and in it, the faint waves they made themselves. That must have been what he meant when he said it was a perfect night: there was no moon, no stars. The sky was blank.

Callie was the first to plunge, naturally, when the water had reached their waists, and after that Hannah had no choice but to throw herself forward. They splashed into deeper water, flipped on their backs, and floated, eyes unfocused. They flung water toward each other and attempted blind, dizzying somersaults. They looked in his direction, sometimes, wondering if he could see them, if he was watching, but they saw nothing outside the halo of the flashlight. The water was soft and warm and seemed to hold them gently. They could hear fish jumping not far away and no longer minded; they were fish, too. They flickered through the water like mermaids, inventing strokes they’d never learned in swimming lessons. Sometimes they brushed against each other, inadvertently—their bare arms and legs soft and similar. Their unruly imaginations tried to conjure up a sense of what the man’s limbs would feel like in the water, hard and male and unclothed. They felt embarrassed, as if their thoughts could travel through the air, as if he could intercept them.