Pretty Is (2 page)

“She’s got her own gun,” I pointed out, keeping my voice light. “She’s no mere floozy.” I noted that she held it in her left hand. As I watched her long, narrow fingers curl around the gun—getting ready to make a run for it, it looked like—I knew I was right. I knew that hand. It was older, longer, more elegant. But I would have known it anywhere.

I had finished my PhD and landed a teaching job at a small SUNY school in upstate New York, where I was teaching British lit to young students whose brains, I was discovering, were attuned almost exclusively to electronic stimuli. They weren’t all that much younger than I was, but they seemed to be from a different century. I lived in a spacious apartment on the top floor of a turn-of-the-century Victorian with more charm than insulation. (In upstate New York,
spacious
is a rental agent’s code word for
cold
.) I spotted Carly May in the corner of my TV screen on a Thursday night in late January. Outside, it was below zero and had been for days. An English department colleague and I were huddled under afghans in front of my TV, watching a movie and eating take-out pizza. When I say
huddled
, I mean
separately
huddled. We weren’t touching. Brad Drake and I were the youngest assistant profs in the department. The next tier, the thirtysomethings, had kids, yards, lives. They had dinner parties from which all the guests departed by ten o’clock, yawning and murmuring about the babysitter. I’d been to a few, when I first arrived. Watching-bad-movies-ironically was not a pastime that amused them any longer. Perfectly good colleagues; I knew they’d never be my friends. Which was fine. I didn’t need many friends: Brad sufficed.

“Go to the credits,” I ordered Brad, who was clutching the remote as usual.

“Can’t we just wait till the end?”

“I know that girl,” I said. “I swear I do. I have to check.”

“How could you know her? You can hardly see her face. And if you
do
know her, why do you have to check? If you’re so sure, I mean. And—”

“Why do you have to argue with everything I say?” A pointless question; this was what Brad did. It was an endearing form of perversity, usually, and one of the many traits that justified, at least to me, the decidedly nonromantic basis of our relationship. I seized the remote.

I scrolled quickly past the characters with actual names, then lingered over the ones identified more cryptically: first dead girl, second dead girl, girl in diner, girl with gun. In this last group I saw a name that was not the one I was looking for, but caught my attention nevertheless: Chloe Savage. The initials were right. And something else: a ghostly echo, beyond logic; a sort of thud in the pit of my stomach. I knew, simply.

“It’s not her,” I told Brad, feigning disappointment, sinking back into the couch. Subterfuge was instinctive; I didn’t for a moment consider telling Brad the truth.

It made perfect sense that she would have changed her name.

After Brad left, dragging his sleepy self reluctantly out into the snow with a wistful look that suggested he was hoping for an invitation to sleep on the couch, I went straight to the computer. I found enough photos of Chloe Savage to confirm what I already half knew. The bios available were disappointingly sketchy, not to mention full of lies. Only one detail linked her to Carly May: competed in beauty pageants as a child. The bios didn’t say she was Miss Pre-Teen Nebraska. They said, in fact, that she was from Connecticut.
Like me
, I thought. She was borrowing that from me. In an obscure way, that, too, counted as evidence.

I printed everything I could find: bios, filmographies, photos. I placed them neatly in a folder and labeled it
Carly/Chloe
. Then, for no reason, I slid it into the bottom of a drawer, as if to conceal it from—what? Prying eyes? I could have kept top-secret government documents on my bedside table at that point, and they would have been perfectly safe.

Nevertheless, I hid the folder. It felt like the right thing to do.

Chloe

I was cute as hell. Tall for my age, willowy, with pale gold curls and sapphire-blue eyes. Like a little fairy. A sexy little fairy, I should add, once they started dolling me up. That was after Gail showed up. By the time Daddy brought her home to meet me, it was already pretty much a done deal: she had agreed to marry him. She had dyed red hair and violet contacts and long pink nails. Nature had made her a drab, mousy little person, but she had done everything in her power to color herself in. It was like Technicolor, though: unconvincing. She had a high, nasal voice. To me, at seven, she seemed like a cartoon. Why sad, quiet Daddy would want to marry a cartoon just two years after my mother’s death was something I would never understand. He must have thought I needed a replacement mother; maybe he assumed I would welcome siblings, which Gail was quick to produce, in the form of two little half brothers. Wrong on both counts, but he never bothered to ask.

“Doll” is what Gail called me the first time we met. “Oh, Carly May, you’re such a little doll!” she gushed. “Hugh, you never told me what a doll she was!” My father just kept unloading grocery bags from the trunk of the car. I noticed right away that he tended to let Gail do the talking.

After I left the second time, Gail published a book. Notice I didn’t say
wrote
a book. I swear she never wrote more than a grocery list in her life. No, it was ghostwritten by Liz Caldwell, whose name is in small print in the lower-right-hand corner, like an artist’s signature—you only see it if you’re looking. “With Liz Caldwell,” it says. I can picture what
with
meant: Gail sitting in the living room, wearing enough makeup for the frigging Oscars, with a cigarette in one hand and every ring she owned smashed onto her chubby fingers, wallowing in self-pity and a pathetic vision of her own importance. Liz Caldwell across from her, pretending to be impressed by Gail’s wisdom and strength of character, consulting her notes and offering an occasional gentle prod, tape recorder whirring away beside her. How do I know Liz was pretending? I know Gail, is all. In fact, Liz might not have had to bother hiding her contempt; Gail would’ve been too caught up in her own drama to notice. Sensitivity to other people’s emotions was never her strong point.

Even the book’s title is a lie:
Losing My Daughter Twice
. It would be nauseating even if it were true, granted. But I am not—was never, in any sense of the word—Gail’s goddamned daughter. And you can’t lose what was never yours.

I was smart, believe it or not. Am smart. People don’t expect it. My mother, who died in a car accident when I was five, was a schoolteacher. My father liked to read. He would come in from the barn and collapse into his recliner and pick up a book. Nonfiction, mostly, but novels, too. They read to me when I was little, talked to me like I was an intelligent life-form. I got good grades in school, if I bothered, though under the Gail regime there didn’t seem much point in trying.

She must have researched the pageants on her own. This was pre-Internet, so it would have been harder then than it is now. She would have had to send away for information. Anyway, when she brought home the brochures that started everything, it was the first we’d heard of it; I mean, Daddy and I. “I didn’t know they had these things for such young girls,” Daddy said, flipping through glossy pamphlets with his big rough farmer’s hands like he was holding something he’d rather not touch—a dead animal, maybe. “I guess I would’ve thought they’d be older.”

“Look at those girls,” Gail said, tracing their round, smiling faces with the hot-pink talon of her index finger. “You have to tell me Carly May is cuter than every one of them. No question she could win these things without hardly even trying.”

“Now why would she want to do that?” said Daddy, handing the brochures back to her and tugging one of my pigtails. “Carly May has a good head on her shoulders.” I was in second grade. “These girls look like a bunch of airheads. Just pretty faces, that’s all.”

“There’s worse things to have,” said Gail.

“Pretty is as pretty does,” Daddy said.

I stared at the glittery, ruffled dresses the little girls were wearing—maybe airheads, maybe not; how could you tell?—and thought about what Gail had said. God, how do kids know the things they know? I remember very clearly understanding two things: one, that Gail was right when she said I was prettier than the other girls. I was only eight, but I knew this like I knew that hens laid eggs. And I sure as hell knew that, since I gathered them from the coop. I’m tempted to say no one told me, but the world must have told me, somehow.

I also knew that Gail—much as I hated her, even then—was probably right when she said how much it mattered. Being pretty, I mean. And I knew that there was something I wanted, something big, something I couldn’t name. Something outside my present world. So I let her find me later, flipping through the brochures on my own at the kitchen table. Daddy was out.

That was all she needed to start planning.

Lois

I don’t hide my past, exactly. My story did not follow me from high school to college, and I chose not to revive it. I wanted to try being a different Lois, at least publicly. Even when I wrote my dissertation on the trope of abduction in the British novel, no one but my parents and my dissertation director made the obvious connection. I have grown up, it seems, to be respectably anonymous: Lois Lonsdale, assistant professor of English, specialist in very long novels in which, according to my students, nothing happens. Stickler for the proper deployment of semicolons. Until recently, no one remembered the abduction, much less the names of the miraculously rescued girls. There have been too many girls in the news, most not so lucky; as spectators, we allow our imaginations to skitter from one tragedy to the next. Carly May and I essentially ceased to exist once our pictures disappeared from the papers; the reporters abandoned my doorstep long ago.

Now, though, I have a new secret: I am Lucy Ledger, author of the modestly selling thriller
Deep in the Woods
, which is, however improbably, soon to be made into a major motion picture. The novel is loosely based on the abduction. My life has become complicated again.

I have always liked secrets.

I’ve been teaching Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela
in my class on the British novel. My plan is to get it out of the way early in the semester and then move on to the fun stuff. More fun, I mean; I admit that it’s relative. I am trying to persuade my skeptical students that
Pamela
is, in fact, fun. It’s an epistolary novel, of course, a novel in letters, though in a rather perverse way, as most letters in the novel never get to their intended recipients. But you could argue that it’s also a kind of horror novel, spun as a marriage plot. When Mr. B’s none-too-subtle efforts to seduce (or ravish) his young (very young!) servant fail, he abducts her, ships her off to another of his houses, and places her in the custody of his ally and conspirator, the sadistic Mrs. Jewkes. The fact that Pamela gets to marry her “master” in the end does little to mitigate the fact that she spends half of the novel imprisoned, warding off his attempts to rape her, and frequently unconscious from fear.

But then, it’s a love story, too.

My students tend not to buy the love story part.

So when Sean McDougal darkens my office door one early February afternoon, I assume he is one of the disgruntled, and steel myself to deliver my speech about the importance of
Pamela
to this looming, cigarette-scented specter.

But he surprises me. “I Googled you.” Sean is tall, pale, thin but also somehow soft around the edges. Sparse, wispy facial hair contributes to the effect: he is blurry. Would he be handsome if he were more kempt, less skulking? I think he might be. It’s hard to say. I have a vague sense that he reminds me of someone, though I search my memory and can’t find the source of the echo.

He’s sitting altogether too comfortably on the other side of my desk, snow from his heavy coat melting onto my floor, a faintly malicious gleam in his pale, no-color eyes. He looks pleased with himself.

Damn.

Originally, I had thought adopting a pseudonym would magically secure me a double life; I had thought I could establish and defend a sharp border between Lois Lonsdale and Lucy Ledger, and shuffle between them as I pleased. My editor, Amelia Winter, swiftly disabused me of this fantasy. The first time she asked me about the backstory of my novel, I told her confidently that there was none. It’s pure invention, I said. She extended a sinewy arm, selected one of the dozens of brand-new books stacked high on her desk, and flipped through it. Glittering skyscrapers crowded the twenty-fifth-story window behind her; I still couldn’t believe my luck. My manuscript was taking on a life of its own. “The thing is,” Amelia said, scanning the pages, “it’s important for us to know. Because if there is anything—
anything
—it’ll come out. The Internet makes sure of that. If we know ahead of publication, we can make it work to our advantage. Otherwise, if you’ve been less than forthcoming with us, it’ll be hard for us to control the damage.” She snapped the book shut, as if she had found whatever she was looking for. “Something to think about,” she said.

I didn’t want to think about it, but I did it anyway.

Sean sniffles loudly, and I thrust my box of Kleenex in his direction. He ignores it. Beneath the desk I uncross my legs, bracing each flat-soled suede boot firmly against the floor. It’s my defensive stance, undetectable from the waist up. “Oh really?” Needlessly, I straighten a stack of papers on my desk. “The wonders of modern technology, yes? If only Pamela could have Googled Mr. B, that whole scandal with his pregnant mistress would have come to light much sooner, and Pamela might not have been so sympathetic.” I say this lightly, since I don’t really consider it an acceptable way of talking about the novel. I am breaking one of my own rules: there are no what-ifs in fiction, no alternate universes in which the characters might have done something other than what is on the page, where everything would have turned out differently, had they only been half as wise as we. It makes no sense, for instance, to insist that Pamela shouldn’t have agreed to marry Mr. B; Pamela matters only because that is precisely what she always does, has always done, must always do. There would be no novel, otherwise. No Pamela.