Pretty Is (29 page)

I wrench my face from his too-tender grasp with none of his gentleness. “I do plan to get out of here,” I say. I can hear the chill in my voice. “As soon as I submit my grades. But I’m going alone.” Part of me wants to fly at him, pummel his stupid plaid flannel shirt, demand why he crossed the line—the friendship line, so carefully drawn and defended; why he is ruining everything. But that’s not the part of me I allow to speak. “I’m grateful for everything, I really am. But I think I need to be alone now. I don’t expect you to understand.”

He looks confused, and I realize he’s wondering whether I am simply repeating my intention of going away on my own at some point, or whether I actually mean that I need to be alone this very minute. I stand up and move toward the door so that there can be no doubt. I pull my old cardigan tightly around my chest, holding myself in.

Awkwardly, he begins to gather his papers. “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. Not your bizarre involvement with Sean, not your treatment of me. And I wish to hell I didn’t care.” His words seem far away, addressed to someone else; I don’t let them in. “I think you’re making a mistake,” he says as he leaves, his words sad and heavy with reproach. He closes my apartment door quietly behind him, but somehow I’m relieved to hear the downstairs door slam so hard the whole house shakes.

When he’s gone the air in my apartment seems to settle, and I feel as if some important balance has been restored.
Lois, you’re the moon.

I go to my computer and act on the plan I hinted at to Brad: I buy a plane ticket to Vancouver, leaving a week from today. I will arrive well before I am scheduled to meet with Chloe, before shooting on the film begins. It seems like a good idea, for reasons I can’t altogether explain. Alone, I don’t have to.

Then, with a curious kind of relief, I decide to abandon my grading and turn to Gary. He’s there waiting, but he is floundering a bit. He still can’t decide what to do with the actress. He doesn’t know how to find the writer or what he’ll do with her when he does. The actress pounds on the trunk from the inside, but no one hears her. I wonder how much air she has. I wonder how I could calculate this. I Google it, idly, and am shocked to discover that I am one of countless people who have inquired how long a person can survive in the trunk of a car. A scan of several discussion threads reveals that there are no easy answers: there are too many variables, weather chief among them. The actress is in no immediate danger, I conclude, as long as it’s not too hot and Gary is providing her with water. Of course he is, I decide. He brings her food and water and he asks her questions through a crack in the trunk, though there is nothing she can say that will make him happy. He keeps his hand on his knife in case she tries anything stupid. He prefers knives to guns—because of his father’s death, of course. He was only a child, but he’s heard stories all his life, even if they weren’t intended for his ears—and usually they were not. He’s read the newspaper reports. He wants nothing to do with guns. He’s building a small arsenal of sharp objects.

I learn, too, that cars manufactured after 2002 are equipped with an escape mechanism: an internal latch that will release the trunk. This doesn’t strike me as a problem for my plot; naturally Gary drives an old junker. (What kind, exactly? I make a note to myself: I’ll need to figure this out.) I remind myself to check my own car to see whether it has an escape lever. How would you know to look for it, if you found yourself in a trunk? Before quitting for the night I make sure the actress has a bottle of water and a snack. I wonder briefly how she can eat and drink if she’s gagged, how Gary can ensure her silence if she isn’t. But these are the kinds of problems I can solve.

I don’t think about the knife that lies at the bottom of the shallow river on the other side of town, though Gary’s newest knife is very much like it.

Chloe

At first, Arrow seems unchanged. The same businesses line Main Street, the same wide spaces separate the houses. The kids riding bikes up and down the side streets might as well be the same kids, with the same dogs at their heels.

But when I knock at the door of the farmhouse, a stranger answers. “Can I help you?” asks a middle-aged woman in an old-fashioned housedress. A dress Gail wouldn’t be caught dead in. There’s a bulldozer in the yard, some kind of construction going on in the back of the house. An addition. Bad idea.

For a very uncomfortable second I can’t think what the hell to say. Then I manage to stammer, “My father—my family—used to live here.”

“The Smiths?” the woman says, helpfully enough. She looks vaguely familiar. Very vaguely. “That was a while back. They moved into town years ago, before … you know. When they sold the farm.” Not being clear on who I am, exactly, she isn’t going to give much away.

No point in asking her questions, but I ask one anyway. “Where in town?” Daddy would never have sold the farm. I’m confused. There’s something going on here that I don’t know about. I don’t know how he died, of course. Gail’s note was skimpy on details. Had he become sick years ago?

She tells me the way to my grandmother’s house, and I get back in the car.

*   *   *

Grandma Mabel’s house has been torn down and replaced with some horrible modern thing that looks totally out of place on the street, which is lined with respectable mid-twentieth-century white houses, like in some John Mellencamp song. This one is big, square, plastered in pale pink faux adobe. Gail comes to the door in tight jeans and a low-cut, sleeveless blouse. Somehow she’s already heard that I’m here—my Prius hasn’t gone unnoticed, here in the land of big American cars. Or maybe the woman at the old farm called. Gail’s makeup looks freshly applied, in my honor. She isn’t smiling.

“You’ve had some work done,” I say, following her into the kitchen.

“You mean the house?” She looks around proudly, like a cat that just ate a goddamned German shepherd. But meaner than a cat.

“No, I mean you.” I don’t bother to keep the nastiness out of my voice. It’s already clear that there is going to be no pretending. There’s been extensive lipo, I speculate, and some work on the face and neck. Lots of work on the boob region.

“Where’s Grandma Mabel?” I ask, seeing no signs of her furniture, her taste, her presence. The pastels and gold accents look like they might be at home in a Barbie penthouse. Or Florida. This could only have happened over Grandma Mabel’s dead body. Which would make a certain amount of sense, I suppose. I brace myself for the news.

“She’s out at Ravenswood.”

That’s a nursing home twenty miles away. Could be worse. “I’ll go see her,” I say, before I remember that I should tell Gail nothing, nothing at all.

“She won’t know you,” Gail says, smiling for the first time. “Too late for that, too. I promised your father I would write, but I didn’t think you’d show up. I told him you wouldn’t,” she says with satisfaction, letting the implications of those words sink in.

“You’re a bitch, Gail. As always.” I will ask her nothing, tell her nothing, give her nothing that her meanness can feed on.

Just then a young man shuffles into the kitchen. He’s wearing boxers and a dirty T-shirt, and his gut is trying to find a way to poke out of the place where the two meet. He smells like cigarettes and dirty sleep. He pats Gail sort of half on the ass, half on the hip, and asks what’s for dinner.

She brushes his hand away. “Look who’s here,” Gail says. “It’s your long-lost sister.”

He looks up and shakes his floppy bangs out of his eyes. “Carly May?” He sounds doubtful. “Jesus.”

“Get dressed,” I say. “I’ll take you out for something to eat.”

He looks at Gail. For permission? A mama’s boy and a loser, it looks like. Way to go, Gail. “I won’t stand in your way,” she says.

His eyes slide back to me. “All right,” he agrees. “I’m down with that. Gimme five minutes.” He retreats.

“He’ll tell you anything you need to know,” says Gail, then she disappears to the back of the house, too. She sort of flounces away, like she thinks she’s making some kind of dramatic exit.

*   *   *

Eddy’s calls itself a bar and grill, but it’s not really much of either. It sells cheap beer but would probably frown upon anyone who drank more than two or three in a sitting, and practically all the food on the menu is fried. I take Jaden there because there’s nowhere else to go but the diner, and that would be less private. At Eddy’s we slide into a dark booth. I wipe a few crumbs off the table. Hardly anyone else is here. I remove my sunglasses and suddenly laugh at myself, feeling like an asshole. As if anyone would recognize me—or give a shit—after more than a decade.

“I’ve seen you in the movies,” Jaden says, surprising me. “Braden and I used to watch you all the time.”

I try to get my head around this. “You knew, then? Did Daddy know?” All these years I’ve thought I was a mystery to them. I assumed my new life as Chloe Savage was a secret, and not a very hard one to keep.

“Yeah,” says Jaden. “I guess we’ve known for a while. Not in the beginning, I mean, when you first left, and Ma wrote that book. At that point it really was like you had just totally disappeared. But then after—I don’t know, a few years—we started seeing you sometimes. We do have TV in Nebraska, you know. Movies, even.” He sounds slightly reproachful that this has not occurred to me. “Dad made Ma promise not to spill the beans to the media,” he adds. “Otherwise she would have outed you forever ago.” Had it been arrogant to assume that my planet was so far from theirs that I could remain undetected even if my face were splashed across millions of screens?
Not Carly’s face
, I defend myself.
Chloe’s. Which is different. Carly doesn’t exist.
How did I ever persuade myself to believe they wouldn’t find out? Suddenly my confidence in my anonymity seems downright delusional.

Jaden doesn’t look accusing; in fact I revise my impression of him slightly now that he is fully dressed and seems to have brushed his teeth and at least splashed water on his head. He used to be a pretty cute kid. I can see traces of that early promise in the parts of his face that aren’t puffy and sprouting tufts of half-assed facial hair. Maybe he’s not as much of a lunk as I first thought.
But
. I didn’t come here for some sentimental guilt trip.

“Tell me about Daddy,” I order.

Between bites of his hamburger, he does.

First it was just depression, he explains. Then a series of little things. Dizzy spells, memory lapses. Then they sold the farm (“Why?” I demand, and Jaden says, “Because Ma said they didn’t need it anymore”). Soon afterward he was diagnosed with Alzheimers. “Early something—”

“Onset?” I suggest.

“Yeah. Early onset.”

He also had arthritis, weird nerve issues, chronic colds—he was always a little sick, said Jaden, though not enough to be really worried about. Minor things. Without the farm he sat around and read all day, became more and more withdrawn. He would try to start little projects around the house and then abandon them. His memory got worse and worse. He was on all kinds of drugs, Jaden said, for a million different things. And that was what had happened: A million different drugs. An accidental overdose. A miscalculation on someone’s part, probably his, definitely not Gail’s.

“Could he have done it on purpose?” I ask, trying to sound completely neutral, like it makes no difference.

Jaden looks shocked. “Of course not,” he says, flushing, looking a little pissed off for the first time. “Jesus. Why would he do that?”

Because Gail took his farm away. Because he was bored to death. Because I deserted him. Because he felt like hell. Because he was lonely. Because he lived in a fucking pink house on the same plot of land where the house he grew up in used to be, after his mother was shipped off to the old folks’ home.
“Have dessert,” I tell Jaden, as if buying him a shitload of cheap, crappy food will make up for something I haven’t done. Or for the tiara incident, maybe. I watch him devour his chocolate brownie sundae, vaguely grossed out.

I learn that he graduated from high school, doesn’t have a job yet. That Braden went to Iraq and came back in one piece except for the fact that his brain was shaken loose by a roadside bomb that left him otherwise intact, apparently unharmed. “He’s totally fucked-up,” says Jaden with feeling. I can’t tell what feeling exactly. Braden lives with his equally fucked-up girlfriend in a trailer outside of town. Grandma Mabel doesn’t know her own name, much less anybody else’s. You can go see her, but she’s rude to visitors. She likes two of her nurses and no one else. She talks to people no one else can see, and doesn’t seem to like them much, either. I decide not to go see her after all. Gail is “writing” another book. He starts to tell me what it’s about, but I don’t even want to know.

Lois

I turn my head to the window and look down. Clouds bulge and billow miles below us. I open my laptop and try to write, but Gary won’t cooperate. I’m almost relieved. I have no choice but to read the novel I bought at the airport, dozing on and off. My mind is strangely quiet.

I like being nowhere. I wish I could stay longer.

In Seattle, where I have a brief layover, a text from Sean intrudes upon my unfamiliar sense of peace:
You’re getting closer, aren’t you.
I shiver, wishing I had never given him my number. Could he possibly know where I am, what I’m doing? I imagine him lurking near my house, watching me load my luggage into my trunk early this morning, drawing conclusions. But even if he saw me go, how could he know where? Closer to what? It’s a bluff, surely. I delete the message, push it from my mind.

I rent a car in Vancouver and make my way to the tiny town where I’ve decided I can hide out for a few days. Carly-Chloe and the other cast members will be staying at a lovely inn ten miles outside of town; even if it weren’t booked solid, it wouldn’t suit my purposes. In a week or so I’ll check into the charming bed-and-breakfast the movie people have secured for me, but for now I’m here and not here. I get a room in a decent-looking but decidedly unassuming motel just off the mountain highway that runs through the middle of town. At first I feel oddly conspicuous, worried that people will suspect me of some illicit purpose; I invent a plausible story about my vacation plans in case anyone is suspicious enough to ask what I am doing here. At the same time, I realize that I’m being absurd; why would anyone notice or care?
You’re not the center of the universe, Lois,
I hear someone reminding me. My mother? No. It’s
him
. Zed. But he had gone to such trouble to find me. His messages were mixed, to say the least. We
were
the center of the universe, Carly May and I. For a summer.