Pretty Is (34 page)

“Screw that,” says Justine.

“You guys want to come back to my cottage for a bit? You can talk shit about everybody, if you want. I don’t care.”

“Sure,” they say, carefully nonchalant.

“Juice?” says Liam hopefully.

“Juice,” I agree, hoping there’s some in the minibar. Diet Coke for the girls. Sauvignon Blanc for me. We’ll sit on the porch and watch for lightning bugs. I’ve been told it’s rare to see them out here, but we can hope.

*   *   *

Later, after Fiona has fetched the kids (with a
very
unconvincing show of gratitude, I might add), my phone rings. Not my iPhone, which wouldn’t be all that surprising, but the landline in my room. Billy, calling to apologize for his wife? But he has my cell number. Lucy Ledger’s agent, confirming our meeting? Not likely; everything’s arranged. The front desk? I pick it up out of pure curiosity and am unsurprised when there’s nobody there at first. “Hello,” I say. “Hello, hello! Who is it?” I hear breathing. Someone
is
there. “Hey, asshole,” I say, pretty cheerfully; it’s the wine, I guess. “You’re boring me,” I say. “I’m going to hang up now.” And I’m about to when the breather finally says something. It’s hard to understand because he’s obviously trying to make his voice sound weird.

“I know who you are,” the voice croaks.

“Well, congratulations! I guess you’ve got the right number then.”

“No, I mean I know who you
really
are,” says the fake voice. “I know everything.”

He sounds youngish. He must want something. What could it possibly be? For a few seconds I have no idea what to say to him. I run through various possibilities. Jaden sold me out? Could it be someone from back home? Some enterprising tabloid reporter? Surely not. Who else knows?

Lois? Someone Lois knows? But who would she tell, and why, Lois who loved secrets more than life?

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I drawl pleasantly while my mind continues to race.

“I can tell everyone,” he says, the hoarseness wavering. “Everyone will know. There’s only one way to stop me.”

“Oh, spare me,” I say, with an indifference I don’t feel. “I’m sure it’ll be great publicity for the film. It’s a wonder I didn’t think of it myself.” And I hang up. I look blankly out the back window into the black woods. Strange. Very strange.

But honestly: who cares? It’s an interesting question, I decide, upending the last of the bottle into my almost-empty glass.

I care.
I’ve built up my world too carefully, for whatever it’s worth. My fake history is well established; no one has ever questioned it—my Connecticut upbringing and all the rest. I can’t stand the thought that it could all come crashing down.

And how on earth could he have gotten my room number, whoever he is? I check the door to my cottage, reassuring myself that it’s locked. I find myself staring out the back window. Instead of the dark woods, I see my own face looking back at me. Some trick of the light makes me look old and anxious.
Fuck it,
I say to myself, and toss back the rest of my wine. A pathetic show of bravado, I have to admit.

Lois

At the diner I learn that the actress tends to arrive around ten, on the days she comes at all. The employees now know who she is, but their interest in her is mild and polite. I decide to stake out the diner. The first day she doesn’t show, and I worry; there’s only one more day before we are actually scheduled to meet. I want to catch her off guard. I want the upper hand, at least to begin with. I fear her professional artifice; I want to startle her into being real, if she is not in the habit of it. Which I don’t know, of course; I have constructed an imaginary Chloe in my mind, draped a rather terrifying personality around the long delicate bones of her half-famous physical self.

But when I see her on the second day, framed in the doorway of the diner, dark glasses concealing half of her face as she scopes the place out, fear is not what I feel. I feel—what? Lost, helpless, lonely, worried. Safe, strong, loved. I feel twelve. I smell warm pine, pipe smoke. I feel jagged mountains all around us.

She is walking in my direction, as if she has a regular table and is making her way directly to it. She passes me, in jeans and ballet flats and a silky, floating white blouse, wavy blond hair loosely pulled back. She slides into the booth directly behind me, her back facing mine. I can sense the practiced gesture with which she removes her sunglasses. I imagine her glancing at the menu—but not needing to study it, knowing already what she wants, because she orders the same thing every time, as I do. It is one of the things I know about her. One of the things that cannot have changed.

“Carly,” I say quietly, not turning my head, not knowing that I am going to say it until I hear myself, hear the quiet word jolt heavily against the bright, unsuspecting air of the diner.

Behind me all is still. The booth does not so much as tremble. I know that the slightest of movements, even vibrations, would be communicated to me through the taut vinyl. But there is nothing: suspension, the refusal of somethingness, the eye of some storm.

“Lois,” she says, her tone of voice echoing mine precisely, carving through the air, which has become thick with strangeness. “Or Lucy, should I say.”

“Chloe.”

“You’re here early.” A stranger’s voice, almost.

“I wanted to see … everything.” I feel as if my words are far away; I am spearing them one by one through dark, rushing water, clumsily, not quite finding the ones I need.

“See your little puppet show, you mean? Your fucked-up reenactment?”

Anger was always a possibility. We are still back to back. I wish I could see her, trace the bits of Carly May still visible in her face.

The waitress appears. “Coffee,” Chloe barks. (Carly? Chloe? Even in my mind, I hardly know what to call her.) The woman looks taken aback; clearly she’s accustomed to the actress being more pleasant. Her eyes drift my way, checking on me, and I shake my head and wave her away.

“Our meeting is tomorrow,” Chloe points out coldly when the waitress is out of earshot. “No one even fucking knows I’m here. What are you doing, stalking me?”

I feel myself turn red. I suppose this is a form of stalking, this staking out of the diner. I think of my
Carly/Chloe
file, the Web sites I bookmarked.
Stalking.

“It’s just a diner,” I say, keeping my voice level. “It happens to be near my motel.”
Guilty!
If I weren’t guilty I wouldn’t be defending myself.

“It’s
my
diner,” Chloe says, and I now hear more than a glimmer of Carly May, petulant and possessive.

I feel myself rising, leaving my breakfast half eaten. I’ll pay at the counter. I don’t know what will happen if I stay. I think I might cry. This has been a mistake.

“Your book is full of lies,” Chloe/Carly says calmly. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it.”

The waitress returns with Chloe’s coffee and I slip away, not trusting myself to speak, letting Carly have the last word, as always.

I don’t think she looked at me. Not once.

Chloe

When Lois is gone I pick up my coffee and promptly spill it all over the fucking table. I’m shaking. I sop up the spilled coffee with tiny paper napkins from the dispenser next to the ketchup and try to figure out why I’m so upset. I consider a range of emotions, and what I settle on is something between scared shitless and pissed as hell.

Which makes no sense. What am I afraid of? What am I pissed off about? I feel a stirring of guilt, deep, deep down in some emotional abyss I tend to steer clear of. Poor Lois; that’s hardly the welcome she deserved, stalker or no. And for a minute I feel wounded, almost sick, and even though it’s been almost two decades since it last happened, I remember this feeling all too well. I’m slipping into Lois mode. And it’s like I just stuck a fork in my own heart.

Maybe some people always know exactly what they’re thinking or feeling. Maybe most people, even. I wouldn’t know. If I really want to know the truth about myself—my emotions, motives, whatever—I need to take a very cold, hard look within. Because in general, I lie—to myself, I’m pretty sure, along with everyone else. Call it acting if you want. It’s falsification. The opposite of truth. I’m very, very good at it.

Turning my attention inward, I’m half afraid of what I might find. It’s like scanning for a tumor, something malignant and spreading and undeniable, a threat that must be faced. Wrenched out, maybe. Thrust into the light. Put under a fucking microscope.

And what comes up is a memory—not repressed, quite, but filed away, locked up, dusty but not faded:

It was near the end. We had maybe a week left, though of course we didn’t know it. God, I can smell the room, see the shadows on the walls … It was late, the middle of the night, and Lois thought I was sleeping. I was awake, though, because my period had started, and I had miserable cramps and no idea what to do about them. I was curled up clutching my abdomen, counting the waves of pain. (Lois had said I should ask Zed for Advil or something, but I would not.) I heard Lois get out of bed and move to the dresser. I opened my eyes just a slit, and as they adjusted to the darkness I could see that she was brushing her hair. When she looked toward me, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I’m not sure why, looking back. I could have said something. Anything. I should have stopped her. Not that I knew exactly what she was up to—how could I?—but then again I
did
, somehow. If I’m totally honest, I have to admit that I had a sense of what she was up to.

She put the brush back down on the dresser, straightened her white nightgown, and drifted out the door.

He didn’t sleep in his room anymore, we knew that. So I wasn’t surprised to hear the stairs creak softly in the places where they always did. Although I couldn’t see her, I could almost feel each careful footstep. I knew when her hand brushed over the raised knot in the unvarnished wooden railing halfway down, the one your dress would catch on if you weren’t careful, and I knew exactly when she reached the bottom. And then I couldn’t hear her anymore, but I knew where she had gone. Five minutes, maybe. Ten at the absolute most. I heard a door slam. A minute later Lois was on the stairs again, moving quickly this time. She burst into the room, bringing cold night air with her. She thrust her tiny self into her bed—quietly, but I could feel the violence of her movements. She curled into a ball—don’t ask me how I knew—just in time to contain the first huge sob that shook her. I’ve cried like that once or twice. I know how much it hurts, really hurts, like someone is punching you in the gut. I almost forgot my own pain, I was so focused on hers. But Lois’s willpower was even stronger than her misery; she swallowed each sob before it escaped. All I could hear was a sharp little hiccough each time, and the sound of the sheets brushing against her skin as she shook. It was a long time before the number of seconds between sobs started to stretch out and her breathing got smoother.

I didn’t have to ask what had happened. I knew, as surely as if I’d been there myself. Lois never mentioned what had happened that night, never suspected me of having seen anything, and I never brought it up. I felt guilty, as if I had been spying. But I also felt like I had something on her. Lois had a weakness, and I knew what it was.

And there was another emotion, one I didn’t recognize at the time, or wouldn’t: rage. By the next morning, I was blindingly, dizzyingly furious with her.

Because she broke the rules. Because she offered herself up, more completely than I ever had. Because she wasn’t supposed to be the brave one, the reckless one. Because it should have been me.

Because she kept a secret from me, or thought she did.

Because she brought on the end, somehow. She fucked up the balance, crossed the line.

Something like that.

Lois

So much for the upper hand.

I return to my motel and burrow into the cool darkness of my room like some tiny pointy-nosed mammal. Tomorrow I am supposed to check into my B&B, but for now I prefer the anonymity of this nondescript roadside pit stop. I try to sleep, so that I won’t have to face my own mind or submit to the torture of memory (
your book is full of lies
), but I can’t quite manage to leave consciousness behind. After a while I pull my notebook into bed with me, squinting at the scribbled pages, retracing Gary’s recent steps.

Gary is frustrated. He had known the abductees would be adults now, but their maturity disturbs him: the women he has captured (he has them both, finally) are not exactly who he needs them to be. He feels thwarted. They are too old, too fucked-up, too
different
. They are not the pretty, flat-chested, bratty twelve-year-olds he imagined. He’s not sure what they have to offer him. He begins to think about children. Maybe what he requires is a more perfect reenactment of his father’s crime. But how would that satisfy his desire for revenge? Who would suffer? Who would understand? More than frustrated, he’s confused. And growing desperate. He has bought another knife, and he’s scoping out pretty twelve-year-old girls. He’s as lost as I am.
Stay in character, Gary
, I admonish him.
Don’t stop making sense.
But I don’t feel as if he listens to me anymore. I have a sudden urge to get him out of this elaborate mess I’ve entangled him in. Could he toss the knives off some bridge, free his captives, go back to his trailer and resume chopping wood? Would that be in character?

I don’t manage to solve Gary’s problems, but, for the moment, he solves mine; I drift mercifully into a long sleep while squinting in the dark at my own wild handwriting. My unused laptop hums quietly in the corner of the room, endlessly charging. I feel as if Sean is watching me from it. This sense follows me into uneasy sleep.

Chloe

I spy Lois through the curtains in my sitting room tripping down the path to my guesthouse and am surprised by another stabbing thrust of guilt. She’s dressed very professionally, in a neat little suit and heels, and I understand this to mean that she is extremely hurt. That I have hurt her. Well, she caught me off guard; my claws shot out; I feel like shit. What else can I do? I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and I realize that I’ve chosen the opposite strategy: I’m showing her my exposed belly; she’s in full battle armor.