Such a Pretty Girl Read online

  Andy works well in the dark. His soapy hands move gently over my skin, up and down between my fingers, around my wrists. He doesn’t talk while he cleanses, but I can hear him breathing.

  We’re not afraid of the dark. Our nightmares were born on sultry, summer afternoons. I was three when my father, Estertown’s middle school gym teacher and favorite softball coach, left my mother and moved in on the other side of town with Paula Mues Beecher, a widow with a sad, shy seven-year-old son.

  I don’t remember those days.

  Andy does, vividly. For him it was the beginning of the end.

  “Done,” he says and rinses my hands with warm water.

  “Thank you,” I say and lean slowly, blindly into the abyss. Our noses bump, shift, and accommodate. I can feel his goatee and his smile against my lips.

  His arms circle my waist. I pick up his bottle and ease down onto his lap.

  We roll to his bedroom.

  Chapter Five

  Andy’s room smells like a fresh grave in June.

  He burns the same patchouli candles as his mother, but in this shadowy space their scent mingles with the sweet musk of damask roses and makes me think of sun-warmed petals scattered by mourners to honor a passing.

  There are no live flowers in Andy’s house and there haven’t been for as long as I’ve known him. The rose scent has no foundation and no traceable source. It doesn’t increase or decrease. It just is.

  The Mueses accept it without question and believe it’s a gift of benevolent grace.

  I have no blind faith, no one to thank for mysterious gifts, so sometimes I crawl around, sniffing the floor vents and searching for hidden plug-in fresheners.

  There never are any, of course.

  I climb off Andy’s bony legs and place the bottle on his nightstand next to the sturdy, oaken Madonna icon. She looms three feet tall, a testament to devotion, and gazes at me in mute radiance, hands gently clasped and lips curved in a beatific smile.

  Ms. Mues is certain that one day the Holy Mother’s serene eyes will weep shimmering oil tears and, in her infinite mercy, will bestow a long-awaited miracle on Andy. She believes his recovery will occur via a victim soul, a pious individual chosen by the divine to absorb and endure the pain and suffering of others.

  I listen carefully and because I like Ms. Mues, I don’t point out that Andy feels no pain from his paralysis or that my definition of mercy does not include picking specific humans to be clearinghouses for all sorts of mortal agonies.

  Ms. Mues must read it in my eyes, though, because she laughs and tells me not to worry, that God works in mysterious ways. How else would I explain this condo going vacant right after Andy’s accident and in time for them to rent, or our deep and immediate bond, if it wasn’t all a part of some grander plan?

  I don’t know. I could mention that my old friend Azzah’s family, the previous tenants, were evicted for cramming too much exuberant, extended family into the two-bedroom condo and not being savvy enough to be quiet about it, but that still doesn’t account for what happened when Andy and I first saw each other….

  I sit on the curb, the June sun baking my brain, a disposable lighter in hand and a pile of notes at my feet. The notes have come once a week, every week, for almost two years now, tucked inside the letters addressed to my mother, all bearing the same New Jersey State Prison return address. Every week after my mother devours her letter she reads mine and then hands it over, waiting for me to read it. Every week I take it into my room and throw it in the gray storage tub I keep in the back of the closet.

  And once a year on the anniversary date, while my mother is off designing window displays, I gather those unread notes and pile them on the pavement near the Dumpster.

  Then I light them and watch them burn.

  I flick the lighter, lower my hand, and touch the first note. It blackens and crumbles in on itself, igniting the page beneath.

  A transport ambulance followed by an enormous old Cadillac cruises slowly around the bend and heads for our lot. The ambulance stops at the curb in front of the empty condo and two EMS guys get out. They leave the engine running and the faint strains of Los Lonely Boys’ “Heaven” in their wake. They glance at me, at the crackling flames at my feet, and exchange speaking looks.

  I avert my gaze and watch as the Cadillac creeps into a parking spot. When I look back, the EMS techs have rounded the ambulance and opened the rear doors. One guy climbs in; the other begins pulling out the stretcher.

  There’s a body shape under the sheet.

  I feel weird now, like some gross rubbernecker ogling an accident, so I quickly pour the last of my bottled water onto the fire’s charred remains and rise to leave.

  As I do, the person on the stretcher comes into sight.

  Pale, gaunt. Dark eyes shadowed beneath sleepy lids, gaze bleak. Brown hair cloaking his shoulders, a battered wooden cross on a leather thong around his neck.

  He looks right at me.

  The world blurs and a great rushing fills my ears. The pit of my stomach throbs, my skin tingles with immediate heat. Jesus, he’s beautiful. And his mouth is moving. What’s he saying? I don’t know, I can’t hear—

  “Honey, are you all right? You look like you’re going to pass out.”

  I draw a sharp breath and the world swoops back. A woman I’ve never seen before has me by the arm and is peering worriedly into my face. “I’m fine,” I stammer, mortified, not daring to look at the stretcher. “I think I got up too fast.” I step back and she releases me, but her grasp still pulses against my skin. “Thanks. I…I have to go.”

  But somehow I don’t and instead find myself invited in, following this woman up the steps and through the back door as the bulb in the porch light pops, as the EMS guys wheel the stretcher across the lawn and into the condo through the sliding glass.

  And somehow he and I end up alone together in the living room while the woman signs off on the transport. The heat is unbearable, the silence stifling. He fingers his cross, turns his face away, and I stand there sweating, searching for something to break this stalemate—

  “You never answered my question,” he says, still without looking at me. “What were you burning when we pulled up?”

  I shouldn’t tell him. I shouldn’t. He’ll think I’m pathetic. “Letters,” I hear myself say. “From someone I never want to see again for as long as I live.”

  He looks at me now and in that raw heartbeat, something more passes between us, something fierce and too intense to be spoken. He nods, pulls himself up to a sitting position, and gestures to the end of the bed. “You might as well take a seat and—”

  “Make yourself at home,” Andy says, closing and locking his door.

  Smiling, I sink onto the bed and crawl up to the headboard. Light the incense, prop a pillow, and watch as he wheels to the media cabinet. Old scars zigzag his bare back and chest, intersecting like cross streets down his arms and along his hands. I’ve traveled them all from source to destination, committing his history to memory and learning him from the outside in.

  “I want you to hear something,” he says, sticking a CD into the player. “All these years of looking and I finally found it on eBay for like five bucks. I can’t believe nobody else bid on it.” His braid has grown past the middle of his back and when he sweats, it sticks to the vinyl back of his chair. “You’re going to like it, Mer. Just give it a chance.”

  The CD starts and it’s Dean Martin crooning “Little Green Apples.” I almost groan, but Andy looks so entranced that I hold back. He’s raved about this song forever, struggling to remember the lyrics, telling me how his late father had loved it, too, humming the few strains he could recall. This song is his personal, private soundtrack, the way “Heaven” has become mine, and the least I can do is keep an open mind.

  Or maybe my response is completely selfish because I know that as the love song gentles Andy, he will, in turn, gentle me.

  …Little green apples…

  Andy s
miles.

  Dino’s voice can do in seconds what quarts of Jim Beam can’t do in days.

  He hoists himself out of his chair and into bed beside me. His skin is parchment in the soft light and his eyes are hooded, black hollows. He unclips my overall straps and folds down the bib. Waits until I take off my shirt, then rests his head on my stomach and sighs. “God, what a voice. I wish I could sing.”

  “I wish you could sing, too,” I tease, pleased by his sudden snort of laughter.

  “Wise guy.” His coarse goatee moves against me with each word. “I love this song, Mer. No angst. No craziness. It just is what it is.”

  “Corny,” I murmur, to keep him talking. I like the way his chin grazes my belly and his breath wisps across me like warm satin. Inhale. Exhale. The rhythm settles deep inside me and I shift my hips.

  He runs a hand up my leg and nudges into the front of my baggy overalls, coming to rest on the low slope between my hipbones. “You were in my dream last night,” he says and kisses my belly button.

  “Good or bad?” I say, watching him in the floor-to-ceiling tiled mirror across from the bed. There are thirty-two tiles in all, four across and eight down, and they provide an interesting angle; I see the ends of us before the beginnings. The soles of my feet are still dirty and dissolve into the shadows. Andy’s bare, bloodless feet tangle together in a heap.

  “Well, it was definitely weird,” he says, dipping his fingers out of sight beneath my overalls. He hasn’t touched anything vital yet, but he’s close, and his voice grows husky with the knowledge. He tilts his head back to look at me and my breast blinds him. Smiling, he props himself up on an elbow, pulls his braid over his shoulder, and tugs off the band. “You were sitting on this stone wall—”

  “Where?” I interrupt.

  “I don’t know, but there were these funky flowers all around that smelled like cotton candy,” he says. “I was standing in the dark watching you, wondering why I was stuck inside while you were out there looking all golden, so I just decided the hell with it and walked out to meet you. I actually heard my own footsteps on the stones.” He glances at me. “You know what you said when I got there?”

  I shake my head.

  “You were reading a dictionary—”

  “A dictionary? Oh, come on. I don’t even own a dictionary.”

  “And you looked up and said, ‘Now I get it,’ and closed the book.” His gaze holds a silent plea. “It was all so real. I mean, I was sweating and shaking and when I sat down next to you, the edge of the wall cut into the backs of my legs. It wasn’t a memory because I didn’t know you when I could still walk. Do you think it was a vision?”

  I don’t know anything about visions and I’m pretty sure paraplegia can’t be reversed, so I don’t answer him, just lean forward and slip off my bra. It’s a B cup, black like the soles of my feet, like the anticipation in his eyes. Black lace via Victoria’s Secret and five minutes alone with my mother’s charge card.

  “You know about victim souls, right?” Andy asks as I scooch back against the headboard and draw up my knees, giving him a wall to lean against while I brush out his soft, rippling hair.

  “I know they’re supposed to be pious people—whatever that means—and that your mother wants to find one who’ll absorb your suffering and bless you with recovery,” I say, separating the silky strands and shivering as they drift across my bare skin. I stroke his hair, trace his scars. His accident-prone days are over. I pick up the brush on the nightstand.

  “Right,” he says, watching me watch him in the mirror. “Well, there’s one out in Iowa. An old disabled guy who receives messages from the Virgin Mary. My mother’s going to make a pilgrimage out there.”

  “That would be good for her,” I say.

  “I’m going, too,” he says quietly.

  I stop brushing. “To Iowa?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  I gaze at our reflection, at my bare shoulders rising from behind my drawn-up knees, at the translucence of his skin and the tension tightening his features. “You’re going to Iowa.” Repeating it makes me want to hurt him. “When?”

  “We leave on Sunday,” he says to the expressionless girl in the mirror.

  “This Sunday? Like day-after-tomorrow Sunday?” I say, sitting up straight. “Why now? What’s the big rush?”

  “My mother put my name on the waiting list over a year ago,” he says. “They finally called last night. We’ll have an hour with him on Monday and another one on Tuesday morning.” An odd, fleeting expression grips his features. They smooth again, but not before realization knuckles a cold fist into my stomach.

  “You want to go,” I say and my hands scramble furiously, separating his hair into three thick strands and reweaving, yanking each over-under pass, jerking his head back again and again until his gaze in the mirror glazes with tears.

  I stop, defeated by his acceptance of my punishment. “Andy.” I can’t say more. I haven’t begged for anything since Chirp’s thighs were yanked apart like a Thanksgiving wishbone.

  “If I don’t take this appointment I’ll have to wait another year,” he says, shifting and pulling himself up alongside of me. He runs his hand down my spine and lingers at the small of my back. “I already asked.” He reaches past me for the bottle of Jim Beam and uncaps it. Drinks and coughs when he’s finished. “I know it’s bad timing, but I can’t wait anymore, Mer. Something’s got to give.”

  “There is no such thing as miracles, Andy,” I say.

  He leans away and cool air rushes to fill the absence.

  I twist to look at him and the stubborn hope blurring his face pushes me further, makes me want to gouge holes in his faith. “I mean, come on, if the Blessed Virgin has such infinite mercy, then how can she listen to your prayers every day for years without doing something about them?”

  He upends the bottle. Wipes his mouth. “Maybe she is.”

  I grab my bra. My hands are palsied and I hate them for it.

  “We’ll be back on Wednesday,” he says.

  “Have a nice trip,” I say, sliding the straps up onto my shoulders.

  “I’ll give you my keys.” His hands cover mine, which are struggling to hook my bra. “I wouldn’t leave you here with nowhere to go.”

  I stop battling my underwear. “Four days is a long time.”

  “I know.” He rubs soft circles on my back.

  I close my eyes against the Believe poster taped to his closet door. “Anything could happen,” I say, surrendering to the rhythm of his warm strength. His hands slip ’round to nudge my bra aside.

  “Come here if it gets bad. You’ll be safe.” His sigh stirs my hair. “I promise.”

  I look at the oaken Madonna. Her face is serene, her gaze a caress. Silently I ask why she’d send him all the way to Iowa now, while my father’s on the loose, but although I listen hard for an answer, the Blessed Virgin isn’t talking.

  Andy is, though. His mouth is against my ear and his hand is in my overalls.

  I reach up behind me and pull his braid forward, unbanding and spreading the rippling strands down over his shoulders. Down over my face. The curtain closes and I open. His reach is blind but accurate.

  “Two,” I whisper, pressing my teeth against his cheek and taking fistfuls of his hair. Two’s a good number, one for me and one for him, pleasure evenly divided.

  “Four,” he counters, a smile in his voice.

  I forgive his approaching abandonment. I forgive him for not being what I want and am thankful for his being what I need. I open my eyes and gaze up into his face. His pleasure is giving me pleasure and I would not disappoint him.

  “You know I love you,” he says.

  The room smells of roses and freshly turned dirt.

  “Andy,” I say, buffeted by the rush.

  And then again.

  “Andy.”

  Chapter Six

  My self-imposed curfew on purification Fridays is 11:30 P.M. Leaving Andy’s before midnight when his
mother ends her exile is easier on us all. There really is such a thing as too much information, and when I ease from his lingering grasp and slip out into the night I am, with my friction-knotted hair and bruised lips, walking proof of this. One look and Ms. Mues would have the answer to a question she’s deliberately never asked.

  I pause on the back porch, shrouded in darkness. The metal steps are cool under my feet. The night air is thick with moisture and ratcheting cricket songs.

  “…the hell is she? It’s almost midnight.”

  “Relax, Charles.” My mother’s voice carries a thread of impatience. “She’ll be back. She’s a big girl, you know.”

  I lean out over the rail just far enough to peek around the corner of the building. My parents are sitting on our front porch, my mother in the center of the step, my father pressed up against the railing. His shoulders are hunched forward like he’s going to launch himself the moment I come into view. Only problem is he’s staring in the wrong direction.

  Silence. And then icily, “She’s a fifteen-year-old child, Sharon.”

  My mother laughs and leans against him. “I was only twelve when we got together, remember?”

  His head snaps around toward her and although I can’t see his expression, the startled flash zapping my mother’s face speaks volumes. “She’s my child and I’m not going to sit by and let her run wild doing who knows what with who knows who. I’m putting the brakes on this tonight.” His voice is rising and my mother touches his arms, shushing him. He shrugs away.

  Air conditioners thrum and lights glow behind shades. The complex is a tomb, haunted only by the Shale family and the Dumpster’s putrid miasma.

  Whap!

  “The mosquitoes are eating me alive,” my mother says.

  “So go inside,” he says, keeping his gaze pinned on the blind curve of the main road. “I’m staying here.”

  My mother pouts and scratches her ankle, but doesn’t surrender her spot.