A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (11 page)

I went with Mosey to get a cookie and said hey to a couple of her teachers, al the while scanning the huge room trying to find Liza and see who she’d been so al -fired eager to talk to. I eventual y spotted her up on the stage. She was faced forward, scanning the crowd herself, side by awkward side with Claire Richardson, of al people. They each held a paper cup ful of those foamy white drinks, and Claire was facing the crowd as wel , unwil ing to waste her minty-fresh moneyed breath on smal talk with my daughter. Liza sucked at her straw and ignored Claire right back.

I saw Mrs. Doats wending her way toward us through the crowd at the snack table, so I got a good hold on Mosey’s arm and steered her the other way. We fetched up by some decorated folding tables where kids were recruiting for chorus and soccer and track and chess. I waved a hand at them and told Mosey, “Pick something, and which one is Mr. Lambert?”

She pointed at a stocky, bearded fel ow, and then her expression brightened and she said, “Hey, there’s Roger!” before she darted right and wriggled off through the crowd, gone as fast as a skinny minnow. I went over to meet the new teacher. After ten minutes with him, I was confident the fel ow knew his way around a microscope and also that he wasn’t a pedophile; he told me how the sophomores would be making their own plant-cel slides while sneaking a subtle peek at my age-appropriate breasts. He was cute, and he made a point of saying something about his “late wife,” but I’d never date one of Mosey’s teachers.

I left him and started looking for Liza again. I was back up near the stage when I felt a light touch on my arm. I turned to see one of the cheerleaders standing there with a tray ful of those white drinks.

“Virgin colada?” she asked.

“Good Lord, child, what are you wearing?” It just popped out.

She bridled up and said, “I’m a hula girl. Mrs. Richardson got us these costumes.” She had on a grass skirt and a coconut-bra top over a flesh-colored leotard that made her body look naked but strangely wrinkled, like she was a slim, peachy-pink elephant.

Sharla Dartner, another cheerleader, came up on my other side and handed me a large wicker tote bag ful of papers and sample-size fruit snacks and hand sanitizer, saying, “Here’s your gift pack!” Claire Richardson had put Sharla in a peach-colored leotard, too, as if getting her one that actual y matched her flesh might lead folks to realize she was black.

I thanked Sharla, and as I turned away, I found Mrs. Doats blocking my path, staring at me down her knife-thin nose. She bobbled her plastic hump of hair at me and said, “I checked my log, Ms. Slocumb, and I see I have yet to get that instal ment on Mosey’s tuition?”

I busied myself tucking my clutch purse down in the big wicker tote so I’d only have one thing to carry, saying, “I told you, Mrs. Doats, you’re going to have to take that up with Liza.”

“She seems a little busy just this now,” Mrs. Doats said in a prim voice, and she cut her eyes in a tel ing glance to my right.

I fol owed her gaze and saw Liza near the wal talking with Steve Mason, a big barrel-chested fel ow with a sweep of brown hair and two kids at Cal. I frowned. Steve certainly had enough money to pay a few extra tuitions. He also had a wife. Liza was leaning toward him, very close. Too close. She put one hand on his chest, and her shiny lips parted. She stil held her cup with the last sips of her slushy colada in her other hand, and it was like she’d forgotten that it existed. The cup tipped sideways as she leaned in. She looked as if she was about to take a lick off Steve’s neck, see if he tasted like ice cream. Steve craned his head away from her and twitched his eyes back and forth, seeking help.

Something was very wrong. Liza, who could read men easier than the morning paper, didn’t seem to realize how uncomfortable he was. I left Mrs.

Doats without a single word and hurried toward them.

Steve stepped back, and Liza fol owed, letting her cup fal out of her hand so that the remains of her white drink splashed onto some woman’s metal ic sandals and up the backs of her bare legs. The woman wheeled around, gasping, and more people turned to see what was going on. Liza cackled like a drunk hyena and splayed both her hands across Steve’s broad chest. I caught sight of Steve’s wife, off to port. Her eyebrows were up so high they’d nearly hit scalp territory, and she began fast-winding her way through the crowd. I sped up, pushing through and saying excuse me, hurrying to beat her to my daughter.

Claire Richardson was handing a wad of Kleenex to the woman with the splashed shoes, her mouth pursed up tight as a cat’s butt, pushing her lipstick into humps. She started to kneel down, more Kleenex in her hand, but I bent and snatched the cup before she could. I sniffed at it, trying to tel if Liza had brought a flask and turned those virgin drinks into something right sluttier. I smel ed nothing but that suntan-oil smel , and anyway, Liza didn’t drink; in January she’d pressed her twelve-year pin from NA into the trunk of her wil ow. As I came up beside her, she pushed her thick coils of hair back over her shoulder. I saw how hard her hand was shaking, and I thought,
It’s worse than that. It’s drugs again. Dear God, she’s jacked
up.

Liza vibrated from head to foot, and the years melted away, and it was as though no time at al had passed since she’d shown up on my doorstep with meth sores around her mouth, poor Mosey riding her bony hip. I started shaking, too, with rage, though, a red wave of pure angry that Liza could decide to shit-can her life like this, now, here, at Mosey’s school. How could she? How could she?

I grabbed her arm and turned her toward me. She was cackling again, this high, weird pitch of sound, and she kept making it as I spun her. I pul ed her away from Steve, everyone staring at us, and I knew what I would see if I got her face pointed up into the light: her dark irises whittled down to rims around huge pupils.

I tilted her face up toward the ceiling, and as the light hit her eyes, I saw one pupil blow open like one of those roses they film blooming fast in stop-motion. Her other pupil spiraled closed, becoming no more than a speck, and she frowned at me, one side of her mouth pul ing down as if someone had run a needle and thread through a corner of her bottom lip and yanked.

I took hold of both her shoulders, my anger flat gone and fright rising up behind. This wasn’t drugs. Behind her eyes something else, something very bad, was happening. “Liza? Liza?”

She stared at me and said, “The drums gave me a headache,” and then I saw it happen. I saw Liza go away. Everything Liza drained out of her twisting face. Half her mouth yawped downward, and she jerked like a puppet with its strings cut and tumbled straight to the floor so fast, no sway, no warning, nothing theatrical about it. I fel to my knees by her and grabbed her, hol ering, “Help us! Help!” Conversation died around me, leaving the awful tinny sound of the surfer music coming out of a boom box that was too smal for this cavern of a room. I flipped Liza over, and her head lol ed back, and both her pupils were blown now. She started jerking in my arms, and her tip-getter jeans darkened as her bladder let go.

I heard a man say, “We need to get a spoon in her mouth,” and I yel ed up at Claire Richardson, “Cal 911, cal 911!” Her lips fel open out of their little pursed-up wad, and she stood there, teetering on her high, expensive shoes like a stupid giraffe with her lipstick al in stripes. “Help us, oh, God, help her!” I yel ed, but it was like I wasn’t speaking English. She stared at me and Liza on the ground, her nose wrinkling as the sharp tang of Liza’s urine rose to meet it. Steve Mason stepped around her, and he already had his cel phone out, dialing, so I turned back to Liza.

I heard Mosey wailing “Big? Big?” in a scared, shril voice, but I was grabbing Liza’s head and making her face point at my face and cal ing her.

Her body stil ed into deadweight, and she wasn’t in her eyes anymore. I started screaming, and strong male hands lifted me and shoved me to Mosey.

The school nurse was by Liza now, saying, “Get that spoon away! Step back, give her air.”

I pul ed Mosey to me, and we held on to each other in the endless minutes before we heard the sirens in the distance. Liza kept breathing with her head lol ed back and her eyelids at half-mast, but she wasn’t Liza anymore. She was just a body, taking in oxygen, sending out carbon dioxide for the plastic palm trees.

She never came back. Not until today anyway. I had not seen my daughter for a red second, not until Tyler Baines dug that box up and she’d fought me so fierce in the yard. That had been Liza.

I hoped so anyway, as afternoon faded into evening and I realized that none of us had even eaten lunch. I cal ed Mosey. She came out of her room and sat at the kitchen table like I was paying her to do it, but she didn’t much enjoy the work. She stared at the wal with her eyes bright and a feverish splotch in each cheek. Looking at her, I hoped to God I had seen Liza, pul ed back into her body in the yard. I couldn’t do this on my own.

I stepped to the table and put my palm to Mosey’s forehead. She felt cool, almost clammy. She got very stil under my hand, waiting it out the same as a cat who likes you but who doesn’t much want to be petted wil do. I took my hand away.

I couldn’t imagine eating, but I went ahead and opened a can of tomato soup and started making gril ed cheese sandwiches. I leaned on the counter by the stove, waiting for the soup to heat.

Mosey asked, “Are they al gone?”

I said, careful like, “Everyone except Chief Warfield. He’s stil waiting on the medical examiner.”

“I meant Olive and them, al those people in the front yard.”

I turned fast to the stove and flipped sandwiches that didn’t need flipping yet, hiding the flush that rose up, hot and hopeful in my cheeks. When I’d gone to roust the looky-loos, our yard had been empty. It didn’t make sense. Mosey had said half the town was there.

Then I saw we had a state trooper’s car parked on our corner, and I thought his name.
Lawrence.
My heart jammed itself into my throat, pulsing there al red-hot and stupid, and my gaze darted al around, seeking him.

He was in the street facing away from me, but of course I knew it was him. He was ushering our across-the-street neighbors back to their own property.

Lawrence lived clear on the other side of Moss Point, but his territory stretched from the edge of Immita al the way to Pascagoula; he kept his radio tuned to the same station as the local cops. He must have heard Rick Warfield cal ing Joel to my home address, saying that human remains had been found in my yard.

And he had come. He’d come immediately to do me a kindness on the sly. I hadn’t seen Lawrence in more than twelve years, but it didn’t matter.

Looking at his straight spine, the shape of his broad shoulders in his trooper’s uniform, it could have been a day ago. It could have been this morning. I was already stepping through the open door, as if my body had been cal ed to his.

I only stopped myself by asking, when he got home tonight, would he confess to his damn wife that he’d been on my lawn today?

“The police sent them al home,” I told Mosey now, and I was proud to hear my voice came out hardly trembling. I flipped the sandwiches onto the undone side. Not three seconds after I’d seen Lawrence, Mosey had started screaming in the backyard, tel ing the cops and the professors and even poor Tyler Baines to get out, cal ing them al bastards. I’d closed my front door and run to find her. Lawrence must have gone home to Sandy and his boys without so much as knocking on my door.

Perhaps he thought seeing me, even after a dozen years, was too powerful a thing to play with. The heat washing even now through my face, down into my chest, landing lower, told me he might’ve made the right cal . He had simply come and done what he could for me, not making any kind of scene. Very like him. I blinked hard and wil ed my cheeks to cool while I ladled out the soup.

When I brought Mosey’s dinner to her, she said, “Thanks. Gramma.”

She made the last word into its own sentence, then cocked her head sideways. She sounded curious but a little distant, like a scientist on Discovery Channel waiting to see what the things in his test tube might do.

“You’re welcome. You want milk?” I said, puzzled.

“No thanks,” she said. And then she added that word again, al alone. “Gramma.”

Her bright gaze was fixed on her food, but she was watching me in her side eyes. I found myself going stil , not sure what reaction she was looking for. I’d always been Big to her.

“What’s with the Gramma?” I asked, careful to keep my tone light.

Mosey shrugged. “I think it’s weird I cal you Big. And it’s super weird that I cal my mom Liza.”

I went back to the counter to load Liza’s dinner onto a tray. “You were already cal ing her Liza when you came to live here.”

I hefted the tray, and Mosey leveled a gaze on me so intense it felt like a glare. “Didn’t you want me to cal you Gramma? Or Mee-Maw or something?”

That question seemed as loaded as a pistol. I met her gaze and said, “Wel , Liza named me Big, back when I used to cal her my Little. When you came home, you picked it up from her. Maybe I stil felt too young to be a mee-maw.”

“What about now?”

I felt my lips thinning because, truth told, I thought forty-five was stil young to be already a mee-maw. Mee-maws traded their skinny jeans for those Christmas sweaters with the three-dimensional sequined appliqués of reindeers with jingle-bel harnesses. They knitted and never learned the tango or went to France or had sex again in their whole lives. I wasn’t there yet, please God, but I also wasn’t sure exactly what Mosey was asking. “I am your gramma, doodle, so you can cal me what you like. Let me get this to your mom while it’s stil reasonable hot.”

Mosey’s overbright gaze fol owed me out. The second the swinging door stopped slapping back and forth between us, a whole-body blush heated al my skin, and I felt a thousand miles away from being any kind of mee-maw. Lawrence had been here.

I walked back to Liza’s room fast as I could with a bowl of hot soup sloshing around on the tray. Lawrence had come, and that meant he stil remembered. Maybe too vividly, like me, maybe only in guilty flashes on the side. But he remembered. I pushed down the foolish curl of something almost happy that I felt rising in my bel y and nudged Liza’s door open with my foot. I would think of Lawrence later. If I truly meant to keep Liza’s secret, there were things I needed to know that only she could tel me. Assuming I had truly seen a flash of Liza in the yard. Assuming Liza was alive, way down inside her body.