A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (40 page)

That started me up again. I cried like a dork al the way to the interstate and for a few miles down it, until my eyes were so grainy and dry they couldn’t make tears.

Big was so mad her lips were white, and her one hand was white on the wheel, too, like she was strangling it, but she put her other hand on me, soft on my leg. She squeezed me gentle and sweet, her palm warm through the thin material of my crumply skirt.

When I could talk, I said, “How did you find me?”

“Patti cal ed this morning while I was getting ready for work. And don’t you be mad,” she said. “That girl is a good friend to you. Tattling was the smartest thing any of the three of you has ever done in your whole lives.”

I wasn’t even a speck mad at Patti. I wanted to kiss Patti on the face, because it was so good to be in the car with Big driving away from that place with that woman in it saying, “Jane Grace?” like a question and then, worse, “Jane Grace.” Like she knew. When she said those last two of al my names, there was a sound to her voice, and a bel tol ed in me like an answer. The way she said that part of my name stirred a pot ful of memories I couldn’t get to, old ones, alive in my underbrain, and they knew that name and answered to it.

We went fast down 65, and I could see Roger’s Volvo in the rearview, obediently staying right behind us. We were quiet for a long time. I was thinking about that woman now, that house, the scary guy’s gray teeth and how my mom-monster was missing a bunch. Her mouth slacked open in the sunlight had been ful of gaps so that her lips crunched in like an old lady’s lips.

Big drove, intense and quiet, her hand warm on me. I mostly didn’t want to think. I mostly wanted to go home and climb into Liza’s bed and press up beside her and sleep for a week with Big sitting in the chair beside to keep us safe.

But Big didn’t leave it alone. “What was it like there? What were they like?”

I didn’t know quite how to answer that. That man’s hand on me. Her eating-me-alive yel owy eyes. When I final y did answer, my voice was al trembly and high. “It’s not a good place. They were very bad.”

Big breathed out, like relieved. Like this was a good answer.

“I knew that Liza wouldn’t hook you from some happy little mommy at a McDonald’s. I mostly knew. But it’s Liza, and she doesn’t have the world’s best judgment, and she couldn’t tel me.…A tiny piece of me worried I was keeping you from something you deserved to have. That I was helping some good souls someplace stay broken.”

My heart went bang in my chest. She was talking like she knew I wasn’t Liza’s real kid, like she knew that the real Mosey Slocumb had been under the wil ow al these years. I gulped and asked, “Did Patti tel you
everything
?”

Big cocked an eyebrow. “Patti is a teenage girl, so I seriously doubt that. But she told me where you’d gone.” She took her hand off my leg long enough to poke an angry thumb back at the Volvo. “I should have known that kid would clue in. I watched him look at those pictures of Liza’s and come up with the word ‘poison’ in eleven seconds.” Her nostrils flared, and she shook her head.

So she knew. She knew now. An awful thing reared up in me, an awful thing I had to ask, but I couldn’t say it out loud to her. So I asked instead,

“Are you upset Liza stole me?”

Big shook her head, immediately, but she kept her eyes on the road. “It’s done. Looking at that place, looking at you now, I can guess enough to understand why she did it. How long were you inside?”

“Hardly any time at al ,” I said, and that was true. It seemed like we were in there forever and I came out the door fifty years old, but real y we hadn’t been in there more than five minutes. I couldn’t ask stil , not the only thing that mattered, but I sidled up a little closer to it.

“Were you upset when Patti told you?”

She snorted again, even louder. “‘Upset’ does not cover it. I was so scared and furious al at once. I drove here like a crazy woman. I cal ed your cel phone a thousand times.”

I said, “Patti had it. So me and Roger could text her what happened.”

“Oh, dear God,” Big said, on a long exhale. “You al three need to be spanked and then grounded until you are past thirty and have some sense. I might let Patti off the hook at twenty-five.”

I peeped sideways at her. She was mad, but not al the way at me, I didn’t think. More mad at us as a group and just, like, everything. That was why I could final y say the hard thing I wasn’t sure I even wanted her to answer.

“Don’t you care?”

She shot me a glance. “Of course. I mean, what? About what?”

My voice was al smal . “About what Patti told you. About I have another mom.”

Big’s eyebrows came down, and she didn’t answer. She started scanning the road ahead. She pressed her foot on the gas to speed up, and then she took the next exit we came to. She turned and cruised into the parking lot of the closest gas station. Roger fol owed us in and then sat behind us idling, I guess too terrified of Big to get out and come see what was up. Probably a good cal .

She shut off the engine and turned toward me. I was looking down at my hands, twisting them together in my lap, but she said, “Hey,” and then she said it again, twice more, until I looked at her. Her eyes were burning at me, al deadly serious. “Patti told me
where
you were, Mosey, and why.

That’s al . She didn’t have to tel me anything more. I already knew who you were. I mean, who you weren’t. I already knew for a long time that the baby Liza gave birth to was under the wil ow.”

That couldn’t be so. I said, “No, but how?” because Big didn’t have a Roger.

Big said, “It was just one of those senseless, awful things, Mosey. Crib death, they cal it. Liza was so young, I think she panicked, and her heart was broken. She made some bad decisions. She buried that child, and she ran.”

I shook my head. I was glad to know for sure, about my mom and the little bones, but she’d misunderstood me. “Not how did it happen. How did you know?”

Big’s eyes softened, going al kinds of misty. “Liza’s silver box. The pink dress. The duck. I knew who owned those things.”

I said, sounding real y slow and dumb, “So but then… but if you knew the whole time? Why didn’t you say?”

“I was trying to keep you from knowing,” Big said, smiling a ghosty version of her own real smile. She shot an ire glance at the Volvo.

But it stil couldn’t be so. Because nothing had changed. She had stayed her same Bigly self like always, no matter how awful I got at her after, as if I truly belonged to her. Nothing in her had changed. Not the way she kept her eyes on me, or her rules, or the way she talked to me or made my eggs. She had stayed al the same. So it couldn’t be true, and yet—I looked at her in her earnest eyes, and she was stil my Big. She had been, every minute, while I ran around learning kleptomania and ravaging Ducktown and toting guns in my Hel o Kitty backpack.

I lay down across the hump between the seats then, and I was bawling my forty-mil ionth tears of the day with my head in her lap, and she put her soft hands on my head, saying, “Hush, hush, baby,” smoothing my hair like she used to back when I was little and had stomach flu a lot. “It’s al going to be okay.”

Liza had stolen me, and a monster man had touched my boob, and we had found my real mother, and she was a nightmare, and now she’d seen me, and maybe she would try to find me, and Big was pregnant with some baby that could total y replace me and be her own true baby, and any bad thing could happen any second. Any bad thing was possible, and I knew that now, because I’d been in that house and so many bad things had been real and happened.

But Big was stil exactly Big.

She kept saying, over and over, “It wil al be okay, it wil al be okay.”

I kept my head in her lap, her hands soothing my hair. I stayed there, being Mosey, my ear pressed up against this new baby she was making, too tiny for it to even have ears and hear me or know me. Al at once I had this weird connecting feeling, unspooling like a thread between us. A nice thing. A good thing. That baby, I felt like it was al pressing toward me from inside while Big pressed me close to it from out, and both of us were so very, very Big’s.

I was smart enough to understand that this was only a pause.

This was a heartbeat in between a shit storm passed over and a thousand more coming. But it didn’t matter. Because this thing she kept saying?

That it would al be okay? I knew as long as I had her and she had me, no matter what came next, her words would stay completely true.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Big

I PUT A BRICK through the big stained-glass window at my parents’ church once. Not my finest moment, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was sixteen, and I’d deposited my settlement check and gotten a secondhand Civic so Liza and I could move the required hundred miles away from her bright-futured father.

I hadn’t slept wel , and so we’d crept out to my packed-up car and left in the dark hour before the sun came up. The route to the highway took me past Faith First Baptist. I’d grown up in that church, been baptized in its font. My Girl Scout troop had met there, and Mrs. Finch, the organist, had given me piano lessons in the choir room. On the little playground behind the Sunday-school rooms, I’d shared my first dry-lipped, middle-school kiss with Bobby Bossi. I’d thought I would get married there someday and have a fel owship-hal reception with a shrimp tree and a poufy white cake and my mother’s sea-foam punch made of ginger ale and sherbet.

After I was showing, I couldn’t stand the eyes there, peeking at me sideways with smug pity or staring me down with open outrage. They had an elder meeting to discuss limiting my “influence” on the other youth group girls, though at least three I knew were only baby-free because they knew their way around a condom better than I had. I quit going to services, and they blamed me for that, too. I was clearly lost, they told each other, and it was easier to let me stay like that. Not one church member so much as dropped by to present Liza with an unwrapped pack of diapers or a used receiving blanket. They didn’t want to receive her.

As I drove past, I found myself staring at the gigantic stained-glass window that loomed up over the sanctuary. It was a huge, barefoot Jesus with a flowing white robe and long, honey-brown hair. He was stepping through a grapevine arbor, treading on curling leaves and flowers. His pale hands were spread wide, palms open and welcoming. I’d seen him reach toward me a thousand Sunday mornings, as the sun shone through and pushed his colors at me.

But from this side, in the night, he was dark. It occurred to me that even when the sun came up, he would brighten and glow only for the people who were inside that building. The feeble electric bulbs inside could never light him up for the people out here. The ones who had been put out like bad cats. Outside, al Liza and I could hope for was the dark, ass end of Jesus.

I got angry in my hands first. They turned the car in to the church parking lot before the rest of me was feeling anything. Then my head caught up, and I drove to the edge of the lot, as close as I could get to that big window. Liza was sleeping, and I left the engine running so the rumble would keep her that way. I got out and ran across the narrow lawn until I was directly under it.

There was a brick-lined flower bed against the wal of the church, centered under that window. I pul ed one of the red, weighty bricks out of the ground and hefted it. I wanted to heave it right through the center of Jesus’s white robe. I imagined the tremendous smashing noise, then the glass pinging like chimes off the edge of the baptismal font. When I heard the distant rainfal sound of the pieces pattering onto the carpet, I’d jump in my car and speed away and not look back.

I didn’t think about getting caught or how legal fees and repairs might eat up a good chunk of my settlement. I was a kid. I didn’t think of consequences much at al . The baby asleep in my backseat was living proof of that. I backed up ten steps, then I reared my arm up and hurled the brick in a hard arc toward that window.

It hit a low, green leaf, dead center, and shattered it. It went right through the pane of glass, but the rest of the window didn’t so much as shudder.

The metal frame outlining the leaf protected the rest. I was already running for the flower bed, grabbing up another brick, then another, one in each hand. I danced back and hurled them, hard as I could with my skinny girl arms. One cracked Jesus’s foot, one bounced harmlessly off another piece of metal frame. Both rebounded, reversing down toward me. I ducked and covered and barely scurried out of the way. I ran to the flower bed, snatched up two more bricks.

Then I stopped, panting. After a minute I set the bricks down. I walked back to my car and drove away, defeated; the thing I was throwing bricks at, it was too big for me, too protected. I couldn’t truly hurt it.

I had never again felt so thoroughly outgunned in a fight. Not until I was sitting in that Shel -station parking lot in Montgomery, Alabama, anyway.

Mosey, weeping and heaving, clung to me like she had when she was three and scared of under-bed monsters. We’d just come from the place where Liza had stolen her. I hadn’t met Mosey’s birth parents, or even gone inside the place. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had seen Mosey’s face, and that was enough, along with the neighborhood and the decaying pink house, so neglected it might as wel have had a WELCOME TO MY METH LAB sign over the sagging dormers. I had her, though. I had found her and would bring her home. I thought that we were through the worst and everything would be okay.