Pretty Is (18 page)

“So he does have a sister,” Callie said thoughtfully, pretending to be perfectly unruffled though her flushed cheeks betrayed her.

Hannah was thinking the same thing: he had given them a rare clue. She filed it away.

*   *   *

At such dark, tense moments they remembered to be afraid, remembered that they were the complicit prisoners of a man about whom they knew nothing, a man whose motives and intentions were inscrutable. At such moments they wondered what was going to happen to them. But mostly they did not. Mostly they lived from moment to enchanted moment, competing for Zed’s attention, slipping into the strange and intriguing territory of each other’s minds. They drove out thoughts of their distraught parents, their real lives, their grim knowledge of what bad men do to little girls. They fell into a regular habit of reading mysteries out loud; they sometimes even acted out scenes. They ate salty, preservative-laden comfort food from cans and mixes. Every night seemed oddly festive, like a party. They sat together at the kitchen table, picking happily at Kraft macaroni and hot dogs or whatever dubious concoction was on the menu. Zed was almost always at his best then, talkative and benevolent. The girls waited impatiently for it to get dark so that they could light the candles and the lantern and—if they were lucky, and he was in a good mood—maybe venture outside. The world they only ever encountered by starlight seemed unreal, like some magical realm to which they had been lucky enough to discover the key: Oz, Narnia, Wonderland. There were raspberry bushes at the edge of the woods behind the lodge, and they learned to pick berries in the dark. When they went back inside they could see the red berry juice mixing on their fingers with blood from the thorns. Some nights Callie and Hannah danced on the lawn to music that was only in their heads, whirling in circles until they collapsed.

Always, there was Zed, barely visible in the darkness. Watching.

*   *   *

Hannah slept neatly: on her back, arms at her sides, like a doll. Or a corpse. Neatly and lightly—the slightest sound or motion woke her, not abruptly but smoothly; she glided easily from one world to the other. For this reason she became aware of Zed’s nocturnal visits sooner than Callie, who slept like a fish on a dock, flipping wildly from side to side, gasping and muttering. When Hannah first heard their doorknob turn—or did she only sense it?—she lay perfectly still and opened her eyes the merest slit. She had long ago mastered the art of pretending to be asleep; she liked her mother to wake her for school in the morning, even if she had been fully conscious for hours. Her mother would come in after she had made breakfast, smelling of coffee and bacon. From this childish habit she had acquired the idea that people’s best selves might be revealed in such moments: moments when they thought themselves unobserved. A wave of cooler air told her that the door had opened. The hallway beyond was unlit, and she couldn’t make him out right away; but after a minute, a dark shape emerged in precisely the space where she knew he must be, the spot from which her too-keen senses had felt the air being gently displaced. He didn’t move into the room but remained framed in the doorway, his gaze moving back and forth from Callie’s bed to Hannah’s. The moon lit a single glint in his eye. Hannah lay rigid with anticipation, every muscle painfully tensed, wondering what was next. Perhaps now was the moment, the unspoken
something
they had been waiting for; perhaps he had come to murder or molest them. Hannah didn’t believe this, not really, but her body, relying on more primitive instincts, feared it nevertheless. She could hardly hear anything but the blood pounding in her ears. Still, she heard him sigh. A faint sigh, nothing more than a gentle expulsion of softly held breath. As if in sympathy, a light gust of wind stirred the curtains, crept across her skin, blew a single strand of hair across her nose, tickling. She thought she would burst.

Then he retreated. Without another sound, he pulled the door shut behind him.

Hannah relaxed her muscles, one by one, beginning at her toes and climbing toward her face.

It took a long time to let the tension go.

After that, Zed appeared in the doorway most nights. His behavior was exactly the same on each occasion. Hannah didn’t tell Callie until after the third time. By then, the pleasure of having a secret had worn off; this new development required analysis and discussion. Hannah felt less threatened than puzzled, and longed for Callie’s unsparing take on Zed’s behavior. Callie, however, didn’t believe her: “There’s no way I would sleep through that,” she said. “Your imagination is twisted, that’s all.” Nevertheless, she promised to stay awake that night in order to verify Hannah’s account. She lasted only a couple of hours before Hannah heard the telltale shift in her breathing, and once again she slept solidly through Zed’s appearance. This strange knowledge remained Hannah’s alone.
He
was Hannah’s, in a way, for the first time. And there was something to be said for that.

Although Callie professed skepticism about Hannah’s story, it wasn’t long after Hannah told her about Zed’s visits that she announced her escape plan: not a plan to escape, but a plan for its own sake. A scheme, a plot, elaborate and labor-intensive. Late at night, in the dark, when he was on the porch: that was when Hannah and Callie talked, quietly, both of them looking straight up toward the slanting ceiling they couldn’t see.

Hannah tried to talk her out of it. It wasn’t necessary to make some crazy plan, she said. If they really wanted to leave, they could waltz out the front door—when he was out, or while he slept. Perhaps even right in front of him. Would he stop them? Really? He had never laid a hand on them. Impossible to imagine that he would grab their arms, their waists, haul them back. Tie them up, lock them in. He wasn’t like that. Besides, where would they go if they
did
escape? As far as they knew, there was nothing for miles around.

“I just want to make a point,” Callie insisted. “To show him that we could if we wanted. Even if he locked us up. Obviously we aren’t really going to
do
it.”

“What if it makes him mad? I mean, what if…” Hannah couldn’t find words for what she meant. What if acting as if they were in danger somehow made it true?

“He won’t know about it unless we want him to,” Callie pointed out. “And that would only be if … if we felt like we needed to make a statement or something.” She sounded defiant and a little shifty, as if even she knew that her logic didn’t really hold up.
What are you thinking, Callie?
For once Hannah couldn’t tell.

“He has a car and a gun,” Hannah pointed out. “Well, more than one gun. He’s twice our size. He knows where we are. On a map, I mean. I don’t really see what kind of meaningful
statement
we can make. Or why we would want to. Unless you know something I don’t.”

“You don’t understand anything,” Callie said. Sometimes it seemed to Hannah that they exaggerated their personality differences to make sure that they didn’t turn into each other. Sometimes it seemed to be happening anyway: Hannah becoming Callie; Callie becoming Hannah. It was what Hannah wanted: to be like Callie, to be brash and bold, to get her way.

So Callie, part-Hannah herself, knew all along that Hannah would help with her plan, even if neither of them was able to be honest about what it was that they were doing and why.

Anyone who’s ever watched a movie or read a book knows how to make a rope out of bedsheets if it becomes necessary to plot an escape. Typically you use your own sheets because that’s all you have, but Hannah and Callie were lucky enough to find old threadbare sheets in the storage room. They prepared their materials when he went out, ears alert for the sound of his car approaching. The sheets tore easily; teeth worked as well as scissors. Adding each ragged ribbon to their growing pile, they shredded until all of the sheets had been reduced to perfect tatters. The repetitive shriek of splitting fabric was strangely gratifying, the dusty afternoon hush of the cabin heavier than ever, afterward. They stashed the evidence of their labor under Callie’s bed. From then on, the noisy part of the project behind them, they dared to work in the dark, on the floor of their room, when they were supposed to be sleeping. At intervals they paused, ears straining, to make sure he hadn’t slipped quietly in from the porch, wasn’t mounting the stairs, listening outside their door. Later it chilled them to realize that he must have done one or all of those things, unbeknownst to them; they were never in nearly as much control as they imagined. But at the time they thought they were working in absolute secrecy. Speaking only in whispers, they tied the bed-length strips together, end to end, to make triple-length ropes. Once they’d made three of these they braided them tightly. Then they made another just like it and tied the lengths together as firmly as they could. The rope they ended up with was longer than it needed to be. They knew that because they tested it one night, saw it puddle on the ground as they let it out. It didn’t even look all that strong. But then it wasn’t as if they needed to escape from a tower. Their rope needed to do no more than lower them from the second floor of a rather squat hunting lodge. They probably could have
jumped
from their window without serious damage, had it come to that. But that was never the point. Especially, they told themselves, since they never actually planned to escape.

The likelihood that their rope would never be put to use didn’t stop them from crouching on the cool floor for three nights running, ghostly pale in their storybook nightgowns, working as efficiently as they could. They’d both start if they heard an owl or a bat. Every now and then they would whisper about strategy or argue about the design. “Pull harder,” Hannah would hiss, as they tested two sheets they had fastened together. “Tie one more knot if you’re worried,” Callie would whisper back. The old sheets they had found all had patterns—flowers, stripes, birds—and they were every color imaginable. Had they seen their creation in the daylight, it would have been garish, absurd: a rope fit for a circus. But in the dark, the colors faded to indistinct shades of gray, as if they had braided gloomy shadows into it, or dipped each section in blood. In the dark it looked serious: serious enough to satisfy them, and to make them uneasy.

When they had tied the last knot, tested it as well as they could, and declared it complete, they coiled up the rope and hid it under Callie’s bed, which was the one nearer to the window. They tied one end around one of the metal legs as securely as they could.

It was ready to go. “Just in case,” Callie said—for the first time—and Hannah nodded, solemnly.
In case of what?

In the days that followed they conferred sometimes about what to do with the rope—how to make their statement, whatever that statement was to be: That they could have left whenever they wanted, but had chosen not to? That he could trust them? They couldn’t decide, and so they postponed any action, growing accustomed to its presence, curled beneath Callie’s bed. Secretly they were relieved to have absolved themselves, at least for the time being, of the need to act.

A week or so later, they heard something thud against their window late one night. They were already asleep, but both sprang awake. “What was that?” Callie demanded, sitting up.

“Something hit our window,” Hannah said, her voice unsteady. “It sounded like someone threw it.”

Callie swung her bare feet to the floor, ran for the window. “Be careful,” Hannah said lamely, and then followed her.

They stood looking down onto the dark grass for a minute before they noticed anything. Then, as they watched, a tiny pinpoint of light they had disregarded at first—dew catching the moonlight, they had thought, if they thought anything at all—suddenly flared up and began to spread in a widening spiral, growing taller and angrier as it raced. At last it burst into a bonfire and burned furiously for a few minutes more.
He must have used gasoline or something
, Hannah thought, as blue and green flames flashed out from the hot core.
To make it burn so fast and so bright.

And then it died, leaving a big glowing spiral on the lawn.

They checked the leg of Callie’s bed where the end of the rope had been tied. They weren’t at all surprised to find that it was gone.

They never spoke of what they had seen, not to Zed, and he didn’t mention it the following day or ever. They had made their statement; he had made his. One more indecipherable clue.

*   *   *

What they liked best were the nights when he allowed them to go outside in the dark—not only because they craved fresh air and the chance to stretch their legs, run at full speed, touch the grass, but because this reckless permissiveness struck them as evidence that he knew them, that he understood that they would find magic in the woods despite the mosquitoes and the damp, that he trusted them to see what he saw, love what he loved. And not to run. One night they lay outside on the mossy ground and looked up at the sky. The stars were outrageously thick and deep. This impressed Hannah more than it did Callie, who claimed that they were pretty much the same in Arrow, Nebraska, and had never done anybody much good. “Who ever said the stars were supposed to
do
anything?” Hannah demanded.

“Girls,” Zed said softly, lying between them—not very close. Not touching or even close to touching. The three were well spaced out on the grass, each laying claim to a private territory. “Shush. Don’t fight. Just look.” It wasn’t like a movie; he didn’t name constellations for them or offer pseudophilosophical pronouncements about life or human irrelevance. They just looked and drifted.

For a while they were quiet. The stars got deeper the longer they looked. But even with Zed’s body disturbingly between them, Hannah could eventually feel Callie getting bored and restless, so although Zed jumped a little when she next spoke, Hannah was expecting it.

“Zed, do you have any kids?” she asked abruptly.

Hannah thought she could feel him almost vibrating; he was furious, she thought, or else very sad, grief-ridden. She would have bet on anger.