Pretty Is (28 page)

“No,” I manage to say. “You’re sick. You have no way of knowing what he intended. He never meant to
do
anything. The plan was perfect.” I am trying to think ahead, to figure out where he’s going with this. I have no idea. I don’t believe Zed lost his nerve, but at the same time a bolt of curiosity cuts through my fear.

“No, you have to know better than that.” He has never sounded so confident, so self-assured. I keep my eye on the knife; he continues to hold it lightly, grubby nails visible in the bluish light. “But here’s my other theory. You’ll like this one even better. I actually got the idea from one of your bullshit stories. See, you’re also fucked-up, Professor Lonsdale. I bet that actress is, too. And here’s what I think: it’s all
because
he didn’t do anything. Because he was a crappy kidnapper. You know what you really needed?” I hear frogs in the shallow river down below. A car, too far away. A barking dog on the other side of town. I can’t see his eyes, just two black holes in his face, but I can’t stop trying to find them. He leans forward, his face way too close to mine. “To be marked,” he whispers. “You got away too easy, too clean. The mark is only in your fucked-up head. Like when you told me the other girl had carved his chest with a knife one night, that was a good idea, except you should have made him carve her, too. Otherwise, it’s like—unbalanced. You guys needed something to show for all that weirdness, something permanent. Something real, something to hold on to. That’s my theory. And that’s why I brought you this. It’s not too late. You can do it yourself.” He holds the knife out. Offering it to me.

I want to say I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I do. A crazy vision of what he’s thinking flashes through my mind: I see myself taking the knife firmly in my hand and slashing it across—what? My thigh, perhaps, through my jeans. I see him watching while the blood gushes forth; I feel the pain, perfect and blinding.

Am I reaching out my hand?

Light flits across his body again, brighter this time, too bright to be headlights belonging to a car on the nearest street, and I realize that what’s actually blinding is a flashlight shining in my face. It can’t be far away. That’s when I finally scream, my voice surprisingly clear and strong, echoing off the banks of the river. I clasp my hands together and bring them up sharply under Sean’s, knocking the knife away. It lands near my feet and I kick it; it goes skittering across the bridge and then sails into the dark. I don’t even hear a splash. My leg actually hurts from the imaginary gash. Sean is reaching for me, I’m sure he is, when a deep voice calls out: “Hey! You little bastard! Get away from her!” I see Sean’s eyes widen, and then within a second he turns and flees across the footbridge, away from the voice. He runs awkwardly, but he’s surprisingly fleet. “You’re a fucking nutcase, Professor Lonsdale! And you know I’m right!” he yells, not looking back.

I spin around, and a dark shape moves swiftly toward me. “Lois!” The shape is calling to me in Brad’s voice, is wearing Brad’s jacket, brandishing a large flashlight. “Lois! Are you all right?” No, I’m not. But I am outrageously relieved to see him. Habit compels me to conceal my gladness, though, to show no weakness. It’s annoying, after all, to need rescuing.
Again
.

“I’m fine,” I say, and although my voice sounds reasonably calm my knees buckle, and I reach out and clutch the guardrail, bracing myself against cold, hard metal. I reassemble my scattered mind, my wits. I’m Dr. Lois Lonsdale, perfectly reasonable woman, respectable professional, successful author.
Not crazy.
I reach in my mind for a soothing string of
C
words, and they don’t come. There’s blank space where my words are supposed to be, like the distance between the swaying footbridge and the cold river below. A space you could fall through.

“That was Sean, right? Was that a
knife
he was holding?” Brad sounds both incredulous and angry. “Have you lost your fucking mind?” I don’t say anything. That tone of voice, I tell myself, grasping at indignation, doesn’t deserve an answer.
Not crazy
.

“Come on,” he orders, reaching for my arm and pulling me along. I go readily enough. He passes my car and guides me to his, not very gently. “You can pick yours up tomorrow.” He’s not asking, and I don’t bother to object. Suddenly I feel as if something inside of me has collapsed, some elaborate, delicate structure has come crashing down. “Fucking nutcase is right,” he says, starting the car. “I won’t argue with that.” And he doesn’t say much else until he escorts me into my apartment, makes me a drink, and sends me to bed. “We’ll call the cops tomorrow,” he says, and I save my arguments for later, though of course that can’t be allowed to happen. This is between me and Sean—and Zed, and Carly May.

I don’t even thank him.

Chloe

I veer east and head for Nebraska. I don’t think about why I’m going or what I expect to find or what I plan to do when I get there. I don’t even think about Daddy, and I sure as hell don’t let myself think about Gail. I stop only for gas and cheap truck-stop food and feel like Carly May again, like the passing miles are erasing time, year by year, dragging me backward. It’s not a feeling I like much. But I have to go. There’s never any question of not going.

Lois

One day that summer, Zed burst into our room with a big dictionary open in his arms. “I have a good one for you, Lois,” he announced. I had already learned to be wary; I knew he did not approve of my spelling. It was pure memorization, requiring no critical thought or creativity, he charged—nothing more than a game. A waste of time, like Carly’s pageants. But now the ground seemed to have shifted; he was full of a strange energy. Still, I expected a trap. “
Syzygy.
Can you spell that, my little monkey? Come on, spell it like you’re on stage.”

“Syzygy,” I said, and I could hear the trepidation in my own voice, although I knew the word. “
S-y-z-y-g-y. Syzygy.
” The word had pleased me when I found it, its oddity curiously balanced by its symmetry, its visual spikiness counteracted by its lilting rhythm. But it is also a word all serious spellers know, a spellingbee staple.

“And what,” he asked quietly, “does this word
syzygy
mean?”

I shook my head, looked down, ashamed because it was clear that I should be.

“Who cares?” Carly interrupted, in a brash attempt to draw his attention away from me. He shot her one of his rare scathing glances. Even though she was defending me, something in me was glad to see that she, too, could lose his favor.

He slammed the dictionary shut and tossed it at me; it landed on the floor beside me with a thud. “Look it up,” he said, and strode from the room.

Syzygy
is a complicated word. It can refer to the alignment of three celestial bodies: the sun, the earth, and the moon, for instance. Or it can refer to any two points in the orbit of any celestial body (planet, moon, whatever) where the object is
either
in opposition to or in conjunction with the sun. Or it can refer to any
two
related things—and these things may be either alike or opposite; each thing retains its own individual characteristics within this relationship. Or, in poetry, it can refer to two feet in a single metrical unit. All of these possibilities taxed my very limited, sixth-grade understanding of both astronomy and prosody. Etymologically, I noted that
syzygy
comes from a Greek word referring to the yoking of two oxen; this at least I could visualize. The definitions seemed not so much simply disparate as downright contradictory.
Syzygy
is a relationship between two things or a relationship between three things. It implies things that are alike or things that are opposite. It involves the solar system or poetry or oxen.

Zed returned later for a report, as I had known he would. I was more nervous than I had ever been at school, but there was no need, in the end: his mood had softened. “We’ll concern ourselves only with the astronomical application,” he began, sounding teacherly. “Let’s say that I am the sun.” He positioned himself in the middle of the floor of our room and signaled us to rise. “You are the earth, Carly, and Lois, you’re the moon. Now you know of course that the earth revolves around the sun. Revolve,” he commanded Carly. “And the moon of course revolves around the earth. That’s you, Lois.”

We revolved. The room was really too small for three celestial bodies; we tended to collide, and soon we were laughing. “Pay attention,” he admonished. “Stop, both of you, when you find that all three of us are in a straight line.” Within a few seconds this more or less occurred, and we halted abruptly. I had ended up in the middle, with the sun on one side and the earth on the other. “Syzygy,” he proclaimed. “And since the sun and moon are on the same side of the earth, they are considered to be in conjunction. Now, resume orbiting.”

He stopped us again when Carly, the earth, was in the middle, and he stood on one side of her and I, the moon, on the other. “Syzygy again. But this time the sun and the moon are in opposition. This is the full moon. During conjunction, the moon is new. Either way, this is when the tides are strongest; the gravitational pull of the sun and moon work together. Understand?” We nodded.

“Well, then,” he said to me, nodding as if he felt that something had been settled. And he left. We tumbled to the floor from our orbits and regarded each other in silence for a moment as our laughter died away. It was Carly who spoke first, looking at the door through which he had vanished. “He’s crazy, isn’t he,” she said slowly.

“Bats in the belfry,” I agreed. It was an expression I had heard my father use. “But … not in a bad way, exactly?”

Carly looked thoughtful.

I imagine the word
syzygy
has never been used so much in conversation as it was in our odd little household that summer. To me, it had acquired yet another level of resonance from our performance of it, and it had less to do with the alignment of celestial bodies than with the shifting relationship between the three of us—sometimes aligned and sometimes not; in conjunction or opposition. Both of us orbiting him; me circling Carly circling him. Eclipses, tides. They could all be understood in terms of syzygy—or its absence.

Later, we became two related objects, not three. Locked in some sort of orbit, I am tempted to say. Or yoked: forever bound, against our will. There is an explanation I came across once, written by someone who was attempting to resolve the seeming contradictions in the word’s meaning, the apparent confusion between two objects and three. In science, he said, the identification of two aligned objects necessarily implies a third: the investigator or observer. This, too, seems rife with interpretive possibilities. Who’s the observer here? Then or now?

*   *   *

One morning near the end of the semester I awake with the cabin fresh in my mind; I dreamed it again. I pad into the kitchen in my L. L. Bean slipper socks, last year’s Christmas present from my parents. I make strong coffee; I empty the dishwasher. But really I am walking barefoot across the rough wooden floors of an Adirondack hunting lodge. The floorboards are warmer in the places where the speckled sun has forced itself through the overhanging branches of the trees that surround us. I am afraid.

My dreams have always insisted upon the fear I don’t remember feeling at the time.

I call Brad and belatedly thank him for rescuing me, if that’s what he did. I cannot think about the night on the bridge. Sean sent me a copy of a document purporting to be his birth certificate, indicating that he was born in Greene, New York, to Patsy and William McDougal. Which proves what, exactly? I recycled it. Brad is angry with me for refusing to go to the police. He demanded an explanation, and I refused. My desire to confess to him has vanished. For now I’ll keep my story to myself. My stories. There’s strength in that, and safety.

Nutcase: Nameko, neginoth, norgestrel, nagami, ninjutsu. Nacreous, nobelium, nonuple. Nilpotent. Niqab. Nemesis.

My words are back.

Part Four

Chloe

You could say I treated my father badly. You could say it was shitty to go off and leave him like that, never bother to write or call. Maybe it’s fucked-up that I call him Daddy in one breath and then in the next admit that I haven’t seen him in over ten years. All I can say is this: he abandoned me first. I was just a kid. And if he had ever wanted to find me, it wouldn’t have been that fucking hard.

I’m driving. Trying to think and trying not to think.

Lois

He only meant to help me. It was an offering. Misguided but genuine. Not a threat. He knew I wouldn’t take his suggestion—wouldn’t mark myself, as he called it. It was a test, and I passed. I believe this, mostly. It was my fault. It doesn’t matter. He is not who I thought he was. Just a troubled student. I never want to see him again.
I’m not crazy
. I’m moving on. I find it hard to leave my apartment, though, and I can’t face going to campus. Brad administers my final exams for me and brings me stacks of papers to grade; he is reluctant to leave me alone. I grow accustomed to his watchful presence. I am not good company, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

One evening we are sitting side by side on my couch, grading papers in what I think is companionable silence, when I notice that it’s been a while since I heard the steady scratch of Brad’s pen. I glance sideways, wondering if he’s dozed off midessay, and am startled to catch him watching me intently. Surprised into looking directly back at him, I realize how seldom I really do look straight at Brad. His dark blue eyes are too serious, too intense. I turn my attention back to the paper in my lap, but it’s too late. Brad reaches out and touches my hair—terribly gently, like the slightest of breezes. Then his hand moves from my hair to my chin, pulling my face back to meet his. “Lois,” he begins, the very word a blow. I brace myself for what I know is next. “I’m so worried about you. You have no idea how much I care about you. Let’s just get out of here, let me take you somewhere, let’s…”