Pretty Is (39 page)
Authors: Maggie Mitchell
“I heard him coming,” Lois explains to me, squeezing Billy’s hand. “In case you were thinking I was completely insane.” She grips the broad arms of her chair and pushes herself up to standing. “These are wrong, aren’t they?” she says, looking down at the chairs. “It’s not like my book at all. Ours were nicer.”
Lois
It feels like forever until we’re in my rental car and I’m driving back to the inn, after the police and the parents and the endless questions. In the rearview mirror I see the faintest glow in the sky behind us—not the sunrise but its promise.
“The police will be coming for us,” I’d said as I stepped off the porch, like stepping off that other porch so long ago. “For Sean,” I corrected myself, though no one seemed to have been listening to me. They hauled Sean away, and I was glad. But what would he do with the scripts I’d so recklessly fed him, blindly driven by my own inarticulate ghosts?
Ghosts: Grafology, gemelliparous, galanty. Gegenschein, gilderoy, gorsoon.
Beside me, Carly leans back, lets her head roll to the side, mouth hanging slightly open. Chloe, I mean. She would hate to be seen this way, but I am reassured by her vulnerability, by her unprettiness, however fleeting. (
Unprettiness: Not a word. Ughten, uvelloid, unberufen. Upaithric.
)
You are the sun …
We’ve been orbiting an absence, a mystery, an unnamed threat, Chloe and I. I don’t think it’s a mistake, the movie that begins filming tomorrow—this oblique, fictional reenactment of our past. Once we’ve collapsed the past and the present, the truth and the fictions, we will peel the layers apart, organize the pieces, and put ourselves back together. More or less.
Chloe stirs. She isn’t sleeping, after all. She turns her head away from me, toward the window, and in the still dark car, lit only by the dashboard controls, I already feel the weight of whatever she’s about to say.
“Would he have hurt us eventually?” she asks quietly, her voice almost without inflection, making the words as neutral as words can ever be. “Do you think? Killed us, I mean?”
Although she could mean Sean, I know she doesn’t. She means Zed. It has taken us a long time to ask that question aloud; almost twenty years. But I find that I don’t even have to think about the answer.
“He would have had to, wouldn’t he? Because what he wanted was impossible. He would have had to kill us to keep us. Like ‘Porphyria’s Lover.’ He gave that to us to read, remember? The man who strangles his lover with her own hair?” I shiver. “‘
And all night long we have not stirred
…’”
“What did he want? I’m guessing you think you have that figured out?”
I don’t like the bitterness that has crept into her voice, but I understand it.
“He was lonely? He was bored? The world disappointed him? He feared female sexuality? He wanted to save his sister; he wanted to keep us pure because he couldn’t protect her. He loved—”
“No, God, stop,” Chloe says. “I take it back. I don’t want to put it into words. It’s better without words. I don’t mean you’re wrong, it’s just—”
“I know. Exactly. Better not to say.” I know that is what she wants to hear. But I’ll never believe it. I think the words are necessary. Why else did I write the book, after all?
“I still don’t think he
meant
to hurt us, though,” Chloe pushes on, not able to let it drop.
“Well, not in the way that he did.” I slow for a small dark animal crossing the road. A raccoon; the headlights catch its eyes. “I don’t think he had really thought very much about how
we
would feel. He was thinking about himself. He was quite selfish, in a way.” We’ve never criticized him before, not out loud. We both laugh uncomfortably at the absurdity of suggesting that a kidnapper of young girls might—just might—have been a little selfish.
“Yeah,” Chloe echoes, “just a little selfish. He never
meant
to break our hearts.”
“Never.” Because we didn’t escape injury, after all: we were far from unscathed. Our frail, ridiculous, twelve-year-old hearts. Some things you can’t put back together again, ever.
The woods rise darkly on either side of the road. I remind myself yet again that they are not our woods. Their secrets have nothing to do with us. The stars are the same, but as morning nears, they’re fading.
Stars: sacring, scelestic, scialytic, scintillescent, scripturient, soliform, somniate.
Yes, Zed, I know what these words mean
. Sacring:
consecration
. Scelestic:
wicked
. Scialytic:
banishing shadows
. Scintillescent:
twinkling, obviously. Like stars
. Scripturient
, a good one: possessing a violent urge to write.
Soliform:
like a sun, sunlike
. Somniate:
to dream
. Syzygy
.
It’s not hard to wrest meaning from those words.
M
AGGIE
M
ITCHELL
has published short fiction in a number of literary magazines, including the
New Ohio Review, American Literary Review
, and
Green Mountains Review.
Originally from upstate New York, she now lives in Georgia with her husband and cats. This is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
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CONTENTS
P
RETTY
I
S.
Copyright © 2015 by Maggie Mitchell. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10010.
Cover photos: forest © Debra Fedchin/Arcangel Images; cabin © Giorgio Fochesato/Getty Images; girl (left) © Jacob Sjoman Svensson/Getty Images; girl (right) © Hans Neleman/Getty Images
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Mitchell, Maggie.
Pretty is: a novel / Maggie Mitchell.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62779-148-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62779-149-6 (electronic book) 1. Kidnapping victims—Fiction. 2. Women college teachers—Fiction. 3. Actresses—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.I8585P84 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014044393
e-ISBN 978-1-62779-149-6
First Edition: July 2015
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.