Pretty Is (8 page)

We, however, like things the way they are. Or I do, anyway, which seems to be what matters. There were boys in college who swore it was okay to be just friends but whose hands were always straying where they didn’t belong, whose faces brushed mine in accidental kisses, who eventually implored me to tell them what was wrong, why I didn’t like them
that way.
Or who simply turned on me, in the end. I am truly grateful for Brad.

I considered visiting my parents over break; I didn’t go at Christmas, and it’s time. It’s not that far: a morning’s drive. But I told my mother I had to finish my revisions to
Kidnapped: Child Abduction in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel
in time for a January deadline, which wasn’t true: I already submitted the revisions; the book is in production or will be soon. I didn’t go because I didn’t want to. “We’ll miss you,” my mother said on the phone, but I didn’t believe her in the least. At such moments I always feel as if she is speaking from a mother-script, merely saying what she thinks she ought to say.

Just before I hung up, I thought I heard something at the other end—a little catch, maybe of breath, maybe not even anything that tangible. For a second only, I entertained the possibility that my mother had been about to say something else; something that veered from the script.

But by then she was gone, and upon further reflection, it seemed unlikely.

*   *   *

After I was returned to them, my parents actually became more distant. You might expect the opposite—that, suddenly conscious of years of benign neglect, they clung to me, found true joy in my presence. But no. They seemed a little afraid of me, in ways I couldn’t understand then and have been trying to forgive ever since. When I find myself avoiding them, I remind myself of this.

My parents and Carly May’s had little in common, but one thing they agreed upon was that she and I should have as little contact as possible. We would remind each other of what had happened, they insisted; we would encourage each other to dwell in the past. Whatever damage we had sustained would somehow increase exponentially if they permitted us to communicate. My mother was especially adamant about this, and Gail and the fathers were easily persuaded. My first therapist gently suggested to my mother that carefully regulated correspondence might actually help us work through what she called our “trauma,” but Miranda rejected such advice. “Lois needs to move on,” she said firmly, as if it were that easy. I think she meant that
she
needed to move on. The very idea of Carly May upset her; I think my mother even blamed her a little. Perhaps Carly’s parents felt the same about me. I can imagine the appeal of making the
other
girl the complicit one, the one who thwarted escape, the one who was dangerously susceptible to the kidnapper’s spell. In any case, geographically, our estrangement was easy enough to enforce; we could hardly sneak out our back doors and meet covertly in the woods, and cell phones had not yet made distance irrelevant. But putting the past behind you isn’t like stuffing something in the back of a drawer or trimming a loose thread. The past has a life of its own. I think if they could have cut us off from it entirely, we would not have survived. That sounds a bit overwrought, I know, but I believe it is true. What had happened was part of us. We couldn’t just lop it off like a gangrenous limb. We needed to acknowledge it, examine it, turn it over and let it catch the light at different angles. We had no idea what it meant—and yet we, and everyone else, seemed to take for granted that it
did
mean something. They just didn’t want to talk about it.

So in the beginning we surreptitiously posted a few awkward letters; we snuck a couple of phone calls. We did our best to narrate to each other something true about those few strange weeks, after which we were not quite the same people as we had been, or would have been. I am still not the person I would have been, although I sense that person like a shadow. I’m not sure what she would have been like. There is no knowing. I suppose it’s possible that Carly wrote more letters than I received, and vice versa; it would have been simple enough for vigilant parents to intercept letters with telltale postmarks. Phone calls showed up on bills and led to recriminations. The few stilted words we did manage to exchange weren’t nearly enough. We needed more space and time to even begin to figure out what to say—what could be said, what needed saying. Could we have met in person, it might have been different; we might have preserved our connection, some trace of our cabin in the woods. But disembodied words were insufficient, perhaps even worse than nothing. After a while there was silence, and I only talked to Carly May inside my head.

It was when my parents came to pick me up that I knew how irrevocably I had changed. Carly and I had been swept from the lodge—the crime scene—and deposited at a tiny jail, where no one seemed entirely sure what to do with us except offer us food and assure us that our parents were on their way. Carly May had blood on her clothes, and a young policeman who seemed shy in our presence brought her some adult-sized jeans and a T-shirt that made her look like a scarecrow. (Later the police claimed my dress, too. It was evidence, they said.) I was struck by how pale we were, compared to everyone else. We had not been out in the sun for weeks. We looked like a slightly different species—related to normal humans but distinctly different. A man who identified himself as a detective asked us a few questions—What are your names? Are you hurt?—but my father insisted to the police on the phone that I not be questioned further until he arrived, and consulted a lawyer about my rights. We were numb, anyway; we had little to say. We were whisked away to a nearby hospital and subjected to extremely thorough medical exams—as if the truth might be found inside us; as if we might contain evidence that needed to be excavated; as if we were hiding something. That experience remains unspeakable. Eventually the policewoman who had accompanied us to the examination room took us home to her apartment
,
where we sat on her couch and watched TV. We hadn’t seen TV for a month and a half, of course, but something about its familiar irrelevance calmed us like a drug. We stared vacantly at the absurd figures on the screen until we fell asleep, side by side on the couch, collapsed against each other.

The nice cop woke me when my parents arrived, and I still remember the few beautifully blank seconds before the gunshot went off in my head again, and I understood where I was and where I wasn’t; the day rushed back in. My parents’ faces loomed over me—Mom’s somehow scattered, as if it had been taken apart and then haphazardly patched back together; Dad’s angry and hard but with fear showing through the cracks. They could not sit on the couch because Carly was sprawled out beside me; instead, awkwardly, they reached their thin, tanned arms out to me, inviting me to stand and be embraced. Which I did, automatically; but I found no comfort. Their arms felt insubstantial, their eyes held too many questions I knew they’d never be able to ask, their fear was wordless and stiff. “I’m fine,” I heard myself reassuring them. “I’m fine, I am, really I’m fine.” And a dark space opened up between us as they searched me for clues, their faces imploring, and I could only look implacably, impenetrably back.

“Oh Lois,” they kept saying. “Little Lois.” My mother even whispered “my baby” at one point, with uncharacteristic sentiment. I did not think she had ever called me her baby before, except perhaps when I truly was one. But I was not their baby. I was not even Lois, exactly. My parents looked like kindly, helpless strangers. I don’t know what I looked like to them, but whatever I saw on their faces didn’t look like recognition.

After that they took me to a motel, where I stayed with my mother while my father talked to the police. I told my mother I was too tired to talk, and persuaded her to let me lie on one of the double beds and watch more TV. I asked her to close the curtains so I couldn’t see the jagged mountains that surrounded us. She sat in a puffy orange vinyl chair by the window and watched me while I drifted off to sleep again, television voices chattering in the background. Sleep seemed the only comfort available. I tried to will myself to dream of nights at the lodge, playing hide-and-seek in the dewy grass, surrounded by fireflies and stars, but I did not dream at all.

What a strange situation, though surely it’s not uncommon: a serious crime had been committed, perhaps multiple crimes, but the perpetrator of the crimes had been removed from the equation. There was no one to try, convict, punish. My parents wanted simply to take me home, but apparently there were procedures that had to be followed, steps that required our presence. We were evidence, after all. We were what remained. And I was not ready to leave Carly, though her father and Gail were also anxious to get her out of there. Reporters clustered outside the police station and flung questions at us as we hurried to and from our parents’ rental cars; they hovered outside our motel rooms, desperate for a glimpse of our well-known faces, a word or two to spice up the news. Gail and Carly appeared on a local talk show, much to my parents’ disgust; I wasn’t allowed to watch it. After that her father put his foot down, and Gail sulked. Her defense was that other girls needed to hear our story in order to protect themselves from danger. “I won’t have my daughter exploited by these vultures,” Carly May’s father said, taking what Carly May assured me was a rare stand, and that was that. I must have received similar offers, but my parents never mentioned it. “That woman is unspeakable,” my mother said of Gail, and my father patted her tanned knee in mute agreement. They would have liked to have nothing at all to do with Gail, but complete avoidance was out of the question. We crossed paths with the Smiths at the police station often enough—at least in passing; generally, Carly and I were questioned separately.

She and I tried to plot seemingly chance encounters. Once we even persuaded our families to have dinner together; we went to an outdoor hot dog stand that claimed to be famous, where I watched my mother shrinking from the crowds of vacationers as if she had developed a fear of strangers. My parents and Carly May’s settled down at a picnic table. I can still feel the hot, splintery wood pressing into the backs of my thighs; I can see the wasp that wanted to drown in my lemonade. Carly sat across from me wearing a Whiteface Mountain T-shirt, tight and cropped, revealing a strip of untanned skin, her hair in a ponytail, a touch of lip gloss making her shiny and a little distant. The world was already reclaiming her, I realized, panicking, afraid of being left alone.

But then Gail made a stupid remark about Officer Hilton, the woman who had taken us in on the first day. “It’s not just the short hair,” she insisted. “It’s something about her, you know? I think you can just tell, personally. I have to say I’m a little surprised they let the girls go home with her.” My mother gazed stonily at Gail while our fathers, embarrassed, looked toward the sharp mountain peaks. Under the table, Carly gave me a sharp kick in the shin with her pointed bare foot. It was a characteristic Carly-message, familiar from the cabin, and I knew I hadn’t lost her yet.

The dinner did not improve relations between our families. My father and Carly’s might have done all right together, but Gail was too loud, too anxious to assert control, too eager to name what she didn’t understand in order to diminish its power. Beneath her chatter I detected an edge, though, a sharp blade she was ready to wield, and I saw—with the strange clairvoyance I seemed to have possessed since our rescue—that it would be a mistake to underestimate her. In response to Gail, my own mother retreated to the Waspy, New Englandy hoity-toityness that was her all-but-abandoned birthright. She looked down her long, narrow, makeup-free nose at garish, babbling Gail and chilled us all. The fathers ate many hot dogs, commenting occasionally upon the weather or the beauty of the mountains. Carly’s father kept tugging her ponytail—but gently, as if it might come off in his hand. Every now and then she offered him a half smile, one side of her mouth twitching briefly upward, and he visibly relaxed.

I wasn’t ignoring my parents, exactly; that would imply that I was aware of them and pretending otherwise. No, I was trying to register their presence in some emotionally appropriate way. I just couldn’t feel that they were really there.

*   *   *

At last it was settled to everyone’s satisfaction that Carly May and I had told all we could. There were no accomplices to our abduction and no additional victims. We had said this from the beginning; at last they accepted our story. According to the news reports, we had been rescued “just in time”—as if our kidnapper had been brandishing a weapon at us just as the cop cars pulled up.

Finally, the police let us go. Carly and I insisted on being permitted to say good-bye, though our parents wouldn’t leave us alone. We hugged awkwardly, neither of us really being the hugging type, and we tried to think of things we could say in front of our parents that would mean something. We glared at each other, eyes full of secrets and promises.

And so she went back to the farm and back to her pageants, and I returned to the inn. The touched-by-(near-)tragedy inn. A house full of strangers. Home.

*   *   *

My parents sent me to a psychiatrist, of course. It made them feel as if they were doing something, and allowed them to believe that I was on my way to being fixed. At least that’s what I assume they thought: naturally we did not discuss it, or not in those terms. They asked me guarded questions about my sessions, my sense of my progress. Usually I told them what they seemed to want to hear. Sometimes I wished I could be more like Carly, who would, I imagined, have been unafraid to tell the truth, to lash out, to make demands.

I always wished I could be more like Carly May.

Chloe

I didn’t have to do as much work on the farm when I got back. I saw that I probably had a pretty brief window where I could bargain, and I totally milked it. I’d go out in the truck with Daddy sometimes to round up cattle or whatever, but my daily chores were lifted, passed on to my little half brothers. I spent a lot of my time in my room. Sometimes I practiced ballet; I was seriously out of shape after a summer with no lessons, and my legs needed to be retrained to turn out properly. Daddy had mounted a barre along one side of my room and a big mirror along the other, and I did endless pli
é
s until I was strong again. Sometimes I actually did my homework. Otherwise I read trashy novels or scrawled stupid stuff in my diary, mostly about what I planned to do when I finally got the hell out. The diary felt like a Lois thing, although as far as I knew she didn’t even keep one. She was the word girl, though. Scrawling my ugly thoughts on blank pages felt like a way of tapping into Lois’s way of thinking and being.