Pretty Ugly: A Novel (18 page)

And then 9/11 changed everything.

Staring at a perpetual loop of plane crashes and crumbling buildings while catatonic on her sofa, newlywed Miranda had the horrific realization that she would
never
be affected by the tragedy in the same way as the people in New York, Washington, or Pennsylvania. It was the most upsetting and isolating thought she’d had all morning. The greatest disaster of her generation was playing out in front of the world, and she had zero personal connection to it.

“I wish I was there,” she mumbled as CNN played “exclusive” new footage of the second tower falling.
What’s wrong with wanting to be a part of something that changed the world?
she thought.
Shouldn’t every American want that?
Miranda sure did. She wanted to feel the heat of the fires as she ran for her life, her lungs burning from the acrid, polluted air. She wanted to be candidly photographed sitting on a curb, covered in ash, drinking from a bottle of water given to her by a stranger. She wanted to tell her story to CNN. But she didn’t have a story to tell.

So she made one up.

Miranda had been to New York only once, in high school, when her drama club took a theater trip to the city. In five days she attended six Broadway shows:
Phantom of the Opera
(hated it),
Cats
(loved it),
Les Mis
é
rables
(really loved it),
Rent
(didn’t get it), another musical, and a very long, very talky play about some old salesman. Citing the kids’ good behavior and his own desire to see an old college roommate (ex-boyfriend), Miranda’s drama teacher gave everyone three hours to “explore the city” on their own. Bravely ignoring Joan’s concerns about “vagrants and sex perverts” traveling beneath the city, Miranda and her friends boarded the subway with a confidence that rivaled that of actual New Yorkers, and made their way down town to the World Trade Center.

“The observatory was on the hundred and seventh floor of the South Tower,” Miranda said, “and I remember, when I got off the elevator, I just froze. Everything was so quiet. It was like being in church, or on a spaceship. It felt so peaceful and safe. No one said anything. They just shuffled from window to window like they’d gotten concussions from banging their heads on the sky. It was like,
bam!
They were speechless, and they were right to be. I mean, I can’t even describe how amazing the city looked from up there. It was like a model of a city in the window of a massive department store.

“Off to the left was the Statue of Liberty, and when I saw it, for some reason I started thinking about my great-great-great grandfather, who came here from Scotland, and what he must have thought when he saw that for the first time knowing he was about to start a whole new life. How scared he must have been. Then I watched the tiny cars come and go and tried to imagine being one of the millions of people who lived there, what it must feel like to live inside the beating heart of the entire planet, the center of art and culture and music and fashion and food and … life. And then I remember I started to feel very, very small. And before I knew what was happening, I was sitting on the floor, crying.

“Now, I’d always gone to church and believed in God and all that, but I was just a kid, you know? I’d never really thought about what any of it
meant
. But sitting there on the floor of … heaven, basically, and looking out over what seemed a lot like a miracle, my whole life just fell into perspective.” She took a thoughtful pause. “I know this sounds really cheesy, but I think God was waiting for me in the World Trade Center that day. I really do. And that was the first time in my life I truly knew what it meant to
believe
.”

That was the story Miranda told people after 9/11, but very little of it was true. She did go to New York with her high school drama club, and she did see six shows in five days. She did
not,
however, spend her three hours of free time discovering God on the observation deck of the World Trade Center. Instead, Miranda went back to her windowless hotel room at the Milford Plaza and made out with her boyfriend, a lanky theater dork named Dustin Ard.

Since seeing
Cats
their first night, Dustin had not stopped pontificating about how Andrew Lloyd Weber represented “the nadir of contemporary musical theater,” an opinion he’d read in the
Village Voice
and fiercely adopted as his own.

Miranda sat nervously on the edge of the bed while Dustin took off his shirt, revealing a severe—and in Miranda’s opinion, repulsive—farmer’s tan. It was the first time she had seen her new boyfriend shirtless, and a part of her hoped it would be the last. Hairless and smooth, Miranda thought he looked like a mannequin that had been outfitted with a darker mannequin’s limbs. Thank God he was a good kisser. Firm of lip and sparing of tongue, Dustin’s breath was Velamint fresh. Miranda, however, worried her mouth still tasted like Sbarro.

“You smell good,” she whispered so as not to break the spell.

“Thanks. Some guy was selling actual bottles of Polo on the sidewalk for, like, five bucks. I got six of them. This city is incredible.”

Miranda managed a noncommittal shrug, “Yeah. It’s cool. It’s so big and loud, though, don’t you think? I mean, I’m having an awesome time. But I’ll be happy to go home tomorrow.”

“Yeah. I just wish we had theater like this in Owensboro. I mean, is there anything more exciting than the unpredictability of live theater?”

Miranda didn’t respond. She wanted to kiss some more but didn’t want to seem slutty.

More interested in his own voice than the horny teenage girl lying next to him, Dustin rolled onto his back and regurgitated other more informed people’s analyses of the shows they’d seen that week.

“Obviously,
Les Miz
has the source material of Hugo’s book to back it up, and I suppose the same could be said for
Cats
and
Phantom
.” (Dustin referred to
The Phantom of the Opera
simply as
Phantom.
It bugged her.) “But what
Les Miz
has on its side is
history
. The French Revolution
really
happened, you know? And that’s what makes it true, and truth is what makes good art, and that’s why it is a superior show.
Rent,
on the other hand, is also truthful, but it’s a
false
truth…”

Dustin’s speeches felt longer than that old salesman play, so Miranda stuck her tongue deep inside his mouth to shut him up. For ten minutes they ate each other’s faces off, separating only to breathe and wipe slobber from their red, glistening lips. Emboldened by his seminakedness and her unexpected aggression, Dustin made his move. Skipping second base entirely—an area he had only recently been granted very limited access to—he lifted her skirt and attempted a daring head-first slide into third.

“Oh, my God! What are you doing?!” Miranda shot up off the bed.

Through the dim light of the room Miranda saw Dustin’s pale, delicate chest flush red.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “We’re in New York, so I thought maybe—”

“Who cares where we are? Do you think I’m a different person here or something?” She looked at him, genuinely waiting for an answer. “’Cause I’m not.”

“I know.” His voice was as weak as his frame.

“I can’t believe you would even
want
to do that! It’s so gross. I mean.”—her voice lowered to an almost whisper—“that’s where I go to the bathroom.”

They rarely spoke after that.

The next summer, Dustin and his family moved to Boynton Beach, Florida. A year later, on the night of his high school graduation, he got drunk for the first time in his life and fell out of the back of a pickup truck when the driver swerved to miss a skunk. The former theater enthusiast landed on his head at forty-seven miles per hour. Witnesses said it sounded like a watermelon being dropped from a roof. Vegetative and wheelchair-bound, Dustin now lives in Tampa with his aging parents, who rely on his disability checks to make ends meet.

From the safety of her living room, eight hundred miles away from the chaos, Miranda watched the South Tower collapse again and cursed her immaturity. That wasted afternoon was her most vivid memory, her only real connection to an iconic city that was crumbling before her eyes. She thought about Dustin, his brain too broken to even understand what was happening, and cursed him, too.
For a boy,
she thought.
I gave that up for some stupid boy.

Regret enveloped her like a cloud of ash. What if she
had
gone to the World Trade Center? What would she have seen? Would God have been there, waiting for her? And if so, would that have fundamentally changed her life? Would she be happier now? More content? Less? Or did it even matter? All Miranda could think about was how she had squandered a once-in-alifetime opportunity. She wished that she had seen the world from twelve hundred feet in the air. But more than that, she wished that she had been the kind of person who’d
wanted
to see it. But she wasn’t, and for that she was ashamed. A swirling, sickening emptiness opened up in the pit of Miranda’s stomach, and she immediately wanted to fill it with a baby.

“Turn this off,” she said to Ray, who had become hypnotized by the endless repetition on the screen. He hit Mute and she laid her head in his lap. Starting with what she could truthfully remember—minus Dustin, of course—Miranda told her new husband about the drama club trip: the musicals, the restaurants, the homeless man who tried to sell Steve Quisenberry Ecstasy, Sbarro. And without so much as a stutter, she segued into the first version of her make-believe New York story, a story she would craft like topiary over the following year. Ray sat quietly and stroked his bride’s hair, offering nothing but his full attention. When she was finished, Miranda looked up at her husband.

“I’m glad I chose you.”

He smiled. “Me, too.”

“I want a baby, Ray. I want us to make a baby right now.”

It was the most unexpected thing that had happened all day.

“A baby,” he said, with an oddly encompassing inflection that made his response sound like a question, an answer, and a surrender. “But”—he gestured to the chaos on TV—“the world’s falling apart.”

“I know,” she said. “But maybe our kid will have the answer.”

Ray didn’t know what to say. What is the appropriate response when your wife proposes conceiving the Messiah? Then again, what if she was right? Stranger things have happened. He looked back at the TV just in time to see new footage of someone leaping from the burning tower.

“Let’s have a baby, Ray.”

“Really?”

“I think so, yeah, really.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

And without another word, Ray and Miranda Miller made a daughter on their couch while the world burned on TV behind them.

*   *   *

Conceiving a baby on September 11 was one thing, but having one was something else entirely. By ten fifteen, Miranda’s contractions had all but stopped and she was starting to worry. Her OB-GYN, Dr. Larry Fales—a doughy middle-aged man with thinning anchorman hair and body odor—had ruled out a C-section.

“Having a baby is the most natural thing in the world.” He smiled warmly. “Women have been doing it since the dawn of time. Brixton is not in distress. Her heart rate is strong. She’s just not ready to come out yet. Now, I pride myself on listening to mothers, and that’s what I’m going to do right now. I’m going to listen to Mother
Nature
.” He smiled and gave Miranda a wink that she felt was too familiar under the circumstances. “Now, just relax and think about what you’re going to say to your new daughter. I’ll be back in a little while to check on you.”

“Fucking hippie,” Miranda mumbled as he trotted out of the room.

“He’s delivered thousands of babies, dear,” Joan calmly scolded her. “It is possible he knows more about this than you do. Here.” She popped opened a can of room-temperature store-brand diet soda and snatched the bendy straw from the unwanted Styrofoam cup of water. “Drink this. It’ll relax you.”

Miranda took a sip and recoiled. “Uch, it tastes like burnt medicine.”

Joan took a sip and shrugged. “I like it. It was only a quarter at the market.”

Miranda sighed and pushed around on her pelvis, hoping to prod Brixton into descending. “I hate hospitals. Where the hell is Ray? It’s been two hours!”

“I’m sure he just got hung up, dear,” Joan said in her most mothering voice. “There’s a lot to deal with when someone dies.” She flashed back to the moment she discovered Roger’s waterlogged body sitting in the bathtub, eyes wide open, toothbrush sticking straight out of his mouth like a tiny spear. Joan shuddered. She needed to talk to a friend.

“Are you there?” she had to ask in her head so Miranda wouldn’t hear.

I’m always here for you, Joan.

What a friend she had in Jesus. “Of course you are.”

What can I do you for?

“Miranda’s worried she’s not going to have her baby before midnight. Ray’s not here yet and she’s starting to panic. I keep telling her there’s nothing to worry about, but she won’t listen to me. Is there anything you can think of that might calm her down?”

Jesus exhaled.
Hmm. She’s just stressed. It’s a big day. Why don’t you try singing to her? I know how she loves hearing you sing.

Joan smiled. He was right again. “You’re so good.”

Hey, it’s my job.
She felt the glimmer of his smile and went flush.

Clearing her throat, Joan ran her fingers through her daughter’s hair and sang in a full, proud voice.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound—”

Miranda immediately cut her off. “Mom! Not now.”

Joan removed her hand.

Try something a bit more upbeat.

“Sunday, Monday, Happy Days! Tuesday, Wednesday, Happy Days!—”

“Mom! Please. I don’t want to hear any music, okay? I’m not in the mood. I just want Ray to get here so I can have this baby!”