Duckling Ugly (4 page)

Miss Leticia waved her hand. “Don’t you give no mind to the things people say. It’s just a whole lotta quacking from a whole lotta geese.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but what about the things they
do
?”

Miss Leticia didn’t have a quick answer for that one. “All I can say about that is what goes around comes around. You may never get to see it, but those kids who played that evil trick on you today, they will get theirs. And if it’s not in this world, it will be in the next.”

She said it with such certainty, it made me feel better. After that, I began talking about everything, as though a floodgate had opened inside of me. I went on and on about the things people said about me—to my face and behind my back. I told her about how most strangers treated me—as if touching me would somehow make them unclean. I even told her things about my parents that I’d never told anyone. Like how years ago, when my momma was sick, my dad had to take me to work with him. I spent a week with him on the car lots, and that was the week people stopped buying his cars.

“Within a year, all of his lots, except for one, went out of business, and we had to move to a trailer park. We’ve been there
ever since. He never said it out loud, but I know he blames me. He thinks my face cursed his business.”

“Hmm,” said Miss Leticia. “Tell me, is your father an honest salesman?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “His cars are mostly pieces of garbage.”

“Well, then, his business deserved to be cursed.”

I told her about my ink drawings, and the green valley I go to in my mind, where the people don’t seem to notice my face—and how the flowers of her greenhouse reminded me of the gardens I imagine there.

“Tell me, child—do you sleepwalk?”

I hesitated. First, because it was an odd question, and second, because I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to answer. “No,” I finally said.

“All right, then. I had thought that maybe the place you was seeing is real, and maybe it was calling to you. That happens, you know.”

I was going to tell her about the problem I had with mirrors and cameras, but I stopped myself—maybe because I was afraid to hear what she might say.

“You talk about being so ugly,” Miss Leticia said. “I wish I could see you to tell you that you’re not. But all I see these days are shadows, like I’m lookin’ through a shower curtain.”

“That’s all right,” I told her softly. “If you saw me, you probably wouldn’t even let me in here.”

She laughed at that. “Is that how little you think of me?”

I didn’t answer her. I knew now that Miss Leticia was a great soul, but there were some things I didn’t think even a great soul could stand.

“Come here, Cara. I want to show you something.”

Then Miss Leticia took my hand and led me through the greenhouse to a far corner. We pushed our way through a row of dense, lacy ferns to see the strangest growing thing I’d ever seen.

It was a pod, about three feet high, with a fat stalk pushing its way out of the top.

“Now tell me what you think this is,” Miss Leticia said with a smirk.

“I have no idea.”

“It comes from the rain forests of Sumatra. That stalk will grow six feet before it opens up into a flower. Take a deep whiff.”

I did, but all I could smell were the sweet blooms growing elsewhere in the greenhouse.

“I don’t smell it.”

“No, not yet, but you will.” She reached over and gently brushed her hand along the smooth stalk like it was a beloved pet. “I’ve been nursing this one for years, and this is the first time it’s going to bloom. The Titan Arum, it’s called…but some folks call it the Corpse Flower. You know why?”

I shook my head.

“It’s called that,” she told me, “because when it blooms, it smells like the rotting dead.”

I shuddered at the thought. “I guess the cemetery’s the perfect place for it, then,” I said nervously. Why on Earth, with all the wonderful-smelling plants she had, would she choose to grow this thing?

She must have read my mind because she said, “Oh, the scent of roses and gardenias is fine, but everyone needs a break from
all that cloying perfume. Now and again I treasure the scent of something…other.”

I took in another breath, trying to imagine what the flower would smell like once it bloomed, but I guess my imagination wasn’t pungent enough.

“The beautiful and the terrible, the sweet and the rancid—it’s all part of God’s glory and has its reason to be,” Miss Leticia said. “Just like you, Cara.”

Suddenly she grabbed my wrists so tightly I could feel her nails cutting into my skin. “You have a destiny, child,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t.”

Then she looked at me, and I swear she could see me through the deadness of her cataracts. “You came to me in your dark time, confiding in me, and that binds us,” she said. “And so I will make it my business to be there when your destiny comes calling.”

All the way home, I felt the sting of Miss Leticia’s nails. I knew her nail marks would be in my forearms for days—but I didn’t mind.

You have a destiny,
she had said. Those marks were a reminder.

Miss Leticia was weird, but she was wise in a way few people could understand. Whether she knew things or just suspected things, I didn’t know—but then, to a person with intuition, suspicion had to count for something. No one had ever suggested I had a place and a purpose in the world. My parents, who on their best days saw life as an inconvenience, had never—
could
never—make me feel the way Miss Leticia had in the short time I had known her.

It was around 9:30 at night when I climbed back through my
bedroom window. My parents were always respectful of my privacy, so I don’t think they even knew I’d been gone. They probably just thought I’d wallowed myself to sleep—as if self-pity was some kind of narcotic.

Well, okay, maybe I did feel a little sorry for myself, but that never made me want to wallow in misery. It just made me mad. It made me want to do something about it, if only I could find the right thing to do. The
satisfying
thing to do.

I opened my door to the fading smell of fried chicken. Dinner was over, but I knew there would be a plate in the fridge for me. My chicken would have its skin peeled off, because Momma had heard that oily foods make acne worse, so what she serves me always has the flavor and consistency of hospital food.

Mom was in her bedroom, probably reading a self-help book; Vance was in his room listening to music so loud I could hear which song was playing in his earphones; and Dad was in the living room, drinking a beer and watching RetroToob, the cable network devoted completely to old, goofy TV shows he grew up with.

I quietly closed my door again, not hungry for dinner or family time. Instead I turned to face my dresser and played the game I played every night. It’s called Does Cara Have the Nerve? See, there’s this big old mirror attached to my dresser. I’ve never actually looked into it because it’s covered with a sheet, just like most of the other mirrors in our house. I hear in some places it’s a custom to cover mirrors with a sheet when you’re in mourning, and I wonder sometimes if my parents are in mourning for the beautiful daughter they never had. Anyway, my momma won’t let me get rid of the mirror because it’s part of a set. So, just to tick her
off, I glued a bunch of ugly things on the sheet covering the mirror: a baboon’s butt, a dentist’s image of advanced tooth decay, plastic vomit. Momma says I have a twisted sense of humor, but at least I have one.

My heart was racing that night, though, because I thought that this might be the night I win the game. This could be the day I actually defied her, and everyone else in this hateful town, by tempting fate and looking into that mirror.

I took a step closer to the dresser. My conversation with Miss Leticia had made me feel strong, purposeful. That’s a good word, P-U-R-P-O-S-E-F-U-L. Spelling it even made me feel more so. I reached up my hand, and took another step closer.

D-E-T-E-R-M-I-N-E-D.

My words gave me power. They made me feel that I could change the way things had always been. That I could pull off the sheet, look myself in the face, and the mirror would hold the reflection, just like it did for other people. For
normal
people. My fingertips were against the sheet now.

V-I-C-T-O-R-I-O-U-S.

But who was I kidding? I knew what would happen. The mirror would see me and shatter, just like every mirror.

A-G-O-N-I-Z-I-N-G.

And then I would have to explain to Mom and Dad exactly what had possessed me to destroy this lovely piece of furniture.

A-B-O-R-T.

In the end, my courage failed me. My words failed me. I pulled my hand back from the sheet and let it be. The game was lost. Tonight was not the night—but I refused to feel miserable
about it. Mom with her helpless self-help books, and Dad with his TV nostalgia, had misery wallowing down to an art—but I refused to join them…because, as Miss Leticia had said,
I have a destiny.

I just had to figure out what it was.

T
hat night—the night before I received the mysterious letter—I had a dream.

It was a driving dream—I’d had a lot of those since Mom had taught me to drive a few months before. I was behind the wheel of her big old pink Caddie, and we were driving down a highway, heading out of Flock’s Rest.

“Just keep your eyes on your destination,” Mom said, which didn’t make sense, because I couldn’t see my destination, but people don’t talk sense in dreams—especially your parents.

We crossed over the river where Marshall’s dad went the way of the
Titanic
and out onto a long stretch of highway.

We kept passing Dad’s old, faded billboards—just like we always do in real life.
WE TREAT YOU RIGHT-O AT DEFIDO,
said one.
BUY AT DEFIDO: SOLID CARS FROM SOLID TIMES,
said another.

Those signs were put up at a time when everyone thought our family was riding a wave to better places, but instead we wiped out. Dad’s biggest consolation was that the billboard company that rented the signs went out of business before his car lots began to fail—and so all those advertisements for DeFido Motors
were still up. Sure they were fading and peeling, but anywhere you drove in the county, you could still see my dad’s smiling face looking down on you, along with some car he had once tried to sell.

“The clock broke during my fifteen minutes of fame,” Dad would say every time we passed one of those old billboards.

In the dream, though, we came up on the billboards much more often than in real life. The next one featured Mom’s Cadillac. I remembered seeing it before on one of the roads heading north out of town.

“Look, there’s us!” Mom said in the dream. “Wave hello!”

We passed the billboard, and then I heard a different voice beside me. A younger voice.

“Shouldn’t you be getting home?” the voice said. “Everyone’s waiting for you.”

I turned to see a boy about my age sitting next to me in the car, where my mother had been. I couldn’t quite see his face—all I could see were his eyes. They were beautiful. A shade of blue that couldn’t exist anywhere but in a dream.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Better keep your eyes on the road,” he said gently, but I couldn’t look away from him.

“Mom, she’s doing it again!”

I woke up from the dream to find myself standing in the corner of my room. The northwest corner, to be exact. As I stepped away from the corner and turned toward Vance, I could feel a stiffness in my legs that told me I had been standing there for hours.

“I haven’t been doing anything,” I told him. “I…I just thought I saw a spider, that’s all.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Vance, shaking his head and walking away.

I wasn’t lying when I’d told Miss Leticia I didn’t sleepwalk—because I don’t actually walk, I just stand. I’m a sleep-stander. Always in the same corner, too—and I often wondered if there was no wall there, would I still stand in the same spot, or would I be a walker after all?

Thinking about it had never yielded much, so I just accepted it as one more weird thing about me. It wasn’t until much later that I began to get truly curious about it and think there might be a reason for it. But on that morning, I was as clueless as ever.

With the dream quickly fading, I dressed and went out into the kitchen. Things were back to normal, as if the spelling bee had never happened. We sat at the breakfast table, with silence punctuated by cereal crunches and “pass-the-milks,” as usual.

A few years back, Momma had gotten it into her head that a healthy day begins with a family breakfast, so the four of us always sat down together in the morning, even on the days it would make us late for school.

“The occasional tardy is acceptable,” Momma would say. “Starting your morning without quality time is not.”

You have to understand, my momma had gone to college for two reasons. One, to get a degree in psychology. Two, to catch a successful husband destined for great things. In the end, she got neither.

At breakfast that morning, I could see Vance looking back and forth between Mom and Dad, and I could tell he was waiting for the right time to talk about something. Finally, when Dad started to push his chair back, getting ready to leave, Vance blurted it out.