Pretty Ugly: A Novel (9 page)

Ray scanned the room for the least erotic thing he could find: yellowed family photos, a sagging shelf of 1960s encyclopedias, a stack of old
Readers Digest
s piled on the TV, Marvin’s service medals, the half-full catheter peeking out from under the sheet. Slowly, Ray’s eyes moved up the hospital bed, past the metal side rails, past the IV line … until he saw Marvin, wide awake, looking back at him, his mouth still open in that horrible, frozen scream.

“Jesus Christ!” Ray shrieked and bucked hard, trying to stand up, but Courtney had wrapped her legs around the back of the chair for leverage, trapping him in place. Mistaking his sudden horror for passion, Courtney smiled and quickened her pace.

“Okay,
let’s
come!”

From his deathbed, Marvin watched helplessly as his trusted caretaker fucked his underage granddaughter in the chair where his late wife used to pray. Ray wanted to look away from the old man, but he couldn’t. Using the same telepathy he’d used on Miranda thirteen years earlier, Ray tried to convey to Marvin how immeasurably sorry he was about all this. But the sincerity of his apology was undercut considerably when his face contorted into the unmistakable grimace of an orgasm.

“I’m coming, too!” Courtney squealed as she faked an earth-shattering climax. “Oh, my good sweet
God
! Whooo!”

Exhaling deeply, she untangled her legs from the chair, climbed off, and headed to the kitchen. “That was awesome. You want a beer?”

Pulling up his pants with lightning speed, Ray shot cautious, staccato glances toward Marvin as if they were fingers testing the temperature of a hot stove. The old man was unconscious again—or dead. Either way, Ray was relieved.

“Thank God,” he said, falling back into his chair.

Still shamelessly naked, Courtney reentered holding a beer. Her skin was flushed and glistening. “My birthday’s in two weeks. Remember?”

“How could I forget?” Ray tore open the beer and drank half of it in one desperate gulp. “You’ll be eighteen.”

“I know! So we don’t have to worry about all that stupid legal stuff anymore. We’re still going to Gatlinburg, right?”

Ray wasn’t listening. How long had Marvin been awake? How much had he seen? He saw her initiate, right? Dozens of scenarios popped into his head, and most of them ended with him getting raped in prison.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Gatlinburg! You promised you’d take me to Gatlinburg for my birthday!”

Shit.
He sighed. He had. “Right.”

A week into their affair, Ray promised Courtney that when she turned eighteen he would take her wherever she wanted for her birthday, na
ï
vely assuming she’d want to do something simple like dinner and a movie. Instead, she shouted, “Gatlinburg!” with such childlike enthusiasm Ray assumed she was joking and laughed. Proving just how serious she was, Courtney immediately stopped the blow job she was in the middle of and locked herself in the bathroom until he agreed to take her.

“Yeah. We can go,” he said, eyeing Marvin’s boxes of medication. “If you still want to.”

“Hells yeah, I still want to! It’s all I’ve been thinking about.”

“Mm-hm. Me, too.” His voice was hollow and distant like he was speaking from the bottom of his own grave.

The naked teenager took a sip of Ray’s beer, made a
yuck
face, and gave it back.

“Lite beer is gross. Okay, I gotta go finish my homework. I got a killer test tomorrow. Hey, do you know anything about algebra?”

Ray shook his head. “No, sorry,” he said, then gestured to Marvin with his chin. “I should probably get back to work.”

Courtney let out a small laugh through her nose and rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, whatever. Thanks for the sex, Nurse Miller.” Giggling, she kissed his forehead, then flitted out of the room, snatching up her raincoat as she went.

When she was gone, Ray blindly grabbed three pills and washed them down with the last of his beer. Taking a deep breath, he leaned in to the elderly gentleman he’d been preparing to reunite with his wife in heaven and whispered, “I am so sorry, Marvin.”

The old man opened his eyes and turned to Ray. For a moment Ray caught a glimpse of his own conscience—a withered, terminal relic.

“You sure are.” Marvin’s voice was stronger and clearer than Ray had ever heard it. “You’re the sorriest son of a bitch I’ve ever met in my life.”

Then turning back to the ceiling, the old man opened his mouth into that horrible scream and drifted off back to sleep.

chapter seven

Courtney Ellen Daye was eleven years old when her parents were killed coming home from an Offspring concert. The police report said that Courtney’s father had fallen asleep at the wheel, sending their car into a ravine just outside Evansville, Indiana. The impact of the air bag had broken Courtney’s mother’s neck as she slept in her husband’s lap. Marvin blamed himself for their deaths. He had selfishly suggested the parents’ night out, knowing Courtney was fast approaching the age where spending the night with her grandparents would segue from being a gleeful adventure to an embarrassing chore. To compensate, Marvin and his wife, Zola, cared for their orphaned granddaughter as if she were an antique Bible. If possible, they would have placed her on a shelf in a church out of reach of the entire world.

When Zola dropped dead from a heart attack picking tomatoes in their garden, Marvin was left as the then fourteen-year-old girl’s only living relative. Two years later, diabetes required the amputation of both his legs, which unfortunately did little to alter his already sedentary life. A spinal fracture from sliding off a barstool had prevented him from walking for the previous sixteen months. Doctors at the Bluegrass Baptist Spinal Center decided that surgery to alleviate the pain was not an option since Marvin’s COPD had grown so severe doctors feared he wouldn’t survive the procedure. However, repeated surgeries to remove large chunks of tumor-ravaged lung—and the occasional inch or two of leg—took place every couple months for the next year.

“The spinal fracture, well, that’s just pain,” the surgeon explained to an increasingly confused Courtney. “People live with pain every day. But those tumors, they could kill him.”

Marvin’s final surgery left him with thirty-two percent of a single lung. His left leg was eleven inches long; his right was just over seven. When his primary care physician gave him less than seventy-two hours to live, Ray was assigned to be his hospice nurse. He assumed Marvin would be a quick job—five days tops. Ten weeks later, Ray looked into the old man’s eyes as he came inside his granddaughter.

Courtney’s small-town na
ï
vet
é
was tempered with just enough personal tragedy to make her endlessly fascinating to a bored married man approaching middle age. The time she and Ray spent together—playing board games at the kitchen table, sharing frozen pizzas, laughing as they scrolled through each other’s iPods—soon became the highlight of his week. For a cute teenage girl, Courtney was surprisingly easy to talk to. Her father had left behind an impressive DVD collection, and in an effort to stay connected to him she had watched every one of them. They talked about movies for hours.

“I think people are just afraid to say Wes Anderson movies are dumb,” she said. “But, dude, they’re like superdumb. They’re like cartoons for people who think they’re smarter than they really are.”

But what Ray liked most about Courtney was that she made him feel interesting at a time in his life when he was starting to believe he’d become anything but. She soon became his closest friend. Then out of nowhere, she blew him.

One unfortunate side effect of Marvin’s growing list of medications was that he would often involuntarily pick at the stitches of his leg stump.

“Marvin!” the doctor shouted, during a rare housecall apparently believing that losing one’s legs causes deafness. “If you keep picking at these, they’re going to get infected and then you’re going to be in
real
trouble!”

Marvin looked at the doctor and winked. Ray couldn’t tell if the old man was acknowledging this as a problem or as his ultimate plan. Wrist restraints were ordered, and then, curious to see what the old man’s body was capable of, the doctor prescribed an experimental blood clotter that ultimately didn’t mix well with Marvin’s twenty-one other daily medications. The resulting vomit was prodigious and unpredictable.

“I hate those wrist restraint things,” Courtney said. “They’re so cruel. It’s like he’s an animal or something.”

“Yeah, well…” Ray replied.

“What if he throws up and chokes on it because he can’t move?”

“That shouldn’t happen, but if it does, I’ll handle it. Don’t worry.”

“What if there’s a fire? How will he escape?”

“There’s not going to be a fire,” Ray answered.

“But what if there is?”

“Then I’ll remove the restraints and carry him out.”

“What if you’re in the bathroom?”

“Then I’ll stop what I’m doing and come get him.”

“You can stop in the middle of going to the bathroom? I didn’t think guys could do that because it hurt.”

She continued on like that until Ray relented and removed Marvin’s restraints. An hour later, while kneeling beside the bed to change a catheter bag, Ray felt Marvin’s hot, watery vomit rain down on the back of his neck.

“Oh, my God, that is
so nasty
!” Courtney screamed as she ran from the room covering her own mouth. “It’s in your ears!”

“Don’t worry, Marvin,” Ray whispered as he cleaned the old man up. “It’s not the first time I’ve been thrown up on. I’m sure it’s not the last.”

The old man smiled, then strained to speak. “I vomited once … on a dead … Korean boy. He was … our translator. I killed him … by mistake. I’m … sorry.” The things people confessed to Ray before they died never ceased to surprise him.

By the time Ray had him cleaned up, the vomit had turned cold and made its way down to Ray’s feet, saturating his socks and punctuating each step with a nauseating squish. Climbing into the shower, Ray closed his eyes as hot water pulsed from the removable showerhead, a device forbidden in his house out of respect for Miranda’s late father. It was so peaceful he didn’t hear Courtney slide open the shower door.

“I brought you a clean towel.”

“Ah!” Ray jumped and instinctively covered his genitals. “Jesus Christ!”

She smiled. “I’ll just put it on the toilet seat.”

“Oh. Okay. Great.” He nodded frantically and backed into the corner. “Awesome. I will use it. Thank you. Thanks.”

When the girl smiled again, Ray felt the early stirrings of an erection and turned his attention to the numerous bottles lining the shelves. “That’s, um … that’s a lot of shampoo,” he said desperately. “I used the green bottle, I think. I don’t remember.”

“Okay.” Her lips pursed into a mischievous smirk, and she scrunched her eyebrows into the face girls use to simultaneously flirt and deride. “Weirdo.” Then she giggled and slid the door closed.

Reluctant to move, Ray watched through the frosted glass as Courtney casually took off her jeans and kicked them across the floor. His mouth turned pasty and thick, and he felt his penis move beneath the increasingly inadequate cover of his hands. It was entirely possible he blacked out for a moment, because before he could comprehend what was happening, Courtney had joined him in the shower, naked as a newborn—which she was when Ray was a senior in high school. His heart constricted into a panicked fist pounding a desperate warning against the wall of his chest. Ray grabbed a pink washcloth and covered his penis.

“What are you doing?”

Courtney just giggled and shrugged. “I thought I’d help you get cleaned up.”

Steam clouded the near perfection of Courtney’s body, but her lack of inhibition was clear. Without another word, she sat on the plastic bench Marvin used back when he had legs, and blew the married nurse as warm water rained down on her head. When Ray came, Courtney stepped out of the shower, grabbed her clothes, and left the bathroom. It was never discussed—until the next night when she did it again.

Acutely aware that their relationship was not only immoral but probably illegal, Ray spent many sleepless nights envisioning himself being passed from cell to cell, traded for a pack of cigarettes or a stick of Juicy Fruit—a nickname he also imagined would become his. At the very least he was sure his disheveled mug shot would wind up on a sex offender Web site with a scarlet dot over his house, assuming he’d still be allowed to live there, which he wouldn’t. The Internet said the age of consent in Kentucky was sixteen, but that gave him little solace. He was old enough to be the girl’s father, and he couldn’t imagine any rational judge giving him a mere slap on the wrist. However, despite the very real consequences, Ray couldn’t bring himself to end it. And not just because of the sex. In much the same way he’d felt compelled to rescue Miranda from the abusive Phil, Ray saw himself as Courtney’s savior. With her eighteenth birthday just two weeks away, his goal was to keep Marvin alive so Courtney could inherit his house without the courts getting involved. How fucking her accomplished any of that was the part of the plan he hadn’t yet figured out.

Staring at the textured ceiling of his bedroom, Ray pulled the sheets up to his chin and tried not to think about his behavior. Instead, he focused on his plans for the next day. Pop Warner football tryouts were coming up and he had taken the day off to help Junior and J.J. prepare. Both boys were small for their ages, and homeschooling had made them socially awkward, but Ray wasn’t worried. Organized sports would give them exactly what they needed. Whatever the hell that was.

During his weekly trek to Walmart to pick up the groceries he liked but Miranda refused to buy, Ray also bought a new football, some mouth guards, and two top-of-the-line pairs of cleats. They’d been in a closet for several days, and Ray was pretty pleased with himself for keeping it a secret. His plan was to surprise the boys when they came down for breakfas—

“Holy shit! The boys!” Ray leapt from the bed, dug his phone from his pants, and turned it on. There were nine missed calls from Joan. He looked at the clock on the nightstand: 11:46.