Such a Pretty Girl (2 page)

T
he driver’s door opens and my mother pops out. She looks around expectantly and spots me hunkered on the curb instead of hurtling toward them, whooping, “Welcome home, Daddy!” Annoyance crimps her smile. “Meredith,” she calls, waving me closer. “Look who’s here!” Her scarlet nails glow orange in the sunset. “Come say hello!”

I can’t. Breathing hurts and I want to run. His head turns toward me and my gaze jumps away, fixes on the fists filling my pockets. I count the rigid knuckles lumped beneath the faded denim. Four is my safe number. Eight is double strength. I smell terror in my sudden sweat. Oh God, please don’t let this happen.

“Meredith,” my mother says again, and there’s steel beneath the honey. “I’m talking to you. Come here and say hello to your father, please.
Now.”

It’s the bitchy “now” that punctures my paralysis.
Now
he’s here.
Now
she’s happy.
Now
I’m supposed to act like nothing ever happened.

Anger saves me. I plant my palms on the curb and push myself up. Smooth my baggy overalls and black tank. Unhook my hair from behind my ears. The halves swing forward to curtain off all but my nose. My eyes burn and heat envelops my face.

The passenger door opens.

One sneakered foot is planted on the driveway. The other joins it.

The Nikes are blindingly new. Size twelve.

My mother has been shopping for him.

The jeans are also new. If I allow my gaze to travel higher—which I won’t—I’ll see the solid gold baseball charm on a chain that my mother gave him for his eighteenth birthday nestled in his coarse, whorled chest hair.

My front teeth throb as the memory of the charm bangs against them.

“Hello, Meredith.”

The voice is quiet, kind, hoarse with history…and it destroys me. A sick, writhing knot of old love and despair lays me open worse than the first time and the force of it almost takes me down. I lock my knees, trying not to sway. This was not supposed to happen. I spent years steeling myself, reliving every rotten moment over and over again to make myself immune, hiding from nothing so there would be nothing hidden left to cripple me, and I thought I’d made it, but now, with one simple greeting, I’ve already lost.

“No, Daddy, no. Don’t.”

“Meredith,” he says again, soft and almost pleading, a voice I know, a voice that sends the nausea churning in my stomach straight up into my throat.

I swallow hard and lift my chin in reply. It’s all I can manage and more than he deserves.

“Well.” My mother plants her hands on her hips, peevish. “Is that the best welcome you can come up with? Why don’t you come over here and give your father a hug?”

Hug him?
Touch
him? How can she even suggest it?

“It’s okay. Don’t push her, Sharon.” He slams the passenger door and stretches, glances around the ominously silent court. Blinds twitch and a shade goes down, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Nice place. Peaceful. We have the rest of our lives to get reacquainted. Right, Chirp?”

My head jerks up, the curtain of hair parts, and for one piercing moment the predator and the prey lock gazes.

He winks at me before turning to my mother. “Don’t worry, she’ll come around. Three years is a long time to be out of a kid’s life.”

Not long enough! I want to shout, but I am mute, rooted in place as my stomach cramps and my defenses stumble in dazed disorder. He found me so easily. Resurrected my old nickname and broke right through. Does he know it? I don’t know. So far I’ve only given him silence and surprise, so maybe he isn’t sure. I have to count on that, have to believe I still have a chance to survive this.

“Yes, it is,” my mother says, shooting me an exasperated look and shouldering her purse. “Why don’t we go in out of this heat, Charles? I have some steaks defrosting—”

“No you don’t.” I come alive, reminded of my sabotage, and force myself up the lawn toward them. The grass is cool in the shade so I sit and make a show of removing my sandals. My feet are filthy from walking barefoot. I hitch up my pant leg and scratch my stubbly shin, making certain my father notes my horrible hygiene. I hate being dirty, but I know that he hates it more.

“Yes I do,” my mother says, frowning. “I took three steaks out before I left.”

“And I threw them away,” I say, and nod at the Dumpster. “They smelled bad.”

“What? All of them?” She is astonished. “Meredith, how could you?”

“They were rotten,” I say with a careless shrug. “Probably loaded with E. coli, too. It’s the stuff no one sees that does the most damage.”

My father rubs his forehead, dulling the sweaty sheen above his brow.

“So you threw them away,” my mother says, as if repeating it is the key to undoing it. “Sixty dollars’ worth of steaks! How could they be rotten? I just bought them the other day!”

“Go smell for yourself,” I say. “They’re right on top.”

She won’t. He might, just to reassert his authority. I hope he does. The steaks are there, unwrapped and carefully laid out on top of a split garbage bag soggy with liquefied waste.

“Meredith, I don’t…you know I…my
God
…” She’s breathing hard, embarrassed and furious, caught between the harmonious, happy homecoming and letting me have it.

“Never mind, Shar,” my father says, crossing around the front of the car and patting her back. His hand is awkward and although she turns from me and leans into him, he doesn’t lean back. He worships youth. She chases it, but can never be young enough again. “I’ve been dreaming about Tony’s pizzas for years. Come on, let’s go order one.”

Neither looks at me as they mount the front steps and fumble with the keys.

I stay where I am, silently counting the bricks in the steps and the cherry red geranium petals scattering the sidewalk beneath the urns flanking our porch. I count in lots of four, my gaze tracing corner-to-corner box shapes for each small group, and it isn’t long before my heart slows and the trembling stops.

My parents will call Tony’s and try to place a delivery order, but it’ll be refused. Tony has caller ID and once he recognizes the last name, he’ll say he doesn’t deliver to our “area.” He does, however, deliver to the rest of the complex. It’s a daring discrimination, one that has earned my reluctant admiration.

My mother doesn’t know Tony shuns us because she doesn’t want to know.

But both she and my father are about to find out.

The good citizens of Estertown don’t take kindly to child molesters or to the carrier families who deliberately host the virus and reinfect the community.

I glance across the court at the condo catty-cornered to my building.

Andy, who has ordered and received countless pizzas from Tony’s for me, is sitting in his living room window. His bare chest gleams in the dying daylight. He shivers and lifts his bottle of Jim Beam in silent luck.

I nod because he sees, and knows.

I
slip through the front door in time to hear my mother’s incredulous, “What do you mean you don’t deliver to this area? Since when?”

Silence. The phone receiver crashes down.

“Well.” My mother’s voice is quick with indignation. “Apparently Tony doesn’t care if he loses valuable customers!”

I wander into the kitchen entrance. My father is sitting at the table beneath his shimmering
WELCOME HOME
! banner. My mother stands by the fridge. The room is overcrowded and smells of soured nerves.

My mother spots me. “Meredith, did you know Tony’s stopped delivering to our area?”

I turn away from her to the overhead cabinets. “Since when?” I say, removing my bottle of multivitamins. “I ordered a pie for lunch yesterday and they didn’t have a problem delivering it.” Actually, Andy had ordered it and we ate it together, but my parents don’t know that and I see no reason to tell them. “So why should they quit delivering to us now?”

The silence demands the obvious conclusion.

I remove my bottle of C vitamins, E, B complex. Flax seed oil, lecithin, calcium, lutein. Power supplements. Line them up in alphabetical order. Uncap them and shake one pill from each, recapping the bottles as I go.

“What’re you doing?” my father asks.

I remain silent, taking a glass from the cabinet and focusing my attention on ensuring my survival.

“It’s nice to see that your father’s homecoming hasn’t affected your little rituals,” my mother says with spite, but she reaches into the fridge and hands me a cold can of V8 anyway. “She won’t talk when she’s taking her vitamins. I don’t know why, so don’t even ask.” Her laugh is strained. “I’m sorry, Charles, I didn’t mean to snap. I just wanted everything to go so smoothly for your homecoming and instead it’s such a…” She stops, breathing deeply to compose herself. “You’re home again and that’s all that matters.”

I cough, then continue swallowing vitamins. Four pills, four sips of vegetable juice. Four is the number of reality, logic, and reason plus the essence of mind, body, and spirit brought to the material plane to form a square. It’s a strong number, one with substance, and I’ve felt safe in it ever since that first night in the hospital.

“You know, there’s something I’ve been wanting to do and now seems like the perfect time,” my father says.

The vitamins rattle in my cupped hand. I put them in my mouth and swallow.

Chair legs scrape the floor and his sneakers squeal as he rounds the table.

If he touches me—traps me in his arms and pulls me against him—if that golden baseball nudges my skull and his belt buckle brands my spine, then—

A muffled, sucking sound breaks my panic.

“Oh no, Charles,” my mother protests. “It’s your first night home!”

“It’s fine,” he says. “I need to get back into the swing of things anyway and besides, I want to see if I’ve lost my touch. Now, what do we have in here to work with?”

Frigid air sweeps my ankles and I risk a glance over my shoulder.

My father’s rummaging through the freezer.

Memories flash and I see him in our old house’s kitchen….

His legs sprout from beneath faded shorts and the golden baseball swings around his neck. We’ve just come in from outside, where he’s been teaching me how to play softball. “Don’t take it so hard, Chirp. We’ll try again tomorrow—”

I slump against the wall and stare at my dusty sneakers. My fingers ache and my palms are blistered. “I wanted to get a hit today.” My bottom lip trembles. “If I got a hit, then you would like me the way you like the boys who get hits.”

He goes still. “How do I like the boys?”

“Better,” I say, wanting to sound snotty, but my voice crumbles.

“Hey, don’t cry.” He crouches and draws me close between his knees. Strokes my back as I burrow into the hollow between his neck and shoulder. “You’re my girl. I’ll always like you better than any old boys.”

“Really?” My voice is muffled and my mouth moves against his salty skin. He tastes like a giant pretzel. This amuses me and I pretend to bite him, raking my new rabbit teeth across his skin and giggling. “Yum, you taste good, Daddy.”

He pulls me tighter, but his body is suddenly too hot.

I squirm free. “How many strikes do I get before I’m out?”

My father rises and turns away. “Three,” he says, and his voice is gruff. “That sound good, Chirp?”

“That sound good, Chirp?”

I jam the last four vitamins into my mouth and guzzle the rest of the juice. It dribbles down my chin, splashes the front of my shirt. I don’t wipe it off.

“Meredith, your father’s talking to you,” my mother says. “He’s going to barbecue chicken. Doesn’t that sound delicious?”

I lean past her and plunk the glass in the sink. “I’m going out.”

“Out?” my father says. “Now? What about dinner?”

“I already ate,” I say, running the faucet. The cold water bubbles into the glass and gushes back up, splattering the stainless steel. I ignore it, knowing my mother will attack the droplets before they can dry and leave unsightly spots.

“Stop it, you’re making a mess,” she snaps, reaching around me and turning off the water. “What is
wrong
with you today?” She grabs a dishtowel and looks down at her new dress, splashed across the belly where she’s leaned up against the spattered countertop. “Oh no, this is silk! It’s not supposed to get wet!” She blots frantically at the spots. “I hope you’re satisfied, Meredith. Welcome home, Charles!” She throws the towel on the floor, bursts into tears, and clatters from the room.

Her bedroom door slams. It doesn’t lock, though, and the implied invitation throbs in the silence.

“That wasn’t a very nice thing to do,” my father says after a moment, making no move to follow her. “If you’re mad at me, don’t take it out on her.”

“I rinsed a glass,” I say in a monotone, and turn to leave because my father and I are not supposed to be alone together, ever, and we all know it.

“Wait,” my father says, rising and crossing the kitchen. He retrieves the crumpled towel and lays it on the counter next to where I’m standing. Casually blocks my path as I try to slip around him. “Come on now, what’s with you? I know it’s been a while, but it’s not like I’m a stranger.” And then, softer, “Are you holding a grudge against me? If you are, then we’re gonna have to work it through because I am home to stay.”

His heat sparks the dry kindling in my chest and I stand helpless, eyes closed behind the hair curtaining my face, trapped between him and the firestorm….

“Mmm, dessert time.” My father brings a teaspoon of sweet baby custard toward my mouth. “Open up, Mer.”

I do, wiggling and banging my hands on the highchair tray.

He chuckles. “You look just like a hungry baby bird.” Leans over and kisses my nose. “You’re a charmer, little chirpy bird.”

I burble and open my mouth for more….

“It hurts that you never came to see me,” he says quietly, touching my arm. “Three years is a long time. Don’t you think we should forgive each other and move on? I love you, you know. That has to count for something.”

My blood boils beneath his fingers. One by one, the vessels split, sear, and shrink away. If I don’t release myself, I will spontaneously combust.

“C’mon,” he says, and it’s not his wheedling tone or his plea for forgiveness that sickens me. It’s the look I catch when I peer through the curtain, the way his thumb is rubbing soft, rhythmic circles on my arm. “How about giving your old man a break here, huh, Chirp?”

“Chirp is dead,” I hear myself say and watch the flat words destroy his pleasure. “You killed her, and now you have to deal with me because I’m what’s left.” I push past him and walk out the front door into the gathering dusk.