Jeremiah Quick (11 page)

No. This ridiculous existence of servitude
is not a thing for a person like her. She had to leave, she had to,
or she would have died of the monotony.

She's an artist, my mother. I know that;
skilled with paint, pen and ink, with pastels, with oils and
brushes, and sticks and stones and oh, how they break my bones, the
precious two brushes hidden under my dresser that had been hers,
hidden next to the rolled sketch of herself looking into a mirror
and seeing horror looking back.

My father liked to rail about that too, all
the fucking mirrors in her work, always mirrors, reflecting back
something other than the person standing there, reflecting fantasy,
when what the fuck was a mirror good for other than seeing oneself?
Mirrors reflect reality, dad said, and my mother's obsession with
mirrors had everything to do with her leaving, off to whore around
in the name of searching for a goddamned fairy tale, and she'd find
out one day that those just didn't exist, did they?

But he's wrong about that.

I'm still little and standing on the toilet
seat watching my father shave, and smooth back his hair, getting
ready for another date with another stupid ant woman. Already I
know them all, I think, and am never surprised when they laugh too
loudly at his jokes, when they smile at me and say "Oh, my, you
must be a bright little thing," because they never want to notice
that I'm rail-thin and pale and ugly. They never find anything to
compliment about that, do they? And yet they smile incessantly;
fake smiles with fake-white teeth and pats on the head that hurt
my
teeth and make me want to bite the smiles right off their
faces.

There's always one or another of them
around,
stupid simpering broads
, my father calls them.

I watch my dad in the mirror, and wonder at
his insistence that mirrors reflect back reality, because… the
mirror doesn't show his clenched fist, or the snarl-twist of his
lips that comes seconds before a blow, doesn't show the deep red
rage resentment that lives inside the man who is my father, the
rage that boils out of him unexpectedly in cracks to the back of my
head, cupped-palm cuffs over my ears, a shove here, and a kick
there. An invitation to eat, or a decree that there won't be any
food today.

No. The mirror reflects a brown-haired,
blue-eyed man, more handsome than not, with bushy eyebrows and
creases around his eyes because he scowls so much, but that
everyone says are laugh lines.

I like my mother's reflections better. They
might not be pretty, but at least they're honest. Even the one that
I keep tucked way, way in the back of my closet, the one I pretend
dear old dad never saw, in which my mother stands half-turned in
front of the mirror, cradling a baby, a baby drawn to every perfect
detail of pure newness, an utterly precious newborn I know is me,
and the rendition is amazing, how the baby almost glows with purity
and beauty, and the kind of dewy freshness that babies have… and I
can see she loves that baby, that she spent hours drawing him,
after all, his eyes still squinting from the bright of the
world…

And the mirror, the mirror shows –

No. I can't think of it, have never been
able to look at it after that first time, when my father flung the
thick, creased paper into my room after a beating, disgusted that
I'd been crying for hours for her to come back.

"Oh, yeah, cry for your mama, you ungrateful
piece of shit. You think she loves you? She never loved you, and
she's never coming back."

I'd stopped crying and unfolded the paper,
the unfolding somehow exposing first the child, the beautiful,
beautiful child, so carefully drawn. So perfect.

The rest, the mirror, I wish I'd never
seen.

Chapter 9

S
he woke up in the
dark, confused and paralyzed, her body hurting in twelve different
places.

For a second she thought she couldn't move
because of the effect of dreaming, some hormone that prevents
thrashing. It happened often enough that even if she was terrified
in her sleep, she managed to wake without panic.

She waited the requisite two seconds, but
still couldn't pull her arms in to her body, and only then
remembered that she'd ridden away from her life with Jeremiah
Quick.

Fuck.

Roaring panic and crushing guilt, and
what have I done what have I done what the fuck have I done?
She fought the bonds, pulling against them, sobbing a little
against clenched teeth when movement caused silver shiver-lines of
burn along her back. That made her stop, made her be still.

One deep breath. Two deep breaths. Three.
Muscle by muscle, relax.

Quiet. Dark.

And he – Jeremiah Quick and all of this –
forced open a floodgate of memory.

Things come back in the dark. Silence left
room for all the thoughts and memories that she worked hard for
years to avoid.

So many of them were unpretty.

Jeremiah thought her life was frivolous and
easy. He was doing all of this because he was angry, because he
thought she needed to feel pain.

Pretty had survived plenty of pain, but how
could he ever know that, walking back into her life after twenty
years of gone? He had no idea. He saw her shopping at Walmart,
okay, and he saw her driving a typical car and living in a typical
house, raising, as he said, two-point-five children and a dog. And
for that she'd earned his scorn? For that, she deserved
all of
this
?

His judgment wasn't fair.

Forbidding her speech made it seem like he
didn't even want to know, like he wasn't interested in her
experience at all.

Her life wasn't frivolous or easy. She'd had
loves and losses the same as everyone did. They'd made her happy
sometimes and sad sometimes, euphoric and devastated. But because
she'd gone into the Walmart store, every other aspect of her life
experience was, what, discounted? Discounted by Jeremiah. Well,
fuck him.

He had no idea the demands of parenting, how
sometimes the very essence of her being was crushed beneath all the
endless NEED. Breakfasts and snacks and dinner on the table at a
reasonable time. Karate and chorus and rides to the mall and school
dances. Clean laundry and clean dishes and clean bathrooms. A
minute to have sex now and then, for fuck's sake, whether there was
time to relax and enjoy it or not.

Yeah, it was mundane.

And so much of the time she felt like the
mundane claimed her very identity, like she was nothing more than
this, and maybe the last thing she can handle is worrying about the
state of the country or the world or the earth, and she just wanted
to get in and out and buy the shit she needed with a minimum of
fuss and nonsense.

He would…
ruin
her because of that?
Really?

No. She wouldn't allow it. She would get her
voice back and tell him her stories, make him see that sometimes
what she needed was a moment of rest, that's all. That she wasn't
the careless apathetic woman he thought she'd become.

She'd make him see that he was wrong.

As much as she pretended to be perfect, she
had longings, too. She had that hollow space, the same center of
nothing that everyone carries around, empty, aching. Starving. And
she made the same mistakes trying to fill it, falling in love with
the wrong people, expecting too much, getting hurt over and over
again.

And yet… even though Jeremiah was wrong
about her apathy, he was also more right than she liked to
admit.

And Pretty hated that possibility, that she
had become apathetic, lazy, following the path of least resistance.
She could do better than that. She could be more.

She could open her eyes and
be
awake
.

Damn him.

Damn him for coming back, and damn him for
leaving her here like this with nothing to do but think.

Here was the thing: she'd always understood
well the power of her cuteness, and the fact that she could easily
get boys to want to sleep with her. She had no reservation about
her ability to seduce, to capture.

It was her power
to keep
that was
lacking.

This created such a profound sense of
insecurity that Pretty's happiness was frantic. Hold and cling and
say anything. Give and give and give some more, until she felt
herself disappear. Once she
had
, she didn't allow herself to
want
. She had no needs. She expressed no strong opinion,
because she had no convictions of her own, and because she used all
her strength to catch. And then, in the end and always, she pouted
that she wanted to be loved for being HERSELF, but even Pretty
didn't know who the hell that was.

She was a chameleon, changing to suit, and
it never worked.

Jeremiah left at the end of her tenth grade
year. He left before graduation. He left without goodbye. He was
just... gone.

The summer was survived. School started
again, but there was no point to it. Eleventh grade, her
seventeenth year, the Year That Drew Died.

A time of existing, not living. A time of
trading sex for marijuana, of pursuing boys she didn't even want,
of fucking them and sucking them and not caring about them at all.
Just activity to break the monotony of not feeling anything, for
anyone.

She could name them, for the most part, but
did it matter?

They weren't relationships.

She was giving Jesse a blow job in the
wooded area across the street from the school when everyone else
found out Drew was dead. She emerged from the woods to see several
of her friends hovering at the edges of the sidewalk, sobbing.

Drew shot himself. Drew did. He said he'd
kill himself if he had to go back home, and he did. He did.

No. She can't think about that right now,
here in the dark, the silence. It hurt too much.

Think about Jesse instead, or Andy, who
stood her up for her senior prom.

Oh, that fateful prom. She'd gone anyway, in
jeans and leather and boots, because some angel at the Burger King
told her Jeremiah was there. It was the last time she'd seen
Jeremiah, until yesterday. She'd always been grateful for Andy's
failure.

But before that, before that...

Jeremiah was gone. Drew was dead. Pretty was
completely fucked-up in love with an ex-boyfriend who wasn't taking
her back, ever. She'd begged, pleaded, and debased herself. Yeah,
he'd fuck her – who wouldn't? They were teenage boys, after all –
but
that
boy and Pretty never did get back together as a
couple, not for real.

Truth was… he was gone, too. He just hadn't
left yet. And she knew it.

She was a slut. So fucking what?

Who was anyone to judge her about it? She'd
always done the best she could with what she had, and for a girl
without a boyfriend and no real interest in the heaviness of love,
sex wasn't a bad way to pass the time.

Her attention span was about three
weeks.

She worried about AIDS, marginally. She knew
more about it than a lot of people, because she'd found Shilts'
gigantic tome of a book at the library shortly after it was
published, and read it out of horror, out of fear, out of trying to
make sense of how this disease could target certain of segments of
the population. She didn't believe in the conservative middle-class
version of God, so she knew it wasn't justice being meted out from
some mystical invisible being.

One of the boys she slept with was Native,
and poor, and Pretty's parents were appalled. They sneered about
him when he wasn't around, but put on achingly nice, non-prejudiced
faces when Pretty invited him to dinner.

This amused her.

She wrote poetry about his silky black hair
entwined with her white-blonde strands, making comparisons of the
night to the moon. But she didn't love him.

She didn't love any of them.

More than one of them wanted to trade
marijuana for sex.

She understood boys would do just about
anything to get sex, and didn't have a problem with it, but the
getting high part seemed so underhanded that she gave it up. She
didn't like the feeling that she
owed
them her body in
exchange for their weed.

One of them pretended he was only sleeping
with her, but she caught him with his dick inside another girl.
Pretty wasn't even all that pissed off, but she
was
done.
She had after all, read the primer on AIDS. This, in nineteen
eighty-nine.

The utter truth of it was that no one could
fill the empty space in her heart that spanned between Jeremiah and
Drew.

She caught Them laughing about Drew once –
the loser who took his own life thinking anyone would care.

It left her frozen in mid-step. She cared.
She missed him. He'd been her sole reason to get out of bed, come
here, and do
this
again, day after day after day, without
Jeremiah.

And she didn't think he thought about being
missed or remembered or forgotten. Whether anyone would miss him or
care wasn't in his head at all. If Pretty had a chasm of
unbelonging, Drew had a chasm of pain. All that mattered to her was
to get through this stupid school thing, footstep by footstep, day
by day.

All that mattered to Drew was to stop the
pain.

She wondered sometimes what it was like for
him, those final moments, brains smattered against the wall, blood
pouring out of the wound. Was he terrified? Satisfied?

Who could even guess?

She'd had sex with Drew two weeks before he
killed himself, which ruined everything there'd been between them.
She thought she could have loved him. But when it came to sex, he
was so… oh, it was hard to explain… raw and rough, contrary to the
compassionate, sweet, and loving boy she'd come to know. She was
almost startled out of love with him. Like his liquid-sympathetic
brown eyes were a lie, had always been a lie, a mask that slipped
from his face as his fingers bruised, and his slim, delicate body
assaulted hers without care, as if her body was nothing more than a
vehicle for masturbation.