Pretty Girls (3 page)

And then she realized that this wasn’t just a robbery.

So did Paul. He said, “I have money.”

“No shit.” The man’s fist hammered into Paul’s chest. Claire felt the impact in her own chest, his shoulder blades cutting into her collarbone. His head snapping into her face. The back of her head banged against the brick wall.

Claire was momentarily stunned. Stars fireworked in front of her eyes. She tasted blood in her mouth. She blinked. She looked down. Paul was writhing on the ground.

“Paul—” She reached for him but her scalp ignited in white-hot pain. The man had grabbed her by the hair. He wrenched her down the alley. Claire stumbled. Her knee grazed the pavement. The man kept walking, almost jogging. She had to bend at the waist to alleviate some of the agony. One of her heels broke off. She tried to look back. Paul was clutching his arm like he was having a heart attack.

“No,” she whispered, even as she wondered why she wasn’t screaming. “No-no-no.”

The man dragged her forward. Claire could hear herself wheezing. Her lungs had filled with sand. He was taking her toward the side street. There was a black van that she hadn’t noticed before. Claire dug her fingernails into his wrist. He jerked her head. She tripped. He jerked her again. The pain was excruciating, but it was nothing compared to the terror. She wanted to scream. She needed to scream. But her throat was choked closed by the knowledge of what was coming. He was going to take her somewhere else in that van. Somewhere private. Somewhere awful that she might not ever leave again.

“No …” she begged. “Please … no … no …”

The man let go of Claire, but not because she’d asked him to. He spun around, the knife out in front of him. Paul was up on his feet. He was running toward the man. He let out a guttural howl as he lunged into the air.

It all happened very quickly. Too quickly. There was no slowing of time so that Claire could bear witness to every millisecond of her husband’s struggle.

Paul could’ve outrun this man on a treadmill or solved an equation before the guy had a chance to sharpen his pencil, but his opponent had something over Paul Scott that they didn’t teach in graduate school: how to fight with a knife.

There was only a whistling noise as the blade sliced through the air. Claire had expected more sounds: a sudden slap as the hooked tip of the knife punctured Paul’s skin. A grinding noise as the serrated edge sawed past his ribs. A scrape as the blade separated tendon and cartilage.

Paul’s hands went to his belly. The pearl handle of the knife stuck up between his fingers. He stumbled back against the wall, mouth open, eyes almost comically wide. He was wearing his navy-blue Tom Ford suit that was too tight across his shoulders. Claire had made a mental note to get the seam let out but now it was too late because the jacket was soaked with blood.

Paul looked down at his hands. The blade was sunk in to the hilt, almost equidistant between his navel and his heart. His blue shirt flowered with blood. He looked shocked. They were both shocked. They were supposed to have an early dinner tonight, celebrate Claire’s successful navigation of the criminal justice system, not bleed to death in a cold, dank alley.

She heard footsteps. The Snake Man was running away, their rings and jewelry jangling in his pockets.

“Help,” Claire said, but it was a whisper, so low that she could barely hear the sound of her own voice. “H-help,” she stuttered. But who could help them? Paul was always the one who brought help. Paul was the one who took care of everything.

Until now.

He slid down the brick wall and landed hard on the ground. Claire knelt beside him. Her hands moved out in front of her but she didn’t know where to touch him. Eighteen years of loving him. Eighteen years of sharing his bed. She had pressed her hand to his forehead to check for fevers, wiped his face when he was sick, kissed his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, even slapped him once out of anger, but now she did not know where to touch him.

“Claire.”

Paul’s voice. She knew his voice. Claire went to her husband. She wrapped her arms and legs around him. She pulled him close to her chest. She pressed her lips to the side of his head. She could feel the heat leaving his body. “Paul, please. Be okay. You have to be okay.”

“I’m okay,” Paul said, and it seemed like the truth until it wasn’t anymore. The tremor started in his legs and worked into a violent shaking by the time it reached the rest of his body. His teeth chattered. His eyelids fluttered.

He said, “I love you.”

“Please,” she whispered, burying her face in his neck. She smelled his aftershave. Felt a rough patch of beard he’d missed with the razor this morning. Everywhere she touched him, his skin was so very, very cold. “Please don’t leave me, Paul. Please.”

“I won’t,” he promised.

But then he did.

TWO

Lydia Delgado stared out at the sea of teenage cheerleaders on the gym floor and said a silent prayer of thanks that her daughter was not one of them. Not that she had a thing against cheerleaders. She was forty-one years old. Her days of hating cheerleaders were well over. Now, she just hated their mothers.

“Lydia Delgado!” Mindy Parker always greeted everyone by their first and last names, with a triumphant lilt at the end: See how smart I am for knowing everyone’s full name!

“Mindy Parker,” Lydia said, her tone several octaves lower. She couldn’t help it. She’d always been contrary.

“First game of the season! I think our girls really have a chance this year.”

“Absolutely,” Lydia agreed, though everyone knew it was going to be a massacre.

“Anyway.” Mindy straightened out her left leg, raised her arms over her head and stretched toward her toes. “I need to get Dee’s signed permission slip.”

Lydia caught herself before she asked what permission slip. “I’ll have it for you tomorrow.”

“Fantastic!” Mindy hissed out an overly generous stream of air as she came out of the stretch. With her pursed lips and pronounced underbite, she reminded Lydia of a frustrated French bulldog. “You know we never want Dee to feel left out. We’re so proud of our scholarship students.”

“Thank you, Mindy.” Lydia plastered on a smile. “It’s sad that she had to be smart to get into Westerly instead of just having a lot of money.”

Mindy plastered on her own smile. “Okay, well, cool beans. I’ll look for that permission slip in the morning.” She squeezed Lydia’s shoulder as she bounced up the bleachers toward the other mothers. Or Mothers, as Lydia thought of them, because she was trying really hard not to use the word motherfucker anymore.

Lydia scanned the basketball court for her daughter. She had a moment of panic that nearly stopped her heart, but then she spotted Dee standing in the corner. She was talking to Bella Wilson, her best friend, as they bounced a basketball back and forth between them.

Was this young woman really her daughter? Two seconds ago, Lydia had been changing her diapers, and then she had turned her head for just a moment and when she looked back, Dee was seventeen years old. She would be heading off to college in less than ten months. To Lydia’s horror, she’d already started packing. The suitcase in Dee’s closet was so full that the zipper wouldn’t close all the way.

Lydia blinked away tears because it wasn’t normal for a grown woman to cry over a suitcase. Instead, she thought about the permission slip that Dee had not given her. The team was probably going to a special dinner that Dee was afraid Lydia couldn’t afford. Her daughter did not understand that they were not poor. Yes, they had struggled early on as Lydia tried to get her dog grooming business off the ground, but they were solidly middle class now, which was more than most people could say.

They just weren’t Westerly Wealthy. Most Westerly Academy parents could easily afford the thirty grand a year to send their kid to private school. They could ski at Tahoe over Christmas or charter private planes down to the Caribbean, but even though Lydia could never provide the same for Dee, she could pay for her daughter to go to Chops and order a fucking steak.

She would, of course, find a less hostile way to convey this to her child.

Lydia reached into her purse and pulled out a bag of potato chips. The salt and grease provided an instant rush of comfort, like letting a couple of Xanax melt under your tongue. She had told herself when she put on her sweatpants this morning that she was going to the gym, and she had gone
near
the gym, but only because there was a Starbucks in the parking lot. Thanksgiving was around the corner. The weather was freezing cold. Lydia had taken a rare day off from work. She deserved to start it with a pumpkin caramel spiced latte. And she needed the caffeine. There was so much crap she had to cram in before Dee’s game. Grocery store, pet food store, Target, pharmacy, bank, back home to drop everything off, back out by noon to see her hairdresser, because Lydia was too old to just get her hair cut anymore, she had to go through the tedious process of coloring the gray in her blonde hair so that she didn’t look like Cruella De Vil’s lesser cousin. Not to mention the other new hairs that required maintenance.

Lydia’s fingers flew to her upper lip. Potato chip salt burned the raw skin.

“Jesus Christ,” she mumbled, because she had forgotten that she got her mustache waxed today, and that the girl had used a new astringent and that the astringent had caused an angry rash to come out on Lydia’s upper lip so that instead of the one or two stray hairs she had a full-on, red handlebar mustache.

She could only imagine Mindy Parker conveying this to the other Mothers. “Lydia Delgado! Mustache rash!”

Lydia crammed another handful of chips into her mouth. She chewed loudly, not caring about the crumbs on her shirt. Not caring that the Mothers could see her gorging on carbs. There was a time when she used to try harder. That time had been before she hit her forties.

Juice diets. Juice fasts. The No-Juice Diet. The Fruit Diet. The Egg Diet. Curves. Boot Camp. Five-minute Cardio. Three-minute Cardio. The South Beach Diet. The Atkins Diet. The Paleo Diet. Jazzercise. Lydia’s closet contained a veritable eBay of failures: Zumba shoes, cross-trainers, hiking boots, bellydancing cymbals, a thong that had never quite made it to a pole-dancing class that one of her clients swore by.

Lydia knew that she was overweight, but was she really fat? Or was she just Westerly Fat? The only thing she was certain of was that she wasn’t thin. Except for a brief respite during her late teens and early twenties, she had struggled with her weight her entire life.

This was the dark truth behind Lydia’s burning hatred for the Mothers: She couldn’t stand them because she couldn’t be more like them. She liked potato chips. She loved bread. She lived for a good cupcake—or three. She didn’t have time to work out with a trainer or take back-to-back Pilates classes. She had a business to run. She was a single mother. She had a boyfriend who occasionally required maintenance. Not just that, but she worked with animals. It was hard to look glamorous when you’d just come from aspirating the anal glands of a slovenly dachshund.

Lydia’s fingers hit the empty bottom of the potato chip bag. She felt miserable. She hadn’t wanted the chips. After the first bite, she didn’t even really taste them.

Behind her, the Mothers erupted into cheers. One of the girls was doing a series of handsprings across the gym floor. The movement was fluid and perfect and very impressive until the girl threw up her hands at the finish and Lydia realized she wasn’t a cheerleader, but a cheerleader’s mother.

Cheerleader’s Mother.

“Penelope Ward!” Mindy Parker bellowed. “You go, girl!”

Lydia groaned as she searched her purse for something else to eat. Penelope was heading straight toward her. Lydia brushed the crumbs from her shirt and tried to think of something to say that wasn’t strung together with expletives.

Fortunately, Penelope was stopped by Coach Henley.

Lydia exhaled a long sigh of relief. She pulled her phone out of her purse. There were sixteen emails from the school noticeboard, most of them dealing with a recent plague of head lice wreaking havoc in the elementary classes. While Lydia was reading through the posts, a new message popped up, an urgent plea from the headmaster explaining that there really was no way to find out who had started the lice pandemic and for parents to please stop asking which child was to blame.

Lydia deleted them all. She answered a few text messages from clients wanting to make appointments. She checked her spam to make sure Dee’s permission slip hadn’t accidentally gone astray. It had not. She emailed the girl she’d hired to help with paperwork and asked for her again to submit her time card, which seemed like an easy thing to remember because that was how she got paid, but the child had been hand-raised by an overbearing mother and couldn’t remember to tie her shoes unless there was a Post-it note with a smiley face physically attached to the shoe with the words TIE YOUR SHOE. LOVE MOM. PS: I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!

That was being ungenerous. Lydia was no stranger to Post-it mothering. In her defense, her helicoptering tended to revolve around making sure that Dee could take care of herself. LEARN HOW TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH OR I WILL KILL YOU. LOVE MOM. If only she had been warned that teaching this sort of independence could lead to its own set of problems, such as finding an over-packed suitcase in your daughter’s closet when she had ten whole months before she was supposed to leave for college.

Lydia dropped her phone back into her purse. She watched Dee pass the ball to Rebecca Thistlewaite, a pale British girl who wouldn’t be able to score if you put her face through the basket. Lydia smiled at her daughter’s generosity. At Dee’s age, Lydia had been fronting a really terrible riot girl band and threatening to drop out of high school. Dee was on the debate team. She volunteered at the YMCA. She was sweet-natured, generous, smart as hell. Her capacity for detail was astounding, if not highly annoying during arguments. Even at a young age, Dee had had an uncanny ability to mimic back whatever she heard—especially if she heard it from Lydia. Which is why Dee was called Dee instead of the beautiful name Lydia had put on her birth certificate.