Pretty Ugly: A Novel (16 page)
The cabin in Gatlinburg was a ramshackle shit box. “Rustic” was the word Safari Leasing used on their Web site, which apparently in Tennessee was just another word for “shitty.” The living room smelled of mildew, menstrual blood, and ashtrays. Staples and duct tape kept the water-damaged wallpaper on the walls, and every surface was mildly sticky, as if the cleaning crew had been instructed to wipe everything down with Diet Sprite. There was a bird’s nest in the fireplace and raccoon hair on the pillows. It was not how Courtney imagined spending the most important birthday of her life. She certainly wasn’t expecting a luxury hotel, but she also wasn’t expecting to step on a snail in the bathroom. The rancid accommodations could have been overlooked, however, had the cabin been anywhere near the city.
“It’s like we’re not even staying in Gatlinburg at all!” Courtney whined as Ray’s Jeep Wrangler wound through a barely paved mountain road that on his GPS looked like a child’s first attempt at cursive writing.
She wasn’t wrong. Technically, there was “access” to entertainment and restaurants just like technically there was “access” to Alaska. But anything Courtney wanted to do, like putt-putt golfing or designing her own T-shirt or firing a real machine gun, required a twenty-minute drive back down the serpentine road that had made her throw up twice on the way up.
“I’m pregnant, Ray! I throw up all the time anyway. I can’t go up and down that road a thousand times a day! I’m not, like, some magic robot or something!”
“I know you’re not a magic robot,” Ray said, expressionless.
Working two full-time jobs and making sure his pregnant wife didn’t find out about his pregnant girlfriend didn’t leave Ray much energy to argue about the accessibility of the Appalachian slum dwelling he rented on the Internet with a dead man’s credit card.
Agreeing to the trip was the worst idea Ray had had recently, and recently all he’d had were bad ideas. Three days in Gatlinburg was not his ideal getaway, but eventually he grew to see it as an opportunity. How often does a thirty-five-year-old noncelebrity get to spend a weekend in a hotel with an uninhibited, barely legal teenager?
Like most men with an Internet connection, Ray had watched a lot of porn. He’d learned things, and he looked at his weekend as the culmination of his two decades of study, his thesis, a three-day master class dedicated to the power and wisdom of his penis. But he and Courtney weren’t going all the way to Christ’s asshole to stay inside and have sex. They could do that in Owensboro. Besides, she was now the future mother of his child. Introducing her to reverse cowgirl now just seemed disrespectful. What Ray really needed was a magic pill to make all his problems go away. Thank God for modern pharmaceuticals.
Bee Rock was an underweight drug rep with the sharp features and angry sexuality of a Fox News anchor. Relaxing in the nurses’ lounge, Ray snapped out of a Percocet stupor when the pretty blond skeleton handed him a sample pack of pills and a possible way out. The package showed a young woman with a knowing smile hugging her knees while gazing off into a bright future. In a reassuring font, the drug Ceaseocor introduced itself to Ray, and asked, “Why shouldn’t the future belong to you?”
“Abortion pills?” Ray asked.
Hearing the “a” word, the young rep’s smile broke for an almost imperceptible moment before she answered.
“That’s not how I would describe them.” The slight edge in her tone made Ray wonder if she was defending the drug from a place of corporate loyalty or personal experience.
“Ceaseocor is a safe and legal solution to a difficult dilemma many women face on a daily basis, unexpected pregnancies. With Ceaseocor there is no stigma and no discomfort. Additionally, it is safe enough to be used at home and has been approved by the FDA, the AMA, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, and is pending government approval in fourteen foreign territories. It’s a real lifesaver,” she concluded without a hint of irony.
Ray could not believe he hadn’t thought of this sooner. It was as if the answer to his problem had been hiding in the shadows waiting for the right moment to jump out and say, “Hey, Ray, why don’t you mash up a bunch of abortion pills and put them in Courtney’s Dr Pepper when you take her to Gatlinburg?”
“Occam’s razor,” Ray mumbled through a faint smile.
“Excuse me?”
He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “Hm? Oh, um … nothing. Occam’s razor.”
The drug rep scrunched her nose to try and look cute but instead looked like a bird smelling a fart. “What’s that?”
“It’s, uh, basically it’s the idea that, all things being equal, the best solution is usually the simplest one.”
Bee nodded seriously. It may have been the most profound thing she’d ever understood.
“I like that.” She took out a small black notebook and started scribbling while Ray imagined the many ways sex with her would be disappointing. “Can I use that?” she asked.
Ray shrugged. “Sure. I didn’t come up with it.”
“Who did?”
“Occam.”
“Right. And it’s a razor?”
“Yes. It’s a razor.”
“Perfect.”
Putting on his most professional nursing face, Ray took a dozen sample packs and slipped them in his pocket.
“Well, Ceaseocor sounds like a real game changer. I’ll pass these along to our OB. Thanks for coming by.”
Instantly, Nurse Miller felt taller, as if he was standing upright for the first time in weeks. Why shouldn’t the future belong to him?
Ray knew this plan was despicable, but he honestly didn’t know what else to do. How else was he supposed to protect the family he loved? He wasn’t ending a life; he was saving a family.
It’s actually the most moral option,
he rationalized to himself. Courtney was young and still had twenty quality childbearing years ahead of her—and at least five to ten sketchy ones. More than enough time for her to prepare for the challenges and ravages of motherhood. She was eighteen. Her life had potential, and there was no reason to throw all that away for some partially wanted baby.
If Ray had any lingering questions about whether he was doing the right thing, the drive to Gatlinburg put those to rest.
“I read that boys do better at math than girls because of something about their brains. Is that true?” “Do you know what the Bible says about breast-feeding at, like, a McDonald’s?” “Is six months too young for pierced ears?” “Did you know that bacteria from baby poop never, ever comes out of clothes? You can’t see it, but it’s always there. Something about their intestines or the way they digest food or something. How gross is that?” “Hey, you’re a nurse. Is it true that for the first year of their lives, babies can see in 3-D and after that it goes to normal?” “I read on a mommy blog that mothers have something like a million times more chances of skin cancer, and then when the baby turns two everything goes back to the way it was before. Something about hormones or something. The article was real long so I didn’t read the whole thing. But isn’t that scary?” “How do you feel about the name Miley Dakota if it’s a girl and Timberlake for a boy?”
Ray simply could not raise a child with this person.
There would be no easy end to their relationship, no parting as friends, but he believed/hoped the emotional anguish from “miscarrying” would give him the opportunity to say, “Look, we’ve both been through something traumatic here, and I think it’s probably best if we just take some time apart to pray about everything and sort out our feelings.”
Courtney, being emotionally devastated from having been pushed down the stairs by life, would want to separate herself from anything that reminded her of little Miley Timberlake, and Ray would be free as a bird—a vulture, perhaps, but a bird nonetheless.
If all that wasn’t enough to justify his actions, somehow Courtney had gotten it into her head that when her grandfather died, Ray would be moving in with her, a belief so immature he wondered if she also thought a fucking stork was going to deliver her baby.
As Marvin’s only heir, Courtney stood to inherit his property as well as somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-five thousand dollars in cash and investments. A sum so immense, Courtney’s teenage brain could barely comprehend it.
“You know, Ray, pretty soon I’m going to be rich, and that will be nice and all, but I’m still going to need
major
help getting the house ready for the baby. I was thinking Memaw’s old sewing room would be, like, the
best
nursery ever. And the bathrooms need to be totally redone, too.”
That was just the beginning of her list. The furniture and carpeting, relics of the Eisenhower era, “totally needed to be totally replaced,” and the whole house inside and out was at least two decades overdue for new paint. The plumbing leaked under the house, sparks shot from the sockets whenever anything was plugged in, and there was no Wi-Fi.
“How do you expect to get all that work done if you’re off living somewhere else?” she asked one night as he came weakly.
Courtney had never asked Ray to leave Miranda, but he could tell it was coming. She’d been asking questions, many of them starting with, “Hey, here’s a hypothetical question…” and followed by a question that was in no way hypothetical.
“Hey, here’s a hypothetical question: If you were going to leave your wife, when do you think you might do that?” Or, “Hey, here’s a hypothetical question: Would you have to pay alimony if you quit your jobs and just lived off my inheritance?”
Plans were being made about his life without his permission, and that needed to stop.
“Hey, here’s a hypothetical question: Do you want to have more than one child?” she asked on the way to the cabin.
“I already have three. Or five, depending on how you look at it.”
“I mean with me.”
“Why would you ask me that?” he asked, genuinely baffled.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was an only child and I always wanted a brother or sister. I think we should think about having another one right away so they’re close to the same age and can play together.”
Absolutely not. Ray was going to fill Courtney’s Dr Pepper with enough Ceaseocor to kill every fetus within a ten-mile radius. Only then would he be free to go back to the overworked, pill-addled life he had once so foolishly taken for granted, and Courtney would go back to doing whatever it was she did before they met. It was win-win.
Ray was exhausted when they returned to Château de Crap after a day of shopping, minigolf, and a fifteen-dollar (per person) chair lift that gave them the same view of the mountains they had from their grimy cabin window. But the night was young. There was work yet to do. Ray made a fire and Courtney curled up on the couch with an
US Weekly
she picked up at the only non-Christian bookstore they could find. Studying the pages as if they were sacred texts, she asked Ray in a tone that indicated she didn’t really care about his answer, “How do you feel about the name Gosling? For a girl. Or a boy, too, I guess. It could go either way. I like it.”
She tore the page from the magazine and stuffed it in her pocket.
As the sun set over the mountains, the room started to take on a stunningly different character. The golden-hour glow accented the flicker of the fire and transformed their vile little cabin into the romantic sex retreat Ray had fantasized about.
The only difference between pornography and art
is
the lighting,
Ray thought.
Glancing up from her literature, Courtney did a double take.
“Holy shit balls, what did you do? This place looks awesome!”
Ray shrugged, trying to be cool. “What can I say? I’m just good.”
“You sure are.” She giggled and pulled herself up from the couch. “How about you start dinner and I’ll be right back.”
She scurried off to the bedroom, where she put on one of Ray’s button-down shirts and slipped into a pair of cute little panties she got at cutelittlepanties.com.
As she did this, Ray went to the kitchen and put his plan into action. He took Courtney’s mocha vanilla swirl ice cream cake from the freezer and unpacked the rest of the birthday dinner she had requested: a DiGiorno pizza, a two-liter bottle of Diet Dr Pepper, a bag of York Peppermint Patties (“the little ones like they have at Halloween”), and a cantaloupe.
The blister pack of Ceaseocor had been in Ray’s pocket all day. He pushed six pink-and-blue tablets from their womblike bubble and with the back of a spoon crushed them into powder. Sweeping his freedom into a glass, Ray noticed a warning on the back of the package: “Caution! Take with food. Ingesting this product on an empty stomach may result in abdominal discomfort, heartburn, and/or gas.”
Ray shook his head. He was very familiar with side effects. And he was very familiar with drug companies. The makers of Ceaseocor didn’t care if a woman farted through her chemical abortion. They just didn’t want to be sued if she did. The warning was absurd and Ray knew it, but he decided to wait until after they had cake to give Courtney the pills. It was, after all, her eighteenth birthday. Why make it worse than it had to be?
“Ray, could you come in here for a minute?” Courtney called from the living room.
“Can it wait? I’m starting dinner!”
“Please? It’s important.”
Ray sighed. “All right, just a sec.” He stashed the abortion powder in the cupboard behind an ancient box of Bisquick and went to the living room. “What is it?” he asked curtly, then froze when he saw her. “Holy shit.”
Courtney was standing in the middle of the room illuminated perfectly by the roaring fire, the setting sun, and a few candles she’d picked up at Ye Olde Candle and Tobacco Emporium. His shirt was unbuttoned to her navel, which she had gotten pierced earlier in the week, and her cute little panties were bunched up at her knees.
“You know, we haven’t had sex since I’ve been legal.”
“Tha—” He cleared his throat. “That’s true. We haven’t.”
“So then why don’t you come over here and fuck me?”
In one fluid motion, Courtney undid the last button of his shirt and let it fall open while subtly shifting her weight, causing the panties to fall to her ankles. “I’m a big girl now,” she said, and bit her bottom lip.
