Such a Pretty Face (42 page)

“Yes, I’m leaving you for a younger man. He is delicious. So tasty. My girlfriends are at
my
home right now. Cherie?”

Cherie turned on a TV. There were the girlfriends, waving, laughing. They were behind the pumpkin-shooting gun. I couldn’t tell if Coraleen was drunk again. Out in the middle of the pumpkin patch? Three sports cars.

“Now you listen here, you porn-hungry, saliva-dripping, fart-dropping, acid-belching old man,” classy Claudia said, as polite as you please. “You will give me a divorce or I will tell them to start shooting those pumpkins till each one of your sports cars might have been dropped from Pluto, got it?”

Funny how sports cars motivate men.

We wrapped up that divorce with no further ado.

I love my walks. Have you ever noticed the geometric shapes in nature? The triangles that tree branches form? The oval-shaped yellow petals of a flower? The circle of a bird’s nest? Have you ever noticed that birds flying in a flock sometimes form the outline of a fish? Have you noticed raindrops plopping off leaves and the twirl of leaves as they fall and the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine?

Have you noticed?

“I have something to explain to you, Stevie,” Herbert intoned, his voice black and gooey on my answering machine days after the renewal of vows disaster. “It might be difficult for you to understand the extreme circumstances surrounding your leave-taking of Ashville as a child. I’m going to have to ask you to trust me and do as I say: Do not take yourself to Ashville and awaken all those memories of your deranged, demented mother and your grandparents and your sister. That’s a part of your past you don’t need to bother with again. It’s done. In fact, I forbid you to go, young woman. I forbid it. Call me back immediately.” He cleared his throat. “Have you heard from your aunt Janet?”

I did not call him. And yes, I’d heard from Aunt Janet when she was in Paris en route to Africa. “It’s divine here. I had no idea this whole world was outside, outside the door of my airplane….”

While I sanded a chair late the next night, after Jake had left me with a passionate kiss to rattle my brain, I thought about Herbert. He hates himself, I knew that. Herbert is the most unhappy, angry, bitter person I have ever met. No one in our family wants him around. He knows this. He’s smart enough to get it but mean enough, controlling enough, for whatever reason, to not stop the behavior that makes everyone hate him.

And now his wife had left him, his kids wouldn’t have anything to do with him, and he was sunk politically and publicly disgraced.

I tried to feel sorry for him.

Couldn’t quite get there.

I saw Sunshine that night in my dream. She was sitting on the front step of the Schoolhouse House. She smiled and waved at me, the charm bracelet she’d given me on top of her head like a crown. Behind her was the vegetable garden. Beyond that, the corn. In the middle of the corn was a painting Helen had made. It was one of the Schoolhouse House, the only thing she ever painted that didn’t reflect the insane cubicles and hallways of the ongoing hell in her mind. The picture was bright and pretty, wildflowers spotting the landscape. The picture grew and grew until it took over what I was seeing.

Helen came flying out of the hills, only she was a hawk with her own head, and kidnapped Sunshine. She dropped Sunshine on a cliff and whispered, “Night night.” She flapped her wings, harder and harder, until the edge of the cliff started to crack. Helen the Hawk stared at me and said, “I don’t like this Trash Heap,” jumped on the edge, and the cliff broke off. I tried to reach Sunshine, but my feet wouldn’t move out of a teacup. In my dream I knew it was my fault that Sunshine died.

When I woke up, sweating and panting, I knew what to plant in the corner of my garden where the weeds are.

Ashville, Oregon

T
he kidnapping of Sunshine happened on a Friday. That day I made Sunshine a heart collage. I used tissue paper, sequins, broken sticks, a pink button I ripped off my sweater, tiny bits of construction paper, and a red pencil I used to draw a miniature picture of our barn. I was ten years old.

My teacher held my heart up and announced, “Now, this is an artist. Stevie,
you
are an artist.” My classmates, many of them relatives, clapped for me. I thought I’d burst right out of my Mary Janes and my purple bell-bottom pants with pride.

Sunshine was not there to meet me at the end of our driveway with Grandma and, sometimes, Helen. Helen would often put two pencils behind her ears, or would bite into an apple and hold it in her mouth because she knew I was coming home from school. We would walk up the driveway, say hi to the horses and the sheep, pet any cats wandering around, and head back to the Schoolhouse House together.

I didn’t see any of them, but I did see the lights flashing on the tops of the police cars.

Instantly panicked, I dropped the heart for Sunshine and my lunch box and ran as fast as I could to the house. I was so scared I remember wetting my pants as I ran. I was huffing a bit because I was already putting on weight, eating for comfort, eating to forget that my own mother had a Command Center, called Sunshine Trash Heap, and yesterday had fastened ropes around her head to make a hat.

I flew into the house and found the police, two paramedics, the local doctor, about ten of The Family and friends, and Grandma and Grandpa pleading with Helen, who was standing on a chair with her arms outstretched as if she’d been hung on a cross.

Helen was wearing my witch’s hat from Halloween, which instantly made me feel sick. Helen had always said, “Witches are evil with sorcerers’ powers. They’re not allowed by Command Center. I don’t listen to them because they do bad things and tell me to do bad things. Thormanntory or chitterbong.”

“Helen,” Dr. Mosher said. “Come on off the chair for a second, will you?”

“I can’t. The spell master is starting soon.”

“Helen, we need to know where Sunshine is,” Grandpa said, his face gray.

“Tell us, Helen, my goodness, you have to tell us,” Grandma begged. She was stark white, her hands knitting together, back and forth.

Helen took off her witch’s hat, twirled it around, then put it back on her head. Then she opened up her trench coat. Underneath she was wearing pink pajamas with white rabbits. “Command Center said I had to do it. The witch said so, too. I had to do the first.”

“Where is she?” Grandpa said, his voice snapping. “You drove her away in the car, Helen. Where is she?”

Helen drove the car? Helen was not supposed to drive the car. They hid the keys from her all the time. The last time she stole the car she put it in the fountain. Before that she drove it to the mountains, then danced on the hood in the rain.

“It’s not here. It’s resting. It’s on a cliff.”

Grandma burst into tears.

“Where’s Sunshine?” I asked Grandma, already crying. “Where is she?”

Grandma shook her head, held me close.

Then Grandpa lost it and yelled at Helen, and she hissed, “I will not have you undermining Punk! He’ll be meaner to me. Stop it! You pig! You overnoisy warlock!” She stuck her left hand out and shook it hard. “Get that off of me, get that off of me!”

“Helen!” Grandpa snapped. “Helen!”

“I said, off, off, it should be off!” She shook her left hand again.

I was sick of this. Sick of her, sick of her rantings and anger, sick of how sad and scared she made me feel, and I wanted Sunshine back. I wanted her back so bad. Sunshine, my little sister, my best friend.

I had no idea I was going to tackle Helen off that chair until I landed hard on top of her.

“You are a dumb mom!” Helen could make me feel like nothing because she never told me she loved me, and she could yell at voices and visions, and I could get by all that, but I could not get by her taking Sunshine from me.

“Where is she, you dumb Helen. Where is she?” I hit her in the nose as hard as I could, and I ignored her cry and the blood that spurted onto my charm bracelet.

Grandma tried to pull me off Helen, but Grandpa stopped her. Grandpa stopped them all. He barked out, “Let her be!” Of course, the man was desperate. He had been getting nowhere with his daughter, so perhaps her daughter could help get his granddaughter home.

“I hate you, Helen! I hate you!” I yelled at her, two inches from her face. “Give me back Sunshine right now! You better not have hurt her, you dumb Helen!”

I pulled her hair and she tried to get up, but I wouldn’t let her and shoved my knees in her stomach. Later I heard the adults talking and found out that Grandpa was holding Helen’s legs down in the back and Grandma was holding one arm, the doctor the other, but in my blind, red rage I couldn’t see that.

“Where is Sunshine?”

Helen pulled her lips tight together. “It’s hiding!”

“No, she’s not!” And then I had an idea. “Where is
it?
Where is Trash Heap?”

“Command Center said I can’t tell!” Helen said, rolling her lips together, the blood now in her mouth, but I saw something in her eyes breaking, something cracking.

I pulled her hair as hard as I could, my other hand on her neck. “Command Center is dumb! He doesn’t know anything! He’s a bad voice you hear in your head, and if you took your medicine, you stupid Helen, the voices would go away. Now, where is Sunshine?”

She started to cry but I didn’t care at all, not one whit. I wanted my sister.

“Where is she!”
I lifted her head with my hands and cracked it back down. I hated myself then. I couldn’t believe I’d hit my own mother, couldn’t believe I was so angry. I was an animal, a criminal, a horrible person.

“She’s on the cliff by the stars.” She breathed, then cried out, her eyes lost, pathetic. “I gave her away to the cliff so Command Center wouldn’t get her.”

“What cliff?”

She cringed, then tears rolled out of her eyes and they mixed with the blood, and I had her tears and blood on my hands. I slammed her head up and down again, hating myself to my deepest core.

Grandma, beside me, made a sobbing sound deep in her throat. I can’t even imagine being in her position: allowing her granddaughter to hit her daughter so that the other granddaughter could be found.

“That cliff high in the sky near the stars.” She relaxed underneath me, her eyes half shutting. “Now Command Center is going to kill me. He’s going to cut me up with a sharp knife. Shut up, Punk! I hid Trash Heap from you. You can’t get her now. Trash Heap is gone.”

I froze. I remembered her painting with trees like jail bars and I knew what cliff Helen was talking about. It was hidden in the woods, off the trail that started in the state park. We had been there once before, when we all went on a hike and Helen had run off. We’d chased her to the cliff, an outgrowth of the mountain, shaped as a finger. We had found her lying on it, hugging it, the drop off that finger so far down I got dizzy staring at it. She’d called it the Star Cliff.

Helen stared right into my eyes, bringing me smack back to reality. “Now Command Center says he’s going to kill you, too.” Her eyes filled with huge tears, spilling out the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t move.

“I’m sorry, but Command Center says you have to die now.”

“Oh, God,” Grandma sobbed.

“That’s enough, Helen,” Grandpa shouted. “That’s enough!”

Helen’s eyes continued to flood with tears, rinsing the blood. “He says that’s it,” she whispered. “That’s it for you and that’s it for
it.
” Her body trembled. “I’m so sorry.”

She started singing “Amazing Grace,” her voice scratchy and wobbly, and I thought she was begging God for help. I felt this cold shiver slither through me, but only briefly. I had what I wanted. I knew what I needed to know.

“Night night,” Helen moaned. “Night night.”

I got up and ran out the door, Grandpa, the police officers, and a bunch of The Family following me.

Sunshine was cowering on the finger of that cliff when we found her. Grandpa went out slowly, carefully and when he brought her back, Sunshine cried on my shoulder and wouldn’t let go. “I knows you comes and gets me, Stevie, I knows it!”

I hugged her tight and rocked her back and forth, Grandpa’s strong arms around the both of us.

That night Grandpa had a heart attack.

Grandma and a bunch of The Family went to the hospital with him.

A bunch of The Family came and stayed with me. Two of our cousins the size of oxen put chairs right outside of Helen’s door so she couldn’t escape.

It wasn’t necessary. For the next three days, Helen went into a catatonic trance. The only time she spoke was when she whispered to me, “You’re next, I’m so sorry.” She wriggled her fingers at me, as in
good-bye.
“Night night.”

Grandma and Grandpa were done. They were backed into a merciless, deadly corner and they had no choice.

Five days later, when Grandpa came home, and three relatives—two brothers and a sister—moved in to help, Grandma flew out to California to check out a mental health facility. She returned on Wednesday. I overheard Grandma and Grandpa’s tearful conversation as they hugged each other close.

Basically it came down to this: save their daughter or save their granddaughters.

They decided to send Helen away permanently. That decision brought both of them to their knees. I saw them, arms around each other on the kitchen floor, foreheads together, the moon shining a light on their devastation.

Three days later, after three of the calmest, nicest days we’ve ever had with Helen, and a day before my grandparents were going to commit her, Helen picked Sunshine up and ran with her through the pouring rain to Grandma’s gray car at 8:00 at night. The keys were always hidden from Helen, but I think one of our relatives accidentally left the extra set out. That’s the only way she could have gotten the keys.

I ran after her, yelling for help. Helen threw Sunshine in the backseat, and I got in, too. I tried to get Sunshine and scramble back out of the car but I couldn’t before Helen was slamming the door and speeding away, in her black dress and nylons, the lines completely straight, her best black heel pressed flat against the accelerator.

We were soon crisscrossing over the center yellow lines, her chants swirling all around, death following us through the slanted light of the moon.