Free Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell Page A

that needed to be excavated; as if we were hiding something. That experience remains unspeakable. Eventually the policewoman who had accompanied us to the examination room took us home to her apartment , where we sat on her couch and watched TV. We hadn’t seen TV for a month and a half, of course, but something about its familiar irrelevance calmed us like a drug. We stared vacantly at the absurd figures on the screen until we fell asleep, side by side on the couch, collapsed against each other.
    The nice cop woke me when my parents arrived, and I still remember the few beautifully blank seconds before the gunshot went off in my head again, and I understood where I was and where I wasn’t; the day rushed back in. My parents’ faces loomed over me—Mom’s somehow scattered, as if it had been taken apart and then haphazardly patched back together; Dad’s angry and hard but with fear showing through the cracks. They could not sit on the couch because Carly was sprawled out beside me; instead, awkwardly, they reached their thin, tanned arms out to me, inviting me to stand and be embraced. Which I did, automatically; but I found no comfort. Their arms felt insubstantial, their eyes held too many questions I knew they’d never be able to ask, their fear was wordless and stiff. “I’m fine,” I heard myself reassuring them. “I’m fine, I am, really I’m fine.” And a dark space opened up between us as they searched me for clues, their faces imploring, and I could only look implacably, impenetrably back.
    “Oh Lois,” they kept saying. “Little Lois.” My mother even whispered “my baby” at one point, with uncharacteristic sentiment. I did not think she had ever called me her baby before, except perhaps when I truly was one. But I was not their baby. I was not even Lois, exactly. My parents looked like kindly, helpless strangers. I don’t know what I looked like to them, but whatever I saw on their faces didn’t look like recognition.
    After that they took me to a motel, where I stayed with my mother while my father talked to the police. I told my mother I was too tired to talk, and persuaded her to let me lie on one of the double beds and watch more TV. I asked her to close the curtains so I couldn’t see the jagged mountains that surrounded us. She sat in a puffy orange vinyl chair by the window and watched me while I drifted off to sleep again, television voices chattering in the background. Sleep seemed the only comfort available. I tried to will myself to dream of nights at the lodge, playing hide-and-seek in the dewy grass, surrounded by fireflies and stars, but I did not dream at all.
    What a strange situation, though surely it’s not uncommon: a serious crime had been committed, perhaps multiple crimes, but the perpetrator of the crimes had been removed from the equation. There was no one to try, convict, punish. My parents wanted simply to take me home, but apparently there were procedures that had to be followed, steps that required our presence. We were evidence, after all. We were what remained. And I was not ready to leave Carly, though her father and Gail were also anxious to get her out of there. Reporters clustered outside the police station and flung questions at us as we hurried to and from our parents’ rental cars; they hovered outside our motel rooms, desperate for a glimpse of our well-known faces, a word or two to spice up the news. Gail and Carly appeared on a local talk show, much to my parents’ disgust; I wasn’t allowed to watch it. After that her father put his foot down, and Gail sulked. Her defense was that other girls needed to hear our story in order to protect themselves from danger. “I won’t have my daughter exploited by these vultures,” Carly May’s father said, taking what Carly May assured me was a rare stand, and that was that. I must have received similar offers, but my parents never mentioned it. “That woman is unspeakable,” my mother said of Gail, and