“What happened to Auntie?” Laverne once asked her mother.
“She fell for the trap that snares pretty women,” her mother answered. The look on her plain face said there was a lesson to be learned. “She was sure her beauty would last forever. So she didn’t bother looking for other sources of strength. And when her beauty faded, as it always does, your auntie found out she had nothing left.”
Laverne had never believed her mother’s tale, until now.
Across the street, the light came on in her sister’s bedroom. Janelle was five years younger and went to Hunter College in Manhattan. The subway ride to the Upper East Side could take two full hours. Soon, she’d be heading out the door, wearing her mom jeans and basic sneakers.
Anthony thought Janelle was ugly. She wasn’t ugly. She just wasn’t a swan like Laverne. From the time she was five, Laverne’s beauty had had the power to stop people in their tracks. At nine, she was on her first catalog cover. At twelve, she was cast in her first commercial. By sixteen, she’d lost count of her suitors. Men of all ages found themselves tongue-tied in her presence. She was twenty-three when Anthony spent weeks wooing her with gifts and jewelry.
When Laverne got pregnant, they married. But instead of binding him to her, the baby had broken the spell.
“Maybe I’ll have an abortion,” she heard herself mutter as she watched Janelle leave for school. She’d come to hate the thing growing inside her.
“Too late for that, sweetie,” her aunt said. “But in a few months, you can get alimony and child support.”
Laverne didn’t go outside after that. She didn’t want anyone in the old neighborhood to see what had become of her. Her parents gave Laverne’s auntie enough money to feed her, but they never once knocked at the door.
Then one night, seven months in, she woke up in a pool of blood. By the time she got to the hospital, the baby had died inside her. The doctor gave her a lecture. Said she’d had preeclampsia, and it was a miracle she’d survived at all. The condition would have been detected if she’d sought care when she first felt sick.
“Next time,” she promised.
“You won’t be having any more babies,” he told her.
She thought she’d enjoy her freedom, but she was never the same after that. There were no more modeling jobs. When the doctors cut out the baby, they’d botched the incision. More than one man lost her number after seeing it. She still did a little acting here and there, but nowhere enough to pay the bills. She was working at Target when they offered her money to pretend to be the girl’s mama. She took it without a second thought. The way she saw it, it was the baby paying her back for everything it had stolen.
Faith
Sixteen people attended the service at the Mattauk funeral home. Jo’s family was there. Nessa’s girls, Breanna and Jordan, took the train in for the day. The rest of the attendees were ladies from Nessa’s Bible study group. Even with tears in their eyes, several of them had a hard time pulling their gaze away from Franklin as the pastor delivered the sermon. Only Harriett had skipped the service. There was work to do at the cemetery, she’d informed them.
Wearing the same black dress she’d worn when she’d buried her parents, Nessa sat in the first pew and stared numbly at the coffin. A closed casket had been the only option. One look at the corpse, and the mortician had informed her there would be no way to camouflage the discoloration. Still, Nessa had spent an entire day shopping for a new dress in the right shade of blue, and she’d requested the girl’s makeup be done, though no one at the service would see it. Then she fixed the girl’s hair herself. When she was finished, she’d looked up to see the girl’s ghost watching her from the end of the mortician’s table.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she’d told the girl. She didn’t know what else to say. The ghost was still standing there when she left. When Nessa got home later that night, her sofa was empty. The ghost had chosen to stay with her body.