Don't Make Me Beautiful

  Brian wraps his right arm around his son’s shoulders and rests the gloved hand in his lap. The end of another game, and they’re going out with hope in their hearts. This is how life should always be - sitting by someone you love, enjoying the moment, waiting for something exciting to happen.

  Wilson’s bat comes around as the fast ball Liam predicted goes sailing towards the plate. It’s the most perfectly-timed swing Wilson has ever made in his six-year career. The crack made by the bat meeting the ball echoes around the field, and he takes off running, dropping the bat on his way.

  “Dad! It’s a fly ball! It’s a fly ball!” screams Liam, jumping up out of his seat.

  Brian sees the ball coming into high left field, a tiny, white speck getting larger and larger as it gets closer.

  “Fly ball! Coming our way!” yells someone nearby.

  Brian puts his glove in the air. “I got it! I got it!”

  “Get it, Dad! Get it!” Liam has a grip on his dad’s leg that’s pinching the hairs there.

  Brian barely notices. His heart is beating so hard and so fast, he can feel it on the inside of his ribs. His breath comes in short, excited puffs. This is the moment they’ve been waiting for. The one he waited for with his dad that never came.

  The ball keeps going, higher and higher. Up and over the wall it sails.

  Brian puts one foot on the seat and stands up, stretching his arm as far as he can and throwing his gloved hand up into the air. The ball’s too high. Too high!

  And then his pocket catches the edge of the red-threaded white leather. The ball doesn’t go in neatly like he’d always imagined it would. It falls down as he bobbles it, trying to keep it in the glove.

  Hands reach out from all around him, trying to steal the ball.

  Brian battles to keep it close to his body, prepared to hug the thing to death if he has to. This is his ball, his and Liam’s.

  He has it in his forearms for a brief moment, before it slips through. It would have dropped to the ground if a pair of hands right below Brian’s elbows hadn’t been there to stop its descent.

  Brian comes back down to the ground, breathless, searching all over for the ball he almost had.

  Liam is standing there with his hands out, a surprised look on his face and an almost brand-new baseball resting in his little fingers.

  “You got it, Liam!” Brian yells, half excited, half incredulous.

  “I got it, Dad!” screams Liam, sounding hysterical, looking scared to death.

  Brian grabs his son and picks him up to hold him high. “My boy caught the ball!”

  Fans around them are cheering and clapping. Liam’s shining face is displayed on the jumbotron, and the announcer is saying something about the fan catching Wilson’s only fly ball of his career.

  Liam holds up his prize, his eyes glowing, his smile bigger than any he’s ever worn before. Looking down at his dad, he leans over to hug his head. “I knew we could do it, Dad. I just knew it! Teamwork, right?”

  Brian lowers him down a little so he can give him a bear hug. Squeezing the small boy to his chest and burying his face in his son’s neck he responds. “You got it, Li-Li. That’s the best kind of teamwork. I’m so proud of you.”

  “I’m proud of you too, Dad.”

  He puts Liam down, but the little boy is too excited to sit. He bounces around on the tips of his toes as he holds up the ball over his head and searches the field for Wilson. The crowd is too happy for him to complain about him blocking their view of the runners moving around the bases, each one of them tapping a foot on home plate to add another run to the scoreboard. The last few minutes of the game pass in a dream as the Marlins take the win and Wilson gets a standing ovation from the crowd as his teammates put him on their shoulders and parade him around the field.

  “This is the best game ever of all time, Dad,” says Liam, sliding his small hand into his father’s larger one.

  “You said it, buddy. You said it.”

  “I never want this minute to end.” Liam looks up at his dad. “Do you?”

  Brian shakes his head, wishing he could freeze time right here in this moment with his son. “Nope. I want it to always be like this.”

  Chapter Five

  IT’S ALWAYS LIKE THIS. THE waiting. The nervous fear. The inevitable. Nicole wishes she could go to sleep and wake up a year or ten later. Skip all the parts in between. But that’s not how her world works. Each day goes by with agonizing slowness, until this moment. The moment the monster pulls into the driveway and shuts off his engine. Then time moves forward with lightning speed, bringing him to the doorstep and through the front door where she’s waiting in the hallway.

  He steps inside and flicks on the light, not looking at her.

  Nicole flinches at the brightness of it. Her eyes need a moment to adjust. By the time she’s comfortable again, he’s dropped his tool belt on the ground by the door and is advancing.

  “How was your day, hon?” she asks.

  He keeps coming.

  “I have a beer for you. It’s nice and cold.”

  He walks right past her like she doesn’t exist. She’d worry she was a real ghost if he didn’t actually bump into her a little, pushing her to the side. Ghosts can’t be pushed around like people can.

  She turns and follows him into the kitchen where another light is turned on. “Would you like me to put it into one of those cold glasses from the freezer?” she asks.

  “Do you mean a beer mug?” he asks, opening up the freezer and pulling one out.

  Her ears go red with worry and embarrassment. “Yes. One of those.”

  He walks over, still not looking at her, and takes the bottle from her hand. Pouring the beer into the frozen mug himself, he finally lifts his eyes briefly. There is no emotion there. His face is blank.

  A spark of hope lights up Nicole’s heart. The fire of his anger is banked for now. Maybe it’ll last and she’ll be able to sleep tonight. She looks at his face for the millionth time, wondering what people see when they look at him. Probably the same thing she used to see. Nicole remembers him being handsome with a strong jaw and an angular nose. Heavy brows and dark suntanned skin give him a swarthy look. Deep-set brown eyes only enhance the effect.

  That’s what she used to see. Now she only sees what’s beneath the beautiful exterior … the monster that lives inside his soul.

  “Why didn’t you put the beer in the mug in the first place?” he asks, setting the empty bottle down on the counter. He takes a big gulp from the glass, wiping the beer mustache off with the back of his hand when he’s done. His hands are strong, thick, the knuckles scarred from his work and his hobby. His nostrils flare, but his anger is still hidden.

  Nicole begins to tremble, but she fights the fear, hoping he won’t notice. He hates it when she cowers. It antagonizes him, and that’s the last thing she wants to do. “I thought last time …”

  He points at her with the mug, cutting her off. “See? That’s the problem, Nikki. You’re thinking again.”

  She says nothing. She just waits for the rest of it. There’s always more.

  He takes another long drink before continuing. “How many times have I told you that you shouldn’t do something you’re not qualified to do?”

  Nicole wants to argue with him. To tell him she’s more than qualified to think. To have an opinion. To make decisions. But she doesn’t. Maybe he’ll just drink and go to sleep and she’ll have another few hours of peace. It’s way more valuable to her than standing up for herself. She learned a long time ago that standing up for herself just puts her in the perfect position to be slapped down.

  He shakes his head in disgust, laughing bitterly. “You make me sick, you know that? Like actually, physically ill.”

  Nicole presses her lips together to keep them from trembling.

  “Have you seen yourself lately?”

  Nicole shakes her head. “You told me not to.” The words come out in almost a whisper.

  He slams th
e mug down on the counter. “Come on.” He grabs her roughly by the upper arm and drags her out of the kitchen.

  “John, don’t. I don’t want to.”

  “Of course you don’t want to,” he snarls, “it’s disgusting. But why should I have to be the only one who looks at it?” As he walks by the front hall table, he swipes the framed picture from the top of it and brings it along. “Fucking disgusting is what it is.” He pushes her into the bathroom next to the foot of the stairs and flicks on the light.

  Nicole is standing in front of a towel hung from its two corners on hooks embedded in the wall.

  “Go ahead.” He says, his tone taunting and cruel. “Take a look.”

  “I would rather not,” she says, her voice amazingly calm considering how sick and scared she feels inside.

  “No shit, you’d rather not. I’d rather not too, Nikki, believe me. Nothing would make me happier than never having to look at your fucking face for the rest of my life. But I’m stuck with you, now aren’t I? Because we both know you can never get another guy to even look at you with a face like yours.” He lets go of her arm and punches her in the back, his knuckles banging against her sharp shoulder blade. “Take a look.”

  He holds up the framed photo next to her head.

  Nicole breathes out a sigh of defeat and leans forward, the pain in her shoulder throbbing with every beat of her pulse.

  Unhooking the towel on one side of the mirror, she lets it fall. Before her now are two faces, one beautiful in a frame and one horrifically deformed not in a frame. The only thing similar between the two are the eyes.

  “See?” He hisses out a breath and shakes his head. “Now that’s what I call ugly as sin.” He looks at the framed photo and then at her reflection. “Do you see what you’ve done to yourself? Do you see what you’ve done? It’s a fucking shame, that’s what it is. You’re nothing but a waste of space. Always have been, always will be.”

  He puts the frame down on the counter and walks away, leaving her alone in the bathroom with her reflection staring back at her.

  The ice-green eyes are the only thing left of her beauty. The rest has been taken. Beating by beating, week by week, year by year, who she used to be has been erased, leaving this monster behind. Medusa, maybe. So ugly, people would run screaming if she ever left the house. He’s right about a couple of things; no man will ever look at her again without recoiling in disgust, and she deserves what she’s gotten. Stupidity has a price, and in her case, it came very steep.

  She reaches up and touches her nose with her fingers, gently, because it’s still sore from its meeting with John’s fist three days ago. She suffered that one for the job he lost when he showed up late to work for the fifth time in a week. The bones have been broken so many times and set in weird shapes that it’s not really a nose anymore. It’s hard to breathe through, collapsed on one side, permanently rounded and big on the other.

  Her cheekbones don’t match one another, one of them having been slammed into the coffee table several times a few months back. She lifts the thinned hair up on one side to reveal her left ear. It resembles a small head of cauliflower, misshapen, large, lumpy and permanently swollen. The other one isn’t quite as bad. John is right-handed, so that side of her body is spared the worst of his anger.

  Lips that have been split too many times to remember are scarred and swollen. The jaw that’s been broken three times is no longer aligned, making chewing difficult. This explains her barely there frame and complete lack of muscle tone. Several of her teeth are gone, two are sharply chipped, and many of the ones remaining are loose. They’ll be gone soon too. She looks like a professional fighter who’s been in the ring a hundred rounds too many.

  She lets her hair drop back into place and puts the towel on the hook, covering the mirror once again. Leaving the bathroom, she picks up the framed photo of the smiling stranger who used to be her and brings it along. Placing it on the table very carefully and positioning it exactly how he wants it, she thinks about her journey from there to here, from beauty queen to Medusa. If she had only known then what she knows now, she would have picked up the nearest weapon and beat John to death the minute she met him. Instead, she dated him, moved in with him, and then became his prisoner.

  She looks forward to the day she can be in the yard sleeping next to Kitten in the dirt. It’s her only escape; she’s knows this like she knows tomorrow and the next day and the next, John will come home and take out his frustrations on her body and her mind.

  Monsters like her do not make good girlfriends, sisters, daughters, or neighbors. Life for her is continuing, and yet, at the same time, it’s already over. She’s twenty-five, but she feels more like eighty. Shuffling down the hall, she goes to find John in the kitchen. It’s always better to find him than to wait for him to find her. There’s something about meeting her fate head on that makes her feel like she has just a touch of control left in her life.

  Chapter Six

  BRIAN NODS TO THE EMPTY, brass stand on his dresser. “Go ahead. Put it up on there.”

  “Maybe you should do it, Dad. You’re the one who caught it first.” Liam looks down into the pocket of the glove, staring for the hundredth time at the ball.

  “Heck no. You caught it, not me. I just ticked it with the glove. The honor goes to the man who actually secured it. That’s you.”

  Liam nods, all seriousness. “Okay, I’ll do it. I have to put it on there so we can see the autograph, huh, Dad?”

  “Yep. Make sure it’s good and centered.”

  Liam takes the ball out of the glove and places it ever-so-carefully in the stand, turning it so the batter’s signature will show. “That was cool how he signed it.”

  “Yep, sure was. He’s a good sport.” Brian stares at the ball and then his son’s face. This is a moment he’s dreamed of for a long time, but it’s not going exactly as he imagined.

  “What are you thinking, Dad?” asks Liam, frowning at his father’s expression.

  “Oh, I was just thinking how cool it is to have a son like you.”

  Liam smiles. “That’s corny.”

  “I’m a corny guy, what can I say.” He picks Liam up, even though he’s really too big for that these days, his legs hanging down to Brian’s knees. “I always thought seeing that ball up there would be the best part of my night, but I think I like looking at your face better.”

  Liam pushes his dad’s cheeks together and smiles. “I like looking at your face too, even though it’s too beardy.”

  Brian deliberately leans in and rubs his beard-stubbled face all over Liam’s neck. “What’s the matter? You don’t like my beard?”

  Liam giggles as he fights his father off. “No! No! Go away beard monster!”

  Brian gives up battling the gangly kid and puts him on his feet. “Get your PJs on and brush your hairy teeth. I’ll be there in a few minutes to tuck you in.”

  Liam stands in front of the dresser and stares at the ball. “Just one minute. I want to look at it some more.”

  Brian turns him around by the shoulders and points him to the door. “Out. You can look at it tomorrow. It’s Saturday, remember?”

  “Cool! No school!” He runs out of the room, the baseball temporarily forgotten in favor of the cartoons he’s allowed to watch for two hours in the morning. “Sponge Bob Square Pants! Sponge Bob Square Pants!…” The rest of the song is lost in the sound of the sink going on and the door to the bathroom closing.

  Brian pulls the ringing cell phone out of his back pocket. Seeing the number there, he relaxes. Perfect timing. “Hey.”

  “Hey, Brian. How’re things going over there?” She’s tired. Brian can tell by the sigh that follows her question.

  “Well, we’ve been busy making dreams come true. No big deal.” He can’t keep his smile out of his voice.

  “Don’t tell me you caught a ball…”

  “Yup, I caught a ball. Liam caught it, actually, but I’ll let him tell you the story.”

  ??
?Does that mean you won’t be going to any more games now that you’ve realized your life dream?” She’s mocking him but he doesn’t take it personally. They both know the score when it comes to him and baseball.

  “Don’t even try it. Listen, when are you getting in again? Do you need a ride?”

  “I should be in late tomorrow night. I’ll come get Liam around nine in the morning Sunday. Thanks for the offer, but I have a ride.”

  “New boyfriend?” Brian asks, hoping the answer is yes.

  “No. Agnes is picking me up.”

  “Agnes my neighbor, right?”

  “Yep. The one and only.”

  “She’s a lifesaver. But you should get your boyfriend to pick you up.”

  “I don’t want to. Stop trying to question me while acting like you’re not. If you want to know something just ask it.”

  “Fine. Do you have a boyfriend? Are you dating?”

  “Why? Are you jealous?” She’s joking. They both know that’s not going to happen.

  “Yeah right. No, I was just thinking that it’s about time you stopped traveling all over the place for work and settled down a little.”

  She pauses before responding. “Are you trying to make me feel guilty, Brian? Don’t you think I do enough of that to myself?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant … never mind. No matter what I say now it’s going to come out wrong. Better quit while I’m ahead.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve finally learned something about women.”

  “Divorce tends to make a big impression on me like that.”

  “Good. Better late than never. Your next wife can send me a thank you card, I guess.”

  “You okay?” Brian asks, sensing something in her voice beyond the playing around.

  “Yeah.” She sighs heavily. “I’m just … frustrated I guess. I’m working my ass off, doing fine at work and all … but I feel like something’s missing. Like I’m not working for something valuable, you know?”