A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson Page B

hands. He kept his nails short and plain, very masculine. I hoped they could be kind hands, as they reached toward the dress. I let him take it and stood up abruptly, turned my face away. I didn’t want to watch Rick Warfield touch the bones.
    “Uh-oh,” Rick said behind me. “See the tag? The Kidworks in Moss Point opened less than twenty years ago, and this dress is stil in decent shape. This isn’t some old cemetery, Tyler.”
    But I knew that already.
    This was the remains of Baby Girl Slocumb, wrapped tenderly in her yel ow blanket and buried with her crib duck for company. Had to be.
    I knew, and Liza knew, too. My baby! Liza had screamed, over and over as she’d wormed her desperate way across the back lawn. Wel , of course she knew. Liza was the one who had buried her. I recoiled a step. Couldn’t help but.
    Joel and Rick were talking, but none of the words they said made any sense to me. I kept backing up.
    “Ginny?” Rick said, and I wondered what dreadful shape my face must be making to have him sound so worried. My arms went to gooseflesh; he could be acting worried to cover up suspicious.
    I said, “I’m fine. It’s just so sad and strange.” I tried to imagine a huge, cold stone rol ing across me and flattening my grimace back into a plain, closed mouth, cool-ironing away the lines that wanted to map grief around my eyes. I turned and walked as straight as I could with the world tilting and rocking and whirling under me to the concrete slab we cal ed a patio. I sank down into one of my stripy plastic lawn chairs.
    A word came into my head then, and it was a fairy-tale word, Grimm variety, like “bad wolf” or “wicked witch.” Those kinds of words don’t hold power over adults. A wolf for a grown woman is just a date who has the grab hands. A witch is the nicest word you cal the snappy lady who needs two hundred in cash back, al in fives. The one who rol s her eyes and taps her foot at your careful counting, then says she wants twenties after al while the line rustles angrily behind her in the bright noon rush of lunch hour at the bank on a paycheck Friday. The word was “changeling,” and this word had been dug up, ivory-colored and frail, from my own backyard.
    I was teetering on the brink of something, and any push could tip me over. I held myself stil in the chair, so stil , as Officer Joel cal ed in a scientist from the junior col ege. I didn’t even offer coffee, barely breathing. I watched the first scientist cal in someone smarter. Tyler spit brown juice on my grass, and Rick made him back away from the hole and the box. It al seemed far and sil y and nothing to do with me as I held my balance, a breath away from tipping. I’d have teetered there til the sun winked out, if Mosey hadn’t pushed me over. I heard her voice behind me saying, “Big?”
    She came and squatted by my chair, her arms looped around her own self in a comfortless hug. I stared at her, blinking. Changeling.
    “Mrs. Lynch is with Mom. Big, are you okay?” Mosey asked.
    I looked at her and I fel , sliding over the lip, down to find what was waiting for me in the dark-lined box they’d dug up from my yard.
    Liza’s baby had not been given back to her, like mine was when Katrina and the Waves had asked and asked if it felt good; and oh, but it had. It had felt so good to hold my magic, living baby that I hardly remembered labor.
    But Liza’s baby had real y died. I didn’t know how. I couldn’t even consider that yet. Al I knew was that Mosey was the stolen child and Liza was the nixie, trading a loss for something lovely and alive. She’d found Mosey somewhere out in the black span of two and a half lost years, when she was grieving and strung out on every drug she could find to gobble, crazy on the road.
    My first thought was that Mosey couldn’t know. It would break her heart and could derail her at this crucial time. This was our trouble year. A thing like this could send her careening for comfort into