Such a Pretty Girl

by T. Greenwood

Genres: Women's Fiction; Siblings

Synopsis

Living peacefully in Vermont, Ryan Flannigan is shocked when a text from her oldest friend alerts her to a devastating news item. A controversial photo of her as a pre-teen has been found in the possession of a wealthy investor recently revealed as a pedophile and a sex trafficker—with an inscription to him from Ryan's mother on the back.



Memories crowd in, providing their own distinctive pictures of her mother Fiona, an aspiring actress, and their move to the West Village in 1976. Amid the city's gritty kaleidoscope of wealth and poverty, high art, and sleazy strip clubs, Ryan is discovered and thrust into the spotlight as a promising young actress with a woman's face and a child's body. Suddenly, the safety and comfort Ryan longs for is replaced by auditions, paparazzi, and the hungry eyes of men of all ages.



Forced to reexamine her childhood, Ryan begins to untangle her young fears and her mother's ambitions, and the role each played in the fraught blackout summer of 1977. Even with her movie career long behind her, Ryan and Fiona are suddenly the object of uncomfortable speculation—and Fiona demands Ryan's support. To put the past to rest, Ryan will need to face the painful truth of their relationship, and the night when everything changed.

Release date: October 25, 2022

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

And so instead of calling him back, I take the extra time required to make coffee with the French press, stepping outside to grind the beans, so as not to wake Sasha. Boiling water in the kettle on the stovetop, removing it before it begins to scream. I ignore the phone as I wait for the coffee to steep.

It’s Sasha’s birthday today. Eighteen. I promised her we’ll go raspberry picking to make a birthday pie for her party tonight. I gather the tools for the crust from the pantry: sifter, mixing bowls, rolling pin. I study the glass jars in the cupboard: flour, salt, sugar. I make sure there is butter and that it’s cold.

My phone buzzes again, and my shoulders tense. I slowly pour myself a cup of coffee, then sit down at the kitchen table and look at the screen. This time, there’s another entreaty—READ—and below it, a link to a Times article. I scowl. Usually, Gilly reads the paper, the actual physical paper, from cover to cover, and he never forwards links to anything.

I click.

Mother or Monster?

The headline asks a question, but the implication is clear. The conclusion foregone. They have always questioned my mother’s motives; this is nothing new. But I’m confused. It’s been years since anyone has written about us, my mother and me. Thirty years since my last film, and nearly as many since I left the business and came home to Lost River. I am no stranger to this vitriol, but it has been decades since a journalist posed this particular rhetorical question.

I remember them, the reporters and talk show hosts, with their Aqua Net hair and hungry smiles. A lifetime later, I can still feel my hands clasped between my knees, ankles crossed, as we sat on their couches, bright lights in our eyes. My mother’s body was warm next to mine, an arm around my shoulder or hand on my quaking thigh. They say you’re a stage mother, one of them would, inevitably, say. That you’re living out your unfulfilled dreams through your daughter. Then the word that made me think of a snake, its V-shaped tongue, flicking, followed by a dangerous hiss: vicarious. It was meant to incite, but she would not humor them. Her sharp laughter was quick and purposeful, the squeeze of my shoulder or knee meant to punctuate her answer. Ryan is a child, and I am her mother. I am her protector. That’s all there is. After the interviews, we would walk hand in hand off set, and she would lean in close and whisper, It doesn’t hurt me, you know. Somehow, she knew my only concern was how their speculations and accusations might upset her. Because even as she claimed to be my protector, we both knew I was hers, too.

I hear Sasha stir, and through the closed French doors to the porch, I see the soft lump of her comforter move, hear her morning grumbles. She’ll be up soon.

I look at the screen and quickly scroll up. Below the headline is an image. A black-and-white photo of me as a little girl. Eleven years old.

Blackout, 1977, by Henri Dubois.

How did they get this?

The article explains that this never-before-seen photo of the young actress, Ryan Flannigan, was found during the raid on billionaire Zev Brenner’s Paris apartment. And now, apparently, leaked to the press. This man, Brenner, has been in all the newspapers for weeks. But now, this photo—my photo—is somehow evidence, historical proof, of the depth and breadth of his unspeakable crimes?

I have no idea how Zev Brenner, this horrible man, this pedophile and trafficker of girls, came to possess my photograph. I haven’t even seen it since the day we made it, Henri and me. Since I watched the image emerge from the paper, like magic, in his darkroom at Westbeth, as I sat on the rickety blue step stool I thought of as my own, his large hands awash in red light. Of course, I had known even then that it was a powerful picture, a dangerous one, from the way Henri’s face had changed. My god, he’d said and shaken his head, his expression not one of wonder but of fear.

They have only posted a portion of the portrait, of course, the photo cropped to reveal just my face, eliminating the offending imagery below. How foolish. They don’t seem to understand it is the face that offends, that has always offended. I remember the words they used to describe me also felt like beestings: precocious, preternatural. The face of a woman on a child’s body, the contradiction that launched my career and, in the end, destroyed it.

Mother or monster?

I imagine this ambitious journalist’s smug self-righteousness as she writes, this millennial with her black-and-white life, her black-and-white type. Unlike those prickly talk show hosts, she sits safely at her laptop and is not forced to address what she goes on to refer to as my “arresting” face. I imagine the tingle of pride she feels at her byline, unaware or indifferent to the wound she has just clawed open with her words.

I scroll up again, scanning the obligatory recap of my brief but prolific career, and my mother’s dubious role in it, to get to the final paragraph.

But more disturbing than the discovery of this photo, taken of the preadolescent actress and displayed by the accused sex offender, is the inscription, ostensibly signed by Ryan Flannigan’s mother. “For Zev, Remember, darling: les loups ne se mangent pas entre eux—wolves do not eat each other.—Fi.”

My heart stutters, sputters, and stops.

Neither Fiona nor Ryan Flannigan was available for comment.

I think of the three Unknown calls last week from a New Jersey number. I hadn’t even bothered to listen to the voicemails.

My phone shudders in my hand, but it’s not my mother. I’m certain she’s read the article by now, too, but what could she possibly say to make this untrue? She gifted a private photo of me to this man, a true monster. For what? How did she even know him? I feel sick.

The French doors creak open; Sasha yawns and pads softly into the kitchen in a pair of bear-claw slippers and a thrift store cashmere robe riddled with moth holes. “Morning, Mama.”

“Happy birthday,” I say and smile, pretending that the earth has not just dropped out from under me. She comes and hugs me from behind, her face warm with sleep. The phone persists.

“Coffee’s ready,” I say.

“You should get that,” she says, glancing over my shoulder at the screen. “It’s Gilly.”

I nod and click Accept, press the phone to my ear.

“Ry?” he says, and at the sound of his voice, the shell begins to crack, that delicate thing I have made to hold my heart.

Sasha blows on her coffee and sips.

“Hi, Gilly!” she says, leaning toward the phone.

“Happy birthday, Sashimi!” he says.

Sasha returns to the porch and nestles into the daybed, the steam from her coffee curling into the crisp air of the porch. A ghost.

“Come home,” Gilly says softly.

“I am home,” I say, looking around at the house where I was born and to which I returned almost thirty years ago. The home Andy and I shared before he left, where we began raising our daughter together, and where I have finished raising her alone. The one place I have always felt safe.

“I mean to Westbeth,” he says. “Your mother needs you right now.”

“She needs me? You read the article, right? What on earth would I have to say to her?”

“She wants to explain,” he says. “Please come home.”

It’s not Gilly’s fault; he only knows part of the story. He was there, of course, but what they always said is true. I was a “gifted” actress. But what most people don’t realize is that she was, too.

I was ten years old, playing at the river’s edge with the other Lost River kids.

“You can do it!” Gilly said from the opposite bank, the river between us. “Come on, Ry! Don’t be afraid.”

It was August, the end of the season at the Lost River Playhouse. Lost River was the summer home of about thirty people, but my mother and I lived there all year long. The Lost River compound was built on the site of an abandoned motel, with a big main house and a dozen tiny cabins all perched on the edge of a lazy river. A large barn, converted into a theater, sat high on the hill above. Serafina, the proprietor, had been a stage actress in New York when she fell in love with a director who had dreams of starting a summer stock theater in Vermont. Together, they built Lost River, a summer respite for actors who worked in the city and a place for aspiring actors to apprentice themselves. Serafina said she quickly learned she was a better teacher than actor, finding her calling in Lost River. And so, when her husband became bored with rural life and returned to the city, Serafina stayed at Lost River, where she mentored season after season of hopefuls. My mother first came to Lost River in 1965, having just graduated high school, leaving her small hometown near the Canadian border to play the role of the nurse in A Streetcar Named Desire. But at the end of the summer, she didn’t want to go home to her sad mother and angry father, and Serafina invited her to stay. Seven months later, on Valentine’s Day of 1966, she had me. I was born here and had never lived anywhere else.

Over the next few days, most of the kids would return to the city with their parents, our summer family shrinking again. But I wasn’t sad. People came and went from Lost River like the seasons in Vermont. It was no different than the way I felt at the first cold snap of fall, or the first below-zero morning when the wooden floors in our cabin felt like slabs of ice. Or when the last bit of snow in the woods where we played disappeared into the earth.

Besides, we still had time. For now, there was nothing but cold water and mud, the kaleidoscopic green of leaves over our heads, and the burn of the rope in our palms as we each swung out over the water.

“Just grab on tight and run!” Gilly instructed.

All summer, I’d been gathering up my courage to swing across to the other side, but I was afraid. I had studied the others, watched the way they got a running start and then flew. I’d spent months gathering my courage, only to be paralyzed once the thick rope was in my hands. “It’s okay,” Gilly would say, slinging his skinny arm across my shoulders. “Next time.” But after today, there would be no more next times, not until the following summer, anyway. Today was my last chance, the last day before Angelica, Joaquin, and Gilly piled into their parents’ converted school bus and returned to the city where their mother, Liliana, taught art and their father, Guillermo, was an actor.

Most of the actors and actresses who came to work at Lost River in the summers were on stage or in movies or on TV the rest of the year. This was my mother’s dream, too, her longing something I could practically touch. I watched her as the other actors talked about their lives—grumbling about auditions or reminiscing about being on location—saw her eyes widen, and paid attention to how she held her breath. She was hungry for their stories, and they offered them to her in little bits, tiny morsels that she savored. Once, when we all went into Quimby to go to the movies and her friend, Cheri, appeared on the screen, a sound escaped her lips like the first bit of steam escaping from a teakettle, quiet but dangerous. She’d squeezed my arm so hard, her nails made half-moons that lingered there for hours. That was the first time I realized her wanting could be a violent thing.

She never got the lead roles in the Lost River productions, though; she was always at the edges, in the wings. The highlighted characters in the worn Samuel French scripts she carried in the back pocket of her faded bell-bottoms never had names: Pretty girl (her favorite); Matron (her least); Waitress; Passerby. But whether she had one line or ten, she took on each role as if it were the lead. She was the only one who, despite having been up late drinking with the cast around the fire behind the big house, or dancing with the handsome actors in the barn until she got slivers in her bare feet, was up at dawn to practice not only her lines, but the lines of every actress in the show.

“Always be ready. People get sick. Hurt,” she said. “Shirley MacLaine was just an understudy in The Pajama Game on Broadway. When Carol Haney got injured, Shirley stepped in, and within a year, she had a contract with Paramount.” This legend was as familiar to me as any bedtime tale. She loved stories like this. Of how stars were discovered. Marilyn Monroe was discovered by a photographer while working in a munitions factory. Lana Turner was discovered at sixteen at a soda fountain, where she was skipping class. All these stories felt like magic to me, too: regular people being plucked from their ordinary lives. There were rumors of directors who came to Lost River to scout for their films. Agents who were searching for models. Producers looking for their next project. My mother was convinced that all it took was being in the right place at the right time. Though now it seemed another summer had passed, and my mother remained undiscovered, like a shimmering bit of quartz just under the surface of the water, waiting for a chance to sparkle in the sunlight.

This summer, they had put on Streetcar again, and again she had been cast as the nurse, though she knew every single one of Blanche’s lines. I could hear her whispering them as the early morning light spilled through the window into our cabin: I can smell the sea air. The rest of my time I’m going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I’m going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean. During performances, I watched her struggle not to say the words aloud along with Cheri in that scene, the want wild in her eyes.

Now, as I stood looking across the river at Gilly, I understood how it felt to want something just out of reach.

The sun was high overhead, which meant it was almost noon. Time for lunch. Serafina would be expecting us at the big house soon. And after lunch, everyone was supposed to pack up their belongings, clean their cabins. We were running out of time. I was getting so close. At least today I had tried, though I’d had two failed attempts so far. The first time, I managed to leave the bank but chickened out halfway and swung slowly back, dangling over the cold water; Joaquin, who was only ten but already bigger and stronger than his brother Gilly, had to yank on the rope to pull me back to shore. The second time, I swung out far enough, but when it was time to drop the rope, my hands would not loosen their grip, and I wound up back where I’d started.

Gilly, who was twelve, stood on the opposite riverbank waiting for me, the way he had every day since I’d announced my plan. He, like his brother, was shirtless and filthy with mud, shielding his eyes from the sun.

“Come on, Ryan! You can do it,” he said again. “Get a running start, hold on, don’t let go until you see the ground.”

I nodded, gripped the rope, and backed up, grass tickling my ankles. I held tight to the rope as I ran full tilt toward the water, held on as the earth fell away from my feet, and then I was flying across the river below. I felt my bare left foot drag into the cold river and then the earth was coming toward me again. Instinctively, I pulled my knees upward, curling up like a pill bug inside its shell, and I could see Gilly beaming at me.

“Don’t let go yet! Hang on!” he said. “Woohoo!”

I shut my eyes tightly, felt the air rushing against my face.

“Now! Drop it!”

I hesitated.

“Now!” he said again, more urgently this time, but already I was a pendulum, reaching the end and beginning to swing back toward where I’d started.

“Wait! Hold on!” he said. “Don’t drop it now! It’s too late!”

But I was determined, and I released the rope.

I saw the ground rising to meet me, but it wasn’t the grassy slope where Gilly stood; rather, the rocky riverbank below. I hit the bank hard and then fell, landing on my back. I felt my chest freeze, my breath seize. I tried to cry out at the pain in my spine, but there was no air in my lungs. I shook my head as Gilly scrambled down the rocky wall.

I sucked in air, but still, nothing came out. When sounds finally did come, I didn’t recognize my voice. The moan was deep and raw and hurt, like a wounded animal’s.

“It’s okay. You just knocked the wind out,” he said. “It’ll come back.”

He helped me up and hugged me, and I felt his heart beating scared in that hollowed-out part of his chest that he didn’t like to talk about.

We pulled apart, and his eyes sparked with sunlight. “You did it,” he said, but I felt almost sick with disappointment.

“Let’s go! It’s time for lunch! We’re gonna be late!” Joaquin hollered. He, unlike Gilly, was impatient. He hopped from one leg to the other as if he had to pee.

“I’m starving to deaf,” Angelica said dramatically, as if she were Blanche Dubois.

Gilly and I walked along the opposite shore to the little footbridge that traversed the river and then made our way with his siblings back up the steep grassy bank to the main house. The sun had dipped behind the clouds, which were moving dramatically across the sky. I shivered. I’d forgotten to bring my towel, and the mud from the riverbank was wet and cold on my skin.

At the side of the house, we hosed the mud off our feet and legs, screeching when the initial warm bursts of water turned suddenly and bitingly cold. We were filthy, wild children when we were on our own, but we knew we would not be fed (never mind allowed inside) until we cleaned up. We took turns, helping each other and then toweling off (towels yanked from their pins on the long line strung from the house to the big maple tree in the yard) before climbing up the steps and entering through the screen door into the kitchen.

When Serafina was on lunch duty, we had sourdough bread still warm from the oven. Tabbouleh with fresh mint, tomatoes, and cucumbers from the garden. She made sweet sesame-seed cookies and chamomile sun tea with honey. My mother’s lunches were less inspired: day-old sourdough bread, a hunk of sharp cheddar cheese, and mealy apple slices. It made me feel bad when the kids accepted their disappointing meals and mumbled their thanks. I always made sure to hug her extra tightly and tell her how delicious it all looked.

Today was no different, and I mustered delight at the pallid green grapes and disc of canned Boston brown bread. “Thanks, Mama! We’re starving!”

But as the others plodded back outside with their sorry lunches, she set my plate down and then helped me up onto the counter so we were eye to eye.

“I have a proposition,” she said.

My mother always had propositions. A proposition, she had explained, meant that I got to help make the decision. We were in this together, she said. Partners in crime: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Bonnie and Clyde.

“How would you feel about going to the city with Gilly’s family?”

“By myself?” I asked.

She laughed that sharp short laugh of hers and shook her head. “No, of course not! I meant how would you feel if we went to the city with Gilly’s family? To Westbeth.”

Westbeth. Gilly had told me about his apartment in New York, of course. Westbeth was a complex of old factory buildings where hundreds of people lived, and everyone who lived there was an artist. Actors, like at Lost River, but all different kinds of artists, too. There were painters and puppeteers. Photographers and dancers and musicians. He told me his neighbor played the French horn for the New York Philharmonic, and the lady down the hall made sculptures out of junk she fished out of the Hudson River. There was even a dance studio in the building; their ceiling thumped as the dancers leaped.

Still, I had never been to the city. I had never even left Lost River. The only cities I knew were from TV and movies. Earlier that summer, we’d all piled in the bus to go to the drive-in movies, a double feature. When Rosemary’s Baby came on, the grown-ups sent us all to the back. Told us to go to sleep, but Gilly and I had peeked out from our sleeping bags to watch. When I thought of New York, it was of Mia Farrow’s character, pregnant and desperate, wandering the streets. The dark apartment, the horrifying chanting in the walls of her building.

“You mean go for a visit?” I asked.

My mother tilted her head, smiling. “Actually, I was thinking more about giving it a try.”

Giving it a try was the phrase my mother used whenever she wanted me to do something new that I might not be very happy about: trying a new food, or trying to wash my own hair, or trying to sleep alone in my bed while she took a walk to clear her head.

“You mean leave Lost River?” I asked; the realization of the enormity of her proposition was starting to hit. I couldn’t swallow, and I wondered if I had lost my breath again.

“Gilly’s dad is going to be on location in LA from the beginning of November through May. He doesn’t want Liliana all by herself with the kids, and Liliana said she’d love to have us. If we like it there, then we’d jump to the top of the waiting list when a new apartment opens up.”

She was saying words, but they were disappearing into the air like puffs of smoke. I was trying so hard to hold on, to make sense of what she was saying.

“And if we hate it, we can always come back here. Serafina said we’ll always have a place to come home to.”

“But what if I don’t want to go?” I said.

She frowned.

“Ryan,” she said, and her voice felt like a balloon about to pop.

“Where will we sleep?”

“The apartment is big, much bigger than our cabin. We’ll have our own sleeping loft.”

I thought of our cabin, just two rooms with a big lumpy bed. A narrow bathroom and a tiny kitchenette, a small potbelly woodstove to keep us warm. I thought of the barn cats that snuck into our cabin and snuggled under the covers. I thought of the little mint-green fridge, where my mother kept ice-cold bottles of Tab for her and Orange Crush for me. I thought of the way the sun streamed through the sheer curtains onto our faces in the morning, the sound of the river below, and the rain on our roof. Home.

I shook my head. I couldn’t breathe.

She backed away from me and grabbed the empty can of brown bread. “I’m never going to get anywhere if I keep playing these bit roles here every summer. Guillermo knows people in the city. On Broadway. Casting directors. Agents. He promised he’d line up auditions before he leaves for LA.”

She walked to the sink to rinse the can. When she turned around, she looked at me almost angrily.

“This wasn’t supposed to be forever,” she said, but I knew she wasn’t talking to me. Not really. It was as if she were only reciting someone else’s lines.

And then . . .