Selena shrugged. There was a connection there, wasn’t there? Maybe the other woman felt it, too. Maybe she was lonely. “Seems like an odd way to try to connect.”
“These days, the world is full of people with bad ideas on how to connect with others.”
“If this becomes a thing,” she said, reaching for his hand, “she knows that Graham had an affair with the nanny. Or that I thought he might be.”
“But it’s not a thing yet,” Will said, taking her hand in both of his. “The media is not involved—all we have is a girl who missed a breakfast date with her sister, then didn’t show up for work. There’s no evidence of more. Geneva could return at any point. You’re always ten steps ahead. Just stay here now.”
“Right,” she said. But the world, the swirling possibilities, seemed so manic, out of control.
“And the next time you need to confide in someone, call a real friend. Like me.”
He pulled her into an embrace and held on tight. She felt herself sink into him—the expensive material of his suit, the subtle scent of his cologne. When she was younger, why had the safe and predictable life seemed like a straightjacket? Now it was all she wanted.
When she saw Graham watching from the window, his dark form dominating the frame, she didn’t pull away from Will.
EIGHTEEN
Pearl
“Pearl S. Buck?”
Charlie trying to make conversation. His words leaked through the thick fog surrounding her awareness.
“No,” she said, after a long pause where the road was black and the tires hummed, and the wind roared around the vehicle. “The Pearl by John Steinbeck.”
Her voice was thick in her throat, her arms and legs leaden with fatigue.
“That’s pretty grim reading.”
It was—a difficult, sad story with a hard ending. Still, Stella had loved it for its stark beauty.
There it lay. The great pearl. Perfect as the moon, her mother used to whisper to Pearl when she was small.
“Stella wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine,” said Pearl. But, Pearl thought, she loved me, I think. In her broken-down way. And now she’s gone.
“She had her moments,” said Charlie. He wore a sad smile, eyes straight ahead.
“A few, I guess. Here and there.”
They drove and drove; they’d been driving for days.
Pearl had never been out of the northeast—the gray ceiling winters and fecund green summers, the smell of leaves in autumn, the gray slush of late February. The tentative burst of color in March. It was all she knew. From the highway every place looked more or less the same until they got to Texas, where things got dusty and flat. Then the southwest exploded in bold clay reds, and towering browns and evergreen. Diners got kitschy and full of themselves. Big cerulean-blue sky, towering cumulous clouds. And a night filled with so many stars it didn’t seem real. The painted desert at sunset. Low adobe structures surrounded by scrub and silence. The hustle of the modern came to a dusky stillness.
“I feel like we’re on the moon,” she said.
They mostly rode in silence. She’d slept for days, not sure what was real and what was a dream. The diner where an old woman dressed in black stared and stared. Charlie’s wail of despair. Stella’s dead stare. A dust storm outside a run-down restaurant where a cowboy walked out of the murk. A motel where she slept on the bed and Charlie on the floor beside her. Kneeling in the roadside, vomiting.
“That’s good. That’s where we need to be for now.”
Charlie said he had a place in a town called Pecos, outside of Santa Fe, and that’s where they were headed. When they arrived, she barely noticed the town before they’d passed through it completely. It consisted of a general store and a bar, a gas station turned art gallery, a diner, a consignment store. It took them less than five minutes to pass through it in its entirety.
They wound along clay roads, past houses that were hidden in the trees, wind chimes on porches, birdsong, until finally they arrived. A small adobe structure waited, surrounded by trees, mountains, and sky. The other properties they’d passed were miles back.
“We’ll stay here a while,” he said, coming to a stop in the squat drive.
“Whose place is this?” she asked. It looked oddly familiar, though she’d never been anywhere like it.
“Ours for now.”
There was a mailbox crafted from the same clay as the house, a collection of pots on the stoop in front of a wooden door, wind chimes hanging.
Pearl opened the car door and stepped outside, kicking up red dust. The smell of juniper and sage was fresh and broad, filling her senses. Something inside her that was tight loosened. And the quiet—no traffic noise, no voices—it expanded.
“What about school?” she asked. Her voice seemed to disappear, swallowed by the wind.
Charlie closed his car door, the sound of it echoing off the mesa behind them. “You can go online.”
He had an easy answer for everything since she’d come back to herself. She nodded, unquestioning. Yes, of course. She could go to school online. Why not?
Something happened to Pearl when she saw Stella—broken, her body left bleeding and twisted in her bed. Blood on the floor, on the sheets. Her eyes open, staring with confused rage. Pearl must have blacked out when she came in to find Charlie on his knees before the mess. His wailing. It was a siren. She’d hit her head on the floor when she fell; there was still a knot. The next thing she remembered she was in the back of Charlie’s car, lying across the rear seat under a blanket, head on the pillow from her bed.
Woman murdered. Child missing.
That’s what the headlines said, all the newscasts they’d caught in roadside diners, what they’d read online.
True and not true.
Pearl wasn’t missing, she thought, looking at the world around her. She was found.
They unloaded the groceries they’d picked up in Albuquerque. He had a key, unlocked the front door as if it was a place well-known to him, flipped on the inside lights. The place was all windows—the living room, dining area and kitchen just one big room—vaulted ceilings that gave the impression of height. The walls dominated by glass inviting in views of the mesa behind them, the Santa Fe National Forest, the valley below.
He settled her in a simple room with a queen bed, a wood dresser. Placing her suitcase by the door. The walls were eggshell, no art. A blank slate. A big window. The bed was a white cloud, clean cotton sheets, comforter, pillows.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said. He’d said this a number of times like a mantra, wearing a worried frown. “I’m going to take care of you.”
They hadn’t spoken much about what happened; she’d barely uttered a word about anything. He panicked, he said, when they’d discovered Stella. Packed Pearl’s things—her bedding, her books, clothing, toiletries, her stuffed bear—and put them in his car. Pearl walked with him; he didn’t carry her. He’d repeated that a couple of times, like it was important that she’d walked under her own steam. Stunned, nonresponsive, Pearl let herself be led away from home.
“They’d have taken you, right? Into child protective services? Stella wouldn’t have wanted that. She’d have wanted me to take care of you. That’s why we ran,” he said the second day. He’d repeated this as well, a couple times. A narrative he was running. She supposed it was true. There was no one else to take care of her; she was a minor. Charlie wasn’t her father, not even her stepfather. Charlie wasn’t even her mother’s boyfriend, technically. Her biological father—she had no idea who he was. Pearl would have gone to foster care or something.