Down in the kitchen, Pearl made tea while Gracie sat quietly at the kitchen table. Now, she just had a glassy look again, her shoulders hunched in, her arms wrapped around her middle. She’d stopped crying, at least.
She brought the tea, sweet with honey, over to the table and then sat across from Gracie. Pearl stared at the other girl’s wheat-colored hair, her too-blue eyes, the delicate turn of her neck, the full pink of her lips. Yes, there was an ethereal kind of prettiness, the unformed beauty of a child. Maybe Pop liked that. A lump of clay he could mold. Pearl knew that she’d never been as malleable as Gracie, but mold her he had. How much of what she was now was because of the things that Pop had done, taught her, showed her?
“What happens now?” asked Gracie.
“How old are you?” She’d asked before. But she’d forgotten the answer.
“Fifteen.”
The answer sent a little jolt through Pearl. A child. Why had Pearl thought she was older? Maybe in her twenties, at least eighteen. An adult, someone with agency. Not a child as she had been when Stella died and she went with Charlie.
“I think maybe,” Gracie said when Pearl was quiet. Apparently she wasn’t going to be able to let this part go. “I think he killed my mother.”
I think he killed mine, too, Pearl wanted to say but didn’t. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe she would have left with him anyway, if he had asked. Maybe Stella would have let her go. There was no way to know any of this now. Pop was dead. And the past was gone.
“Why do you think that?” asked Pearl.
“We found her,” she said, voice shaking. “Someone strangled her. I don’t know—who else could have done it.”
Pearl flashed again on the moment they found Stella, how the world faded out and went wobbly. How the ground felt like air beneath her. Pop—Charlie, as she knew him then—leading her away.
“He said that they’d take me,” said Gracie. “With my mother gone, no relatives, I’d go to foster care.”
Did he know before he chose? Did he pick women and girls with no safety net beneath them, no one who cared, no one to ask questions? Of course he did. He was the king of recon. A predator, patient and careful. He chose the ones that couldn’t get away, who in some real sense didn’t even want to.
“He said he’d take care of me,” said Gracie sadly.
And he would have, in his way. Like he took care of Pearl.
“Did he kill your mother, too?” Gracie asked. She held Pearl in a watery gaze that managed a surprising intensity.
“I don’t know,” said Pearl. “Maybe. There were other men.”
Gracie seemed to take this in with a slow blink of her eyes.
“Why did you go with him?”
“Because there was no place else, no one else.” That was the truth without being the whole truth.
A slow nod of understanding.
“Did you love him?”
“Yes,” said Pearl. And it was true. Whatever he was, Pearl loved Pop as much as she’d loved anyone. He was father, friend, partner in crime.
“I loved him, too,” said Gracie. “I don’t know why. He was the first person other than my mom to ever see anything special in me. He took care of her, of us. For a while.”
That was true for Pearl, too. She allowed a feeling of sadness to expand. Who were you really, Pop? But there was no answer for that because he was a changeling, something different to everyone who encountered him, someone different in every place they traveled. What was at the core? Maybe nothing, just a gaping black maw.
The house was utterly silent except for a ticking from the refrigerator, the hum of air through the vents.
“So, what happens now?” asked Gracie.
And for that matter, who was Pearl? At her core, was there the same emptiness?
“What do you want to happen?” she asked.
There was a moment where they could call the police, report the crime. Here they might tell their stories, what had happened, what Pop had done. It hovered between them, a possibility they both considered.
The whole ugly truth.
But then what? Then, they became defined by what had happened to them, instead of creating themselves. Gracie would go to foster care. Pearl would become a news media curiosity, her true identity outed. She’d belong to the world, instead of to herself.
They held each other’s eyes for a long moment.
No. It would never do. It was safer in the shadows of life.
“I want to stay here with you,” said Gracie.
The girl didn’t know what she was saying. She was a mouse. And the mouse was so afraid that she was looking to the cat for love.
Pop would want them to leave. It was the safe choice. After all, if Bridget had found them, anyone would be able to. She’d worked her magic with Bridget’s social media, disposed of the car. But they could never be sure they were safe. There were too many loose ends, Pop would say.
“He said we’d be sisters,” said Gracie. “He knew you were mad at him, but he was sure you’d come home again. That we’d be a family.”
Maybe that’s what he really wanted, deep down. A family. So in his own twisted way, he cobbled one together from the broken girls he found along his path.
The girl reached her hand across the table, and Pearl surprised herself by taking it in her own. The world didn’t always give you the things you wanted. You couldn’t choose your family, your circumstances, the unfolding of life. Often, things you loved were cruelly wrested away. But Pop was a master of creating a reality, for himself, for others. And he’d given that gift to Pearl.
Pearl and Gracie.
They would stay in the house that Pop promised her was home. And they would be sisters, just as Pop had wanted. Pearl would teach Gracie everything she knew about the game. And they’d play it together. Best of all, Gracie was malleable. She would do what Pearl told her to do. And Pearl liked that about her new sister. It would come in handy in all sorts of ways.
“Okay, Gracie. If that’s what you want,” said Pearl.
The girl nodded. Her posture softened a bit, shoulders relaxing, arms unwrapping from her middle.
“But Pop doesn’t want me to call myself that anymore.”
Present tense. Maybe he’d always be alive for each of them. A voice in their heads. A shadow, a trick of light.
“What does he want to call you?” Pearl asked.
“He wants to call me Gennie,” she said. “Short for Geneva.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Selena
Selena drove too fast, taking the winding back roads toward home.
A glance at her phone. No answer from Pearl. Selena’s text hung on the screen. The stranger on the train. A woman shadowing her life for who knows how long. Someone who might have been a friend, an ally, was a destroyer wanting to do damage. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? Selena reached for something that kept slipping away—a feeling, a thought.
“What do you want, Pearl?” she asked the empty car.
Her shoulders felt like they were cast from concrete, she was so tense, leaning forward toward the wheel as if that might get her there faster.
Her father’s voice, the things he told her, kept echoing back. She felt a twist of sadness, of compassion for Pearl, for the things she’d endured. Abandoned by her father, her mother murdered. No wonder she was a pain giver.