Pearl

by Jo Knowles

  Henry’s mouth drops open and stays there.

  “Whoa,” I say out loud by mistake.

  All three of them freeze and look at us. I swear the clock in the hallway goes into slow motion, waiting for a response. It’s a standoff.

  “What happened?” Henry asks, as if Sally had shaved her head.

  I step closer to get a better look. Without her dark hair poofed up on top the way it usually is, Sally seems lighter. Like a giant white lily with pink streaks. Her cheeks have too much blush. She looks like a Barbie experiment gone wrong. Like she got microwaved and blew up and her face got all out of proportion.

  She smiles weakly at us.

  “It’s makeover day,” my mom says, ignoring our obvious looks of disapproval and, well, horror. “I’m next!”

  Terrific.

  I can only imagine what they’ll do to her if this is what they’ve come up with for Sally.

  “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” Claire asks. I’ve never seen Claire smile in such a genuinely happy way. Maybe she should change careers and be a stylist. Or not.

  Sally blushes at the new word most likely never used to describe her. She touches her hair and looks at Henry hopefully.

  Henry finally closes his mouth and appears to swallow.

  “Wow,” he says.

  First off, Sally is in our kitchen for the second time in two days. She’s out of the house for a second day in a row. And now this. I think it might be too much for Henry to take.

  Sally touches her hair again and smiles at Henry. There are tears in her eyes.

  “Blond,” she says, like she can’t believe it. “Do you like it, Hen?”

  Henry manages to nod at the stranger in front of us.

  “Beany?” Sally looks at me with the same, hopeful eyes. I touch her hair gingerly and force myself to nod like Henry. She smiles back and her whole body seems to glow.

  I quickly glance over at my mom, whose own face is glowing just as brightly. Why is everyone so happy?

  “Okay. Sal gal, get on up off that stool and give me a turn,” my mom says.

  Sal gal? What the hell is happening here?

  “Mom,” I say, “you’re already blond.”

  “I know,” she says. “And now I’m going red.”

  She holds up a box of Clairol and shakes it, smiling. She never would have done this if Gus was here.

  And that’s when I finally understand. That’s why she’s so happy. It’s hard to think of Sally and my mom having anything in common, but they do. Suddenly, they’re both free.

  Claire helps my mom arrange a towel over her shoulders to protect her shirt from the dye. “I’m going black,” she says.

  What a surprise.

  I watch as she takes control, gently guiding my mom’s head back under the faucet. Sally stands to the side, beaming at them. Henry leans against the counter, apparently still recovering from the shock of seeing Sally, here, in our kitchen. Blond.

  “Well, have fun,” I say sarcastically. I can’t help it. This just doesn’t seem right. Everything—everyone—is changing. Literally. And while they may look happy, I’m not sure if it’s for the better.

  I turn around and walk out, hoping Henry will follow.

  But he doesn’t.

  I walk through the living room and keep my eyes from looking at Gus’s empty chair.

  In the hallway upstairs, Gus’s door is closed again so I open it. Then I go inside and lie down on his white cotton bedspread. It’s one of those old-fashioned chenille spreads with the tiny ball things on it. When I was little I used to sneak in the room while Gus was out and lie on the bed and pick at the balls with my fingers.

  I look up at the ceiling light and imagine Gus doing the same thing, night after night. I imagine him lying awake, staring at the light, thinking about … things. Maybe wondering about my mom and why she acts the way she does. Maybe about me, and why I act the way I do. Maybe he wondered why I seemed to have only one friend. Maybe he thought about my grandmother, and how much he wished she was still here. Thinking about her, I wonder if she stared up at this light when she couldn’t sleep, too, wondering about the future and, when she knew she was dying, if my mom would be okay. I think about how all of our eyes have settled on this same spot. This one, old light with the frosted white glass. I spread my arms out to either side of me, my fingers outstretched, like I’m making an angel in the snow. As I move my arms, I feel the empty spaces where my grandparents have both lain. I stretch my fingers out and concentrate as hard as I can on the light that holds us all together in memory, willing myself to feel them both if only for a second. Then, maybe I could feel real myself.

  “What are you doing?”

  I jump into a sitting position.

  Henry looks at me from the open doorway as if I’ve lost my mind.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  He steps into the room and looks around.

  “I’ve never been in here.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wanna sit?”

  “Okay.”

  I move over. He sits next to me on the bed. I lean back and put my head on one pillow, and he does the same. We stare up at the light.

  “This is weird,” he says.

  “Everything’s weird,” I say.

  “Yeah. My mom.”

  “I know.”

  “She looks ridiculous,” he says quietly.

  “I know.”

  “Do you think they’re really going to be, like, friends with her now?”

  “I guess. I’m not sure.” I feel myself getting annoyed with my mom and Claire again. I’m sure they think they’re Sally’s saviors now, having gotten her out of the house with such ease. But she came out first for me, not them.

  Oh.

  Crap.

  “This is all my fault.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I asked Sally to come to the funeral. If she hadn’t come, she’d still be at home and everything would be normal.”

  “Normal?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He keeps staring at the light. “I guess I should be glad she’s out. I just hope … she doesn’t get hurt.”

  Exactly.

  I move my head so I’m facing him.

  “You know why I think she never left the house till now?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “She’s been waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  He swallows loudly, like he has a pre-cry lump in his throat. “My dad.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I was thinking, you know, with her being here now, and not home? I’m thinking maybe she’s finally given up. Maybe she’s decided it’s safe to leave the house. Maybe she’s finally realized he’s never coming back.”

  He rubs his eyes as if he’s trying not to cry. I want to reach out to him, but I’m not sure where to touch.

  “Hen. That’s not really a bad thing, is it? Her finally realizing it’s true?”

  He nods but stays quiet for a while, as if he’s the one finally realizing. “I thought it would be,” he says, “a good thing. When I heard her name when we came in, I felt glad that she was here. But then when I saw her … Bean, I mean, she looks horrible. Like way worse than any soap star she idolizes. Like she’s a joke! Your mom wouldn’t do that, would she? Make a big joke out of my mom?”

  “Of course not! God, Henry. My mom is whacked but she isn’t mean.”

  “Sorry. It’s just that—how could they really think she looks good?”

  “Maybe they just think different is good. No matter what.”

  “I guess. Maybe the two of us should dye our hair, too.”

  “Ha ha. Maybe we should shave our heads.”

  He touches his buzz cut and laughs.

  “I mean all the way. As in bald.”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  “Yeah, me neither.”

  We lay there quietly for a while. A gentle
breeze drifts through the window and over us like an invisible moving blanket. Every so often our peaceful moment is interrupted by an exaggerated high-pitched screech through the floorboards, indicating, most likely, that my mom is now a redhead.

  Henry sighs heavily beside me. He’s so close I can feel his body warmth and hear the occasional gurgles inside his stomach. He holds his hand over it to try to muffle the sound. I want to tell him I don’t mind it. I even like his raspy asthma breath.

  I close my eyes and listen to that steady breathing.

  * * *

  When I wake up, Henry is gone and I have a soft blanket over me. I’m sweating.

  I listen for signs of annoying women in the kitchen but I don’t hear anything, just the tock tock tock of the clock downstairs, echoing through the house. I roll over and smell the bleachy white bedspread, then hear the click of a light switch.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  My mom stands in the doorway, looking like she’s seen a ghost. I squint in the sudden brightness of the room.

  I sit up quickly.

  “Jesus, Beany. I thought you were at Henry’s. I was just coming to shut this damn door.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” Her hair is conveniently tucked under a hot-pink bandanna, but I can see a wisp of bright red sticking out.

  “Why do you shut his door?”

  She scratches her head through her bandanna and winces. “I don’t like it open,” she says.

  “Well, I do,” I say.

  “Get out of this room.” She puts her hands on her hips but stays in the doorway.

  “No.”

  “Beany, I’m not kidding. I know you’re grieving, but I don’t want you in here. It isn’t right.”

  “What’s not right about it?”

  “Look at you! You’re on his bed, for God’s sake!”

  “So what! It makes me feel close to him. To them.”

  “To them? Are you kidding me?”

  “No! What’s wrong with that?”

  “Everything! Just get out of there. Now.”

  “No, Mom.” It feels strange to call her Mom. I think this is about the longest conversation we’ve had in days. Maybe weeks. Maybe even months. I can tell by the way she looks at me that she thinks I’m a freak. But I guess she’s always felt that way.

  “Beany,” she says, still not stepping inside the door. “Don’t make me come in there.”

  Or what? I don’t say. I imagine my mom trying to drag me out of the room. It’s a pathetic sight.

  “Don’t make me leave!” I say.

  “Fine! You want to act all crazy? Go ahead! I don’t need this!”

  She turns and disappears from the doorway. I listen for her footsteps, waiting for them to move down the hall, but they don’t. She’s waiting.

  I look around the room and suddenly feel like I don’t belong, and I hate my mom for making me feel that way. I rush to the hallway and almost slam into her. She’s standing with her arms crossed at her chest. I don’t meet her eyes. I just walk to my room. But before I go in, I turn to face her. “At least leave his door open,” I say.

  She turns away from me without answering.

  I slam my own door shut.

  chapter eleven

  It feels like early evening when I finally creep out of my room. I go downstairs to find something to eat and, big surprise, there’s Claire heating up leftovers for a late-night meal.

  “So, are you moving in or something?” I ask. I’m not usually this rude, but Claire’s presence is really starting to get to me, like everything else.

  “Your mom needs me to be here. Can’t you see that?”

  No. I can’t.

  A strong whiff of leftover lasagna reaches my nose. I make a face that I’m sure is unattractive. “Where is she, anyway?” I ask.

  “Up on the roof. She told me to send you up when you came out of your room.”

  “She’s on the roof?”

  “Yeah. Don’t tell me you don’t know she goes there.”

  I shrug. “Of course I know,” I lie. “I just … didn’t think she’d be there now.”

  Claire studies me for a minute, like she knows I’m lying. “Well, she is. And I know she’d probably like to talk about things with you.”

  She turns away from me to stir something in a pot. She doesn’t seem like she really knows what she’s doing. Her new hair is jet-black. Spiky and short like a guy’s. I don’t know what look she was going for, but it wasn’t successful. The back of her neck is blackish purple where the dye dribbled down and stained her skin. God, she looks bad.

  “Okay, well, I guess I’ll go up there then,” I say.

  I leave her in the kitchen and go upstairs. I don’t know how my mom got on the roof, but I’m determined to figure it out without having to ask Claire.

  From the top of the stairs, the door to the bathroom is straight ahead. The light is on and the window and screen are open.

  I stop at Gus’s closed door and touch the handle, but something stops me from opening it. Instead, I go to the bathroom and peek my head out the open window and see her silhouette. She’s sitting way over to the left, leaning against the slanted roof. Her body is dark, like a shadow, in the deep shade of the tree. With her ponytail profile, she looks like a young girl.

  “Come on out here,” she says without turning her head to see that it’s me. She doesn’t sound mad anymore.

  “How did you know I was here?” I ask.

  “I could feel you.”

  I pause at that one, and my heart warms up just a little. I lean farther out the window and eye the slanting roof I’d have to crawl across to get to where she is.

  “I don’t think I can come out there.”

  “Oh, come on, live a little. It’s not as steep as it looks.” She pats the space next to her for me. I don’t think she has ever done that before and I’m immediately suspicious. However, there is no way I’m going to let my mom be braver than I am, so I hoist myself up and squeeze through the window. The shingles are still warm from the day’s sun and rough under my hands as I crawl on all fours to her. I sit close enough to smell her watermelon hair spray that doesn’t quite conceal the chemical smell of hair dye.

  “Claire told me you come out here all the time,” I say. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Claire said that? No. I used to. But I haven’t been out here in—” She lifts her head to the branches above. “Wow. Not since I was pregnant with you.”

  “But that was fifteen years ago.”

  “I know. I used to come out here a lot when I was your age. Your grandmother showed me how when I was about ten. Gus had yelled at me for something and I told her I was going to run away. I’d packed up my pink Barbie suitcase and headed down the street. Mom drove up behind me and talked me into coming back home. Then she walked me up to the window and pointed to this very spot and said next time, instead of running away, to come on out here and tell my angry thoughts to the leaves. She said the leaves were the tree’s ears. Isn’t that funny?”

  I shake my head.

  “She was starting to get really sick then. She went downhill so fast. The sicker she got, the more time I spent out here, just waiting. We knew she was going to die. And I was pretty sure that without her, I would die. At least inside. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like without her.”

  I feel the loneliness blanket spread over me again, smothering me. Dead while living. It makes me think of Gus.

  “Why did you stop coming out here?” I ask to break the quiet.

  She half laughs, but it sounds like she’s more sad than amused. “I couldn’t fit through the window. Then, after I had you, I felt like I should be a grown-up. The leaves didn’t seem like ears anymore. I knew they weren’t listening. And even if they were, they sure as hell couldn’t help me.”

  The blanket goes up over my head. I can’t breathe. I imagine my mom so trapped she couldn’t even escape to her fake runaway place. And it was all my
fault.

  “I really ruined your life, didn’t I?” I say. And I feel it so strongly. How I changed everything for the worse. I understand why she never felt like I imagined a mother should. How could she?

  She turns and looks me in the eye for the first time in a long, long time. “I won’t lie to you. At the time? Yes. I thought my life was over because of you. And life as I knew it was over. But come on, Bean. It’s not like you had any control over your existence. That was my own doing.”

  “It still sucks to know your existence ruined people’s lives.”

  “You didn’t ruin people’s lives. You just changed them. Eventually for the better. I mean, honestly, I was not going down a very pretty road when you came along. In fact, I think you probably saved me.” She lifts her arm and carefully puts it over my shoulder. I try hard to concentrate on the foreign feeling of her hand pressing into me, connecting us.

  “I’m sorry for earlier,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting to find you in Gus’s room. I guess I overreacted.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. Her hand feels heavy on me. I try to feel her energy passing through to me, like I do when Sally touches me, but I don’t. It’s the way we’ve always been with each other. Too distant to feel, even when we’re touching.

  We sit quietly for a while, not telling the leaves anything at all.

  “Why did you come back up here tonight?” I finally ask. “Do you feel like running away again?”

  I picture my mom and Claire running off in my mom’s car like in Thelma and Louise, one of my mom’s favorite old movies.

  “Not at all! I don’t know why I came back here, actually. I guess with Gus gone, I feel like taking back all the things he stole.”

  “What did he steal, Mom?”

  She’s quiet for a minute. “My childhood. Who I am. Who I want to be.”

  For what feels like the thousandth time, I try to imagine how my Gus and her Gus could be the same person. “How did he do that?”

  “By not understanding. Not listening. By making me hide—” She stops.

  “Hide what?”

  She sighs. “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s talk about something else, huh?”

  I want to ask her about my grandmother. I want to be brave and ask her about me. And my father. But instead I sit quietly next to her. For the first time, she feels like she could be that mom I always imagined. Someone you can talk to. Someone who can put her arm around you. Almost.