Pearl

by Deirdre Riordan Hall

  Her voice grates against what feels like edges inside my aching head. “Your uncle Gary wants to send you to a special school.” She says his name with disdain, as if I’m more related to him than she is. This gets my attention. “He says you’re leaving in a week. Don’t go, Pearl. You can stay with one of your friends or something. Or I can talk to someone . . . I’ll be out in thirty days, and we’ll get an apartment. I’m going to stick to the program this time, promise.”

  “What happened?” I ask again.

  Uncle Gary’s silence is louder than the nicotine-stained growl of JJ’s voice.

  “It was an accident. I promise. I was just—it was an accident.”

  Uncle Gary doesn’t dignify her with eye contact, but instead he stares at me, his eyes filled with something other than sympathy. “Janet, explain to your daughter, to the press, to me how starting a fire at a homeless shelter and almost burning it down was an accident. Explain why you ran to me, practically confessing, hoping I’d clear your name. Explain why you left Pearl in the building.”

  “I couldn’t wake her up. She’s always been a heavy sleeper.”

  I look into her eyes, comprehension rushing toward me this time.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she says.

  “No, you weren’t thinking, because you never do. Because you were high. Because you’re a filthy addict. A selfish—” His face is in flames.

  I’ve stopped listening, the rush of facts burning in my head. I almost died. In a fire, possibly along with tons of other people, because JJ was getting high. My body aches. My eyes, throat, chest, and parts that I don’t have names for, the places where love and hope live, sear.

  I want to roll over, roll away. Instead, I close my eyes.

  I wake up to a doctor at the foot of my bed.

  “Morning, Pearl. I make it a point not to ask patients how they’re doing. I already know you’re in a lot of pain. But it’s a good thing there weren’t any burns. The damage from the smoke inhalation should resolve before long. Thankfully, the fella on the next bunk got you out of there quickly.”

  It’s like there’s smoke and flame in my head. I can’t remember anything other than a dream where I was sailing through the air, landing with a bump on a hard surface, my wings tattered and feathers like ash.

  “I don’t remember,” I say, my voice slightly less harsh than it was the day before.

  The doctor sighs and sits down next to me, pulling a folded newspaper out from under his arm. He sets it down, along with my chart. His skin looks like he once saw more sun. The stark lighting highlights the dark shadows under his eyes. He glances at the paper. “You were lucky, and even more so that you have an uncle like Gary Jaeger.”

  I have no idea how my uncle is synonymous with being lucky. All I know is that he’s cold, distant, and unpleasant. Or, according to my mother, an asshole she’d rather never see again.

  The doctor clasps his hands and gets to his feet. I’m not sure if that was supposed to be an assuring moment, but a hundred questions scatter me in as many directions, yet I’m firmly rooted to this bed.

  “Get as much rest as you can. The medicine has been helping. You’ll be fine before you know it. Your uncle will be here this evening to bring you home. Good luck, Pearl.” He whisks away, leaving the inky paper next to me on the white blanket.

  Home. I don’t have one of those. I guess my backpack, clothes, magazine, and everything that wasn’t at Darren’s went up in smoke.

  I doze until dusk turns my sterile surroundings into shadows. I imagine my mother at my side, brushing my hair out of my face and telling me everything is going to be OK. I want to hear it from her and, for once, believe her.

  I pick up the newspaper, folded to the article about the Avenue D fire. I skim the words, not wanting them to make sense.

  After curfew a resident spotted suspicious activity in the lavatory. A short time later a fire broke out, displacing seventy-five homeless men, women, and children.

  My eyes land on the final sentences: Authorities believe the blaze began after a temporary resident of the Avenue D Homeless Shelter used an open flame, forbidden at the facility, while in the course of drug use. The suspect is believed to be a former musician, fallen on hard times, staying there with her teenage daughter.

  It’s like I’m turning a corner, taking it slightly too fast, but there aren’t any brakes, no stopping, no denying the message printed in black and white. There’s a sudden distance between Janet and me. At the same time, there’s a kind of absurdity in this situation. For years, I tried desperately and feebly to piece together a quilt to keep us warm, connecting bits of our tattered reality. Now I not only see but acutely feel how threadbare and hopeless it is.

  I move into a spare bedroom at my uncle Gary and aunt Beverly’s condo that reminds me of a hotel—the upscale kind with gilded frames, Louis XVI decor, and appropriated heirlooms. It would make a great set for a Vogue spread. The last time I stayed with them, my cousins were still home and they lived in a city penthouse.

  JJ’s here too, a cranky, petulant houseguest. At first, I confine myself to my room, and either anger or shame keeps her at a relative distance. However, Janet’s pleading, whenever her brother makes an appearance, over the course of the next days does nothing to help my perma-headache. The pills dull the pain until her growl from another room grows louder. I stagger to my feet.

  Janet, dressed like a cross between a Barbie and a clown, wears a pair of heels beneath bruised legs and a skimpy dress that hangs off her shoulder. She looks as out of place as I feel. Her complexion is rugged, like she hasn’t slept in days. She probably hasn’t. I part my lips to say something, but nothing comes out of my mouth or hers. I return to my room.

  In the two days she waits for her slot at rehab, she and my uncle duke it out in a verbal assault that could rival a world war. Her lyricism translates well in debate, and she has a rebuttal for every single one of my uncle’s justified claims. I gather his top concern is not having his public image tarnished by her delinquency. He’d all but made the bad press disappear years ago, saving his profile in the government from going up in flames along with her fame. With tight lips, Uncle Gary usually keeps control over his temper, but Janet has the unique ability to push even the strongest, most disciplined, steely people over the edge.

  I pull the couch pillow over my head, but their words, or maybe just the truth, reach me nonetheless.

  “I have no doubt you’re beyond saving, Janet. The writing has been on the wall for years, but I won’t let you drag my family into this.”

  “Since when has Pearl been your family? She’s mine.”

  “You’re only thinking about yourself and the government financing you receive from checking off the child box on the welfare application.”

  “Bullshit. You wouldn’t understand. Pearl means everything to me.”

  “I do, in fact, understand, and their names are Erica and Logan. If you haven’t noticed, they have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, and are both going to top universities.”

  “That’s always the bottom line for you—success, prestige, money. You pimp your kids out so you can get a few more notches in your belt. Valedictorian, Notre Dame, law degree. Blah, blah, blah. We’re all prostitutes; some of us just wear our heels better.” She smirks like she’s won.

  “No, Janet, that’s called being a caring, stable parent.”

  She doesn’t give up, going for low blows and fabrications, throwing her fists at his chest. The final straw is when she shouts, “You can’t take my daughter away.”

  He storms out. I try to ignore the fact that it was her doing that almost took me away permanently.

  In the haze of pills to dull my physical pain, her protests sound like an echo. She spots me retreating down the hall.

  “Pearl, there you are. You can’t leave me. He’s sending you to that sc
hool your cousins went to. You can’t leave me,” she repeats.

  “I don’t really think this is a choice,” I say evenly.

  “Please, Pearl, stay.”

  “Where?” I ask dumbly.

  She grovels and whines as if it isn’t her fault we’re going in different directions. We resided at a homeless shelter that she set on fire. Now she waits for a vacancy at a drug rehab facility, and then who knows, jail? Kids and pets aren’t welcome at detox centers or in prison cells. There isn’t room for me in her life.

  “Pearl, if you go . . . I can’t live without you. Please . . .” Her pleading tugs at my heart as she tugs on my hands. Tears fill her eyes.

  I look away. The room tilts and shifts. A cough rattles my chest.

  “Pearl. Please don’t go. Thirty days isn’t long. Then it’ll be over. We’ll figure it out. Maybe we can move or maybe—Pearl, I won’t survive without you.” Her croon, trying to pull me back into her web, morphs into a growling threat.

  The orchids on the table in the foyer, the lamps, the sectional, the walls, and the rugs snap into glassy focus.

  “You don’t get to say that to me. I almost died. Me. Because of you.” I wrest my hands from her grip and slam my bedroom door, anger and sadness mixing like salt and water as tears spill from my eyes.

  It amuses me, in a melancholy kind of way, that the adults in my life—rich Uncle Gary and my aunt—have finally decided it would be best to remove me from the failing situation that is Janet’s inability to be a parent. Teachers at school and other adults say life isn’t fair. I want to throw this fact at her like mud.

  After two long days, she’s finally quiet. Resigned. I assume she’s only remained at Uncle Gary’s out of necessity. Aunt Beverly certainly doesn’t want her, or me, here. However, unlike JJ, I’m quiet. Even though I’m starting to feel better, I can hardly talk anyway; my throat, jaw, and eyes are perpetually too close to tears. I’m not sure I’d even know what to say.

  “I’m leaving,” JJ says flatly, standing in the doorway to my room. “In an hour.”

  I nod or shrug. I thread a loose string from my shirt around my finger—I found it in the drawer across the room. The designer label suggests it is my cousin Erica’s. I gaze at my feet.

  “Say something, Pearl.” Her voice softens to the memory of a lullaby.

  I swallow. My mind is foggy. Emotions stack between us like dominos. I’m not sure which direction they’re going to fall. I should know better; history has taught me a powerful lesson in the force that is Janet Jaeger.

  In the absence of my reply, she turns on me. She glares, and her lips crease into a scowl. “You’re just like your father,” she spits.

  I want to ask her about him, find out what about me is like him. Why didn’t they work? Where is he? But that is a conversation for another time, and anyway, she’s told me often enough that he’s not worth remembering, and if I’m so much like him, I guess that means me too.

  “No, I’m just like me,” I whisper, but she doesn’t hear me as she rustles in her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes.

  “One more before they take everything away from me,” she says with disgust, glancing at me, putting the filter between her lips.

  When she flicks her lighter, the flame blooming from the opening, words suddenly burn on my tongue. “You always think it’s you against the world. This life, you made it. It’s you against you. That’s what this is, y’know, your own doing. No one made you start taking drugs, or be in a band, or do anything you’ve done. No one made you have me or start that fire. You made all these choices. Your life is hard because you made it that way.”

  I’m breathing heavily as the last words tumble out of me, but she doesn’t flinch.

  “That’s the problem, Pearl.” She goes outside to the patio, and we don’t say good-bye.

  Chapter 4

  Uncle Gary waits impatiently for me outside Darren’s apartment. Perhaps he’s hoping to shake the city out of me. He doesn’t realize a girl like me doesn’t belong in a preppy private school.

  Before I add a selection of Vogues from my collection to my small stack of books at the bottom of the cardboard box, I let the familiar pages of an issue from the 1930s fall open. My eyes catch a vivid spread about the artist Frida Kahlo. The same one who painted my grandmother’s beloved Watermelons. If anyone ever asks me who my fashion icon is, I answer, Frida. Although she is better known for her paintings, her aesthetic shouts, Run fast and run far, unless you’re fearless. Unless you’re courageous. I’m not, but I’d like to be. That’s why I look at her through the safety of seventy-five years of preserved monochromatic imagery. However, I feel as if her dark eyes follow me from the poster on the wall, evaluating whether I’m ready to lift my chin and meet her gaze.

  I run my finger along the drape of her flowing skirt in the magazine. She poses in the desert; her expression suggests home. She experienced ceaseless pain; it’s there, in her eyes, reflecting mine, and yet she holds herself like royalty. Funny how painting and pain seem to share the same root words. Frida created beauty from what hurt her the most.

  I close the magazine with a slippery feeling inside. It’s easier to ignore what hurts. I slide it in the box, along with a couple of keepsakes, including a stuffed bear my dad won for me at Coney Island. I was too young to remember him or the trip.

  After clearing shards of glass from the broken frame of my Shrapnels poster, I roll it up and place it lengthwise in my suitcase. I add the poster of Frida too. The small room echoes with nights I long to forget as I pick up a couple of shirts and some mismatched socks off the threadbare rug and stuff them, along with my other clothing, in the tattered suitcase.

  I pack my few art supplies. I’d managed to get into an advanced art class my sophomore year, not an easy feat given my spotty attendance record. I try to imagine what the art department at Uncle Gary’s school will be like. Probably fussy and regimented. I toss my journal with the heart on the cover in last.

  I slip into my mother and Darren’s room and slide the closet door open as quietly as possible. A few metal hangers dangle from the rod, and at the back, I spot the dress JJ wore to the Grammys. It’s the only remaining item from her once-abundant collection of designer clothing. The gown matches the color of the little gramophone award the Shrapnels didn’t win that night. She’s shredded or sold everything related to her music career—guitars, equipment, rare and rough copies of albums, clothes, dignity—except this, a rendition of what she perceived to be her ultimate failure.

  When I was little, I’d try on her dresses and heels, parading around the house, asking her to take photos of me so I could see if I looked just like her. I wanted to be her. I would get lost in the folds of fabric, the scent of her perfume lingering there, and disappear to festive nights, lights flashing like flickering stars.

  Now it’s all gone. And she’s gone. Sometimes, it’s like I cling to my magazines and sketches, hoping to resurrect my icon, my heroine, my mother. Other times, they are a buffer between me and the world, like I’m bleeding graphite onto the page, trying to get every last ounce of JJ out of my system.

  I take the dress from the closet, along with fragments of hope that our life could still be different.

  I carry my luggage through the dingy apartment to the door. Darren watches TV listlessly. He should be Janet’s ex, after the two broken ribs and six stitches beside her eye. Somehow, that didn’t happen. She said he’ll be waiting for her when she’s out of rehab, but this time they’re not going to live together. I quickly write a note, sensing she’s more likely to get it here than at my aunt and uncle’s house.

  Mom,

  I packed everything up. If you find any more of my stuff, set it aside and I’ll get it when I come back for Thanksgiving. Wish me luck and you too.

  Love, Pearl

  I take the scrawled good-bye from the counter, amid empty beer
cans, an overflowing ashtray, and insignificant clutter, afraid she won’t see it there, and post it on the fridge. Love, Pearl. It’s easier to communicate with her through the scratch of pen on paper than to say things to her in person. She’s quick on the defensive and has given me verbal whiplash more than once.

  “This building ought to be condemned,” Uncle Gary mutters when I exit to the hall. He irritably jingles the keys in his pocket. When the hired car honks outside, he takes the box from my arms. I trundle down the stairs behind him with my suitcase and backpack.

  On the sidewalk, Uncle Gary awkwardly squeezes my shoulder. Maybe he worries a hug might infect him with whatever makes me undesirable.

  “Stay out of trouble,” he says as I get into the black sedan.

  As the car speeds out of New York City, in the wake of my lonely departure, I whisper good-bye to all the people I didn’t get to see again. So long to the boy who hung out at the falafel place, filling notebooks with sketches—he’d sometimes show me his work, but I was too shy to share mine. Adios to the guy at the deli who gave me free coffee on Sunday mornings. Bye to the kids at the clubs downtown, the lady at the thrift shop who offered me the senior discount, and the librarians who were kind enough to waive my late fees. Thank you to the person who carried me out of the encroaching fire, away from peril.

  I’ve always wanted to leave, prayed for a way out, but now that the time has come, I’m not sure about the terms or the destination. I don’t believe the end of nearly two decades of living with the recklessness and uncertainty that define Janet Jaeger has reached its conclusion. I’m sure my uncle will see his error and return me like an overdue book, or the students and faculty will see I don’t belong and send me packing, and then life will resume its natural chaos.

  As the car quietly motors north, the tightly packed buildings give way to sparse trees and open sky. For a brief instant, I feel like the blackbird that flies above the guardrail in the slipstream of a tractor trailer. It keeps pace with the sedan for a distance, then flies toward the clouds. Freedom. But it’s a trick. I’m sure. I don’t trust it.