Don't You Cry(58)

I open the blinds and peer to the wilted lawn down below and there she stands. Pearl.

She’s cloaked in her black-and-white checkered coat, the black beanie set on her head. It’s murky outside tonight, making it hard to see clearly. But I see her; she’s there, standing in the quiet night like a figure in a blurry photograph. Hazy and imperfect, but still perfect in so many ways. She waves as I open the blinds and gaze outside feeling more than a little bit flummoxed. Why is she here? I don’t know why, but I thank the heavens that she is.

All my life I dreamed some girl would come to me in the middle of the night, and now here she is.

I raise my hand and wave back, a shiftless sort of wave, though inside I feel anything but; inside I forget the fact entirely that I was just on the cusp of sleep, brooding over Pops and an unpaid electric bill, the fact that he’d stolen my telescope. Feeling sorry for myself. Sulking. Wanting and hoping for something other than this life.

I hold up an index finger and mouth the words, One second, though I doubt she can see. I snatch a sweatshirt from the handle of my closet door and dash outside before she can change her mind and go.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, my voice little more than a whisper as I meet her on the lawn. The grass is wet, covered in dew. It seeps through my gym shoes, moistening my feet, making them cold. Her hair is wet and I want more than anything to reach out and touch it, to graze the ombré hair with my fingertips and see if the texture changes along with the tinge: gritty to coarse to syrupy and silky, like velvet. That’s the way it looks to me, like velvet. It’s been raining, I think, and that’s why her hair is wet. But I never heard any rain. There’s dew on the lawn but the concrete of the sidewalks and street is dry. Maybe she was swimming again, treading water in Lake Michigan. Maybe that’s it. That’s probably it, I decide. She was swimming.

But I don’t ask.

“I was bored,” she admits. That’s why she’s here, then. I don’t know what to say to this, or what to think. How bored did she have to be to come see me?

But I try not to let my self-doubt get the best of me. She’s here and that’s all that matters to me. She’s here.

She turns and starts to walk, and like some little lost puppy, I follow. The air outside is brisk tonight, the town eerily quiet. Little more than the sound of our own footfalls fills the night, the involuntary kicking of gravel beneath our feet, the rhythmic squeak of a single shoe. There are no cars, no trains, no gulls or owls. The whole world is asleep save for us—Pearl and me.

We walk. I don’t know where it is that we’re going, and I don’t think she knows, either. As far as I can tell, we’re not going anywhere. We don’t say much. Sometimes that’s best, so that I don’t say anything stupid and mess the whole thing up. But every now and then we say something unavailing and dumb like, That’s an ugly house, or Looks like the streetlight is out again. Just shooting the shit. That kind of thing.

But then, after we’ve gone halfway around the block for the second time, she says, “My folks gave me up.” The words come out of nowhere, though I bet they’ve been dwelling there in the back of her mind for a long time now, trying to work their way out, like lab rats trying to work their way through a maze. “When I was a girl,” she adds, and I put her words together in my head, her confession: My folks gave me up when I was a girl.

Admissions like this seem a lot easier in the dark, when you don’t have to see the pitying look on someone else’s face, a look that somehow makes you feel worse when it’s supposed to make you feel better.

“What do you mean gave you up?” I ask. “Like for adoption?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Sorry,” I say because I can’t think of anything better to say. Doesn’t seem like it’s my right to try and gouge out more information, anyway. So I settle instead on a listless, Sorry, hoping that she knows I really mean it. She’s not a kid. She’s old enough that you’d think she might be over it by now, and yet I guess you don’t ever really get over these things. It’s not like I’ve moved past my mother’s leaving me. That’s the kind of pain that’s more of an aching throb than a sudden sting. It goes on forever.

She shrugs her shoulders and says to me, “It’s okay. I’m over it,” but somehow I don’t think that she is. My best guess is that she’s twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight years old, and she’s still mad about the fact that her parents gave her up for adoption. That’s the thing about stuff like that. It festers. It’s human nature to hold a grudge. It’s hard looking forward when you have trouble figuring out what you’ve left behind, or rather, what’s left you behind. My own mother’s been gone for thirteen years now, and not a day goes by that I don’t have bad feelings about it. Truth be told, I’m still mad. And I think about her all the time. I’d tell Pearl about how she needs to forget the past and move forward with the future, but that’s what we call the pot calling the kettle black. I’m no hypocrite. Sometimes things like that are easier said than done.

“How come?” I ask her then. “How come your folks gave you up?”

I can’t see it, but I imagine that she shrugs.

“Why does anyone give up their kids?” she wants to know. It’s a rhetorical question; she’s not really looking for an answer. But inside I start to come up with all sorts of replies, such as financial trouble, divorce, a young, unmarried mother, a lack of support, just some lady who didn’t have a clue how to be a mom. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to hear any of these things. She harbors a resentment in her voice; I can hear it, clear as day. If anything, she wants me to tell her that folks give their kids up because they’re lousy people and terrible parents. Because they’re just mean. But I don’t have a chance to say this.