Don't You Cry(59)

“Bad girl,” she spits then, the intensity of her words making me jump. They’re potent and angry, and then there, in the night air, to no one in particular, she points a rigid finger accusatorily, and says again, “Bad girl. You’ve been a bad girl.”

It’s bizarre, that’s for sure, Pearl’s declaration or memory or whatever it is that just happened. It’s not like I don’t already know she’s a tad bit loony, and this gives me further reason to question her sanity, and yet for whatever reason I don’t. Maybe it’s nice to be in the company of someone who pays no regard to the norms of society, who doesn’t care what other people think. And yet those words, that pronouncement—Bad girl—on an otherwise quiet night stays in my mind. You’ve been a bad girl. It’s a slogan that sticks with her like mine does me: Go away, Alex. Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.

The night grows silent. I listen to the rhythm of our footfalls, my feet keeping pace with hers. We walk slowly, aimlessly, not even in a straight line. Ambling would be a better word. We amble down the street at night, under a canopy of stars and trees. Somewhere off in the distance, a pack of coyotes passes through a forest or field, spouting their high-frequency howls as the pack reunites for a kill. We listen, imagining a pack of coyotes stalking and surrounding a prairie dog, a cat, a squirrel.

“That’s what they always told me at least. You’ve been a bad girl,” she says again, but this time her words are quieter, told with reserve. I want to ask her if it was true, if she was a bad girl. I think that maybe it was true, but also, maybe not. Maybe it was taken out of context or blown out of proportion, something along those lines. Really, all kids are bad, anyway, aren’t they? Self-absorbed and all that. It’s in their nature. I’m guessing I probably was and that’s why my mother decided to leave. But suddenly, knowing her folks gave her up makes my mother look not quite so bad for leaving me. At least I still had Pops. She didn’t take me away from Pops.

“Did you just find out?” I ask. “About being given up?” But she says no; she’s known for a while. “Someone told you?” I want to know, but she says, “I figured it out on my own.”

She started having dreams, she tells me, about another mother, another father. About fingers getting pointed at her, angry, denunciatory fingers, and those same five words repeated over and over again like a broken record: You’ve been a bad girl. It was years ago, many years. She was still at home living with her folks. She told her adoptive parents about the dreams, though she didn’t really need to. They’d already heard her, calling out in her sleep. They knew about the nightmares, or what she thought were nightmares at the time. Turned out they were flashbacks. She was remembering. And little by little she put the pieces together and figured it out. There was the fact, too, that she didn’t look a thing like her family, all tall and thickset with strawberry blond hair and light green eyes. They looked nothing like her. She was upset, overcome by a sense of abandonment and sadness, whether or not she had a family who loved her. She felt hurt, rejected by the parents who gave her up. But it was more than that, too; she’d been lied to and made to look like a fool.

Her adoptive family was contrite. “They were good people,” she tells me then as we walk down the splintered street. “They are good people.” We’re closer now, moving in parallel lines. We don’t touch, not intentionally, no, but every now and then the swing of her arm grazes the swing of mine. “They wanted to make it better,” she tells me of her adoptive parents. She doesn’t tell me their names or anything about them, but she admits that they stuffed her full of love and affection; they sent her for therapy. And at the mention of therapy, a signal goes off in my brain.

Dr. Giles.

“They did the best they could with what they were given, you know? I was a screwed-up kid. Still am, I guess. I made her cry a lot, my mother. I made him mad. But they were good people. They didn’t yell, they didn’t hit me when I was being bad. And it’s not like they were just going to drive on into the next town and leave me with some new family I didn’t know. Who does that kind of thing?” she asks with a sardonic laugh. I don’t say a thing. She isn’t looking for me to say anything. “They were stuck with me, you know? They’d adopted me. They signed the papers and all, though still, I put them through hell. I know I did. Couldn’t help it, that’s just me. It’s who I am. But still,” she says, “when I turned eighteen, I took my cue and decided to leave. They didn’t need me sticking around anymore, poaching on their family. It was their family, anyway, not mine.

“I tried to find my family,” she confesses. “My real family, anyway. And I did,” she says, her voice gloomy and withdrawn. There’s a long hiatus in her admission. I think that’s all she’s going to say. I tried to find my family and I did. I want to know more; I want to pry. I want to ask what happened. But I don’t. I leave it at that, knowing that when she’s ready she’ll tell me more.

Instead, I unclasp the shark’s tooth necklace from around my neck and hand it to her. For strength and protection. Right now, she needs it more than me.

“I can’t,” she says, but she does it, anyway, taking the cord from my shaking hands as we continue on into the darkness of night, walking until I think I can walk no more, but even then, I don’t want to go home.