Don't You Cry(63)

“I wonder what happens when you drown,” Pearl says. “I wonder if it hurts.” She looks at me then, her sad eyes wanting to know.

“I don’t know,” I say, “but I bet it does. I bet it’s scary, not being able to breathe.”

These aren’t the words she wants to hear; I know that. She wants me to tell her that Genevieve merely closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. That Genevieve didn’t know any better, that one minute she was blowing bubbles in a bathtub and the next she was dead. In the afterlife. Heaven. At the pearly gates, and all that. She never knew she was dying. That’s what Pearl wants to hear. But for some reason or other, I tell her the truth. Maybe because I think she’s been lied to enough and she deserves the truth.

“Really scary,” she agrees. “Did you ever see her after, you know...after?”

“You mean, like her body? After she died?” I ask, and she says yes. That’s exactly what she means. “No,” I tell her. “I wasn’t even born when Genevieve died. All I’ve heard are the stories.”

“Oh,” she says, and she seems a bit let down, like she wants to hear more. Like she wishes I had seen Genevieve’s corpse. But I don’t have any more to tell. “I bet her family was sad,” she says, and I nod my head and say, “Yeah. Really sad.” But this I don’t know, either. I don’t know anything about Genevieve’s family. They were long gone before I was born.

And then I get to wondering. “When you die, do you think you’ll come back as a ghost?” I ask. It’s tangential, sort of, and entirely hypothetical. Theoretical and speculative and completely make-believe. Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I ask, anyway, for the sake of conversation.

“No,” she tells me decisively. “No way. There’s no such thing as ghosts. Besides, if there were, I hardly think anyone would be scared of me,” and she holds her flashlight up under her chin and dons a morbid expression on her face, ghostlike sounds emerging from her chest. Ohhhh... Ohhhh...

I laugh.

She’s not scary at all. She’s the flip side of scary. Her tone of voice and her warm smile and her kindly eyes, they’re soothing. I find that I’m not so nervous anymore. Well, sort of. I’m still scared to death I’ll say something stupid to screw the whole thing up. But I’m not so scared of her. There’s something about her that puts me at ease.

“What about you?” she asks, meaning whether or not I’d come back and stalk loved ones from the beyond.

I tell her yeah, I would. Well, not loved ones exactly. But other people I would. “I’d screw with all those guys who used to pick on me in school. The girls who ignored me. My boss, Mrs. Priddy, for all the times she was mean. That kind of thing,” I say, and for just a minute I savor the thought of an apparition of me tormenting Priddy from the great beyond. I smile. I kind of like that idea.

“Do you ever think about it?” she asks.

“About what?” I ask.

“About death,” she says to me. “About dying.”

I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Not really. I try not to think about that kind of thing. You?”

“Yeah,” she admits to me. “I think about it all the time.”

“Why?” I ask her, and I feel her body shift closer to mine. Is it real, or is it only my imagination? I don’t know, but it seems suddenly that she’s within arm’s reach, that if I wanted to, I could reach out and touch her hand. I don’t. But I imagine that I do, running the pad of a thumb along her soft, smooth skin. “It’s not like there’s anything you can do to stop it. We’re all going to die one day, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” she says. “I get it. It’s just that, what if that day is soon?”

“It’s not soon,” I assure her, but of course I don’t know one way or the other if it’s soon. For all I know, a hunk of drywall could come crashing from the ceiling right this very instant and smother us both. “You just have to try not thinking about it so much. Live for the moment, or whatever they say. Enjoy life and all that stuff.”

“Enjoy life,” she repeats. “Live for the moment and enjoy life.” And then she turns to me, and in the murky room, I’m half certain I spy a smile radiating on her face. “You’re smart, you know?” she asks, and I nod my head and tell her that I know. I am smart.

But as it turns out, being smart doesn’t always get you where you need to go. Sometimes you need guts, too. And so I take a deep breath and reach out and touch her hand. I do it before every single neuron in my brain can scream at me, No! Before my overly logical and judicious side can come up with ninety-nine ways why this could go bad: she’ll laugh at me, she’ll pull her hand away, she’ll slap me, she’ll leave. Instead, the pad of my cold thumb strokes the satiny surface of her skin, and when she doesn’t pull back, I smile. Secretly, quietly, on the sly, I smile. A vapid, wimpy sort of smile that I’d never want her to see, but one that seeps into every orifice of my being.

I’m happy, happy in a way that I’d never known I could be.

She doesn’t say a thing; she doesn’t laugh; she doesn’t leave. Instead, we stay like that on the floor of the old darkened home, holding hands in silence, thinking about something other than ghosts and death and dying. At least I’m thinking about something other than ghosts and death and dying, though of course I don’t know what she’s thinking about until she tells me.