Don't You Cry(68)

I’ve been thinking about her all night, since I walked her home from the cemetery and in the middle of the street in the middle of the night we said good-night.

In fact, I find that I can’t get her out of my mind.

I tread quietly through the first floor, a mug of instant coffee in my hand. I don’t drink coffee, but it was the only thing we had on hand at home. I don’t want to wake her—not yet, anyway, not before I catch a vision of her asleep, just a whisper of the ombré hair spilling across the country plaid pillow, the moth-eaten blanket pulled up to her chin, her skin rosy red, her eyes still crusty with sleep. The house is warm, thanks to the heater, the faint smell of kerosene still filling the air. That and something chemical and unpleasant, like mothballs and mold.

But when I come into the living room, the ad hoc bed is empty. She’s not there. The heater is on, and so I know that she’s here somewhere. She knows better than to leave the heater unheeded. I told her as much before. And yet she’s not here, on the floor, sound asleep as I expected her to be, in my sweatshirt, with my necklace wrapped around her neck. I lay my hand on the bedding and feel that it’s grown cold. And I think that she’s left, that she’s left me, and I feel sad and more than a little bit let down. She’s gone.

But then I hear something coming from up the stairs, a sound. A voice, singing. A soprano voice crooning a song. I stop for a moment to listen, willing my heartbeats to stop so that I can hear. It’s little more than a murmur that echoes throughout the hollow home, bouncing off the pared walls and the frail steps that are covered in unraveled carpeting. I hold my breath. I try to hear past the ringing in my ears.

It’s her. It’s Pearl, and she’s singing.

I leave the coffee behind and head up the stairs, one step at a time, summoned by the melody.

On the second floor, I scan the bedrooms one by one, pitying the family who once lived here, the forgotten dolls and animals, a child’s drawing that still hangs from the putrefying pink walls. It’s sad. Pathetic, really, and what makes it even worse is that whoever swiped the refrigerator, the air conditioner, the copper pipes, didn’t want a thing to do with the bears or dolls.

Upstairs, it’s cold, the outside air bursting into the bedroom without restraint. The broken windows are open wide, and the range of the heater doesn’t reach this far.

I follow the sound of Pearl’s voice, and before I’m fully aware of what’s happening, I’m in a bedroom, her bedroom, Genevieve’s bedroom. I know it’s Genevieve’s bedroom because a wooden G hangs crookedly from a nail on the wall. I take in an old, cracked dresser, a shattered mirror, walls that are a cloudy pink. I step over the shards of glass on the floor, certain some vandal did that—that they broke the mirror—consigning him or herself to seven years’ bad luck. There are things left behind that no one wants: a doll on the floor, an eerie, eldritch doll that stares up at me with acrylic eyes; furniture, splintered beds and the cracked dresser, left behind for the rats and mice to share.

And then there is Pearl.

She stands on the far side of the room with her back turned to me. She doesn’t know that I’m here. She stares down at a doll in her arms, a soft cloth doll with filaments of blue yarn for hair. Blue, yes, blue. Don’t ask me why it’s blue. That’s not the weird thing.

The weird thing is the look in Pearl’s eye, which I glean in the reflection of the broken mirror on the floor—a patchwork of endearment and sadness—as she cradles that doll in her arms, and runs a gentle hand over the fibrils of hair. The way she lifts the doll up to her lips and places a kiss on its raggedy old forehead. The doll is dressed in a knitted green dress with matching green shoes, a pink cardigan that stretches to her fingerless hands. She’s made of cloth, her smile a simple strip of red yarn. Her eyes are made of beads, but the whole of her is in tatters, badly worn, and abandoned for many long years, along with the home. Just like Pearl.

It’s then, as I stare like a deaf dumb mute, that Pearl presses the doll against her chest, supporting and protecting her like a mother does her child. She closes her eyes and begins to sway at the hips, resuming the melody that first summoned me up the broken stairs and into the bedroom. And that’s when I realize this isn’t just any kind of song, but rather a lullaby.

I gather bits and pieces of the lullaby’s refrain: Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, as she sings for the doll that lies listlessly in her arms. She cradles the baby with fondness and devotion, but also something akin to ownership, claim and proprietary rights.

It’s weird.

I’m speechless. I can’t say anything, and for a good thirty or forty-five seconds, I can’t move. I can’t do anything but stare as Pearl holds that doll and pitches herself back and forth, back and forth, slowly in the room. She sings, her voice perfectly pitched. It’s seductive, really; it could lull me to sleep. Go to sleep, my little baby.

But there’s something not right about this. I feel that in every single one of my bones. My body screams at me to leave. Leave! But I don’t leave. Not at first, anyway. I can’t, for I’m completely captivated and enchanted by the measured sway of her hips and the tiny, precise toe taps, the squeak of the floorboards that accompanies her every move like a three-piece band. There’s a part of me that wants to say something, to reach out and touch her, to swap places with the doll so that she’ll dance with me instead. And I close my eyes for one moment and one moment alone and allow myself to evoke the soft touch of Pearl’s hands around my neck, to feel her warm breath in my ear, even if it is only pretend. I want to tell her to stop. To put the doll down. To come back downstairs with me so we can both pretend this never happened, that I didn’t see this. I want to sit on the moth-eaten blanket and talk about ghosts and death and dying. I want to go back in time, if only ten minutes at best. I want to go back to ten minutes ago when I climbed merrily though the broken window with a cup of cheap coffee in my hands, thinking that maybe—just maybe—today we would kiss.