Pearl Read online

  I’ve heard this before. We’ve had to leave abruptly from other situations: lousy boyfriends, landlords she owed rent to, roommates she’d stolen from, and the police.

  As the stream of blood reaches her T-shirt, she clutches her side. Her face crumples in agony. “I think I have a broken rib. He hit me with his guitar.”

  Everything about this is wrong. I want to wish it all away—go somewhere simple, clean, and faraway, like Antarctica. I’d prefer the cold to the fevered flush of fear running through me. I get to my feet and grab a pair of stretch pants from the floor. I help her into them. As she leans on me, we slowly make our way to the door. In the hall, she falls against the door frame of the bathroom.

  “Come on, Mom, let’s go.” She probably needs an ambulance, but who knows how much crack—and whatever else—she has in her system, so I dare not get the police involved. We’ve gone that route, and I don’t want to see her arrested again.

  “Wait. Get my purse and some clothing. Pack me a bag. No, never mind. I’ll do it,” she says hoarsely. She gets to her hands and knees and crawls back to her room.

  “Mom, come on, let’s just go. I can come back for whatever you need later.” I grip my hands together, my fingers blanching as I hold on tight.

  “I have to get a few things,” she whimpers.

  “I’ll get them. Tell me what you need,” I say insistently, my vision starting to blur.

  She shakes her head, continuing. She wants to get the crack pipe and other drug paraphernalia she has hidden in her room. This scenario is uncomfortably familiar.

  I shift from foot to foot. My stomach clenches with anxiety. What if Darren comes back?

  Part of me fears what other damage he might do, but the bitter part is that if he comes back with drugs, she’ll do them instead of getting medical attention.

  “Mom, let’s go.”

  She must have used the bed to pull herself up and stand, because she emerges, staggering on her feet, dragging a duffel bag. “Why don’t you grab some clothes too?”

  I scoot past her and stuff a couple of outfits, underwear, and Vogue into my backpack. I scrounged whatever I could this past month, saving every penny, even the ones I found on the ground, to get the latest issue, my lone extravagance. “Ready?” I say when I step back into the hall.

  She nods. Step-by-step, we make our way down two of the three flights. She droops on the top of the last one.

  “Do you have any money?” she asks.

  “No,” I answer honestly. I tried getting a job, but no luck. I complain that I have a young face, and well-meaning adults assure me that when I get older, I’ll be thankful. It doesn’t help me now. I inherited my mother’s youthful look, the one she had before drugs and alcohol took their toll. But I’m already taller than her, five seven to her five three, my father’s genes. I’m slender, but that probably has more to do with the scarcity of a hot meal than anything else. She occasionally reminds me I have my father’s gray eyes and his height, like my DNA insults her.

  She mumbles something about going to the bank, but all she’ll find are overdraft fees and denied credit. I’m afraid to tell her.

  “Go out to the street. See if you recognize anyone. Tell them I need to see them,” she orders me.

  I bound down the stairs. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust as I emerge into the bright summer sun. I look up and down the sidewalk. A homeless guy perches on top of a newspaper box, and a kid rides by on a bike. Finding someone my mother knows is a sketchy task. I retreat inside.

  “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “Pearl, I need to get out of here.” Her cheek rests against the grimy wall, and the gash on the other side still bleeds, staining her yellow T-shirt crimson around the shoulder. “Go across the street to the apartment with the Christmas wreath on the door. Knock six times.” She lifts her knuckles and beats them, weakly, on the floor. “Ask for Pauline.”

  The building across the street houses a pimp and an assortment of women who emerge, raccoon-like, around dusk. I’ve met Pauline, long limbed, with scars on her arms that she doesn’t try to hide. My mother has gone over there a few times and returned with fifty, and sometimes a hundred, bucks.

  I knock as directed. Vinyl blinds part, and a pair of bloodshot eyes appear. The door opens a crack. I seize the opportunity.

  “I’m looking for Pauline. My mom, across the street, needs to see her. It’s urgent.”

  The door opens just enough to let me slip through into a dark foyer. Something like cinnamon hangs in the air, but mostly I smell cigarettes and defeat.

  A woman about my mom’s age, wearing a silk robe, leads me back to the kitchen.

  “Midge. Says she’s lookin’ for Pauline. Somethin’ about her mother across the street.”

  A giant of a man sits at the kitchen table, playing solitaire. He looks up at me and licks his lips. “Whatcha looking for, sweetheart?”

  I swallow hard. Leave it to my mother to put me in this situation. I draw a breath. “Janet, across the street, Pauline’s friend, she just needs her help real quick.” I sense that if I bring any word of trouble to the table, they’ll escort me to the door.

  Midge looks at me full on, his eyes simultaneously hungry and concerned. Finally, he jerks his head toward the lady who answered the door. She gives me a sharp look before exiting.

  “Pauline will be right with you,” he says gruffly before returning to his game.

  With the toe of my boot, I trace the lines between the tiles on the floor like a maze, trying to find a way out of feeling vulnerable and helpless.

  I hear Pauline’s smoky voice from down the hall before she appears. She greets me with her arms opened wide. Even though we’ve only met a few times, a long embrace is her customary greeting.

  As we exit the shady building, Pauline asks, “You still collecting those magazines?”

  I nod.

  “I’ll be sure to save some for you. Sometimes the girls leave them in the house.”

  I hope I’m not still hanging around here by the time the next issue comes out.

  I jaywalk through traffic, filling Pauline in on what happened. I worry Darren may have returned.

  When Pauline pushes open the door to the building, my mother is where I left her, but with her eyes closed. At first, I fear she fainted, but she’s probably been up at least twenty-four hours, if not longer. Pauline, gentle as ever, strokes my mother’s leg to wake her up. For a vague instant, I picture Pauline tending babies or the elderly. She doesn’t belong in this harsh life.

  “Pauline,” my mom says, brightening.

  “Hiya, JJ, how ya doin’?” she coos softly.

  “Been better.”

  “Well, come on,” Pauline says, wrapping her arms underneath my mother’s to help her up.

  “Where we going?” Pauline asks, but before my mother answers, Pauline suggests, “How about the Constance House up on Riverside?”

  I get the sense she’s done this before. Constance House is a battered women’s shelter—a place I doubt will abide my mother’s lifestyle—and as such, I expect Janet to protest, but apparently Pauline’s caring manner is all the convincing she needs.

  “Pearl, you have a towel or something? She can’t go in a cab like this. She needs shoes too.”

  I run upstairs. Each step reminds me that Darren might be back any second. I grab a pair of flip-flops and look in the bathroom cabinet for a towel. There aren’t any clean, so I pull a worn pillowcase off the bed and race back down to meet them outside.

  “Thatta girl. Thanks,” Pauline says as she helps my mother into the flip-flops. Janet’s eyes are nearly closed as she leans heavily against Pauline’s shoulder.

  It’s times like these I’d also like to give myself over to Pauline’s capable hands, the hands of a mother, sister, caretaker. Instead, she hails a cab and hands me a twenty.
/>   “Look after her, Pearl,” she says before I close the cab door. That’s what I’ve been trying to do, but how can she expect a kid to look after a grown woman when neither one knows how to take care of herself?

  The cab drops us off on a side street in front of an anonymous brick building. A woman with tight curls confidently helps us inside. I flash to a magazine clipping of my mother holding her hand up to the camera as she emerged from a limo, back when the Shrapnels were big. It was rock star glitz and glamour. Now it’s just grit.

  I suppose sightings of Janet are about as significant as spotting a yeti. She dropped off the rock scene years ago, but the public doesn’t know my uncle bought her out so she’d keep quiet when he decided to step into the political spotlight. If nothing else, Uncle Gary doesn’t want anything to tarnish his upstanding good-old-boy reputation. I imagine she knows about a few skeletons in his custom-built closet. He should have known his money, the condo, and the car had an expiration date.

  The lady who helped us out of the car examines my mother’s wounds, and the two of them disappear to another room. If she recognizes JJ, she doesn’t say as much. When I was younger, fans would stop JJ, asking for an autograph, but in the last ten years, it seems she’s slipped from everyone’s minds, including her own.

  I sit in a stiff chair like the kind in hospital waiting rooms, twisting a wisp of my hair around my finger. A sign on the wall explains in English and Spanish that domestic violence is unacceptable. There’s a number to call for help at the bottom. A phone rings somewhere in the background.

  The lady returns with a clipboard. “Don’t worry. Your mom is going to be OK.”

  I know that without her telling me. Janet is always OK, fine, or all right, but never any more than that and most of the time a lot less.

  “I asked her a few questions, but she’s resting, and I was wondering if you could try finishing. She indicated that she wanted help and to stay here with us, but first we need to know some things. Can you help?”

  I nod, aware that answering very carefully means the difference between having a place to stay tonight and ending up out on the street.

  After confirming some basic background information, she asks me what transpired. “This will be kept in the strictest confidence, between you and me.”

  I’ve heard that line before. Nothing’s actually confidential, but my stomach growls, reminding me all I’ve eaten today is a dry bagel. Where there’s a bed, there’s bread.

  It wasn’t always like this. I can’t begin to understand why JJ traded in her old life for a starving, groveling half-life.

  After the intake interview, the woman leads me to a dining room. I dig into a bowl of watery soup and sliced white bread. I nervously squish it between my fingers and roll it back into dough.

  Beyond the kitchen, a talk show plays dully from a community room. On the screen, a well-meaning doctor tries to convince a young mother to use birth control as audience members chime in. Some sound sympathetic, others accusatory. During a commercial break, there’s an ad for an exposé show on the latest celebrity scandal. I wasn’t sheltered from the media storm when the Shrapnels imploded, Nell died, and my mother burned through money, boyfriends, and people, leaving herself with nothing, but I was too young to understand it fully. I hope there aren’t too many casualties in the wake of whatever crime the latest starlet has committed. The drama usually ends in tragedy.

  By the curtained window, a pair of twins and a toddler play with shabby toys, their mother’s eyes glued to the ancient wood-paneled TV set.

  I settle on the couch and reach into my backpack for something to occupy myself. I dig for my notebook with the heart stamped on the cover and a pen, but the notebook isn’t there. In my haste earlier, I must have forgotten it. My hand rests on the once-glossy, now-scarred copy of Vogue. Burn marks scorch the gown the model wears like a calla lily. I’ve been collecting issues of Vogue, US and foreign editions, vintage and new alike, for as long as I can remember. The perfumed advertisements, the shiny images, the tropical backdrops . . . They promise another kind of life, an escape from this one I’m barely hanging on to. As I flip to the first page, I become a stowaway on a glamorous yacht bound for distant lands; I withdraw into the visual fiction, hiding from what will surely be a long ride, and leave everything else just a memory.

  Chapter 3

  After a few days, Janet and I graduate to a homeless shelter. The counselors there urge her to get help. In the past, she’d smile and comply, everyone involved confident their particular method of assistance would pull her clear from self-destruction. This time, through drags of the cigarette continually between her lips, she smiles and cackles like we should all be grateful to be graced with her charming presence.

  Despite our thighs pressing side-by-side on the bench, the brush of her arm against mine, and her smoky breath, she seems further away than usual.

  “I can take care of us, Pearl,” she tells me while she flips through my magazine. “I’m going to the bank—gonna get us out of here.”

  I want to tell her she can hardly take care of herself, so how does us figure in, but instead I take a deep breath, having held on to the empty nothingness of the bank account through our flight from Darren’s. “About that.”

  Her head whips in my direction; her lips pull back in a snarl. “You didn’t spend it, did you?”

  “No, of course not,” I say, rooting through my bag for the statement. I hold it out to her. “You did.” My words are a whisper, but the truth hangs in the air between us, charred like the blue-gray haze that’s been clouding her head for months.

  She swipes it out of my hand and glances at it. Her glare turns to me. “This is bullshit. I didn’t sign up for this.” And by this, she means us. “If I didn’t have to—”

  I crumble, a sand castle washing away, and stop listening to the veiled speech about how I’m a burden, how she used to have stylists and be on TV. She’s inflamed, but doesn’t finish reflecting on how good things were. Instead, she stamps out of the shared, narrow cubby containing a bench, a bunk bed, and our few possessions. I pick up the bank statement and rip it to pieces. I hope she went to talk to someone about applying for the work program, government assistance, anything that demonstrates she’s willing to help us.

  A sign hangs by the exit, written in bold: No drinking, no alcohol, no drugs, no fighting. Below that are the words: 10:00 p.m. curfew. No exceptions. Then, as the door slams shut, I wonder which rule she’s going to break.

  If anyone at the shelter has recognized the famed JJ of the Shrapnels, they haven’t mentioned it. Lately, I don’t recognize her. But I want to find my way back into her arms, even if they were never very snug around me to begin with. We used to be closer, her more of a mother and less of a ghost. I wish for us to have our own apartment, with a tiny kitchen and a stocked fridge. I’d have a shelf for all my issues of Vogue; she’d have a closet filled with designer clothing, a wall lined with plaques and awards for my designs and art. We’d dance together in the living room, singing at the top of our lungs. I wouldn’t mind the parties, the people crashed on the couch and floor, because every morning I’d snuggle in next to my mom, assured by her heart beating next to mine.

  She doesn’t return for mealtime, and the bunk below remains empty as the minutes tick down to curfew and I drift to sleep, afraid that this building filled with snoring and farting, shifting mattresses, failed dreams, and calamity is my ultimate nowhere.

  My chest and throat and face and eyes burn like I’ve breathed fire, like I’ve swallowed bullets, like I’ve combusted. Maybe I have. My head and body throb. Yes, I have a pulse. I hear beeping, screaming, and smell fire and smoke. I should get up, run, find fresh air, but I can’t move. I am heavy, molten, disintegrated. I’m also thirsty.

  Time is an indistinguishable thread. With great effort I blink open my eyes. There’s a mask over my nose and mouth. A white curtain w
ith brown and blue stripes surrounds me. A bleached blanket drapes over my body. I wiggle my toes. Thank God. I lift my arm to take the mask from my face and see tubes running from my hand to an IV.

  What happened? Shoes squeak by on the other side of the curtain. There are murmuring, distant voices.

  “Hello?” I call, lifting my head slightly, but my voice is huskier than usual. My entire body burns, stings, aches. I drop my head back and close my eyes.

  Sometime later, a nurse holds my wrist, refreshing the IV. “Hi, sleepyhead,” she says sweetly.

  “Hello?” I say, more of a question than a greeting. “What happened? Why am I here?” I hardly recognize my voice.

  Her expression is conciliatory, like we’ve reached the last page of a story that doesn’t have a happy ending but she knows that I’m a child and won’t want to hear it. “There was a fire. At the shelter on Avenue D. You were very, very lucky.”

  Her words come to me slowly, in pieces, as if she’s communicating in the private language of dream-filled sleep instead of English.

  “There was a fire?”

  She nods, adjusting the bandage. “Does that feel OK?” she asks, smoothing her thumb over the tape holding the IV in place.

  Nothing feels OK.

  “Where’s my mom?”

  Her expression moves past charitable to a kind of hardness I don’t know how to interpret. “The good news is I think you’ll be able to leave tomorrow.”

  “Where’s my mom?” I say, urging my voice above a hoarse whisper.

  The curtain parts as the nurse leaves. On one side, my mother stands with a hand on her hip, her hair stringy and her eyes vacant. Her fingers flit and twitch with impatience. On the other side, my uncle, a formidable figure in a slate-colored suit, has his arms across his chest. His lips purse together like he’s holding back the kind of verbal grenades he’s known for as a higher-up on a government legal team.

  “Pearl,” my mother says. “I got a spot at the rehab center.” She says this like it’s a jail sentence. From the stormy expression on Uncle Gary’s face, I think it is. She’s familiar with both.