Page 63 of If Looks Could Kill

There was no one at my old apartment. Clearly, Pearl had not been by.

I had mailed Freyda and Cora’s article and Cora’s letter, then come here. It was the last place I hadn’t looked for Pearl. I knew it would be futile, yet I had to try.

I wandered around the corner and found myself in front of Reggie’s Bakery, with its fogged-up windows and its warm aromas beckoning. It was mid-afternoon, and Aunt Mag’s breakfast was a distant memory now. I needed something to eat.

The scent of buttery bread and spun sugar assailed me as I entered. I ordered a bun and a cup of coffee and sat down at a table facing outward toward Rivington.

The streets were clogged with horses, wagons, and carriages. Children done with school darted in and out around adults plodding along. None of them knew or cared that Pearl was out there, somewhere, a Medusa bomb about to go off.

It was time for me to face the obvious: Pearl did not intend for me to find her. She neither needed nor wanted me. I was wasting time, trying to find someone who didn’t want to be found.

Was I doing this for Pearl? Or was this like every other time I’d tried to “do good” for her—more about my own need to feel wanted? To feel like I belonged?

Pearl would never be my best friend, Jane. Jane was not my Jane anymore either.

Nor did Freyda nor Cora need me. They now shared a bond I never could enter.

There was nothing more for me in this city.

Except Mike.

But I’d only really known him for a day.

And one does not reach out to one’s dad to ask him for money to establish oneself into a new apartment in Gotham, after bailing on one’s “save the world” project, without any job or purpose, on the basis of enjoying one day, kiss or no, with a certain boy, be his Irish accent ever so divine.

And his kindness. Be his kindness ever so divine.

I jumped when Reggie’s mother, Marianne, placed my coffee cup on my table.

“Just me, darlin’,” she said. “Want any cream?”

I shook my head. “Not today, thanks, Marianne.”

The look on her face said that everyone was allowed to be a fool now and then. “Where’s our Pearl today?” she asked kindly. “Haven’t seen either of you in a while.”

“Oh,” I said, “she’s… not feeling well.”

Her round face dimpled with concern. “Tell her hello from me, and I hope she feels better.” Marianne returned to the counter and busied herself frosting the X’s on hot cross buns.

I sipped my coffee and burned my tongue.

Aunt Lorraine would crow over the fact that I’d quit the Salvation Army. It stung to leave it just when it had begun to feel rewarding. Much more soup. Quite a bit less salvation.

It was time to go home and cry on Dad’s shoulder and sleep in my comfortable bed. Celebrate Christmas. Move forward with a life closer to what Aunt Lorraine intended for me.

But what if Pearl was in danger? What if she was trapped somewhere?

What if it was me in harm’s way, praying that my friends wouldn’t give up on me?

I wrapped my cold hands around my coffee cup and breathed in its warmth.

God in heaven, tell me what to do, because I can’t even think at all.

I stared into the darkness beyond my eyelids until colored pinpoints of light burst over my vision like fireworks in the night sky.

You ask and you ask, I thought bitterly, and what you get is nothing.

Tell me what to do, I implored, giving the thing one more try. I’m lost. And so is Pearl.

Nothing.

And then the noise of the bakeshop faded away.

Tabitha, dear one. You don’t need to be told what to do.

Not with words. Bypassing words. Transcending words.

Yes, I do, I insisted. I am in over my head here.

Liquid quiet.

Why did you come to the city in the first place?

To help people.

And who needs help?

I need help, I said. Everyone needs help. The need is so great, it will drown you.

I know.

Yes, well, Pearl needs help. And I don’t know how to help her.

Again, the question. Why did you come to the city in the first place?

Because you told me I needed to find your lost daughters. And bring them home.

Tears stung my eyes. You have too many lost daughters, I told him. As though God should have looked after them better. Remembered where he put them.

I know.

I sat with it, my surprise at the heartache, and set down my coffee.

This wasn’t the severe God I’d met at the pulpit of my childhood church, nor the boisterous, jovial God of the Salvation Army street parade. This God was… what, exactly?

Wounded with the pain of an entire world. The bottomless pain of countless millions through countless years. I marveled at it. I stood at a distance, with bowed head.

But that was the point, I realized, of the Cross. Wasn’t it? The wounded God? I hadn’t thought of it that way before. I thought the Cross was then . Not now. Not, perhaps, forever.

Even so. Too many lost daughters, I reminded him, and nothing I could do about it.

“Are you all right, lovey?”

I blinked my eyes open to see Marianne gazing down at me in concern. She now had a pink frosting smear on the bosom of her apron.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “Thank you for asking.”

She didn’t seem convinced, but she patted my shoulder and bustled off to her work.

She’d burst the bubble. It was the horrible moment when a streetcar or a crowing rooster wakes you from a beautiful dream, and you know you’ll never get it back.

I closed my eyes again. Please come back.

Bring them home.

If I found Pearl, would home welcome her, after what she’d become?

What about Freyda? I’d helped find her. And Cora. We got her out. Didn’t that count?

Perhaps it did if what you wanted were pats on the back. Not if you wanted rescued lives.

It counted to Freyda and Cora.

My heart leapt. Divine comfort flowed in.

It was true that the problem was too enormous, the sufferers too many to count. I couldn’t save the world. But for each girl released from the hell of bondage, their whole world might begin anew. And if God’s love for them burned like the fire warming me, then my efforts counted in his eyes too.

Perhaps I could try. I might find a way to help more girls who were trapped find a way home. I needed to be more intelligent about this work. I was lucky to have survived last night. Lucky not to have met Freyda’s fate. I couldn’t afford to be so na?ve.

Not lucky. I’d survived because I had a weapon with me. A Medusa.

How could a Medusa, and the God I knew, both exist? Mustn’t the one disprove the other? And yet here was God, I felt sure, and somewhere out there was Pearl. What then?

Ask.

So I asked. Why does Pearl have snakes for hair?

Does it matter?

It matters to her, I thought. And to me. It’s horrible. Evil. Hideous. Why would you punish her so?

In answer, I seemed to see Pearl herself. Pearl, radiant in a pool of divine light. Pearl, encircled in heaven’s love. Not because she was so “good.” Because she was so Pearl. With a beauty that made her ordinary prettiness irrelevant. She took my breath away.

I am not the God you think you know. I am the God who is.

An abyss opened at my feet. My scriptures, my certainties, my facts, my “faith”—what were they in the face of what actually was? The unknowable real?

The God who is.

The God who loves Pearl. And loves me. Perhaps not so unknowable after all.

I’ve created all things since the dawn of time, and all my creations delight me.

My sense of the world tilted back through time, through ages of the earth’s history, to dinosaurs and mammoths, to curious birds and beasts, large and long gone and strange, huge of tooth and fang, that had perhaps once stood where I stand and had now passed out of being.

(Aunt Lorraine had quite a lot of vitriol for Mr. Darwin and his theories, but I had visited the Museum of Natural History and written to tell Dad all about it.)

Deep waters, these. Beyond my understanding. Not beyond God’s care. And if Pearl-the-Medusa was also beyond my understanding, I knew, I knew she was enfolded in God’s care.

Maybe we really know nothing at all, I thought. About God or about one another.

But God, it seemed, wanted me to find Pearl. Even if she didn’t want me to. Pearl, who’d aggravated me from morning till night for three months straight. She was my companion. My absolutely unbearable companion. My biggest problem.

That was it. She was my problem. She was my problem.

She had lived with me. Worked with me. Borrowed my sweaters. Judged my character and criticized my singing. Made me chop all the soup onions so her eyes wouldn’t look bloodshot for Purse Laurier. You can’t overlook a bond like that.

Pearl is mine, I prayed. I claim her. She’s my sister. Not the sister I thought I wanted. She’s the sister I got, and worth more to me than all my fairy-tale illusions.

I don’t know what I’m doing, I confessed. I have neither the skill, nor the desire, if I’m honest, to do what you’ve asked of me. I’m terrified. And you know that.

I’ll bring Pearl home. But you’ll have to guide me to her or guide her to me.

The conversation was over. The presence was gone, as if a sun had set.

I was left alone, rattling about in my ill-fitting body.

A moment ago, I felt as vast as the cosmos.

Now I was one small life, anchored against the current of a teeming city, one of thousands of cities.

A stranger to all but a small handful of souls on a lonely planet.

Or perhaps not so alone.

Through the haze of afternoon sun pouring through a steamy bakery window, I saw one figure watching me through that window, with a grin on his indescribable mouth.

Mike.