Don't You Cry (14 page)

“You don't think...” asks Ben, but he stops just short of finishing that thought out loud.

But yes, I do think. I think exactly what Ben is thinking though neither of us can say the words aloud.

I can't even begin to describe what goes through my mind.

And then there's my stomach, which has sunken somewhere down to my toes.

All at once, I think I may puke.

Alex

In the end it's curiosity that makes me decide to step foot inside that derelict house across the street from mine. It's dark out, nighttime, as I walk home from another long day of work, my feet and legs bone-tired. As I close in on the house, I see the flicker of light, same as Pops and I did the night before:
on, off
.

And that's what gets my attention.

A bird, a common grackle, sits on the contorted roof shingles, singing a rasping, croaky song, its luminous blue head glowing in the glossy moonlight. It sits there perched on the old, sunken-in roof with black bug eyes that stare down onto the street at me, its cusp-like beak pointed in my direction. I take it all in: the bird's shiny body; the lustrous blue head; its long, attenuating tail; its feet, brown and gnarled like an old lady's hands.

The moon, a perfectly round sphere, ascends high into the nighttime sky as lazy clouds float by.

I run home first to grab some tools, and then from a distance appraise the house, trying to figure out the best way to get inside. I want to know who it is that's living in there and whether or not it really is, as Pops thinks, a squatter. I bring with me some pastry I carried home from the café. A chocolate croissant, stuffed inside a pocket. Whoever's living in there might just be hungry.

I cross the street and settle on the fragmenting sidewalk, seeing the names at my feet, names sculpted decades ago into the solidifying concrete, proof that someone once lived here. That this home wasn't always abandoned.

It's the blue hour, the time of day when the entire world takes on a navy hue, the derelict house becoming blue, too. A few of the windows have been boarded up with plywood, and so those entryways are out. I'm not about to wrangle with the plywood with my bare hands. It's pinned to the window casement with rusty old nails so that I'll probably die of tetanus if I touch the darn things. That's not really something I want to mess around with—the spasms and muscle stiffness, the risk of death—and so instead I use the tools I brought from home, a Craftsman nail puller that belongs to Pops and a pair of industrial work gloves.

I slip my hands into the gloves and use the nail puller to pry the rusty old nails from a boarded-up, busted window—in the back of the house where I'm less likely to be seen—and remove the plywood from the yellow siding. I drop it to the ground. And then I rely on a stepstool I dragged along to climb inside, using the end of the nail puller to push out any remaining bits of broken glass so I don't get cut. It's getting dark out here—hard to see much of anything—and yet it's as I'm climbing in that the moon's glow hits the rear of the house and I realize it's all been for naught, for less than ten yards away stands another window, plywood removed, glass already smashed. Squatters.

Inside, the ceiling caves right on in, hunks of drywall falling off, leaving the framework of the home exposed. It's dark inside, but thankfully for me, I brought a flashlight, too. I feel a wall for the light switch, surprised—and yet not surprised—to find the home is without electricity, probably shut off years ago. Just means whatever illegal tenants have been camping out here also have their own flashlight, the light Pops and I spied radiating from the open window.
On, off.
A flashlight or a lantern. Maybe a candle.

Inside I discover that when the owners left, they left quickly. They didn't take much with them when they went. But still, it's been stripped of appliances, and furniture is missing, things other people could sell and profit from. What remains are the knickknacks and other novelty items, things with sentimental value but not monetary. A vase, a chessboard, a defunct clock whose hands will forever be stuck at 8:14. In time many of the utilities were shut off for nonpayment, the water only after the pipes froze and burst. The bank tried to sell the home at auction, but no one made a single bid. It wasn't worth the cost to level it to the ground, and so instead the home remained. The neighbors had half a mind to light the thing on fire and watch it burn; wouldn't be such a bad idea in my opinion. But no one wanted to mess with the ghost of Genevieve, a thing that doesn't even exist.

Inside there is writing on the walls. Graffiti. Some kind of creeping vine grows right through the splintered walls and into the home. The lawn is a mess, overgrown shrubbery all but taking over the home's facade. In the backyard, there are downed trees everywhere, their remaining stumps blackened with rot. Inside there are the oddly normal facets of life: a stack of melamine cereal bowls resting in the cabinet, covered with webs and rodent droppings. There are chunks of fallen drywall from where the roof sank into the room, the shingles of the roof exposed. An impromptu skylight. Insulation falls out of the walls like stuffing from a torn teddy bear.

What I expect to see as I tiptoe my way through the derelict home is a squatter, maybe even a small family of squatters, huddled together in blankets on the floor. Or maybe a bunch of teenage hoodlums, smoking pot where they don't think anyone will see, or some hobo passing through town, looking for a warmer, dryer place to get some sleep beneath a somewhat intact roof.

But maybe I'm not as smart as everyone seems to believe, because it doesn't ever cross my mind, not one time, that I might see Pearl standing there in the abandoned living room, but there she is. I spot her ombré hair, which falls in waves down her back, the redness that strikes her cheeks as if she'd been slapped. As I watch on, she presses her fingertips to those cheeks; I can tell they're cold. Even inside, in the unheated home, with broken windows that embrace the autumn night, they've gone numb. Her eyes glisten, starting to water in the cold November air. Her nose does, too, as puffs of air emerge into the room from her salmon-colored lips, whitish-gray puffs like clouds.

And now, standing in near-darkness, out the open window, the bird—the grackle—again begins to sing, a creepy little elegy, and a plump full moon shines in through the barbed broken glass, and Pearl turns to me and smiles.

“Hi there,” she says. “I was wondering if you'd ever come.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask, and she says, her voice calm like a millpond, “The same thing as you.” Her tone is poetic, rhythmical, and as she says these words, she turns her small feet in my direction. “Just nosing around,” she says as her index finger traces a line of dust on the fireplace mantel, and she stares down at the filth on her skin before wiping it on the leg of her pants.

It's dark in the room, not black, but still dark, the full moon trying hard to find its way in. It glints from behind the obese clouds, the light flickering on and off, as does the light from the flashlight in Pearl's hand as she presses the power button again and again.
On
,
off.

I think of Pops, sitting all alone in the house across the street, watching the blinks of light from the window.
Damn squatters
,
I hear him say.
Damn squatters are living over there again.

But no, I think. Not squatters. Pearl.

These things are mutually exclusive; they are to me at least. This girl cannot be a squatter because, well, because she just can't. She deserves more than this, more than the dirt, the grime, the filth. She deserves better.

I come into the living room slowly, not quite sure what to say or do. This is the living room, I know, because there's a couch here still, a plaid sofa, and the remnants of what was once a fireplace, a cast-iron insert surrounded by a marble mantel that's covered in dust, Pearl's finger now traced through it like a road map.

On the floor beside her feet lies a blanket, a holey, moth-eaten blanket, and a flat cushion, one that I'm guessing she took from the sofa, a place to lay her head. The fabric matches the couch, the blue country plaid that I have trouble believing was ever in style. But it was. Once. Long ago. My heart splinters a little bit, thinking of Pearl laying her pretty head on that ratty pillow and spending her night sleeping on the dirty, rigid floor. Before me, she wraps her arms around herself and shivers. It's no more than fifty-some degrees, I'd bet. My eyes rove again to the fireplace, the hearth empty and cold.

“You're sleeping here?” I ask, though the answer is obvious, and I want to tell her about the rats, the bugs, the signs outside that say No Trespassing and Not Approved for Occupancy, but I don't. I'm guessing she already knows about these things. She doesn't answer my question, but simply stares, her bewildering eyes trying hard to read mine, as mine do her. Instead, I say, “You know they say this house is haunted,” and I wonder if I should say more, about Genevieve, about the little girl that died in a bathtub, her spirit said to haunt all who enter this home. But I don't. I don't have time to say a thing before she smiles at me, a confident smile, and says decisively with a shrug of her shoulders, “I don't believe in ghosts.”

I smile back at her and say, “Yeah. Me neither,” as my hands inadvertently find their way to my pockets, coming across the chocolate croissant. But my smile isn't confident at all, and my words come out thick and breathy as if I've swallowed cotton and can hardly find the voice to speak. They shake, too, as do my hands. I might even wheeze. I draw the croissant from my pocket, flattened now and a tad bit pathetic, and offer it reluctantly to Pearl. She shakes her head and says to me, “No.”

Before me, she stands: an ingénue. That's the way she looks to me. The girl next door or, maybe, the damsel in distress. Something along those lines, or maybe that's just who I want her to be. She looks tired, cold and maybe even a little bit scared. Up close, I see that her clothes are shabby—and not, of course, shabby chic, but the kind that looks like she's been trekking across the country for days, sleeping on some dirty, dusty floor. But still, she brings out the introvert in me, that kind of antisocial loner who doesn't know the first thing about talking to girls. It has nothing to do with her, but rather the fact that she is a girl—a
woman
—and a pretty one at that. That's what makes my hands shake, what makes my words hard to find, makes my sight line fall to the repulsive floors beneath my feet instead of into her eyes.

“What's your name?” she asks me, and, glancing at her quickly, transiently, I say that it's Alex.

But when I ask her her own name, she says sagely, “My mother told me I shouldn't talk to strangers,” and it's the smile on her lips that says it all. She isn't as bashful as she'd like for me to believe. There's a bit of playfulness going on here, maybe even subterfuge, but I can't say that I mind. In fact, I kind of like it.

“You're already talking to me,” I say, but still, she's not going to tell me her name. I don't pry. There could be any number of reasons why she won't. She's on the run, here to hide. She's in trouble with the police, or maybe even some guy. It's none of my business. I think of her and Dr. Giles, the way her eyes gazed through the café window at him. The way I saw her yesterday, ebbing away on the street, his eyes watching as she disappeared over the hill at the far end of town. Had she been there already, in the blue cottage, talking to him? I don't know. I'm guessing her being here has something to do with him, that maybe she's a patient, but the way she stares out the café window with fascination and curiosity, maybe even a bit of nostalgia mixed in, I think that it might be more than that. There might be something more to it, something that goes beyond the realm of a doctor-patient relationship. But that's just a hunch, some bedtime story I've made up. I don't really know.

“How long have you been staying here?” I ask, and she shrugs.

“A couple days,” she says. “I guess.”

There's a cheap motel in town, a bed-and-breakfast and one of those extended-stay hotels. There are summer rental homes, beach homes, a campground or two. But I'm guessing these are things she can't afford, so I don't tell her this. I'd give her money if I could, but I don't have money. Though it's hard to see in the murkiness of the room, I look, anyway, for signs of maltreatment or abuse, such as healing bruises, a fractured bone, a limp. Something to tell me she's on the run from something or somebody, but there's none.

It's as she wraps those spindly arms around her body, and shudders from the cold, that I say to her, “Too bad we can't start a fire in there,” as my finger points to the dilapidated fireplace, now little more than a grubby hole in the wall.

As I step forward to the fireplace, I feel the floors beneath my feet start to give, and I move quickly, as if I hover long enough I might just disappear into quicksand, a black hole. Thankfully, I don't. As I pause for a moment to gather my bearings—seeing the way the carpeted floors just sank a good inch beneath my feet—I feel grateful that I'm still here. Not Approved for Occupancy,
the sign says, and now I know why. When I get to the fireplace, I eyeball the inside, absolutely certain the chimney itself must be filled with bird nests, squirrel nests and other soot and debris. I'm no chimney sweep, but I'd bet my life the bricks of the chimney are missing and the mortar desperately needs to be fixed. And that's all on the outside; the inside alone, the cast-iron insert, is covered with so much grime and smut it'd probably be the first thing to combust if I were to start a fire, that or the inside of the house would fill with carbon monoxide, and before either of us knew it, we'd drift off to sleep and die, joining Genevieve in the afterlife.

“You sure?” she asks me as she eyes the fireplace herself, and I consider this—fire, carbon monoxide, death—and say quite simply, “It'd be a bad idea.”

But I have something else in mind.

I lower the zipper on my sweatshirt and remove it, handing it to the girl. “Here,” I say, “put this on,” but she doesn't take it right away. Instead, she stares at the sweatshirt in my shaking hands, and I start to feel like a fool, as if I've crossed some sort of malapropos line. I think about pulling it back, about putting it back on and pretending this never happened. I feel her eyes watching me, looking at the sweatshirt in my hand.