Pocketful of Pearls (21 page)

“Dinah?” Without thinking, he crossed the kitchen and wrapped his arms around her, smelling fresh cotton and mint mouthwash.
Her head fell forward and she wept into the front of his shirt. “Dinah, please tell me.”

She dragged in a jagged breath, her fingers curled into his shirt. “She should never have come out here.” Her voice was muffled
and watery.

“Why not?” he asked gently. “She wants to be your friend.”

“How long will that last?” she wailed on a long note of grief. “Why would anyone want to be friends with me? I’m ugly and
dirty and used. Who wants to be friends with that?”

M
ATTHEW’S ARM AROUND
her shoulders was a small comfort as he guided Dinah into the living room. A small comfort against the wilderness of loneliness
and self-contempt inside her.

He should take his arm away, she thought, palming tears off her cheeks. Why would he want to touch garbage like me?

Instead, he sat her down on the brown couch and kept her in the circle of that arm, where she cried until she was exhausted
and her eyes were red and stinging. Then he handed her a tissue and waited for her to blow her nose.

“Talk to me,” he said in a voice so gentle it made her tear up again. “Tell me why you think you’re dirty and used.”

“You know why!” How could such a smart man be so obtuse? She tried to pull away but he wouldn’t let her. Finally she gave
up and slumped against his side, her arms crossed over her chest. She put her shoulder toward him so she wouldn’t have to
see his face. “Hello-o . . . I’m somebody’s mistress. Claire is pure and a virgin and I’m just one of Phinehas’s whores. Not
even the only one. My body is used and ugly and I’m filth in everybody’s eyes, even God’s.”
Correction.
“Particularly God’s.”

“And you’ve taken on all the ugliness that belongs to Phinehas and appropriated it for yourself.”

Shock hit her in the solar plexus. “What? What did you say?”

“Listen to yourself. Filth, ugliness, moral ruin . . . you’re taking all that on yourself instead of placing it where it belongs—squarely
on Phinehas. Why are you protecting him?”

“I’m not!”

“Something inside you is. Is it easier to do that than to admit the person who was supposed to care for your soul and act
as your shepherd is a wicked, selfish man who should be in prison?”

“It was me that turned him,” she said in despair. “He couldn’t resist me. He said so. And I liked it. I liked having something
he wanted, because goodness knows I didn’t have much else.”

“He manipulated you, Dinah. He pushed all the blame on you when you didn’t deserve it. That’s what abusers do, you know. They
blame the victim and make her think it’s her fault because they can’t take responsibility for their own actions. But you don’t
have to believe it any more. It’s all a lie. Your responsibility is to live the truth.”

“I don’t even know what the truth is.” The confession was dragged out of her word by word. “I’m a lie, he’s a lie, God’s a
lie. Everything’s a lie.”

“I’m not,” he said quietly. “Tamsen isn’t. Schatzi isn’t.”

Involuntarily, her lips twitched. “There’s nothing quite so real as a chicken. Or a baby.”

“Phinehas created a woman who has to lie to herself and others in order to survive. And you see that woman when you look in
the mirror. But she isn’t real. I want to know the real Dinah.”

Dust was beginning to coat the surface of the coffee table, Dinah thought distantly. It was time to clean house again. “I’m
twenty-four. It’s too late for the real Dinah, Matthew.”

“I’ll never believe that. But the first thing you have to do is admit there is a real Dinah, somewhere under this illusion
Phinehas has made. I’ve seen her a time or two.”

“When?” How could he see someone who didn’t exist?

“The first morning I was here. I saw a lovely girl with a bird on her shoulder, singing to the other chickens. That was very
real.”

Sheba, my darling.
Dinah’s throat closed with loss.

“And I saw her again, holding Tamsen, counting her little fingers. And just now, laughing at the kitchen table with a friend.”
Matthew squeezed her shoulders, just briefly. “That’s the woman who deserves to live. The joyful one who finds beauty in a
single moment and lets it shine out of her.”

Beauty? Dinah could hardly remember any beautiful moments that hadn’t been tarnished by Phinehas or her father. But these
had happened after all that. These had happened in the present, when there was nearly nothing left of her. How could that
be?

“I’ll agree with you that Phinehas is a lie,” Matthew went on. It was obvious he’d been thinking about this. A lot. For days,
probably. “He’s a ‘whited sepulchre,’ looking on the outside like everything a person should be, and on the inside he’s dead
and rotting.”

She couldn’t agree more. Did anyone but she and Matthew see it, though? And what good did it do them? Phinehas was holy, untouchable.
Even if she said something, no one would believe her. Matthew had said she was appropriating his filth to herself. Well, that
was nothing to what the church would heap on her if she dared to open her mouth.

“He’s recreated God in his own image for you.” Matthew’s voice, while still gentle, was tight. “You told me that night at
the river that God was a punisher, throwing thunderbolts at you every time you turned around.”

“He is. He does.”

“If you looked at those thunderbolts closely, though, my dear, I wonder how many of them really came from Phinehas’s hands?”

Sheba’s death. Her mother’s stroke. Tamara’s pregnancy and disappearance. All were connected in some way to Phinehas.

“Why would he do that?”

“Maybe he doesn’t intentionally, but his actions still reverberate in your life. And God has nothing to do with it.”

“But the Shepherd is God’s representative here on earth.” Oh, for goodness sake. Even she could see how silly it was to believe
that. “Never mind.”

“He might be representing the God he sees, but it certainly isn’t the God I know and love. The one that loves you and whose
heart breaks every time you paste Phinehas’s face on him.”

It was difficult not to. That God was the only one she knew—and feared and hated.

But what if it were true?

Your whole life would have to change. Somehow.

I can’t. It’s all I can do to survive right now. I can’t change anything.

Maybe not. But Matthew sees beauty in you. That’s a change.

Matthew is a homeless man who is just being nice because I feed him.

Stop lying to yourself.

All right. All right. Matthew is either pure of heart or completely naïve.

You’re doing it again. Shoving him away. Putting yourself down so no one will do it for you.

Fine! So he sees beauty in me.

And?

And there
is
beauty in me. Phinehas took it away. Took my pearls and threw them all over and ground them into the mud. He did it. Not me.

His fault. No matter what you did, it’s still his fault.

I have to be responsible for some of it.

No. The only thing you’re responsible for now is what you’re going to do about it.

Do? I don’t know what to do.

I don’t either. But if Matthew’s right, there is One who does.

THE MORE SHE
thought about it—and that was a lot during the next few days—the more she could see that time after time Phinehas had manipulated
events and her own thinking to make her accept the blame for his actions. Maybe that was why she’d taken refuge in control—of
the household, of her body. Of Matthew’s fate, even. Maybe her soul was trying to get out from under the crushing burden of
shame that should have belonged to Phinehas.

Now, more than ever, she longed to talk to Tamara. Between the two of them maybe they could ease the burden it was clear they’d
both carried for years. At least having someone to talk to who had been through what she had would ease some of the pain.

Talking to Matthew, though, was a pretty good substitute. She could see that he carried some pain, some wound, deep in his
heart, but was incapable of releasing it. However, the very fact of its presence made it easier to open her own heart, which
she’d closed off from everyone in sheer self-defense. If she were patient, he might open up and tell her what it was that
troubled him.

He didn’t push her to talk, but if she wanted to, he listened. She watched carefully for any signs that he was judging her,
but the most he did was make her think.

And hurt. That happened a lot, too, but she could hardly blame him for it.

She’d decided that since he knew part of the story, he should know it all. A little niggle in the back of her mind said that
maybe if he knew it all, he’d admit she was right and she was really as filthy as she believed. Then he’d leave her in disgust
and she’d be vindicated.

But the new voice inside her, the one that wondered if beauty and realness were even possible, wanted to get it all out for
another reason. Maybe if she could lance the boil, it would heal.

Right. Until Phinehas comes back. Then what will you do?

Hastily, she buried that thought. She’d jump off that bridge when she came to it.

So, over several nights and days, she immersed him in her life—as it had been and as it was. Those childhood moments when
the only brightness came from Phinehas’s affection. The days in her preteens when she’d been his little favored flower, receiving
his caresses and special times of prayer and meditation as though they were refreshing rain in the cold desert of her family
life. It took a couple of days to get through her teenage years, though, mostly because the story came out in jagged little
pieces that tore and hurt, and he would gently withdraw to let her cry in peace.

Sometimes she wondered what his motives were. Why did he bother? Was he some kind of saint? Because he never seemed to ask
anything from her except the necessities of life. She gave him her past and his meals, and he gave her manual labor and understanding,
and somehow she thought she was getting the better side of the bargain.

Altogether, it was a strange way to treat a hired man.

Oh, face it, Dinah, he isn’t a hired man.

No, he isn’t. He’s more like a friend.

Are you sure that’s all he is?

Well, he certainly can’t be any more, can he? Not with everything he knows now.

He’s still here, isn’t he? He’s not running for the hills.

The paycheck is here, too. Don’t get ideas. The last thing I want to do is have everything be spoiled by—by that.

By what?

But Dinah went outside to feed the chickens and refused to give herself an answer.

MATTHEW WAITED UNTIL
Dinah had finished giving the chickens their evening treat—vegetable peelings, broken lettuce leaves, apple cores—and had
gone inside. He knew how possessive she was about the birds. Well, perhaps
possessive
was the wrong word. It was more like she needed the time alone with them the way some people needed prayer. He could hardly
begrudge her that, though he wished there was some way he could show her that the real thing—prayer—was a source of strength
and comfort that could outdo even that of chickens.

And speaking of which . . .

He opened the door to the barn passageway. In the dimness, he heard a rustle and then a familiar sound like water bubbling
in a pipe. Opening the door wider, he stood aside and a small golden hen poked her head into his kitchen, tilting her head
to gaze up at him with a sharp hazel eye.

“Hello, Schatzi.” He’d learned that when she greeted him, she expected a reply. In just the same manner the chickens greeted
each other and Dinah . . . and for that matter, so did the people back home in Cornwall. How many times had he heard that
abbreviated West Country greeting, “All right?” and answered “All right” without thinking about it? It was just what social
creatures did.

With a liquid cluck that sounded like a request for permission, the hen picked her way carefully across the linoleum floor.
The first time she hadn’t known the floor was any different than that of the barn, and the results had been disastrous to
her dignity. She’d come originally, he supposed, thinking that he was Dinah moving around in the suite, and he’d surprised
her in the middle of the floor, on her stomach, feathers askew from the slip. He’d given her a handful of bran flakes to make
it better, and every evening after that she’d come to visit after Dinah had gone in.

He felt a little guilty about coercing one of her birds, but where was the harm, really? He and Schatzi had hit it off from
the first, hadn’t they, and it was only thanks to her recommendation he’d been allowed to stay at all. Once in a while she
left a small, round deposit on his linoleum, but that was easily cleaned up. Certainly she was never anything but socially
acceptable when she hopped up on the back of his reading chair.