Now that there are paper cranes to count, Harriet and Margot do this at Perdita’s bedside. The night passes slowly, as it must when your wish is that another’s won’t come true. Perdita has done her best to unmake herself, but they won’t let her. They keep on counting the cranes. The odd numbers bring a raggedy comfort, as close to huggability as numbers get. The horror of the even numbers is all-enveloping. You do have to be so very careful, don’t you, what you wish for. Mother and grandmother count paper cranes until they see that the sun has risen.
* * *
—
HARRIET DOESN’T THINK about where Perdita may have got her gingerbread additive until about forty-eight hours later, when she’s finished cleaning up Perdita’s bedroom and the living room and the strip of floor they walked between the two. She’s lined the shamefaced dolls up along the edge of Perdita’s bed and has intensified their distress with a lecture on their responsibilities. It’s true that Prim, Sago, Bonnie, and Lollipop have not been brought up in the usual way, but they are old enough to know better.
Next Harriet sits down at the kitchen table and peels one of the oranges Perdita left her so she can truthfully tell Margot she’s eaten something. She opens Perdita’s note.
Don’t misunderstand: not dead, just traveling. You know where. You’ll be angry, but I have to see it just once! Please trust me and leave me where I am until I wake up? Three times three times three to the power of three (oranges) . . .
As Harriet reads, Perdita’s handwriting distorts and elasticates, cakewalks around the page, mocking. She reads her daughter’s mind in this, yes, Perdita’s whim and will, but there is another mind alongside it. One capable of deepening the fascinations of a suicidal thought until they bloom and shine, gems and flowers woven around an iron crown. Harriet shakes the note and dried ink flies off like soot. Its particles multiply and settle into the chair across from her, the chair facing the kitchen workstation.
That’s where he sat as Perdita made her gingerbread. He reread steps of the recipe aloud at Perdita’s request; music played as they talked and laughed. Harriet rolls the blank page into a cudgel, but the soot figure flows out of the room before she can strike. She follows it back to Perdita’s room. The dolls recognize the figure—this is where he lay down with her daughter as the gingerbread began to take effect, he lay down with her in a manner that was irresistibly illicit, his attentions somewhere between those of a father and those of a lover. And—Tell me, dolls, did he sing?
He did. Badly, but with soul. The dolls let Harriet hear the melody of a lullaby Margot used to sing, one that Harriet has sung to Perdita herself. The soot figure lies with Perdita until she is no longer awake. When he rises, Harriet thrashes him. Soot encircles her, looms over her, blots out her vision, even, but she is swift and frantic and doesn’t rest until her blows have driven him back onto the paper, back into the words Perdita wrote.
There’s a Kercheval mixed up in this somehow. The elder two, Aristide and Ambrose, she rules out. But their sons . . . Harriet knows Rémy and Gabriel well, and not being able to narrow down this hunch to a single name is a mark of how well she knows them both.
So much for all the strategies that ought to earn a peaceful existence. So much for the complete surrender to being unexceptional. Years ago Rémy Kercheval had asked Harriet if she felt she was someone who had a future. She’d said yes even though she had doubts. Doubts he seemed to share. An expression crossed his face as he heard her answer—she saw curiosity there, and perhaps even sympathy.
3
Margot and Harriet are Perdita’s only visitors, though Alesha Matsumoto has broken away from the rest of the PPA to write a private email to Harriet: she writes that she spoke to her son Fitz, and he doesn’t know anything about Perdita’s “accident” or possible causes for it, but according to him, he’d tried to befriend Perdita some time ago. He’d thought things were going well until Perdita had suddenly asked him what he thought he was doing and then said: “Friends . . . ? Thanks, but I can’t do anything like that at the moment.” Alesha signs off, and then adds a postscript—this son of hers, Fitz, an intellectually fastidious boy who never rushed a choice if he could help it, had just approached his mother mid-email to add something: Perdita’s telling Fitz she couldn’t see him as a friend had flustered him. It had seemed to Fitz Matsumoto that Perdita Lee was hinting at non-platonic feelings, so he’d told her that if she wanted to be more than friends they should talk about that issue separately—on the following day, for instance (I honestly don’t know who my son takes after, Alesha writes). Anyway, Perdita’s response—or at least the response that Fitz Matsumoto tells his mother he remembers Perdita giving: “More than friends, eh? More than friends . . . You know, my mother once told me that half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in this mistaken belief that there’s any human relationship more sacred than friendship.” And after saying that to Fitz Matsumoto, Perdita Lee checked her watch and hurried off. Alesha Matsumoto of the Parental Power Association adds a further postscript to this message: she never listened to her own mother and often regrets not having done so. Perdita being a girl who actually listens to her mother, Alesha would like to meet her when she’s well enough.
Harriet is smiling; it’s a certainty: this is a smile. And now she laughs a little bit—it’s as if Perdita is comforting her. A girl who listens to her mother: not really. No relationship more sacred than friendship? Harriet’s never said any such thing—not to Perdita or to anybody else. A girl who listens to her mother indeed . . . actually, Alesha Matsumoto is only half wrong about that. Harriet has the evidence in her phone—a text message exchange she treasures due to the rarity of Perdita’s asking her advice:
Mother
At your service—
Suppose I want to make a statement with a low probability of that statement being questioned
How low a probability?
Just enough to break a chain of other questions
So—something you can say and then just make a quick getaway?
My mother catches on fast
Have you already asked Margot?
Yes, and she gave me some chat about cowardice
OK
Well, any ideas?
Make a statement that you’re personally invested in—something that you think is 100% true. But protect the statement from being questioned by claiming that it’s someone else’s belief and you’re just repeating it as a bit of food for thought. Ideally you should say these are the thoughts of someone long dead
Someone long dead and white?
Even better if you pin your own statement on someone long dead and white and male
Minimum 90% of all further questions killed dead?
99%
Got it. Thanks
* * *
—
HYORIN NAM OF THE Parental Power Association sends Harriet a recipe for danpatjuk, a red-bean porridge she used to eat every winter solstice. Hyorin writes that it’s a good meal to have when the darkness of a night begins to seem as if it’s aspiring toward the eternal. Hyorin makes no mention of gluten, but since the main components of the recipe are beans and rice flour, it could be that she somehow knows about Perdita’s celiac disease. Of the one thousand paper cranes she sent, Hyorin writes: Don’t be thankful yet.
These lapses in PPA protocol are especially heartening given that Perdita continues to shun consciousness, and domestic snooping is so hard nowadays. Perdita’s phone is passcode-protected and threatens to revert to factory settings if Harriet hazards one more guess. Perdita’s laptop does the same. Nobody’s rung the phone since Perdita was hospitalized, and the only messages Harriet can see on the lock screen are from her and Margot. This is how Harriet learns that her number’s saved in her daughter’s contact list under the title “Minister of Health, Education & Welfare.” Margot’s alias is “Nightlife Czar.” Between them, the Nightlife Czar and the M
inister of Health, Education & Welfare have smothered this child, prevented the formation of extrafamilial relationships, fostered dangerously odd perspectives in her. You wouldn’t catch any of the PPA offspring believing that they could do what Perdita had done and have a great adventure in nightmare country instead of coming to harm.
“Strongly disagree,” Margot says, closing Perdita’s laptop and confiscating the phone. “All we do is love her.”
The Canterbury trail grows fainter by the minute, and Margot sees no point in following it. Of Perdita’s note, she says: “I thought this must have happened because she was unhappy. Or that it was the gingerbread . . . I thought there must be something spooky about it after all and it had decided to finish Perdita off. This . . . this is idiotic, but better than—”
“No, it’s not. It’s not better. And where did she even get the idea that eating gingerbread is some sort of fast track to Druhástrana?”
“What do you mean, where did she get the idea . . . she’s on the internet all the time, isn’t she? Or are you saying you finally see what I mean about the gingerbread?”
Yeah, yeah, the gingerbread did it. Margot would believe that before she’d allow herself to suspect a Kercheval. And so Margot and Harriet stay by Perdita’s side as the soot figure escapes scot-free. Each morning, around the time Perdita would normally wake up, Harriet whispers into her daughter’s ear. She tells Perdita the date and time of her birth, and she tells her that what was begun then doesn’t end today.
Perdita isn’t listening. Perdita dies. She dies in a dream Harriet has, and in that dream, grief sends Harriet staggering from place to ruined place in the form of a flightless crow. If anyone looks at her, she scratches out their eyes with her clawed feet, and if anyone listens to her cries, she rips their ears clean off their heads. Another crow hidden in a cloud told her that this anguish is sort of like a trial by jury—it will run out of steam if there’s no witness testimony.
Perdita comes back. She comes back while Harriet is asleep in the chair beside her bed, dreaming that she’s died. Harriet’s eyes open—that’s how it feels, as if somebody has plucked them open—and Perdita is watching her and breathing quietly, her lips pinched together with pain. The girl is, after all, swathed in a fine net of electricity, run through with needles and tubing. Here they both are in the middle of the night, Harriet and Perdita, though Perdita’s look shifts from devotion to disinterest the millisecond she realizes Harriet is awake too. This is how Harriet knows her child really has come back. She is the first to smile. Perdita says something, but her words come out so slurred that she stops, surprised at the sounds she’s making. She chuckles and shakes her head—OK, I’ll come back to this later—and when Harriet squeezes her, she squeezes back as best she can. But when Harriet calls out for Margot and a doctor and everybody else, Perdita holds out her hand with a look of urgency. The gesture is abnormally stiff, the fist clenched.
“What is it, Perdita? Does it hurt?”
Perdita grunts and punches the air a few more times until Harriet takes her by the wrist. Then she opens her hand, wincing as she lifts each finger to reveal a wooden ring. She’s been holding on to it so tightly it’s embossed her skin. Harriet’s wits scatter when she sees the ring, but she doesn’t know this until she recovers them and the room rolls back in. Perdita’s watching her again. She seems to know that Harriet has seen the ring before. It’s carved to resemble a stalk of wheat that bends around your finger, the head of the stalk reaching for its heel to complete the circle. Harriet runs her thumb over each kernel, then drops Gretel’s ring into her coat pocket and listens to her daughter’s baby talk as rapturously as she did the first time around.
* * *
—
PERDITA IS MOVED onto a ward where she’s popular because the other patients find her babbling pleasant. Thankfully Perdita’s only staying until the hospital makes certain that her liver and kidneys are in good working order. Hopefully she’ll come home before her antagonism becomes unmistakable. The kids who’ve mustered up the courage to spend time with Perdita might take her requests pretty badly if they understood them. Most are the same age as her and are recovering from suicide attempts too. Andrew, the ward host, asks Harriet to stop bringing in gingerbread for them. According to him, the patients lie under the covers nibbling away at it all night. He’s all for treats, but his instinct tells him not to indulge this: “It’s a bit . . . I don’t know, like some sort of ritual. I don’t think it’s right.”
There is a girl on the ward named Tuesday; she wears a beanie jammed over locks dyed deep sea-green. A beanie or a brightly colored beret—Harriet never sees her bareheaded. She seems delicate in the refined sense of the word rather than the frail sense. She doesn’t strike Harriet as suicidal, but of course you can never tell, even with the type that tends to get photographed for street-style blogs. This just in: Black Indie Ariel spotted at bus stop.
Tuesday writes poems for Perdita.
(Of course being is an unnecessary thing,
the kind of mistake I
didn’t think I’d find forgiveness for.
You went looking and returned saying: Whatever,
it’s fine,
it’s fine, we can do unnecessary things
They are not inferior.
Continue with impunity
Each day a little more mistaken and
a little more forgiven.)
When Perdita gurgles for her to please go away, Tuesday kisses her cheek and says: “Yeah, you too.”
Perdita is happy to babble unintelligibly at first, but over the following days, there are tests and conversations and test conversations that establish the extent to which hovering below a waking state for eight days has been hard on her brain. Perdita can only make her simplest thoughts understandable in speech, and marginally more effective in writing. She can follow what is said to her if she really focuses her attention, but even then one out of every five or so words she hears seems to be a unit of white noise. She needs speech therapy and time. Much more time than the eight days she was under. Perdita scrawls something to the effect of this not being that much of a problem because she didn’t really talk to anybody before anyway, but she cannot completely hide her frustration. She’s never been more physically expressive. Margot has been weeping a lot now that there’s no longer any need to show death her poker face, and while the weeping is under way Perdita administers clumsy hugs and says: “Oh no! Oh no!” Her consternation is made cartoonish by the sheer amount of energy she has to put into conveying it. And the way she revs up when she tries to talk about the ring she brought back with her . . .
Hang on. Brought back with her . . . ?
“Oh,” Harriet says aloud to Perdita, “what am I thinking? That you went to Druhástrana, that you went there somehow without leaving this bed . . . even though you would have had to leave this bed to get there, Perdita, because as I have been saying all your life, Wikipedia doesn’t get to decide which places have actual geographic existence and which don’t. But OK, playing along for now, I seem to be thinking that you made it across and that Gretel was there. My Gretel. She saw you. She knew who you were, helped you, maybe. She gave you her ring. And she said—now let me see, what is it I’m wishing she’d said: Tell Harriet Lee I am still her friend . . . something like that . . .”
Perdita looks dizzy and signals to Harriet to start all over again and speak much more slowly, so Harriet does. As she repeats herself, Perdita nods with increasing enthusiasm. To the bit about Gretel telling Perdita that she’s still Harriet’s friend, Perdita throws both hands up in the air and says, “EHHHHHH!” which is her new placeholder sound for “YES EXACTLY!” The hairs on the back of Harriet’s neck give this reply a standing ovation and turn the skin there into fur. The same thing happened when she set down Gretel’s wheat-sheaf ring alongside her own matching one; the lid of the jewelry box had jerked and buckled unti
l she took away one of the rings. But in this case, while Harriet would love to have made a preternaturally accurate guess, it’s much more probable that Perdita’s hearing different questions from the ones Harriet’s been asking her. Dr. Ilesanmi has spoken about this:
Expect a fair amount of disorientation for the first couple of weeks. Perdita may have stable or improved verbal recall for five or six days in a row; you may see meaning and pronunciation lining up more or less as it should, but then a day later she could become discouraged by a small slipup. Keep practicing with her; maintaining confidence is going to make all the difference here.
Harriet doesn’t ask all the questions she wants to ask. Instead, she tells Perdita about her death dream. Perdita feels bad about the dream but thinks Harriet might not have had it if only she’d read the note as soon as she’d found it. And now Perdita wants to know what Harriet-as-crow did afterward—after she’d gouged all the witnesses to her grief. Or did she wake up mid-rampage?
All this is whispered. Harriet’s laugh is a whisper as well. “Oh, after I’d gouged all the witnesses I ate a small bowlful of grapes, and I was trying to decide whether I myself count as a witness, and I couldn’t decide. I just couldn’t. Thank goodness you came back. I’m sure whatever decision I made would’ve been wrong. Hopefully now you see that it’s better if you just live on a long, long time after me, as you should.”
Perdita grudgingly agrees, and Harriet takes advantage of this to begin saying what needs to be said about the Kerchevals. Anybody who says you must hurt yourself primarily wishes to see you hurt, regardless of rationale or supposedly beneficial outcome. This is what Harriet tells Perdita.
No response whatsoever. Perdita is ICU Girl again; empty-eyed until Harriet says the dolls have been informed that Perdita’s coming home. Then she revives, nods, and smiles.
Gingerbread Page 4
