Gingerbread

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Of course she didn’t say that. This is a protest Harriet only has the words to make seventeen years later—at the time nobody but her friend Gretel could have seen to the bottom of her gingerbread heart and expressed these things verbally. Harriet’s actual answer at the time wasn’t so bad when you take into consideration her age and her not being a changeling and her being face-to-face with the wrath of Tamar. Harriet mumbled something about how she and Margot had invested faith in the Kerchevals too, a barely audible reminder that the Lees had believed without seeing and come to live with Ari without knowing what he would really be like, what any member of that family would really be like. Harriet might have spoken a bit louder if she hadn’t had the guilty awareness of not having tried her best to be worthy of the generosity shown her. She’d tried, but not her best, and had been hoping to settle the balance with gratitude, but there hadn’t been enough gratitude either . . .

  Tamar said nothing, but took a couple of steps back. Margot, correctly guessing that this was no retreat, that Tamar was in fact preparing to dive into the back of the taxi with them and make them fight for their lives, reached across Harriet and pulled the door shut as soon as its handle was released.

  Harriet hasn’t seen or spoken to Tamar Kercheval since that day, nor has she seen or spoken to Ambrose, Kenzilea, or Gabriel. A minor correction: Harriet does see Gabriel in nightmares—the first came after Ari’s offhand mention that Gabriel had been sent down from Oxford; Ari seemed rather pleased by this, as this made his son a member of a club even more exclusive than the one comprised of students who’d been admitted to the university. Ari mentions Gabriel from time to time and then Harriet has a nightmare, but they don’t really alarm her anymore—Gabriel Kercheval runs her a bubble bath and makes her lie in the bubble bath forever, that sort of thing. She only thinks of these as nightmares because she’d rather not have such dreams, or see him in them, or something.

  Harriet and Margot made their way to London town, where a super-duper lucrative project of Margot’s was already in the works, and where Harriet had her kid, the kid she kept by her side when at home because that kid definitely didn’t want anybody seeing or hearing what she was up to and worked out how to turn the baby monitor off as soon as her mother left the room. On school trips Perdita Lee was the first to remove and discard any hat or sticker that linked her to the other kids before scampering off into the depths of the zoo/park/museum . . . and the manner in which the girl scampered was analogous to the CEO strut depicted on cinematic screens. Cue the gravelly voice-over: Rushing headlong into obscurity was her forte . . . in that field she had no rivals . . .

  This same kid took and placidly donned Harriet’s bachelor’s and master’s degree hats without so much as a “congratulations” at both ceremonies, though she did consider turning thirty a notable achievement and wrote in that year’s birthday card: Good news—past the age of thirty there’s a dramatic decrease to your chances of being murdered by a serial killer. This was the child named Perdita, who didn’t grow up as a Kercheval, so she never discovered whether hers was a face that said “Save” or a face that said “Spend.” Where the Kerchevals are differentiated by “Save” and “Spend,” the Lees are “Rent vs. Buy.” Margot prefers to live in property that she owns, but whenever Harriet reads or hears anything about mortgages, she can’t help but hear it all said in the voice of Clio Kercheval, and she dares not exchange something as weird as money for something as crucial as permanent shelter—that’s a wicked prank she won’t fall for. So she just makes sure there’s always a spare bedroom Margot can have whenever the truth about her mortgage comes out, or in the event of somebody showing up with a contract that predates Margot’s and seems to prove that the bearer of the contract paid even more for the place than Margot has; perhaps a second antagonist might also appear with a claim to the land upon which the house is built . . .

  Ari Kercheval says he will buy a hat shop and eat it if any of that happens. To this day he’s refused to leave Harriet’s life, and she’s stopped trying to shake him off. “You’re our good deed,” he tells her. “You’re our good deed, and I’m your benefactor, and nothing changes that.” He may be right, though talking to him can be bad for her nerves, and for Margot’s. So many lies of omission, however cheerful the conversation.

  And as for Rémy—

  Rémy came to the antiques shop in Whitby too, all those years ago, before London and Perdita. Harriet was standing in for Margot again that afternoon, and Rémy didn’t make a game of this visit; he came straight to the shop counter and asked her when she was leaving. She told him, knowing he would be glad not to have to keep watching over her.

  Come with me for a sec, he said.

  I’ve got to stay until six.

  The clinic closes at five.

  The . . . clinic?

  Harriet. Be a bit wiser than you have been so far, OK? Choose freedom.

  Freedom to do what you want. By the way, why are you “advising” me to—?

  It’s hard to describe what’s going on at home right now, but just think of it this way: The wrath of my dear Aunt T passeth all understanding—she neither gives nor hears any explanation, no matter what we do or say. As for a way that she might leave you alone if you have this kid . . . there is none. But I’m not only thinking of you. I’m saying: Why reproduce? Personally I’d be a lot easier in my mind if this branch of the Kerchevals just gets cut off altogether.

  Even though we’ve already announced the next generation?

  Yeah, that announcement sets the scene for further announcements. Once you’re gone, I’ll tell them something that lets them call up any image they please. You miscarried and we had a breakup so bad I don’t ever want to talk about it again. Done.

  Hang on—

  That’s what I’m telling them, Harriet, no matter what you do.

  She made a sort of hiccupping sound, and he sighed. That was when he asked Harriet if she thought she was someone who had a future, and that was when she’d gone with “yes” although she hadn’t a clue. Rémy gave her that look of curious sympathy and then he went back to work.

  13

  Perdita’s found it invigorating to hear about the people allied against her birth. She says she could get big-headed if she dwells on it, so she’ll just allow herself a moment of smugness for existing and then move on. It was strange too, to hear about Kercheval House as Harriet knew it—Perdita paid the Kerchevals a visit there, she invented that school trip to Canterbury just so she could go to Kercheval House, and it’s still the same Brutalist building site, never to be completed, its walls whirring as units of space yawn and are filled with room-sized cubes that are just passing through, just passing through . . .

  When Perdita visited, there was no way for her to know that none of this was intended to have a menacing effect. She was yet to spend time with Ari Kercheval and gain some understanding of his idea of fun. All she did know was that no matter how many staircases she fled down or in which direction she hurried, the person she was trying to get away from was able to stride toward her as soon as she arrived on a new floor.

  “Who was that person? Gabriel? Tamar?”

  Perdita says she met a man and a woman at that weird white building, and that the names they told her to call them by weren’t their real names. They seemed really confident as they said the fake names too, confident that she would never be able to find out their real names unless they wanted her to. The man told her his name was Hansel and the woman said her name was . . . Gretel. The woman who said her name was Gretel was the person Perdita had gone to see and the reason she left so quickly.

  “Perdita—honestly—you. Don’t you have any common sense? Going to a place like that without even knowing who you were really dealing with . . .”

  Perdita says she thought they were being like that because of money—they asked her to wait a moment while they had a quick chat, and retired to the next
room for a massive quarrel. Gretel was a little at a disadvantage; it seemed she wasn’t at all used to Hansel pushing back against her. And Hansel had plenty to say . . . he was in fact a fount of long-suppressed vexation. Gretel would flare up and get doused down to the faintest flicker—each point Gretel made got hit with three of Hansel’s ice-cold and crystal-clear rebuttals. The name Ari was repeatedly mentioned, in varying tones—as if speaking of someone omniscient, as if speaking of someone brainless, someone adored, scorned, feared, in need of protection, a habitual turncoat, a bully, a disappointment. Hansel and Gretel saw all that and more in this Ari, whose name they kept invoking—Perdita thought he must be the one with the most money. And he wasn’t there at the house. Perdita should be long gone before Ari returned (this was the law Gretel wanted laid down). Perdita should stay and meet him (this was Hansel’s insistence). This girl’s family; this girl’s no family of mine. Perdita heard all this as she waited in a drafty antechamber lined ceiling to floor with family photos. She picked him out immediately, the “Ari” they were talking about, and even though you can’t really tell from pictures, she thought he seemed like someone she could have a few laughs with.

  Whose child is she?

  . . . not a penny more from us . . .

  Perdita half listened to all this as she ran a finger down each row of photos, keeping on the vertical so it felt like a physical analog of scrolling through Tumblr. Sport, parties, picnics, fashion, silliness, and solemnity, and when she looked at the photos in which six faces squeezed together in a frame she thought it did look a bit crowded, she could see why at least one of those pictured felt six should be the limit.

  . . . my grandchild . . .

  . . . your damn grandchild . . .

  Perdita considered putting in her earphones. She was happy for Hansel and Gretel to just keep their Gothic drama to themselves. She might have been a bit more vigilant if she’d had some prior knowledge of the cast, but even if “Gretel” had said, Hi, I’m Tamar, and “Hansel” had flourished his rainbow-striped cane, straightened his red-spattered collar, and said, My name’s Ambrose, Perdita wouldn’t have turned a hair. Her mother had never mentioned either of them.

  “Listen, you,” says Harriet. “Our social circles are a bit different, so the probability of your ever running into them and needing to know who they were was fairly slim, don’t you agree? How did you even come into contact with them?”

  Harriet had brought this on herself

  (“Charming,” says Harriet)

  with all her wistful talk of Gretel and how it had been twenty years since they’d last seen each other. Perdita had been doing all she could toward reuniting them for Harriet’s thirty-fifth birthday—“It is morning now, happy birthday, Mother-of-Perdita,” the dolls say—and to that end she’d researched private investigators . . . not expensive ones, obviously, more in the “Tesco Value” range.

  Harriet is laughing, but she is also angry at any investigator who’d take on a case for a Tesco Value fee whilst promising—well, Fortnum-type results. Perdita says she could only just about believe her luck when she came upon a guy who said that, depending on the difficulty of the case, he could find anybody in the world for a very low fee. Perdita was able to speak to people this guy had helped out, and they were on the level—plus the guy said that since it was a Druhástranian she was looking for, he’d do it for free.

  This guy, Perdita explains, is the sort of gentleman detective you used to find all over England in the olden days—he doesn’t need money, so finding people is his hobby. He told Perdita his name, but it wasn’t his real name either. And he was so much more handsome than anybody really needs to be that Perdita giggled idiotically whenever he looked at her. Neither Perdita nor Harriet have photographs to compare, so the gentleman detective could be Rémy Kercheval or he could be Gabriel Kercheval or some other excessively handsome black man.

  Wait—Perdita thinks for a moment. There were a few occasions on which the gentleman detective had seemed to completely ignore something she’d said, and if what she’d said definitely required a response she’d touch his arm, he’d look at her, she’d repeat herself. Then the gentleman detective would respond as if hearing her for the first time. This could just be how a person behaves when somebody else isn’t letting them get away with being rude, but Perdita’s decided the gentleman detective was lip-reading and that he is Rémy Kercheval.

  When Perdita met Rémy—and, indeed, when Perdita met “Gretel” and when she met “Hansel”—the reaction of each fell along the same spectrum. Dread and fascination combined—they were like witnesses to a most unnatural wonder.

  “Behold, the child that should not have been born sort of thing?”

  No. Perdita’s been giving it a lot of thought, and she thinks they mistook her for Harriet. She is, after all, about the age that Harriet was when they last saw her, and they are as much alike in build and facial features as one would expect a mother and daughter to be. One wouldn’t call them twins, but seeing Perdita for the first time must have been like seeing Harriet after an interval, after a few details had been forgotten. The gray-haired seventeen-year-old comes in and she’s like a gingerbread ghost, her chronological age bearing very little relation to her exterior. Then Perdita spoke, and Halloween was canceled.

  “So it was Rémy you met first—and then he told you he’d found Gretel and . . .” Harriet’s grabbing her coat; now that she knows who to go and hit, they can finish talking later. But the doll named Lollipop says: “Mother-of-Perdita, I really wasn’t going to mention this, but . . . if the arrangement with Gretel was that she’d be in touch once you’d grown up, might it not be the case that she hasn’t been in touch because you still haven’t . . . ?”

  And Perdita tells Harriet she needs to sit down and hear her out, just as Perdita has heard Harriet out all bloody night.

  Harriet sits down and hears that Rémy met up with Perdita at a train station café, took down all the details Perdita was able to give, and then contacted her a few days later, saying he couldn’t take the case after all. He told her it was for personal reasons and took the time to send her a list of alternative birthday presents, each of which actually came in under Perdita’s budget . . . she’d been impressed not just by this but by the presents actually being the sort of thing Harriet would like—so when Harriet had begun talking about Rémy, Perdita had sort of hoped he was her dad. Perdita says she knows the gentleman detective has his boyfriend and his pet tortoise to think of.

  (“Rémy Kercheval fell for someone? Rémy Nearboy Kercheval fell for someone?”

  Perdita says yes, provided the gentleman detective is Rémy Nearboy Kercheval . . .

  Whoever the boyfriend is, Harriet is ready to take his master class on enchanting the hard-hearted. Or are the hard-hearted only conquered when their deeds are outdone?)

  At any rate, Perdita stopped herself from asking the gentleman detective for more time than he gave her of his own accord. But even after he dropped Perdita’s case, he stayed in touch, sent her links to YouTube playlists and online essays and articles, all with accompanying jokes of the dad variety. Perdita responded in kind—they emailed more or less daily until he told her there was a family situation (“family situation,” “personal reasons,” . . . ) and he’d have to be out of contact for a while. The situation seemed to have been a result of tracking down Gretel Kercheval . . . and the woman who said that was her name, the woman Perdita thinks must be Tamar, she was the next to contact Perdita.

  “Oh,” says Harriet. “And have you heard from your Tesco Value investigator since?”

  Perdita hasn’t. She misses him. Perdita thinks only two people knew she was visiting Kercheval House that day, and that the two people were “Hansel” and “Gretel.” Ambrose and Tamar.

  “Go back to Tamar emailing you under Gretel’s name.”

  There they were in Perdita’s inbox, a handful of emails, sende
r’s name Gretel Kercheval. To Perdita these messages seemed legit, partly because of the fond reminiscences of Harriet’s baking prowess and an unmistakable familiarity with the unedited history of the Lee family gingerbread. Tamar’s fifth email invited Perdita to her family home, out in Whitby, and sent an address. Perdita ran that address by her gentlemen detective to see what he thought. Could this person really be Mum’s friend Gretel?

  “But he didn’t reply.”

  He didn’t, but someone replied from his account saying Perdita should go.

  “How are you so sure it wasn’t him?”

  He’d blatantly been hacked, that was all. If Harriet still doesn’t know what Perdita means, then she should imagine getting a message from Perdita that’s so utterly inconsistent with the tone, style, and even punctuation of all Perdita’s other messages that she, Harriet, is tempted to send the imposter some helpful tips on how to make the ruse less transparent next time.

  “Still, you went to visit . . .”

  Still, Perdita went to visit. It all seemed like such a caper. Until she got to the house and saw Hansel—well, she’ll call him Ambrose now—and met Gretel—all right, Tamar. It was all such a caper until Perdita sat down with those two and a certain mind-bending pressure that came in with them, a blend of the things Ambrose hoped and wanted Perdita to be and the things Tamar was very much afraid Perdita was. Welcome and get lost.

  What Perdita now thinks Tamar wanted from this meeting: never to be scammed again. To keep six family members as the functional limit, and not to sit idly by while some newcomer pops up and pushes Gabriel down to an even lower position on his father’s list of priorities.

  What Perdita now thinks Ambrose wanted from this meeting: acknowledgment of Rémy’s daughter (Ambrose must have been sure Perdita was his granddaughter—only a child of Rémy’s could be this bloody-minded) and assurance of said daughter’s safety.