Pearl

by Deirdre Riordan Hall

  Shale’s instruction to sit with the enemy within, to raise my expectations until I am friends with myself, joins my thoughts. I think of the friendships I’ve lost and gathered along the winding path of my life, and now here I am, surrounded by the work of my favorite artist and standing next to Grant, far, far away from the past.

  As I pause and linger in front of each framed painting, there’s nothing else. I forget and then remember myself, grateful I have me to come back to.

  Chapter 49

  The buds on the trees and the scent of mud in the air reveal the arrival of spring at Laurel Hill. Having spent so much time abroad, I expect things and people to be out of place when I return, like I’m a book missing from the shelf. Instead, I find the campus humming with its usual precollege-acceptance drone about small versus large envelopes, along with preparations for the final push before exams.

  When I return to Viv Brooks, Charmindy is at her desk, the poster of my mother is on my wall, and I am home.

  Charmindy leaps from her chair. “You’re glowing. Tell me all about it,” she says while I’m still in the doorway.

  We hug, and I gush about the trip, the museums, Grant . . . She fills me in on some minor gossip and goings-on in the dorm until Brett calls down the hall for her, boys unable to go past the common room, unlike the dorm in Barcelona.

  To my delight, for the first time in my life, I feel OK in the present and excited about the future. Twisted, self-destructive fears don’t cause me to worry until I climb the three flights of stairs to the art studio.

  Shale’s whiskers lift when I enter. “You came back.”

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “Ready?”

  “No.” I get a canvas anyway, gather paint and supplies, find the light, and begin painting. I put down my brush. “It feels all wrong, like I’m using my left hand, or I’m blindfolded.” I step back.

  Shale grunts. “Your icon, Frida Kahlo? You saw her work while in Bilbao, yes? You think she became prolific, that she gained access to the visual language that allows her to reach through time and pigment and speak to you because sometimes she didn’t feel like it? No. She lay in her bed, in unimaginable pain, and painted anyway. She painted because she had to. She had no other choice. It was create art or be swallowed up, devoured by her enemy, herself. When she was broken, shattered, she painted. Ask yourself what art means to you. This is not a rhetorical question.” He’s nearly out of breath. He stares at me like he’s waiting for my reply.

  I return to Frida’s images in the gallery at the Guggenheim and surround myself with her bougainvillea blooms, birds, lilies, dogs, and dusty Mexican desert. I breathe deeply, and then I trace my way all the way from Manhattan, passing littered streets, broken dreams, starlit nights, and golden light, all the way here to where I am right now, but still, the image begging to be seen on the canvas doesn’t translate.

  When I don’t answer the question, he asks, “How much do you want it? What are you willing to do? Do you want to be a dabbler, a hobbyist, only living half your life? Do you want to be a patron of the arts? We need them too. Or do you want your artistry to help you put yourself back together, brushstroke by brushstroke, rearranging the pieces of you until one day, you put the brush down and at last you feel complete?”

  “But I don’t know how.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  As April rains itself out, college acceptance letters roll in. By the end of the week, I’ve received acceptance letters from all the schools I applied to except one. The challenge now is choosing.

  I’m sitting in the library, completing a research project, when Grant enters looking upset, his hand rubbing his head feverishly. “Will you take a walk with me?”

  I quickly put my books away and follow him outside. We quietly cross the lawn together toward the woods. When in the clearing, he lights a cigarette and says, “Sorel.” He swallows hard. “She is in the hospital. She was in a car accident.” I return to the claustrophobic office where Dr. Greenbrae gave me the news about my mother. Sorel could be worse off.

  Nonetheless, his words fix me to the spot where I stand, unable to move or speak. However, my inner terrain has become more familiar and the prospect of how loss might unfold within me less terrifying. In the past, I would have immediately wanted to run, run, run away and escape the pain of memories and the potential for loss. Instead, I feel it slicing through me, white-hot. It doubles back and gives me its worst. I crumble, and then like a phoenix, I do the agonizing work of regenerating. I put my arms around Grant, hoping my newfound strength can help steady him.

  “What happened?” I whisper.

  Grant takes a drag off his cigarette. “Apparently she was high. She wasn’t the driver. I guess she was with a friend, and they had just left some dealer and shot up in the car. It must have been bad.”

  “Where’s Pepper?”

  “He left. But he had one foot out the door without her here anyway.”

  I can’t imagine Sorel in a hospital bed and how close she came to being gone from this world. In my mind, I watch her caper around me in the grove, kicking up leaves and cursing at the sky. I hear her voice the last time we spoke, thousands of miles away, and realize what about it had bothered me. Intuitively, I knew she was high. She sounded just as my mother did, indifferent, absent, like she’d already let go of whatever tethered her to life.

  A memory of a car accident blends with the image my mind creates of Sorel in the passenger seat, the driver losing control, heads smacking glass, the sound of crushing metal.

  I open my eyes and inhale deeply, realizing I’ve been holding my breath. I talk myself off the edge of the traumatic memory and assure myself with my feet on solid ground.

  Grant and I, two figures under the great trees, stand there in shock and disbelief until the last light fades from the sky.

  The next day and for several weeks after, Grant and I meet in the clearing almost every evening and, in our own way, say good-bye to Laurel Hill. We pledge not to smoke anymore, a reverse tribute to Sorel as she heals from the crash and slays her demons.

  One evening, I bring my old journal with the heart inscribed on the cover. I scribble a memory down about the car accident when I was about five, how I slid across the vinyl seat into the passenger-side door as the car twisted around and around on a bridge exiting the city. The car finally stopped when it wedged under the guardrail, and the front tires spun over the water below.

  From this story, I move forward in time, jotting down all the stories, all the fears, traumas, and hurts. I spill them out of myself and into that wooded place, writing intensely, passionately, across the pages. The trees recycle my memories into oxygen, and my heart forms them into pearls. I tell the stories of my childhood, as much as a eulogy for my mother as for me, and my lost years.

  Sitting across from me in the dining hall, Grant tosses me a quarter.

  “What’s this for?”

  “The deadline for your decision is tomorrow.”

  “I can’t flip a coin to decide where I’ll be for the next four years.”

  “You’ve done far crazier things,” he says warmly. “It’s just an idea.”

  I study the gritty coin. It’s from the year I was born. I take this as a sign. “Heads up, UCLA. Tails, FIT,” I say.

  Our eyes meet.

  “OK, here I go.” I watch the coin spin and pirouette before I catch it. “Heads.”

  Grant hoots. “Now we can be neighbors,” he says with a giddy smile.

  “I would have picked UCLA even if it was tails. Getting out of New York City seems like the right direction, plus a handsome Scotsman will be there.” Do better. Charmindy’s voice echoes in my mind. “I’ll do better,” I say aloud as an image forms in my mind. I give Grant a reassuring squeeze and rush off to the art building.

  I squeeze a rainbow of color onto my palette: bright reds and marigolds,
bold greens and blues. I add tans and a shade that reminds me of eggplant. Then I add a dollop of a color I’d call sunshine. Shale isn’t at my shoulder, in his office, or pacing along the creaky floor.

  I begin painting, and instead of a girl fading away, I see myself bursting forth, an explosion of color that can only be described as pure wow. I anticipate a grunt over my shoulder, but it doesn’t come. When my neck and arm ache, I step back; gaze at the painting, so joyful I can almost hear music in it; and set my brush down.

  On a sunny day in late spring, as I roll up the Shrapnels poster, my mother’s expression taunts me. It’s as if she challenges my resolve to do better. Then Frida, in all her agony, looks at me approvingly, as if to say, Sister, this is your show. Play it how you like it. You’ve got this. I tuck her away and note her voice is louder than JJ’s.

  Charmindy comes in, almost out of breath, as though she just sprinted across campus. “Quick. Come with me.”

  As she pulls me by the hand, I ask, “What happened?” imagining accidents or calamities.

  She doesn’t answer. We arrive at the student center, where students, parents, and alums mill around, drinks in hand, chattering. It’s a meet and greet on the eve of graduation. With their backs to me, a layer of people line the wall. I spot Shale talking to a dignified couple. He’s smiling, beaming actually.

  “What is this?” I ask Charmindy over the din.

  “This, my friend, is you.”

  In a gap between a man wearing a pressed button-down and a woman in a navy cocktail dress, the edge of an oil painting, the edge of me, appears. In a few long strides, I reach the perimeter of the room. If I were to paint myself now, there’d be a girl with her mouth hanging open and beads of salty water brimming from her eyelids.

  “Who did this? Why?”

  “For you,” Shale says, coming up behind me.

  I gaze from canvas to canvas, seeing versions of myself in various stages of dissolution, but as I continue around the room, there are images of me constructing a new self, landing brilliantly on the latest self-portrait, titled Spring, as if finally, after a long winter, I’ve come to life.

  Shale turns to me. My face glows, and my eyes glisten. “Now, that is the girl I’ve been waiting to see.”

  Graduation is a sunny day complete with plastic leis and the tossing of tasseled mortarboards. Beneath my gown, I wear the gold dress Charmindy gave me on my birthday. I’m radiant. I think of JJ at the Grammys and the times I’d play dress up in her gold gown, grasping at the mother I wanted. But now I have my own dress, my own sparkle.

  All around, there’s hugging and laughter, tears too. I thank my teachers, Connie, and even Dr. Greenbrae, who seems surprised to see me in attendance.

  A car waits for Charmindy, Grant, and me in the exact spot a similar one left me nearly two years ago. The flowers in front of the Laurel Hill sign are different, an array of peonies, orange cosmos, and azaleas.

  Charmindy travels with Grant and me to Brooklyn. He and I plan to spend a week with Gavin before going to Scotland for a few weeks and then traveling west for school next fall.

  Unbelievably or morbidly, depending on how I look at it, with only one remaining member of the Shrapnels, along with a retrospective on a music channel, there’s been an uptick in sales, resulting in a larger than normal royalty check being deposited into my account. That, plus saving my allowance, bought me a ticket.

  “You sure you want to cross the bridge?” I ask Charmindy. “It’s pretty hot out.”

  “I promised I’d send Brett a picture of me every day we’re apart this summer. It’ll be a while before we see each other in Boston for the fall semester.”

  “But you saw him this morning, before we left.”

  Charmindy gazes out the window as the skyline comes into view. She opens her mouth, closes it, and then says, “And, y’know, it might be a cool way to part ways, on the Brooklyn Bridge, before you guys go to visit Grant’s brother and I go to my sister’s. That way, you know you always have family on both sides.”

  I smile appreciatively. As we enter the city, I think about the triad of accepting and letting go, forgiving, and welcoming the possibility of change and renewal in my life. I think about going to college, about Grant and me, friendships that have become sisterhoods, and family.

  Charmindy interrupts my ponderings. “Poesy would love to see you again if we can arrange it before you leave,” she says.

  “Let’s all go out to dinner,” I suggest. “I know a great place,” I say, thinking of a little hole-in-the-wall pizza shop that serves the most inexpensive, yet authentic Italian pies with fresh mozzarella, roasted tomatoes, garlic, and basil.

  The car leaves us off, and we gather our luggage, most of it awaiting our arrival at our respective universities. I breathe in another version of Manhattan air, a mixture of exhaust, river water, and home. Passing to the pedestrian part of the bridge, the cables and granite pillars rise toward the sky as though promising us we too can touch the blue, the sun, each other.

  “So, Scotland?” Charmindy asks, breaking the New York City spell.

  “Yeah, I have to see my dad,” Grant says dryly.

  “And visit the family cottage, your grandfather, and see the sights,” I add excitedly. The trip was my idea. I knew that if I could mend my shattered self, he could repair his relationship with his dad . . . and selfishly, I want to hear his accent come back.

  “Are you from Scotland?” Charmindy asks in surprise.

  Grant nods.

  “Get out! Where’s the accent?”

  He smirks. “It’s here, buried under layers of bitterness,” he says in a perfect Scottish burr.

  Charmindy raises her eyebrows.

  “Just like I have mommy issues, Grant has daddy issues,” I say with a laugh.

  He playfully nudges me.

  “Well, nice for you both. I have mommy and daddy issues.”

  We all laugh.

  A peculiar, fuzzy, and sparkly feeling comes over me. Charmindy and Grant have both taught me something that sweeps up the remaining shards of my broken childhood.

  I inhale, and the words come on my exhale. “I realize the F word, forgiveness, has two sides, like a coin. Charmindy, last fall, when we took that walk, you told me the hardest thing a person could do is forgive. At the time, I thought you misunderstood me, thinking I needed to forgive Grant and not the other way around.” I pause, afraid for a moment, but he squeezes my hand, listening, urging me on. “Really, I think you meant for me to forgive whatever it was that caused me to hurt someone I care about. I needed to forgive my mother and myself in order to move forward with my life.”

  I turn to Grant before going on. “By forgiving me, you taught me that forgiveness, even when it seems inconceivable, is possible. It’s something I can and must do too, over and over again. This winding road of mistakes, unlikely friends, teachers, and you brought me to this wonderful moment.” My smile stretches wide, and it’s almost like the wings of the tattooed sparrows flap, keeping the beat of my heart. I realize they’ve guided me home to the company of my two best friends in the world.

  I pause halfway across the bridge, the river and sky and city stretching in every direction, with every possibility. I take out the journal I filled with my life story, and pen the words and whisper, “I forgive you.” Each syllable lifts the burdens and weight of the past. I have become so used to carrying its load I only realize its density when I let it go. The inside of my brain is suddenly clear of cobwebs, and my heart fills with sunshine.

  I trace my finger around the heart on the cover, thumbing the pages on the tattered journal, a record of the triumphs and tragedies from the past eighteen years that I recorded over these last few weeks. I’m no longer afraid to look back, because all those experiences brought me to where I am now.

  I take a deep breath. I toss the journal containing the t
ired tale of my life with JJ and everything that came after into the water below. After a moment, I can’t quite see it, but I imagine the pages fluttering slowly down toward the river, the water washing away the ink.

  “What did you do that for?” Grant asks, aghast, knowing what the journal contained.

  “I don’t need it anymore. I’m the author of my life.” I smile at Charmindy and at Grant. “Thanks, guys,” I say.

  “For what?” they both ask at the same time.

  “For being you and helping me to be me.”

  And now I know what it means to be free.

  Acknowledgments

  There are only two words that belong on this page: thank you, but there aren’t enough words to express the enormity of what my gratitude means. Warm thank-you hugs filled with the fuzzies to the following:

  My family, thank you for cheering me on, cheering me up, and bearing with me while I click, clack, write, and write some more.

  My friends, Tamar, Christine, Seana, and Val, your check-ins are like a breath of fresh air.

  God, thank you for reminding me daily to flex my wonder muscles. This life is truly awe inspiring.

  Cheyanne, I’m glad we get to share and swap stories on this adventure!

  My Skyscape team: Courtney, I’m thankful you visited Brooklyn recently and crossed bridges, figuratively and literally; Kelli, your emails are a favorite in my in-box, always; Dennelle, your multitude of skills sure do make a gal feel special; and much, much gratitude to Megan Beatie, and all the people who take my words and make magic.

  Readers, it is an honor and a privilege that I get to share these little bits of my heart with you.

  Thank you.

  Author’s Note

  At the heart of Pearl’s experience was the lesson that she wasn’t alone, no matter how often she felt like she was. To some readers, her story might sound extreme, but for those living with domestic violence, addiction, and other forms of abuse, it is very real, scary, and isolating. There is no need to wait for a crisis to get help. Various kinds of assistance are available, from talking to a counselor online, on the phone, or in person, to staging an intervention, to getting out of a dangerous situation. Making a decision to reach out isn’t necessarily easy; it takes courage and a leap of faith, but I believe that every person’s safety, well-being, and life are worth it. Here are some resources: