Pop didn’t like smartphones, said that they were practically tethers. But she didn’t know about the network of home cameras, security cameras, and police-owned surveillance that was just starting to crisscross the world.
She waited. No email. No phone call. Five days. Six.
“Maybe he didn’t get my email,” she agonized to Pop. “Maybe the woman at the desk trashed my note. She looked at me like I was something she wanted to scrape off her shoe.”
“Or maybe he’s just hoping you’ll go away.”
She thought about giving up. There was a pile of homework for her major in psychology—useful in any profession. Her professor was interesting, someone who pushed and challenged. Pearl had even started dating a guy who made her laugh. When she looked back on that moment in her life later, she thought that maybe the doorway to “normal” was open just a crack. She could have walked through possibly. But Pop.
“Time to turn up the heat a little,” he said. “Just a little.”
Her father’s house. It was so—beautiful. It wasn’t that it was so grand. Certainly, there were grander. But the brilliant green of the lawn, the crawl of bougainvillea around the pergola that hugged the garage, the brick stoop, red door, black shutters, white siding. How his BMW glided from the driveway when he left for work, sometimes with his younger daughter (the older already away at college) in the passenger seat. Her glossy black hair, slim body, pretty clothes.
She was lovely. But it was more than that. She was oblivious to the darkness in her life; she only knew the light. Pearl could tell by the smooth innocence on her face, the careless way she walked, and tossed her backpack into the trunk, stared at the phone in her hand. Life for her was easy. Nothing ever broken that couldn’t be fixed. Nothing ever lost that couldn’t be replaced. Her life was so easy that she didn’t even know there was another kind of life—hardscrabble and unpredictable.
That ache. It was a black hole inside Pearl, swallowing light and time.
For a week, she just watched, burning with feelings she could barely understand.
She parked just up the street in the mornings, watching as they left for work and school. Then she’d leave after his wife departed for her morning errands.
Pearl then returned around 3:30 to watch the girl come home on the bus, usually with a gaggle of friends. Designer clothes and styled hair, lip gloss, and bubbling laughter—teasing, pushing, chasing. They’d disappear behind that red door and to Pearl it seemed like they had entrée to a world from which she’d always been, always would be, excluded. A world not of privilege, but of belonging.
Then one night in the gloaming, she climbed out of her car and began slowly walking up the street. She knew he’d be pulling into the driveway at 6:10, so she made sure she stood behind the big oak—out of view of the house, but visible from the driveway. She stood listening to the birdsong and the wind kicking leaves up the street.
When he pulled in, he turned his head and saw her.
She lifted her hand, and they locked eyes. Did he know her?
Then, he turned his head and the garage door opened. He pulled inside. She waited, heart thumping, thoughts wild. Did he see me? Recognize me? Maybe it’s too dark. Maybe this is too bold.
The garage door closed heavily behind him, rumbling and squeaking, quieting the evening birdsong. He never even exited the car.
She walked back to her vehicle. Her inner life was usually cool, but that night it roiled with a storm of anger she didn’t know was possible.
It was something deep, something that maybe had always been there, lying neglected, silent. She got in her car and drove, gripping the wheel, until she came to an empty parking lot across from a deserted sports field. Pearl pulled in there, found a far spot, stopped the car.
A long wail, like a siren, escaped her throat. A sound she didn’t even know she could make. It rocketed through her; and then she did it again and again, pounding on the steering wheel. She screamed for herself, for Stella, in rage at the man who was her father, his pretty, clueless daughter—her sister?—the normal life she’d never had. Even Pop—who was what? Her father? Her captor? The man who probably killed her mother? And yet she was hooked into him in a way she had never been to anyone else.