“You’re sleeping here?” I ask, though the answer is obvious, and I want to tell her about the rats, the bugs, the signs outside that say No Trespassing and Not Approved for Occupancy, but I don’t. I’m guessing she already knows about these things. She doesn’t answer my question, but simply stares, her bewildering eyes trying hard to read mine, as mine do her. Instead, I say, “You know they say this house is haunted,” and I wonder if I should say more, about Genevieve, about the little girl that died in a bathtub, her spirit said to haunt all who enter this home. But I don’t. I don’t have time to say a thing before she smiles at me, a confident smile, and says decisively with a shrug of her shoulders, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
I smile back at her and say, “Yeah. Me neither,” as my hands inadvertently find their way to my pockets, coming across the chocolate croissant. But my smile isn’t confident at all, and my words come out thick and breathy as if I’ve swallowed cotton and can hardly find the voice to speak. They shake, too, as do my hands. I might even wheeze. I draw the croissant from my pocket, flattened now and a tad bit pathetic, and offer it reluctantly to Pearl. She shakes her head and says to me, “No.”
Before me, she stands: an ingénue. That’s the way she looks to me. The girl next door or, maybe, the damsel in distress. Something along those lines, or maybe that’s just who I want her to be. She looks tired, cold and maybe even a little bit scared. Up close, I see that her clothes are shabby—and not, of course, shabby chic, but the kind that looks like she’s been trekking across the country for days, sleeping on some dirty, dusty floor. But still, she brings out the introvert in me, that kind of antisocial loner who doesn’t know the first thing about talking to girls. It has nothing to do with her, but rather the fact that she is a girl—a woman—and a pretty one at that. That’s what makes my hands shake, what makes my words hard to find, makes my sight line fall to the repulsive floors beneath my feet instead of into her eyes.
“What’s your name?” she asks me, and, glancing at her quickly, transiently, I say that it’s Alex.
But when I ask her her own name, she says sagely, “My mother told me I shouldn’t talk to strangers,” and it’s the smile on her lips that says it all. She isn’t as bashful as she’d like for me to believe. There’s a bit of playfulness going on here, maybe even subterfuge, but I can’t say that I mind. In fact, I kind of like it.
“You’re already talking to me,” I say, but still, she’s not going to tell me her name. I don’t pry. There could be any number of reasons why she won’t. She’s on the run, here to hide. She’s in trouble with the police, or maybe even some guy. It’s none of my business. I think of her and Dr. Giles, the way her eyes gazed through the café window at him. The way I saw her yesterday, ebbing away on the street, his eyes watching as she disappeared over the hill at the far end of town. Had she been there already, in the blue cottage, talking to him? I don’t know. I’m guessing her being here has something to do with him, that maybe she’s a patient, but the way she stares out the café window with fascination and curiosity, maybe even a bit of nostalgia mixed in, I think that it might be more than that. There might be something more to it, something that goes beyond the realm of a doctor-patient relationship. But that’s just a hunch, some bedtime story I’ve made up. I don’t really know.
“How long have you been staying here?” I ask, and she shrugs.
“A couple days,” she says. “I guess.”
There’s a cheap motel in town, a bed-and-breakfast and one of those extended-stay hotels. There are summer rental homes, beach homes, a campground or two. But I’m guessing these are things she can’t afford, so I don’t tell her this. I’d give her money if I could, but I don’t have money. Though it’s hard to see in the murkiness of the room, I look, anyway, for signs of maltreatment or abuse, such as healing bruises, a fractured bone, a limp. Something to tell me she’s on the run from something or somebody, but there’s none.
It’s as she wraps those spindly arms around her body, and shudders from the cold, that I say to her, “Too bad we can’t start a fire in there,” as my finger points to the dilapidated fireplace, now little more than a grubby hole in the wall.
As I step forward to the fireplace, I feel the floors beneath my feet start to give, and I move quickly, as if I hover long enough I might just disappear into quicksand, a black hole. Thankfully, I don’t. As I pause for a moment to gather my bearings—seeing the way the carpeted floors just sank a good inch beneath my feet—I feel grateful that I’m still here. Not Approved for Occupancy, the sign says, and now I know why. When I get to the fireplace, I eyeball the inside, absolutely certain the chimney itself must be filled with bird nests, squirrel nests and other soot and debris. I’m no chimney sweep, but I’d bet my life the bricks of the chimney are missing and the mortar desperately needs to be fixed. And that’s all on the outside; the inside alone, the cast-iron insert, is covered with so much grime and smut it’d probably be the first thing to combust if I were to start a fire, that or the inside of the house would fill with carbon monoxide, and before either of us knew it, we’d drift off to sleep and die, joining Genevieve in the afterlife.
“You sure?” she asks me as she eyes the fireplace herself, and I consider this—fire, carbon monoxide, death—and say quite simply, “It’d be a bad idea.”
But I have something else in mind.
I lower the zipper on my sweatshirt and remove it, handing it to the girl. “Here,” I say, “put this on,” but she doesn’t take it right away. Instead, she stares at the sweatshirt in my shaking hands, and I start to feel like a fool, as if I’ve crossed some sort of malapropos line. I think about pulling it back, about putting it back on and pretending this never happened. I feel her eyes watching me, looking at the sweatshirt in my hand.
But then she takes the sweatshirt into her own grasp and says to me, “That’s sweet of you. Really it is. But won’t you be cold?” And I shrug my shoulders and mutter, “Naw,” but of course it’s not true. I’m already cold. But soon I’ll head home for the night, into a soft bed with blankets and a house whose thermostat is set to sixty-eight degrees. Soon I won’t be cold. But she will. She’ll be here in this cold, dilapidated home all night.
As she slides my sweatshirt over her own hoodie, her long, rippled hair falling over the bulgy hood, her hands getting stuffed into the soft, worn cotton of the already-warmed pockets, I realize I kind of like the idea of my sweatshirt keeping her warm for the night.
I don’t stay long. I don’t want to overstay my welcome.
But even more importantly is the fact that I haven’t done a thing yet to humiliate myself, and I’m hoping to keep it that way. But for a few minutes I do stay. I stay and watch as she sets herself down on the floor, covering her body with the moth-eaten blanket. I stay while she folds her legs up in what we used to call Indian-style and hums quietly beneath her breath. I cross my own arms across myself—warmed now by only a thin T-shirt—and think to myself that Pops and my garage would be warmer than this. So, too, would our wooden shed. But this girl doesn’t know me from Adam. I find it impossible to believe she’d spend the night in my garage.
Heck, with Pops likely out cold, I could bring her right on into my room and there, in my bed, she could sleep, snug and cozy and warm—with me on the floor, of course. I let that image dwell in my brain for just a little while.
But she doesn’t look that naive, and so I don’t bother to ask.
She’d just say no, and then I’d feel like some degenerate for even thinking that was a good idea. She’d think I was a creep. Open mouth, insert foot.
“You from around here?” I ask, and she replies rather aloofly, “Sort of. Not really,” and I smile self-consciously and ask what that means.
She shrugs. “I guess you could say that I am,” and still, even with this I’m left wondering.