“My daughter.” Harriet provides a little more context. Nothing too disruptive of Perdita’s privacy, but nothing factually incorrect either. Emil very much hopes Harriet’s not implying that his twins have been bullying Perdita—he says it just like that: “I very much hope . . .” Mariama suggests contacting Perdita’s friends. Gemma asks, in the most roundabout way possible, whether this couldn’t be a case of heartbreak. Alesha says she is sorry and waves her hands, fending off the question of what she’s sorry for. Abigail asks about Perdita’s current condition. Felix says he hopes his twins haven’t been bullying anybody either (subtly different from Emil’s hope that Harriet isn’t saying his twins have been bullies) and expresses a resolve to get to the bottom of this if he can. Noah and Hyorin say they’ll visit. Harriet welcomes this but will believe it when she sees it.
Perdita lies under white sheets, her eyelids so smooth the sockets could be empty. Sunken cheeks and inflated veins. The ICU is keeping her afloat, but its beeping and whirring is impartial; Perdita is alone here in a way that she was not before, when her dolls and bedposts stood watch. Harriet sits beside her daughter, and Margot sits in a chair by the door. They turn to their phones for information and are tortured by the search results: kids hounded to death by messages that pop up in every inbox they have passwords for so they know they are hated—by one person who hates them very much or by a multitude who only hates them a little at a time. Yeah, tell your parents all about this. Go crying to Mummy or Daddy. Let’s all sit down and have meetings with our guardians and sign contracts promising to be nice to one another—you’ll have to sign too even though you’re the victim—let’s do all of that and see if anything changes. Margot and Harriet swap phones, read each other’s findings, and then close all the tabs so as to keep from having to cry out. The scope of their project was petty: they wanted Perdita to get good marks at school; they wanted her not to cause trouble, not to punish them for being unable to afford the very best of everything for her. Oh, and they also wanted her to smile every now and again. Those boxes were all ticked, so they’d concluded that all was well, or well enough. They dare not be noisy now. Sick and injured people are sleeping in the neighboring rooms, and they shouldn’t have to forfeit the rest they need just because these two have only just become aware of the fine print. After a time, Harriet hears herself counting aloud. She’s not sure what she’s counting. The numbers don’t seem to correspond to any external event.
Around midnight Harriet gets a text message from somebody who says Hyorin Nam from the Parental Power Association has sent him, and she goes down to the drab terrace, where a young man with bloodshot eyes and hair longer in the front than it is at the back hands her a cardboard box. The young man is Hyorin’s nephew, Toby. He’s a university exchange student. “We just got done folding these for you,” he says, pointing at the box. “Me and my aunt and two cousins. There are exactly one thousand.”
Harriet opens the box. Row upon row of radiant symmetry: a thousand paper cranes.
Toby says: “My aunt said to tell you it’s so you can have a big wish.”
Her tears don’t appear to make anything awkward for him. He seems to be reasoning that she’s doing what she needs to. This is a one-thousand-crane situation. Eventually he says he’s got to go and backs away, saying: “No,” offended by the sight of her money. She’s not trying to pay him for the paper cranes. She just wants to make sure he gets back to Ealing safely. The distinction she draws has no effect on his resistance. “Uber . . . I’ll take an Uber.”
Harriet likes Toby’s accent and its ample slice of Decencyville, Canada. Would it be weird to get his email address for Perdita? Yes. Yes, it would.
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.
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