Margot and Harriet are Perdita’s only visitors, though Alesha Matsumoto has broken away from the rest of the PPA to write a private email to Harriet: she writes that she spoke to her son Fitz, and he doesn’t know anything about Perdita’s “accident” or possible causes for it, but according to him, he’d tried to befriend Perdita some time ago. He’d thought things were going well until Perdita had suddenly asked him what he thought he was doing and then said: “Friends . . . ? Thanks, but I can’t do anything like that at the moment.” Alesha signs off, and then adds a postscript—this son of hers, Fitz, an intellectually fastidious boy who never rushed a choice if he could help it, had just approached his mother mid-email to add something: Perdita’s telling Fitz she couldn’t see him as a friend had flustered him. It had seemed to Fitz Matsumoto that Perdita Lee was hinting at non-platonic feelings, so he’d told her that if she wanted to be more than friends they should talk about that issue separately—on the following day, for instance (I honestly don’t know who my son takes after, Alesha writes). Anyway, Perdita’s response—or at least the response that Fitz Matsumoto tells his mother he remembers Perdita giving: “More than friends, eh? More than friends . . . You know, my mother once told me that half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in this mistaken belief that there’s any human relationship more sacred than friendship.” And after saying that to Fitz Matsumoto, Perdita Lee checked her watch and hurried off. Alesha Matsumoto of the Parental Power Association adds a further postscript to this message: she never listened to her own mother and often regrets not having done so. Perdita being a girl who actually listens to her mother, Alesha would like to meet her when she’s well enough.
Harriet is smiling; it’s a certainty: this is a smile. And now she laughs a little bit—it’s as if Perdita is comforting her. A girl who listens to her mother: not really. No relationship more sacred than friendship? Harriet’s never said any such thing—not to Perdita or to anybody else. A girl who listens to her mother indeed . . . actually, Alesha Matsumoto is only half wrong about that. Harriet has the evidence in her phone—a text message exchange she treasures due to the rarity of Perdita’s asking her advice:
Mother
At your service—
Suppose I want to make a statement with a low probability of that statement being questioned
How low a probability?
Just enough to break a chain of other questions
So—something you can say and then just make a quick getaway?
My mother catches on fast
Have you already asked Margot?
Yes, and she gave me some chat about cowardice
OK
Well, any ideas?
Make a statement that you’re personally invested in—something that you think is 100% true. But protect the statement from being questioned by claiming that it’s someone else’s belief and you’re just repeating it as a bit of food for thought. Ideally you should say these are the thoughts of someone long dead
Someone long dead and white?
Even better if you pin your own statement on someone long dead and white and male
Minimum 90% of all further questions killed dead?
99%
Got it. Thanks
* * *
—
HYORIN NAM OF THE Parental Power Association sends Harriet a recipe for danpatjuk, a red-bean porridge she used to eat every winter solstice. Hyorin writes that it’s a good meal to have when the darkness of a night begins to seem as if it’s aspiring toward the eternal. Hyorin makes no mention of gluten, but since the main components of the recipe are beans and rice flour, it could be that she somehow knows about Perdita’s celiac disease. Of the one thousand paper cranes she sent, Hyorin writes: Don’t be thankful yet.
These lapses in PPA protocol are especially heartening given that Perdita continues to shun consciousness, and domestic snooping is so hard nowadays. Perdita’s phone is passcode-protected and threatens to revert to factory settings if Harriet hazards one more guess. Perdita’s laptop does the same. Nobody’s rung the phone since Perdita was hospitalized, and the only messages Harriet can see on the lock screen are from her and Margot. This is how Harriet learns that her number’s saved in her daughter’s contact list under the title “Minister of Health, Education & Welfare.” Margot’s alias is “Nightlife Czar.” Between them, the Nightlife Czar and the Minister of Health, Education & Welfare have smothered this child, prevented the formation of extrafamilial relationships, fostered dangerously odd perspectives in her. You wouldn’t catch any of the PPA offspring believing that they could do what Perdita had done and have a great adventure in nightmare country instead of coming to harm.
“Strongly disagree,” Margot says, closing Perdita’s laptop and confiscating the phone. “All we do is love her.”
The Canterbury trail grows fainter by the minute, and Margot sees no point in following it. Of Perdita’s note, she says: “I thought this must have happened because she was unhappy. Or that it was the gingerbread . . . I thought there must be something spooky about it after all and it had decided to finish Perdita off. This . . . this is idiotic, but better than—”
“No, it’s not. It’s not better. And where did she even get the idea that eating gingerbread is some sort of fast track to Druhástrana?”
“What do you mean, where did she get the idea . . . she’s on the internet all the time, isn’t she? Or are you saying you finally see what I mean about the gingerbread?”
Yeah, yeah, the gingerbread did it. Margot would believe that before she’d allow herself to suspect a Kercheval. And so Margot and Harriet stay by Perdita’s side as the soot figure escapes scot-free. Each morning, around the time Perdita would normally wake up, Harriet whispers into her daughter’s ear. She tells Perdita the date and time of her birth, and she tells her that what was begun then doesn’t end today.
Perdita isn’t listening. Perdita dies. She dies in a dream Harriet has, and in that dream, grief sends Harriet staggering from place to ruined place in the form of a flightless crow. If anyone looks at her, she scratches out their eyes with her clawed feet, and if anyone listens to her cries, she rips their ears clean off their heads. Another crow hidden in a cloud told her that this anguish is sort of like a trial by jury—it will run out of steam if there’s no witness testimony.
Perdita comes back. She comes back while Harriet is asleep in the chair beside her bed, dreaming that she’s died. Harriet’s eyes open—that’s how it feels, as if somebody has plucked them open—and Perdita is watching her and breathing quietly, her lips pinched together with pain. The girl is, after all, swathed in a fine net of electricity, run through with needles and tubing. Here they both are in the middle of the night, Harriet and Perdita, though Perdita’s look shifts from devotion to disinterest the millisecond she realizes Harriet is awake too. This is how Harriet knows her child really has come back. She is the first to smile. Perdita says something, but her words come out so slurred that she stops, surprised at the sounds she’s making. She chuckles and shakes her head—OK, I’ll come back to this later—and when Harriet squeezes her, she squeezes back as best she can. But when Harriet calls out for Margot and a doctor and everybody else, Perdita holds out her hand with a look of urgency. The gesture is abnormally stiff, the fist clenched.