of my SUV. When I pull it from beneath the wiper and feel the hard lump between my fingers, my heart lodges in my throat. I take off a glove and pull out a smooth, round bead, something I’ve held only once before.
The largest Mississippi pearl ever found.
Kelly’s pearl.
I see her jagged handwriting on the back of a gas receipt that flutters from the envelope like a dead leaf to the ground. I pick it up.
I try to swallow my heart back into place. Tire tracks veer off the driveway and cross the lawn to the back of the house. I don’t think to go inside and wake up Mom and Dad. I don’t think to call 911. I only think to run.
My leather shoes soak through as they splash through the slush of tire tracks. The snow has turned to rain, and the rain feels like cold bullets on the back of my neck. The tracks continue across the back lawn to the lake.
I hear ice pop and groan. Catch a whiff of exhaust. Two bright red eyes in the distance grow slowly smaller. Tail lights. Their glow briefly illuminates the half-sunk shanty less than a hundred yards out. Even at that distance, the crunch of tires on dirty ice is audible over the crackle of icy rain.
I try to scream Kelly’s name, but there’s nothing in me, no air. I struggle to fill my lungs, to suck oxygen from the rain-drenched atmosphere. My throat burns.
If the ice can hold a pick-up truck, it can hold me.
I step out onto the ice. Slip and fall. But I find my voice.
“Kelly!”
I rise, soaked and freezing, and force myself to run again.
“Kelly!”
Brake lights glow fiercely as the truck stops. A figure sits up slowly in the truck bed. In the hellish reflection of red light, I recognize Bruce’s sodden shape.
My foot breaks through the ice and the freezing black water feels like sharp fingernails digging into my shin.
I’ve never felt so desperate, so helpless. This can’t be happening. This isn’t real, is it? I have to save her.
I pull my leg from the hole and limp forward.
Bruce falls off the pick-up bed and lays immobile, face up on the ice. I see the back of Kelly’s head silhouetted against the glow of the dashboard. She sits in the driver’s seat completely still. Even her shaking has stopped.
I stumble, slide, lurch and run. The truck is thirty yards away. “Get out,” I yell. The pearl is hard and cold against my thigh, pressing through the wet pocket of my jeans.
Kelly’s head turns slightly.
“Please,” I whimper.
I hear a click. A truck door opening. But it opens only an inch. I hear a loud groan, pitiful, awful, and at first I think it’s Bruce regaining consciousness. Kelly must hear it, too, because the truck door clicks again, and I realize Kelly’s shut herself back in. The groan grows louder, inhuman, and I stop as I realize it’s not coming from Bruce. It’s the ice.
With a sharp crack, the walls of the half-sunk shanty split and collapse. Its mass rises, shifts, then disappears from the surface. Kelly’s eyes shine briefly in the rearview mirror, two glistening pearls infinitely more perfect and pure than the thing in my pocket. She lifts her hand and waves to me, slowly. Then with a dull splintering noise I’ll never forget, a noise I still hear when everything else is silent, the truck jerks forward and down. Bruce rolls in after it and disappears.
I stop running, and when I scream, it doesn’t even sound like me. The blood in my veins feels like slivers of hot glass. I’m frozen in place. I have to help her. I can’t help her. That’s Kelly, that’s my sister. Oh God Kelly what did you do, what were you thinking,
Swim. Kelly, swim. Get out of the truck and swim.
Maybe she’s swimming to the surface. Maybe right now she’s swimming to the surface and she’s going to get out and she’s going to be okay. I can still see the faint glow of tail and brake lights beneath the surface. Maybe she’s—
I hear something, like birch-wood popping in a hot fire. I realize it’s the ice cracking beneath me. The entire surface swells as if the lake is breathing.
I don’t know what to do. What can I do?
I find myself slowly backing up.
The taillights fade beneath the heaving ice.
I want to lie down. Curl up in a ball and suck my thumb. I fear my body will never stop trembling. My fingers are raw and stiff. What can I do?
I keep backing up. Why can’t I stop? Why can’t I force myself forward? Why can’t I save my sister? I keep backing up until the ice stops moving, until the black and gray horizon becomes still.
What can I do?
I slide the pearl out from the cold wet folds of my pocket. I kiss it. Hold it up against the hazy glow of an emerging moon. It’s almost a perfect match.
The rain stops. What can I do?
Sometimes we all need something pure and perfect within us.
So this is what I do.
I tilt back my head, open my mouth and let the pearl drop.
I try to hold onto the memory of Kelly’s rare smile and perfect jewel eyes as it slides easily down my throat.
When the Heart Dies
The walls of the dimly lit garage swelled together, and the smell of oil and gas and the hanging buck’s inner smells were too much for Pearce. He opened the garage door to let the cool autumn breeze sweep out the old smells and replace them with the smell of fallen leaves and cold rain. He frowned.
He stood beneath the raised garage door, his thick hands dripping blood, and squinted at the red house across the street. Limp, white snakes of toilet paper hung from two massive oak trees and lay cluttered on the lawn in wet lumps. It dripped from the juniper bushes on either side of the front door. A bloated wad of it bulged from the mailbox.
Damn kids, why pick on an old lady?
Ms. Bolt.
Pearce had only seen her the few times she’d dragged her trash bin out to the street. She wore baggy clothes, a brown wig, painted on eyebrows. A little creepy, sure, but still no reason to harass her.
He went inside, stripped down, cleaned himself up. Took a paint-splattered aluminum ladder down from a pair of wooden pegs in the garage and grabbed a handful of trash bags. He crossed the street blinking away the rain and started picking up the soggy bits of tissue. He felt her darting eyes on him, but she never opened her door, never called out a thank you.
That was okay. It just felt good to be out in the rain.
Bob Davidson let Pearce hunt on his property ten miles out of town in exchange for a cooler full of venison. A fair exchange. Davidson was retired. Mrs. Davidson was buried out front under a large oak tree heavy with acorns and excited squirrels. The land was full of trees and creeks and whitetail deer. Good hunting land.
