Page 113 of If Looks Could Kill
Perhaps it did if what you wanted were pats on the back. Not if you wanted rescued lives.
It counted to Freyda and Cora.
My heart leapt. Divine comfort flowed in.
It was true that the problemwastoo enormous, the sufferers too many to count. I couldn’t save the world. But for each girl released from the hell of bondage,theirwhole world might begin anew. And if God’s love for them burned like the fire warming me, then my efforts counted in his eyes too.
Perhaps I could try. I might find a way to help more girls who were trapped find a way home. I needed to be more intelligent about this work. I was lucky to have survived last night. Lucky not to have met Freyda’s fate. I couldn’t afford to be so naïve.
Not lucky. I’d survived because I had a weapon with me. A Medusa.
How could a Medusa, and the God I knew, both exist? Mustn’t the one disprove the other? And yet here was God, I felt sure, and somewhere out there was Pearl. What then?
Ask.
So I asked. Why does Pearl have snakes for hair?
Does it matter?
It matters to her, I thought. And to me. It’s horrible. Evil. Hideous. Why would you punish her so?
In answer, I seemed to see Pearl herself. Pearl, radiant in a pool of divine light. Pearl, encircled in heaven’s love. Not because she was so “good.” Because she was soPearl.With a beauty that made her ordinary prettiness irrelevant. She took my breath away.
I am not the God you think you know. I am the God who is.
An abyss opened at my feet. My scriptures, my certainties, my facts, my “faith”—what were they in the face of what actually was? The unknowable real?
The God who is.
The God who loves Pearl. And loves me. Perhaps not so unknowable after all.
I’ve created all things since the dawn of time, and all my creations delight me.
My sense of the world tilted back through time, through ages of the earth’s history, to dinosaurs and mammoths, to curious birds and beasts, large and long gone and strange, huge of tooth and fang, that had perhaps once stood where I stand and had now passed out of being.
(Aunt Lorraine had quite a lot of vitriol for Mr. Darwin and his theories, but I had visited the Museum of Natural History and written to tell Dad all about it.)
Deep waters, these. Beyond my understanding. Not beyond God’s care. And if Pearl-the-Medusa was also beyond my understanding, I knew, Iknewshe was enfolded in God’s care.
Maybe we really know nothing at all, I thought. About God or about one another.
But God, it seemed, wanted me to find Pearl. Even ifshedidn’t want me to. Pearl, who’d aggravated me from morning till night for three months straight. She was my companion. My absolutely unbearable companion. My biggest problem.
That was it. Shewasmy problem. She wasmyproblem.
She had lived with me. Worked with me. Borrowed my sweaters. Judged my character and criticized my singing. Made me chop all the soup onions so her eyes wouldn’t look bloodshot for Purse Laurier. You can’t overlook a bond like that.
Pearl is mine, I prayed. I claim her. She’s my sister. Not the sister Ithought I wanted. She’s the sister I got, and worth more to me than all my fairy-tale illusions.
I don’t know what I’m doing, I confessed. I have neither the skill, nor the desire, if I’m honest, to do what you’ve asked of me. I’m terrified. And you know that.
I’ll bring Pearl home. But you’ll have to guide me to her or guide her to me.
The conversation was over. The presence was gone, as if a sun had set. I was left alone, rattling about in my ill-fitting body. A moment ago, I felt as vast as the cosmos. Now I was one small life, anchored against the current of a teeming city, one of thousands of cities. A stranger to all but a small handful of souls on a lonely planet.
Or perhaps not so alone.
Through the haze of afternoon sun pouring through a steamy bakery window, I saw one figure watching me through that window, with a grin on his indescribable mouth.
