Page 9 of If Looks Could Kill
She looked down at the pavement. “Even if I did, I can’t afford them, and that’s that.”
“But your allowance,” I protested. “Surely—”
She glared at me. “Would you please stop?”
She continued walking. I followed after her, baffled. I’d hurt her somehow. Embarrassed her. I’d meant it as a kindness, even though she could be the most irksome girl on God’s green earth. I was ready to pay for them myself, but that would hurt her worse. Wound her pride.
It wasn’t Pearl’s happiness I was urging along so stubbornly. It was my own.
Tucked down into what I thought was generosity were layers of smugness and self-satisfaction. As if I knew best what she wanted. As if I knew better what she could afford.
Life is a bad mess. The least little thing you think you know can still be wrong, wrong, wrong. The best of intentions can do the utmost damage. May this be a lesson to me, I thought.
All the same, and even though Pearl gives me a stomachache on good days, I couldn’t shake my regret at having caused her pain.
Halfway along the block, I realized Pearl was no longer ahead of me. I turned to see her frozen in her tracks and gazing upward. I trotted back to see what had captured her interest.
She seemed transfixed by the sight of something in a second-story window, above another saloon, the Lion’s Den. I followed her gaze to see a girl standing in a bay window, gazing outward as if at nothing through the rain-streaked pane.
“Who’s that?” I asked Pearl. “Do you know her?”
She shook her head.
I studied the girl. Her dark hair was piled on her head in a soft, unruly pompadour. Her face was painted with a dark red stain upon her lips and cheeks, and heavy black outlined her eyes. She wore a blue dressing gown hanging loosely around thin shoulders and collarbones.
“She calls to us,” Pearl whispered fervently. “She begs us to rescue her.”
She certainly did present a striking portrait of pathos. Like a French painting—the pale, blurred face gazing out sadly through a sheet of autumn rain.
“What do you suppose she’s looking at?” I whispered back. “She’s so young.”
A woman clad in frowzy finery appeared at the girl’s side, with an irate expression and words the girl didn’t acknowledge.
The girl turned and noticed us then. Her body tensed. Her eyes grew wide.
“You’re sure you don’t know her?” I whispered.
“Not her,” Pearl said quietly, “but living here, you see, and hear of, thousands like her.”
The girl in the window watched us both intently.
One girl. Thousands like her.
It left me dizzy, the vertigo of trying to reconcile the humanity of one girl standing there against the faceless, forgettable blur of unnamed thousands.Here she was, one small needle in an overwhelming haystack. One small lobster among countless others caught in a giant trap.
“Wotcher piping, you Hallelujah Lassies?”
We turned to see a bald, round-faced man in a black suit approaching us from the door of the saloon with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He was thickly built with the sort of muscles I imagine one acquired from a career of knocking people’s skulls together.
“What’s a pair of bundles like yous two doing out here on a cold afternoon?” A hammy hand landed on my shoulder and another on Pearl’s. “Whyn’t you come inside for a drink?”
Pearl snapped out of her reverie with a jolt. Girl Soldier was back on the job.
“We’ll come in for a song and a scripture,” Pearl said. “We would never touch liquor.”
The bouncer’s gaze flicked reluctantly from her face to mine, then back to hers. Naturally.
The pensive girl was gone. Her window was dark, as though no one had ever been there.
