This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781473548916

Version 1.0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

VINTAGE

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Jennifer Clement 2018

Cover photograph © Stefan Schmid/Gallery Stock

Jennifer Clement has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Hogarth in 2018

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

One

My mother was a cup of sugar. You could borrow her anytime.

My mother was so sweet, her hands were always birthday-party sticky. Her breath held the five flavors of Life Savers candy.

And she knew all the love songs that are a university for love. She knew ‘Slowly Walk Close to Me,’ ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,’ ‘Born Under a Bad Sign,’ and all the I’ll-kill-you-if-you-leave-me songs.

But sweetness is always looking for Mr Bad and Mr Bad can pick out Miss Sweet in any crowd.

My mother opened her mouth in a great wide O and breathed him right into her body.

I couldn’t understand. She knew all the songs, so why would she get messed and stirred up with this man?

When he said his name was Eli she was down on her knees.

His voice tamed her immediately. The first words he said were all she needed. He spoke, singing, I am your medicine sweet baby my oh me oh my your name has always been written on my heart.

And from there on all he had to do was whistle for her.

Two

Me? I was raised in a car and, when you live in a car, you’re not worried about storms and lightning, you’re afraid of a tow truck.

My mother and I moved into the Mercury when she was seventeen and I was a newborn. So our car, at the edge of a trailer park in the middle of Florida, was the only home I ever knew. We lived a dot-to-dot life, never thinking too much about the future.

The old car had been bought for my mother on her sixteenth birthday.

The 1994 Mercury Topaz automatic had once been red but was now covered in several coats of white from my mother painting the car every few years as if it were a house. The red paint still appeared under scratches and scrapes. Out the front window was a view of the trailer park and a large sign that read: WELCOME TO INDIAN WATERS TRAILER PARK.

Our car was turned off under a sign that said VISITORS’ PARKING. My mother thought we’d only be there for a month or two, but we stopped there for fourteen years.

Once in a while when people asked my mother what it was like to live in a car, she answered, You’re always looking for a shower.

The only thing we ever really worried about was CPS, Child Protective Services, coming around. My mother was afraid that someone at my school or her job might think they should call the abuse hotline on her and take me off to a foster home.

She knew the acronyms that were like the rest-in-peace letters on tombstones: CPSL, Child Protective Services Law; FCP, Foster Care Plus; and FF, Family Finding.

We can’t go around making too many friends, my mother said. There’s always some person who wants to be a saint and sit on a chair in heaven. A friend can become Your Honor in an instant.

Since when is living in a car something you can call abuse? she asked without expecting me to answer.

The park was located in Putnam County. The land had been cleared to hold at least fifteen trailers, but there were only four trailers that were occupied. My friend April May lived in one with her parents, Rose and Sergeant Bob. Pastor Rex inhabited one all by himself while Mrs Roberta Young and her adult daughter Noelle occupied one right next to the dilapidated recreation area. A Mexican couple, Corazón and Ray, lived in a trailer toward the back of the park, far from the entrance and our car.

We were not in the south of Florida near the warm beaches and the Gulf of Mexico. We were not near the orange groves or close to St Augustine, the oldest city in America. We were not near the Everglades, where clouds of mosquitos and a thick canopy of vines protected delicate orchids. Miami, with its sounds of Cuban music and streets filled with convertibles, was a long drive. Animal Kingdom and the Magic Kingdom were miles away. We were nowhere.

Two highways and a creek, which we all called a river but was only a small stream off the St John’s, surrounded the trailer park. The town dump was at the back through some trees. We breathed in the garbage. We breathed in gas of rot and rust, corroded batteries, decomposing food, deadly hospital waste, odors of medicines and clouds of cleaning chemicals.

My mother said, Who would clear land for a trailer park and a garbage dump on sacred Indian ground? This land belongs to the Timucua tribes and their spirits are everywhere. If you plant a seed, something else grows. If you plant a rose, a carnation comes out of the ground. If you plant a lemon tree, this earth will give you a palm tree. If you plant a white oak, a tall man will grow. The ground here is puzzled.

My mother was right. In our part of Florida everything was puzzled. Life was always like shoes on the wrong foot.

When I read over the headlines on the newspapers that were lined up at the checkout counter at the local store beside the gum and candy, I knew Florida was asking for something. I read: DON’T CALL 911 BUY A GUN; BEAR RETURNS TO CITY AFTER BEING RELOCATED; DEADLY MEXICAN HEROIN KILLS FOUR; and HURRICANE BECOMES A CLOUDY DAY.

One summer, conjoined twin alligators appeared near our river. They had four legs and two heads.

It was my friend April May who found them. She’d been down by the river when she saw the baby alligators in the sandy earth beside the short wood dock. They still had white pieces of eggshell on the green, scaly back they shared.

April May didn’t stick around. She knew what we all knew: if there’s an alligator egg, then there’s an angry mother alligator nearby.

That afternoon, after word had spread through the park, everyone went down to the river to see if the babies were still there. Tiny specks of white eggshells lay broken around the alligators, as the creatures had not moved from the very place they’d been born, and no mother alligator ever appeared. The babies were only a little larger than a chick.

The next morning, the first local journalists began to arrive. By the afternoon, reporters from national television stations in trucks with filming equipment had moved in. Before dusk, someone had tied one of the creatures’ four legs to a palm tree with a thin blue sewing thread so that it could not escape.

For two days our quiet visitors’ parking area outside the trailer park was filled with cars and news trucks and all their broadcasting equipment. Our baby conjoined twin alligators, born from our jigsaw land, were on the national news.

Only one reporter, a tall and slim black woman with light-green eyes wearing a CNN News baseball cap, was interested in our car house. She tripped on us by accident. As she marched toward the river something made her stop at the open window of our car.

My mother was at her job. She worked as a cleaning lady at the veterans’ hospital. I was just home from school and making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the dashboard.

The reporter leaned over and poked her head inside the Mercury’s window. She looked around.

Do you live in here? she asked, and peered into the backseat.

I nodded.

Is that yours? Did you draw that? she asked, and pointed to a crayon drawing of the solar system that was stuck to the back of the driver’s seat with pieces of Scotch tape.

On her finger were a gold wedding band and engagement ring with a large diamond.

My eyes always looked at women’s hands to see if they were married. My mother said rings were like a passport or a driver’s license for love.

I nodded and placed the bread I was coating with a thick layer of blueberry jelly back on the plate.

No, don’t stop making your lunch, she said. I’m going to ask you about the baby alligators, okay? But first I need to ask you some basic questions. How old are you?

I’m nine.

I couldn’t stop looking at her gold-love-forever rings.

I was nine then. I remember this perfectly because the alligators appeared the week before my tenth birthday. I also think of my life living in the car as divided into two parts – before my mother met Eli Redmond and afterward. Those words – ‘before’ and ‘afterward’ – belonged on a clock.

And you live in this car? the reporter asked. She peered in and placed her head almost completely inside the window. What’s your name?

Pearl.

How long have you lived here?

Since being a baby.

But what about a bathroom? she asked.

We use the park, the trailer park’s bathroom. The one next to the playground. Sometimes they cut off the water as it smells bad because of the garbage dump. On those days we go to McDonald’s and brush our teeth there.

Why does the water smell so bad?

Everyone here knows it’s the dump. The garbage is bad for our water.

That’s a very fancy plate you’re eating on, the reporter said.

I looked at the white porcelain plate covered with delicate pink flowers and green leaves.

It’s Limoges, I said. From France.

The reporter was quiet for a few seconds and then asked, Do you like living in a car?

You can get away fast if there’s a disaster. Well, that’s what my mother likes to say.

The reporter smiled and walked away. She never asked me about the alligators.

Within three days, all the reporters had left because, on the third morning after the discovery, the alligators were dead.

The reporters got in their cars and trucks and U-turned right out of there. It was fast. It was a twenty-minute funeral march.

They sure got out in a hurry. They never even looked over their shoulders to see if they’d forgotten something, my mother said.

We knew those reporters couldn’t take the odors from the dump. Our garbage was messing with their perfume.

After the reporters left, my mother slipped on her sneakers, grabbed her frayed straw hat, and got out of the car.

Let’s go look at those alligator babies, she said.

As we walked toward the river she took my hand in hers. We were almost the same size. If someone had watched us as we moved away they would have thought we were two nine-year-old girls walking together toward a swing.

My mother and I went through the park and along the trail, lined by cypress trees and saw grass, down to the river. As we walked our bodies broke up a cloud of blue and yellow dragonflies that hovered in our path.

The afternoon sun was large above us in a cloudless sky. This made our shadows long and slender and they cast ahead of us as we moved forward. Our shadows, like two friends, led us toward the river.

What’s the best thing about living in a car? I asked.

I can tell you. There’s no stove with gas burners. As a child, and then growing up, I was always afraid of the gas being left on. I hate the old cabbage smell coming out of a stove. And there’s no real electricity in a car, my mother said. And no electrical sockets. You can bet there’s always some person who wants to poke something into those holes like a hairpin or a fork. So, I don’t have to think about that.

The soft ground leading from our car to the river was a mess. The grass along the path had been trampled and there were a few plastic water bottles, crushed cans, and white lumps of chewing gum left behind. Under a cypress tree there was a length of coiled black electrical cable.

My mother and I expected to see the dead alligators, but when we reached the riverbank they were gone.

The white sand, where the creatures had been the day before, was red sand. Only a tiny pulp of scale and flesh remained tied to the blue thread.

The bullets had torn the newborns to shreds.

The shooters had left behind a few spent casings and shells on the ground nearby.

We never wondered about it. Some person was forever in the mood for target practice. There was always someone skulking around with an itchy trigger finger. Those babies never had a chance.

One time we even found a bullet hole in our car. It had pierced the hood and must have lodged somewhere in the motor because we couldn’t find the bullet or exit hole.

When did this happen? my mother said on the day we discovered the clean hole in the steel with a dark ring of residue around it.

We never felt it.

People are hunting cars these days, she said. That’s a joke. It must have been a stray.

But we both knew this was not unusual. In our part of Florida things were always being gifted a bullet just for the sake of it.

Three

On rainy mornings, with the car windows blurred with water, I never daydreamed about a house. That dream was too big. My dreams were about furniture. I imagined having a chair and a desk.

At night I placed a pillow over the hand brake so that the two front seats became one bed. In the dark space of the brake and accelerator pedals, I kept a pair of tennis shoes and sandals.

My books and comic books were laid out in short piles in a row along the dashboard and were warped from the sun shining down on them day after day.

We kept our groceries in the trunk and ate foods that didn’t need refrigeration.

Our clothing was folded into plastic supermarket bags.

In the glove compartment we kept our toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap. In this space my mother also kept the can of Raid Flying Insect Killer. Every night before we went to sleep, we closed the windows and doors and sprayed the inside of the car with the insecticide. Every morning as we stretched and yawned, the taste of Raid filled our mouths and mixed with the breakfast taste of Cheerios and powdered milk mixed with water.

In that car my mother taught me how to set a table and how to serve tea. She showed me how to make a bed using a dishcloth folded around a book.

My mother knew about these things because she was raised in a big house with a veranda and swimming pool and five bathrooms. She had servants and a playroom where she kept all her toys. She knew how to play the piano and how to speak French, because a French tutor came to her house twice a week during her childhood. When she was in a good mood, my mother’s talk always had French words in it. When she was seven, she was given a Shetland pony for her birthday.

My mother’s name was Margot, after Margot Fonteyn, the great ballerina. My mother was delicate and graceful. Her neck was even long and slim like a dancer’s. She had thin limbs, long fingers, and yellow hair that was spongy and made a yellow cloud all around her head.

By the time I was eleven, my mother and I were the same size and I never grew any taller.

You’re the apple on my apple tree, she said.

My mother named me Pearl because, she said, You were so white. You came from a place that is far away from any normal birthplace like a hospital or clinic.

She said, Nobody knew, and I gave you your birthday, to you all alone, by myself, in silence. I did not cry and you did not cry.

I used the bathroom near my bedroom because it had a long, wall-to-wall bathtub, she said. I had to think about everything I needed to do. I lay down in the bathtub like it was a bed. I placed towels down first and a blanket and then I lay down.

My mother was so small, a bathtub was the perfect size for her.

While I lay there, waiting for you to come to me, she said, I breathed in and out.

From the bathtub she could look out the window, through the palm trees of her family’s garden, at the sky.

While waiting for you I prayed the rosary, she said. When you pray the rosary your life stops.

She watched the sunset and sunrise.

And you came to me early with the birds, she said. I heard them outside the window.

After she’d cleaned her body, she washed me in the sink with a bar of Avon soap and patted me dry with Kleenex.

She said, You were so small. You fit inside a hand towel. You were so white. More like a pearl than skin. You were like ice or cloud, like a meringue. I could almost see inside your body. I looked at your pale-blue stone eyes and named you. Just that, she said.

I was a pearl. People stared at me. I didn’t know a different life. I didn’t know what it was like to walk around and not be noticed. They could think I was beautiful or ugly but, no matter what, everyone stared. Hands were always reaching out to touch my silver hair or the white glaze of my cheek.

You’re all luster, my mother said. Being with you is like wearing pretty earrings or a new dress.

My mother lived in her father’s house for two months after my birth without anyone knowing I was there.

She said, When I had to go to school or leave you to do something, I placed you in the closet in my room, all in the dark, all wrapped up. I made a bed for you on the shoe rack with towels and my sweaters. I nested you there like a kitten. I used paper towels from the kitchen as diapers. The house was so big, no one ever heard you cry.

You were born in a fairy tale, my mother said.

During the time my mother had been pregnant, she’d driven around in search of a place she could park the car and live with me while she looked for a job and a small place to rent. The trailer park was only forty minutes from her father’s house.

If you’re going to hide, hide close by, my mother said. Nobody thinks you’re going to hide in plain sight. There are over one hundred thousand people missing in this country. If they can’t find those people, how are they going to find us?

My mother picked this spot because it had a public recreational area with a bathroom. She always thought we would be there for only a few months.

We had a place to start our living together, my mother said. I cleaned it. And, over the months while I waited for your birth, I stole everything from my parents’ house I thought we might need.

Two months after my birth, two months before her exams, and two days before she was going to be seventeen, she drove away from home and never went back.

I didn’t look over my shoulder, she said. Don’t ever look over your shoulder, because it can make you want to walk backward. Don’t ever twist and turn and look over your shoulder, because you might break in two pieces. If anyone ever looked for me after I ran away, they didn’t look hard enough, because I was never found.

I never had a birth certificate. My mother falsified one copied from the Internet so that I could enroll at the local public school, but my birth was never registered.

Don’t worry about yourself, my mother said. You’ll never be found, because you’ve never been missing.

Every time she talked to me about my birth she said, That green-tiled bathroom with a toilet, bathtub, and sink was my manger.

One night, a few weeks after the appearance and death of the conjoined twin alligators, my mother and I were talking in the dark before going to sleep as we did most nights.

We almost always told each other about our day. I’d tell her about school, which was a forty-five-minute walk down the highway to the town, and my mother would recount her day at the veterans’ hospital.

Those men are hurt and angry, but they’re full of the national anthem, she said. Pearl, it’s important to know the world’s geography, because the vets hate it if people don’t know the places they’ve been to fight.

I knew the words ‘got some’ meant the soldier had killed enemy combatants.

As my mother told me the stories she heard from the soldiers, the wars outside in the world came into our car.

My days at school were never as interesting, although there were often fights or kids being caught with cigarettes or a gun in their school bag. I kept to myself and didn’t have any close friends except for April May, who lived in our trailer park.

It didn’t take long for my mother to figure out what people thought about us. I’d guessed it on my very first days of school: if you were living in a car, it meant you were just pretending you were not a bag lady living under a bridge. People were always thinking homelessness was contagious.

Even with the Mercury’s doors closed and the windows rolled up with a tiny space open at the top for air, we could still hear the crickets outside. The croaking sound of frogs coming from the river mixed with the noise from cars and trucks driving up and down the highway.

My mother’s hand reached toward me, through the space between the door and seat, and softly rubbed my head.

I looked out the front window and my mother looked out the back window.

Do you see any stars? she asked after a while.

No. Can you?

The car windows were beginning to fog up.

No. There’re no stars tonight, not one, but I do feel them. They’re coming now.

What do you feel, Mother? Who’s coming?

Don’t you feel it? Indian ghosts are on the prowl tonight.

I don’t hear anything.

My mother stopped rubbing my head.

Feel it, she said. Close your eyes.

No. Nothing.

But don’t you feel it? They’re coming through the trees, from the dump, she said.

Yes. Maybe. No.

There’re two. Yes, two of them. Yes.

Are you sure?

Yes, I’m sure. They alight.

What?

Yes, they alight. They’ve come to take the spirit of those alligators away with them. Every time things go wrong on their land, they come. It’s the Great Brilliance.

How do you know?

Just feel it.

I closed my eyes but could hear only the rustle of my mother’s body in the backseat and hear her breath go out, out, out like a gentle pant. I never once heard her breathe in.

I closed my eyes and listened to the strange soft squeaks or sighs the car sometimes made when the air outside grew dense and cold.

I can see there’s no silver bullet to end this life, this one-dollar-bill lifestyle, my mother said. We must remember to buy a lottery ticket tomorrow. It hungers me just to think about it.

Yes, I said.

You know, my mother said after a few minutes. Sometimes I’m taken over by a great wish to start all over. I want to fall in love with my future again.

My mother was always full of birthday-candle wishes.

Four

Once, after Eli had come into our lives, I found my mother all alone in the backseat of the car. I was coming home from school and she should have been at work.

My mother was wearing a light-blue cotton summer dress and she still had her shoes on, which she never did. We always took off our shoes when we were in the car.

What happened to you? I asked. Why aren’t you at work?

Words are only meaningful if they’re true, my mother said. I think Eli lies to me. He doesn’t talk about his life. If I ask him a question, he changes the subject. I can’t see inside.

My mother could see inside a person and see broken glass. She could see splinters inside their bodies and the bottles filled with tears.

I can see broken windows, my mother said. In a person’s body I can see the bathtub’s dirt ring and cigarette burns in the carpet. I can see all the little white Bayer aspirins.

My mother said these feelings increased with every birthday. I remember my piano lessons, she said.

My mother had studied the piano ever since she was six years old at a private music school, until it closed when she was fifteen. Then she took private piano lessons at her home from Mr Rodrigo until the moment we drove away.

Mr Rodrigo was a musician from Cuba who had studied in Vienna and London and could have been a great concert pianist. He also taught my mother to love blues and jazz.

Of course, he never became famous, my mother said. He only became a teacher because he had to support his wife and two children. But I also knew there was another reason. Mr Rodrigo would clap to keep time, and every clap was a slap and a spank and a whipping. Every clap to the metronome was a night of going to sleep without supper. I could see the childhood bruises and broken bones under his grown-up skin. Every piano lesson, every time, after playing the warm-up scales, the room began to smell of Merthiolate.

Do you miss your piano? I asked.

Yes, and I also miss Mr Rodrigo. He was that kind of man who knew all anyone really needed was to listen to a song and be swayed.

Since she could see under the rind and husk, my mother was always getting mixed up, stirred up with a spoon, shaken like a milkshake with the wrong people all the time.

Once she let an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker stay in the Mercury with us for two days. I moved into the backseat with my mother and he took my place in the front. He was so thin, the belt loops on his jeans almost came together with the cinched leather belt that held them on his hips. The belt buckle was silver with a gold eagle in the center.

The veins along the young man’s arms stood out like branches.

You can see the tree inside that man, my mother said.

He had pale skin, dark-blue eyes, and long eyelashes, and he was as small as we were. He was from California and was kind and well mannered. He said his parents were schoolteachers.

He was a runaway. When he told his parents he was going to leave they’d laughed and said, If you leave, just don’t come back. They didn’t believe him. They thought he was joking.

My mother called him Mr Don’t Come Back.

I’m a runaway too, my mother said to him. Runaways need to take care of each other. Anyway, she added. I can see you’re a boy who never had a dream. You never went to sleep and had a dream. You’re only living half a life. You don’t have the other side. You have the life side; the death side will come, but no dream side. If there is no dream then there’s no vigil of the dream. You’re not keeping watch.

My mother was right. The runaway never slept. His eyes were always open.

You’re making a mistake, my mother said to him. You need to rest. If I had a sport, if someone asked me what my sport was, I’d have to say sleeping.

It was because of Mr Don’t Come Back that I found out about my mother’s father and the reason she’d left her home.

Mr Don’t Come Back had been with us for one day and one night. We were outside the car, leaning against the trunk and looking at the cars and trucks pass on the highway. My mother was peeling an orange and giving Mr Don’t Come Back the full juicy wedges for him to suck on. She’d already decided he was shipwrecked and had scurvy since she believed you don’t have to be adrift on an ocean to be shipwrecked.

I was chewing on a piece of gum and wondering how long my mother was planning to let Mr Don’t Come Back hang around. I was ready for him to move on out.

So, Mrs Lady, he asked, why you living in this car with your baby girl?

My mother didn’t answer.

And look, he said, stepping away from the car and pointing. The grass has grown tall around the tires. This old car hasn’t been driven in years. The tires are even flat.

I know. I know, my mother said. I really don’t have anywhere to drive to, not really.

So why? Why you living here?

The answer is easy. My father had a fly swatter in every room of our house, my mother said. That’s why I left.

As she said these words, I became still and held my breath. My gum chewing came to a full stop in my mouth.

The fly swatters would be hanging from a hook or lying under a windowsill. My father had many and was always swatting something until it was dead, my mother explained. He even used it on butterflies. So he liked to take a whack at me. And he always looked to step on things like a beetle or an ant. My father had shoes on his feet to crush and squash and kick. You can’t go around killing little things. And he never went to work. He never had a job. I did leave him a note to say I’d left because he wasn’t going to come or go looking. My father thought I’d be back when I ran out of money. He must still be waiting.

You never asked him for money, Mrs Lady? the runaway asked, but then corrected himself. Of course you never asked him for money. You don’t even need to answer my stupid question. People think that runaways have no pride but we’re full of pride like a pride bank.

Pearl, my mother said to me. I saved you from a fly swatter. As a kid, I always wondered one thing. It was a question inside me all the time. Do people in other houses wash their fly swatters?

It’s good you left your daddy, Mrs Lady, the runaway said. You can’t have some old man swatting your baby girl. That’s just the worst thing I ever heard.

These words made my mother fill up with joy as if he were giving her a Being a Good Mother diploma. Usually everything my mother did was met with disapproval, as if not having a front door to open made you unworthy of a job or friendship or someone lending you something. People were always shaking their heads at our life.

My mother never forgot about Mr Don’t Come Back. She said his hands were full of church claps. They understood each other. His one-sided life made her anxious and she’d bring him up from time to time.

Of course, he was a firecracker you could burn your fingers on, she said. Of course, he was a cutthroat and a runt. If you don’t dream at night then only this life matters. There’s nowhere else to go. I sure don’t miss his bag-of-broken-bones body.

Since my mother translated the world for me, I understood everyone was walking around with secrets and broken bones and hurtful words that could not be washed away with soap.

At church she’d scan the pews, bend toward me, and whisper, Pearl, sweetheart, all the people in here are afraid they’re going to die.