“Pearl?”
She looked up.
The voice in the air was her mother’s voice, seeming as if it were spoken from a cloud. Pearl?—the voice from the cloud asked. And she answered—“Yes, I’m here.”
Pearl’s mother heard her daughter’s voice spoken as if from under the bed, but it sounded quieter, as if it were coming from far away. Her mother looked under the bed, and saw the heating duct’s hole. “Yes, I’m here” came out of the hole. Pearl’s mother thought her daughter was caught in the bowels of the house, searching for the pearl she had lost. Her mother inched under the bed, inched herself to the hole, and, surprised at how wide it was, bent her body down in it. “Pearl?” “Yes, I’m here.” And Pearl’s mother dropped herself in to find her.
Her mother fell down the hole, but it was filled with water; she could breathe without breathing; she had no sense of panic. A picture in a frame fell through the water as an oak leaf falls off a tree, shuttling gently back and forth as it descended, a picture of a woman holding an umbrella, pink cheeks, looking gently down so that her eyes could not be seen; a picture of herself. There, open in the ocean, swaying in the current, was the blue umbrella she had tossed away after a violent gale destroyed its handmade spokes. A paper scroll rolled in waves within the waves. A white whale swam in a circle around her, swam between the objects floating in the sea; his tail knocked a blossom off an apple tree. The bottom of the ocean glowed brightly, a fact Pearl’s mother found strange. She sank down toward the brightness as she watched a wedding dress—how could it be, but it was, her own—float up above her. Her head entered the brightness first, and she took a deep breath in the sun-filled air, felt sand under her feet, and walked up the shallows, the ocean wave silver at her heel, to shore.
“Pearl?”—she called out. “Pearl?—where are you?” “I’m here, Mother.” And there she was, sitting with her back against a palm tree at the edge where beach turned to forest.
Pearl held a green book in her hand. “I knew you’d come,” she said.
“I just read this story—” and Pearl held open a page on which an illustration showed a woman walking up from the ocean onto the beach, her arms held out, and a child standing up, waiting for her on the sand.