Purity (47 page)

She texted him every night at bedtime and didn't turn off her phone until he'd texted back. She'd come to think it would have been less bad to sleep with him, less of a moral surrender, than to open the email attachment he'd sent her. Why, why, why hadn't she slept with him when she had her chance? Running away from Bolivia seemed all the more regrettable now that she knew that his fear of Tom was unfounded. Planting spyware was a pointless and truly vile sin that she could have obviated by staying with Andreas and committing a pleasurable sin.

She had to fight the temptation to sext him a picture of her private thing. She was the latest of those women who stayed loyal to him. The alteration of her brain by wooden spoon was apparently ongoing.

It wasn't hard to conceal the state of her brain from Tom and Leila, but its alteration was the reason she'd flown directly from Bolivia to Denver without stopping to see her mother. Her mother could be scarily perceptive about her state of mind. No sooner had Pip arrived in Denver than she'd been forced to conceal it from her.

“Purity,” her mother had said on the telephone. “When you told me you couldn't find anything out about your father in Bolivia, were you lying to me?”

“No. I don't tell lies to you.”

“You didn't find anything out?”

“No!”

“Then tell me why you had to go to Denver.”

“I want to learn to be a journalist.”

“But why did it have to be Denver? Why
that
online magazine? Why not someplace closer to home?”

“Mom, this is the time when I need to be on my own for a while. You're getting older, I'm going to be there for you. Can't I have a couple of years where I get to be away?”

“Did Andreas Wolf want you to go to that place?”

Pip hesitated. “No,” she said. “They just happened to have an intern position I applied for.”

“It was the only news service in the country accepting applications?”

“You just don't like it because it's in a different time zone.”

“Purity. I'm going to ask again: are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes! Why are you asking me?”

“Linda helped me use her computer, and I looked at the website. I wanted to see for myself.”

“And? It's a great site, right? It's serious long-form investigative journalism.”

“I have the feeling you're not telling me things you should be telling me.”

“I'm not! I mean, I'm
not
not.”

However sensitive to smells her mother was, she had an even keener nose for moral failings. She could smell that Pip was doing something wrong in Denver, and Pip resented her for it. She'd already denied herself Andreas because of something her mother had said. To live up to her mother's ideal, she'd behaved more worthily than she'd had to, and she felt she deserved credit for it, even though her mother knew nothing about it. She was in no mood to be lectured.

But her mother had been sulking ever since. Not returning phone messages and then, when Pip did reach her, not joyfully ejaculating but making her displeasure known with sighs and silences and monosyllabic answers to Pip's dutiful questions. Pip had finally gotten angry and stopped calling altogether. She hadn't even told her mother she'd moved in with Tom and Leila. For a while, living with them, she'd felt vindicated in her belief that she could have been a well-adjusted and effective person if she'd had a pair of parents like these. They'd already done so much to help her that finding her real father had ceased to be a burning priority. But preferring them as parents made her pity her mother, who was alone in Felton and had done her best with the poor resources she had. Pip's life seemed like a conspiracy to betray every single person in it. And now Tom seemed to have a thing for her, which amounted to yet another betrayal, a betrayal of Leila that Pip hadn't intended and couldn't control. It was all making her even more dependent on her nightly textings with Andreas and the self-touching she often did afterward.

Tom was still snoring when she ventured out to the bathroom. From downstairs came a smell of coffee and the faint patter of a keyboard. Pip felt pity for Leila, too. And for Tom, if he was attracted to her. And of course for Andreas, and for Colleen. Apparently pity and betrayal were related.

Back in her bed, she texted Andreas. It was too late at night to expect a reply, and she should have just gone to sleep, but instead she appended further texts.

She was erasing the last message, which she'd typed only as a masturbation aid, when a reply came in from Los Volcanes.

She was surprised. It was four in the morning in Bolivia.

She waited ten minutes, second-guessing herself, for his reply to her temerity. She knew she was behaving badly, trying to keep him interested after having twice rejected him. But right now their texting was the closest thing she had to a sex life. She typed more:

His text was like a sock in the jaw. Her hands jumped away from her device, letting it fall between her legs. Was he jealous of Tom? It seemed important to set the record straight, and so she picked up the device again. She cursed the errors her trembling finger made.

She fell on her side with a whimper and pulled the comforter over her head. She couldn't figure out what she'd done wrong—she'd
said
she wasn't interested in Tom. Why was Andreas punishing her now? She writhed under the comforter, trying and failing to make sense of what he'd written, until the comforter became a tormentor. Sweating all over, she threw it off and went downstairs to the dining room, where Leila was working.

“You're still awake?” Leila said.

Her smile was troubled but not phony. Pip sat down across the table from her. “Can't sleep.”

“Do you want an Ambien? I have a veritable cornucopia.”

“Will you tell me what you found out in Washington?”

“Let me get you an Ambien.”

“No. Just let me sit here while you work.”

Leila smiled at her again. “I like that you can be honest about what you want. It's something I still struggle with.”

Her smiles were taking some of the sting off Andreas's brutal words.

“But let me try it,” Leila said. “I want you to not sit here while I work.”

“Oh,” Pip said, very hurt.

“It makes me self-conscious. If you really don't mind?”

“No, I'll leave. It's just—” Outburst Alert. Outburst Alert. “I don't know why you're being so weird to me. I didn't do anything to you. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

Leila was still smiling, but something was glittering in her eyes, something awfully similar to hatred. “I'd appreciate it if you'd just let me work.”

“Do you think I'm a home-wrecker? Do you think I'd ever in a million years do that to you?”

“Not intentionally.”

“Then why are you being this way, if it's not my fault?”

“Do you know who your father is?”

“My
father
?” Pip made an insultingly baffled face and gesture.

“Are you ever curious?”

“What does any of this have to do with my father?”

“I'm just asking.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn't. I already feel like I walk around in life with this sign hanging from my neck,
BEWARE OF DOG, DIDN'T HAVE FATHER
. It doesn't mean I want to have sex with every older man who comes my way.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I can pack my things and move out tomorrow. I'll quit my job, too, if that would help.”

“I don't want you to do either of those things.”

“Then what? Wear a burka?”

“I'm going to be spending more time with Charles. You and Tom can have the house to yourselves to work out whatever you have to work out.”

“
There is nothing to work out
.”

“The point is simply—”

“I thought you guys were sane and normal. That's part of what I love about you. And now it's like I'm a lab rat you're leaving alone in a cage with another rat to see what happens.”

“That's not what I'm doing.”