I sat on the veranda of the Beauregard house for the first time in sixteen years, wearing Pearl's best dress--white organdy with lace trim that itched in all the wrong places--and pretending to be someone I had never been allowed to be.

The veranda was wider than I remembered. Or perhaps I was just narrower, having spent sixteen years on a plantation where narrow was a virtue and full was a sin. The chairs were rocking, though no one was sitting in them, and the sound was steady and patient, like a heartbeat that had learned to live without a body.

Pearl sat across from me, and when I looked at her sitting in my chair, wearing my clothes, speaking with my voice--or rather, speaking with the voice she had practiced in the mirror for three months, the voice she had coaxed out of me in the quiet hours before dawn--I understood that the world was made of mirrors and I had never been allowed to choose which one to look into.

"You're doing well," Pearl said, and her mouth--her mouth was steady. The treatment had worked. The electricity and the patience and the white coats of the New Orleans specialists had done what years of prayers and home remedies could not. Her mouth was straight, and her smile was whole, and she looked like the Pearl everyone knew: the angel of Blackwater, the daughter of Judge Beauregard, the woman who would marry a federal agent from Washington and carry the Beauregard name into a future that had nothing to do with cotton and everything to do with change.

"I'm doing fine," I said, and my voice was Pearl's voice: light, musical, with that slight Atlanta lilt that the family had paid for years of elocution lessons to instill.

A woman brought us tea. Sweet tea, poured from a crystal pitcher into crystal glasses, with lemon slices cut so thin they were almost translucent. I took a sip and felt the sugar burn my throat. I had been drinking rain water with a hint of silt for sixteen years. This was the first sweet thing I had tasted since I was a child.

"Your hands," Pearl said. She was not looking at me. She was looking at my hands, which were resting on my lap, and they were not Pearl's hands. They were broader, the knuckles larger, the skin roughened by years of hauling water and splitting wood and catching rabbits with my bare hands when Granny Mose's traps failed.

"I've been washing them," I said.

"Good." Pearl smiled, and the smile was perfect, and I had spent three months learning how to make it. "We have a guest coming tomorrow."

"Who?"

"Agent Crowe. From the FBI. He'll be here for the weekend." She set down her teacup with a precision that had not been in her before--the treatment had given her control not just over her mouth but over everything, and I wondered how much of Pearl was natural and how much was manufactured. "Thomas Crowe is very important, Lula. This visit could change everything for our family."

"I'm sure it could."

He came the next day, and he was not what I expected. Federal agents were supposed to be men in dark suits with hard eyes and fast hands. Thomas Crowe was smaller than I expected, with a face that was more tired than hard, and eyes that were the color of the Mississippi river after rain: brown, muddy, and carrying with them the weight of everything they had passed over.

He shook my hand--Pearl's hand--and looked at me with an expression I could not quite read. Interest, perhaps. Or pity. Or both.

"Miss Beauregard," he said, and the way he said it made me feel both seen and invisible at the same time.

"Agent Crowe," I replied, and held his gaze for a second longer than was polite.

He did not seem to know. He asked about the house. About the town. About the Cotton Exchange meeting that was scheduled for Monday. He asked questions that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the investigation he was conducting against Sal Marchetti.

I answered in Pearl's voice, with Pearl's mannerisms, and I thought: if he can be fooled by a voice and a dress, his investigation is not as thorough as he thinks.

But then I realized: I was fooling myself. And that was different.

That night, in Pearl's bed--a bed so large it felt like a landscape, with sheets so soft they felt like water--I could not sleep. I got up and walked through the house. The rooms were dark and empty and full of things I did not understand: portraits of people I had never met, furniture that was too ornate to sit on, a grand piano that I suspected had never been played.

But they also had secrets.

I found the first one in the study: a locked trunk, hidden behind a bookshelf that swung open on a hinge I had not noticed. The trunk was iron-bound and heavy, and the lock was old but still functional, and when I picked it with a hairpin--a skill I had learned on the plantation, where locks were the difference between food and starvation--I found photographs.

Dozens of them. Black and white, dating back to the 1900s. Photographs of a woman who looked exactly like Pearl and exactly like me. The same eyes. The same nose. The same mouth--steady and whole and perfect.

But there was a note attached to the photographs, written in a hand that shook: Constance Beauregard, 1937. The girls are identical. But Pearl--Pearl has her father's eyes. And her skin. And I have kept this secret long enough. God forgive me.

Constance was Pearl's and my mother. She had died when we were born, or so we had been told. But the note said she had lived long enough to write. And the note said Pearl had Judge Beauregard's eyes and his skin.

I sat on the floor of the study with the photographs spread around me like a hand of cards, and I understood that the story I had been living my entire life--the story of the blood-drinking twin, the cursed one, the castaway--was a lie constructed to hide a deeper lie: that the Beauregard bloodline was not pure white, and that the "twin curse" was a cover story invented to keep the truth from a town that would have torn the family apart if they had known.

The second secret came from Granny Mose, who appeared in the kitchen at three in the morning with a cup of coffee. "I knew when Pearl was born," she said. "She was not the judge's daughter. Not fully."

"Why didn't anyone say anything?"

"Because saying something changes nothing. The world wants what the world wants. But you--you are the truth, Lula May. You are the truth that they tried to bury."

I wrote a letter to Thomas Crowe the next morning. I told him everything: the photographs, the note, Granny Mose's confession, the truth about Pearl's parentage, the truth about the Beauregard family.

I sealed the letter and walked forty miles to the nearest town, where there was a post office, and I dropped the letter into the mailbox.

Then I bought a ticket to Memphis, and I sat on the Greyhound bus and I looked out the window at the Mississippi landscape rolling past--beautiful and broken, just like the story I was leaving behind.

Pearl was waving from the front porch of the Beauregard house, and the house was tall and white and wrong, and I did not turn around.

---

OTMES Objective Codes:
TI=9.0(T9) M1=8 M4=10 M7=7 R=2.0 I=4 N=2 theta=225deg
Style: Southern Gothic | Era: 1955 Mississippi | POV: 1st Female
Theme: Historical Truth/Identity | Ending: Limited Redemption

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: