Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (10 page)

I understand why Sister Evangeline didn't give this to me before, and why she didn't turn it over to my new parents'
safekeeping
. But that's all I understand.

Mother had Ralph's baby shoes dipped in bronze. They're shaped like his goofy toddler feet. They show his personality. My bootie has the personality of a hollow, paper-thin, breakable question mark.

Maybe there's a note inside. Sitting at my vanity with tweezers, I pick out stuffing the consistency of dandelion fluff. It floats all over the place, including into my mouth. I'll never get it all stuffed back inside. Sandy grit trickles out when I tip the shoe. That's it. No note or tiny picture or Chinese writing.

I sneeze, face myself in the mirror, and start crying. The personal present Gone Mom left for me is a maddening,
useless, Martian slipper—odd as can be. Odder than everything in my other box combined.

Okay, Sister Evangeline, what is the truth that will make me free?
I open my Bible and turn to John 8:32. It's Jesus talking: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I sit back.
The truth, the truth . . .
That's not how Sister Evangeline said it. She made a dramatic point of saying
whole
truth. But the true Bible verse doesn't distinguish whole truths from half truths.

Ralph is making a racket outside. I walk to the window. His tent is pitched. He is crushing tin cans from our trash and tossing them in a hole he dug in the frozen garden dirt. I open the window. “Hey! What're you doing?”

“Cleaning my campsite,” Ralph yells.

“But you're not camping!”

“I
know
that. I'm just doing the cleanup part for my merit badge.” Ralph has stacked twigs for kindling and is burying the cans. He points to his pitched tent. “I'm achieving the badge in parts, not all at once.” He smooths the dirt he has shoveled over the trash and then starts unpitching his tent. “I'll need a witness to check off on all this.” He points to his
Handbook for Boys
lying on the dead grass. “I'll be up in a sec.”

I shiver and shut the window.

Minutes later he barges in my door in his socks with the manual in hand. His eyes get wide, focused on the world's
weirdest little bootie on my vanity. “What gives?” he asks, walking over.

I dash to block his way. “Don't touch it! Do not blink on it.”

“
Blink
on it?”

“I will tell you what it is if you promise to stay a safe distance away—like outside on the driveway. We can use Morse code.”

He sits on my bed. I explain about Sister Evangeline and how she has kept the bootie all this time just waiting for me to come over and get it.

“Did she know about the other stuff in the box?”

“She knew there
was
a box, but I'm not sure if she knew what was in it.”

“Why's the toe mashed up?” Ralph says.

“How should I know?”

“Where's the other one?”

I shrug. “I guess it belonged to a one-legged, midget Chinese Martian who my first mother also gave birth to.”

Ralph nods, stroking an invisible beard. “It looks real old.”

“Yep. Probably buried for a thousand years, until she found it and thought it'd be the perfect memento for her temporary daughter.”

“What'd the nun say?”

“Nothing. She wouldn't let me open it there.” I explain
about our sneak into the shed. “I'm gonna ask her tomorrow.”

I sit at my vanity and rub the tiny shoe against my cheek, touch it on my tongue, blow into it, sniff it. I stare at it cradled in my hands—so precious, so fragile, so empty.

I try to sketch it in my notebook before it crumbles to dust or simply floats out the window, but I can't get the shape or the shading right. The hairline cracks in the glaze are roads leading nowhere. Every sketch looks worse. I drop the pencil. Wad the paper.

I need help.

I need Elliot!

*  *  *

After school I step off the bus and squint into the orphanage side yard wondering if Evangeline might be waiting there for me. I am a nervous wreck. No one on earth but me is obsessing over a miniature shoe as dingy as an old cracked tooth. I ring the bell. Joy weaves around my legs. I pick her up. Her water bowl is frozen.

Sister Immaculata swings the door open. She looks up at me, her eyes watery and luminous.

“Hello. I've come to see Sister Evangeline.”

Joy jumps from my arms. Sister Immaculata says, “The laundry man is going to take him; in fact I thought he already had. Our new sister is allergic.”

“It's freezing out there. Plus Joy is a girl, a
girl
cat.” I
am practically yelling in her face. “Sister Evangeline?” I say again.

Sister Immaculata shakes her head.

Dread floods me. I search her face. “Is she . . . here?”

Sister whispers, “Gone.”

“When will she be back?”

“Yesterday.”

“She'll be back
yesterday
?”

I scour the coat hooks. Sister Evangeline's black coat and boots are gone.

“She's not coming back, dear.”

“Why? Did she leave me a note or an address or . . . ?” Sister Immaculata is so feeble it seems my words are shoving her.

“Sisters aren't allowed to explain. Only Mother Superior knows.”

Sister Evangeline
knew
I'd come back. Ralph's wrong! Nuns
do
budge. They disappear.

Sister Immaculata shuffles into the living room, folds herself into her old chair. She's infuriating. Everything is infuriating.

I am heart-slapped. Run-over. Maybe there's a note in Evangeline's room or in the shed.
Something.

I shoot upstairs behind Joy, a sharpened arrow with no target. Nothing in her room except a wilted African violet.

I check the little girls' dorm—thirty beds and nine
radiators. I remember my weekly orphan chore of wiping the buckled green linoleum under each heater with a wet rag. Everybody, no matter how young, had a job.

Tilted against the wall is the same huge push broom Nancy and I used to play witch. She wrapped the bristles with a towel and I stood on the broom, straddling the handle. Nancy
sailed
me across the wooden floors while I perfected my cackle. I wonder if she remembers me, if she became a nun or maybe a witch?

Joy and I sit on my squeaky old bed, seventh on the right side. Our big sisters kissed us good night because the dorm mothers wouldn't, no matter how much we begged. The big girls swore it was a Bible rule that nuns can't hug or kiss anybody, ever.

“Where
is
Evangeline?” I ask Joy. “You know every story in this place. Why can't you
talk
?”

I walk down the hall and turn on the chapel light. I am eye to eye with a statue of Mary with Baby Jesus on her arm. We learned endlessly about her devotion and how losing Him was unbearable. She swooned and grieved forever.

But not all mothers are named Mary, and not all mothers are alike.

I check the shed. Find nothing. Minutes later I wait for the bus in the same spot a different traveler waited yesterday. Did she just undo her headpiece and hop on the bus? Evangeline unhooked from the world. If Picasso painted
Nun before a Mirror
what would her reflection be? God frowning? Or offering His fingertip to touch?

This cement square is a popular spot to consider what you're giving up—your little girl? Your vows? Your home?

Just like Gone Mom, Evangeline made an
appointment
with the future that did not include the ropes and roots of the past.

Elliot James paces the art room, combing his hair with his fingers. He glances over when I come in. We both know my detentions are over now, that I only come here to look at the Picasso poster and talk with Mr. Howard.

Whatever his upsetness is about, it is very dramatic and includes huffing and clenched fists. I hope he doesn't plan to cut off his ear.

Out of my mouth pops this question: “What's bothering you?” He just stands there silent, supertall with no pencil or paintbrush, no handful of clay. “Well,
okay
. Why don't you
draw
what's bothering you?” I say. I like the idea, but I hate how I
sound.
I have a let's-get-this-over-with tone that's just like my mother.

Elliot shakes his head.
I know, I know. Everything I say is stupid, Elliot.
He bumps the door open, heads out to the track,
and runs. If I drew
him
he'd be a sprinting, tongue-tied stick figure with floppy hair. Drawing him would not help me understand him one bit better—one minute he's calling me stupid and the next he's drawing my portrait.

Mr. Howard comes in. He nods to me and once again rearranges the still life. “If kids have trouble drawing that thing I know why. It's boring as hell,” he says. “Plus, life doesn't stay still.” In his peripheral vision he catches Elliot running, gives me a puzzled look.

“I have no idea what's going on. It might not surprise you to know that he didn't tell me.”

“He's not big on small talk. He either talks
big
or nothing. He could use a bit of coaching in repartee, but the two of us
have
tiptoed into some interesting subject matter lately.” Mr. Howard smiles, then turns to the Picasso poster. “How's our girl with the mirror?”

“Busy,” I say, “trying to figure out who's staring back. Is it herself in the future, maybe, or her past or what?”

Mr. Howard studies the poster, his hands stacked on his broom handle. “Look there.” He points. “She's not just looking, she's
holding
that mirror.”

I squint. I'd missed it before, but Mr. Howard's right. The girl has both arms raised, hands gripping the frame. “So you think she's reaching out for her mother, maybe?”

He gives me a wide-eyed look, shakes his head. “Maybe. I knew
mine
, but I wouldn't know my father if
he spit in my face. I can't be ashamed of it. I had nothing to do with it.”

A nervous hum starts in me that turns into these words. “M . . . m . . . my parents were Chinese. I remember my mother, but not my birth father. He's a
phantom
.”

“Phantom,” Mr. Howard says. “Phan Tom. Sounds kinda Chinese, doesn't it?”

I smile. “Yeah, I guess. But Phan Tom was rotten no matter what I call him. He could have been a crook or a bum or the emperor of China or . . .”

“You ever try to locate him?”

“Never.”

“You think he might be deceased?” Mr. Howard says softly.

“He is to me.”

“We're alike then. We will never know the blood men who made us. Trying to be who you are, when you don't
know
who you are, is a hard go,” he adds. “But I do know some nice Chinese folks. I work for them evenings at the House of Chow.”

Air forms a boulder in my throat. I glance out at Elliot starting his second round of the track. “You know Mr. and Mrs. Chow?”

“I work there weekend nights. I love Chinese food! Don't you?”

“Well, I have eaten one-fourth of a fortune cookie, and
I've had hot tea, which is Chinese, or maybe it's Japanese . . . and then, uh . . .”
I have the worldly intelligence of a wart.

“The Chows live with prejudice every day,” Mr. Howard says. “They turned it into energy. They turned their Chinese heritage into a business. For Chinese New Year they serve long noodles for a long life and dumplings that look like little money pockets with pennies hidden inside for prosperity.” He shakes his head and smiles. “And of course there are the fresh dragon eggs.” Mr. Howard squats. “The mother dragon sits right on 'em in her nest in the kitchen. Tricky business collecting those eggs.” He goes back to sweeping the spot he just finished cleaning.

I think how my mother can turn any conversation into a ball of barbed wire and how Mr. Howard turns a loaded, tense topic like our birth fathers into fun. We watch Elliot circling the track. “He told me I was stupid for walking out of class that day, you know, when I got the detention. But
you
saluted me!”

Mr. Howard smiles, rubs his chin. “Yup. But I'm not so sure Elliot was calling you stupid, Miss Firestone. Maybe he was referring to the class.”

“Hmm . . .”

“Why don't you ask him?” Mr. Howard says. “It's real easy to start imagining things in other people.”

“But.”

“No. Hear me out. I know you weren't imagining what
happened in class. I saw it! I'm just saying that it is easy to make assumptions that everybody is against you when maybe they're not. But prejudice you internalize, turn against yourself, is the worst. It can get you so sunk inside you're unwilling to take a risk. Leaves you kinda”—he shrugs—“
cold
acting toward other people.”

“Unwilling to take what risk?”

“Caring about somebody else and letting it show. Feeling like you have something worth giving.”

We are quiet a long moment. “What do you tell your kids? Don't they get, you know, bothered by people who . . .”

“I hope they learn by watching my wife and me.” He turns. I see the exact moment it dawns on him that I don't have an example. All I feel is the weight of Donald Firestone on one shoulder and Vivian Firestone hooked to the other.

Elliot barges in the door steamy and panting. He waves to Mr. Howard. “Hey! How you doing?”

“Hungry. We're talking Chinese food. Chopsticks. Eel. That sort of thing. Lily says she likes her dragon eggs scrambled with a side of soy sauce.”

“Me too,” Elliot says. The track has absorbed all his angst or headache or diaper rash or whatever put him on edge.