Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (9 page)

I study the row of coat hooks. Only two occupied. Sister and I lock eyes. Hers are greenish and tired looking. A wave of longing seems to move between us. “I've kept up with you, Lily. I know you have a brother and that you do well in school. I . . .” She stops. Maybe she can tell she'll knock me flat with another word.

“Yes . . . Ralph is m—my little brother.”

She nods. A black kitten pads toward us, weaves around my ankles and the folds of Evangeline's habit. “This is Joy. Black cats are better than white ones around nuns,” she says. “Her mother, Mystery, lived here when you did. Cats make good pets for a home where so many come and go. They don't miss a thing and their purr is the perfect lullaby, at least for some.”

I pick up Joy and scratch her ears and, of all the insane
things, wonder if Mother will find cat hair on my coat and figure out where I've been. “Who lives here now?” I ask.

“Just Sister Immaculata and me and Joy.”

Joy jumps out of my arms and curls up on the bottom stair. Sister Evangeline sits at the desk and I sit beside Joy. The entry hall fills with old sounds—clattering shoes, recited prayers, the dinnertime bell, laughter.

“I remember Nancy the best,” I say. “She was an orphan too, a fifth grader. I was her ‘charge.' ” I picture Nancy's smiling mouth full of teeth too big for her face.

“Yes, she took good care of you.”

I glance into the visitors' room, with the same doilies and dish of stale butterscotch candy.

“Is your school out?” Evangeline asks.

“No. I called in sick but . . .”

Sister Evangeline's eyebrows shoot up. “We nuns are familiar with managing secrets.”

“I was wondering how long I lived here.”

“About a year, Lily.”

“Is that long for an orphan?”

“No. Some children aren't ever placed.” She looks off.

I stare ahead and say the lines I have rehearsed. “I found a box of my belongings from my birth mother, Lien Loo, in the attic at home and I wondered if there might be anything else?”

Sister Evangeline sniffs, blinks, reblinks, and stands up.
She seems trapped by her wimple, unable to scratch her head or comb her fingers through her hair or even tug her collar. She folds her hands—grips them, actually. I remember her strong hands—the look of them, not the touch.

“Or if there's something I should know. The pictures in the box she left for me are awful. . . .” I cover my face. Tears slide between my fingers and onto my coat.

I hear Sister Evangeline sigh, but she doesn't say a word.

“She was definitely Chinese, wasn't she, my birth mother?” I say.

“Yes, and a very determined young woman, as I recall.”

“Sh—she wasn't married, right?”

“That is correct, Lillian.”

“So she was alone when she brought me here?”

Sister stands, leans on her fists on the desk. “Yes. And she was very much alone when she left.”

Evangeline's nun-ness verifies Gone Mom's realness somehow. The strong, upswept
pillar
of Sister Evangeline would not lie. She locks her attention on her desk calendar, clears her throat. “I will check regarding your additional belongings. Come back a week from today,
after
school. Policy dictates that all belongings go with the child, but occasionally . . .” Something ripples behind her words. She grimaces and nods slightly as if concluding a conversation with herself and says, “A complicated past is best understood a bit at a time.”

On Saturday morning I walk across the track and practice field with no plan, pulled by the lights in the art room. Hopefully Mr. Howard is here. He sees me out the window and waves, pushes the door open. “Did you forget something else?” he asks.

“Uh . . . yeah.” I freeze. Elliot James is here too! He glances up from his drawing table. They've got a bakery box of doughnuts. The steam from their coffee thermoses fills the air.

“Miss Firestone, in case you hadn't noticed, Elliot does not sleep. He is a drawing machine.” Mr. Howard sweeps his hand, grinning. “The world doesn't grow trees fast enough to keep him supplied in paper.” Mr. Howard brushes crumbs into his dustpan. “He's gonna be real famous—actually he already is.”

“Okay, enough of the commercial,” Elliot says.

“I guess
I'm
a sweeping machine,” says Mr. Howard, “and of course my bucket and broom are gonna be real famous someday too.” They look over at me, as if I should grab a doughnut and join the game, tell what kind of machine I am, how I'll be famous someday. But I stand there like a toadstool with nothing but orphan cat hair stuck to my coat. Mr. Howard checks the wall clock.
Don't leave, Mr. Howard. Please don't leave.

“Well, gotta go to
work
. Pull that door, will ya?” He taps Elliot's shoulder and is gone.

Elliot's voice seems to have walked out with Mr. Howard. He does not ask why I'm here on a Saturday. I have no idea either, except the world tilted funny and rolled me in the door.

“I—I couldn't find my protractor last night,” I stutter. “I thought I might have left it in here.”
Last night—spending Friday night hunting down my protractor?

Elliot says, “So . . . getting back to Picasso . . . he wants
us
to make our own sense of his paintings. He starts it and we finish it.” He points to the
Girl before a Mirror
. “What do you see?”

“She's got two faces in one. The profile's white, and the full face is yellow. One face split into two.” My mouth has not tripped and somersaulted. It has just performed a miracle—uttered the truth, plain and simple.

“Yeah, but if you let your eyes go blurry they combine into one.”

I soften my focus and the miracle happens—the girl's two faces blend, then separate into the yellow side and white side, and then meld together again.

Elliot flips to a blank page on his tablet. “Face me a minute,” he orders, all business. “Now turn to the side. Now back.”

He works fast, looking from me to his paper, then back at me. “Now the side again.” He chews his lip. His pencil scrapes the newsprint with confident-sounding strokes. Elliot turns his sketch to me. “See? Drawing works if you need to understand something. Two perspectives, two sides mixed.”

I squint at the shading on the sides of my nose and chin, and the upward curve in my cheeks. My lips are open, as if I'm about to speak. My eyes look focused on something intriguing that's just outside the picture.

It looks like me, but better. Much better.

Elliot lifts the corner of the paper like he might tear it off, then stops.
Are you going to give it to me?
“Still needs work,” he remarks, I guess to himself. He takes a deep breath and shuts his tablet on my face.

*  *  *

Wednesday after school Evangeline opens the orphanage door before I ring the bell. Sister Immaculata dozes in a rocker
in the living room, the baptismal stole she's mending draped over her lap. It has replaced the babies she used to rock in that very chair. She taught me how to do it—cradle the head and keep the swaddle tight. I used it on Ralphie when he was freshly home from the hospital, barely two weeks old. I taught the technique to Mother. She'd never held an infant before, but I had, lots of times.

Sister Evangeline hurries me to the kitchen and shuts the door. Unless it's hidden in the bread box, I do not see a belonging from my pagan past anywhere. I start to remove my coat, but she says to keep it on. She checks the clock, motions me to a kitchen stool. “The transfer sisters will be here any minute.” She's tense and businesslike today. Maybe she's sorry I came.

“Transfer sisters?”

“New residents. Retired teachers. One is allergic to cats,” she remarks, putting a saucer of milk on the floor for Joy. Sister's ring flashes in the fluorescent light—a wide silver band with an incised crucifix. Nuns are brides of Christ, a
marriage
of commitment.

I have no idea why we are waiting for the transfer sisters, but that is exactly what we are doing. As much as I want my mystery belonging, if there is one, I grab the chance to ask something I'm dying to know. “How does it work when a couple wants to adopt a child?” This is a safe version of the question I really want answered, which is why Donald
and Vivian Firestone picked
me
, out of all the orphans to choose from. There were thirty occupied beds in the little girls' dorm, plus the cribs.

“If a child was adoptable, then I . . . well, each match was unique.” She appears to be reliving something. “On rare occasions the child picked the parents.”

“Did you learn the stories, why mothers brought their children to be adopted in the first place?”

“It wasn't always the mother. Regardless, I didn't ask, but it was frequently offered. The young women needed so desperately to explain themselves. They were so often ashamed, overwhelmed, and distraught. They just couldn't go on.”

I inch toward Gone Mom. Evangeline must feel it too. “Did you think the girls who had babies, you know, and left them here were
bad 
?”

“Are you wondering if I thought they'd sinned and required forgiveness?”

“Well, yes, that they were, you know . . . that my birth mother might go to . . . hell.” The air tightens around us. “That she was deprived of her relationship to God.”

Sister Evangeline straightens her back. “The God
I
believe in doesn't punish people, Lillian.”

Really?
An impossible thought lights my mind, then blurts out of my mouth. “Y . . . you mean you pick your own . . .
God 
? Not the
real
one?”

Sister Evangeline's words gain conviction as she talks.
“I pick forgiveness and compassion and grace and second chances. Women who bear children they can't raise should not be condemned. And women who can't bear children shouldn't feel they have failed God.”

“So you don't believe in . . .
hell
?”

“I've known many young women who think hell is where they live on earth.” Sister Evangeline folds her hands on the countertop, her face like
The Thinker
's.
Amen.

I recall Ralph's Catholic sister philosophy: Don't push nuns. They won't budge. They're half mule. Ralph should know. The teachers at Our Lady of Sorrows dig in their hooves whenever they see him coming.

We hear the front door and voices. Evangeline grabs her coat on a hook by the back door and practically yanks me outside.

I follow her across the frozen side yard to a shed—a place that used to terrify me because wasps floated around their nests in the rafters. Without a word we slip in the door. She pulls the chain on the light—a single hanging bulb dimmed by dust.

Sister Evangeline stands under it in her habit. The dusky shed takes shape as my eyes adjust. Dead vines rustle around the black oilcloth window covers. A lawn mower and rakes and hoes fill one corner. There are stacks of apple-gathering baskets and shelves full of coffee cans and tools. It smells of dust and dry grass.

Did Gone Mom leave me a wheelbarrow or a bucket of nails?

“I believe everything of importance,” Evangeline says, “a move, or an opening of the heart, or a birth, requires a
gestational
period, a critical time for development. To everything there is a season.”

But I am not waiting nine more months. It's already been thirteen years.

Sister Evangeline takes a cardboard container the size of a recipe box off the shelf. She stares at it as if she's forgotten I'm here. I reach out, then withdraw my hand. She's obviously not ready to let go.

“It's from your birth mother. Extremely fragile,” she says, her voice husky.

Oh, God.
I want to ask if she left any instructions or a message, but the look on Sister Evangeline's face stops me cold.
She
looks fragile, about to crack. We stand together, shivering. “I'll be very careful,” I say, my heart drumming as I take the box. It's light as air.

“Open it at home. Not here and not on the bus. Use a pillow.”

I glance up at her and nod. She holds my gaze a long moment, and then looks into the rafters, blinking away tears. A strange loneliness seems to have settled over her, over both of us. “I'll come back and visit,” I say.

“I'm quite concerned for Joy,” she says, looking off. Her cheeks are pale. She stands so tall and regal, armored
in her habit, the bulb spreading light over her. She raises two fingers in a blessing. “John chapter eight, verse thirty-two . . . know the
whole
truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Then Sister Evangeline steps around and pushes the door open for me. I walk outside bewildered, but she doesn't.

I skirt Ralph shoveling in the backyard and creep upstairs as if I'm transporting a bubble under my coat. No one else is home.

I place the box on my pillow, shut my eyes, and take a breath. In a moment I will touch the secret of Gone Mom. It will explain the pictures and the wrist rest and the camels. And me. This will be a message directly from
her
to
me
.

I pull the string knowing that she tied it, wishing I didn't have to undo something she did. The cardboard is dark, stained. I work the lid off.

Inside is cloth—powder-blue silk with a swirling design of dragons. They are not fire-breathing dragons, but cute, with pug noses and big eyes. They are playing tag in heaven. I work my fingers down the inside of the box and pull out the blob of fabric. I try to believe it smells like Gone Mom's
incense, but it's just old and musty. There's something hard inside. As I unroll the cloth a miniature Cinderella slipper tumbles into the palm of my hand. It's thin as an eggshell and no longer than my pinkie finger. I hold it up to my lamp. I can see light through the delicate ceramic. I could crush it just looking at it too hard. But no foot, even a newborn's, would fit it. It's not a baby bootie or even a doll shoe, because the toe is molded up at a funny right angle, creating a fan-shaped bumper. The slipper is packed with shredded silk that I'm afraid to remove for fear the whole thing will crumble in my hand.