Girl in Reverse (9781442497368)

by Stuber, Barbara

  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.”

  Chapter 13

  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,” Evangelin
e 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.

  Chapter 14

  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.

  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 n
ote 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?