And she disappears.
Chapter 18
Maggie
Maggie digs her hands deep into the soil and breathes in the smell of dirt, a smell she still associates with her father’s store. She can practically hear his voice as clearly as if he were standing beside her. Forget using a trowel and plant the bulbs deep, at least nine or ten inches for tulips and daffodils.
She always follows his instructions to a T. As a result, her garden is the pride of Knowlton. The depth will keep the roots cool and moist during our hot dry spring. Now mulch the bed with bonemeal and bulb fertilizer.
It’s 1959 and Maggie is almost nine weeks pregnant. Having already had two miscarriages, both around eight weeks, she’s reluctant to get her hopes up this time.
The miscarriages feel like retribution for having given away her firstborn. Since Maggie started trying to have a baby, Elodie has been constantly in her thoughts.
She’s nine years old now, no longer a baby. It’s strange imagining her growing up somewhere possibly nearby, a complete stranger. Maggie can’t stop wondering what sort of girl she is, whom she looks like. Gabriel? Yvon? Blond or dark? Plump or slender? Optimistic, charming, sullen, or sad?
After the second miscarriage, Violet said, “Maybe something got damaged when you had your baby.”
Her mother said, “Maybe God is punishing you.”
Both hypotheses are plausible. Motherhood—which so far has proven to be frustratingly out of her reach—seems to be the singular prerequisite for feeling valued as a woman or being of any worth whatsoever in the world. If she can’t get this right, it’s hopeless.
Her life these days is spent traveling back and forth between two grand homes—both beautifully decorated, both lonely. Roland bought the country house in Knowlton after the first miscarriage, hoping it would cheer her up or at least give her a project. She still works at Simpson’s, but she hasn’t been promoted yet.
Roland works long hours, and Maggie is alone most of the time. Even on weekends, he drives into the city to spend time at the bank, leaving her by herself to rattle around the house. She tries to ignore her percolating resentment—she knows he doesn’t want to be around her sadness—but it doesn’t work. Roland, in spite of all his assurances and promises of compromise at the beginning, has turned out to be slyly inflexible.
Still on her knees, Maggie reaches for the hose and tenderly sprays her flowers. Gardening is meditative for her. This season she planted creeping vincas, which have spread across the rocks like pink carpet. She’s got vivid phlox and gentians and geraniums, and spectacular running strawberry bushes along the sides of the stone walkway. She’s not afraid to try unexpected things. Sometimes they exceed her vision; other times they fail miserably. No matter what, she loves her garden.
Some nights, long after Roland has fallen asleep beside her, she sneaks outside to inspect her work. She’ll stand here, with her bare feet planted in the dewy grass, admiring her beloved annuals and perennials. It’s the garden her father has always dreamed of making as soon as he can take some time off work. He has notes about all the unique and breathtaking bulbs he’d plant; detailed sketches that include perches where he could sit among his flowers; elaborate plans for a stone birdbath, a fountain, a pond full of frogs. He’s always dreamed of languid days in which he would do nothing but garden. His office is still full of old plans, lists of potential flowers—brilliant bluebirds, lavender Canterbury bells, snow-in-summer—but he’s never had the time. Not with the store and the catalogue and the mail-order. He always complains he’s too busy with other people’s gardens to have his own, but Maggie suspects he derives more pleasure from the planning and the daydreaming than he would from actually working on the damn garden.
After an hour of toiling in the soil, Maggie stands up. The cramps start the moment she gets to her feet. Back down she goes, doubled over in the grass. She can feel hot blood between her legs even before she sees it on her white shorts.
She stays there for a long time, lying in the grass. Too numb to cry, too devastated to move. Roland eventually comes home and finds her staring up at the sky.
“Maggie? Dear?” He crouches down beside her. “What happened? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Were you gardening?” he asks, his tone accusatory. “Did you overexert yourself? You were to take it easy—”
“You make it sound like I’m doing it on purpose!”
Roland’s lips are pursed. “You were just supposed to . . . You weren’t supposed to push yourself . . .”
“It’s not my fault.”
“No,” he says quickly. “Of course not. It’s just another setback.”
“This is the third one.”
“We’ll go to a doctor,” he says. “We’ll get you looked after. We shall not give up.”
Comforting words. Heroic. We shall not give up! At least it’s something she can latch on to.
A few days later, Maggie finds herself staring at the telephone. She’s wanted to do this for months, maybe even years. With a sudden burst of courage, she reaches for the receiver and dials. “Connect me to the foundling home in Cowansville, please,” she tells the operator.
“One moment,” the operator says, her voice crisp and neutral. Maggie lights a cigarette, exhaling into her coffee.
Within seconds, another woman comes on the line. “Good Shepherd Sisters,” she says pleasantly. “This is Sister Maeve.”
Nothing comes out of Maggie’s mouth. She’s staring into the mouthpiece as though it’s a foreign object.
“Good Shepherd,” the nun repeats. “Hello?”
“Hello, Sister,” Maggie manages, with the appropriate amount of humility and respect in her voice.
“How can I help you, dear?”
Kindness. Maggie relaxes. “I’m looking for information about a little girl,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” the nun responds, her tone changing. “I can’t help you.”
“Well, but she’s my daughter.”
“If you had a baby and she’s here, then she’s not your daughter. Unfortunately, you have no rights in this province, dear.”
“But I’m her mother.”
“Best forget her. You understand if she’s illegitimate, you’ve no rights? That’s the law.”
“I’m not even asking you to tell me where she is,” Maggie says. “I just want to make sure she’s been adopted—”
“The records are sealed,” the nun says. “No one here or at any orphanage in Quebec can give you any information. Pray for forgiveness, child—”
“Please. I’d be so grateful for anything you can tell me,” Maggie begs, the receiver trembling in her hand. “I only want to know if she was adopted so I can stop worrying she’s wound up in an asylum—”
She holds her breath, waiting for Sister Maeve to tell her to forget it and move on. The nun sighs. “Do you know the date of birth?”
The question catches Maggie off guard. She hadn’t really expected to get anywhere. “March 6, 1950,” she says, her voice shaky.
“And the day she was brought here?”
“The same.”
“Hold on, please.”
Maggie tries to stay calm. Deep breath, deep breath. Her heart is hammering her chest. Sister Maeve is gone for a long time, at least ten or fifteen minutes.
“No infant girl was ever brought here that day,” she says, returning at last.
“What about the next day?” Maggie asks, confused.
“No babies arrived here in March of 1950,” she says. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong foundling home.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is there another one in the area? Close to Frelighsburg?”
“The closest I know would be in Sherbrooke,” she says. “And a good deal of unwanted newborns go to Montreal.”
Unwanted newborns.
“I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, dear. God bless.”
The line goes dead.
Maggie doesn’t move for a long time. She lights another cigarette off the last one. Deda told her that her father took the baby to the foundling home in Cowansville. Why isn’t there a record of Elodie’s arrival?
Maggie impulsively reaches for the telephone and calls her father at work. “Where did you take my baby?” she asks him.
“Maggie?”
“I spoke to someone at the Good Shepherd foundling home,” she says, vibrating with adrenaline. “Deda told me that’s where you took her, but there’s no record of a baby girl that or any day in March.”
“They told you that?”
“Yes.”
“It’s illegal for them—”
“Where did you take her, Daddy?”
“Calm down,” he says. “You shouldn’t be dredging this up, especially now. You’re pregnant.”
Maggie squeezes back tears. She hasn’t told her parents about the latest miscarriage. “Where did you take her?” she repeats.
“I took her to the foundling home in Cowansville,” he answers, his tone rising. “Just as your aunt told you. Which she shouldn’t have, by the way.”
“And I told you no infant arrived there that day.”
“Where else would I have taken her?” he asks. “I’ve got nothing to gain by lying, Maggie. That’s where all illegitimate babies were brought. There wasn’t exactly an abundance of choice in the matter.”
“You didn’t take her to Sherbrooke? Or Montreal?”
“I did not.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe there was an error, Maggie. I doubt very much their records are foolproof. In any case, you have to put the past behind you. You’re lucky to have such a good situation now.” She can hear men’s voices in the background. “I have customers,” her father says. “I have to go. Focus on the baby you’re carrying now. The other one is a dead end.”
Chapter 19
Elodie
1959
Elodie tries to lift her head off her pillow, but it feels like bricks. The pill they give her at night turns her into a zombie the next day. She rarely feels awake. Instead, the world unfolds through a foggy slow-motion filter. She knows from the nuns that the pill they give all the patients is called Largactil. Some of the older girls in Ward B call it the lobotomy pill. Even though Elodie is only nine, she already knows what a lobotomy is from a girl named Nora. Nora was transferred from the epileptic ward last spring. When she arrived at Ward B, Elodie wasted no time asking her about Emmeline.
“She hasn’t spoken since the lobotomy,” Nora said matter-of-factly.
“What’s a lobotomy?” Elodie wanted to know.
“It’s when they stick an ice pick into the front of your brain to make you less violent,” Nora explained. “They do it all the time at the surgery.”
Elodie gasped, not believing it could be true. She ran to Sister Alice—the only semihumane nun on the ward—and tugged at her habit. “Is it true they stick ice picks in patients’ heads to stop them from being violent?” she asked, breathless.
“What are you babbling about, Elodie?”
“Nora told me Emmeline hasn’t spoken since she had the lob . . . lob . . . the thing where they make a hole in your head—”
Sister Alice sighed. “A lobotomy is a perfectly respectable operation,” she explained. “With the dangerous patients, there’s no other choice.”
“But Emmeline wasn’t dangerous—”
“If you mind your business and stay out of trouble,” she warned, “you won’t need to get one.”
That afternoon, Nora was chained to a pipe because of her “big mouth.” She blamed Elodie and never spoke to her again, right up till she was transferred to another ward.
Elodie lies motionless on her cot, still groggy and dry-mouthed. In some ways, she’s grateful for the Largactil. Although she hates how it makes her feel during the day—slow and foggy and dim-witted—it does dull the pain immediately before falling asleep and upon awakening. In those few minutes of docile stupefaction, when her thoughts are a blur and her mind barely conscious, she can forget. Everything has a hallucinatory quality—the other patients, the nuns, the hopelessness of her incarceration. The Largactil at least neutralizes the despair for a while.
I’m not crazy, she reminds herself. I’m not crazy.
The lights go on and the girls rise from their beds. They shuffle to the washroom, brush their teeth, and splash cold water on their faces, trying to shake off the effects of the drug. The best that can be said about Elodie’s days at Saint-Nazarius is that she doesn’t mind her current job sewing bedsheets in the basement. Her first job was cleaning the bathrooms on all the women’s wards. Floor upon floor, toilet after toilet, she did that for the better part of a year. When she heard from one of the other girls that there was a job sewing, she lied and said she knew how. Somehow, she got away with it. By observing the other sewers—and with the help of one of the old-timers, a kind epileptic named Marigot—she was able to pick it up fast enough to keep her job. Apparently, she has a knack.
After breakfast and prayers, Elodie makes her way down to the basement—her refuge—and sits down at the sewing machine. It doesn’t bother her to sit for hours at a time without a break; the back pain is a luxury compared to how scrubbing floors and toilets made her body ache. Besides, there are worse jobs, like carrying the dead bodies out to the cemetery behind the hospital. Patients die at Saint-Nazarius almost every day—not just the old ones, but children, too. Word travels fast through the wards, filtering down from the older girls to the younger ones. In this place full of secrets, there are no secrets.
She gets to work sewing her quota for the morning—a dozen sheet hems an hour, two dozen by lunch break—letting her mind wander to the hum of the machine. She loses count of the sheets as they pile up beside her, but somehow the correct amount always gets done. Sister Calvert’s bell clanging next to her ear startles her out of her daze.
So goes the monotonous routine of her days. Lunch is some kind of brown meat drowned in thick, clotted gravy. Dessert is always a smudge of molasses on the plate. Afterwards, it’s back down to the basement, where she is expected to meet her afternoon quota—the threat of a transfer always looms—followed by more indiscernible mush for dinner and then back to her ward to rock mindlessly in the creaky chairs with the real crazies.
By nighttime, when the nun on duty stops at her bed to dole out the Largactil, Elodie takes it with a mix of dread and relief. She’s grown to like it when her lids get heavy and her head starts to float, the precise moment when reality falls away.
Tonight, her last conscious thought before peaceful oblivion is, Oh, there’s the moon.
She wakes up shivering and disoriented, her bed soaking wet. It’s still dark and everyone is asleep. She’s aware of a pungent vinegar smell. It takes her a few minutes to realize she’s peed the bed.
For a long time, she lies in her own urine, contemplating how she’s going to navigate the maze of beds to the bathroom. Her row is the farthest from it, and she’s still semidrugged. When she finally has a strategy mapped out in her mind, she slides off her cot, strips the sheets, and rolls them into a ball.
She creeps carefully along the narrow space between the wall and the first row of cots, but she’s still very groggy. Her legs aren’t doing what they’re supposed to—they feel like cooked noodles—and the room is spinning. The Largactil is powerfully immobilizing, but she uses the wall to steady herself. What she hadn’t counted on was the strewn boot sticking out from under one of the cots.
The boot is supposed to be in the cubbyhole at the entrance to the dormitory; every girl has her own cubby—a small shelf above a hook to keep her precious few belongings—but leave it to Elodie to trip over a stray boot and go flying across the room. Had she been more alert, she might have been able to stop herself from falling so hard; instead, she reaches out for something to hold on to and winds up knocking over one of
the metal nightstands. The nightstand and the lamp go crashing to the floor, the glass of the bulb shattering around her.
She can hear some of the other girls rousing. What’s happening? Who’s there? The light suddenly comes on, and Elodie is momentarily blinded. Her knees hurt and she can see she’s bleeding from the broken bulb.
When she looks up, Sister Ignatia is towering above her, frowning. Short and stocky as she is, from Elodie’s vantage point on the floor, the nun is a giant. “What happened?” she roars.
“I had to go to the bathroom,” Elodie murmurs. “I couldn’t see.”
“It smells like you already went to the bathroom.”
Elodie tries to hide the wet sheets with her body.
“You’ve woken everyone up.”
“It was an accident,” Elodie says. “I tripped over someone’s boot.”
“Are you trying to get someone else in trouble?”
“No, Sister. It was an accident.”
“You should have been more careful.”
Elodie can’t hold back a rogue sob that escapes her lips.
“Go wait for me in the bathroom,” Sister Ignatia tells her. “And take off that soiled nightgown.”
“But I didn’t see the boot!” Elodie cries, unable to control herself. “This isn’t fair!”
“Fair?” Sister Ignatia says, her lips pulling into a frightening smile. “May I remind you that you are a patient in my hospital? I am your judge, and I judge not only your transgressions today, but all of your sins, as well as the sins of your parents. Now go and wait for me in the bathroom.”
Elodie scrambles to her feet and scurries off to the bathroom. She removes her nightgown and stuffs it into the sink with her sheets, running hot water over the whole pile. Shivering and exposed, she wraps her arms around her bare chest and crouches down to generate some body warmth.
The Home for Unwanted Girls Page 12
