The Home for Unwanted Girls

by Joanna Goodman

  “Do I look like them?” Elodie asks, wiping her eyes. “Your kids?”

  “I think there’s a resemblance,” Maggie says. “Would you like to meet them? I wasn’t sure.”

  “Of course,” Elodie interrupts. “All my life I’ve longed for a big family. Sisters and brothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins . . . Of course I want to meet them.”

  Maggie pulls Elodie into her arms and clings to her. Elodie lets Maggie hold her like that for a long time, until Maggie finally pulls away and stares into her daughter’s haunted eyes. She strokes her long blond hair and cups the girl’s chin in the palm of her hand. “You’re so beautiful,” she whispers.

  “No, I’m not,” Elodie says. “But you are. I never imagined you with black hair.”

  Maggie stands up and pulls Elodie to her feet. She leads her across the room to the mirror above the dresser, and they stand side by side, staring at their reflections. “There’s definitely a family resemblance,” Maggie says. “Not our coloring, but look here.” She points out their eyebrows and noses. “And the shape of our eyes is exactly the same.”

  “Maybe,” Elodie concedes, clearly unconvinced.

  “You look a bit like my sisters, too,” Maggie says. “I have three of them, and a brother. You wanted a big family, that’s what you’re getting.”

  Elodie hasn’t taken her eyes away from the mirror, as though she can’t quite believe what she’s seeing. “Is it really you?” she asks. “I’m afraid if I look away, you’ll be gone.”

  “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere,” Maggie assures her.

  Elodie reaches out and touches the mirror.

  “I know this is a lot to ask,” Maggie says, still looking straight ahead into the mirror. “But do you think you can ever forgive me?”

  Elodie hesitates before responding, taking her time to think about it. The silence is interminable. Finally, she says, “You were young. What else could you do? No one knows better than me that it’s a sin to have a baby out of wedlock.”

  “That’s more than I could have hoped for,” Maggie says. “Thank you.”

  Elodie leans her head on Maggie’s shoulder. Maggie doesn’t budge; she barely breathes. She wants to stay exactly like this as long as possible.

  “Maman,” Elodie says, and Maggie understands that she’s just saying the word out loud to test it, that no response is required. Maman.

  “I see your father in your face, too,” Maggie says softly. And then, after a few more minutes in the mirror, “Should we go back?”

  They leave the bedroom and go downstairs. Elodie approaches the chair where Gabriel is waiting for them. “Allô, Papa,” she says.

  Long after everyone has gone to sleep, Maggie climbs out of bed and creeps down the hall. She stops at James’s room to peek in on him, and she can see by the blue and green light of his lava lamp that his legs are dangling off the bed, his body rising and falling beneath his quilt. In the next room, she finds Stephanie sleeping horizontally across her bed, with her Raggedy Ann doll on the floor. Maggie picks it up, tucks it under Stephanie’s arm, and kisses the little girl’s warm cheek.

  Finally, Maggie reaches the end of the hall and stops outside the guest bedroom, where her other daughter—her firstborn—is spending the night. She stands there for a moment, overcome with emotion. Never would she have imagined all her children sleeping under one roof.

  She opens the door as quietly as possible and freezes when she hears the soft sobbing from inside. She considers going in to comfort Elodie, but quickly dismisses the idea. Elodie might prefer to be alone; she’s always been alone, after all. A stranger barging in on her in the middle of the night might make her uncomfortable. And Maggie is a stranger, mother or not. She has to remind herself of that. She has to remember to go slow.

  And so Maggie backs away and heads downstairs to the kitchen. She pours herself a glass of wine, lights one of Gabriel’s cigarettes, and sits down at the table. Her mind is wired. A welcome numbness has washed over her, subduing some of the intensity of the day’s events, but she can’t shut down her thoughts.

  What have I let happen to her? The question beats like a drum in her head.

  Elodie is upstairs crying into her pillow—how many tears has she already shed in her lifetime? how many nights has she cried herself to sleep? how deep are her wounds? how bereaved is her soul?—and all Maggie can do is sit here helplessly, knowing she is the cause of it.

  Her worst fear is that all the love in the world—which Maggie and Gabriel are prepared to give—can’t possibly be enough to neutralize what’s been done to Elodie or restore what’s been destroyed.

  Maggie gets up and grabs the bottle of wine from the fridge. May as well finish it. It’s the only one left over from dinner. They all drank too much. Part celebration, part tension reliever. She refills her glass and notices the box of her father’s things sitting on the floor by the pantry. She hauled it out the other day in anticipation of Elodie’s visit.

  She goes to it now and settles on the floor with her wine and her ashtray, and starts making neat piles of the contents—old agriculture books, business and inspirational books, cards and drawings his children gave him over the years.

  Someday she will tell Elodie about her grandfather, maybe even take her to the seed store, where he was larger than life. She would like Elodie to know that he was so much more than just the person who took her away from her mother, that he was fundamentally a good man trying to protect his own daughter. Over and over again, he attempted to redeem what he’d done, always with quiet, meaningful gestures that ultimately yielded fruit. First, he sent Elodie into the world with her name—a seemingly small detail, but momentous enough to have made their reunion possible; then he tried to get her back from the orphanage; and finally, he conceived of the ad that brought them back together.

  There’s really a perfect symmetry to it all, Maggie thinks, a sweet, symbiotic full circle that’s led them to this moment. Her mother used to say, The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.

  Maggie is reminded of that now. Her father took away, and then he gave.

  Your grandfather was known as the Seed Man . . .

  In spite of everything, Maggie has managed to turn out all right. She is a mother of three children—all of them here tonight in the house she loves so much; she is a wife, a lover of seeds and language, a French woman with English blood, an English woman with French blood. She is neither fully one thing nor another, as she’s always wanted to be. She is arrogant and humble, audacious and timid, alive. She is still growing and always will be.

  She pulls Elodie’s baby blanket and hospital bracelet out of the box, and then retrieves an elastic-bound stack of photographs. She lingers over them for a while, lost in bittersweet nostalgia, until she finds herself staring at a picture of her father standing in the middle of a garden she doesn’t recognize. He’s knee-deep in flowers, with a wooden rail fence behind him. He’s in his late thirties, wearing suspenders and a white Panama hat that conceals his premature baldness. He has a round face, a curly moustache, and he’s holding a cigar between his fingers. He looks content, as though there’s nowhere else on earth he’d rather be but in that garden, communing with nature in all its wild splendor.

  It’s an expression Maggie recognizes from when she used to observe him working at the seed store—fully and wholly in his element. A place Maggie has found herself in many times over the last few years, and where she knows she will be again.

  Chapter 56

  Elodie

  Elodie hears the door open and holds her breath. She knows it’s her mother. Her mother. Over and over again, she’s been repeating that word in her head. No longer some hypothetical idea or childhood delusion. Her mother is here to hold her in the dark, to wipe away her tears and take away her pain and terrors.

  “Maggie?” she whispers, but her voice is too meek, not quite loud enough.

  And as suddenly as the door opened, it closes, and Elodie can hear Mag
gie retreating down the stairs. Her heart sinks. Maggie must have heard Elodie crying and fled.

  Elodie lies very still. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been longing for her mother to comfort her. Even in a house full of people, in this pretty room with its floral wallpaper and grand brass bed and red patchwork quilt, she still feels frightened and strangely hollow. Resentment starts to bubble up inside her, and she reminds herself that for all their kind words and hospitality, she is probably just a nuisance to them.

  She wonders what it would have been like to grow up in this lovely, warm house full of love. That girl in there, Stephanie—her sister, the same age as Nancy, with her fat pink cheeks and her fearlessness and her happy disposition—will grow up with everything that was taken away from Elodie. It should have been me, she thinks, with a stab of acrimony. I came first.

  She lies there stewing for what feels like a very long time. She can hear the crickets outside, and it reminds her of her early years at Saint-Sulpice—a memory she’d forgotten until now. She used to love them chirping outside her window. There were no other sounds to drown them out, only the perfect silence of a country night. Sister Tata told her the chirping noise came from the males rubbing their wings together. How could she ever have forgotten that?

  She doesn’t fall asleep. How could she? All she wants is to go home to Nancy. She misses Nancy’s warm little body curled up against her, her sweet breath against her skin.

  And then the door opens again, and this time, Maggie enters the room. The floor creaks as she approaches the bed. Her weight on the edge of the mattress, her hand on Elodie’s damp cheek. “Elodie?” she whispers. “Do you want to be alone?”

  “No,” Elodie blurts, her voice childlike.

  “Good,” Maggie says. “I’m here.”

  Elodie reaches for her. “Don’t go,” she says, and as she listens to Maggie’s heartbeat, she feels the bitterness fade.

  “Of course not,” Maggie promises. “I wasn’t sure you wanted me.”

  “I’ve always wanted you.”

  Maggie settles in beside her and rests her head against a propped-up pillow.

  “Will you write my story?” Elodie asks her. “Will you tell it exactly the way it happened?”

  “Yes,” Maggie answers without having to give it any thought. “Of course I will.”

  “And will it be published?”

  “Absolutely,” she says, knowing it will. She will fight for that; Godbout will help her if need be. The idea feels as right as anything she’s ever set her mind to.

  “We have to do it soon,” Elodie says. “I want it to be published while Sister Ignatia is still at Saint-Nazarius. And I want you to use her real name, and for us to bring it to her in person.”

  “Yes,” Maggie agrees, her heart racing with excitement. The prospect of a new project that will require them to work together for many months—their lives intertwined, their connection deepening—while at the same time outing Elodie’s abuser is exhilarating.

  “Thank you,” Elodie says. “I’ll give you my notebook to start. I’ve written absolutely everything in it.”

  “Maybe you could live here with us while we work on it,” Maggie suggests. “I don’t want to pressure you, but Stephanie and Nancy are about the same age . . .”

  Elodie can’t quite believe the offer. “Nancy would love it here in the country,” she says. “It must be a beautiful place to grow up.”

  “And you could be home with her,” Maggie says. “At least until she starts school, and then there would always be a job for you at my store.”

  “It sounds nice,” Elodie says, thinking about her apartment in Pointe Saint-Charles and Len’s Deli, and how much she would miss working there.

  “I don’t want to overwhelm you,” Maggie adds. “We have all the time in the world for you to decide.” She puts her arms around Elodie and strokes her hair. They lie like that for a long time, wide-awake in the dark.

  “I’ll never sleep tonight,” Elodie says.

  “When I was little, my father used to recite this poem to help me fall asleep,” Maggie whispers softly.

  “Tell it to me,” Elodie says.

  “Let me see if I can remember it. ‘Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed . . .’” she begins, using the French translation, Jean Pépin-de-Pomme.

  In that pack on his back

  In that talisman sack

  Tomorrow’s peaches, pears, and cherries,

  Tomorrow’s grapes and red raspberries,

  Seeds and tree-souls, precious things,

  Feathered with microscopic wings . . .

  Elodie closes her eyes. Maybe I’ve died, she thinks. The feelings inside her are too good, unfamiliar. There’s sadness, too, of course. This she accepts as the most natural, inevitable aspect of her life. Sadness lives in her cells, alongside her sense of injustice and outrage toward Sister Ignatia and God. These things cannot be transcended. They are as much a part of her being as her limbs and her organs and Nancy. But tonight there’s something else: hope.

  She has a family now, at the helm of which is a beautiful, living, breathing mother. A mother who wants to be in her life, who tried to find her more than once and wants forgiveness and a second chance; a mother who was forced to give her up and then tried to get her back.

  Elodie can live with that. She will never get those twenty-four years back—she knows she will carry the burden of her past for as long as she is alive—but at least now she has a future as part of a family.

  “‘All the outdoors the child heart knows, and the apple, green, red, and white,’” Maggie continues. “‘Sun of his day and his night, the apple allied to the thorn, child of the rose—’”

  Elodie doesn’t understand the poem. She doesn’t need to. Nothing is diminished by the not knowing.

  Acknowledgments

  Much of the insight I gained into the emotional story of the Duplessis orphans came from Pauline Gill’s magnificent book, Les Enfants de Duplessis (Quebec Loisirs Inc., 1991). The heartbreaking true story of Alice Quinton helped me to understand the physical, spiritual, and emotional toll these orphans endured throughout their lives, long after they were freed. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Alice Quinton for sharing her story with Pauline Gill, and for her candor, honesty, courage, and resilience.

  My biggest debt of gratitude is to the one and only Billy Mernit, my mentor and first reader-slash-editor extraordinaire: without your vision and insight as to what the real story was—and challenging me to tell Elodie’s story—this book would still be in my drawer. Twenty years in the making, it took your gift for storytelling and editing to steer me in the right direction. Again. I’ve said it before, every writer should have a Billy.

  Another enormous thank you to my resilient, relentless, beloved agent and friend, Bev Slopen, whom I met twenty years ago when I showed her the very first version of this manuscript. We’ve toiled on the “Seed Man” together, on and off, for two decades, and you never ever fired me! I am so blessed that you’ve stood by me all these years. Not many agents would. I think we are officially family now.

  Thank you SO VERY MUCH to Jennifer Barth, my magnificent editor at HarperCollins. I feel so blessed to have your support and guidance, and it’s always a delight to work with you. Again, thank you for taking such good care of this book in particular—it means everything to me. You set it free with its new title and all your brilliant insights, and allowed it to soar above and beyond what I ever hoped it could be.

  Thank you to the most wonderful marketing team ever, both at HarperCollins US and Canada: Mary Sasso, Katherine Beitner, Sabrina Groomes, Cory Beatty, Leo Macdonald, and Sandra Leef. The past year has been full of excitement, surprises and joy, truly. I can’t wait to see where this one brings us.

  To my “live-in” editor and best friend, Miguel, let me copy and paste the last book’s acknowledgements (they still apply): thank you for picking up the kids and driving them all over the city and basically taking care of my enti
re life, so I can continue to be The Writer. I love you. Jessie and Luke, you didn’t contribute much to the process, but your snuggles helped. A lot.

  Finally, thank you to my mother, Peggy, the inspiration for Maggie. All those interviews and long talks, everything you shared with me about your childhood in Montreal, all your feedback and read-throughs, have finally come to fruition. I only wish you were here to experience our book finally coming into the world. I’m just going to assume that you are, somewhere. I miss you.

  About the Author

  JOANNA GOODMAN lives in Toronto with her husband and two children. Originally from Montreal, she based The Home for Unwanted Girls in part on the story of her mother. She is also the author of The Finishing School.

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  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  the home for unwanted girls. Copyright © 2018 by Joanna Goodman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.