Back on Highway 20, the opera was on now. Today it was La Bohème, but it was nothing Julia wanted to hear. She fell to thinking about the place where they were headed, and what had happened there. Even if they found that the baby really had died, there was no question in Julia’s mind by now that Milo and Joyce Shelburn had been up to no good.
She had already compiled a list of adjectives for them: hypocritical, greedy, oppressive, authoritarian, and of course pious and virtuous in their most negative sense. And villainous. Julia’s words, all of them. None came from Carmen. Her word was a mild one: strict.
Though Carmen had believed them in the end, the things she told were more than enough to let Julia know what they were really like. More than anything, it was the pressure they had brought to bear on the girl, when she wouldn’t commit to adoption, that convinced Julia they were not to be trusted.
The Shelburns had a speech they gave over and over. It would be unfair to the baby to have a single girl like Carmen for a parent, someone without a home or a job or a car. How was she going to take care of it, feed it, clothe it, get it to the doctor when it was sick? What kind of life could she give a child? And so forth. And think of all the good Christian couples who wanted a baby but couldn’t have one—how unfair to deprive them.
Unfair to the baby, unfair to the childless couples, but never a word about the unfairness of taking a baby away from her mother. They weren’t used to “balky girls.” That was what Milo had told Carmen.
They had narrowed the choice of adoptive couples to four, whom they claimed to be “good matches,” which Carmen thought was odd since she had told them so little about herself and nothing at all about the father. They magnanimously told her she could have the final word about which couple got the baby, but she kept saying no, she couldn’t meet with any of them yet, she needed more time.
But the strongest evidence in Julia’s opinion had to do with the papers Carmen wouldn’t sign. “You know, the ones agreeing to an adoption,” she had said when Julia questioned her. “They kept trying, and I kept saying the same thing—I had to pray about it some more. And Milo kept saying I didn’t need to pray about a promise, which I didn’t remember ever making in the first place.”
Julia didn’t know much about adoption, but one thing she did know was that papers like that were signed by a birth mother only after a child was born, never before. And she was pretty sure the mother usually had a certain amount of time even after signing to change her mind. Poor, young, ignorant pregnant girls wouldn’t necessarily know this, however.
If she didn’t agree to place the baby, they told Carmen, she would have to pay them back for room and board and medical care. Another way to pressure a girl who didn’t know better. They kept reminding her, too, of the money they would give her when she left—without the baby—to help her start a new life.
All of this, and yet Carmen had taken their lie to be true. All because they had acted sympathetic when they told her the baby had died. Incredible.
It was almost beyond belief that things like this could happen today, especially in a liberal, progressive state like Massachusetts, which surely must have watchdogs to keep adoption agencies honest. But perhaps it was also true that those who knew the adoption laws best were also best equipped to circumvent them, to resort to duping if a girl refused to cooperate.
• • •
ON the radio, a tenor was singing an aria now. Julia turned it down. She was curious about something. “Why didn’t you just leave the Shelburns’ house and ask someone else for help?” she asked the girl.
Carmen looked puzzled. “Well . . . it never crossed my mind to leave,” she said.
“Why? You weren’t happy there,” Julia said.
Carmen shrugged. “But I didn’t blame that on them. I got used to living there. They weren’t . . . malicious. They didn’t beat me or anything. They let me take walks into town, and I went to church with them—a little church just down the road from their house. They were members there.” She paused. “And they were letting me live there free—that’s a big thing when you’re homeless and pregnant.”
Well, yes, of course. That was the only part that made at least a little sense.
• chapter 20 •
LOST CHILDREN
They drove on in silence and passed through the village of Woronoco, Massachusetts, on the Westfield River—the entrance to Jacob’s Ladder, a scenic byway along a thirty-five-mile stretch of Highway 20. Julia looked at the trees along the road, at the height of their autumn pageantry—originally one of the big reasons for this whole trip—yet the view somehow looked more like a flat photograph than a real scene.
Carmen broke the silence. “They have a lot of goat farms up here.”
So the girl wanted to talk now. Julia didn’t reply.
Another mile or two went by, and then Carmen said, “They make cashmere out of goat hair. But not these kinds of goats.”
The briefest pause, then, “Did you know Gil saw his grandmother shot in the back in Poland when he was only six?”
The only Gil Julia knew was her yard man, but she certainly didn’t know anything about his grandmother being shot. Sometime in the summer Carmen had taken to working outdoors with Gil on Tuesdays, and from time to time Julia had seen them standing in the driveway by his truck, talking. She had wondered what kinds of things a peculiar little man like Gil would say to a girl like Carmen. She guessed she knew now.
They drove through Russell and then Crescent, quintessential New England at its picturesque best, yet Julia couldn’t even say she felt appreciative, much less awed. Traffic was heavier now, and slower. Clearly they weren’t the only tourists driving Jacob’s Ladder today.
They entered the town of Huntington, and Carmen slowed to a crawl as they approached the town square. Julia looked at her watch. “Let’s stop,” she said. “I need to sit awhile.”
Carmen laughed. “Uh . . . aren’t you already sitting?”
Julia pointed to a gazebo next to a white church. “There. Let’s just sit and look around awhile.” And put off getting to Danforth a little longer—she could have said that, too. But no need for Carmen to know how nervous she was getting.
Carmen pulled into a parking place in front of the white church. Two children were chasing each other around the gazebo while their mother waited for them on the sidewalk.
After a few moments Carmen said, “Did I tell you I peeked ahead in that book—Ethan Frome? I should’ve expected that sled accident, but I didn’t.” A pause. “Poor old Zeena—I felt sorry for her. She was so . . . hypochondriacal. Is that a word?” She tried a couple of different pronunciations, then laughed. “I went sledding once in Maine. I was holding this dog in my lap, but he flipped out. Both ways.”
If the girl had to talk, which apparently she did, at least Julia was glad she was content to carry the whole conversation by herself.
“Hoosier had a hot dog stand in downtown Chicago,” she continued. “Well, supposedly. I never found him.”
Hoosier? All Julia could think of was the state of Indiana.
As if she read her mind, Carmen said, “Lulu’s real father. That was his name—Hoosier. I looked for him when I was passing through, but I finally gave up and left.” She made a whistling sound. “They don’t call that the Windy City for nothing, I’ll tell you.” A pause and a sigh. “Hoosier Leland LaPierre—that was his name.” She said it again, slowly. “Hoo-sier Le-land La-Pi-erre. Kind of . . . classy, isn’t it?”
Oh, yes, a classy hot dog merchant. Julia glanced at the radio, wondering if it would seem rude to turn it on. There was always an interesting follow-up program after the opera on NPR. Maybe that would quiet the girl, ground her flights of thought.
“I wonder how Josette is,” Carmen said.
At least Julia knew who this was. Since the day at the zoo, Carmen had mentioned the little French girl several times.
“Every kid needs a father,” Carmen said.
A good father, Julia wa
nted to say. She wondered what Carmen would say if she told her she used to climb under the covers as a child, after angry words and tears, and wish her father would die.
“I heard my daddy sing a song once called ‘The Ballad of the Lost Child,’” Carmen said. “Only once. He was playing his guitar. He and Lulu were in their bedroom. They didn’t know I was listening, but I heard every word. Did you know that song? I remember Lulu crying, telling him never to sing it again, it was too awful.”
Julia leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Maybe Carmen would think she needed to rest and quit talking. She did know the song, and Lulu was right, it was awful—the story of a little boy whose family died off one at a time. And finally, as could be expected in a ballad, the boy, dressed only in rags, also died in the coldest part of winter. Broke through the ice on a frozen lake and drowned. Tragic tripe. Julia still remembered the tune, in a minor key naturally, and all the words. They came back to her now, all of them, down to the last sorry lines: No one to hear his fearful cry, No one to take his hand.
It was the song Julia hadn’t been able to get out of her head after Jeremiah left home. She would close her eyes and imagine him facing all the worst disasters, alone. Even many years later when they knew he was alive and well, living with a woman and child in Wyoming, she would still sometimes hear the melody when she was lying awake in the middle of the night. Lost children—the saddest thought in the world. And children could be lost in so many ways.
Carmen stopped talking, and they sat quietly for several minutes. Julia opened her eyes again. The mother and the two children had left by now. A matronly-looking woman in a long ashy-gray coat and black lace-up shoes walked by in front of the car, looking down at the sidewalk as she stepped carefully, a large black purse swaying from the crook of her arm.
“That woman looks a little like Stephen’s mother,” Carmen said. Julia wondered if she meant to say grandmother, but she didn’t ask. They watched the woman proceed down the street, and then Carmen resumed. “Here’s something I didn’t tell you. One day when the Shelburns weren’t home, I called Stephen. I remembered his phone number. His mother answered. He wasn’t home, but I talked to her a little while. She remembered me, said they all missed me at church. She asked if I was okay.”
She was running a finger around and around the steering wheel. “It was only a week or two before the baby came,” she said. “I suddenly had this wild hope that maybe he and the other girl had . . . unpledged, or whatever. I imagined us moving to the West somewhere and living together in our own little house. Painted white. And being a real family.” A long pause, and then, “I didn’t tell his mother why I was calling. Especially not after she told me she would give everybody at church my greetings, and Stephen, too, the next time they talked—and, oh, by the way, he’d moved to Boston after his wedding a month ago. He had a new job.”
No hint of self-pity. The girl lifted her head and looked toward the gazebo. “I don’t even remember if I said good-bye to her before I hung up,” she added.
Julia could feel the cold seeping into the car. She looked at her watch and saw that only seven minutes had passed. And to think—before Stephen and the little white house out West, the girl had been talking about goats and a man who ran a hot dog stand. Well, she had also talked about lost children.
Within a few minutes they had left Huntington and were making their way slowly toward Chester, then Lee, and from there due north toward Danforth.
• • •
DANFORTH, Massachusetts, was a small town on the Housatonic River in the Berkshire Hills. As they neared it, Carmen began talking again. She knew the town well, had explored it from one end to the other during her stay with the Shelburns. As winter melted into spring and all throughout the summer, she had seen it all—snow, then buds and flowers, even the earliest tinges of autumn color by the time she finally left.
The Shelburns called it wanderlust—Carmen’s compulsion to walk about town and countryside every day—but the girl herself called it survival. They agreed to her walking but sternly instructed her not to talk to people. Everyone around here was nosy, they said, and in radical left-wing states like Massachusetts, people disliked anyone with unshakable morals. And adoptions were very private matters, they said, so if anyone asked questions about Babies First Mission or her situation personally, she was not allowed to answer. As it was a small exchange for freedom, Carmen agreed. And they evidently trusted her, for they let her come and go as she pleased.
Every day she rose early and did her assigned duties. As thorough as she was, and as quick to spot other tasks to do without being told, there was little for Milo and Joyce to complain about. The Shelburns’ house was on the northern end of town, set back off the road leading to an abandoned paper mill. Milo had purchased the cottage from the former mill owner years earlier and had renovated it room by room. It was sturdy and trim, impeccably maintained, for Milo was very particular.
The nearest neighbors lived a mile away in a yellow house next to the church the Shelburns attended. Carmen liked the pastor, obviously more than the Shelburns did, for Milo always spent a good part of Sunday dinner pointing out the flaws in that morning’s sermon.
The yellow house, once the parsonage, was now occupied by two single women in their early sixties about whom the Shelburns had strong suspicions, which they frequently voiced. They might be their nearest neighbors, but they weren’t about to make any friendly overtures toward the likes of them.
To Julia, New England seemed like an improbable place for people like the Shelburns, with their Bible Belt mentality, except for the fact that it must have given them ample opportunity to feel superior to everyone else. They would surely have put an end to Carmen’s walks had they known that she often stopped at the yellow house on her way into town. Sheila and Hope were the two women who lived there, and the girl sat in their kitchen sometimes for as long as an hour eating their bran and raisin muffins and drinking an herbal tea they grew, one they claimed especially effective for developing a baby’s immune system. And talking, of course.
Through their kitchen window over the years, the two women had observed other girls come and go in the company of the Shelburns on Sundays, but none of those other girls had ever walked past their house. For certain none of them had ever opened their gate, entered their yard, pointed to the herb garden Hope was tending, and said, “What are their names?” the way Carmen had. Without looking up, Hope had touched each plant and spoken its name softly, except for the last four, which she sang in a hauntingly beautiful voice: “Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.” Carmen recognized the song, of course, for it was one Jeremiah used to sing.
Sheila said they had learned over the years to mind their own business; thus it was no struggle for Carmen to keep her promise about answering questions, for they never asked any.
Carmen sometimes sang with them in the kitchen or on the back porch. Sheila and Hope both played guitar and had given concerts during their hippie days. They taught Carmen some of their songs, and she taught them some of Jeremiah’s.
The Shelburns wouldn’t have liked the singing either, for in their opinion, any music other than religious and classical was what the Devil played as he led men to hell. And he didn’t play a pipe like the Pied Piper; he played a guitar. Carmen had once heard Milo say the only thing guitars were good for was kindling.
All of these facts Carmen imparted as they drove to Danforth. When at last they came to the southern edge of town, she took a deep breath and said, “Well, here we are. It feels . . . surreal.” A sign read, Welcome to Danforth—Home of David Wentworth Haggerty, Beloved Poet of the Berkshires. As they made their way slowly through the main street, Carmen pointed out places of interest and remarked on a few changes that had taken place since she left.
From the looks of things, Julia concluded that the locals could meet their basic needs here but just barely. A general store, a small diner, a post office. A large boulder beside a flagpole bore a prominent inscri
ption: Hereupon stood Richard Clay Danforth to deliver his famous Call to Courageous and Humane Action—November 6, 1861.
“And there’s the library,” Carmen said, stopping the car in front of what looked like a rust-red clapboard saltbox cottage at the end of a slate walkway. A large sign near the curb identified the building as The Lottie Cowell Sinclair Memorial Library, along with a brief biography of the woman, founder of the first one-room school in the region. Clearly, one thing could be said for Danforth: It was proud of the achievements of its citizenry.
“I slept and ate at the Shelburns’ house,” Carmen said, “but this is where I lived.” She pointed. “That was my window up there—second floor, far right.”
She couldn’t begin to guess how many hours she had spent here, but whenever she wasn’t at the Shelburns’ house or visiting Sheila and Hope or roaming about the fields and hills, this was where she came. She sat in the same old leather armchair every day, beside the same window looking out toward the Housatonic and the hills beyond, and read straight through book after book.
“I wonder if Mrs. Orliss still works there,” she said, still gazing at the library. “She was like a hundred years old, but you’d never guess it. I think she knew the call number of every book in the whole library. She had this long gray braid of hair and wore a little blue felt hat every day. She could quote whole sections of Beowulf from memory.”
Julia said, “Well, before you tell me about her pet bird and her rock collection, let’s review the plan again.”
There wasn’t much to review, but saying it aloud calmed her. To start with, they would stay on the two-lane highway, which Carmen said would take them right past the church. Carmen would get out at Sheila and Hope’s house and stay there while Julia drove by herself a mile down the road to pay a visit to the Shelburns.
To See the Moon Again Page 24
