Evergreen (19 page)

On the way back to Hopewell, Naamah sobbed in her seat while the glass rattled, while they passed the blue plate, the overturned apples, the people made of snow. Sister Cordelia was sitting next to her and would make her pay dearly for her tears and for what she’d done at the festival, but Naamah couldn’t stop crying.

She wasn’t free. She wasn’t free.

When they arrived at the orphanage, Sister Cordelia didn’t say a word to Naamah. She didn’t drag her to the broom closet or strike her in front of the others or set a bucket in front of her and tell her to scrub until God forgave her for trying to run away—one day for each step, one week for each glance at the evergreen trees. She didn’t say or do anything.

That night while the other girls slept, Naamah turned and turned in her cot, the metal creaking beneath her, wondering why Sister Cordelia didn’t pull her away from the other girls to punish her the moment they walked through the front door, wondering why she’d been allowed to pick at her supper with the other girls, to brush her teeth, and to recite her nightly prayers on her knees. What new punishment awaited her? How much would it hurt? How long would it take? Naamah had never been more afraid.

“You’re going to be all right,” Mary Margaret had said that morning, but before they went to bed she’d said, “You’re letting her make you ugly.”

When Naamah couldn’t sleep and couldn’t wait any longer for her punishment to come, she got up from her cot. She stood in the middle of the dormitory, shivering in her thin cotton nightgown. She watched the girls nearest to her sleep, their faces awash in blue light. The littlest girls had climbed into bed with one another and lay together like spoons. The others slept alone. How was it no one had wanted any of them? How was it that at the exact same time one woman could be turning sausages and another woman could be dying?

Naamah made her bed as neatly as she could in the darkness. She kissed her pillow the way the woman at the festival had kissed her hand. She touched the cross Sister Cordelia had placed around her neck. She knew whom she belonged to. She always had.

Naamah left the dormitory and walked into the broom
closet.
You can’t punish me if I punish myself first
, she thought, and lay down on the cold floor. When freezing wasn’t punishment enough, Naamah dug her fingernails into her back until she reopened the sores from the last time she was in here, and the blood rose. With that blood—pain she understood, pain that was safe, pain that felt like home—she was finally able to rest.

Hours later Naamah woke to Sister Cordelia standing over her, shaking her head lightly in the moonlight. Sister Cordelia was wearing a white nightgown just like Naamah’s, just like all the girls at Hopewell. Her silvery hair trailed down her back, ending in waves at her waist. In this light, Naamah couldn’t see Sister Cordelia’s moles. She couldn’t see her crooked yellow teeth. Naamah thought she was dreaming.

“What are you doing in here, child?” Sister Cordelia said, sighing deeply.

When Sister Cordelia kneeled before her, her bones creaked. She helped Naamah up from the floor and led her out of the broom closet down the dimly lit hallway. Back to her cot, Naamah thought. She didn’t understand why she wasn’t being punished.

Sister Cordelia’s feet were bare. Were they also bare in the broom closet? Naamah had never seen her toes or heels or arches; up until this very moment she’d believed Sister Cordelia had hooves instead of feet. Naamah had never seen the patchwork of red and blue veins around her ankles—evidence Sister Cordelia had a heart.

Instead of the dormitory Sister Cordelia took her down to her office, where Naamah found her baby blanket and her pretty white bird on Sister Cordelia’s desk.

“Are you taking them away?” Naamah said. Of course she was. She was probably going to make Naamah smash her bird and burn her blanket.

“No, you are,” Sister Cordelia said. “As well as the rest of this.” She handed Naamah a white laundry bag stuffed full. “Open it.”

Naamah untied the strings and reached inside the bag, expecting to feel something sharp snap at her skin. At the very least, she thought she’d see soiled linens she’d have to scrub clean. But on top of the bag, she found the gray winter coat she’d worn to the festival, the pair of mittens, and the scarf. Beneath that layer was a pair of winter boots. Beneath that a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a tin of figs.

“I don’t understand,” Naamah said.

Sister Cordelia leaned against her desk. “Keep going.”

The last item Naamah pulled out of the bag was a hat, which was covered almost entirely, intricately, with green feathers. Naamah recognized it at once.

“Ethelina dropped this in front of the gates,” Naamah said. “I saw her when I was cleaning the window.”

“You were a little girl then,” Sister Cordelia said, fingering the material at the collar of her nightgown. She looked very old without her habit on. Her skin hung from her neck as if it were about to peel away from her and fall to the floor.

Naamah touched the green feathers. “I waved to her, but she didn’t wave back.”

Sister Cordelia looked out the darkened window as if Ethelina were still standing there with her hand stretched across her heart. “Ethelina was special,” she said. “Most of the girls who come through here aren’t.”

“Where did she go?” Naamah said.

“I opened a door for her, and she walked through it,” Sister Cordelia said.

She turned from the window and faced Naamah.

“Do you know you were only a few hours old when I found
you? The umbilical cord was still warm. You were special, too, Naamah. Your eyes were so gray.”

Sister Cordelia walked behind her desk, opened the top drawer, and closed it again.

“We were so close to having everything, Naamah. You and me and God. Your mother didn’t want you, but I did.”

Naamah let go of the laundry bag.

Your mother didn’t want you
. Naamah had always told herself that one of the logging-camp men had forced her mother to leave her on the doorstep on the night she was born. Every girl at Hopewell told that kind of story because if their mothers had left them by choice, then no one had loved them even for a minute.

Sister Cordelia came out from behind her desk.

“Put the coat on, the boots, the mittens,” she said. “It’s cold out there.”

“Where are we going?” Naamah said.

“You’re going,” Sister Cordelia said. She tucked the bird and the blanket into the laundry bag. She put a hand on Naamah’s back and urged her out of the office and toward the front door of the orphanage. When Sister Cordelia opened it, the icy wind came tumbling through, unhinging the wooden cross from the wall in the entryway.

“You wanted to go, so go,” she said.

Naamah looked past the snowy yard and the front gates toward the dark woods on the other side of the road.
Hypothermia
, she thought.
Frostbite. Black fingers. Missing toes
. From the steps of the orphanage, she heard tangles of branches scraping against one another in the wind. Trunks creaking. She heard the cry of the wind itself.

All her life, she’d waited for the day she’d finally get to leave Hopewell, and yet now that the moment had arrived she
was afraid to go. And it wasn’t just because the snow was falling and the wind was howling and the woods were dark. The idea of running through all that toward someone who might not love her, who might not have ever loved her, felt like running off the edge of a cliff. Blue skies. Bluebirds. She couldn’t hear her mother’s voice.

The wind lifted Naamah’s nightgown; it blew open her coat.

“Keep moving or you’ll freeze to death,” Sister Cordelia said.

Your mother didn’t want you
.

If that was true, then Sister Cordelia was right about what was on the other side of the wall. Naamah already felt the ice crystals following her veins to her heart.

“I’ll be good,” she said and let herself fall to Sister Cordelia’s feet the way people in the Bible did when there was nothing left to do but beg for God’s mercy.

Sister Cordelia tried to shake her loose. “You already made your choice.”

Naamah looked up at Sister Cordelia through the snow. She thought of the pink room. The pink dolls. The pink curtains gathered over the empty pink crib. People may have donated all of that stuff, but it didn’t explain the careful way Sister Cordelia had displayed it.

“I’ll be your pink baby,” she said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

At that moment, everything, even the wind, stopped.

Sister Cordelia unwrapped the strings of the laundry bag from Naamah’s wrist and set the bag beside the door. She was smiling a little, the way she did when she was finished scrubbing Naamah down with bleach, the way she did when she knew she’d won.

“Do you understand this is the only time I’m opening this
door for you?” she said. “If you come inside, you’ll live your life here with me and God. That’s the promise you’ll be making when you cross the threshold.”

Naamah looked at the woods and then at the open front door.

Hopewell was the only place she’d ever lived. The only place she knew by heart.

Naamah looked up at the tall dormitory windows, at the place on the roof where a paper airplane she’d made carrying the message
SAVE ME HUX
had landed and the place on her arm she was struck for it. She tasted the cornmeal at the corners of her mouth, the smears of lard on dry white bread. She saw the Word in the bricks.

Naamah looked toward the frozen kitchen garden, hoping to see her mother walking among the vines once more. Hoping to see the grape juice dripping from her mother’s chin. Hoping to hear her say,
Fight for me, Naamah
.

Instead of her mother, when Naamah closed her eyes, she saw the woman at the festival with the worn-out fur coat, the worn-out heart. She felt the woman’s cracked lips on her skin. The woman was the one saying,
Fight for you
.

Sister Cordelia took Naamah’s hand when Naamah crossed the threshold.

“I did a better job with you than I did with Ethelina,” she said.

Naamah thought of Ethelina’s strawberry hair. Her blue-ice eyes. The way she had looked standing on the other side of the gate in her feathery green hat, as if, for the slightest moment, she’d wanted to come back inside, too.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to leave, but I had to know for sure,” Sister Cordelia said. She reached into the front pocket of her nightgown and pulled out a small gilded Bible
with Naamah’s name printed on the cover. “I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to give this to you. To be able to tell you of my love.”

Naamah took the Bible from Sister Cordelia and leafed through the pages in the dim light of the entryway. She paused when she came to the long passages about people begetting other people she’d worked so hard to recite perfectly when she was small. She saw the floor she’d been scrubbing since she could hold a rag. She saw the rulers she’d been kneeling on since she could kneel. Naamah felt every pinch and poke and prod in the name of God. She smelled every drop of bleach.

But it wasn’t until she saw the words from 1 John 4:18 and looked up at Sister Cordelia and realized her moles and her loose skin and her twisted yellow teeth weren’t really what made her ugly that she knew what she had to do even though the snow was falling and the wind was howling and the woods were dark.

There is no fear in love
.

All at once a cold black wave came rising up from somewhere very deep in Naamah.

“I hate pink,” she said.

Naamah pushed the Bible hard against Sister Cordelia’s chest, against her heart, which made Sister Cordelia lose her balance. Sister Cordelia cried out on her way down the front steps. She cried out when she landed on the walkway with a thud.

Her toes were covered with snow. Her hands were covered with snow. Snow was collecting in her old-woman hair.

Sister Cordelia looked up at Naamah with utter surprise.

With fear, which made Naamah strong.

“It was my mother’s favorite color,” Sister Cordelia said.

Before Naamah picked up the laundry bag, before she ran
through the Hopewell gates for the very first and last time, toward the woods and the logging camps, she bent over Sister Cordelia, lifted her hair away from her face, and pressed her lips to her wrinkled ear.

“You’ll never be my mother,” she said. “You’ll never have my love.”

PART THREE

Evergreen, Minnesota
1961

17

Hux should have told Leah he loved her—he knew that. When she announced she was leaving last month, he’d only said okay from his place in front of the woodstove. Leah had come to Evergreen because she had gotten separated from her canoeing group on the river. She’d stayed with Hux in a cabin without indoor plumbing an entire year. He was lucky for that, wasn’t he? Most of the time he was fine about being alone again. He could leave out as many mugs of half-drunk coffee as he liked. He could listen to his favorite old-time program on the radio without Leah calling him Grandpa. Sometimes, though, especially when he came in from preserving animals in the work shed at night, and she wasn’t there to reach for her nose plug anymore, he’d miss her below and above the belt enough that last week he threw out her comb, her flowery perfume, and her wool bunting.