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 note 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?
This cement square is a popular spot to consider what you’re giving up—your little girl? Your vows? Your home?
Just like Gone Mom, Evangeline made an appointment with the future that did not include the ropes and roots of the past.