The first time I went into Joe’s room to see a news report on his television, I was six years old. He wanted me to see the Negroes walking to work in a place called Montgomery, all in a big crowd instead of riding on the bus. I didn’t know back then what a bus was. And I sure as heck had never seen that many brown faces. Joe tried to explain that they were walking because they were mad about not getting to choose where to sit on the bus. They always had to be in the back, even if there were empty seats up front. All I understood was that it wasn’t fair play, and fair play was a big notion at the Home.
So now I’m standing beside his old pickup while he gets ready to move Mrs. H. to Cartwright, where she’ll recuperate from sucking in smoke. And after he drops her? Well, who knows? Joe is putting his thermos on the front seat next to a wax-paper packet of sandwiches. I know without asking that they’re his favorite, made with chopped-up hard-boiled eggs. My head hurts with all the things I won’t have time to say.
He’s humming a jerky tune as he loads in a couple of boxes of books from Mrs. Hazelton’s study. But I see his old canvas bag back there too, alongside a laundry basket holding some cooking pots from Mrs. H’s cottage kitchen. He’s got to find someplace else to work and live. It’s my guess he’ll take his time looking once he makes certain Mrs. H. is settled with her belongings.
I push on corners to help make it all fit, and then finally there’s nothing left to do except look at each other.
“Someday,” I tell him, “I’m going to take a bus. And I’m going to sit as close to the front as I can.”
“Ha!” he says. “You remember that?” He puts a hand on the top of my head like he likes to do, squeezing his fingers into the spring of my hair. “Lucky thing you’re in Canada. You know that?”
“Uh-huh.” I feel like a cat, pushing at his hand for more patting.
“Lemme add a little something,” he says.
He tells me that when brown people agree to sit in the back of the bus, they’re accidentally letting themselves feel low-down based on nothing but where they’re sitting.
“Turn it around,” he says. “Those white folks up front have a mistaken idea of their own importance based on the same foolish notion of who sits where. What you gotta do, Miss Malou, is adjust the map. Plunk yourself in any territory that tickles your fancy. You hear what I’m sayin’?”
“I hear.” I’m blinking hard.
He climbs into the driver’s seat, closes the door, starts the engine. And starts it again, because it’s hiccuping like an old man with indigestion. When it catches, Joe rolls down the window, salutes that way he does with two fingers. And drives on over to the cottage, where Mrs. H. is waiting. I wave from here. No point in saying goodbye more than one time.
How does he think I’m going to adjust to anything, all by myself? What am I supposed to do? Walk around telling people how important I am, when really I’m lower than a snail? That’s how fast I’m going places. I was lying about getting on any bus. That was just my way of telling him…well, that I’d be thinking about him.
I take out the bracelet and look at it again. Parry Sound Hospital.
Where is Parry Sound? Ontario. The Dominion of Canada.
The bigness is too much. How could I go to some place I never heard of before this afternoon?
Not to sound pathetic, but I have never been alone in the nighttime. Never. Hardly ever by day either, since this place is crawling with girls, like an orphan anthill. Not many corners of solitude. Always noise and always company.
It’s still light and I’m hungry. Do I walk into town? I think of the crack of glass and Luke’s boot on my box. I’ll wait till morning. I have half a bag of Peek Frean shortbread cookies and the church-lady sandwiches, bologna and cheese.
It’s so quiet inside the shed that I can hear whispers of wind sneaking between the slats. I think about Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, how she wakes up one morning in her home in India and finds that both of her parents and several of the servants have died in the night, victims of a cholera epidemic. The story moves quickly past this bit, but I think about the awfulness she must have felt, suddenly stranded like that. She doesn’t see her parents’ bodies because they’ve already been carried away. I imagine them on a cart, bouncing over cobblestones, turned yellow overnight, with seeping sores and mouths gaping in anguish. Meanwhile, Mary is left alone in the bungalow with only a little rustling snake.
That’s me right now, only there’s no snake. There’s a spiderweb in one corner and a fly buzzing against the teeny window—two critters of the cosmos destined to come together with a bad end for one of them.
I stand at the door, my hands inside the big sweater sleeves like mittens, arms folded as tightly around myself as I can manage. Looking out at the hill of blackened rubble, I might as well be in India—or on the moon. The landscape is so altered, especially now, at twilight, that I expect to see ghostly spirits hovering in the half-light.
I eventually sleep, on a heap of burlap sacks, feeling like a pioneer or a runaway or something. In the morning I pee in the grass and pluck burlap threads off my skirt and wish the church ladies had given us deodorant along with the toothbrushes. Also that I had some water to make the tooth brushing not so…gooey. I spit about ten times. Where am I going to find water? Who knew I would miss the blue-door bathroom in such detail? The door was painted turquoise by an art class when I was about seven. The deep porcelain bathtub had griffin claws for feet, there since long ago when the house was for a family instead of orphans, when the maids who had the attic quarters were lucky enough to have a proper big tub to soak in and a row of sinks with silver taps marked Hot and Cold in cursive script.
Thinking about water taps makes the layer of leftover toothpaste taste like mud in my mouth. And then I remember the rain barrel behind the shed. Yes! It’s nearly full. I scoop up water in cupped hands and swish away the toothpaste and drink and drink. I splash my face. My hair pick is somewhere in the ashes, a melted lump of metal, but I do my best, tugging at the worst tats in my hair.
I’m awake and groomed. So now what?
Mrs. Hazelton’s cottage is locked. I try the door, of course. I sit on the bench. I look at her flowers. I listen. Bugs buzz, a frog croaks, a breeze riffles the grasses. Mostly it’s quiet.
So quiet.
I don’t want to go to town. I’d stick out like a poppy in a field of daisies, worse than before. Used to be our smocks would scream, Orphan! Now it would be only my skin. They’d remember. Oh, the dark one. Maybe it’s even against the law for me to be hanging around like this, sleeping in the shed.
I eat the second-last bologna sandwich and four cookies.
It’s only Sara. Phew. Was I expecting the boogeyman? I’m dying to know what Mrs. Hazelton told her, but she starts with “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
She admits that she suspected that Luke was a small-minded pig even if she pretended not to know. She feels badly for never standing up for me, for not telling him to piss off. She’s sorry, she says again.
Why now? I look away, wondering.
All this time Joe has been teaching me that being a colored girl out there in the big wide world was going to be a whole lot harder than what I knew in the Home. I didn’t care what he said because I was never going to leave. I was going to have my Seven sisters forever, and they would love me whatever my color. But maybe that isn’t true. Maybe it was hard for them to be my friends. Maybe white girls can never ever understand how many times a day a brown girl feels brown.
So what did Sara learn today about where she came from? Why is she saying sorry and then sorry again?
“I know it doesn’t fix everything.” She sounds as if telling me sorry is the most important thing she has to do today.
“It helps,” I say, not exactly believing it. “Thank you.”
“I’m going to Germany,” says Sara. She’s fighting back tears. “Can you imagine?”
No, I can’t. Germany is impossibly far. On the other side of an ocean.
She reaches inside her blouse and extracts a necklace with a little charm hanging from it. A star with six points.
“That’s what you got?” I say. “What does it mean?”
Sara blinks back tears. “This is a Star of David. Mrs. Hazelton told me that my mother was Jewish. That means I am too.”
“Oh. Wow. That’s pretty huge,” I say. “Bigger than just getting a new name.” I tell her I’m Baby Fox now. “Being Jewish,” I add, “makes you different from everyone. More like me.”
How weird to be saying hello to new selves and goodbye to each other in the same minute.
“What about your boyfriend?” I say.
The shed goes quiet, except for a piece of dangling twine flapping in a whisper from one of the shelves.
Sara sighs. “I think I’m happy to be leaving him behind.”
As far as I can tell, there is not another person anywhere on the entire school property. Mrs. Hazelton…gone to a nursing home, I think. Miss Webster…who knows where? Someplace where bossy is a valued quality. If Joe’s lucky, he’ll find this catastrophe is an invitation back into the world of music. Maybe he’ll play the guitar again.
The main thing is, the other girls are gone. Sara on her way to Germany, Tess someplace French. I’m not sure where Cady is headed. Betty and Dot are still in Ontario, I think. And Toni went to Toronto.
Baby Fox, I say to myself. You know what you’re supposed to do, right? You’re supposed to be an adventurer like every other orphan. Like Toby Tyler joining the circus, or Huck Finn taking a raft the whole way down the Mississippi. You’re supposed to go to the hospital and get your mother’s whole name. Like a quest in a book. Easy peasy.
Maybe tomorrow.
At night, raindrops ping on the roof, weirdly comforting. I invent new stories to be in. I’m a prospector in a tarpaper shack. I’m a Mohawk maiden in a wigwam. I am a cabin boy on a ship heading to a new land. I imagine that I’ve tilled the ground and I have an abundant crop of lettuce and beans. I’ve somehow learned to shoot a rabbit. Skipping the part about skinning and gutting, the stew is delicious, just the way it always is in books about pioneers.
Tuesday morning is gray, and I’m happy for the big sweater. The grass is damp on my legs when I crouch to pee. (Thank goodness, no period yet. Maybe the fire scared it out of me.) The rain has helped cool down the wreckage, but the smell is stronger, like inhaling deep inside a chimney. Underfoot is mucky, wet and black. I’d been thinking I could forage through, find a few things. We lived at the top of the house, so maybe our stuff will be close to the surface? But after wandering through, poking and sifting, I see there’s nothing to salvage. Muck and ash. I can identify a few charred shapes, like our metal bedside cupboards, one of the bathtubs, a heap of book-shaped lumps. But not one item I’d like to pick up or hold.
My sneakers—in fact, my legs—are sogged and sooty up to my knees from standing in the ruins. Everything in sight—the only home I know—is melted into a huge ugly heap. My eyes and nose get that hot swelling feeling, and the tears come leaking out. My family isn’t here anymore. The reasons to leave are staring me in the face, smoldering all around. I’m not leaving the home I know or the girls I’ve loved all my life. They’ve already left me. I’m the only dummy who didn’t see there’s nothing here anymore.
This isn’t promising new territory waiting to be planted and built upon. This is rubble, what used to be, not the place where I need to start over.
I rinse my legs and scrub off my shoes as well as I can, using the rain barrel in the vegetable patch. Now they’re as wet as wet. How long do shoes take to dry? Another thing I’m going to find out.
I go to sleep before it’s properly dark, worried about what to do in the morning. Tomorrow will mean making decisions all by myself. No suggestions, no teasing, no chatting, no Sevens.
Only me.
I fix the shopping bag under my head to make a better pillow. I tuck the burlap sacks around my middle. I drift.
But then, snap! I’m awake and sitting up, my skull creeping. One second of total silence and in the next second, craack!
The shed has one window, set into the door.
Craack! The small pane shatters, thanks to a brick or a stone being whacked against it. They aren’t even trying to be quiet.
I’ve stopped breathing. I hear muttering voices, and a chunk of masonry comes through the window. The door’s not locked, you morons. I edge my way in the dark to hide behind the door, so when they finally figure out to try the handle and it clicks right open, I’m lurking like a shadow in the corner. Two shapes blunder in, led by a dancing flashlight. They might not have even seen me except that the door smacks me hard and I say, “Ouch!”
“What the…?”
The flashlight hits me in the face.
“Will you looka here,” says Luke. “A door prize.”
In the Greek myth about Achilles, when Achilles was a baby his mother dipped him in a magic fountain where the water coated him from head to foot in a powerful enchantment to protect him from harm when he eventually went into battle. Only she had to hold on to him, right? When she lowered him into the water, she held him by one heel, so her grip prevented the magic water from reaching that area. And twenty years later, that’s how he was killed. Someone shot an arrow straight through the small vulnerable spot on the mighty man’s body.
But the vulnerable spot with most boys is where their legs meet, where they keep what Tess calls their “equipment.” I’m a little vague on what exactly the equipment is, since Dr. Blunt hasn’t been too blunt on that point. He says that the less we know, the safer we’ll be. But one thing we do know is that if you need to stop a boy from hurting you, a fierce whack in the place will do the trick.
That’s what I do now. I have a clay flowerpot in one hand and a trowel in the other. Whomp! I get him smack in the place. Luke yelps like a hurt dog and drops the light so it lands with a smash.
“Oh Jesus! Crapping Jesus!” He doubles over, and then he’s on his knees. I’m kind of dismayed at how effective it is, but I’m not hanging around to worry about it.
The other boy scuffles in the dark, but I know the shed better than he does. I rescue my shopping bag, scoop up my wet sneakers and slide out the door. The boy abandons Luke and thumps out seconds behind me, only he zooms off in the other direction, down the back drive. For the first second, I’m aiming along the path for home, but then I remember.
There is no home.
I run as best I can in bare feet, with the lumpy Simpson’s bag clutched to my chest. No way am I waiting for Luke to stand up and move. He’s shouting the N-word. The word Joe says will burn tongues in hell. I can hear Luke moaning till I’m through the gate and onto the road. Then all I hear is pebbles skittering under my toes and my own gulping breath.
Who knew a restaurant could be open all night? Who ever comes here at four o’clock in the morning?
I’m worried that Luke and his buddy might stumble in on their way home, so I sit in a booth away from the window and sip a hot chocolate till I stop trembling.
There’s a bus to Toronto, first thing at six, Mrs. Clifford tells me. It stops right outside the grocery store, and I can buy the ticket there. She runs the diner and sometimes the post office too. I’m sort of dizzy with not sleeping. And with running like I’m fueled by Russian rocket power. My feet were dirty and cut up with road grit, so I put my sneakers back on before I came into the café. Which I’m still amazed is open. Only the beginning, I think. The world holds many wonders beyond the gates of the Home.
Mrs. Clifford puts down a plate holding a bacon sandwich. She shakes her head when I object. “My treat,” she says. “A goodbye present. Goodbye and good luck.” I pick up the sandwich. The first bite is beyond delicious—salty and hot.
“Where you headed, honey?” says Mrs. Clifford. “Not off to some foreign place like Sara, are you?”
I tell her I don’t even know. Three days ago I would have gone into the school library, pulled down the Canadian atlas and turned to the Ontario page, run my finger around until it found the town that is printed on my bracelet.
“Did you ever hear of a place called Parry Sound?” I ask her.
Mrs. Clifford shakes her head. “I’m gonna say north.” She waves her arm vaguely, as if we’re talking north of the main road past the gas station. “Your best bet is to get on the Toronto bus and ask the driver. He’ll set you right.”
I keep thinking how smart I was to put my shoes on before we left our room. I only wish I’d grabbed some soap and my hair pick too.
What I have with me:
my skirt and two blouses from the pile at the church
the zipper-pocket sweater that I have come to love
the toothbrush so generously donated by Dr. Fenton
two pairs of undies and one bra, thanks to Guthrie’s Bridal
$138—since Mrs. Clifford doesn’t make me pay for the hot chocolate or the sandwich
one hospital bracelet
Mrs. Hazelton didn’t steal the bracelet, but she definitely kept it hidden for sixteen years. Why did she do that? It wasn’t greed, not like Sally from the workhouse who stole the gold locket from Oliver Twist’s mother, the one that holds locks of hair that can identify his parents. Was Mrs. H. protecting someone? Me? Or someone else? I don’t want to be mad at her, but…holding on to a clue that reveals a person’s true identity? That can’t be right.
It is not a new situation. I have always been the only person who is not white. I’m also the only person getting on at this stop.
The driver says, “No luggage?”
I lift my shopping bag. “Just this.”
“Sit anywhere,” he says, because I’m hesitating, not knowing what happens after I hand over my ticket. There’s no room at the front. I find a place about halfway down the aisle. I set the Simpson’s bag on the floor between my feet, and I fall asleep nearly at once.
I wake up as the bus lurches into the station in Toronto. I guess the shed wasn’t the most comfortable place to rest. I wait in line at the ticket counter and ask where Parry Sound is and how I can get there. The man sells me a ticket and says the next bus leaves in one hour and twenty minutes. Part of me wants to sit right there in one of the station seats and not move. But more of me is hungry. The bacon sandwich at Loretta’s seems a long time ago. The bus to Parry Sound will take nearly five hours.
“Outside,” says the lady selling newspapers when I ask where I can find something to eat. “Turn right, turn right again.”
When I get to the corner, I freeze on the spot. I feel like Dorothy landing in Oz. There might be more people on this single street than all the people I’ve ever met. I know that Chinese people exist, but I’ve never seen one before, let alone a million on one block. Their skin is not yellow, by the way, but I’d say they’re shorter and slighter than most white people. And they seem to be wearing clothes they maybe brought with them from China, as if they’re from the same orphanage—dark-blue smocks and wide dark trousers, even the women. And all so busy! Hurrying or strolling, everyone is carrying something—shopping bags, baskets, vegetables, newspapers, bundles or boxes.
Over our heads are signs painted with red or yellow Chinese characters. The store windows are crammed with things that I linger to identify. Green stone statues of ancient warriors, tiny crocheted animals with threads for whiskers, heaps of lacy place mats that make me think of weddings, painted fans spread wide to show elaborate rippled landscapes, brass bottles that look as if a genie might emerge at any moment, bins of gnarled roots and dried mushrooms, rows of roasted ducks hanging upside down…
The air is fresh, and the sky is so blue it sparkles. I bet most of these busy people are wishing they didn’t have to go to work today, the sun is so bright. But for them it’s a regular day. Their houses didn’t burn down. They didn’t wake up this morning with creepy boys barging into their rooms. I lean against a wall for a minute, watching a gazillion people I have never met until my eyes blur. Nobody knows I am Baby Fox.
The strung-up ducks remind me of how hungry I am, though obviously I don’t want a duck with its head on. Do Chinese people eat normal stuff too? Like Velveeta-cheese sandwiches and bananas?
I join the throng and inch my way along the street. I spot a store that says Becker’s in big green letters and has window signs in English advertising Popsicles and chocolate milk and Cheez Whiz. Inside, I’ve arrived in food heaven. I go up and down the aisles in rapture. I am Babar the orphan elephant arriving in Paris and shopping with the Old Lady. So many delicious things to buy! Stuff we never got to have at the Home, like potato chips and Cheetos and peanut-butter cups. I buy chocolate-chip cookies and a box of pink popcorn.
Who knew there was pink popcorn?
Safely back in the bus station, I sit on a bench and eat half the cookies while I watch all the little stories unfolding around me. A mother tells her son to send a postcard (but I bet he doesn’t). A girl is crying like crazy while her boyfriend kisses her goodbye. A lady can’t find her bus ticket. I pat my zippered pockets to feel the bumps of my own ticket and the envelope from Mrs. Hazelton. Is there anyone else in all of Toronto who is holding an envelope with a secret history inside?
Remembering my promise to Joe, I choose a seat closer to the front this time and next to the window, so I can look out. The bus is not full, so I end up with both seats all to myself. I slide off my damp shoes, find the socks donated by Woolworth’s and tuck my feet under me, thinking maybe I’ll have another nap. After a few more cookies.
I feel the lady across the aisle watching. I give her a half smile, wondering, What did I do? Why is she staring with those round blue eyes?
“You all alone?” She has an accent that chops the sentence into pieces. Russian? Norwegian?
I don’t think she’s a robber or a creepy person, so I nod.
“You very young,” she says. “Where you go?”
“Umm.” How to answer? With a wish. “I’m going…to meet my mother.”
My mother’s ghost anyway.
And when the buildings dwindle away, there are fields and trees. Lots of fields and lots of trees. My eyes go blurry and I sleep again. When I wake up, wow! This part of the highway was made by cutting through gigantic rocks, so the road is often flanked by towering orange crags. Where the rock subsides, I get glimpses of inlets of glittering water dotted with islands, docks and boats and white-barked trees.
The scenery is like pictures in a book, spread out as if I’m flying over it instead of just riding along. I’m a bird for a while. Or snuggled up next to Santa Claus in his sleigh.
True fact. I’m an expert, like I said.
Saint Nicholas was born in Greece or maybe Turkey, to parents who had prayed and prayed for a child. When baby Nick finally came along, his parents vowed that his life would be devoted to God, so when they died he landed with his uncle, the bishop. It seems unfair not to have given him a choice in the matter, but those were the olden days.
This is now. And I do not have an uncle.