“Oh crap,” says Pete. He’s leaning over his bike. “Someone slashed my tires.”
Jimmy checks his quickly. “Mine too. My work bike.” Jimmy’s bike carried two of us, as well as the gear. “We’re screwed.”
“What the hell?” Lucy’s tires are also slashed. “Who would do this?”
Somebody laughs an ugly laugh, and my neck and arms prickle a warning. We spin around. The horrible pig named Bender is standing at the land end of the dock. His brother comes out from behind a pine tree, rubbing his hands on the seat of his pants.
“Jeez-us,” says Pete. “What are you losers doing here?”
“Uh, not the best approach,” says Jimmy, quiet and tense.
“Get lost,” says Lucy. “I mean it. Take off!”
Jeff laughs again. “Hear that, Bender? She’s tellin’ us to take off.”
“Take off what, eh?”
They’ve got us trapped on the dock, moving close enough that I can smell unwashed shirts and cigarettes and some kind of alcohol.
“Take off her little shorts and see her little black muff,” says Jeff. He lunges for Lucy.
She squeals and tries to dodge, but she crashes into Pete, who has stepped in to protect her. With a quick, hard shove, Jeff topples Pete right off the side of the dock. He lands with a splash, luckily not hitting a boat or anything on the way down. He slaps the water and comes up bellowing. But we’re not watching, because we’re suddenly in the middle of crazy-time.
The men grunt and grab, calling us that worst name, the one that starts with N. After a minute of pushing and shouting, Jimmy and Lucy together do to Jeff what he did to Pete. Wham! Overboard. But Bender has my arms pinned, one hand covering my face, making me taste worm slime and cigarette butts. I squirm, and stomp on his feet, and finally yank away to one side and jam my knee into his place as hard as I can, feeling a surge of triumph when he howls. Pete has sloshed his way out of the bay, and now we’re running, all of us, faster than ever before in our lives.
“What are you, nuts? We’re not calling the cops, and we’re not telling anyone else either.” Pete is fiercer than I’ve ever seen him. “We got the bikes. What more do you want?”
We’d run and run, but then circled back in the nasty pitch darkness and retrieved our stuff when the Brothers Grim were gone.
“But isn’t that what the police are for? To protect, you know, citizens?” I say.
“Have you looked in the mirror lately?” says Jimmy.
“What?”
“You do not have blond hair and blue eyes,” he says. “In case those details escaped you.”
Wow, Jimmy has never been mean like this either.
“Let me explain,” says Lucy. “Remember that moment when you so awesomely rammed your knee into that guy’s crotch?”
I nod, even though…sheesh. She said crotch in front of the boys.
“That is the moment of triumph,” she says. “That is the only justice you are ever going to see for those idiot snortdicks jumping us. If we reported the ‘incident’ to the cops? Jeff and Bender would somehow make it like we attacked them. The cops would take one look at our four brown faces and assume we’re the bad guys. Pete and Jimmy especially, being boys, would be in deep shit. So hold on to that one special moment when your knee met the target, ’cause that’s it.”
They tell me fifteen stories, or maybe a hundred and fifteen, about times when the cops have ignored or bullied or dismissed or harassed them—or any one of the Indians on the reservation nearby, or even the occasional colored tourist passing through town.
We don’t call the police. We go home and act like it never happened.
“So,” she says. “About your hair…”
Part of me winces, because her saying that means she’s been thinking how awful I look. But most of me wants to hug her, because she, and only she in all my life, knows how I feel about my hair.
“What should I do?” I lay a hand on my head, pressing down on the dense mat.
“I get the feeling you haven’t had much help in the styling department,” she says.
We start to laugh. I am the most unstyled person in Canada.
We go to the store and I spend two dollars and twenty-five cents on a “Complete Home Kit” of something called Perma-Strate Cream Hair Straightener. The package promises that the product will recondition hair as it softly straightens and keep it perfectly relaxed for three months or more.
We’ll see about that.
“They only carry this stuff because my mother phoned them up and promised we’d be really good customers if they carried the right products. I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones who buy it.”
We also got me a new hair pick, which is maybe even more exciting.
In the bathroom at Lucy’s house, I sit on the rim of the tub. Lucy admits that it’s her mom who does her hair, and she’s not exactly for sure certain how to do this. But she knows more than I do, so I let her take charge. She carefully rubs Vaseline around the edges of my hairline and tries to get some on my scalp too.
“The box says creamy and easy,” she says. “But it still stings, I’m warning you.”
She works in the cream relaxer starting at the roots and, bit by bit, all the way through to the ends. She tells me about the first time her mother did hers—and burnt her head so badly that she cried. Lucy checks her watch and says we have to leave the muck on for fifteen minutes. She’s wearing rubber gloves, as if she’s a hospital cleaner handling vomit, which makes me wonder what the stuff might be doing to my brain.
Eventually, finally, the fifteen minutes of tingling has gone by, and Lucy says, “Maybe a little longer? Just to be sure?”
After that she performs a series of magic-potion acts: rinsing with water, sudsing with shampoo, rinsing more, dousing with conditioner and more super-softening conditioner.
She doesn’t let me look until it’s dry. She rakes through it a couple of times with my new pick and declares me ready for viewing.
Poor Anne yearned for raven-black locks, so she bought hair dye from a peddler and ended up with hideous green hair instead. My hair is black, no question there, but it’s not my hair anymore.
There’s no frizz, nap, curl, kink, whatever you want to call it. I’m wearing a helmet of…of what? Horse hair, maybe? It looks like the cushion from an antique chair in a museum, sagging over my ears at the sides.
Lucy’s face, beside mine in the mirror, is beaming with pride.
I’m supposed to be thanking her, but I want to burrow my head under my pillow and cry. I’m so glad Jumpin’ Joe isn’t here to see me. Three months? Or more? Is this the person I have to be for all that time?
“I guess it’ll take some getting used to,” I say to Lucy.
“That girl is here,” says Pete. “The one who works at the marina. She came into the store today. I thought it was you.” He’s looking at me. “She was buying popcorn and apple juice. She had on a hat I never saw you wear. I go up behind her and say, Where’d the lid come from? And she whips around, like, Who the hell are you? And I go, Crap, you’re not Malou.”
“Oh,” I say. “A hat? Maybe Lucy did her hair too.”
They all say it’s not so bad, and Lucy stubbornly says she likes it, but I’ve been wearing a kerchief ever since the disaster.
Tomorrow, after my shift at St. Joe’s and his newspaper deliveries, Jimmy and I will go to the marina and see if we can find this girl who supposedly looks like me.
“We have to take a look,” he says. “If it feels right, we’ll say hi and go from there.”
“Just go from hi to is your mother’s name on this secret document stolen from a confidential file in a locked room in the cellar of a hospital?”
“Yeah.”
We wave goodbye, and then I think, Why wait till tomorrow?
It turns out to be the place I came the day I first got Sherry’s file. Before I went to Jimmy’s trailer and all of this started. Looks like a field full of boats tied up to jetties. Sailboats and speedboats and kayaks and canoes.
I sit on the same bench where I read the list of names and asked the geezer for directions to Salt Dock Road. It’s like the bench of discovery or something. Here I am again, looking for the next clue, waiting for a crackle of thunder from the bright blue sky.
And it’s coming.
Each jetty is like a different channel on a television set, each with its own drama playing. Two guys are arguing beside a carton of groceries. “Who forgot the batteries?” one of them shouts. “Numbnuts!”
A boy is teasing a yappy little dog with a knotted rope, making the dog jump high before letting it grab on with its teeth. In the shade of a striped canopy, on the deck of a boat called Sea Princess, two people are kissing, leaning toward each other from their separate deck chairs.
My eyes keep moving, one thing on my mind.
It doesn’t take long to find her, the only brown person in sight. And even if I hadn’t been looking for her, she is something to watch. She’s on the land end of the main dock, next to a row of orange canoes and kayaks, each one with TURTLE COVE painted on its side in black letters so bold that even the seagulls know who owns the boats.
The second I see her, I get this jumpy feeling in my stomach. Or maybe I’ve decided to get that feeling because I want more than anything for something to happen.
Or maybe it’s because she’s doing this maneuver where she single-handedly lifts a canoe, rocks it on her thighs, flips it over and raises it above her head. All in about five seconds.
It’s astounding. I nearly applaud. Then she carries it—a whole canoe, by herself—to a ramp at one side of the dock, where she flips it down and rests it gently on the grass. She strolls back to the other canoes and starts the dance again. Lift, rock, flip, raise, balance, carry, flip, drop. Only it’s not a drop. She’s strong enough to actually put it down, easy as returning a fork to a drawer.
She goes back for the next one. I stand up from my bench and head over, drumming up the nerve to say hello. She is already rocking the next canoe on her thighs, so I stand still, let her lift it, step back a bit so she can pass, steadying this massive thing over her head.
A dog bounds out of nowhere, barking and frisking under her feet. The boy I saw earlier, teasing the dog with a rope, is running toward us, calling his pet. But the girl’s balance is thrown off. The canoe sways at a perilous angle. I’m close enough to hear a gasp of panic.
I leap forward in time to catch the back end and hold on for dear life while she adjusts her weight to keep the front from pulling her right over.
She is flustered and grateful. I’m thinking what a fluke it was, my catching the tip just right. But also? My heart is racing in a way that didn’t happen when I met Lucy or the boys. Maybe because now I’m closer to knowing something big, I’m expecting a moment in a million. And here it is. We’re not identical. But her gray eyes are my gray eyes, simple as that. Her fluster doubles because she sees it too, that we’re connected somehow.
“Thanks.” She’s puffing a bit.
“Bad Ringo,” says the kid, tugging the dog’s collar.
“Coulda been squished-dead Ringo,” I say to the boy. “You’re lucky.”
“You’re the lucky one,” he says. “If you killed my dog, I’d push you in the bay till the crayfish got you.” He sticks out his tongue and races away.
The girl’s eyes meet mine, and we start to laugh.
“That was so close,” she says. “I really nearly dropped it.”
“I never caught a canoe before. I can’t believe you carry them around like loaves of bread.”
“Carrying is not the hard part,” she says. “It’s all in the lift. Guess I’m out of practice though. First day back on the job.” Her eyes sweep my clothes. “You don’t work here, do you? Who are you?”
“I’m Abby, by the way,” she says before I can speak. “I didn’t mean that to sound rude, you know, asking who you are. But…” She shrugs the question at me again, like, Seriously, who are you?
“My name is Malou. And I’ve been sort of looking for—”
“Hey, Abby!” A shout from the boathouse makes us both turn.
“Shit,” says Abby.
“The rules haven’t changed since last year!” the guy shouts. “You’re paid to work, not to stand around yakking.”
“Can you wait around for a bit?” Abby says to me. “Or come back in half an hour? I have to finish up.” She nods toward the canoes.
I retreat with a wave, hearing her call out, “She was asking for directions, Chris. Gimme a break!”
I wander along the shoreline and sit out of sight behind some big object covered in a canvas tarpaulin. I look down into the water, clear to the sandy muck on the bottom. Two fish dart between reeds, nibbling at minuscule specks. She looks like me. She really does. Her eyes anyway. Wide and gray, unusual for girls with brown skin. Her hair is wavy, not kinky like mine was before Lucy messed with it, and her nose is wider. She’s got way more muscles than I do, but she’s about the same height…and she looks like me.
She looks like me…I am gripped with conviction, as of this second, that I am related to Abby. And very probably to Jimmy and Pete and Lucy too. The list connects us all, not just on a random piece of paper but maybe for real. I am 100 percent certain—well, maybe 96 percent—that Abby’s mother’s name will be on the list in my pocket.
“This is going to seem really strange,” I say, “coming from a stranger out of the blue. But I don’t know how else…” I fumble with the zipper on my sweater and pull out the folded list.
“It’s a long story,” I tell her. “But basically…”
My mind flashes to the back of a book jacket, where the synopsis of the story is supposed to catch the reader’s attention, to make her want to open the book. I need two sentences to sum up my whole life and hook this girl into stepping inside.
“I’m an orphan,” I say. “Maybe this sounds cuckoo, but I’m on kind of a quest. To find out who my parents were. And my only real clue”—I carefully unfold the list, the paper softer than when I first found it, the creases wearing thin—“is this list.”
Abby leans in to look.
“Huh!” she says. She points to Judith Anderson.
My heart jumps! I was right!
“That’s my…wait!” Her finger pauses on P. Golia, slides down the list and off the page. “Where’d you get these names?” She looks around over her shoulder and back to me, almost like she’s scared. “Seriously, what is this?”
I explain about the hospital and the records room, how nobody knows I have the list. Except the other kids. I talk fast, telling her about the bracelet and finding Jimmy, about meeting Lucy and Pete.
“They kept saying, There’s this girl at the marina who looks like you. So I came to see.” I shrug and grin. “Checking you out, like a weirdo. And…you do. Look like me.”
We stand there, eye to eye, while my skin tingles with the oddness of telling secrets to a stranger—and the unnerving certainty that she isn’t entirely a stranger.
“You better come over to my house,” she says. “I think my family will want to meet you.”
I can’t say what I expected, but it wasn’t this elegant lady in a silky turquoise shift. She sits at the kitchen table, drinking something that smells powerfully of cinnamon. My mind flies back to Tess, who used to smuggle in bread from her boyfriend’s family bakery. We’d feast sometimes in the dark, pulling apart the buttery layers, stuffing in sweet pockets of spice.
“This is Malou,” says Abby. “Malou, this is my mom.”
“Hello,” I say, “Mrs.—
“No Mrs.,” she says. “Just call me Preesha. It’s very nice to meet you, Malou.”
Preesha’s skin is cinnamon too, her glossy black hair as thick as a shawl lying across her shoulders and down her back.
“Abby, bring more cups,” says Preesha. “There is plenty more chai in the pot. I’ll tell Judy to join us.” She goes into the hall, and I realize there has been a muffled tapping noise that stops when Preesha calls out, “Abby has brought a friend home. Come have chai!”
Abby is putting green teacups on the table, each one with an orange saucer. “Sometimes,” she says, “that typing goes on until midnight.”
Another woman appears, a white woman wearing blue jeans and a plain gray T-shirt. Her hair is blond and short, tufty like a baby bird’s.
“This is Judy,” says Preesha.
“My aunt.” Abby puts an arm around her. “And this is Malou.”
I smile and put out my hand to meet hers. Since Judy is not East Indian like Preesha, maybe Abby’s father is Judy’s brother and has white skin?
“Wow.” Judy stares at me. “You’re like peas in a pod. Aren’t they, Pree? Like Patty and Cathy, the cousins on The Patty Duke Show. Only brown.”
“Just what I was thinking,” says Preesha.
The women glance at each other and back at us, almost gaping. It doesn’t feel rude; it’s more as if I’m a seashell found on the beach, not a shard of broken glass, the way I’m usually looked at.
“See?” Abby nudges me. “We weren’t imagining things.”
“Pretty name,” says Judy. “Where does Malou come from?”
“Mrs. Hazelton gave it to me. The matron where I grew up.” I explain about the Benevolent Home, and I see Preesha and Judy glancing at each other again with eyebrows lifted.
“Where is this place?” says Judy.
“South,” I say. “And east. It took me all day on two buses.”
“That’s far,” she says.
Abby pours chai from the pot into each of our cups. “So everyone who lived there had dead parents?” she says, making me cough while I nod.
“Abby,” says her mom, “maybe this is a touchy topic.”
“That’s okay.” I take a sip of the tea. “We talked about it all the time. One of our main sources of entertainment was making up stories about who we might be.”
“I used to do that even when I lived with both parents,” says Judy. “Being an orphan seemed so…romantic. I know it’s not!” she adds in a hurry, flushing. “But as a teenager? I longed to find out that those peculiar people in the dining room were not related to me!”
“And yours are the nice ones!” Preesha laughs. “Mine behave as if they’re responsible for upholding every rule on the planet.”
Abby rolls her eyes. “My grandparents live in India,” she says. “I’ve never met them.”
Preesha and Judy quick look at each other again. They seem to do that often.
“It’s very far away,” Preesha explains. “Another world, believe me.”
A loud buzzing noise erupts from the back of the stove.
“Oh!” Judy jumps up to push a button that stops the noise. “That’s to remind me to get to the post office before it closes. Do you want a lift somewhere, Malou?”
“It’s called a Volkswagen Beetle,” she says. “Isn’t it the cutest thing you ever saw?”
It is. Round and green, more like a frog than a beetle.
“Three of us can hardly fit, especially if we’ve got luggage. But it gets us where we want to go.”
I want to ask her, Where is Abby’s dad? I want to ask her, Are you Judith Anderson? I want to ask, Do you know who my mother was? But we’re on Broad Street already, and I’m thanking her for the ride, saying it was lovely to meet her, goodbye. Abby and I already have a plan to meet again tomorrow, same place, same time. I feel a twinge about doing stuff without Jimmy, but that’s blown aside by the enormous churning sandstorm telling me that Abby holds the key I’ve been searching for.
Understatement of the century.