Evergreen (14 page)

Eveline buried her face in her child’s neck, inhaling her sugary smell.

All at once her child latched on to Eveline’s cheek and pulled at it hard the way Cullen had pulled on her wrist.
I’d like some dessert
.

Eveline unlatched her tiny hand from her face. She was afraid again.

There isn’t any
.

One of the nuns walked by the window, and Eveline got down on her knees. She could see the moles on the nun’s face—black hairs growing out of the brown lumps—and the heavy silver cross she wore around her neck swinging back and forth.

When the nun sat down, Eveline stood up. She wrapped Hux’s blanket—the one with little ducks on it and his name embroidered at the corner—around her child and set her in
the reed basket. “I have to let you go,” she said, drops of blood falling from between her legs onto the front walkway like tears. Her child stopped crying.

Eveline leaned over her daughter one last time.

“I love you,” she said.

Eveline rang the orphanage’s doorbell and ran, because unlike with Cullen, this time her legs would carry her wherever she wanted to go. She thought of broken legs and dreams, of a woman named Meg who’d left behind her silver hand mirror, perhaps because the vision of her life in Evergreen would only haunt her. When Eveline reached the truck, she saw that Lulu had moved over to the driver’s seat, and Eveline sat where Lulu had been sitting; the passenger window was still foggy from the warmth of her hand, her heart.

“Drive,” she told Lulu, who said, “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Eveline said, although as they drove away from the orphanage, from her sugary daughter, she wondered if this was the biggest mistake of her life, leaving a child on a doorstep at half past ten o’clock. She thought of the day last spring when she saw the doe and her two fawns in the garden. Her two fawns. She felt herself letting go of the bowstring.

Go back
, she thought as they turned the corner, which would lead them to the county road and eventually to the alfalfa fields and home, but she couldn’t say it out loud no matter how much she wanted to. Back there was stillness. In front of her was life. Eveline kept thinking of Emil in the Black Forest, shivering around a dying fire for months and months, waiting for her to do what must have seemed so simple to him: to wish him home.

And that’s what she did finally on this cold spring night halfway between Green River and Evergreen, on a dark country road illuminated by the truck’s yellow headlights. She could
see a light go on in the Black Forest, and her husband running toward a clearing, a road much like this one that would steer him home. She could see him crossing the ocean, boarding a train in Grand Central Station without his butterflies but with no need for them after all he’d survived. She could see him paddling upriver in a leaky old boat.

Lulu reached for Eveline’s hand, and there they were, the dwarf and the giant.

In the dark, Eveline kept hearing a voice, a howl, which would pull her back to this moment the rest of her life. She thought of the wolf woman in a cage somewhere in Canada, and a powerful longing sprung up in her. She dug her fingernails into the door handle, hoping it would give beneath the pressure, praying she’d fall out of the truck onto the cold hard road.

The moon appeared between the clouds, and though Eveline was miles from the orphanage, she was bound to it now, to the woman with the moles and the cross, to the moment she laid her child down in the reed basket beneath a blanket full of cheery ducks, to the moment she turned her back on the past, believing she could for an instant—you couldn’t, she knew now—and steered toward the future.

As they turned onto the first of many alfalfa fields, Eveline saw a girl with black hair and long thin limbs in the headlights. She saw the crackling fall leaves in her hands, the sticks in her hair, the question, always the same question, in her startling gray eyes.

Why did you leave me?

PART TWO

Hopewell Orphanage Green River, Minnesota
1954

13

That girl with the black hair and the long thin limbs was Naamah, and Sister Cordelia took up her cause from the start. She said the devil had hold of Naamah’s soul, and for the last fourteen years she’d been trying to drive him out. That was why Naamah had spent the first week of her life in a crib positioned beneath the holy-water font and this last one banished to her cot, which Sister Cordelia had moved out of the dormitory Naamah shared with the other girls and into the broom closet. This time Naamah’s crime was being hungry and plucking a beautifully purple grape from the vine in the garden without asking for permission.

Each morning Sister Cordelia made the girls walk past the broom closet before they went down to breakfast to deter them from falling into temptation’s arms like Naamah had.

“Don’t be fooled into feeling sorry for her,” Sister Cordelia said as she hurried into the closet this morning. The hem of her habit stirred up the fine layer of dust on the floor and sent it whirling in the air. Her moles and the wiry hairs that grew
out of them started to quiver, and her upper lip curled back, exposing a rotting tooth among a row of twisted yellow ones. “This is about more than a grape,” she said to the girls. “This is about giving in to your desires the moment you have them. It’s about lust. Think about what would have happened if I didn’t knock the grape out of her hand in time. If she’d actually eaten it.”

“Yes, Mother,” the girls said, and each of them made the sign of the cross.

If the other nuns had still been at Hopewell, they might have tried to convince Sister Cordelia to let Naamah go back to the dormitory, or at least let her move an inch or two on her cot, but they might not have. Most were as fearful of Sister Cordelia and her very particular interpretation of the Bible as the girls were. The other nuns usually stayed only as long as it took to be transferred to other, more pleasant orphanages down south. After the last nun left and no one came to take her place, Sister Cordelia walked the halls with her cane held high once again. That she’d had a mother and father once, a history outside of Hopewell, seemed impossible to Naamah. Sister Cordelia belonged to Hopewell, and Hopewell belonged to her.

The only nun who’d ever tried to stop Sister Cordelia was Sister Lydie, who’d grown up milking cows and making cheese on a dairy farm in a place called Racine, Wisconsin. During her first week at Hopewell, Sister Lydie intervened when she saw Sister Cordelia striking Naamah’s hand with a ruler in the hallway because her locker wasn’t up to scratch.

“Stop striking her this instant,” she’d said, putting herself between them. Her voice and her body were tiny but bold. She was only twenty years old then. “Children need love in order to follow the rules we impose on them. God would be
ashamed, Sister. Naamah’s an innocent in his eyes, as she should be in ours.”

“Don’t you dare talk about him that way,” Sister Cordelia said. Without warning, she stopped striking Naamah’s hand with the ruler and struck the top of Sister Lydie’s.

Sister Lydie only lasted sixty-four days before she left Hopewell, but the impression she left behind was everlasting. Sister Lydie was the only person who’d ever rubbed Vaseline on Naamah’s hands to take the sting out of them or offered her a cold glass of milk when she was thirsty or a hug when she was lonesome. She was the only person who ever sang a song to Naamah, for her. Naamah liked to imagine Sister Lydie walking through fields of sweet grass on her parents’ farm, a pair of marmalade barn cats purring in her arms. She thought Wisconsin must have been full of gentle people like her.

After Sister Cordelia and the girls finally went down to breakfast, Naamah moved a few inches this way and that to disperse the pain radiating from the lower part of her spine from lying down too long. She was careful not to creak the metal springs too much because other than going to the bathroom she wasn’t supposed to get up. She was supposed to lie on her cot and think about what she’d done. Today, Naamah mostly thought about how much she wished Sister Lydie would come back to Hopewell, though no one who left ever did.

Well, almost no one.

Once, when Naamah was nine years old, she was cleaning the windows upstairs in the dormitory, and a car pulled up to the iron gates at the entrance of the orphanage. Naamah had never seen a car as fancy as that. She thought it belonged to a king or a queen. The wheels looked like they were made of gold. Naamah didn’t recognize the young woman who stepped out of the car until she took off her feathery green hat. Ethelina,
who’d slept in the cot next to Naamah’s until she was sixteen and was sent out into the world without any warning. Ethie. Her hair was still red as a strawberry. Her eyes still like blue ice.

That day, Ethelina stood on the gravel driveway with a hand on her cheek and the other stretched across her heart, staring up at the orphanage. She stood that way for a very long time before she got back into the car and drove away. Even though she’d dropped her pretty green hat on the gravel, she never came back for it.

Naamah didn’t know what Ethelina saw when she looked up at the orphanage, but it made her wonder what the world was like outside Hopewell and what had made Ethelina come back. All her life Naamah had dreamed of turning eighteen and walking through the front gates for the first and last time, of Sister Cordelia finally having to let her because the law said so. Most of what Naamah knew about the world, which the high stone wall surrounding Hopewell obscured the view of, she’d heard from the two girls who went to town weekly to help Sister Cordelia carry whatever she bought at the market. Sister Cordelia said the world was full of liars and thieves and murderers, but Mary Elizabeth and Mary Ellen told everyone it was full of shops and restaurants and cars that came in all colors of the rainbow. They said there was a large stone fountain next to the market, and people who walked past it would toss pennies into the water to make their dreams come true.

The rest of what Naamah knew, she learned from books or from Sister Cordelia. The broom closet was situated on the second floor of the orphanage, above the classroom, and in the afternoons Naamah heard the girls doing their sums on the blackboard and reciting the meanings of the words Sister Cordelia made them memorize the night before.
Deference. Authority. Dominion
. Again. Again! Sister Cordelia said a stupid girl was a useless girl, and neither she nor God would abide that inadequacy. She expected their letters and numbers to be formed perfectly, and if they weren’t she’d make them kneel on a ruler for the rest of the lesson. Naamah was the only girl unfortunate enough to have been born left-handed, with a proclivity for smudging and cursive that leaned toward hell instead of heaven.

All the other girls shared the name Mary there. Their middle names were what distinguished them. Mary Margaret. Mary Catherine. Mary Elizabeth. But even those could be confusing. Mary Alice. Mary Alise. Purposely so, it seemed,
as if Sister Cordelia didn’t want them to be told apart. Naamah and Ethelina were the only girls who’d ever been given different first names. Ethelina’s meant “noble” in the dictionary. Naamah’s meant either “pleasing to God” or “pleasing to the devil,” depending on religious interpretation.

The devil, a few of the Marys had decided.

“At least my name doesn’t rhyme with
comma
,” Mary Helen liked to say. “KOM-ah. NOM-ah. You have the ugliest name in the world.”

Even before Naamah plucked the grape from the vine in the garden, most of the girls avoided her because they were afraid if they got too close Sister Cordelia would start believing the devil had hold of them, too. Some would tell if Naamah wet her bed, which she still did when she had nightmares, or if she forgot to bring her rosary beads to morning mass or if a thread were loose at the hem of her uniform, and they’d be rewarded with wedges of cheese or one of Sister Cordelia’s beloved figs, which she had shipped in little oval tins all the way from Turkey. Naamah didn’t blame them even when she did. Even though in a room full of girls she always felt very alone. She
might have done the same thing if a fig or wedge of cheese had ever been within her reach, which was why she didn’t scowl at the girls who scowled at her or tell on them when they broke a rule. She didn’t even tell when a girl got her monthly blood, though there was always a girl who told when Naamah had hers, and then Naamah would have to stand in the bathtub while Sister Cordelia washed her down with a bleach solution because of how dirty the blood made her in God’s eyes.

Sister Cordelia said God was the only one in the world who deserved unconditional love and that you had to give yourself to him completely, like she had, before he’d ever consider loving you. She said he knew the difference between empty gestures and real heart. Each morning after the girls were sent outside to rake the yard of its birch and bigtooth leaves, Sister Cordelia came into the broom closet with a bowl of cornmeal and spoon-fed Naamah her breakfast, even though Naamah knew how to feed herself perfectly well.