Evergreen (17 page)

“Who should sing?” Naamah said.

Mary Margaret tapped the songbook with her finger. “You should.”

“That’s a good idea,” said one of the girls who’d pulled Mary Margaret away in the locker room. “If Sister Cordelia doesn’t like it, which she won’t, she’ll be the one to blame.”

“It’ll be Cotsville in the broom closet,” said the one who’d taken her other arm.

“That’s not why,” Mary Margaret said, looking at Naamah as if she knew something about her even Naamah didn’t know.

“Why then?” Naamah said, but it was too late.

Sister Cordelia came sweeping into the room, fury on her face. Or maybe it was panic. The girls scattered to the outer edges of the dining room, but Naamah stayed where she was on the floor with the songbook in her hands. All at once, Sister Cordelia lifted the black record from the gramophone and broke it into as many pieces as she could.

“I’ve suffered enough today,” she said with what was left of her breath.

The girls disbanded to finish their chores, leaving Naamah alone with Sister Cordelia, the songbook, and the gramophone.

Sister Cordelia got down on her hands and knees to collect the broken pieces of the record, which she tucked away in some hidden place in her habit instead of putting them in the garbage bin across the room. She looked diminished somehow.
If she was anybody else but her, her eyes might have welled up just then and overflowed with salty tears.

“Leave,” she said to Naamah, but in a way someone else might have said,
Stay
.

Naamah got on her hands and knees, too, as she did whenever there was a mess to clean up. She picked up a jagged piece of the broken record and handed it to Sister Cordelia, who took it from her and tucked it into her habit without a word.

Sister Cordelia reached for the songbook. She sat on the floor, staring at the worn cover, the photograph of the man and woman at the center of it.

“This is my mother,” she said, touching the paper. “She used to be the soprano in our church’s choir in Minneapolis. People said her voice was like an angel’s, but I don’t remember it that way. She used to tell me to be silent.”

Naamah handed Sister Cordelia another piece of the record.

“She fell in with a Holy Roller and went south with him to bring his false god to the backwaters of Mississippi when I was eight,” Sister Cordelia said, covering the man’s face with her finger. “They wouldn’t see it that way, but that’s the way it was. Magic and light shows and speaking in tongues, even though God gave us the Word.”

Naamah tried to give her another piece of the record, but she didn’t take it.

“She was pretty,” Sister Cordelia said, rubbing her thumb along the woman’s cheek and through her hair. “She was disappointed I didn’t take after her. She’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry,” Naamah said, because she didn’t know what else was safe to say or why Sister Cordelia was telling her the story. Maybe it was meant as a cautionary tale.
This is what happens when you worship false idols
. Maybe it was a warning.
I know what you’re planning, Naamah
.

Sister Cordelia smiled strangely at the gramophone. “Now I have this unwieldy old thing to remember her by.” Even though she’d carried it downstairs perfectly well by herself, Sister Cordelia asked if Naamah would help her carry the gramophone back upstairs.

“Yes, Sister,” Naamah said.

Sister Cordelia carried the songbook and Naamah carried the gramophone up to a room on the second floor that was always locked. Naamah and the other girls were forbidden to even pause in front of it. If the other girls thought about the room or wondered what was inside, they didn’t say so in Naamah’s company. Naamah didn’t wonder about it either. She’d accepted that a great many things at Hopewell, and probably in the world, didn’t belong to her and never would. With a tarnished brass key, Sister Cordelia opened the heavy wood door. She nudged Naamah forward when Naamah wouldn’t move.

“You may pick one thing for yourself,” Sister Cordelia said, turning on the light. “But you mustn’t tell the other girls about what’s in this room.”

In all directions Naamah saw variations of pink: light pink on the walls, dark pink on the border that the circled the top of the room,
pink
pink on the dolls that were adorned with sparkly shoes and hairpins and sat primly on row after row of shelves. There were pink puzzles, a pink rocking horse, a pink spinning top, and a bookshelf full of pink books—stories that seemed like they would take a lifetime to read. There were even pink curtains gently gathered over a pink crib in the corner of the room, as if they were only waiting for a pink girl now. As if they’d only ever been waiting for one.

“What do you want?” Sister Cordelia said, her habit even blacker against all this light.

Naamah knew better, but she allowed herself to walk around the room inhaling the scent of pink. She allowed herself to come under the spell of all the pleasure it promised. Naamah looked over the dolls and toys, this foreign land, with pure bedazzlement, instead of asking silent questions.
Where did all this come from? Why haven’t I seen it until now?
No one had ever given her a gift. There was no Santa Claus. No Easter Bunny. No birthdays. Nothing but longing to mark the passing of time.

“This,” she said, and lifted a ceramic bird off a shelf full of tiny figurines—men and women, animals and flowers, a whole miniature world of them. Naamah cradled the little bird in her hand as if it were injured and needed her to become well again.

“That?” Sister Cordelia said, turning the key over in her hand. “It isn’t even pink.”

“It has wings,” Naamah said. Snow-white wings.

Naamah used her baby blanket to make a nest for her bird on the shelf in her locker. The rest of the girls had either gone outside to harvest that day’s store of vegetables from the garden or down to the kitchen to chop and boil them for supper. Now and then Naamah heard girls humming between the rows of vines, and then, inside, Sister Cordelia’s office door would slam, and the girls would harvest in silence again for a while.

Naamah stood in front of her locker, cradling her pretty white bird in her hand.

“You need a good name to have a good life,” she said, stroking its shiny ceramic wings, the ridge of feathers soft beneath her fingers. “You can’t have one like mine.”

Sister Cordelia once said Naamah was lucky to have a name at all; at other orphanages girls had numbers.

Step forward to be struck, number 134682
.

“You can’t have a number,” Naamah said to her bird, stroking her orange beak. “I’m going to call you Gracie.”

Naamah kissed the top of Gracie’s head, at first with only a tinge of suspicion about what she’d seen in the pink room, which she tried to block out with adoration. When that didn’t work, she held Gracie tightly, as if someone were already trying to take her away.
You belong to me now
, she said. But the longer Naamah stood in front of her locker, the more she wondered where everything in the pink room had come from and why Sister Cordelia had shown the room to her. To reward her for teaching the girls the song? That hardly seemed likely. To keep her quiet at the festival? Maybe so. Did the other girls have dolls and toys and pretty pink books hidden away in their lockers, too? Naamah held Gracie with one hand and opened every single locker with the other, but all she found were clothes, shoes, towels, and the occasional wet sheet a girl was trying to dry out before Sister Cordelia noticed.

No other girl had a baby blanket or a little book about wilderness survival like the one she’d swiped from the library in Sister Cordelia’s office when she was supposed to be eating lard sandwiches. No one else had a white ceramic bird.

Naamah kissed Gracie again. She was so sweet, so tiny.

I’ve earned you
, Naamah thought.

The more she thought about it, the more she believed everything in that pink room had been donated, and even though Sister Cordelia didn’t want what was offered she’d been forced to take it. Some of the dolls Naamah had seen still had price tags attached to their dresses and to the bottoms of their sparkly shoes. Were people outside of Hopewell that generous? That kind? Maybe there really were cars in all colors of the rainbow and a fountain that made dreams come true. Maybe Sister Cordelia really did have a mother once.

Naamah kissed Gracie a third time. She didn’t know what
she’d bargained for by taking her, or if she’d bargained anything at all, but she was glad for Gracie’s springy feet and her triangle beak. She was glad for her snow-white wings. Before Naamah placed Gracie in the blanket nest in her locker and told the ducks to protect her, she heard a rustling of feathers, the call of somewhere other than here.

15

On the morning of the harvest festival snow began to fall in wide, wet flakes. While the other girls took turns bathing, Naamah stood in front of a tall window in the dormitory. She’d been ready to go to the festival since the first brush of light in the sky. She’d been ready to go all her life. Outside, the rows of plants in the garden were beginning to turn white. White the earth. White the sky. White the last ripe grapes clinging to the vines. What if this was the last time Naamah looked out a Hopewell window? Wasn’t it? She didn’t know why, but she wanted to remember the wavery old window glass and the tiny drops of water that clung to it. She wanted to remember the sound of the radiators gurgling steam into the air. The few pleasant things about Hopewell.

“What do you think it feels like?” Mary Margaret said, sidling up to her at the window. She pressed her hand against the glass.

“Out there?” Naamah said. “I don’t know.”

None of them was allowed outside when it became too
cold to wear the thin blouses and skirts, which was most of the year in northern Minnesota. Only the girls who helped Sister Cordelia in town each week had ever felt snow on their skin or had stuck their tongues out to catch it when Sister Cordelia was tending to business.

“Maybe it’s like the icebox, except a giant one,” Mary Margaret said.

Naamah was thinking about the song she was supposed to sing and the crowd she was supposed to get lost in afterward. She’d memorized the words, but wasn’t certain about the melody, since she’d only heard it once before Sister Cordelia destroyed the record. Sister Lydie used to say you could only remember a melody if it found its way into your heart.

When Mary Margaret lifted her hand from the window, narrow rivers of water pooled at the sill. “Maybe it’s like heaven, and all this time we’ve been so close to it.”

Little fingers of fear started to pinch at Naamah’s heart. She was going to have to leave Gracie and her baby blanket behind. The book about how to survive in the wilderness—how to avoid hypothermia and frostbite, black fingers, missing toes. She was going to have to keep running and running and running, even though she’d never run more than a few yards her whole life. She was going to have to believe the world beyond the Hopewell wall wasn’t what Sister Cordelia said it was. She was going to have to believe in the logging camps up north and not believe in them at the same time.

“You’re going to be all right,” Mary Margaret said, as if she knew what Naamah had been planning. “You were always going to be all right.”

When all of the girls had bathed and dressed, they went downstairs together. Twenty-six coats, twenty-six scarves, and twenty-six pairs of mittens had magically appeared on the
table where they usually ate their meals. No one knew where the winter garments came from, but they made for a lovely sight, all those reds and wools and blues.

“Make sure each of you has a coat, a scarf, and a pair of mittens,” Sister Cordelia said, coming into the dining room. “Naamah, come with me.”

Naamah followed Sister Cordelia to her office, wondering if like the pink room there was one full of all things winter: ice skates and coats and snowmen that came to life when nobody was looking. Maybe there was a room for each of the seasons, a room for each of the girls filled with their hearts’ desires.

“I have something for you,” Sister Cordelia said. “Close your eyes.”

Naamah did as she was told, even when she felt Sister Cordelia’s hands at the front of her neck and then at the back of it. Even when they formed a collar for a moment.

When Sister Cordelia allowed her to open her eyes, Naamah saw the small silver cross and chain dangling from her neck.

“This is so you remember whom you belong to,” Sister Cordelia said.

Sister Cordelia carefully looked Naamah over, adjusting the fit of the clothes she’d chosen for her earlier that morning. Naamah was wearing a gray sweater, thick gray tights, her gray uniform skirt, and a pair of dull-black shoes that had appeared at the foot of her cot before she woke. Her coat was gray, her scarf. Naamah didn’t know what she looked like—a storm cloud? She didn’t care.
Goodbye
, she thought.

Sister Cordelia stared at Naamah as one might stare at a window, waiting for the glass to yield to the view. She placed her hand over her cross, as if she didn’t want God to hear her. “Everything I’ve done has been to protect you, Naamah. You’re still too young to understand what I mean. Too willful.”