Evergreen (18 page)

Naamah touched the cross around her neck.

Sister Cordelia touched the window. “Your soul is like this glass.”

A moment later Mary Elizabeth knocked on the office door, announcing the arrival of the bus. She said she’d brushed all the girls’ hair and put the ribbons in and that Mary Catherine had done the same for her. They’d all pinched their cheeks until they were pink.

“We get to ride on a bus?” the littlest girls were saying in the hallway.

“A bus! A bus!” said the others.

“Remember what I said,” Sister Cordelia said to Naamah before she came out of the office and reminded the other girls about the rules. Sister Cordelia’s hands, which had just been so definite in their movements, were shaking slightly.

“Don’t be worried about the snow, Sister,” the bus driver said when Sister Cordelia let him in. “It’s just showing off for us today, since it’s the first of the season. I’ll get you there in one piece.” He turned to the girls. “I’m Mr. Philips. How do all of you do?” When none of them answered, he scratched the back of his head. “I don’t blame you. Nothing’s worse than a bald bus driver who’s got snow for hair.” Water dripped down his face faster than he could wipe it off. “All right, then. Let’s get you to town.”

The whole way to town Naamah sat beside a rattling window, staring out at the earth and sky beyond the bus. Each girl, except the five-year-olds who were told to sit together, sat alone on the brown cloth seats. Mr. Philips kept looking back at them as if what he saw was strange, but he didn’t say anything. He only smiled, hoping, it seemed, someone would smile back at him. He turned the heater up because he said they looked cold.

Shortly after they drove through the Hopewell gates, the
bus made a turn and then another, and out her window Naamah started to see smoke pouring out of brick chimneys between the cover of trees. She started to see houses. Front yards. Backyards. Fences whitewashed with fresh snow. She even saw a snow family perched beside a rusty swing set; the family had carrots for noses, buttons for buttons. The bus continued past them. Past bright red berries. Wet black branches. An old schoolhouse that had boarded-up windows and a heavy leftward lean. Past more than Naamah could see at one time.

She looked down at the white line on the road, wondering what it meant and why the bus kept crisscrossing it. She looked up at the wires strung between the high wooden poles, knowing they made telephones work even though Hopewell didn’t have one. She saw a bushel of apples overturned on the side of the road. She saw a blue plate.

The bus continued into town, which was full of buildings and cars and signs painted red, white, orange, green, blue.
SODA FIVE CENTS. GORDON’S BAIT AND TACKLE
. A bank, a park, an empty bench.
MARYANN’S QUILTING SUPPLIES. THE CORNER STORE
.

How could all of this new color and these words and this life be here, so close to the stern white walls of Hopewell? How could that white be so different than this white racing past the bus windows to the ground? Sister Cordelia looked back at Naamah, momentarily distracting her, but Naamah saw the sign anyway.
LOVE’S CAFÉ, WHERE THE BAKED CHICKEN IS AS GOOD AS YOUR MOTHER’S
.
Your mother’s. Your mother’s. Your mother’s
.

The bus made another turn before it slowed and stopped altogether, and Naamah saw the sea of hats and coats and mittens. She saw the stage and the shiny instruments covered with snow. She saw husbands helping wives out of front seats and wives helping children out of backseats and children tumbling forth with red cheeks and noses.

“Snow!” one of them yelled, and then they all did.

One by one, the Hopewell girls stepped off the bus into the snow with them. Unlike the other children, the Hopewell girls flinched when the first flakes touched their skin.

Mr. Philips looked back at Naamah. “Aren’t you coming, little girl?”

“I’m fourteen, sir,” Naamah said, getting up from her seat at the very back of the bus where Sister Cordelia had positioned her.

“That isn’t so little, but it isn’t big either,” Mr. Philips said when Naamah reached the front of the bus. He pulled out his wallet and within it a photograph. “I have a granddaughter your age. You look like her. See?”

“What’s her name,” Naamah said.

“Elena,” Mr. Philips said. “She wants to be a doctor when she grows up. The kind that delivers babies. What do you want to be?”

“I don’t know,” Naamah said.

No one had ever asked Naamah that before. She and the other girls at Hopewell had spent all of their time thinking about what it was going to feel like to pass through the Hopewell gates once and for all. They didn’t think about what would happen after that because it didn’t really matter; the
after
had to be better than the
before
.

Mr. Philips put the photograph away when Sister Cordelia stepped onto the bus.

“Don’t wait too long to think about it,” he said, winking.

Sister Cordelia took Naamah’s hand and led her down the steps of the bus out into the snow, which the wind whirled around and around.
Snow
, Naamah thought. She couldn’t help but smile.

The first flakes landed on her eyelashes, and there they glinted like tiny stars until the heat of her skin melted them
into droplets of water, which she blinked away and which rolled all the way down her cheeks and disappeared into her scarf. The next snowflakes fell onto her shoulders and then her gray mittens and then the snowflakes fell everywhere. The accumulation was so startling Naamah stopped moving forward.

Cold, snow, ice:
these were old words, but their meanings were entirely new. They were filled with magic, overflowing with it. Anything seemed possible. Everything. At the exact moment Naamah stuck her tongue out to catch a snowflake like the children around her, Sister Cordelia jerked her forward, but not before she caught one.

“There’s the stage,” Sister Cordelia said. “Everyone keep your order.”

All the Hopewell girls were together now, walking in a straight line, past folding tables full of empty cups waiting to be filled with cider and empty plates waiting to have sausages placed on them. The women behind the tables were trying to wave away the snow as one would wave away flies in the summer, some with their hands, some with spatulas. They were wearing white aprons over their coats, turning sausages in pans.

They were laughing.

“The sausages,” they said. “The snow.”

Sister Cordelia led the girls past the tables, past a crowd of people tossing balls of snow into the air and then trying to figure out whose ball went the highest. Some of the people were jumping up and down to keep warm. Some were blowing on their mittens and gloves. All of them were smiling.
Were regular people always so happy?
Naamah wondered.

A little girl, of four or maybe five, dropped her doll on the ground, and her mother was helping her wipe the snow off with a handkerchief she’d pulled from her coat pocket.

“There,” she said gently, as Naamah passed. “Miss Lilly’s all better now.”

“But she had snow on her, Mommy,” the little girl said. She and her doll had bright blue eyes and blond hair that curled under at the ends. Both were wearing shiny black shoes with little bows at the heels. Both looked like they’d only ever been loved.

The mother kissed the girl’s forehead in a way Naamah had always dreamed of being kissed. First by her mother, then by any mother, then anyone. Mary Elizabeth and Mary Ellen had told stories about seeing families holding hands on the walkways in town or families throwing pennies into the fountain together, and all of them had wondered what it would be like to have their own coins, their own hands to hold. Once, a passerby had given Mary Ellen a penny and was disappointed when she wouldn’t toss it into the water, but the Hopewell girls understood perfectly well: she was waiting for a family to throw it with.

Sister Cordelia urged Naamah and the other girls forward toward the stage. A snowflake landed on Sister Cordelia’s cross, and she brushed it away as if it were unholy.

“Keep moving, girls,” she said. “Don’t get distracted by all of this sin.”

As Naamah and the other girls climbed the steps of the stage, Naamah memorized how many there were—one, two, three, four—so her feet could navigate them on the way down. She looked back at the bus and then at the stand of trees on the opposite side of the park. She thought of what the wilderness book said:
If you want to survive, you need to figure out where you are in relation to where you want to go. If you don’t have a compass, you’ll have to make your own
.

When they were all on the wooden stage, which was covered in a layer of snow marred by trails of footprints that went everywhere and nowhere, a member of the town’s board of trustees introduced the girls as a whole and then
asked each of them to come up to the tall silver microphone and say her name individually. Mary Catherine. Mary Elizabeth. Mary Margaret. Mary Alice. Mary Jo. Mary Constance. Mary May. Mary Alise … Naamah.

“That’s an unusual name, isn’t it?” the trustee said, stopping Naamah from returning to the other girls with his hand. “What does it mean?”

Naamah looked at Sister Cordelia, who told her to go on and answer the question. By this time, the crowd of people had mostly stopped talking and had directed its attention to the stage. A few babies were crying, and their mothers were bouncing them on their hips. Children were swiping sausages from untended pans and hiding them in their coats. The snow was falling faster now than it was melting, and the people of Green River were starting to look like the snow people Naamah had seen from the bus window.

“It either means ‘displeasing to God’ or ‘pleasing to God,’ ” Naamah said.

“Depending on what?” the trustee said.

“My behavior, sir,” Naamah said, and the crowd erupted in laughter. Naamah didn’t understand it.

“The Hopewell girls, everyone,” the trustee said, waving his hand dramatically before he hustled Sister Cordelia away from the stage, and Naamah and the girls were alone.

Naamah stayed in front of the microphone just as they’d planned, and the other girls formed a half circle around her. She looked out onto the sea of people loving and laughing and living their lives. Instead of families she wasn’t a part of, in their place Naamah saw trees. She saw her mother. She saw green after green after green.

“ ‘My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run,’ ” she sang.

Naamah thought of all the nights she’d spent in the broom
closet unable to sleep because she was so afraid. All the days she’d spent on her hands and knees trying to scrub her way into Sister Cordelia’s heart, the Lord’s heart, anyone’s heart. She thought of all the years she’d spent watching the other girls eat wedges of cheese and fat purple figs.

“ ‘My strongest trials now are past, my triumph has begun.’ ”

Naamah was never going to get down on her knees for anyone ever again. She was never going to let anyone stuff cornmeal into her mouth. She was never going to let anyone cleanse her with bleach.

“ ‘Oh, come Angel Band, come and around me stand.’ ”

She was going to tear up every Bible she ever saw.

She was going to spit on every cross.

“ ‘Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings …’ ”

She was going to be free.

When Naamah stopped singing, the crowd started clapping and cheering and whistling. People were moving toward the stage quickly, just as Naamah had hoped they would. The trustee who had introduced them told the girls to take a bow.

“Especially you,” he said to Naamah. “You have a beautiful voice.”

As Naamah stepped forward and curtseyed, she looked to the left side of the stage and saw Sister Cordelia surrounded by a group of people trying to congratulate her. On the right side of the stage, Naamah saw the stairs and started running.

Naamah was down the stairs—one, two, three, four—and on her way across the field, to the woods on the other side of the park, to the logging camps and her mother’s tender arms, when a woman wearing a worn-out fur coat blocked her way.

“Is it you?” she said, as if her heart were breaking.

The woman’s face was a strange yellow color; her skin had sunken in on itself like a piece of old fruit. Mucus gathered at
the corner of her eyes. The woman was too young to look old. To look that weathered. Her hair was the color of wheat.

“I can’t cry anymore,” the woman said, wiping the mucus away with a handkerchief. “This is what comes out of me now.”

The coat she was wearing was missing big patches of fur.

“You haven’t had a good life, have you?” the woman said.

Naamah looked toward the woods at the other end of the park. She thought of the wilderness book.
Hypothermia. Frostbite. Black fingers. Missing toes
. If she went now, she could still make it there. But she had to go now. Her legs would have to move as fast as her heart was beating. As fast as she was breathing. “No,” Naamah said.

The woman reached for Naamah’s hand, and though Naamah hesitated—the woods, the woods—she gave it to her because the woman looked so sad and sick and alone.

The woman pressed her lips to the top of Naamah’s hand; it was the first time anyone had ever kissed her. The first time since Sister Lydie that Naamah had felt the warmth of another person’s heart on her skin. Just before the woman let go of Naamah’s hand, and Sister Cordelia came running down the last of the stairs, her habit white with snow, chanting
Our Father, Who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name
, and seized Naamah with her claws, the woman leaned to one side as if she might tip over.

“Please forgive me,” she said. “If you’re you. If you aren’t.”

16

Naamah didn’t make it to the trees. She didn’t make it to the logging camps. She didn’t run and run and run until she was holding her mother and her mother was holding her and everything was all right for the first time in their lives. She didn’t even get to say goodbye to the woman who’d kissed her hand. Sister Cordelia steered her back to the bus by the collar of her coat saying nothing but the Our Father prayer over and over again. When Mr. Philips greeted them with a wide smile—You should be a singer, that’s what! How lovely your voice was, like those angels you were singing about—Sister Cordelia quieted him with a sharp wave of her hand.
And lead us not into temptation
, she said.