The War that Saved My Life (24 page)

Susan didn’t get anything from Santa Claus. She told Jamie grown-ups didn’t. But I pulled my gifts from my pocket. For Jamie I had a scarf made of all the oddments of yarn, different colors and kinds, in stripes. He looked at it and frowned. “I like the scarf Susan made me better,” he said. Susan poked him and he said, “Thank you,” which kept me from smacking him.

Then I gave Susan her scarf, knit from the white wool. I’d made hers last of all my gifts, so it would be the best, because I really did get better at knitting the more I did it.

Susan unfolded it against her knee. “Ada, it’s beautiful. This is what you’ve been doing?”

“I got the wool from Fred,” I said quickly, so she’d know I hadn’t stolen it.

She hugged me. “I love it. I’ll wear it every day.”

I shrugged her away. It was too much, all this emotion. I wanted to get away. She seemed to understand even that. “Put your jods on and run out to see your pony,” she said. “Jamie’ll help me clear up, and we’ll get started on dinner.”

Jamie’s three pilots came midafternoon. They wore their best uniforms and identical polite smiles. They gave Susan a bottle of wine, a box of chocolates, and a potted plant. Susan told them she felt like she was getting the gifts of the Magi, and they laughed.

The house smelled like roast goose. The fireplace crackled. The sun was setting already, and the living room looked warm and bright even with the blackouts up. The pilots sat awkwardly on the sofa, all in a row, but then Jamie started cutting up, running his new car over their knees and grinning and acting silly, and pretty soon one of the pilots was on the floor playing with Jamie, making towers with the building blocks and smashing into them with the car, and Susan gave the other two pilots glasses of wine and everyone seemed much more relaxed.

I wasn’t relaxed. I was wearing the green dress.

I’d put it on when I came in from seeing Butter, because I knew it would please Susan, and it did. She brushed my hair and let it hang loose, tying my new green ribbon around my head. “That’s an Alice ribbon,” she said. “The girl in your book, Alice, she wears her hair like that.”

I felt like an imposter. It was worse than when I tried to talk like Maggie. Here I was, looking like Maggie. Looking like a shiny bright girl with hair ribbons. Looking like a girl with a family that loved her.

Jamie squeezed my arm. “You look nice,” he whispered, scanning my face anxiously.

I took a deep breath. I did have family that loved me. Jamie loved me.

Susan called us to dinner. She’d put Christmas crackers by everyone’s plate. I’d never seen them before. They were tubes of paper; when you pulled the ends apart, they made a cracking noise and paper crowns and little toys fell out of them. We all wore our paper crowns to dinner. The pilots and Susan and Jamie laughed and talked, and I ate goose and tried to keep my insides still.

“That’s a pretty dress,” one of the pilots said to me.

I felt prickly all over, like my skin was too tight for my body, but I wasn’t going to let myself lose control again. “Thank you,” I said. “It’s new.” It was kind of him to mention my dress instead of my bad foot. I told myself that, over and over, and kept still.

When they left, Susan sat me on the sofa beside her. “That was hard for you,” she said. I nodded. She pulled me against her, tight, the way she had the night before except that I wasn’t screaming. “Put the radio on, Jamie,” she said. “Ada, let’s see to your foot.” I sighed and arranged myself on the sofa, my bad foot in her lap. She pulled off my stocking and started rubbing and twisting it, the way she did every night. We were, she said, making a very small bit of progress.

“Where’s our book?” Jamie said, and went to fetch it. We were halfway through reading
Swiss Family Robinson
for the second time. I understood the story better now, but I still didn’t like it. The family landed on the perfect island, where everything they needed was right in front of them. Susan pointed out that they had to work together to put the good things to use. Jamie just liked the adventures.

“Not that,” I said. “Read mine.” I made Jamie fetch
Alice in Wonderland
. Between Alice’s hair ribbon and the word
wonderland,
I doubted I’d like it, but it was better than more Family Robinson.

It
was
better. Alice chased after a rabbit who was wearing clothes and a pocket watch. He went down his hole just like the rabbits I saw when I was out on Butter, but she went after him, and fell into a place she didn’t belong, a place where absolutely nothing made sense to her.

It was us, I thought. Jamie and me. We had fallen down a rabbit hole, fallen into Susan’s house, and nothing made sense, not at all, not anymore.

In January rationing began. It was a way of sharing out what food there was so that rich people, like Susan, couldn’t go hogging it and leaving poor people to starve. Rationing meant there might not be any butter or meat in the shops, and if there was you’d better get in the queue for it fast before it sold out. We all had ration books that said how much food we were allowed.

It made Jamie nervous. Me too. Susan had always given us plenty of food, but we knew that was because she was rich, no matter what she said. I’d gotten used to eating regular.

We tried eating less. The first time Jamie asked to be excused before he finished his dinner Susan felt his forehead. “Are you sick?” she asked. He shook his head. “Then eat. I know you can’t be full.”

“I’ll save it for tomorrow,” he said.

I pushed my plate away. “Me too.”

Susan told us firmly that we were not to save our dinners. She said rationing meant we would have to eat different kinds of food, more vegetables, less meat, less butter and sweets. It did not mean there would not be enough food. There would always be enough food. She would personally see that we always had enough to eat.

“Even if you have to get a job?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said firmly. “Even if I have to char.”

Chars were the lowliest kind of cleaning lady. Some of the older girls on our lane back home were chars.

“Why?” I asked.

She looked at me, blank.

“Why? You didn’t want us. You don’t even like us.”

Jamie held perfectly still. Susan sipped her tea, the way she always did when she was stalling. “Of course I like you,” she said. “Don’t I act as though I like you?”

I shrugged.

“I never wanted children,” she continued, “because you can’t have children without being married, and I never wanted to be married. When I shared this home with Becky, that was the happiest I had ever been. I wouldn’t have traded that for anything, not even children.

“I was so sad the day you came—but it wasn’t about you. I was just sad. I didn’t think I could take good care of you. I didn’t think I could take care of any children.”

“And you didn’t want to,” I said. “Especially us.”

Susan said, “Ada, what’s this about really? The better you get, the worse you seem.”

I shrugged again. It was scary, how angry I felt inside. At Susan, for being temporary. At Mam, for not caring about us. At Fred, for wearing the scarf I had knit him from his wife’s wool every day, as though it was something special, when I could see myself how I’d dropped some stitches and picked up others, so that the scarf was full of holes.

At Maggie, for loaning me her copy of
Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass
when I told her how much I liked
Alice in Wonderland
. As though books were something you could just give out like yesterday’s newspapers. As though I would be able to sit down and read it as easily as she would. As though the letter I sent her when she went back to school, which took me hours and was full of scratches and misspellings, was anything at all like her letter back to me, written in ink with the curvy handwriting.

At the war, for taking us away from Mam before she realized she loved us.

At myself, for being so glad to go.

“Ada.” Susan spoke slowly and clearly. “Right now you are here. I am not sending you or Jamie anywhere. You will both stay here. I will take care of you. You will have enough to eat. You are learning to read and write, and next year you will go to school. We will get your mother’s permission, and as soon as we do, we will get the operation to fix your foot. All will be well. Relax.”

When she started to speak I almost went away, to the place in my head where I didn’t feel anything. But Susan tapped my arm, keeping me with her, and she put her hand lightly around my wrist while she spoke. I pulled my hand away, but I stayed where I could hear her. That’s how I heard the words “an operation to fix your foot.”

Fix my foot? What on earth did she mean?

Three days later I rode Butter to the top of the hill. I halted where we could see the sea, dark and violent and thrashing, where the wind whipped Butter’s mane against my bad foot, held as it was by the crook of the sidesaddle. The wind blew the wisps of hair around my face and made tears come to my eyes, and I could feel its coldness even through my warm coat and hat and mittens.

No boats anywhere. No signs of spies. New towers built near the beach, and more barbed wire, and what looked like soldiers marching along the ocean’s edge. Our soldiers—if it were the Germans invading, the church bells would have rung.

I rode slowly down the hill, through the village. The butcher standing in his shop door nodded his head to me. One of the women I passed smiled. Another waved. They saw me ride by every day. If they thought I should be kept locked up, at least they didn’t say so. They didn’t look disgusted by me.

At home I untacked Butter and rubbed him dry. I fed him and combed out his tangled mane. I cleaned the saddle and bridle and put them neatly away. I took my time.

Then I went into the house, where Susan was, and asked, “What does the word
operation
mean?”

Susan took me back to see Dr. Graham so he could explain. He did not reexamine my foot. We sat in his office, all three of us, and he talked, and I listened.

“First of all,” he said, “understand that we can’t proceed without your mother’s permission. At this point it would have to be considered elective surgery, and that’s why we’ve been waiting for her approval.” He glanced up at Susan. “You haven’t gotten it?” She shook her head.