“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.
“If only you’d let God into your heart,” she said today as she guided a spoonful of cornmeal toward Naamah’s mouth. Her heavy silver cross swung across her habit like a pendulum. “I can see it, Naamah. It’s still flecked with black.”
Sister Cordelia had a way of sounding sincere sometimes, like she really did want to help Naamah but Naamah was the one making that impossible. When Naamah was a little girl, she believed what Sister Cordelia told her: that the cross gave her the power to see into Naamah’s soul as if through a window. Naamah would put all of her effort into trying to change the view. She’d pray until her knees went numb. She’d scrub the floors until she saw her reflection in them. She’d memorize Sister Cordelia’s favorite passages in the Bible. Still, her devotion was flawed. She’d confuse the order of someone begetting someone else or the floor would shine in a less-than-holy light. Naamah didn’t think Sister Cordelia could see into her soul anymore, but part of her still clung to the belief that if she could just scrub a little longer or pray a little harder she’d become lovable.
Naamah lay all day watching the sunlight move across the walls. When night came she watched the moonlight move across them. She soothed herself by thinking of her favorite of the songs Sister Lydie used to sing to her. Go to sleep my darling, close your weary eyes. The lady moon is watching from out the starry skies. The little stars are peeping, to see if you are sleeping. Go to sleep, my darling, go to sleep, good night. Naamah thought about her mother and why she left her at the orphanage with only a blanket to know her by. That small white square of cotton with rows of yellow ducks on it was the only thing Naamah owned that her mother had once touched. When no one was looking, Naamah would press her lips to each of the ducks,
as if her mother were in there somewhere and only needed to be coaxed out.
It’s all right that you left me. It’s all right if you come back.
Sister Cordelia allowed her to keep the blanket as a reminder of the low place she came from. She told Naamah her mother was a prostitute at a logging camp up north, which Naamah thought meant her mother was a cook or a nurse or a special kind of woodcutter who climbed high up into the branches of trees until Sister Cordelia described the crimes of the flesh her mother committed daily, nightly, for money. Every night since then, Naamah would trace the letters stitched into the corner of the blanket—HUX—wondering what they meant, pretending it was a secret message. Maybe it was Morse code like they’d used in the war. Maybe it meant I’m sorry, my little duck. I love you.
Of everything she was deprived of in the broom closet, Naamah missed her blanket, which she kept hidden behind a towel in her locker during the day, the most. She missed the thinning fabric, the fading ducks, her only true friends at Hopewell. She didn’t care what Sister Cordelia said about her mother and the men who paid her money to take off her clothes. She didn’t care how many sins of the flesh her mother had committed. She didn’t even care that one of those men was probably her father. One day she was going to find her mother and push all those men down into the sawdust where they belonged, and she was going to hold her mother tight until her mother held her and everything was all right for the first time in their lives. That’s what kept her going.
That night, Naamah dreamed of her mother’s face, her skin, the shape of her heart. In her dream, she and her mother were meandering through a garden like the one at Hopewell. Her mother was humming a tune about everything blue in the world. Blue skies, bluebirds, blueberries. When they passed a vine full of jam grapes so ripe some had already burst and fallen to the ground, her mother reached for a small cluster of them.
You can’t, Naamah warned her. You’ll get in trouble.
But her mother picked the grapes anyway and put several of them in her pretty pink mouth. As she chewed, she let the sugary juice run down her chin. She picked another grape from the vine; this one she handed to Naamah.
Try one, she said. They taste like love.
Just as Naamah was lifting the grape to her mouth, anticipating its sweetness, she woke with a start and found herself on the floor of the broom closet. She didn’t know how she’d arrived there or what kind of noise she’d made on her journey down from her cot, but she braced herself for a late-night visit from Sister Cordelia. Sister Cordelia knew everything that happened at Hopewell. Her moles were detectives. The hairs that grew out of them were antennae. She knew things about Naamah that Naamah didn’t even know.
Naamah listened for Sister Cordelia’s footsteps on the stairs. She listened for the swishing sound of her heavy black habit against the tile floor. She listened for how quickly Sister Cordelia was breathing, how much trouble she was going to be in. She listened until the pool of silvery moonlight flooding over the windowsill slipped from one wall to another.
Still, Sister Cordelia didn’t come. Maybe she didn’t know everything.
Naamah waited until the moonlight gave way to daylight before she climbed back into her cot as noiselessly as she could. She drew her knees to her chest and closed her eyes, trying to call forth an image of her mother. Blue skies, she whispered. Bluebirds. Blueberries. Only when Naamah finally stopped listening for Sister Cordelia and the hem of her habit brushing against the floor in the hallway could she hear her mother singing in the garden once more. Only then could she see the grape juice dripping from her mother’s chin.
14
Although Sister Cordelia had bent herself to the task of saving Naamah’s soul, she had to delay her plans because the town of Green River had invited all twenty-six of the orphans at Hopewell to its harvest festival on the following Saturday. In the letter, which was hand delivered by an assistant clerk from the town hall and which Mary Elizabeth had brought up to the broom closet straightaway, the board of trustees wanted the Hopewell girls to sing one of the Lord’s songs on a stage in front of the whole town. They wanted the girls to feel like they had a real place in the community instead of simply sharing an address with them. Afterward, cups of warm apple cider and plates of sausages would be served, and the girls could mingle with the townspeople.
“Whores mingle,” Sister Cordelia hissed as she read. Surely Sister Cordelia wouldn’t be opposed to the request, the letter said, since she could select any of the Lord’s songs she saw fit. The town’s board of trustees said they were looking forward to hearing the girls sing because they were certain their voices would sound more poignant than the voices of girls who were blessed with (yet spoiled by) mothers and fathers. They were looking forward to enjoying a bright future with Hopewell.
“Fools,” Sister Cordelia said.
Sister Cordelia was feeding Naamah spoonfuls of cornmeal, reading the letter, and reacting to it all at once. She wasn’t aware she’d been reading out loud until Naamah started choking because Sister Cordelia had pushed the spoon too far into her mouth.
“Singing is for heathens,” Sister Cordelia said, retracting the spoon.
While Naamah lay on the cot with bits of cornmeal strewn across her face, Sister Cordelia looked over the letter very carefully, as if she might have missed something in the blocky print (print!) and Naamah was waiting for it to be her fault.
Warm apple cider and sausages? The sounds of the words, the fragrant steam rising off of each letter, made Naamah’s mouth water. She licked the stale cornmeal from the outer edges of her lips, pretending it was anything other than what it was, even the slender piece of chalk Sister Cordelia had made her suck on so she never forgot Pythagoras’ theorem again, the geometry of fear. Naamah hated cornmeal.
“There’s no community out there,” Sister Cordelia said. She held the letter away from her cross. “People lie to each other. People cheat. Out there people have babies and leave them on my doorstep like dogs.”
“Maybe they don’t mean to,” Naamah said because she thought Sister Cordelia was talking to her and therefore awaiting a response.
Sister Cordelia tucked the letter into her habit. She told Naamah she could get up from her cot now and return to the dormitory with the other girls, but she kept hovering over Naamah as if she had something else to say. A fat blackfly was darting around the broom closet, buzzing across the length of the floor, the ceiling, the cot. When it landed on one of Naamah’s toes, Sister Cordelia’s hand came crashing down on her foot.
“There’s good and there’s evil,” Sister Cordelia said. “There’s in here and out there. You’re foolish if you believe anything worthwhile exists on the other side of our wall.”
Sister Cordelia always said there were two worlds—the one at Hopewell and the other one—and that the other one had different rules. Out there, plenty of good Christians got punished for following God’s laws, and plenty of bad ones lived like kings for breaking them.
“Think about that when you see people stuffing themselves with sausages.”
“I get to go, too?” Naamah said, trying to picture the fountain, the colorful cars, the market with an entire aisle devoted to salty canned foods.
“I can’t very well leave you alone, can I?” Sister Cordelia said. “But you certainly haven’t earned a trip to town. A trip anywhere other than the broom closet.” Sister Cordelia put her hand on Naamah’s cheek. “What happened here? You have dust on your face.”
Naamah thought about the time she spent on the floor of the broom closet last night. She thought about her mother’s pink lips, the sweetness of her voice. Naamah didn’t want to lose her garden dream by giving it to Sister Cordelia.
“I do?” she said, waiting for Sister Cordelia to see the truth in her soul and punish her for lying. For dreaming of her mother. For dreaming at all.
But Sister Cordelia didn’t say anything. She simply went to the bathroom and returned with a washrag and a basin of tepid water. She wip
ed down Naamah’s face the same meticulous way she would a corner of the floor to prove her loyalty to God and whatever humble work he required of her. Though Sister Cordelia had seen every one of Naamah’s angles from her head to her toes, Naamah had never even seen Sister Cordelia without her habit on. She didn’t even know what color her hair was or if she had hair at all.
“Sometimes I wonder if you’re ever going to follow the path to God,” Sister Cordelia said, wringing out the washrag. “Don’t you see it, Naamah? It’s right in front of you. All you have to do is open your eyes. I can’t keep prying them open for you.”
From the window in the broom closet, Naamah saw a group of girls huddling together in the garden to try to keep warm in their threadbare uniforms, pleated gray skirts and white blouses pintucked at the sleeves, while they harvested the last of the season’s tomatoes and corn and the first of the squashes and root vegetables, which they carried to the screened door at the back of the kitchen, where the oldest girls worked very hard to make whatever meals Sister Cordelia requested.
From where she stood now, Naamah could also see above the high stone wall. She could see beyond the iron gates. To the south was Green River. To the north, the woods. Tall evergreens. Green as far as she could see.
“Do you have any idea what God thinks of you?” Sister Cordelia said. “What he tells me while you’re sleeping? He thinks you don’t have a chance at redemption. Maybe I should stop fighting for you like he tells me. Maybe I should move on to another girl.”
“I’ll be good,” Naamah said, thinking, Maybe you should.
For the first time in her life, fear wasn’t the only thing steering her into good behavior. Fear wasn’t the only thing flooding her heart. Naamah imagined herself standing on the stage at the harvest festival with the other girls. She imagined a whole town of people clapping for them after they finished singing, a whole town of people rushing onto the stage to shake their hands and hand them plates of sausages and glasses of cider, to welcome them to the community. She imagined slipping away from the stage in all that commotion and running toward her mother, the forest ever green.
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