“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 frostbi
te, 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.”
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.
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