Evergreen

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  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.

  On the way back to Hopewell, Naamah sobbed in her seat while the glass rattled, while they passed the blue plate, the overturned apples, the people made of snow. Sister Cordelia was sitting next to her and would make her pay dearly for her tears and for what she’d done at the festival, but Naamah couldn’t stop crying.

  She wasn’t free. She wasn’t free.

  When they arrived at the orphanage, Sister Cordelia didn’t say a word to Naamah. She didn’t drag her to the broom closet or strike her in front of the others or set a bucket in front of her and tell her to scrub until God forgave her for trying to run away—one day for each step, one week for each glance at the evergreen trees. She didn’t say or do anything.

  That night while the other girls slept, Naamah turned and turned in her cot, the metal creaking beneath her, wondering why Sister Cordelia didn’t pull her away from the other girls to punish her the moment they walked through the front door, wondering why she’d been allowed to pick at her supper with the other girls, to brush her teeth, and to recite her nightly prayers on her knees. What new punishment awaited her? How much would it hurt? How long would it take? Naamah had never been more afraid.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Mary Margaret had said that morning, but before they went to bed she’d said, “You’re letting her make you ugly.”

  When Naamah couldn’t sleep and couldn’t wait any longer for her punishment to come, she got up from her cot. She stood in the middle of the dormitory, shivering in her thin cotto
n nightgown. She watched the girls nearest to her sleep, their faces awash in blue light. The littlest girls had climbed into bed with one another and lay together like spoons. The others slept alone. How was it no one had wanted any of them? How was it that at the exact same time one woman could be turning sausages and another woman could be dying?

  Naamah made her bed as neatly as she could in the darkness. She kissed her pillow the way the woman at the festival had kissed her hand. She touched the cross Sister Cordelia had placed around her neck. She knew whom she belonged to. She always had.

  Naamah left the dormitory and walked into the broom closet. You can’t punish me if I punish myself first, she thought, and lay down on the cold floor. When freezing wasn’t punishment enough, Naamah dug her fingernails into her back until she reopened the sores from the last time she was in here, and the blood rose. With that blood—pain she understood, pain that was safe, pain that felt like home—she was finally able to rest.

  Hours later Naamah woke to Sister Cordelia standing over her, shaking her head lightly in the moonlight. Sister Cordelia was wearing a white nightgown just like Naamah’s, just like all the girls at Hopewell. Her silvery hair trailed down her back, ending in waves at her waist. In this light, Naamah couldn’t see Sister Cordelia’s moles. She couldn’t see her crooked yellow teeth. Naamah thought she was dreaming.

  “What are you doing in here, child?” Sister Cordelia said, sighing deeply.

  When Sister Cordelia kneeled before her, her bones creaked. She helped Naamah up from the floor and led her out of the broom closet down the dimly lit hallway. Back to her cot, Naamah thought. She didn’t understand why she wasn’t being punished.

  Sister Cordelia’s feet were bare. Were they also bare in the broom closet? Naamah had never seen her toes or heels or arches; up until this very moment she’d believed Sister Cordelia had hooves instead of feet. Naamah had never seen the patchwork of red and blue veins around her ankles—evidence Sister Cordelia had a heart.

  Instead of the dormitory Sister Cordelia took her down to her office, where Naamah found her baby blanket and her pretty white bird on Sister Cordelia’s desk.

  “Are you taking them away?” Naamah said. Of course she was. She was probably going to make Naamah smash her bird and burn her blanket.

  “No, you are,” Sister Cordelia said. “As well as the rest of this.” She handed Naamah a white laundry bag stuffed full. “Open it.”

  Naamah untied the strings and reached inside the bag, expecting to feel something sharp snap at her skin. At the very least, she thought she’d see soiled linens she’d have to scrub clean. But on top of the bag, she found the gray winter coat she’d worn to the festival, the pair of mittens, and the scarf. Beneath that layer was a pair of winter boots. Beneath that a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a tin of figs.

  “I don’t understand,” Naamah said.

  Sister Cordelia leaned against her desk. “Keep going.”

  The last item Naamah pulled out of the bag was a hat, which was covered almost entirely, intricately, with green feathers. Naamah recognized it at once.

  “Ethelina dropped this in front of the gates,” Naamah said. “I saw her when I was cleaning the window.”

  “You were a little girl then,” Sister Cordelia said, fingering the material at the collar of her nightgown. She looked very old without her habit on. Her skin hung from her neck as if it were about to peel away from her and fall to the floor.

  Naamah touched the green feathers. “I waved to her, but she didn’t wave back.”

  Sister Cordelia looked out the darkened window as if Ethelina were still standing there with her hand stretched across her heart. “Ethelina was special,” she said. “Most of the girls who come through here aren’t.”

  “Where did she go?” Naamah said.

  “I opened a door for her, and she walked through it,” Sister Cordelia said.

  She turned from the window and faced Naamah.

  “Do you know you were only a few hours old when I found you? The umbilical cord was still warm. You were special, too, Naamah. Your eyes were so gray.”

  Sister Cordelia walked behind her desk, opened the top drawer, and closed it again.

  “We were so close to having everything, Naamah. You and me and God. Your mother didn’t want you, but I did.”

  Naamah let go of the laundry bag.

  Your mother didn’t want you. Naamah had always told herself that one of the logging-camp men had forced her mother to leave her on the doorstep on the night she was born. Every girl at Hopewell told that kind of story because if their mothers had left them by choice, then no one had loved them even for a minute.

  Sister Cordelia came out from behind her desk.

  “Put the coat on, the boots, the mittens,” she said. “It’s cold out there.”

  “Where are we going?” Naamah said.

  “You’re going,” Sister Cordelia said. She tucked the bird and the blanket into the laundry bag. She put a hand on Naamah’s back and urged her out of the office and toward the front door of the orphanage. When Sister Cordelia opened it, the icy wind came tumbling through, unhinging the wooden cross from the wall in the entryway.

  “You wanted to go, so go,” she said.

  Naamah looked past the snowy yard and the front gates toward the dark woods on the other side of the road. Hypothermia, she thought. Frostbite. Black fingers. Missing toes. From the steps of the orphanage, she heard tangles of branches scraping against one another in the wind. Trunks creaking. She heard the cry of the wind itself.

  All her life, she’d waited for the day she’d finally get to leave Hopewell, and yet now that the moment had arrived she was afraid to go. And it wasn’t just because the snow was falling and the wind was howling and the woods were dark. The idea of running through all that toward someone who might not love her, who might not have ever loved her, felt like running off the edge of a cliff. Blue skies. Bluebirds. She couldn’t hear her mother’s voice.

  The wind lifted Naamah’s nightgown; it blew open her coat.

  “Keep moving or you’ll freeze to death,” Sister Cordelia said.

  Your mother didn’t want you.

  If that was true, then Sister Cordelia was right about what was on the other side of the wall. Naamah already felt the ice crystals following her veins to her heart.

  “I’ll be good,” she said and let herself fall to Sister Cordelia’s feet the way people in the Bible did when there was nothing left to do but beg for God’s mercy.

  Sister Cordelia tried to shake her loose. “You already made your choice.”

  Naamah looked up at Sister Cordelia through the snow. She thought of the pink room. The pink dolls. The pink curtains gathered over the empty pink crib. People may have donated all of that stuff, but it didn’t explain the careful way Sister Cordelia had displayed it.

  “I’ll be your pink baby,” she said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  At that moment, everything, even the wind, stopped.

  Sister Cordelia unwrapped the strings of the laundry bag from Naamah’s wrist and set the bag beside the door. She was smiling a little, the way she did when she was finished scrubbing Naamah down with bleach, the way she did when she knew she’d won.

  “Do you understand this is the only time I’m opening this door for you?” she said. “If you come inside, you’ll live your life here with me and God. That’s the promise you’ll be making when you cross the threshold.”

  Naamah looked at the woods and then at the open front door.

  Hopewell was the only place she’d ever lived. The only place she knew by heart.

  Naamah looked up at the tall dormitory windows, at the place on the roof where a paper airplane she’d made carrying the message SAVE ME HUX had landed and the place on her arm she was struck for it. She tasted the cornmeal at the corners of her mouth, the smears of lard on dry white bread. She saw the Word in the bricks.

  Naamah looked toward the frozen kitchen garden,
hoping to see her mother walking among the vines once more. Hoping to see the grape juice dripping from her mother’s chin. Hoping to hear her say, Fight for me, Naamah.

  Instead of her mother, when Naamah closed her eyes, she saw the woman at the festival with the worn-out fur coat, the worn-out heart. She felt the woman’s cracked lips on her skin. The woman was the one saying, Fight for you.

  Sister Cordelia took Naamah’s hand when Naamah crossed the threshold.

  “I did a better job with you than I did with Ethelina,” she said.

  Naamah thought of Ethelina’s strawberry hair. Her blue-ice eyes. The way she had looked standing on the other side of the gate in her feathery green hat, as if, for the slightest moment, she’d wanted to come back inside, too.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be able to leave, but I had to know for sure,” Sister Cordelia said. She reached into the front pocket of her nightgown and pulled out a small gilded Bible with Naamah’s name printed on the cover. “I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to give this to you. To be able to tell you of my love.”

  Naamah took the Bible from Sister Cordelia and leafed through the pages in the dim light of the entryway. She paused when she came to the long passages about people begetting other people she’d worked so hard to recite perfectly when she was small. She saw the floor she’d been scrubbing since she could hold a rag. She saw the rulers she’d been kneeling on since she could kneel. Naamah felt every pinch and poke and prod in the name of God. She smelled every drop of bleach.

  But it wasn’t until she saw the words from 1 John 4:18 and looked up at Sister Cordelia and realized her moles and her loose skin and her twisted yellow teeth weren’t really what made her ugly that she knew what she had to do even though the snow was falling and the wind was howling and the woods were dark.

  There is no fear in love.

  All at once a cold black wave came rising up from somewhere very deep in Naamah.

  “I hate pink,” she said.