by Lauren Wolk
I was hot and sticky, my feet hurt, I wanted just one tree and a small patch of shade—or the ocean, better yet—and I was hungry for my pocket lunch. Too early, though, to eat what I had or I’d have nothing left when I needed it most.
And suddenly I was at the hospital. There was no mistaking it. It was huge and beautiful in its own way.
I felt like a stranger, a sore thumb among all these city people, but no one paid the least bit of attention to me as I climbed the stairs and ducked through the big doors of St. Luke’s.
Here was a city within a city. Bustle and clatter. Sour smells overlaid with alcohol fumes. Loud shoes and, somewhere, a woman crying. And I had too many choices and no idea how to make one. A rising sense that I was on a fool’s errand. Until a young woman at the front desk said, “Can I help you?” She motioned me closer, curiosity plain on her face. “Are you lost?”
“No, but I’ve never been to the city before. I’m looking for what used to be the orphanage,” I said. Then quickly corrected myself: “Really, someone who can tell me about a boy who used to live there.”
The woman examined me some more, quizzical, not quite smiling. “Well, any child who ever lived there hasn’t for years,” she said.
I nodded. “I didn’t expect to find him,” I said. “Just someone who could tell me about him.”
“I haven’t worked here long enough to help you,” she said, “but there are a few people in the wards who’ve been here since then.”
She gave me directions to the nursery. “You’ll find Mrs. Pelham there,” she said. “She helps with the babies now, but she used to work in the orphanage. Start with her. If anyone can answer your questions, she can.”
I made my way through a maze of corridors, out through a door into a yard with, finally, trees, across the yard and the street beyond and up the walkway to the steps of another building, not as big as St. Luke’s proper, through the door, down a corridor, and up a flight of stairs to a ward where I could hear babies crying.
“Can I help you?” asked a nurse coming out of the nursery just as I meant to go in. Her uniform was so white it made my eyes hurt.
“I’ve come to see Mrs. Pelham,” I said, trying not to sound as uncertain as I felt.
“Well, you can’t go in there,” she said, looking me up and down as if I had fleas, “but I’ll see if she can come out here for a minute. What’s your name?”
“Crow,” I said.
She frowned at me. “Like the bird?”
“Like the bird,” I said.
She raised one eyebrow but went into the nursery and, moments later, returned with an older woman in tow.
“This is Mrs. Pelham,” she said, and then swept off down the hallway like a great white goose.
Mrs. Pelham’s face was old but she moved like someone younger, and when she smiled I could see that her teeth were still strong. I wondered what had mapped her face like that.
She peered at me, her brow furrowed. “Do I know you?”
“No,” I said.
“Then what can I do for you?” she said.
“They told me you used to work in the orphanage.”
She nodded. “Yes I did. For years.”
I hadn’t expected such luck. “I’m trying to find out about a boy who used to live there. His name is Jason. He came from Penikese Island when he was just a new baby. Did you know him?”
Mrs. Pelham stood up straighter. She wasn’t much taller than I was, but she suddenly seemed formidable. And every trace of curiosity in her eyes was suddenly gone, replaced with something else.
“You’re here about Jason?” she said. She looked not angry, quite, but serious.
I nodded.
“This ward is for mothers and their babies,” she said. “But it used to be where the orphans lived.”
It was not a bad place. The corridors were wide, the ceilings high. It was clean with lots of windows.
But it was not a home.
As I stood there, I thought of the cottage that Osh had built. So small. So crooked. The sound of rain on its roof. The sight of Osh stirring the fire. The amber light it made. The shadows flitting on the walls.
“Did Jason live here?”
She pointed. “In the room at the end, there.”
“By himself?”
She sighed. “Why do you want to know about him?”
“I live on one of the other Elizabeths,” I said. “By Cuttyhunk. And I think . . . I wonder . . .” I wasn’t sure how to make my long story short enough. “It’s possible that I have a brother named Jason who was sent here. And I’m trying to find out what happened to him.”
Suddenly, as if I had said something warm and kind, everything stern about her softened. She closed her eyes. Her lips trembled. She backed toward a bench and sat down, her hands in fists beneath her chin, head bowed. “Oh my,” she whispered. “Oh my.”
I sat beside her, and when she didn’t move away I liked her very much.
“Mrs. Pelham?” I said. “Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes and nodded. “I am,” she said. Her hands fell into her lap. She turned to me and smiled a little. “It’s just that we all gave up hope of ever finding a family for Jason. And now a family has come to find him.”
Chapter 22
It was odd to think that I—just me, one person—was a family. And that I really might have a brother.
“Do you know where Jason is now?” I asked.
Mrs. Pelham shook her head. “Not anymore,” she said. “The orphanage stopped taking in children when Jason was five years old. All the orphans were placed out, with foster families. Except him.” Her lips trembled again, a little. “You know about Penikese, then? And why he was sent here?”
I nodded.
“The poor boy. The doctors here told us to consider him contagious until they were sure he didn’t have leprosy. So we kept the other children away, and we wore gloves and masks for the first few months. And even after that we kept our distance, though I found that hard to do. We would bathe him, of course, and dress him and do all the other things he needed us to do when he was very small, but he was alone too much. Such a sweet, quiet, big-eyed baby.”
She shook her head. “After the first couple of years, when I was convinced he wasn’t sick, they said I could hold him, but he wouldn’t let me. He acted like it hurt to be touched.” She began to cry but didn’t make any fuss about it. “He didn’t talk, either, or sing or play or seem interested in much. Just looked out the window for hours, sometimes hummed a little. When he slept, I would sit by his bed and stroke his little arm or lay my hand on his forehead, just so some part of him would know that he wasn’t alone.”
“But what happened to him when all the other children left?”
Mrs. Pelham wiped her cheeks with her sleeves. “We kept him here. What else could we do? I couldn’t take him home with me.” She looked away. “My husband is a good man, but he wouldn’t have it. We had children of our own.”
“So he stayed in the orphanage?”
“In that same room, yes, but he had the run of the place, too, as he got older. And that’s when he began to talk.” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “To the patients at first. I was shocked, I can tell you, to find him sitting on the foot of a bed one day, talking to a little girl who had been hurt in a grease fire. She was burned on her legs, where the fire had climbed up her skirt before her mother put it out. And there was Jason, asking what was wrong with her. I remember it so well. I remember her saying, ‘I got burned in a fire,’ and him saying, ‘Does it hurt?’”
She looked at me, clearly amazed still after all this time. “Five years old before he said a word . . . and then talking like you and me. I couldn’t get over it. It was as if he’d decided to just get on with it. Just start from there and make his own way. At five. And he did, too. Nev
er did learn to read or write, though we tried to teach him. Never did spend much time again in that room. He slept wherever there was a spare bed, went down to the kitchens when he was hungry, kept himself clean enough and dressed and busy helping out in the wards. Fetching and carrying. Showing people the way. And then, when he was just a little older, adventuring around the city on his own, though I tried to keep him close.” She laughed. “Which was like trying to keep a cat close. Quite impossible.”
I tried to picture it: a child half my age, earning his keep, roaming the city, his home wherever he was at the moment, his life entirely in his own hands.
I had thought of myself as a resourceful person, but not compared to him.
“Is he still around here?” I asked, though I knew he was perhaps twenty by now and surely long gone from St. Luke’s.
“I do wish he were,” she said. “And he does show up from time to time. Once with a valentine he’d made out of shells.” She rubbed her eyes again. “Until then, I didn’t think he cared much for me, and who could blame him? Someone who’s supposed to look after orphans, too afraid to care for him properly. Or to take him in when he needed a home. But he seemed to understand, as he got older, that nothing is quite as simple as it seems.”
“He brought you a sailor’s valentine?” I pictured the young man on the Shearwater. “Did he go to sea?”
She nodded. “How did you know?”
I stood up. “When I came in on the ferry from Cuttyhunk, I saw a sailor on a schooner. The Shearwater. He looked just like me.”
Mrs. Pelham smiled. “I doubt very much that he was Jason,” she said. “I haven’t seen him for years. But you do look almost like he did when he was your age.”
We talked for a little while longer, and then I decided I ought to head for the ferry dock.
“When Jason comes back to see you again, will you tell him about me?”
“I will,” she said. “A girl named Crow. If he comes back.”
“From over by Cuttyhunk.”
“From over by Cuttyhunk. I won’t forget. How could I?” she said. “It’s not often I get a second chance like this one.”
I walked back to the docks so deep in thought that I nearly fell through an open cellar hatch in the sidewalk. A man rolling a barrel from a truck yelled, “Hey there!” at the last second, and I pulled up short, sidestepped the gap, and went on my way.
I knew there was a movie house in New Bedford. Miss Maggie had told me about motion pictures, and I’d always wanted to see one. I knew there were confectioners there, too, who sold candies I’d always wanted to taste. But even if I’d had the money for such things—which I didn’t—I would not have spent a moment on them.
I could not imagine a movie more interesting than this day of mine, or a candy as sweet as the idea that Jason was real and might be my brother.
I kept telling myself to add the might when I thought about that.
Until I knew for certain, might was important.
But Mrs. Pelham had said I looked like Jason had at my age.
That was real.
And so was the sailor I’d seen on the Shearwater. Whether he was Jason or not, he was a place to start.
I would watch for the Shearwater to come through the Graveyard. And I would be patient. Or at least I would try.
As I made my way through the noisy, crowded, dirty streets, I remembered what Osh had said about New Bedford making me dissatisfied with our island. With our life there.
But all I wanted right then was to go home.
Chapter 23
When I reached the dock, the ferry wasn’t there.
“Gone for a run to Mattapoisett,” the dockmaster said through his wild beard, his long pipe clenched in his brown teeth. “Back soon.”
“And when does it leave for Cuttyhunk?” I asked, squinting up at him. The sun, behind his head, gave him a halo, but he smelled awful, like old fish and old man, both of which needed a bath.
“Seven bells,” he said. “Half past three, give or take.”
“What time is it now?”
He glanced over his shoulder at the sun. “Just two,” he said. “Four bells. You’ve got some waiting to do.”
As I turned to be on my way, a thought occurred to me. “Do you know a schooner called the Shearwater?” I asked him.
“I do,” he said. “A scow lucky to be afloat.”
“Do you know where she was bound?”
He squinted, his mouth pursed. “Maine, I reckon,” he said after a moment. “Portland. Not sure where she’s headed after that.”
“If she comes straight back from Portland, how long will that take?”
He cast an eye skyward. “With enough wind, not too much, up and back?” He did some figuring. “A week? Maybe more. But if they were bound somewhere else after Portland? Months, maybe.” At which he shrugged, his pipe bobbing in his teeth. “Could be anywhere and back anytime,” he said. “Best I can tell you.”
And he hobbled away, yelling something at a deckhand who was dumping slops off the stern of a sloop at anchor. Baitfish below swarmed madly among the potato peels and eggshells floating on the water.
I turned away and found a perch on a pylon where a herring gull had been keeping watch but was now down among the baitfish, guzzling its lunch.
I ate my own, one pocket at a time, until I’d finished the stuffed roll and the apple, which was juicy enough to be both food and drink. I felt better. Not hungry. Not thirsty. Just hot in the midday sun, anxious to be out of my shoes, eager to be on the islands again.
But then I glanced down the dock toward the street and grew cold all at once, then again hot, at the sight of the man from Penikese, the big man who had left Mr. Sloan for dead, coming out of a doorway.
He stopped, looking carefully right and left, and I memorized him as he was now. His brown trousers, black shirt, brown hat with a rolled brim.
After one more look in both directions, he walked off along the waterfront out of sight.
I hadn’t expected to see him here. Surely he’d known someone would find Mr. Sloan sooner or later and come looking for the man who’d held him prisoner.
Perhaps he thought Mr. Sloan had died by now. Perhaps he wasn’t worried that we’d seen him on Penikese. After all, he didn’t know that Mr. Sloan had lived to tell his tale of captivity and abuse. And he didn’t know that Osh would draw a picture to help the police hunt for him.
But why stay so close by? Why take the chance?
I thought about following him. I thought about staying where it was safe.
I thought about Mr. Sloan sitting in the sand, scrubbing himself clean.
And I headed off to follow the man before I could think another thing.
He had a good head start, but I was quick, and he was big enough to stand out.
Up ahead I could see him striding along with a clear purpose, a good head taller than anyone else on the street. Even when I had no clear sight line, I could see his brown hat bobbing above the crowd, and I kept my eyes on it as I followed, ready at any moment to duck into an alleyway if he happened to turn around.
But he didn’t. And I stayed close enough so that when he opened a shop door and disappeared inside, I had time to slow and creep up to the shop.
The window was full of jewelry and guns. A long fur coat. Gold pocket watches. A gleaming saddle and a silver platter carved all over with scrollwork.
I scampered across the street to a shed on the docks and ducked behind it to wait until he reappeared. The empty corpse of a pigeon lay at my feet. Cigar butts and rotten seaweed, too. Things I couldn’t name, all of it steeped in old rainwater and mud.
To my relief, the shop door opened again soon enough, and the big man came out. He looked furious, even from a distance. Bunched up like a watchdog. And I ducked back out of sight to wait until he’d left.
/> When I looked again, I saw him headed back the way he’d come, and I knew I’d have to be careful not to run into him again when I returned to the ferry dock.
From my post on the wharf, I could see the sign above the shop. PAWNBROKER, it said. I didn’t know what that meant.
I crossed the street.
A bell jangled when I opened the door and went inside. The place was filled with treasures of every kind. Big glass cases of jewelry and guns. Along one wall, fur coats hung, empty and bored. On another, beautiful paintings. Shelves filled with lace fans, crystal, cigarette lighters, and perfume bottles. A barrel bristled with canes, some with ivory handles.
At the end of the shop, behind a jewelry case, a man in a visor looked up from his work and said, “What do you want?” without a trace of welcome.
“Just to know what a pawnbroker is,” I said in a small voice.
Which drew an unexpected smile.
“You bring me things worth money, I pay you a fee. If you return soon enough, you can buy your belongings back for a bigger fee. If not, I get to sell them to someone else. You got something to pawn?”
I went closer. On the case in front of him was a square of black cloth. Laid out on it was a pretty necklace, gold, with a locket shaped like a heart.
“I might,” I said, but I didn’t think he would give me anything for my shoes.
He grinned. “Had your hand in somebody’s pocket, did you?”
Which set me back a step. “Not me,” I said. “But I’ll bet that man who was just in here stole that necklace.”
He didn’t like that.
His face changed. He made as if to come around the counter, and I turned and fled out the door and down the street at such a run that I nearly caught up to the big man I’d been tracking.
He had stopped to buy a sausage from a cart alongside the curb near the ferry dock.
My face was the only thing about me he might recognize, so I slipped past him and straight along to the dock, never looking back except to glance quickly, for trucks, before crossing to where the ferry would tie up, and soon I hoped.