by Vicki Grant
“Now what the heck is she wearing?” Ida said, and we both stepped closer. “Everyone was supposed to be in uniform.”
Only Lucinda’s head and the lower part of one arm were visible. The arm stuck out from the end of the row in kind of a pretty gesture, as if she’d just given somebody something or let go of a child’s hand. You could see the ruffled edge of her sleeve.
I noticed a hint of a ruffle at her neck too, and then, just like that, I knew what she was wearing. It was gray in the picture, with a darker stripe around the edge, but I bet had I seen it in color it would have been bright yellow or pink. Something little kids would like.
Ida figured it out at the same time. “It’s that clown costume,” she said. “That’s what it is.”
A girl in a clown costume. Lucinda was one of the girls Sandra had thought might be the mother.
“I forgot she did that.” Ida was still talking. “Lucinda looked after the kiddies that summer. She came up with this idea of calling herself Loosey Goosey. The little ones loved her. Always doing crafts with them, teaching them about wildlife and flowers. But see what I mean?”
My heart was chugging gallons of extra blood into my brain, preparing me for the shock. This could be her. This could be my mother.
Ida was looking at me.
“Sorry. What?”
“Bas? Going out with a girl who dressed up like a clown? Never would have worked. Mind you, better than who he has now.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody.” She slid the rag off her shoulder and began wiping down tables again.
I turned back to the photo, my hand flat against the wall, propping me up. I leaned in closer and peered at her. Small. Medium-brown hair—or dark blond, perhaps. Freckles. Was she my mother?
“What happened to her?” I said.
Ida didn’t look up. “Lucinda? Got sick that summer. That kissing disease. What’s it called?”
“Mononucleosis.” I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Ida. You know about Bye-Bye Baby?”
She stopped and put her fist on her hip. “What does that have to do with Lucinda?”
“You don’t think she could be the mother?”
“The mother of what? An imaginary baby? Honestly. And anyway, that girl wasn’t kissing anyone, let alone…well, you know. Good as gold, Lucinda was. I think she’s the only kid other than you who ever brought all her dishes back.”
Twenty-Four
“OH, OF COURSE. Lucinda Harvey! Haven’t thought about her in years.” We were sitting on her verandah again. Miss Cameron seemed delighted when I told her who I thought she was mixing me up with. “So glad you came by to straighten me out. I was worried I was turning into just another dotty old lady.”
I laughed, although I was still catching my breath. I didn’t care what Ida’d said. As soon as I’d made the connection, I’d run all the way to her place. Top speed. So excited at what I was going to be able to tell Eddie.
“You know, there is a bit of a resemblance, now that you mention it.” Miss Cameron eyed me like I was a bowl of fruit she was thinking of painting. “Small-boned. Little chin. Something about the hands. I can see it. You know, I actually rather liked her, poor thing.”
“Why poor thing?” I said.
“Miserable life for a young girl. Only child. Her mother died of pleurisy when she was small. Her father was the minister at St. Ninian’s.” She took a sip of the “thimbleful of sherry” Frieda allowed her once a day. “He was the Right Reverend Archibald Harvey—and about as much fun as that sounds.”
“How’d you meet Lucinda?”
“Oh, I’d always known her a bit. St. Ninian’s was my church, but I never thought much about her until after the war. As part of his parish duties, her father visited all the vets recovering from their wounds. Isabel Adair—Ward’s mother—was a great friend of mine. Reverend Harvey came to see Ward and Len every Sunday afternoon with that poor little girl in tow, bored senseless. Isabel called me up and asked if I’d take her on as a student. Of course I said yes. No one should have had to spend their days with Archibald.”
Miss Cameron called out, “Frieda!” in a surprisingly singsong voice. “See if you can find Lucinda Harvey’s portfolio in my studio.” Then she turned back to me. “I tried to keep a little something from each of my students.”
“What happened to her?”
“I taught her for about a year. Then I told Ward—his mother had died by then—that he had to hire her at the Arms. I was better company than Lucinda’s father, but I was still an old lady. She needed to be with young people. He got her teaching the children arts and crafts. I understand she was quite good at it.”
“I heard she left suddenly.”
Miss Cameron looked at me over her glasses. “You make it sound suspicious, as if she’d gone to visit an aunt or something.”
She laughed. “You don’t know that expression, do you? Used to be when a girl disappeared all of a sudden, people would wink and say she’d ‘gone to visit an aunt.’ It was code for pregnant.”
“Do you think that’s what happened?”
Miss Cameron put her hand on her chest and gasped. “Lucinda? Hardly. Unless I missed something entirely, in which case I’d be extremely disappointed in myself.”
Frieda appeared with the portfolio. “Thank you, darling,” Miss Cameron said. “Let’s see what we have here.”
Miss Cameron put the portfolio on the wicker coffee table and leafed through the papers inside. “‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.’ Now you must know that expression. It’s one I’m quite sure would have applied to Lucinda. Terrible thick spectacles she had to wear. Distorted her eyes. Made her look like a bookish Chihuahua. But look here. I made her take them off when I sketched her. Rather pretty, wasn’t she?”
She handed me a black-and-white drawing of a girl curled up in the very chair I was sitting in. She had her elbow leaning on the armrest, her chin in her hand and not quite a smile on her face.
“Pity it’s not in color. Lovely blue eyes she had, as I recall. Almost azure. Maybe that’s why you reminded me of her. That and the jawline.” She ran her finger along the sketch. I could see it too.
“Was she much of an artist?”
Miss Cameron pursed her lips and shrugged. “I had students with more skill but never more imagination. I’d send other girls out into the woods to find something to draw and they’d come back with mayflowers or daisies or something predictable like that. Lucinda was not predictable. Here’s the type of thing she’d come back with.”
She pulled another drawing out of the portfolio. It was done in charcoal and kind of smudged, and I could see it was no masterpiece.
“Her perspective’s a bit off, and her lines a little cruder than I like, but what a subject. A bird skeleton! Only Lucinda would have thought to do that.”
It was her. I was sure of it.
“Where is she now?” I said. She had to be around here somewhere. Lucinda had to be the person leaving me the bones.
“Toronto, I think, but I haven’t seen her in years. Once her father died, there wasn’t much reason to come back, I’d imagine.”
It was almost eight o’clock. Frieda arrived with Miss Cameron’s bedtime ration of toast, and that was my cue to leave.
I practically skipped back to the colony. I’d found my mother. Oddly, I wasn’t even worried about explaining the whole story to Eddie. I figured he’d be so thrilled, none of the stuff about my being an orphan would matter anymore.
The only question still to answer was, Who was the man at the clearing? His initials were E.B. something. The look on Bas’s face had proved I was right about that. I tried to remember what else Bas admitted to seeing—the man, something in his arms, something that made him recognizable, even from behind. I knew the answer was there. I just didn’t know what it was.
There was a root that bubbled up from a big tree near the Meat Department. I’d walked around it at least twice a day since I’d arrived at
the Arms. This time, I was so lost in my head trying to figure the mystery out that I walked right into it. Smashed my big toe. Pain and pins and needles and embarrassment bolted up my leg and into my face. I bit my lip, hopped around on one foot, then limped back to the cabin, sucking my teeth.
And in my head I heard Bas’s voice. Him limping off through the woods.
That’s what he’d said. And in that instant I knew what he meant.
Twenty-Five
BAS WAS STILL scrubbing when I went back and no happier to see me than the last time.
“What now?” he said, and I realized we used to be friends.
“He limped,” I said. “That’s how you knew who it was, isn’t it?”
Bas pulled a sodden wad of cloth from the sink and checked it for stains.
My hands kept clenching into fists. I had to know—but I couldn’t bear to find out.
“You only saw his silhouette, but you recognized him. You could tell by the way he walked,” I said. “You knew exactly who it was.”
Bas scratched his neck with wet fingers. Water dripped black down the back of his green uniform.
“Anybody around here would have recognized him,” I said. “He had a bad leg.”
Bas stood up straight, slapped his hands on either side of the sink and stared at the wall. He was so mad or upset that you could almost see heat waves coming off him, like a toaster on high. When he spoke, though, his voice was flat.
“No. The man didn’t have a bad leg. He had a good leg.” Bas made a noise almost like a laugh. “He was missing the other one.”
He turned the tap on full blast. Steam billowed up. “That what you wanted to know, Dot? Happy now?”
Twenty-Six
THERE WAS A note tucked into my door.
Come to the dock as soon as you get this. Really need to talk. Quigley canned the Bye-Bye Baby article. Someone’s not happy about us doing it.
Eddie xo
It was the xo that killed me.
Eddie was my brother—or at least my half brother.
I checked to make sure the cabin door was locked, pulled the curtains closed and tried to think.
Run.
Run-run-run-run-runaway. That song Sara and I used to listen to. That’s what I needed to do. Run away.
I’d been happier before I met Eddie. I’d been happier when I got to choose my parents from newspaper clippings and movie trailers and pictures in Mrs. Welsh’s LIFE magazine. I’d been happier when I was an orphan.
I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed and threw it open, determined to go that very instant, then stopped short.
That stupid coat.
I took it out, laid it on the floor.
I thought how proud of it I would have been when I was at the Home. Patsy could have been talking about her mother being a model at Eaton’s before she got herself pregnant, or Sharon bragging about her cousin winning the Durham County road race, and instead of just nodding or trying to think of something else until they’d finally, mercifully, stopped, I could have jumped in and said, “My dad was a war hero.”
And they’d have gone, “Was not,” and I’d have said, “Was so. You can even ask Mrs. Hazelton. He lost a leg in the war, and he got a medal for it.”
“Right,” they’d have said, making a big show of nodding over their shoulders at each other as if I’d just made it all up. So I’d have said, “I’ll even show you his coat. His war coat. He lost a button too.”
I sat on the floor of the seamstress’s cabin, kind of laughing and crying at that, because it was true. That person I used to be—that little kid, that desperate love-me, love-me little kid—that’s the kind of thing she’d say. He lost a leg and a button, as if that made it even more devastating, and I wouldn’t realize how ridiculous that was until they all started laughing, and then it would be a few more days before I could laugh at it too.
No use blubbering about it now. I needed to get my wits about me and go.
I took out my money and counted it: sixty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents. That would be more than enough to get me back to Hope, but I didn’t want to go there anymore. I wanted to go someplace where no one knew me, where I’d never need to explain anything, where I could just be Dot. An insignificant Dot.
There was a train that came through on Sunday. Maybe it could get me to Toronto or New York. Someplace far like that.
I just had to avoid Eddie until then. But how? If I didn’t show up at the dock soon, he’d come looking for me. Nowhere to hide in this little cabin. Too far to walk into town. I’d be afraid to hang out in the woods all by myself until dark.
The same three thoughts did a loop of my brain until I heard noises in the colony. The first of the waitresses were getting off the evening shift.
Glennie, I thought.
French fries.
I decided to take her up on her offer.
Twenty-Seven
WE ALL PILED into Finlay’s car—me, Glennie, Janice the redhead and some guy called the Weasel, whose girlfriend worked at the Esquire Diner and could apparently get us free French fries. Glennie made sure I was squeezed up next to Finlay in the front seat.
Finlay drove with one finger on the steering wheel and half a smile on his face, as if he found something moderately funny or himself extraordinarily charming.
Everyone jabbered on about people I didn’t know and places I’d never been, and that suited me fine. The gossip and the noise and the Weasel’s high-pitched laugh almost kept my mind off Eddie.
With the exception of the black-and-white-checked floor, the Esquire was done entirely in not-quite-matching shades of turquoise. Glennie led us to a booth at the back, and we squeaked in across the vinyl seats. Finlay sat with his legs in a wide, manly V, making the rest of us clamp ours together like cookies lined up in a tray. He stretched his arm over the top of the booth, leaving a warm damp spot just under his armpit for my head.
The Weasel’s girlfriend, Trina—hair backcombed into a haystack, miniature bow tucked in above her bangs—took our orders while the Weasel ran a hand up and down her leg. It took her four times around the table before she got our orders more or less straight. She sauntered off giggling.
“Apologies to the Wease,” Glennie said, “but that has got to be the world’s worst waitress. Even I’m not that bad.”
“Trina’s nothing,” Janice said. “Dot’s way worse than her.”
I didn’t have time to object—Who, me? A waitress? What?—before Janice launched into a comic retelling of how I’d knocked boiling hot coffee all over Mr. Peters.
Glennie loved it. “Did he go utterly mental on you?”
I twitched my neck and shoulders to suggest, Not really and just hoped she’d drop it. I suddenly had a lot of sympathy for Mr. Peters. I realized it wouldn’t be that difficult to lose your mind.
“Oh, please,” Janice said. “You want to see mental?” She tucked her chin in and bugged her eyes out and did a pretty good imitation of his whole You. Why. You. thing, then grabbed the Weasel by the neck and shook him.
“He actually throttled you?” Glennie grinned at me.
“No,” I said.
“Did he?” She was talking to Janice now, who only let go of the Weasel to answer.
“Okay. No. But you could tell he was dying to. Even now, anytime she walks by, his face goes all white and crazy-man. All very Boston Strangler, if you ask me. I’d watch myself, Dot, if I were you.”
Finlay wiggled a comb out of his back pocket and began to smooth the hair on the sides of his head as if he were icing a wedding cake. “I don’t know how Adair handles it, looking after that nutcase day in, day out.”
“And all the while looking after Gunky too,” Janice said.
“Why does he have to look after Gunky?” That was me. A trickle of laughter ran through the group.
“Have you seen him?” Glennie asked.
The Weasel tipped his hand back in front of his face like he was glugging from a bottle.
“It’s terrible. Mummy says that before the war he was positively yummy. They all were. Ward, of course, was utterly gorgeous. But Len, if you can believe it, was the best. Apparently, nothing like being a medic for six years to play hell on your looks.”
“A medic?” Janice started to laugh. “The guy goes berserk at the sight of blood. How could he be a medic? Remember last year when he went nuts over that prime rib of beef at the Dominion Day buffet?”
Chuckles all around. Glennie, to be fair, said, “If I saw that many boys reduced to hamburger, I’d probably lose my taste for rare meat too.”
Trina brought our order. Glennie picked up the French fries that fell on the table and stuffed them into her mouth.
“It’s a sin. Almost twenty years since the war ended, and the most eligible bachelor in Buckminster is still a bachelor because he’s stuck looking after those two. If you ask me, he’s taking this whole true-blue-loyalty thing too far. It’s killing him. Or at least his social life.”
I watched Glennie talk and laugh and eat. Word would get out about us. A little place like this. I wondered if in the years to come she’d remember me as anything more than the scandal of 1964.
We were past curfew by the time we got back to the resort, so Finlay turned off the engine and glided into the parking lot. Everyone whispered goodbye and headed off in their own directions.
“I’ll walk you back,” Finlay said.
“I’m okay. It’s just over there.”
“I know where it is.” He smirked as if he’d just said something clever.
“Okay. Fine.” I figured I might as well shut up and get it over with. I beetled to the cabin as fast as I could.
“You’re hot to trot,” he said.
“Long day,” I said.
“But the night is short.”
“Which is why I’m anxious to get to bed.”
We were past the lilac bush now. I could see a note stuck in my door, no doubt from Eddie, no doubt wondering where I was. I stood on the first step so I could slip it into my pocket without Finlay seeing, then turned to say goodbye.