Small Bones Read online

  “You had a little accident,” she said, and I kind of blushed, although I don’t know why. She could hold me accountable for a lot of things, but not that.

  “I woke up Flossie Bradley—she was helping us out back then—and she ran for the doctor. I turned the stove on low and popped you in. Just like a loaf of bread on the rise. I’d heard they did that with the Dionne quintuplets, and I figured it was the only chance you had.”

  She held up her palm. “You were no bigger than this. Honestly. Like something you’d see in a jar at a traveling circus. Dr. Blunt came and just shook his head. No one thought you’d make it through the night. We dragged Reverend Messervey out of bed, and he had you baptized by dawn and ready to go. Flossie was the one who started calling you Dot. It was kind of a joke.” Again that smile. “You were a little bigger than a dot, but not much.”

  Mrs. Hazelton was fiddling with the lapel of the coat now, trying to keep it from turning up at the edges. She was right about the stitching. The only time I’d ever seen hand-stitched lapels were on Mr. Welsh’s suits. He owned the foundry, and everyone knew he was the richest man in town.

  I had all sorts of questions, but my brain couldn’t seem to turn them into words.

  “You surprised us,” she said, slapping the dust off her hands. “You survived. You even became a bit of a tourist attraction. People used to drive out here just to get a look at you. I thought you were going to be snapped up in no time, with those big eyes of yours. Then I realized these people were just sightseeing. Nobody wanted to take a chance on some problem cropping up down the line because of how little you were. One person—who will go nameless—even said he hoped you wouldn’t grow to normal size. Said if we charged people to see you, we wouldn’t have to rely on charity to keep the Home going.”

  She plumped up the back of her hair the way she did when she was outraged. “In any event, no one stepped up, so we got to keep you. And look at you. You turned out just fine.”

  “But now you want me to go.” She shouldn’t have reminded me.

  “Want? No.” Her lips turned down, and her nostrils got really big, and for one horrible second I thought she was going to cry, but then she said, “I almost forgot. There was something else too.”

  She reached into one of the coat pockets and pulled out a tiny spoon. A mustard spoon. I only knew what it was because I polished Mrs. Welsh’s silver every Tuesday, and she was always very particular about her mustard spoons and her pickle forks and her fish knives and all the other fancy utensils only rich people seem to need to get their food into their mouths.

  “It’s sterling,” Mrs. Hazelton said. “It was in the pocket, for some reason. Can you make out what the crest says? You’ve got young eyes.”

  I held the spoon up close and squinted at the handle. “I think it says royal or maybe loyal then…something something. Loyal on the earth?”

  She nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she meant “could be” or “doesn’t matter.”

  The train suddenly juddered. A little girl screamed. The man in front of me held on to his hat like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. The brakes squealed and smoke billowed up from the rails and the train finally coughed to a stop. A few people laughed like, That was close. A guy leaned out the window, looked up and down the tracks, then popped back in, shaking his head. I just sat where I was, aware of the boy again. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.

  For two hours the train had been full of strangers, but now everyone was talking to everyone else. A tree down? A mechanical failure? The lady behind me lowered her voice and mentioned a suicide she’d heard about some years earlier. The man in the hat grumbled that he was going to miss an appointment if things didn’t get moving.

  Eventually, the conductor came through the car and explained there’d been a rockfall, and the tracks were blocked.

  It seemed like good news. Maybe I’d get to see Malou and Sara again.

  “Will we be turning back to Hope?” I asked. He laughed as if I was making a joke.

  “Hardly. It’ll take at least an hour to fix this mess. You can get off the train, but stay close. You hear two whistles, a long and a short, that means we’re leaving.” He walked through the car, saying the exact same thing to everyone he passed.

  The train got muggy pretty fast. I was worried about sweating all over Lorraine Welsh’s aqua linen suit, and then I remembered it wasn’t Lorraine’s anymore. It was mine. It was almost new, and so were the matching shoes and the slacks and the short set and the two other dresses Mrs. Welsh had given me after the fire. I didn’t want Lorraine to come home from her trip to Europe and be upset because her clothes were gone, but Mrs. Welsh said she’d be delighted to see them put to good use. She’d even insisted I stay in Lorraine’s room for a couple of nights rather than in that awful old church hall with the other girls. After the trauma of the fire, she said, I needed a good sleep.

  I looked out the window. I could see a splash of blue through the trees. A lake or a river, not that far off. Mrs. Welsh had really tried. I was starting my adult life now, she’d said. I should look like a lady. She gave me lipstick and mascara and rouge and showed me how to put them on. Then she drove me to the train station in that big green Cadillac of hers and got my luggage out of the trunk. Just as I was about to go, she said, You know you’re always welcome here, dear.

  She leaned in to kiss my cheek, which she’d never done in all the time I’d worked for her, even at Christmas, and I don’t know what came over me. I put my arms around her and hugged her, hard. Next thing I knew, I was bawling. When she finally disentangled herself, I immediately knew Mrs. Hazelton was right—I really was just a girl from the Home. Mrs. Welsh’s face spelled that out in great big letters for me.

  I did my best to pull myself together. I thanked her for the suitcase and the lovely clothes and letting me stay with her, and then I walked away. Tears were streaming down my cheeks like a pot boiling over, but I had no way to turn down the heat.

  I’d tilted my face back to stop the flow, and that’s when I saw the boy for the first time. He was in the train, looking out the window at me. I turned away and hurried into the station to buy my ticket.

  Now, two hours later, the train was practically empty. People were standing in the shade, smoking or hunched on the ground changing babies’ diapers or just pacing up and down beside the tracks, fuming about missed meetings. The boy had disappeared.

  If I went down to the lake, I could splash a little water on my neck, take off these ridiculous stockings. I left my stuff on my seat and stepped outside. The woods smelled good, like long walks with Sara, cutting down the Christmas tree or the time Joe piled us all in the back of his truck and took us berry picking at Sinclair Ridge.

  I wasn’t going to let myself think about that.

  I wasn’t going to think about Joe at all, or the look on his face when we said goodbye. My purse was on the train and my hankies were in it, and if I thought of him at all, I knew I’d start to cry again.

  I slid down the embankment toward the water. As soon as I was out of sight, I took off my shoes and stuffed my stockings into them. The moss under my bare feet reminded me of something I thought was good at first but then realized wasn’t.

  Running out of the Home in my pajamas. The grass mercifully cool after the heat of the fire.

  I wasn’t going to think about that either.

  The trees thinned out toward the lake. As I got closer, there were mostly wild-rose bushes and some other thorny thing I didn’t know the name of but knew could ruin my suit if I wasn’t careful. I held my skirt up so it wouldn’t get snagged, and waded through the bushes.

  There was a boulder hunched on the shore. I’d just scrambled up onto it when water splashed my legs, and the boy’s head popped out of the lake.

  “Hey!” he went. “You spying on me or something?” He swung his bangs off his forehead and launched himself up onto the rock beside me.

  I turned and ran.

  I could hear him
going, “Just kidding! It was a joke!” but that only made it worse. Of course it was a joke. Anyone would know that.

  I grabbed my shoes and beat it all the way back to the train. I didn’t worry about thorns or brambles or my fancy new clothes anymore. I just kept thinking I’d made a fool of myself and that he did have freckles. A lot. Even more than me. His shoulders were covered with them, and the tips of his ears too.

  I leaned back in my seat with my hand on my chest and blood pounding in my face. I could have told Mrs. Hazelton this type of thing would happen if she made me go. All those years she was so worried about my heart, and then she went and did this to me.

  “You’ll be fine,” she’d kept telling me in her study. “You’re a smart girl. You can sew. People always need seamstresses.”

  And then, of course, when none of that had worked, she’d said, “You don’t have a choice, Dot. We’re not rebuilding the Home—the province is closing down the orphanages anyway. We’ll do our best to foster out the Little Ones, but the big girls have to leave. The seven of you have to look after yourselves now.”

  When I asked again where she expected me to go, she did the same thing as before. She started fussing with the coat.

  “Howell’s of Buckminster.” She was back to reading the label. “For the discerning gent. Oh dear…I should have had this cleaned.” She scratched at the mildew on what was left of the three letters embroidered on the inside pocket. “These must have been the owner’s initials, but the last one’s all but gone now. I can read E and B, then…I don’t know. R? N? A? Could be almost anything, I guess.”

  I turned my face into my shoulder and rubbed away the tears. The smoke from the fire had seeped into my skin. I smelled like a weenie roast.

  When I looked up, Mrs. Hazelton was staring at me with her head tilted and her eyebrows raised. “This could be the key to your future, don’t you think?”

  I had no idea what she meant. “What? You want me to go work as a seamstress at”—I checked the label—“Howell’s of Buckminster?”

  Wrong answer.

  She adjusted her posture and tried again. “There are laws regarding adoption, Dot. Parents give up their children with the understanding that their identity will be kept secret. Many have good reasons for never wanting to see the child again.”

  She took the lid off the teapot to see how much was left, then poured herself a cup.

  “Other people aren’t so sure. They’re just trying to do what’s best for the child. People like that often leave behind a…” She circled a hand in front of her, but I didn’t know the word she was looking for.

  “…a token of some sort. A Bible, maybe, or a locket. A little something to let the child know this was done out of love. Sometimes though”—she poured a thin dribble of milk into her tea—“the token seems an awful lot like a clue. One baby arrived here with a torn ticket to a dance hall pinned to her dress. Another came with a photo tucked into her bunting bag. It was of a man—a boy, really—wearing a hockey jersey, the name of the team on the front, a sign for the arena in the background. The only thing missing was his phone number.”

  She cleared her throat. “And then, of course, there was this one newborn who arrived wrapped in an expensive coat complete with the store label and the initials of the man who owned it.”

  Everything went quiet and sort of sparkly. I looked at the coat. I looked at Mrs. Hazelton. Her hand was hovering over the sugar bowl, as if she was trying to decide between one lump or two.

  “Are you saying my parents”—the word was so strange—“want me to find them?”

  She took two lumps and stirred them in. The tinkling of her spoon seemed way too cheerful for the situation.

  “I’m not saying anything of the kind. I heard someone pounding on the door one night. I came downstairs and found a baby. I looked up and saw a dark car speeding off down a dark road. I have no idea who left you, why they left you or what they meant by leaving these things with you. Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. As I said, I’m not legally allowed to disclose the identity of parents.”

  Mrs. Hazleton had always been so straightforward. Stay. Sit. Roll over. Now she was going around in circles. Perhaps she could tell it was starting to annoy me.

  She folded her hands on the edge of the desk, like a kid waiting for roll call. “I will tell you, though, that as a rule, babies are left on the doorstep under cover of darkness because someone’s trying to hide something, usually themselves. You, on the other hand, arrived with what amounted to a mailing label.”

  She flipped open the coat again and started reading. “Ten Queen Street, Buckminster, Ontario. All I needed was an envelope and a stamp and I could have sent you back by return post. Make of that what you will.”

  She paused to make sure I understood.

  “And there’s another thing I know too. I know you. I know you’d be better off trying to track down the truth than continuing to let your imagination run wild—although you’d never get me to admit that in public.”

  She finished her tea and settled into her chair, her job done.

  Great, I wanted to say, and just how exactly do you expect me to get myself to Buckminster? How am I supposed to pay for this little investigation? I’d kept all the money I’d earned at the Welshes in an old jam jar under the bed, and we both knew what had happened to that.

  I wanted to scream at her, but I didn’t. She pulled her thin beige cardigan around her chest. She looked tired. Betty had told me Mrs. Hazelton was sick, but I hadn’t believed it until then.

  I shrugged, nodded, did something with my face that looked vaguely like sure, why not.

  She nodded too, then reached into her top drawer and laid a thick white envelope on the desk in front of me.

  The long and the short whistle sounded. People climbed back onto the train, laughing and chatting.

  It could have been the happy noises everyone was making, but I felt calmer. Even the sound of the boy whistling as he got on board was almost okay. (What difference did it make? I’d get off the train and never see him again.)

  I thought of Joe. When I’d gone to say my goodbyes, he was packing up his things. He’d worked at the Home since before I was born, and now he had to go too. He’d laughed at my sad face and said, C’mon, girl. There’s only a screen door between scared and excited. Time you stopped worrying and walked on through.

  He was right. Why shouldn’t I be excited?

  Mrs. Hazelton had given each of the Seven an envelope with $138 in it to see us on our way. I had a brand-new wardrobe. I was on a train to Buckminster.

  And there was a tall man missing a cashmere coat and a sterling-silver mustard spoon who just might like to meet me.

  Two

  TWO HOURS LATER, I found myself on the scared side of Joe’s screen door again.

  I was perched on the crossbar of a blue CCM bicycle as the boy from the train double-rode me up Highway 7 toward Lake McKie.

  That was absolutely the last thing I’d expected to happen when I arrived in Buckminster that afternoon. I’d almost forgotten about him. I’d been lost in this crazy idea that all I had to do was go to Howell’s, find my father and begin our happy life together.

  It didn’t work out that way.

  Long story short: there is no Howell’s in Buckminster—hasn’t been since the war.

  At least, that’s what the man who ran the pet store at 10 Queen Street told me after we cleared up our little misunderstanding over whether I was looking for Howell’s or owls. (He found that way funnier than I did. He kept saying his wife was going to have a real hoot over that one.)

  It was five o’clock by then. The man said if I wanted mens-wear, I’d have to try the Dads ’n’ Lads Shoppe on Prince Albert Street the next day, and then he locked up the store and left to catch the tail end of his son’s canoe regatta. I slumped on his front step and tried to figure out what to do.

  My new shoes were killing me. My so-called clue was useless. I wanted Sara.

&
nbsp; Across the street was a yellow brick building with a sign that read Maple Leaf Inn—Klean, Komfortable, Kourteous! I decided I’d get a hotel room for the night. I’d think better with clean feet and a couple of Band-Aids.

  The man at the desk said he had a single room with a lovely view of the Okanoka River. It cost four dollars, which I knew was extravagant but thought was doable—until I opened my purse and realized the envelope with all my money was gone.

  I ran all the way back to the train station—my neck straining like a sled dog’s, my suitcase banging at my knees—but by the time I got there, the place was closed for the day.

  Not that it would have made any difference.

  I knew the envelope hadn’t fallen out of my purse. I knew it wouldn’t end up at the lost and found. Someone had taken it while I was down at the lake. I knew that as surely as I knew what an idiot I’d been for leaving my purse on the seat in the first place.

  I could feel tears beginning to sizzle on the underside of my eyeballs. Once again, I hadn’t kept my wits about me. Once again, I’d made a mess of things.

  I sat on the steps of the deserted train station with my knees together and my feet apart and my head in my hands, and I thought of everything I’d lost. My home. My friends. My money. My job. I had nothing left except some fancy clothes, and I couldn’t have cared less about them.

  I let the tears splat onto the scuffed brown steps. None of the other Seven had even tried to stay. No one had said, “We don’t need the Home. We can work something out together.” We’d hugged and cried, but then everyone had just taken off. Everyone had better things to do than stay with me.

  I thought about that for a long time. Then I stood up, wiped the tears and snot and last smudge of lipstick from my face, and thought, Fine.

  Fine.

  Throw me out. Look down on me. Ditch me. Rob me blind. I don’t care.