Rust & Stardust Page 12

  SALLY

  On Halloween night in Baltimore, Sally longed to be like the other children at St. Ann’s, going out trick-or-treating in their costumes. Hobos, and cowboys, and clowns. Last year her mother had made her a gypsy costume, purple chiffon with tinkling coins sewn into the hem. Her mother always made Sally’s costumes, refusing to spend money on the cheap plastic Ben Cooper masks they sold at the Woolworth’s. Before Mr. Warner took her, she’d already planned out what she wanted to be this year: Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Back when she first started talking about it, her mother had promised she’d make her a blue gingham pinafore dress. Her mother had an old pair of heels she thought she might cover with red paint and glitter. They wore the same size. Sally had even entertained the idea that some of the other girls might like to join her. Perhaps Irene, Bess, and Vivi could have been the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Maybe her mother could make costumes for all of them.

  But now there was no one to make her costume, and no girls to play along. Though even if there were, she knew there was no way Mr. Warner would let her go door to door with the other children. As it was, she was never on her own. He walked her to school on his way to work at the garage down the street and was there waiting for her when she got out, taking a late lunch break to walk her back to Sammy’s house. At the house, he locked her in the attic room, where she did her homework until six o’clock when he got home from work. Then he would let her go wash up in the bathroom on the second floor before sending her to the kitchen to cook supper. And the three of them would sit at the table, making small talk.

  “You getting along with the other kids okay?” he’d asked not long after school started in September, his jaws grinding away at the piece of meat she’d cooked.

  She’d nodded, though this was a lie. She was too afraid to talk to any of the children, the other girls. He’d told her that under no circumstances was she to tell the other children at the school where she was from, her real name. Fogg, this was her name now. Florence Fogg. (This name made her think of those opaque dreams she had sometimes, the world obscured by a dense haze.) He told her that it was for her protection. They were undercover, fugitives. Unless she wanted to get dragged out of class in handcuffs, locked away forever, she would be exactly who he said she was. She was so terrified of slipping up, she’d decided it was easier to simply stay away from the other children. During class, she never giggled and whispered with the other girls when Sister Mary Katherine turned her back to face the blackboard. During recess, instead of jumping rope or playing games, she sat on the cold stone steps and wrote in her composition book. It didn’t take long for her silence to register not as a product of shyness but of oddness. And curiosity turned to cruelty.

  Little Florence Fogg, sitting on a log. Daddy’s a bum and mama’s a hog. They’d push their noses up and make oinking noises. She kept her head down and pretended not to hear them. She became not only a mute but deaf as well. Florence Fogg sitting in a daze, how dumb is she? Let me count the ways. One, two, three … This one hurt the most, because she wasn’t dumb, not at all.

  “You doing well in your subjects?” he’d asked, and she noticed the shine of grease on his thin lip.

  She nodded. She was a straight-A student. Sister Mary Katherine lent her books, as many as she could carry. She selected stories she thought Sally would like and set them aside for her. It was wonderful to read books about children rather than the grown-up stories in Sammy’s paperbacks. But just as at home, she didn’t have any friends. So on Halloween night, instead of trick-or-treating, she stood at the stove, listening to the crackle of the cube steak; he liked it loaded up with pepper, which made her eyes water.

  It was a Sunday, so Sammy was off work, and he and Mr. Warner were half in the bag already by the time they finished supper and started to play cards, a game called Machiavelli. It wasn’t a betting game at least, so they never argued the way they did when they played cribbage or gin.

  After supper, Sally stood at the sink washing the greasy dishes, the window open to the cool autumn night to let out the smoke from their cigarettes. Outside she could hear the neighborhood children excitedly going from door to door, ringing doorbells, hollering out “Trick or treat!” When she pulled back the curtains, she could see the groups moving in packs, the white sheets of ghost costumes glowing in the night. And she thought about the Dorothy costume that never was. Those red slippers. At the sink, she closed her eyes, stood on her tiptoes, and clicked her heels together three times.

  Sammy, not wanting to be bothered by the doorbell, had turned out the porch light, a signal that there were no treats to be had here, but every now and then the doorbell would ring anyway, and one of the men would cuss. “Go away! Goddamned kids.”

  “Sir, I’m going to wash up,” she said, drying her hands on a tattered dishrag, and Mr. Warner looked up from his plate at her. Winked.

  She made her way down the hall, the smoky air seeming to follow her down the dark corridor. In the bathroom, she moved the hamper against the closed door since there was no lock. She raised the lid to wedge it under the knob, and the smell of gasoline wafted out of the hamper, turning her stomach. She ran the water in the sink and washed her face, her hands. She tried not to look in the mirror, because seeing her reflection made her unbearably sad.

  They didn’t talk about what happened with the blood even once. But a whole box of those pads appeared on the back of the toilet in the bathroom the next day, and it was a good thing, because just last week it had happened again. The box was in the linen closet now where she’d put it, something about it making her feel deeply ashamed.

  Ding dong.

  “Trick or treat!” the voices rang out in the night. She heard the chair legs scraping against the linoleum and the heavy footsteps as one of the men went to the front door.

  “Git!” Mr. Warner’s voice said. “Ain’t nothing here. Now shut up and keep moving.”

  This was followed by a trail of squeals and giggles.

  Sally went to the bathroom window and peered out at the street below. Groups of witches and cowboys and princesses scurried along. It would be easy to get lost in one of these crowds. To slip in among the robots and the nurses and vampires. If she had a mask, she could be any other child.

  Sally checked to make sure the hamper was secure under the doorknob and went to the window. Slowly, she lifted it, a gust of cool autumn air rushing in. She looked down below, noting for the first time that there was a fire escape; its metal bones had been right there all along. It would be just a short drop to the landing, a climb down the cold rungs, and then she could be free. Her breath grew shallow as she considered the possibility of escape.

  “Florence!” His voice was like metal. The doorknob turned back and forth and the hamper jumped. Then, in that scary, slurry voice, slippery as gasoline, he sang, “Trick or treat!”

  SUSAN

  Right away there were phone calls from folks saying they’d spotted Sally.

  Saw her at the supermarket.

  A girl matching that description come to my door looking to sell Girl Scout cookies.

  Goes to my church, always sits in the back pew with a man I thought was her daddy.

  Though hopeful, Susan thought it sad that until five hundred dollars was on the line, nobody had come forward with information about Sally. Now everybody and their brother were weighing in about her whereabouts.

  With the first few calls, even Ella had become hopeful. Truly believed that someone somewhere might have actually seen Sally. But as the weeks went by and the newspaper stopped running the ads, the calls became fewer and fewer and further and further in between.

  Saw a girl like that on the playground, darker hair, though. Taller.

  Mighta caught a glimpse of her in a shop window.

  But by the time Thanksgiving came and went, the phone calls had almost stopped altogether.

  Al was determined, though.

  “Man’s gotta have a job. How’s he suppo
rting her if he hasn’t got a job? I only made it to about a half-dozen service stations when I was there. Thought I’d call all the ones in the book. See if they’ve had any new employees over the last six months. Anybody matchin’ his description.”

  While Susan fed the baby, he sat at the secretary in the living room, searching through the Baltimore phone book he’d stolen out of a pay phone booth when he was there in August.

  Watching Al scour the phone book, scribbling numbers down onto the yellow legal pad they kept by the phone, Susan felt an overwhelming surge of gratitude, the distinct feeling that despite the tragedies in her life so far, she was undeniably blessed.

  “Christmas can’t come and go without her coming home,” Al said. “It will kill your ma.”

  Susan nodded. It was true. Ella had been buoyed by the phone calls, the so-called tips. But after they all proved to be dead ends, Al and Susan regretted that they’d gotten her hopes up. Ella seemed even further resigned and defeated.

  “Christmas is just a few weeks away, Al,” Susan said.

  “I know.”

  Susan was struck by a memory of a Christmas a few years before, when Sally was still little. Five or six maybe? She’d asked Russell if Santa was real, said one of the older boys at school said he was made up. And so Russell put on a Santa suit he borrowed from a family he worked for and climbed up on the roof. He’d told Ella and Susan to play along.

  “What’s that sound up there?” Ella had said, winking at Sally. There was the faint sound of footsteps above them. The distant jingle of sleigh bells.

  “I don’t know,” Susan said, shrugging her shoulders.

  “It’s awfully early still, only eight o’clock. You don’t think it could be Santa already, could it?”

  Sally’s eyes had widened.

  “We should go look at the upstairs window,” Susan said conspiratorially to Sally, and reached for her small hand.

  They ran upstairs to Ella and Russell’s bedroom and peeked out the window. Sure enough, there was “Santa,” a giant sack slung over his shoulder, making toward the chimney.

  Sally had nearly cried. “I knew he was real. I knew it the whole time.”

  At the time, it had made Susan’s heart soar. They’d salvaged Christmas for Sally, at least for another year. But thinking back on it now, it felt almost cruel. Getting a little girl’s hopes up like that. For nothing more than a borrowed costume and an empty potato sack.

  SALLY

  Sometimes, when the weather was too cold, Sister Mary Katherine would let Sally stay in the classroom during recess. She didn’t have a proper coat anymore. She thought of the one her mother had made for her last year, the light gray princess coat with the scalloped trim. She had picked out the Butterick pattern at the fabric shop in Camden. Her mother had even let her choose the soft wool from the giant bolts in the back. Because Sally was often so cold, her mother made a special lining inside of light pink flannel.

  One day, as Sally was lost inside the pages of Misty of Chincoteague, Sister Mary Katherine had come to her with a bright red woolen coat.

  “Florence? This has been sitting in the lost and found for over a year. Would you like to have it?”

  It was the color of a fire engine with big shiny black buttons and black velvet cuff and collar. The lining was black satin, cold but silky soft, as Sally stood up and slipped her arms into the sleeves.

  Sister Mary Katherine stood back as if to appraise her, but Sally’s chin dropped to her chest.

  “I can’t keep it, Sister,” she said softly.

  She could already imagine exactly what Mr. Warner would say. That she wasn’t a charity case, that he’d buy her a new coat before Christmas and that prancing around in a bright red coat was calling attention to herself. A fugitive of the law must blend in.

  “Why not, sweetheart? It’s only forty degrees outside. Soon it’ll be colder than that. Please, whoever left it there has forgotten all about it by now.”

  Lost and found. She felt a sudden affinity with this coat—left on the playground or in the classroom, waiting for its rightful owner to come claim it. How lonely it must have been, waiting for whatever little girl had been so careless with it. She imagined it, folded and expectant in the giant wooden crate where all the lost things went. She’d be no better than Mr. Warner if she were to take the coat as her own. What if that little girl one day recalled what she’d lost and went looking for it only to find it wasn’t there anymore?

  The coat was the most beautiful shade of red. The color of candy apples, of plump summer strawberries. It was soft and so gently worn.

  Sally had looked up at the nun and studied her face. She wasn’t old like the other nuns at St. Ann’s. Her face was so pretty. Like Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life.

  “Consider it a Christmas gift. Wouldn’t it make a lovely coat for the holidays?”

  Sally shrugged off the shoulders of the beautiful coat and handed it to her. “My father won’t let me take charity,” she said.

  Sister’s face darkened then, and her eyebrows pinched together.

  “Perhaps if I spoke to your father,” she started, and Sally trembled. She didn’t know if it was just the chill of the classroom or the fear that caused it.

  “He works days,” Sally said, and thought of him at the garage down the street. The stink of his skin at night. Gasoline. The smell filled the attic room, made Sally dizzy. It gave her a headache. No amount of soap and water could cut through that awful smell. It lived in his skin, in his hands as they pressed against her mouth so that she wouldn’t scream.

  “Well, if you tell me where he works, perhaps I could go visit him. Explain that it’s improper for a child to go without a coat,” she said sternly.

  “Please don’t,” Sally said, and shook her head.

  Sister’s face had softened, and she reached out for Sally’s hand.

  Sally was flooded with memories of her mother’s hand, reaching for hers as they crossed a busy street, on her forehead as she lay sick in bed.

  “Are you having some troubles at home, Florence?” Sister asked.

  Sally felt her throat grow thick, swollen, pushing back the words. It felt like her body was filling with all those words she wasn’t allowed to say. She pictured them inside her, scrambled together in her belly: “fugitive,” “wanted,” “kiss,” “mama.” She had no words, however, for what happened in that room after dark. The punishment it seemed that Mr. Warner meted out. She had no way to articulate the pain. Gasoline, gasoline, gasoline.

  “You can trust me,” Sister said again.

  Sally nodded. But could she trust her? She had trusted Mr. Warner when he told her that she would be safe as long as she checked in with him from time to time, but he had punished her anyway: taken her away from her family. She’d trusted him when he told her she’d be able to plead her case to the judge. But he never even talked about the judge anymore. Her own stepfather had promised he’d be her daddy forever and ever—she’d asked him once; she remembered peering up into his face as he came to tuck her in. Not a year later, he’d walked out onto the railroad tracks and stood there waiting for the train that would take him away.

  Sister Mary Katherine had squatted down so that she was looking Sally in the eye. “I promise, your secrets are safe with me.”

  Sally was not Catholic; her mother was Episcopalian. But she knew that nuns were not supposed to lie. That the promises they made to God were sacred. She felt galvanized by the possibility of opening up her mouth and letting those words out. But all the words were trapped inside. Mr. Warner had made a prisoner of not just her body, but her thoughts. Her words held captive.

  Sally nodded, tears running down her cheeks.

  “Your father…,” Sister Mary Katherine started. “Florence, has he done something to hurt you?”

  She felt dizzy, the same sinking diving-bell feeling she’d felt when Mr. Warner found her slipping that composition book under her sweater that day. God, it felt so long ago. It was only
June then, and here it was nearly Christmas. Six months ago. The seasons were moving on without her. She recalled the carousel in Atlantic City, the way it spun on and on and on, barely slowing to let other riders on. (She still wore that brass ring, the cold metal wish pressed against her skin underneath her blouse.)

  Her own voice barely seemed to belong to her. It was low and seemed to come from a dark place inside her chest as one secret escaped. “He’s a bad man, Sister.”

  “Okay,” Sister said, nodding, ignoring the tears that welled up in her own eyes. Nodding, squeezing Sally’s hand. “It’s okay. I’ll help you. I promise.”

  SISTER MARY KATHERINE

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession,” Sister Mary Katherine whispered at the wrought-iron grille in the confessional.

  Outside the church, the other sisters were staging the nativity scene. She could hear the parishioners hammering the makeshift stable.

  “Yes, Sister,” Father said. She had rehearsed her confession quietly in her room the night before. Snow falling softly outside her window, she had asked God for the words that might explain the ways in which she was failing.

  “I actually came today to ask for your advice, Father.”

  “Go on, Sister.”

  “There is a child, one of my students. She is new this year, Father.”

  Sister Mary Katherine was certain there was something dark happening in that child’s life. She’d seen sorrow in a child’s eyes before. She’d seen little boys whose fathers’ belts regularly met their behinds, little girls whose mothers neglected them. But the depth of Florence’s burden scared her. It wasn’t just that the girl had no coat, that the skin of her hands was chapped, that she never, ever smiled. It was that the mere mention of her father made the child’s eyes go vacant. All the light gone.

  Father’s silhouette on the other side of the confessional was familiar to her now. How many times had she sat here and sought forgiveness for all of her small sins?