A Big Dose of Lucky Read online

  “Yes, please,” I say.

  “How many nights?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I tell her. “A week?” My voice goes up like I’m asking permission. Who knows how long?

  “Oh,” she says. “Long-term. We don’t have any privates.”

  For a second I think she’s telling me something really personal. Privates is the word that Miss Webster used, at the Home, for down there, the place you keep private from everyone else, what the Seven call our cha-chas. So I’m thinking, She doesn’t have any privates? And then I realize she means rooms. Private rooms. I want to die. What if she knew what I was thinking?

  “Th-that’s okay,” I say. “I’m happy to share.”

  “Happy or not, that’s what we got,” she says. “It’ll be the other guests who might think twice when they see you. But we’re open door here,” she adds in a hurry. “It’s a Christian hostel, and we welcome all of God’s children.”

  Oh, so now it’s God who died and left me an orphan?

  I fill out the form she gives me, telling her that I don’t have a permanent address at the moment and I don’t have a telephone number. She wants payment up front for five nights. Two-fifty a night.

  “Stay a month, there’s a lower rate,” she says.

  “I’ll know better later.” I count out the money from my stash.

  “You need a town map?” She pulls a printed page from a drawer and smooths it on the counter.

  She makes a purple X on the map with her pen. “This is where we are,” she says. “Broad Street. Shopping’s around here”—she makes another purple X—“and the water…is over here.” Another X.

  “Can you show me the hospital?” I ask.

  “Here, on Church Street. See?” She looks at me with her eyebrows raised. “You know how to read a map?”

  “I’ve seen maps of whole countries,” I say. “Not little towns with streets and buildings. This is nice, thank you.”

  She gives me a towel and a small silver key.

  “Not for the room,” she says. “That’s always open. But there’s a locker beside each bed where you can put your stuff so no one steals it. You’ll be in Dorm B, Bed 3. The bathroom is farther along the hall. There’s a kitchenette too, with a kettle and a fridge.”

  “Really?” I say. “Thanks!”

  She lifts her eyebrows again as if to say, Why is that so exciting?

  “Don’t leave food in there,” she says. “Some pig will eat it.”

  MY NEW ROOM

  Dorm B, Bed 3.

  I like how it rhymes.

  I forgot to ask Linette how many others would be sharing with me. I get to Dorm B—the sign is a big letter B handwritten on cardboard and nailed into the door—and go in, holding my breath like I’m going to make a wish and blow out candles in the next second.

  It’s not terrible, not at all. Bed 3—another handwritten sign—is one of four beds, and it’s the one next to the window. I look out through grimy glass to see the roof of the building next door. Not exactly a view. Not the vegetable garden and the shed and the woods like outside my room at the Benevolent Home. But Cady had the window there, so I’m lucky this time.

  No one else is here right now, but from the rumpledness of the covers and the folded nightclothes sticking out from under the pillows, it looks like Bed 2 is being used and will have an occupant tonight. Each bed has a brown wool blanket and a pillow, except that Bed 4 has no pillow and Bed 2 has two.

  I put my Simpson’s bag beside Bed 3 and try the little key in the lock of the bedside cupboard. It works. There is a box of matches and a button in there. I add my few clothes and all of my money except five dollars. I fold the Simpson’s bag and stash it too, in case I need it again. I lock the cupboard and slip the key into the zippered pocket of my sweater.

  I put my toothbrush and toothpaste into the drawer of the cubby. I sit on the edge of the bed and bounce a couple of times. It creaks like it’s saying hello.

  I take the towel and walk down the hall to the bathroom. A toilet, two sinks and two shower stalls. All pretty clean; no bugs or anything. I splash my face and grin into the mirror. I did it. I’m here. All moved in.

  THE NEW VIEW

  The pillow is not my pillow. From the instant I wake up, I know I’m somewhere I’ve never slept before. Without even opening my eyes, I sense the light coming from a different direction. I hear tires on wet tarmac and beeping horns instead of bird peeps and girl chatter and morning bells.

  Closer by, it’s not Cady murmuring as she often did in her sleep, but the stranger in Bed 2. An older lady, like, twenty-five, with red hair and an open mouth, is making gentle wheezing noises. It feels rude to stare while she’s sleeping, so I don’t.

  I get my toothbrush and creep across the room. One thing I’m good at is not bothering other sleepers. In the bathroom I brush my teeth till my whole mouth is foamy. I splash water on my face and rub my scalp to unmat my hair. Usually when it got this long, Mrs. Hazelton asked Joe to go at it with the clippers. They kept it short because I think it made them nervous to touch or try to manage it. It was Joe who bought me my pick, knowing about kinky hair from his old girlfriend, Asha. Maybe I can buy a replacement today, if I can find one in a town where I haven’t seen another dark face.

  I smile into the mirror.

  “Good morning,” I say. “My name is Malou Fox.”

  As I go past the reception area, Linette says, “Hey!”

  I think right away that maybe she’s changed her mind and I can’t stay after all. But she’s holding out a box, the size that shoes come in.

  “If you want any of this stuff,” she says, “people leave things behind, so we just pass it on.”

  I pounce on an alarm clock. “Do you think it works?”

  She shrugs. “Sure, why not? Try it.”

  So I take the clock and two pens and a picture postcard that shows a huge rock shaped like a turtle, with its stony neck peering out at Georgian Bay.

  MY PLAN IS NOT EXACTLY A PLAN

  Linette tells me again which way the hospital is, even though I have no clue what I’m going to do there. I doubt that I can walk in with a polite smile and ask for information from sixteen years ago. But I have to start somewhere.

  Inside the front door of the hospital is a reception window with a lady sitting behind it. She’s wearing a white nurse’s uniform, and her hair is crimped into tight gray curls.

  “Name of patient?” she asks before I open my mouth.

  “I’m not visiting,” I say. “I’m, um, looking for…” How do I put this?

  “Around the side.” She jerks her head to show where she means. “Staff entrance. That’s where you fill in the form.”

  “The form?” I say. “What form?”

  She looks at me hard for a moment, suspicious. Then she speaks slowly, like I’m five or stupid.

  “You want a job? You fill out the form,” she says. “Can you write your name?”

  I nod. “Of course, but—”

  “You speak with Mrs. Kowalski. She’ll decide if you qualify. I happen to know she needs a new cleaner.”

  “But I—”

  “Next.”

  There is someone waiting behind me, an old man leaning on a cane. I step aside, cheeks burning. If I were white, my face would be so red.

  WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

  Why does Old Nursey assume that I’m here to find a job? Outside, sitting on a bench, I rub my sweaty palms against my thighs and think I know the answer. She looked at me the way the church ladies might, her eyes whispering, Darkie.

  My cheeks are cooling. It’s not a terrible idea. I can’t just keep spending all the money Mrs. H. gave me. I’m going to need more. But I’ve never had a job. How can I pretend to be an actual cleaner? I was the messiest girl in the Home. Is there special training I’m supposed to have?

  If I can fake it for a few days, having a job at least will get me inside the hospital. I might meet someone who knew my mother. Is that possible?
r />   I stare up at the brick wall and the rows of windows. Not exactly a place of beauty, but this is where I was born! My mother came here with me inside her, full of hope—I’m guessing. In through the door as one person and out through the door as two. Unless, and probably, this is also where she died.

  DEATH IN CHILDBIRTH

  I’ve thought about it pretty much every day of my life. Every time we played Who Am I? Even though I pretended there was a cozy brown family nestled in a cozy little cottage, chances are—since I was not even a day old when I showed up at the Benevolent Home—my mother died while having me or very soon after.

  It is by far the most popular way for mothers to die in books, the best way to get readers feeling sorry for the character right from the start. Nothing like a motherless waif to twang your heartstrings.

  Oliver Twist’s mother dies having him. Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights dies having her daughter. Even Snow White’s mother died giving birth to her.

  Not that I’m Snow White. Obviously.

  But is that what happened?

  THE INTERVIEW

  Miss Webster, in our Home Economics classes, is always—was always—telling us that half our job as young women is to present ourselves well. I review her prime points of presentation:

  posture, poise and propriety.

  (The emphasis on the letter p seems to be a key part of instructional lists. Like Dr. Blunt’s reasons for avoiding relations with boys—which, I admit, had some of the older girls shrieking with laughter and me wanting to stick pins in my ears. He said that intimacy before marriage would lead to something called venereal disease and that meant pain, pus and…the official word for the boy’s place down there. (At the Home we called it a winkie. Who knows why?)

  Not exactly what I should be thinking about if I want to appear poised.

  I smooth my skirt, lick my lips and touch my hair to smooth it too. With good posture in mind, I make my way around to the door marked Staff Entrance, like the lady said to. Inside, I ask for Mrs. Kamaski.

  “You mean Kowalski,” says the woman, tough-looking as a tractor. “That’s me.”

  “Hello,” I say. “My name is Malou Gil—er—Fox. Malou Gillis Fox.”

  She leads me into her little office, where the papers are piled so high on the desk that I almost can’t see her when she sits down. She points to a chair, but there are papers heaped there too, so I perch on the edge of it, smiling like I’m not thinking, Hmmm, you could use a cleaner in here.

  Her telephone rings, and she ignores it. I lick my lips again and move my tongue around inside my mouth, trying to make it not so dry. She asks me questions and I answer. Where have I worked before? Nowhere. Why do I think I can do this job? I was raised in an orphanage and taught how to obey orders. Am I willing to work hard? Yes, of course.

  I can start tomorrow, she says. At six thirty in the morning.

  Her telephone rings again, and she shoos me out.

  THE SEARCH BEGINS

  Back at Rocky’s Diner, I order a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. The bread is toasted gold on the outside, and the inside is gooey and orange and delicious. Who invented such a wonderful thing?

  “How did you get to be a teenager and not know what a grilled cheese sandwich is?” Mona shakes her head, like, Will wonders ever cease? “Are you a Martian or something?”

  The Planet of Necessitous Girls, I think.

  She waits to see what else I’m willing to try, but I’m not so hungry today.

  She asks, “Did you sleep okay? Are you feeling all right?”

  “Better than all right! I’m celebrating. I got myself a job!”

  After I finish my lunch, I ask Mona for directions to the cemetery.

  I never much liked going to St. Jerome’s church on Sundays with all the other orphans, sitting in rows, pretending there might be a heavenly father who determined in his great wisdom that all our parents should die and abandon us. No argument about meekness or blessedness could convince me that whoever’s idea that was could be worthy of worship.

  But when I walk through the gates of the Hillcrest cemetery and along the leafy, sun-sprinkled pathway…well, it seems like a nice place to rest, that’s all. As if maybe there are such things as spirits, and they like to be here, surrounded by flowery shrubs and stones that mark their time in the world.

  How to find the marker I’m looking for? I’ll bet there’s a map someplace that tells who lies in which grave, but the best I can do is start in one corner and walk past every stone, checking the chiseled letters for ones that say FOX, probably with a date late in the spring of 1948.

  Up and down I go, skimming side to side. Sometimes a funny name catches my eye—Lucinda Cripps or Harold Hoddy—but I don’t linger because there are rows and rows and rows to get through. Sleep on, my sweet. Gone but not Forgotten. Beloved Mother With Christ, which is Far Better.

  Nearly at the end, I find myself in a section where the headstones are only as big as dictionaries, decorated with lambs and little angels. This is where the babies are buried, where the grieving parents leave fresh flowers or little toys or, on the grave of Allison Forsythe, a pink knitted hat with ears.

  It might have been me, I think, under one of these stones. If my mother died having me, I could easily have died too. Instead of landing in the Benevolent Home, I could be lying unremembered under a pile of dirt. My eyes stray back over the acre I’ve just wandered, blurring a bit at the flock of granite bumps in the grass.

  I haven’t found my mother, but so many other mothers are resting here. Beloved, gone-but-not-forgotten mothers. Dozens of mothers missed and mourned in this one little graveyard, sons and daughters weeping for them. Mothers who’d washed their children’s grubby hands and buttered their bread and known that they didn’t like tomatoes or thunder or itchy sweaters.

  And mine had to die without knowing a single thing about me. I wasn’t even me yet. I was only a little brown baby in a slatted wooden box.

  Not surprising that nobody in the whole world knows where that baby is today, sitting alone this hour with dead people and their stony markers.

  Not the one dead person I care about finding though. No Mama Fox. I sit in a patch of sunlight near a gravestone so mottled and old that the lettering is only faint indentations in the cracked facade.

  Why isn’t she here?

  Was Fox my father and for some reason she had a different name? Like, if they weren’t married but she gave me his name anyway? Or maybe she’s buried in a different town nearby? Just because she had her baby here doesn’t mean she got buried here, right? Or maybe she’s not buried in a grave. She could have been cremated and is now bones and dust, sitting in a china pot on someone’s mantelpiece, like in a Victorian novel.

  I sit for a long time, until my ankles are stiff from being tucked under me. What if I never find out where she is or how she died or if she loved me a little bit? That would be dismal.

  I buy two cans of chicken noodle soup on my way back to the hostel. I learn the survival skills of using a can opener and a two-burner stove in the little kitchen. The prize is sipping my supper out of a cup while sitting on my bed.

  FIVE

  GOING UNDERCOVER

  I’m standing at the staff entrance extra early, worrying. Do I just push in? I don’t feel like staff yet. Am I even in the right place? Then, phew, a lady shows up. She says her name and I don’t understand, because she’s Chinese or something and she speaks with an accent. She has to say it about five times, shaking her head a little bit, like I’m stupid. It sounds like Chew, but later she writes it down so I can see that it’s spelled Thiu. She’s not Chinese but rather from a place called Vietnam. I know from Joe’s television that there’s a war in her country right now. Maybe she’s a refugee. Maybe she’s an orphan too, but I don’t ask, of course.

  Another lady comes along right after, with skin darker than mine, but she’s not a Negro. Her hair is straight, pulled back in a ponytail. She’s called Berna.

>   All it takes to be a cleaner? Don’t be white.

  THERE’S A UNIFORM

  Thiu gets me a smock from the cleaners’ cupboard. It’s gray but otherwise nearly identical to the ones we wore at the Home, designed to make the person wearing it look like an old coat on a hanger. That’s fine with me, because I need to be invisible.

  TOOLS OF MY NEW TRADE

  Broom and dustpan

  Vacuum cleaner with four different nozzles

  Bucket and mop

  Sponges

  Rags

  Paper towels

  Mr. Clean

  Toilet cleaner

  Glass cleaner

  Tub and tile cleaner

  Aluminum cleaner

  Bleach

  Lemon polish, which I don’t get to use too often because there isn’t much wood in a hospital, except for in the waiting room.

  THE FIRST DAY

  Is horrible.

  And so is the next.

  I WAS NEVER EXACTLY TIDY

  The other girls would laugh their heads off if they knew I’d been hired as a cleaner. I was the first to get demerit points for bed not made, clothes strewn, dishes stashed under the bed. Cady drew a line with chalk down the middle of our room so my mess would stay on my side. Well, chalk’s real easy to rub out, you know?

  A BOY NAMED FRANKIE

  “It’s your break time,” says Mrs. Kowalski. “Take fifteen.”

  “Fifteen?”

  “Minutes.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s the law. You take a fifteen-minute break after three hours. Three hours more, you have thirty for lunch.”

  “What can I do in fifteen minutes?”