Before We Were Yours(30)

Mrs. Murphy stabs a finger toward Camellia. “You are the reason everyone must sit here rather than going outside to play.” She stomps off down the hall, her steps drawing a crooked line.

We sit. The little ones finally sleep, and Gabion falls flat out on the floor. A few other kids pass by—older and younger, boys and girls. Most wear clothes that are too big or too small. Not a single one looks our way. They walk through like they don’t notice we’re there. Women in white dresses with white aprons move up and down the hall in a hurry. They don’t see us either.

I wrap my fingers around my ankles and squeeze hard to make sure I’m still there. I almost think I’ve turned into the Invisible Man, like Mr. H. G. Wells wrote about. Briny loves that story. He’s read it to us a lot and Camellia and me play it with the kids in the river camps. Nobody can see the Invisible Man.

I close my eyes and pretend a while.

Fern needs to potty, and before I can figure out what to do about it, she wets herself. A dark-haired woman in a white uniform walks by and spots the mess running across the floor. She grabs Fern up by the arm. “We will have none of that here. You’ll use the bathroom properly.” She pulls a sack towel from her apron and throws it over the mess. “Clean that up,” she tells me. “Mrs. Murphy will have a fit.”

She takes Fern with her, and I do what she says. When Fern comes back, her drawers and dress have been washed out, and she’s wearing them wet. The lady tells the rest of us we can go to the bathroom too, but to hurry up about it and then sit down by the stairs again.

We haven’t been back in our places long before someone blows a whistle outside. I hear kids clambering around. Lots of them. They don’t talk, but their footsteps echo beyond the door at the end of the hall. They’re in there a while, and then there’s a racket like they’re hurrying up stairs, but not the stairs next to us.

Overhead, the boards creak and groan the way the gunwales and planking do on the Arcadia. It’s a home sound, and I close my eyes to listen and pretend I can wish us back aboard our safe little boat.

My wish dries up pretty quick. A woman in a white dress stops by and says, “Come this way.”

We climb to our feet to follow. Camellia goes first, and we keep the little kids between us, even Sherry and Stevie.

The lady takes us through the door at the end of the hall, and everything looks a lot different back there. It’s plain and old. Strips of paper and cheesecloth hang off the wall. There’s a kitchen to one side where two colored women are busy with a kettle on the stove. I hope we’ll get to eat soon. My stomach feels like it’s shrunk to the size of a peanut.

Even thinking that makes me hungry for peanuts.

A big staircase rises off to the other side of the kitchen. Most of the paint’s rubbed off, like it’s been walked on a lot. Half the bars are missing from the railing. A couple loose ones hang out like the leftover teeth in Old Zede’s smile.

The woman in the white uniform takes us upstairs and stands us along a hallway wall. Other kids form lines nearby, and I hear water running in a tub someplace. “No talking,” the woman says. “You will quietly wait here until it’s your turn for the bath. You will take off your clothing now and fold it neatly in a pile at your feet. All of it.”

Blood prickles in my skin, hot and sticky, and I look around and see that all the other kids, big and small, are already doing what we’ve just been told to do.





CHAPTER 9


Avery

“May Crandall. Are you sure that name isn’t familiar?” I’m sitting in the limo with my mother and father, en route to the ribbon-cutting ceremony in Columbia. “She’s the one who found my bracelet at the nursing home yesterday.” I say found because it sounds better than lifted it right from my wrist. “The Greer design with the garnet dragonflies—the one Grandma Judy gave me. I think this woman recognized it.”

“Your grandmother wore that bracelet frequently. Anyone who’d seen her in it certainly might remember it. It’s quite unique.” Mom searches her memory banks, her perfectly lined lips compressing. “No. I really don’t recall that name. Perhaps she’s one of the Asheville Crandalls? I dated a boy from that family when I was young—before your father, of course. Did you ask who her people are?” For Honeybee, as with all well-bred Southern women of her generation, this is a natural question upon meeting. Wonderful to know you. Isn’t this a lovely day? Now, tell me, who are your people?

“I didn’t think to ask.”

“Honestly, Avery! What are we going to do with you?”

“Send me to the woodshed?”

My father chuckles, looking up from a briefcase filled with documents he’s been reading. “Now, Honeybee, I have been keeping her busy. And nobody could file away all those details the way you do.”

Mom swats at him playfully. “Oh, hush.”

He catches her hand and kisses it, and I’m pinned in the middle. I feel thirteen years old.

“Eeewww. PDA, y’all.” Since coming home I’ve readopted words like y’all, which I had expunged from my vocabulary up north. They’re good words, I’ve now decided. Like the humble boiled peanut, they serve perfectly in many situations.

“Do you recall a May Crandall, Wells—a friend of your mother’s?” Honeybee retracks our conversation.