“I’m sorry. You just keep telling me and I’ll keep trying. It’s only because I love you, you know.”
“I love you, too, sis. Thank you.”
“Call me anytime.”
As I’m heading down the sidewalk, I’m thinking about when to call my sponsor today, and maybe I’ll do it when I walk on the beach. I also need to fit in a meeting at some point.
What I notice is how much lighter my step is, how much less fury is in my lungs. Whatever else might have happened, I’m very lucky that I landed my sister.
Chapter Twenty-One
Norah
It’s hot when I leave Trudy, the sun a high burning ball that makes the sidewalks sizzle, and even flies are too tired to do more than buzz up lethargically when I pass. I long for the pool at Belle l’été, for my cozy room under the oleander bushes, but of course I can’t go back there right now. I have to find refuge. I head for the library. It’s air-conditioned and no one will hurry me.
And books are always a source of comfort. Bookstore, library, even a bookmobile, I’m happy.
One of the great pieces of luck in my life was landing in a foster home filled with books when I was seven. I mean, overflowing with books. They were stacked on shelves, as books are meant to be, or so I learned, in the living room and in the bedrooms, and stacked on a shelf by the stairs that led to the basement. In the kitchen, cookbooks lined the top of the fridge, a place I’d only ever seen boxes of cereal, and filled up one whole counter.
It wasn’t the nicest house in the world. It smelled of dogs and the cigarettes my foster mom Susan smoked, and she loved reading so much she didn’t spend all that much time cleaning, although the army of children she cared for did a lot of it. We had chores, ordinary kinds of chores, like teaming up to do the dishes after meals, and taking turns vacuuming and cleaning bathrooms and watering the garden, not like some places I lived later, where kids were treated like slaves.
Susan and Joseph were good foster parents. I lived there for almost six years, from age seven until I was thirteen, and in that time we ranged between five and seven kids, three who were born to the family, the rest fosters Susan took in because she’d been orphaned at nine and hated it. She loved kids, and cooking and growing vegetables, but mostly she loved reading. Reading while she stood at the counter, smoking and waiting for water to boil for spaghetti. Reading in her chair after dinner while everyone else watched TV on a console in the living room. Reading in the bathtub and reading in bed. She read a bit of everything, from mysteries to biographies and everything in between, but her true love was romances of every variety, the subscription books that arrived every month and the fat paperbacks she picked up at the used bookstore for a quarter or a dollar each.
She took us to the library once a month, the whole gang, whoever was living there at the time, and let us check out whatever we wanted. No limits on how many or what subject—well, one time Billy Orly wanted to check out a book on a true-crime murder, and she didn’t let him have it, and I’m just as glad; we all were.
Not everyone loved it as much as me. Sometimes, kids would just slump in the shared areas and give irritated looks at the rest of us.
But I was in heaven. I’d always liked reading, but with full permission from Susan, I became a readaholic, big-time. I tore through a book a day, gulping down everything that swept into my realm, from the Baby-Sitters Club and The Yearling to Charlotte’s Web and the Goosebumps books. When I was nine Susan gave me the first two Harry Potter books for Christmas, and I was desperately in love with the world. We read them together, and she took me to a Harry Potter event at a bookstore in downtown Pittsburgh when I was eleven. I don’t have many possessions I carry around, given the number of times I’ve had to move, but I own and protect the entire Harry Potter collection. It’s one of my most treasured belongings.
In the air-conditioned library, I wander down the stacks of children’s books and find Harry Potter and sit on the floor in the aisle and open it, feeling Susan all around me. I never called her mom or mother—her “real” kids never liked that—but she was the only mother figure I had, and I loved her.
When I was twelve, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it moved fast. By my next birthday, she was too sick for foster kids or even reading. By the time they found me a new home, she was gone.
I press my forehead against the shelf, feeling a swell of longing and loss, which seems weird so many years later, but it rises up like this periodically, out of the blue. I don’t often wonder about my biological mother, or dwell on the years I spent in less-than-stellar homes, but I think of Susan all the time. Bringing the book to my nose, I fancy I catch a little wisp of cigarettes, and close my eyes, bring up a tattered memory of a wiry woman in a blue T-shirt watering zucchini. She would have liked Meadow, I think. All of us motherless daughters.