Home Free (11 page)

And Mrs. Fergus said, “I beg your pardon?” and sounded just like my mother when I know I'm going to get it.

Cassandra shoved her hair over her face and said again, “What is it?” and reached out to take the book. Mrs. Fergus snatched her arm back and held the book up and behind her head like she was going to swat a mosquito.

“Are you telling me you've never seen this book?” she asked.

“I can't even see it now,” Cassandra answered.

Mrs. Fergus looked back and forth at both of us. Then she put her arm down behind her back.

“This is a piece of filth,” she said. Then again, “FILTH!” in capital letters. “It's going in the fire.” She marched off and Cassandra and I swam out to the raft.

“She snooped,” I said.

“All adults snoop,” said Cassandra. “They pretend they're doing it to help you, but they just want to catch you doing something wrong.”

I thought about this and nodded. It had never occurred to me before that my mother snooped. But suddenly, I knew how she knew I loved David. She had looked in my underwear drawer and found the letter I wrote him, but never sent to him. And even though this happened way back last year, I felt suddenly angry as if it just happened now. I was planning out a better hiding place when I wondered about something else.

“Why is it filth?” I asked. “Lots of people touch each other and get married and have babies. Why does she say
FILTH
like that?”

“Because the people in this book aren't married.”

And then I suddenly had a brainstorm.
So-called Mrs. Harris
! And I knew! The mothers always said “so-called
Mrs
. Harris.” They meant she wasn't a “Mrs.” They meant
she wasn't married. I felt a wonderful sense of satisfaction. I had just solved one of those perplexing adult puzzles.

Cassandra was still talking. “Or maybe Doris is mad because Ray won't touch her like that and that's why they don't have any babies,” she said.

And then we both thought about Mr. and Mrs. Fergus touching and saying dirty things like in the book and we laughed like a couple of hyenas until we hiccupped.

“I wonder what it would be like to have big buttery breasts?” Cassandra asked.

I looked down at my chest and I wondered too.

The people at the cottage next door came over one night and asked us to join them later for a sauna. A sauna is what the wooden shack is that they have right down on the water. They heat it up really hot and sit in it and sweat. Then when they're so hot they can't stand it, they run outside and jump in the lake naked.

Mr. and Mrs. Pedersson were very nice. She made lots of desserts and called Cassandra and me over to eat them. Mrs. Fergus bought store-bought desserts because she said she was at the cottage and didn't want to work. But Mrs. Pedersson said it wasn't work to bake desserts, and so we got to eat all kinds of different things I'd never had before. I especially liked the little buns she made with cardamom
seed. Mrs. Fergus said she never used cardamom seed and it must be something foreigners use.

One day they let us see inside their sauna. It was all wood and the wood was almost white and very shiny. There was a big bucket they filled with water and then poured it on the burner when the burner got very hot. They had something called a loofah that they used to rub their skin before they got all sweaty. They said it rubbed all the old skin off and then your skin was soft as a baby's bum. Everything smelled nice, like you were in the middle of a wet forest.

Mr. Pedersson said it was very healthy to take a sauna. He said it got poisons out of your body. He said it made you relax and then it made you sleep very deeply.

Mrs. Fergus said that was all hogwash. She said there were no poisons in her body and how she slept was her own business. But I liked listening to the Pederssons talk about the sauna. It reminded me of all the things I had learned in school in social studies about other lands and people. And when they showed us pictures of where they grew up, it was different from the pictures that were in our books at school. Maybe I will go to Sweden one day when I'm older.

There were only a couple of days of our week left when the Pederssons asked us over to the sauna. Mr. Fergus said maybe they would be over later, but Mrs. Fergus looked like a mouse had run up her leg and her mouth puckered
up and she said “Certainly not.” Then when the neighbors were gone, she yelled at Mr. Fergus and said he'd had too much beer and sitting around naked was disgusting.

“But they don't sit around naked,” I told her. “Mr. Pedersson says they wrap themselves in towels while they sit in the sauna and then they drop them right when they go in the water. And it's at night so nobody sees you.”

Mrs. Fergus looked at me like I was a bug. “I don't recall asking for your opinion, Miss Mets,” she said. And her voice sounded all frozen.

It was a warning, I could tell, but Cassandra ignored it. “It sounds like fun being naked underwater,” she said.

Mrs. Fergus banged a spoon down on the counter. “That's enough!” she said. “I'm sure with your background it would seem like fun. Any more of this talk and Lee will be sent home and you will be packed off now, instead of in two weeks. I won't have it, do you hear me?”

Cassandra's eyes were flashing, but she didn't say anything.

“Do you hear me?” Mrs. Fergus said again.

“Yes.” She spit out the word.

“And furthermore, I don't want you girls spending any more time with those Pederssons. Is that clear?”

We both nodded.

Then Mrs. Fergus marched into her bedroom and
slammed the door. Cassandra started to cry and ran outside. I ran after her, but I didn't see where she had gone. I called her name but she didn't answer.

I went inside and Mr. Fergus was asleep on the couch, so I cleaned up the supper dishes. Cassandra Jovanovich came back, but she wouldn't talk to me. We went to bed still not talking and I lay there for a long time wide awake. I was pretty sure there were poisons in my body.

It didn't rain at all the next two days and we spent every minute outside. Mrs. Fergus seemed to forget about yelling at all of us and just acted like the whole thing had never happened. She even made a cake from scratch. But I knew Cassandra hadn't forgotten.

“Whenever I do something someone doesn't like, they threaten to pack me off,” she said. “See Leanna? That's what happens if you're not ‘owned.' No one has to care about you long term. They just … just borrow you – like a book – for a while.”

Cassandra had become all sulky and kept her hair over her face, so I couldn't get a good look at her, and I knew she was thinking about packing and leaving the cottage and
then packing and leaving the Fergus's. I was pretty sure we wouldn't be having too much fun anymore.

And then before we knew it, it was the last day at the cottage. Cassandra was all jumpy and prickly, like a thunderstorm was coming. Well, it was more like Cassandra
was
a thunderstorm, just waiting to start. And after Mr. and Mrs. Fergus took the little boat and went to visit the Smiths up the lake for the evening, Cassandra let out all the thunder and lightning that was inside her.

This is what happened.

I started talking about
Anne of Green Gables
again and told her she had to read it.

“I know what I said about orphans and that it's not as fun as I thought, but you know Anne's my favorite book and you still haven't read it. And now that I'm half an orphan, I like Anne even more. So please, please, please – ”

Cassandra Jovanovich jumped out of the chair and screamed, “You and your stupid orphans! I hate your stupid orphans! And I hate you for being so stupid!” She was crying and screaming and waving her arms up and down. “I'm not an orphan! Do you hear me? I'm not an orphan. I never was! I just pretend because my mother didn't … DOES not want me!
Present
tense. Everybody's embarrassed because I'm not wanted by my mother! She wasn't married and nobody knows who my father is. She
wouldn't ever tell. Rita got pregnant when she was fifteen.
Fifteen
! And here I am. And nobody wants to talk about it. I'm not allowed to tell anyone. And she just ran away. Nobody knows where she is. Everybody takes me for a while and then passes me along. I don't belong to anybody! I'm not an orphan! I'm just not wanted! You don't want to be owned. Well I
am
owned and my owner doesn't want me!”

Then she ran out of the cottage. The back door slammed like a gunshot.

I just stood there. I couldn't take it in. And then everything just shifted in my head in an instant and it all made sense. Why she wouldn't talk to me, tell me her secret, anything about her parents. She must hate me.

And then suddenly, I was afraid for her. What was she going to do?

I was out the back door in a second. She was only just ahead of me. She ran up the hill and over the hydro-line clearing and down the other side of the hill. She stumbled and so did I, but we didn't stop running. I knew I was cut, but I kept following her because I was afraid. Then I tripped and slid down the hill and banged into her and knocked her down. She jumped up and looked all about, as if she hadn't seen the diving rock before. As if she was looking at it for the first time. All of a sudden she was flying
across the ground and took a huge jump into the air. I followed a foot behind her, and we tumbled together into the lake.

We came up at the same time and I checked for my glasses with one hand and grabbed her shirt and hung on tight with the other. She was still crying and there was stuff from her nose on her lip, but I didn't let go.

She smacked at my arm in the water. “Get away from me. Go away!” she shouted.

“No! I don't care if you're not an orphan,” I shouted back. “You're the best friend I ever had, and I don't care about anything else.” This was true. I didn't have to think about it, even. The words just came out of my mouth and they were true.

Cassandra stopped pushing me. All the fight just collapsed out of her. I let go of her shirt and she swam back to the rock. I followed right behind her.

She sat down and let out a sigh that sounded like it came all the way up from her belly button.

“I am so sick of lying. To everybody. But mostly to you. Especially after your father died. I felt terrible. But I couldn't tell you the truth. But you see Leanna, it doesn't make me special that no one wants me. It just makes me nothing.”

“You're not nothing,” I said. I wanted to say more, but
I didn't have the words. I didn't know how to say what I felt like inside. It was just like the ache I felt when Miss Gowdy read to us. I had all this … desire inside and I didn't have the words. But I did know one thing, and I could tell Cassandra this.

“You are my friend. It's true. And not because you're an orphan, I mean because I
thought
you were an orphan. But because you're … you're … you. You're exciting. You make me think about things. I mean, really think.” I thought about Laura Butterfield, and about how I suddenly saw her as so fragile. But Cassandra Jovanovich was the opposite. “You're so strong,” I told her. “You just don't know it.”

Cassandra looked at me.

“When we go home and I'm gone, will you still be my friend?” she asked.

“I promise,” I told her. “I will write letters to you all the time. And I'm good at writing letters. I say things better when I write them. I have time to think about the right words.”

Cassandra smiled at me. “I will miss you very much, Leanna. But I'm glad I'm leaving. I hate Doris and Ray and all their stupid rules.”

Then she jumped up from the rocks. “Do you want to go skinny-dipping?”

“But Mrs. Fergus said no. We'll get in trouble.”

Cassandra put her hand up to her eyes and pretended she was looking around.

“Nope. Can't see her. She's not here.”

Then she looked behind a tree and behind the big rock. She was so silly, I laughed.

Then she pulled off her blouse and pulled down her shorts. “I don't care what Doris says anymore. She's passing me along now, so I don't care. And why can't we go skinnydipping? Why is it
DISGUSTING
? Why is it
FILTH
?” And she said both words in capital letters and she sounded just like Mrs. Fergus.

I didn't know. I don't know why adults have so many rules.

So I took my off my blouse and shorts. And this time I remembered to take off my glasses. We stood there in our underpants.

Cassandra looked at me. “I dare you,” she said.

And so I stuck my tongue out at Cassandra and pulled down my underpants first. Then she pulled down hers and I took her hand and yanked. We took three running steps and leaped into the water, holding hands. We went down, down, fast at first, then slower. And then, for the first time all week, I touched bottom. I stretched out my toes and touched! It was because of Cassandra. Cassandra and me together, we were heavy enough to sink to the bottom. And
I felt the rock and sand and dead leaves at the bottom of the lake. And then that funny feeling that you're getting lighter and lighter until the water can't hold you down anymore and spits you back up to the air and sky. We bobbed back to the surface, still holding hands.

We floated on our backs and looked at all the stars. You couldn't begin to count the stars, ever. It was just like being at home in my secret spot. It was just like I'd brought my Sanctuary along to the cottage with me. Except I didn't have a little star window to look up at. I was looking at all of the heavens. I was looking into infinity.

And suddenly it was like a lightning bolt had struck me. And I knew something really important. My Sanctuary wasn't like other sanctuaries, like the ones made out of wood and stone in churches. So it didn't matter if my mother and I moved. I wouldn't be leaving my Sanctuary behind. My Sanctuary was wherever I was. It would be with me always if I just looked up and looked inside myself.