Wonder Show (3 page)

Like an oasis in the desert, there was The Home.

“Pack your things,” Sophia said to Portia. They had just finished dinner.

“Why?”

“I’ve found a better place for you to live. There are lots of other girls there, and an apple orchard, and a very nice man who will watch after you. Here. Look.”

Sophia stood up, went to her sewing box, and extracted a thin slip of paper. As she pushed it across the table, Portia could see a faint picture of a large house surrounded by bold words in newsprint. Words like
BETTER LIFE
and
CARE
and
HOME.
The words smudged her fingers as she pinched the paper between them.

Portia felt her scalp getting hot. When she looked up, she could see her apple tree through the window behind Sophia. “You’re sending me away?”

“It’s for the best, dear. You’ll be much happier there. You’ll get an education.”

It was as if her hair were actually on fire. She itched at her head and said, “But you promised Max you would take care of me. He’s coming back here to get me. I’m supposed to be
here.
”

Sophia folded her hands together tightly. “There’s . . . he . . .” She paused, chewing on her words. “I will tell him where to find you. Obviously. And I
am
taking care of you. I have found a better place for you.” She stood up, hands clenched as if in desperate prayer. “Now, pack your things. We’re leaving in the morning.”

I’ll run away,
thought Portia. But there was no time to plan, and she knew only fools fled into the night without the proper supplies. She had heard too many tales of men mauled by bears, getting lost in the woods, sleeping their way into death when the snow caught them. She would not suffer that kind of end. She would not give Sophia the satisfaction.

A whole orchard of apple trees. Other girls to climb them with. A kindly man, watching over them like the Holy Father. Portia pictured a friendly, wrinkled face, a snow white beard, a pipe threading sweet smoke into the air. A deep voice telling her stories, tucking her in at night.

Maybe it won’t be so bad,
she thought. And when she woke up in the middle of the night and heard Aunt Sophia yelling in her sleep, Portia smiled and thought,
So long, you old witch.

She didn’t know yet: There are far worse things than witches. Worse than bears. Worse than the devil himself.

Meeting Mister

They drove for nearly two hours before they got to Brewster Falls. It was the longest trip Portia had ever taken.

Aunt Sophia didn’t like for anyone to speak to her while she was driving, and so she and Portia made the journey in silence, except for the constant rattling of the ancient truck that had been left behind by some near-forgotten cousin. Portia entertained herself with visions of the kindly old man who awaited her, and his pipe and the bedtime stories she hoped to hear—her stock of stories was wearing thin, and she couldn’t tell them to herself without hearing Max’s voice.

Her hopeful imaginings started to sag when they drove through Brewster Falls and it looked exactly like all the other towns they’d gone through already. Portia was suddenly suspicious that Sophia had been driving in circles and this had all been an elaborate trick to scare Portia into behaving better. But then she saw the sign:

MCGREAVEY HOME FOR WAYWARD GIRLS

Block letters burned into the wood like scars.

“What does
wayward
mean?”

Sophia coughed. “It means you’ve strayed from the righteous path.”

For all the times she’d been dragged to church, Portia didn’t think she’d ever been on the righteous path in the first place. She did not imagine that Brother Joshua—unearthly tall and thin, with a waxed mustache and a crooked smile—was at all qualified to lead anyone to Righteousness. Even Sophia seemed not to trust him and pursed her lips when he clasped her hand at the end of services every Sunday. But the real preachers had all joined the westbound caravans, and beggars could not be choosers. Even in God’s house.

The truck lurched uncertainly onto the dirt road indicated by the sign and quickly came to a fork—downhill, to the right, Portia saw a cluster of small wood cabins and, behind them, the apple trees. They were different than her apple tree. Hers had grown tall and sat heavy over her like a canopy, even now that she was thirteen. These were dwarfish, twisted, and gray. It was halfway through harvest time, and many of the trees stood bare as skeletons, reaching for the cold sky. Uphill, to the left, was a massive dark house with a sharp, staggered roof that looked like the teeth of some huge, mythical beast. Portia had no desire to get any closer, but Sophia, as usual, had other ideas.

“That must be where the director lives,” she said, and aimed the truck accordingly. When they pulled up in front of the house, the door opened as if by magic, and a man stepped onto the porch.

He was thin, with well-trimmed black hair and the bearing of a man who believes himself taller than he actually is. His suit was a cold gray, like slate, and there was no expression on his pale face. He matched the house perfectly—his eyes were as black as the shaded windows behind him. He stood with his hands behind his back and waited.

Sophia heaved herself out of the truck and approached the man. “You are the director?”

The man nodded, drew one hand from behind him, and extended it to Sophia. “You must be Mrs. Stoller. Charmed, I’m sure.”

He did not sound charmed at all. He sounded, in fact, like a man who had never been charmed by anything or anyone in his life.

“You received my letter?”

“I did,” he said.

Sophia pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and ran it through her hands like a rosary. “Portia’s not a bad girl, you understand, it’s just that I can’t—”

“Of course,” he said.

Sophia sighed heavily and only then noticed that Portia was still sitting in the truck. “Come on now,” she said, her voice heavy with forced sweetness.

Portia did not move.

“Yes, come now, Portia,” the man purred. “Come out and meet your new friends.”

At that, two girls in dark dresses emerged from the side of the house and approached the truck. They stared at her through the open window. One of them smiled. The other ducked her head so that her long yellow hair draped her face like water closing around a stone in a riverbed.

“Portia,” Sophia hissed. “Now.”

Slowly, Portia reached for the door handle, pulled it, swung the door open, and stepped into the strange new air. From one corner of the porch, a rusted, empty birdcage shuddered and creaked in the breeze.

“The girls will show you to your quarters,” said the man.

The smiling one reached into the back of the truck and retrieved Portia’s bag. “This way,” she said, and started down the path to the orchard and the bunkhouses. Portia glanced at Sophia, who waved her hand impatiently as she turned back to the dark man and began to speak low words that Portia could not hear.

The yellow-haired girl looked at Portia for a long moment, and then she whispered, “It’s harder if you put up a fight. Just come.” She put out her hand, and Portia didn’t know what else to do but put her own hand in the girl’s palm and follow her. And their hands stayed together as they walked to the dingy bunkhouse that smelled like rotten apples, as they sat on a lumpy bed with scratchy blankets, as a swarm of sad-eyed girls surrounded them.

And it wasn’t until Portia heard Sophia’s truck driving away that the girl said, “My name is Caroline.”

Family Traditions

Family recipes must be kept in your head, Aunt Sophia told Portia once. They are not for writing down.

But Portia liked to write things down. She was very fond of her own handwriting, and she liked the way everything looked when she wrote it out. When she went back to read what she’d written before, it was as if everything were her idea.

So she spent part of her modest allowance (which she awarded to herself from Aunt Sophia’s purse) on notebooks and pencils. And she wrote down Aunt Sophia’s recipes and stories she imagined, and over and over again she wrote what she could remember.

Her mother in a blue coat with a furry collar.

The soap smell on Max’s neck.

Knock-knock jokes.

Aunts in red lipstick and rose perfume, uncles in suspenders and whiskey.

It wasn’t much and also Portia wasn’t sure if she was really remembering these things or if she was simply writing what she had written before. Still. She kept writing, kept stealing dimes from Aunt Sophia for notebooks and pencils.

The notebooks were the first thing Mister took away.

Night Voices

The one inside Portia said:

“It’s cold here and everything smells like apples.”

It said, “I hope Aunt Sophia has one of her headaches right now.”

It said, “How will Papa find me?”

The ones outside, in the wind and the rustling orchard, said:

“Now you belong to us.”

They said, “No one is coming for you.

And you know it.”

Bluebeard

The Home was a giant on the hill, towering over the bunkhouses, all angles and dark dead window eyes. Mister’s resemblance to it made a certain amount of sense, because he hardly ever left it.

Mister liked having girls work for him. Long ago, when his mother was alive and still spry enough to enjoy a good party, there had been servants who were trained to run the household like a business: efficiently, quietly, and without crisis. On the day of his mother’s funeral Mister gave each of the servants an envelope with a terse letter of recommendation and a small sum of money and sent them packing. He saw no reason to employ professionals. Not when there was a population of girls so conveniently located at the bottom of the hill.

The Home, too, had been his mother’s idea. A pet project, a personal charity that would (she had hoped) endear her to the people of Brewster Falls. She had pictured herself as a guardian angel, a patron saint. In the end, she failed to obtain endorsement of the church and the entire enterprise had backfired, for she was ultimately seen as the woman who sought to populate the town with young ladies of questionable character and perhaps even loose morals. The young men in town were delighted at first, but soon they turned on her as well, after seeing that the girls who came to The Home were just like the girls they already knew, only without parents or spending money or decent clothes.

It was precisely these deficiencies that Mister preyed on when recruiting the girls for his household staff, by promising pocket change and the chance to win their way back into the hearts of the families who had sent them here. Of course, not every girl was convinced. Portia, for instance, was sure that Mister had no real desire to help any of his charges and had about as much chance of redeeming her as he did of sprouting a pair of wings and flying south for the winter.

On the other hand, Portia was very curious about a few things, such as the contents of her personal file. The girls liked to speculate about these files, carefully stored in a secret place in the big house, cradling all sorts of vital information. Parents’ names, addresses, correspondence. Dates of release. The files became invisible security blankets, something to hold at night and soothe their minds, which buzzed and hummed like machines. Some girls who had been inside the house, for work or discipline, reported seeing marked papers and such on Mister’s desk, but since none of them had ever had the courage to touch anything in his office, they could not attest to the files’ contents. Portia doubted the credibility of these girls, as she doubted nearly everything she heard. But she reasoned that
if
the files existed, and
if
she could get her hands on them, she
might
find something useful. She had always suspected that Sophia had an idea of where Max had gone, though Sophia had always denied it. If she had shared that knowledge with Mister, he would likely have put it in Portia’s file.

If there was such a thing.

And the house itself fascinated her, tugged at the same part of her mind as ghost stories and the dime novels she had stolen from the general store and hidden under her mattress at Sophia’s. (They had probably been discovered by now.) She cast Mister as Bluebeard, luring girls into his house, locking his secrets away in closets where the dark was thick. She could see the house through a knothole in the cabin wall, and she watched it at night, the frigid winter air breathing back at her, and after some time she would have sworn she saw the house pulsating like a beating heart. Savage. Relentless.

She couldn’t wait to get inside.

“What makes you think he’s even going to ask you?” Caroline asked. “You’re nothing but trouble as far as he’s concerned.”

“But he likes
you,
” said Portia, “and you like me, and if you tell him you won’t go without me . . .”

In fact, Mister had already approached Caroline several times and appealed to her, in his noxious way, to come up to the house. He had projects, he said, that involved documenting his family history and his own philosophies on matters of great importance, and he was in need of a smart girl to take dictation and assist in his research. Caroline repeated all of this to Portia, who rolled her eyes and expressed her belief that Mister’s reasons for wanting Caroline in the house had very little to do with research. Portia had often seen him watching Caroline from the door of the sewing room, through the trees in the orchard, across the pews during Sunday chapel.

“Why would I tell him that?”

Portia tapped one of Caroline’s smooth white hands. “Because you don’t want to ruin those with manual labor. Once we’re up there, I will do all the cooking and all the cleaning, and all you’ll have to do is assist him with his crazy projects. And neither one of us will ever have to pick another goddamned apple or hem another goddamned pair of pants.”