Songs of Willow Frost (23 page)

William’s heart leapt in his chest, hoping it was Willow—his ah-ma.

“Coming for who?” Charlotte asked.

“It’s your father,” Sunny said. “Can you believe it?”

“My father? Uncle Leo?” William blurted, bewildered. A surprising tide of anger seeped into his voice. Though truth be told, a queer part of him
was
curious, the same way a newspaper article
about a ship sinking makes one curious, or a train wreck, or a gang shooting. “Sister Briganti said he’d never find me here. Why would he …”

“Not
your
father,” Sunny said as he rested his hands on his knees, out of breath. Then he pointed to Charlotte. “Hers.”

William sat back, relieved, disappointed, but hopeful for his friend. He touched her arm as she stared at something unseen. She grimaced and stood up. He noticed that her pale skin seemed to redden and her hand trembled as she reached for her cane.

Charlotte uttered only a single word. “When?”

“In a few days. He’s coming to visit, to make arrangements to eventually take you away from here. Can you believe it?”

“I thought your dad was …”
How do I say he was a creep, a criminal?
William wasn’t sure how much Sunny knew, so he stopped short of saying the word
prison
.

“He must have got out, William,” Charlotte said. “All good things come to an end. All bad things go on forever.”

“You’re not happy about this?” Sunny asked. “This is what everyone hopes for. This is great news—you deserve it.”

Charlotte tapped her cane until she brushed Sunny’s leg. “That’s sweet of you. But you’d understand if you were a girl and you had my father.”

“But …” Sunny said. “It means you’ll get to go home.”

“It’s okay,” William said.
Home is a fairy tale, the kind where children are lost in the woods, found, cooked, and eaten
.

“You can tell Sister B that I don’t have a father,” Charlotte said. “And that I’m not going anywhere.”

A
FTER DINNER
W
ILLIAM
sat with Charlotte outside the main chapel as the boys’ choir practiced some Latin hymn he didn’t recognize. Their melodic voices filled the alcove, inspiring a sad reverence. The song had a depressive quality, like a funeral march—intended
to be celebratory, but laden with melancholy. William helped Charlotte light a candle for her mother. He lit one for his own ah-ma while he was at the altar. And he lit one for Charlotte, though he didn’t tell her that. He had such mixed feelings. He struggled to see her situation through any lens but the one that magnified his own loss, his own longing. She had been given a damaged gift, but one most at Sacred Heart would have been grateful to receive. If his mother had wanted him back—if only for an afternoon visit, he would have jumped into that quagmire with both feet. But he knew their circumstances were different. Their situations weren’t merely apples and oranges. They were oranges and some strange poisoned fruit.

“Did you tell Sister Briganti that you didn’t want to see him?” William asked.
Because we all know how compassionate that woman is. She makes cactus cozy
.

Charlotte nodded, then shrugged. “There’s nothing she can do. He’s my father. My mother is dead. He has every right. I asked about my grandmother—I practically begged to go live with her, but she doesn’t have a say in the matter. My father served time for bootlegging. But now he gets a fresh start. We should all be so lucky.”

“But did you tell her?” William asked delicately. He knew that Charlotte was terrified of her father—something terrible must have happened between them. She never spoke of it, and William had always been too afraid to ask.

“Sister B said that perfect parents don’t exist and that I was just being willful and belligerent—that sometimes children get used to the routine here and don’t want to return to the real world. She said I should be grateful to have him back in my life.”

People change
, William thought,
Willow certainly did. Maybe Charlotte’s father missed her and would make restitution somehow
. William wanted to be positive and optimistic, but if Charlotte didn’t want to have anything to do with her father, her reasons were valid enough, and he believed her.

“Sister B just told me to pray,” Charlotte said. “As if that ever helped any of us.”

William had tried. But Catholicism, with all of its pageantry, was still a mystery clad in Latin, with ceremonies he didn’t understand. Like a mynah bird, William could mimic what was expected of him, but he knew it was merely the price of admission to a strange musical.

Charlotte pulled out a long string of glass beads with a large crucifix at the end. “She gave me a new rosary. Sister B said she gives a special one to every orphan who finds a new family, or every child who is welcomed back into the home they once knew.”

William took hold of one end of the long strand. The expensive-looking chain was elaborately woven—a sturdy keepsake, meant to last a lifetime.

Charlotte sighed. “She said this would be the key to my salvation.”

William listened to the choir.

“Maybe you should join the order,” he said, trying his best to lighten the dour mood. “Become a nun. I bet they’ll let you stay then.”
Sister Charlotte
.

She didn’t laugh. But she didn’t frown either. William thought he detected a smile, if only a slight one. He watched as she tucked her long strawberry hair behind her ears. And he noticed for the first time just how pretty she was—maybe it was because she’d be leaving soon. His mother’s spotlight had made him see just how far his shadow of sadness had been cast and what that darkness obscured. He realized that Charlotte had always been there, a blind girl hoping he would finally open
his
eyes and see her as more than a friend. He watched her gentle movements, trying to imprint her image on his heart so that he’d never forget what she looked like. He tried to count every freckle. They seemed interesting since they were so uncommon in Chinatown. Most of the people there had birthmarks or moles, if anything, and these were viewed as omens—symbols of
good fortune or bad luck. If that were true, then the tan sprinkles that dappled Charlotte’s nose and cheeks represented a windfall, of one or the other.

He reached out and laced his fingers through the soft warmth of her hand.

“I’m sorry you’re leaving,” he said.

She held on tight.

“I’ll never leave you, William. I promise.”

T
HE RUMOR OF
Charlotte’s refusal spread like the plague through the barracks, breeding jealousy and dissent between the older boys and aching confusion among the little ones, who didn’t believe such a refusal was even possible.

“Who does she think she is?” Dante asked as the lights went out.

The responses were legion.

“Maybe she’s dim as well as blind.”

“I heard her father was a bootlegger …”

“She’s an addlepated pinhead—should be with her own kind anyway.”

“… I told you she was stuck-up.”

Hardly
, William thought.
She’s more accepting than anyone I know
.

“She can’t see what she’s missing,” someone said. And snickering followed.

Sunny threw a sock at William, who was trying to go to sleep. “I think she has yellow fever if you ask me,” his friend said quietly.

William ignored him, unsure of what he could, or should, share. Sacred Heart was gossipy enough without him adding more cabbage to the stew.

“I’m just kidding,” Sunny whispered. “But the two of you taking off together—it was the talk of the town. You’re lucky you’ve got me, Sunny Truthseer. I heard the girls haven’t been as understanding.
They’ve been teasing Charlotte something fierce. Going on about her being with a boy and—you know, an Oriental and all that.”

William suddenly felt terrible. He’d never considered the damage he might have done to Charlotte’s reputation. He’d never planned for any outcome beyond that afternoon at the 5th Avenue. He realized how self-centered, how preoccupied he’d been. He was still dying to run away again, to find his ah-ma before she left town. Or to muster the courage to demand more answers from Sister Briganti, but Charlotte had to come first, at least for a few days. He owed her that much.

“That’s okay. I’m sure they’re all just jealous,” Sunny said. “Who wouldn’t want to spend time on the outside, in the real world? And for a girl that walks with a cane, she’s easy on the eyeballs. I’d have done the same.”

William didn’t feel like talking. He rolled over, hoping his friend would get the hint. He waited in the dark for Sunny to run out of steam.

“I understand why she doesn’t want to see her dad.”

William rolled back over and opened his eyes. He couldn’t see his friend’s face in the pale moonlight that spilled through the high windows of the room. But he could see Sunny’s faint outline in the bunk next to his. “What are you talking about?”

“It didn’t make sense at first,” Sunny said. “But I’m in the same boat—I wouldn’t want to see my dad either. My mother dropped me off at the library and said she’d be right back. But my dad, he’s nothing but trouble—he didn’t even go that far. Some dads are like that. I don’t remember much …”

I don’t remember Leo at all. I barely remember the man my mother called Colin
.

“You never told me that,” William said.

“That’s because I never told no one.”

“What else is there to tell?”

Sunny paused, and when he spoke again William could hear the change in his friend’s voice. Sunny spoke in soft, sniffling bursts.

“My dad took a job out here in the canneries, but then ran off with some woman and we never saw him again. He never wrote. Nothing. My mom, she brought me out to Seattle and we went looking for him. But we ran out of money and no one would take us in, so we had to sleep in the street. She got an infection in her hip from living out-of-doors and couldn’t take care of me and had to say goodbye. She said I should forgive him for running away and that I’d understand these things when I got older, but I hated him—I still hate him. I hate his name too—so much that I refuse to say it, even to this day. Growing up on the reservation, I always wished I had a name like Sunny Goes Ahead or Sunny Not Afraid. So when the sisters came for me, I gave up on him and chose a tougher name, Sixkiller, hoping the other kids wouldn’t mess with me. I read the name in a book one time. It’s Cherokee, but I’m from the Crow res. I’m not from anywhere, anymore. No one around here knows the difference anyway. I’m just another prairie nigger.”

William paused to take it all in.

“I’m sorry, Sunny.”

“It’s okay, Will. You know how it is now. And Charlotte, she probably knows this better than anyone. I mean, her dad went to jail and all, but I heard he was worse than that. I heard he used to do things—kiss her while she was sleeping. How creepy is that?”

William felt sick to his stomach.

“We don’t get to choose our parents,” Sunny said. “If we did, some of us might choose never to be born at all.”

Charlotte’s Eyes

(1934)

William woke to another gloomy, drizzly morning, the sun hidden beyond an overcast sky, pale and cadaverous. He shivered as he peered through the October mists of Puget Sound. The horizon was a wet blanket of gray, without any real definition. Just fog and haze. The inverted weather system was perpetually coiled up, ready to sneeze.

When William arrived in his main classroom, someone handed him a note. He recognized Sister Briganti’s handwriting immediately. The note was actually an exhaustive list of cleaning duties to fulfill before he could return to class. Evidently he would learn the broom and the coal shovel, and study the washing board and the scrub brush, long before he’d be reconsidered as a suitable candidate for book learning.

Is this to keep me away from the other kids, or to keep me away from Charlotte?
William wondered as he found himself mopping the second floor of the main school building, sloshing soapy water about the wooden surface. He thought about his estranged father as he worked on an old, stubborn shoe-polish stain, and he remembered the startled, stricken, distant expression on his mother’s face when she’d first seen him. He debated whether she was an actress who occasionally played the role of a mother, or a mother who was
given to acting. In his memories she was a lioness, but in reality, she was meek, tamed, caged.

He was wringing dirty water from the mop when he heard excited whispers and the squeaking, rasping sounds of metal chairs on a wooden floor. He peeked into a half-empty history classroom where students had been working on extra-credit projects. They had all left their books open and their papers on their desks and rushed to the windows, crowding in closer for a better look.

“What is it?” William asked anyone who might be listening.

“Get in here and check it out for yourself,” Dante answered without turning around. “That must be him down there—the joker’s a day early.”

“Who?” William asked as he walked toward the window.

Dante looked over his shoulder and said, “Charlotte’s papa.”