Memory and Dream

“It’s only for a few months.”

“People months,” Jilly corrected. “But how long is that in cat months?”

“This is true,” Isabelle said.

V

The offices of the Newford Children’s Foundation were situated in a building not nearly so prepossessing as one might imagine from its name, taking up only the ground floor of an old Edwardian-style house in Lower Crowsea. The outside of the house bore little resemblance to the blueprint from which it had been constructed. The original architectural lines were blurred with the addition of various porches and skylights, a sunroom along one side wall, the wall on the other side half-covered in ivy. Inside, it was changed as well. The front foyer led into a waiting room that had once been a parlor, while the remaining rooms on the ground floor had been converted into offices. Only the original kitchen at the rear remained as it had been, still overlooking a postage stamp of a backyard.

Because she lived in one of the two apartments upstairs, Rolanda Hamilton could often be found in the Foundation’s offices during off-hours, catching up on her paperwork. She was an attractive woman in her mid- twenties, broadnosed and full-lipped with short corkscrew hair the color of chestnuts. Alone in the office, she’d dressed for comfort rather than style. Her white sweatshirt made her coffee-colored skin seem darker than usual while her long legs were comfortably ensconced in a pair of baggy jeans. Her Reeboks were a dark magenta—the same color as the large plastic hoop earrings she was wearing.

She’d discovered not long after beginning work here that, since the salary for an office support person wasn’t in their budget, she, like the other four counselors that the Foundation employed, had to do double duty: counseling the children they worked with during the day, and then trying to find time to bring files up to date, send out the donation mailings, balance the budget and whatever else needed to be done that they hadn’t been able to get to during the course of their working day. It was an endless task, but Rolanda had yet to bum out on the job as had so many others before her.

There was a reason why she was so dedicated to the furtherance of Kathy Mully’s ideals. Rolanda had grown up in the projects, where her mother had instilled in her a respect for hard work and doing what was right. Her younger brother had been shotgunned when his gang got into a turf war with another crew. He died en route to the hospital and never saw his twelfth birthday. Her older brother was in jail, serving seven to ten for armed robbery. Two of her cousins were also in jail. The boy next door that she’d played with before she entered her teens was serving a life sentence for murder one.

These were statistics that her mother liked to recite whenever Rolanda got into trouble herself, like the time she got sent home from fifth grade for beating up a white girl during recess.

“But Mama,” she’d wailed as her mother gave her a slap across the back of her head as soon as they returned home from the school. “She called me a stupid nigger.”

“You are a stupid nigger if you can’t do better at school than listen to some white trash mouth off”

“It’s not fair. She started it.”

“And you finished it.”

“But—”

“You listen to me, girl. There’s nothing fair about having to try twice as hard to do well and then still have ’em spit in your face, but I’ll be damned if I won’t have one child of mine do well. You hear me?

Are you going to make your mama proud, girl, or do I have to be shamed by you as well?”

The projects ground you down, and Rolanda had never understood how her mother had resisted the oppressive heartbreak of its weight upon her frail shoulders. Five-foot-one and barely a hundred pounds, Janet Hamilton was tougher and more resilient than men twice her size. She had raised three children on her own when her husband abandoned her. She’d worked two jobs and still managed to keep their house clean and regular meals on the table. She’d always had time for her children, and even when she’d lost two of them to the projects, her spirit refused to bow under the loss.

“Why you always got to try so hard?” one of Rolanda’s classmates asked her when they got their tests back one day and Rolanda’s was the only one sporting that red “A” at the top of the paper. “You that afraid of the back of your mama’s hand?”

Rolanda had shaken her head in response. No, she’d thought. I’m afraid Mama won’t be proud of me anymore. But the words remained unspoken. Rolanda had long since learned how to make do in a world where her peers reviled her either for being black or for acting white, depending on the color of their own skin. She simply kept to herself and did the best she could. She didn’t fight with the other kids anymore. She didn’t run with the gangs. Her mother had taught her respect for the rules, both legal and societal, and Rolanda made a point of staying within their parameters, even when all she wanted to do was strike back at the unfairness that surrounded her every day of her life, even after the injustice of her mother’s death, in a drive-by shooting. She fought for change, but she fought from within what she wanted to change, rather than chipping away at it from the outside.

Rolanda had been bent over her computer for over an hour when she suddenly realized that she was no longer alone in the Newford Children’s Foundation office. Lifting her head, she looked across the waiting room to find a red-haired girl standing in front of Isabelle Copley’s painting The Wild Girl, and for a long moment all she could do was regard the stranger with mild confusion. It wasn’t that the girl was barefoot and wore only jeans and a thin flannel shirt—clothing not at all suitable for late-September weather; it was that she seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Rolanda hadn’t heard the front door open, hadn’t heard the girl enter. One moment she’d been alone at her desk and the waiting room was empty, in the next the girl was here, standing barefoot on the carpet and looking up at the painting. She bore, Rolanda realized, an uncanny resemblance to the subject of the painting.

“She could be your twin,” Rolanda said.

The girl turned with a smile. “Do you think so?”

“Definitely.”

Rolanda had thought the girl was in her early teens, but now she was no longer so sure, though she couldn’t pinpoint what had made her change her mind. Perhaps it was the momentary trace of a very adult mockery that she’d seen in the girl’s smile. Or perhaps it was the worldly look in her eyes. The latter, in itself, wasn’t so unusual. The children who came to the NCF’s offices invariably had either one of two looks about them: a worldliness that was out of keeping with their tender years, or fear. Rolanda hated to see either. Both spoke of lost childhoods.

“It’s awfully cold to be walking around in bare feet,” she said.

The girl looked down and wriggled her toes on the carpet. “I suppose it is.”

“What’s your name?”

“Cosette.”

Of course, Rolanda thought. They never had last names. Not at first.

“I think we might have some socks and shoes that would fit you,” she said. “A jacket, too, if you’d like one. Or a sweater.”

“That would be nice.”

Rolanda stood up from behind her desk. “Let’s go see what we can find.”

The girl dutifully fell in step behind her as Rolanda led the way down the central hall toward Shauna Daly’s office. Because it was the largest room in the building, Shauna had to share her space with much of the clothing and toys that were donated to the Foundation. Still more was kept in boxes in the basement, replenished whenever the supply in Shauna’s office ran low.

“Take whatever you like,” Rolanda said.

Cosette seemed delighted by the jumble of clothing that took up one side of the office. Laid out on a long worktable, or spilling out of various boxes, were any number of jeans and skirts, jackets, sweaters, socks and underwear. Shoes were lined up under the table, ranging from tiny footwear suitable for infants to boots and shoes to fit teenagers.

“Do you have a place to stay, Cosette?” Rolanda asked as the girl felt the texture of various jackets and sweaters.

“Oh sure. I sort of have a boyfriend and I’m going to be staying with him.”

Oh-oh, Rolanda thought. She’d didn’t like the sound of that. A “boyfriend.” Who let her wander around on the streets barefoot and without a jacket.