Nothing has changed. My mom’s dish of tangled jewelry is still on her dresser, and her glass perfume bottles are still lined up. I can see her dresses are still hanging in the closet, like little ghosts of her missing her body, and her shoes are still lined up beneath them. Seeing her clothes and shoes sends a jolt through me. Why wouldn’t she have taken them with her on her trip around the world? Only a dead woman would not need her clothes or shoes, and suddenly my mind begins to wrap around other possibilities: my dad and Miss Joe buying postcards, faking my mother’s handwriting, mailing them just so I can open them and believe she really is still alive.
Heart pounding, I walk farther into the bedroom. If she’s still alive, there must be proof somewhere—and if she isn’t dead, then she has to be living somewhere too, somewhere I can find her. She would never turn me away. She would wrap her arms around me and apologize for leaving, and whatever reason she had—it wouldn’t matter, because I’d be with her again.
I open the closest drawer, then open the next and the next, and throw open boxes piled up in the closet, and tear through jeans and folded shirts, looking for paper that has my mother’s name on something, anything—when the front door slams open and shut. I hear heavy footsteps.
“Caroline,” my father calls out, “are you still here? I forgot to leave money for the ferry.”
I’m too afraid to move, so when he stops in his doorway, my dad looks down at me the way a cat might look at a mouse that has begun to eat from the kitty dish. When this was my mother’s room as well, I was allowed inside at any time—but when it became only my father’s room, I knew that I wasn’t welcome. “Caroline,” he says quietly, “what’re you doing?”
I swallow and stand from where I’d been kneeling on the hard floor.
“Caroline,” he says again, “what are you doing?” Except he says a rude word here too, and while my dad makes me so angry I can cry, that’s one thing he’s never done. He’s never cursed at me.
I take a breath. I can’t tell him the truth, because he can’t know I’m still looking for my mother. A lie tumbles out of my mouth instead. “I was looking for money,” I tell him, “to take Mister Lochana’s speedboat.”
Understanding crosses my dad’s eyes, but a moment later, suspicion strays across it too. If he doesn’t believe me, though, he doesn’t say anything about it. “Well, then,” he says, “I have the money here. Come on, come on.”
I follow him out the door, and he snaps it shut firmly behind me.
Miss Joe invites me to eat lunch with her inside her office, but I will never sit with a woman who wants me to be content with staying a half orphan, and besides that, I also hate the idea of Kalinda or Anise or Marie Antoinette seeing me eating in her office, because truth be told, I can’t think of a single thing more pathetic than someone so lonely that they must be invited to eat with their principal, and while I really am the loneliest girl at the school, I also have my pride.
Kalinda Francis sits with Anise and Marie Antoinette every day for one week, and for one week every day I sit in the corner and watch as everyone gathers around the table, peasants begging for scraps from the queens. Except now, it’s not clear who the queen is anymore. Is it Anise, sitting tall like always, yelling at anyone who gets too close? No, I think it’s obvious to everyone that it’s now Kalinda, who never laughs loud like the others around her but always has a special smile for everyone—a smile made and catered for each different person, the way fingerprints are different for all of us. For Anise, it’s a smile that barely turns up the corners of her lips so it’s more like a blank stare. For Marie Antoinette, it’s a big smile that shows all her white teeth. For me, she gives a closemouthed secretive smile, like she means for me to find her one day after school and ask her what it is she wants to tell me. Maybe she does. She looks up at me and smiles, then looks away again—but something catches her eye.
I turn my head to see what she’s looking at—and there, in the corner of the cafeteria, stands a white woman in her nightgown, looking at Kalinda. She’s gone before my gaze can even settle on her, and I would think it was just my mind playing tricks—but when I turn to look at Kalinda, she’s watching me again—squinting her eyes, confused, but still smiling.
I start to make eye contact with her everywhere—in the halls, in class whenever she turns around and feels my eyes on her, even through the crowds of curly heads in the cafeteria. She never seems upset to catch me staring. She only ever has the same secretive smile. And now there’s a question there, a question she has for me. It’s
