Dancing Through the Snow (3 page)

“It’s not just me, I tell you!” Enid shouted suddenly. “Natalie Snyder told me she couldn’t keep her — and they had her for three years. And there was someone before that. What do you suppose the child did to make someone abandon her?”

“Stop it, Enid.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m sure that girl did something to bring this on. It’s her own fault.”

Her fault … Her fault …

As the dark, heavy words struck Min, she froze. Her eyes stretched wide and her vision blurred. Her throat closed so she could not breathe or swallow. Unable to stir, she waited for the avalanche of hate looming above her to come thundering down.

At the same moment Jess Hart sprang up and flung the office door wide. Enid Bangs, who was standing, glaring at the caseworker, stumbled back against her chair. She let out a shriek like a train whistle and went plum-coloured to the roots of her hair.

“Not another word!” Jess Hart bellowed at her.

Min dragged a gasping breath into her starved lungs. Then she stood up and took shelter behind the doctor, who seemed to have grown taller and be about to go into battle for her. Such a thing had never happened before.

Jess Hart did not glance back at her. She was too busy raging at the dumbfounded women.

“Do you realize that you didn’t even have the door shut properly?” she blazed. “The world and his wife could have been listening while you spouted all that poisonous rubbish. Min and I have been treated to a real earful. If she were an adult, she could sue you for slander, Enid.”

Enid Bangs, looking frightened and furious at one and the same time, was edging toward the other door.

“You don’t know what it’s like —” she began to bleat.

“Oh yes I do. I was a foster child once and a foster parent too when I was first married.” The doctor’s answer startled Min. “It isn’t easy. But I’m not stopping to discuss it at this moment. Sybil, right now, this very minute, I am taking this child home with me.”

“For … supper?” Mrs. Willis asked, her voice weak with a mixture of relief and uncertainty.

Min, peering around the doctor, wished she could give Mrs. Willis some comfort, but she could not think how. She was too shaken herself.

Jessica Hart’s towering rage abated slightly as she, too, caught the tremor in her friend’s voice. She grinned at the caseworker. “No. I’m kidnapping her. And I have a feeling I might not be returning her soon, even for a fat ransom, not unless she begs me to.”

“But, Jess, there’s no need for that …” Mrs. Willis started to protest.

Enid Bangs had reached the other door. It closed behind her with a defiant slam. Min could hear her half-running down the hall. But nobody sent a glance after her.

“Save your breath, my friend. Min and I are out of here. You know I’m an experienced foster parent even if Enid doesn’t.”

“But you haven’t taken a child since —”

“Not since Laura reclaimed Toby, and Greg and I went overseas. You’re right. But mothering isn’t something a person forgets. It’s like riding a Harley Davidson. I’ll fill out whatever new forms you need, but I am not leaving Min even to your tender mercies now.”

“Jess, Enid has done well with other children. I suspected she and Min weren’t hitting it off, but had no notion —” Sybil Willis tried to delay her.

“I’m not interested in excuses. Min does not give me the creeps. Enid does. I’ve been following this child’s progress for some time and I’ve decided we are kindred spirits. I, too, was thrown away in early childhood. And you can tell Enid for me that it was not my fault, any more than it was Min’s. Little children are not responsible for the evil worked upon them by their elders. Come on, girl. I’ve got your pack and we’ll fetch the rest of your things from the front desk if Enid doesn’t forget to leave them there.”

Min tottered as Jess Hart swung around and Jess’s hand gripped her elbow and turned her to face the outer door. Before she could say a single word, she was swept across the empty waiting room into the hall leading out.

Min felt as helpless as the girl in the fairy tale who pricked her finger and fell into a frozen sleep for one hundred years. Where was Dr. Jess taking her? But she could find no voice to demand answers. Then a warm flood of gratitude washed through her and started to melt the ice’s grip. She still had no idea where they were going or why. But, in the midst of confusion and fright, she suddenly knew, for the first time in years, that she was safe.

And even if something went wrong, and it still might, she had nowhere to retreat to. She must trust her rescuer and forward march.

3

A
S THEY STRODE, SIDE BY SIDE
, through the empty building, neither of them spoke a word. Min tried to find enough spit in her mouth to moisten her dry lips, but her tongue had turned to a chunk of styrofoam. She felt a jolt of dread explode within her, doing its best to quench the joy springing up within her. It shouted that trusting people only got you bruised and battered.

Kindred spirits.
Had she really heard those words?

She doesn’t know me, Min cried deep inside herself. When she knows me, she’ll throw me away too. Everyone does. I have to stay ready.

She turned her back on the woman who had carried her off, and glared at a piece of paper taped to a bulletin board near the front door.

With Min’s bulging backpack slung over her shoulder as though it were full of feathers, Dr. Hart marched ahead, leaving Min to come to her senses and scuttle after her. She led the way to her van, still without making any encouraging little speeches the way most new people did. She opened the passenger door for Min. Automatically, Min got in and did up her seat belt. When they were driving down the snowy street, Dr. Hart broke the silence at last by letting loose a crack of laughter.

“Did you see Enid’s jaw drop?” she gasped.

Min’s head whipped around. Had Dr. Jess actually said what she thought she had heard?

“If only I’d had a camera!” the woman added, still chuckling. Then she caught sight of Min’s shocked expression. “I know, I know. I should have given you a chance to say whether or not you wanted to come with me,” Jess Hart said. “I apologize. I am apt to get carried away. Everybody who knows me will tell you.”

Min struggled to find an answer for this. No words came to help her out.

“You needn’t comment,” the doctor told her. Her voice was still unsteady with laughter. “I should be sorry, but they made me so furious! I was on the verge of punching that woman in the nose. I bet she prefers toddlers to kids your age who are old enough to see through the sugar coating. Sybil must have been desperate to have placed you with her.”

Min had turned her head away again but, at this, it swivelled back. There was a moment of stretched silence before she could recover enough to speak at last.

“She says herself she likes the smaller ones. How did you know?”

“I’m psychic. Let’s try to forget her. Min, has it all been too much of a shock? Would you like me to return you to Sybil?”

“No,” Min said instantly, wondering what she was letting herself in for. With difficulty, she added, “I wanted to come.”

“Brave girl.”

They were quiet then. The van headed down the hill and across the river. The doctor drove on through the late afternoon. Snow was still falling in lacy, lazy flakes. The oncoming evening had turned their cloudy white to a soft grey. Despite the islands of yellow light cast by the streetlamps, the dusk deepening into night was strangely eerie and Min, peering out the window, shivered. As they left the centre of town and entered the streets lined with family dwellings, she saw that Christmas lights had been switched on in most of them. They passed by others, each more splendid than the last. Min caught sight of a whole team of reindeer on one roof, pulling Santa’s sleigh. And a family of sparkling snow people on another. A tinsel-decked troll hugged one chimney and a polar bear in a Santa suit was stretched out along the ridge pole of another house. He looked nervous. Min sent him a comforting wave.

“How silly most of them are,” Dr. Hart remarked. “They haven’t much to do with the real Christmas, have they? It’s just a crass competition among neighbours with more money than sense.”

Another silence. Min knew that foster parents hated her silences. She swallowed and forced out one word. “Maybe,” she mumbled.

She did not have the nerve to say that she found the childish scenes decorating the houses cheering as they glowed above the dark street. Getting them up there had to have been risky and the people must have been pleased when they had managed it. Especially without falling off and breaking their necks.

Her stomach tightened with nervous excitement. She was certain that she had no need to be afraid of the woman who had just “abducted” her. Once more she remembered what had happened in the middle of that night she had spent in the hospital, the time she had had pneumonia. Her foster mother had thought it was just a bad cold until Min’s temperature had shot up and she had grown delirious. Mrs. Willis had been away, and her foster mother could not leave the other children, so someone she did not know had taken her there. It had been like a nightmare. Although people had spoken to her as they started the intravenous dripping fluid into her arm, they were rushed, and nobody had explained to her why she was so sick or assured her that the pain and the rattle in her chest would soon be better. She remembered lying in a high bed with sides like a crib, feeling confused and frightened and lost. When the night shift came on, a nurse had taken her temperature and given her a drink. But, once she thought Min was asleep, she had gone to check on another patient. “That child will wake up everyone if his mother doesn’t get him to stop,” Min heard her mutter as she whisked out the open door.

Left alone in the shadowy, unknown room, Min had closed her eyes but been unable to keep back the hot tears that slid out under her lids and down her cheeks. Even back then, Min had been known as a girl who never cried, and yet, despite herself, she heard herself moan softly.

That was when Dr. Jess had come and sat beside her bed in the darkness and sung to her.

She must have heard me and known I wasn’t asleep, Min thought now. But that night, she had kept her eyes shut and lain as still as she could, drinking in the gentle, healing words.

Goodnight, little girl, good night.

Sleep tight, little girl, sleep tight.

Starlight, little girl,

Shine bright, little girl,

On my little girl. Good night.

It was the only time in her life that Min Randall could remember anyone singing to her or calling her “my little girl.” Robin Randall, her first foster mother, may have done both, but that was long ago. The memory of that night in the dark hospital was still vivid, however.

She sat replaying Dr. Jess’s amazing statement that Shirl’s leaving her in that washroom all those years ago had not been her fault. Dr. Jess had sounded very sure.

Min herself had never known what to think. The question of why Shirl would first cut off her hair and then just leave her in a public washroom had lain like a dark blot in her mind ever since. The story of her being abandoned like that had always filled her with guilty shame. But, if Dr. Jess was right about it, she had nothing to be ashamed of.

Did the doctor know the whole miserable story, though? Would she, like all the others, start asking Min about what had happened?

Now, on the car radio, a reedy voice began to sing “I Wonder As I Wander.” Min leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. She felt frightened, all at once, like the child she had been that day, wandering through the Exhibition grounds.

She had trudged about the crowded buildings for what seemed, looking back, like endless years before anyone noticed her. When at last they did, things grew even more alarming.

Two women had paused to stare down at her.

“Are you lost, dear?” one asked. “Can’t you find your mother?”

Min still remembered her bright red shorts and the large purse that swung down as she leaned to ask where Min’s mother was. Min had not answered. Was she lost? She did not know.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“I’m Min,” she had said at last. Thinking back, she imagined how she must have looked with those big eyes and hardly any hair.

Like the little match girl, she thought now.

“Min who?”

She had not known what to say. Determined not to cry, she had stared down at her scuffed sneakers, the pair Mrs. Willis had saved for years and recently given back to her.

The song on the radio went on about Jesus being able to have anything he wanted because “he was the king.”

Not when he was a baby, Min thought, her mind drifting.

Snap.

Min’s eyes popped open. The doctor had switched off the radio.

“Are your thoughts worth a penny or are they private?” Dr. Hart asked.

It took Min a few seconds to dig out an answer. “I was remembering stuff,” she said.

Dr. Jess shot a glance at her and put her foot on the gas. “We’re nearly home,” she said. “Supper will help. After that scene in the office, we both need some nourishment.”

“Yeah,” Min muttered, not correcting her — Jess must have imagined she was still thinking about Enid’s leaving.

Really, Enid had only been the last in a long line of people who had left her. “Poor little love,” Robin Randall had cried, when Mrs. Willis had handed Min to her. Min had been too tired to speak.

I wouldn’t even smile, she thought.

“How could anyone have abandoned such a sweetheart?” Robin had said.

Mrs. Willis had looked into Min’s eyes and looked away.

“I cannot understand it either,” she had said. “Maybe we’ll get some answers when we trace the shoes.”

But the address written in the canvas runners Min wore had only led them to a woman who had finally remembered being given the shoes by the Salvation Army. When her son had outgrown them, she had put them out in the garbage. They were no help in discovering Min’s identity.

Despite this, Min thought those shoes had brought her luck and had been pleased when Mrs. Willis had presented them to her when she turned ten.

“They’re a tiny piece of your past,” her caseworker had said. “You have so little. They are part of your story and they brought you to me, after all.”

Min had tried to say how grateful she was but, as usual, the words stuck in her throat. She came close to hugging Mrs. Willis then, but could not do it. Sybil Willis had reached out and tugged Min’s braid gently. “It’s all right. I know how you are feeling,” she said softly. “I feel it too.”

Before she left the Bangses’ house, Min had dug the little shoes out from behind a loose board in her closet and jammed them into the bottom of the bulging backpack to go with her into the unknown.

Now Dr. Hart was the future she had been dreading. Suddenly something the woman had declared in the Children’s Aid office rang out again in Min’s memory. Dr. Hart had said something about having been a foster child like Min. Had she said “thrown away”? She couldn’t have meant it. Not really. Min had never met anyone else who had been dumped the way she had. Longing to ask her about it, Min stole a sideways glance at the woman at the wheel, and then came to her senses and went back to staring fixedly at the windshield wipers swinging back and forth, back and forth. They seemed to be talking.
“You’re … nobody … You’re … nobody!”

Min clenched her fists in her lap and blinked away a mist she refused to call tears. When she thought about it, she knew hardly anything about the woman now driving her through the snow. Where was she taking her?

“Here we are,” Dr. Jess said, pulling into a driveway next to a low stone house with dark shutters. There was a light on in the front room and, just inside the big bay window, sat a cat who appeared to be watching out for them.

As Dr. Jess turned in, she saw Min craning her neck to keep the cat in sight. “She’ll be at the back door to greet us when we get there,” Jess Hart said. “She pretends she just happens to arrive there as I come in, but she’s always watching out for me.”

As the car stopped in the garage, Min reached for the shabby backpack, but Dr. Jess had already slung it over her shoulder.

“Come on in,” she said, opening a gate and walking up a short path to the back door. “We mustn’t disappoint Maude.”

The cat was a plump calico and, as Jess had said, she was there, come to meet them, meowing a greeting. She wove a figure eight around their ankles. Reassured, Min stooped to stroke her.

“Did you call her Maude?” she asked, just above a whisper. She spoke in a voice none of her foster parents would have recognized. The fact that she spoke at all, without being asked a question first, would have astonished every one of them.

“Miss Maude Motley,” Dr. Jess said. “I leave her plenty of food when I go out, but every time I walk in the door, she tells me someone stole it all and she is famished. Yes, Miss Motley, we hear you. Yes, we know you are a fine cat. Yes, yes, a queen among felines.”

Min went down on her knees to stroke the butting head with its perky ears. As she smoothed the soft fur, the cat changed its meow into a throaty purr. The rumbling sound vibrated up Min’s arm into her body and woke an answering chord. She smiled her first real smile in days.

“My godson, Toby, found this lost kitten on the street a couple of years ago and brought her to me,” Jessica Hart said, watching the two of them. “My husband had died a few years before and I had returned to Canada from overseas. Toby told me I needed company. The truth was, he knew his mother would have taken her straight to the Humane Society. Laura does not find strays appealing. Toby calls me Jess, by the way. Why don’t you do the same?”