We glance left and right before crossing Beacon Street, but without much interest: Boston pedestrians walk protected by the confidence that motorists would rather stop than face the lawsuit if they killed you. Once across the two lanes of traffic, we are directly on the Common. It is no surprise I considered it my front yard when I was growing up and no surprise that we have no outdoor area to our home. Why would you need one with so many empty acres right in front of you, kindly maintained by the city? My aunts have beautiful window boxes'another Beacon Hill necessity'but that is their only concession to nature. And they don't even take care of them, hiring out their care to gardeners. 'Our kind does not garden,'my aunts always say, ever the proper Bostonians.
Kelsey and I walk through the Common to the T station. It's windy, as usual, and Kelsey's hair is whipping in front of her face.
She sighs, pushing hair out of her mouth. 'I should have thought to bring an elastic.'
'Oh,'I say and pull a rubber band out of my pocket and hand it to her.
'How clean is it?'she asks dubiously.
'I found it in with my aunts'yarn the other day,'I assure her.
'I don't know what I would do without you,'remarks Kelsey. 'It's like having my own personal genie. If I didn't have you, I'd have to, like, remember things on my own.'
I don't bother to say anything. I can't help the habit I have
of pocketing random things, and lots of times it comes in handy, like now.
Kelsey takes the rubber band and pulls her blond hair briskly back into a ponytail.
I look around for Ben, but I don't see him. I almost never see Ben when I'm not alone. Sometimes I wonder if he hides from me. Sometimes I wonder if he's a figment of my imagination. I've never told anyone about Ben, not even Kelsey. It's weird. For all I consider Kelsey my best friend, there's so much about my life I feel I can't tell her'can't tell anyone. My antiquated aunts in their time-frozen home seem too rarefied to be discussed with Kelsey, who exists for me in such a normal world. These are the worlds I straddle'home and high school'and it's hard for me to get the two to intersect. Football games and study hall and prom'I can't fit them into the other pieces of my life. And Ben exists in still another world, a world all his own for me, neither school nor home but a special slice of life. I could tell Kelsey about him, but somehow I feel like he would be less mine then. Which is both silly and selfish, but I can't help it. I have never told Kelsey about Ben, and I don't mention him now.
We get to the Park Street subway station. The T worker keeping guard at the turnstile frowns at us, so I make sure to make a big show of swiping my card. The T is always freaking out about non-paying riders. Sometimes they're so strident, you'd think they were fighting a war or something.
'And they'll just let you look up information about your
mother?'Kelsey asks me as we head toward the Red Line platform. The Red Line will take us into Dorchester, where the Registry of Vital Records is, the object of our mission today. I am determined to learn everything I can about my mother. I've asked Kelsey along because I don't want to be alone, and Kelsey is always game for an outing.
Someone steps in front of me, and I have to concentrate on darting around them. This is always happening at Park Street. There are always too many tourists around, all of them lost, all of them wandering around so confusingly aimlessly that they seem to pop up out of nowhere. Walking through Park Street station requires as much concentration as driving a car.
'Well,'I reply, having completed my darting maneuver. 'They're public records. Why shouldn't I be allowed to see them?'
'I don't know,'she says. 'If it was this easy, why didn't you ever do it before?'
Frankly, sometimes even I can barely understand my motives for the things I do. This used to frighten my aunts. I learned to cover whenever I found myself doing something inexplicable, like dancing to nonexistent music in my room or trying to read the language of dust motes. This is probably why I haven't mentioned to them my latest determination to find my mother. Well, that and the fact that my aunts obviously didn't like my mother.
To Kelsey I say, 'I don't know. I'm seventeen now. I guess it's time.'
'Seventeen?'exclaims Kelsey in delight. 'Did you have a birthday? You should have told me! We could have celebrated!'
I take the Ben route and shrug.
Kelsey is silent a moment before saying, 'But'why seventeen? What's the big deal about seventeen? Sixteen I could see, or eighteen. But seventeen's just'seventeen. Nothing big, nothing exciting. Just an in-between age.'
I don't know what to say to that. Seventeen seems like a huge deal to me.
The Red Line gets stalled underground for a bit, which is not at all an unusual occurrence, but we eventually reach Dorchester. Dorchester is a decidedly different part of Boston than where I live. Everything about Boston can seem vaguely faded'it is a very old city by American standards'but Beacon Hill is so faded that it has come full circle to being fashionable again. There was a time period when modernizing Bostonians wanted to tear down Beacon Hill, all the lovely old homes with their lavender windowpanes, in favor of a new residential area with all the conveniences, like places for automobiles and electrical systems that weren't fire hazards. The less-modernizing Bostonians, Bostonians like my aunts, resisted the entire idea, and Beacon Hill survived its shabbiest era more or less intact, the same as it had been for ages, only the barest concessions to the passage of time, to emerge today as the type of place that gets thrown onto postcards.
Dorchester is at the point in time when modernizing
Bostonians wish to tear it down and start from scratch, and Dorchester doesn't have proper Bostonian inhabitants to insist upon its unchanging preservation, so some of that has happened. In among the older, rundown buildings are gleaming new ones, like the Registry of Vital Records. I don't like new buildings in Boston; they make you wince, like hearing a sour note in a song. The streets are also wide enough that cars easily fit down them, and you could be anywhere in America with streets like that. I don't feel at home here. I may be only seventeen'already seventeen?'but I'm most at home in the places where seventeen-year-olds were at home, like, two centuries ago.
The accents are at least comfortingly Boston, as proven by the woman at the front desk.
'I'm looking for information about my mother,'I tell her, pushing across my identification.
The woman smiles at me kindly. 'Okay. And what was her name?'
'Faye Blaxton,'I say and spell the name for her. I know that much from my birth certificate.
The woman types into her computer. Then she looks back at me. 'Was she born in Massachusetts?'she asks me.
'I don't know,'I admit. 'Maybe not.'
The woman does some more typing'and then frowns a bit. 'I can't find anyone by that name. At least, not in the right time period to be your mother. You're sure it's the correct name? And the correct spelling?'
I'm sure. But, just in case, I have her look up my birth certificate, and there is my mother's name on it, plain as day. Faye Blaxton.
'It could be a glitch in the system,'says the nice woman at the desk. 'A typo maybe. Or something.'
'Yeah,'I agree glumly. I don't want to sound glum. I want to sound like it's no big deal that I can't find my mother. I've done okay without her so far, haven't I? But I'd thought, well, that it'd be simple. Oh, Faye Blaxton, she lives out in Malden. And then, maybe, I would know that she'd never bothered to check in on her daughter, but I would also know that she existed.
'It's a dead end, maybe,'says Kelsey when we leave, 'but there are other avenues to explore!'Kelsey is all big-picture enthusiasm, which I know is for my benefit. 'What do you know about your mother?'
One day my father walked into his Back Bay apartment to find a blond woman asleep on his couch. I can't say that. 'Not much,'I say. And then, truthfully, after a pause, 'My aunts say she was flighty.'I know my aunts mean it as a negative, but when I was little, I always had the impression that it meant my mother could fly, that she had deposited me on that Back Bay doorstep and then soared into the never- ending sky.
'Your aunts knew her, then,'says Kelsey.
'No,'I reply. 'Not really. Well, I don't know, actually. I think to them she's just a woman who left her baby on a doorstep.'
'Wait, she really did that?'Kelsey asks.
I look at her in confusion because I've told her at least this much about myself, my family, my past. 'Yeah.'
'I thought you meant that figuratively. Like, that you just meant your mom gave you up or something. She literally left you on a doorstep?'
I nod. With a note. A note etched into a snowflake, sighed into a gust of wind, rustled through the trees of autumn, rippled over a summer pond.
'Well,'says Kelsey. And then she doesn't say anything else.
We get on the T. This time there are no delays, but I feel like people watch me the whole way, like it must be common knowledge, written all over me: I am the girl who has no mother.
You're supposed to go to Salem in October. At least, that's what Kelsey tells me. I go though, because not going doesn't seem like an option'one of those things I do without really knowing why. I don't particularly want to go to Salem, but I feel like I need to go.
Salem is crowded despite the fact that it's a cold and misty day. The sidewalks are so jam-packed you can't walk without stepping on someone's broomstick. I walk along, picking up dropped coins because you never know when they might come in handy. Mike and Jake are throwing pieces of cotton candy at each other. It's stupid, because you can't really effectively throw cotton candy and because it's causing chaos'people are glaring at us'and I wonder if Mike thinks this is cool and I'm going to be thoroughly smitten with him now. I try to imagine Ben ever throwing cotton candy around. I can't. It makes me wish Ben were there, but it's the sort of day Ben avoids like the plague, when he's dressed in at least one layer more than any normal person would wear and huddles under the meager shelter of the Park Street subway station entrance. I admit I kind of like weather like this. I've only started to dislike it because it makes Ben so miserable.
I look at Kelsey. 'I've had enough,'I tell her.
She looks at her watch. 'The next ferry isn't until''
'I'm going to go in here,'I say. It's one of the plethora of witch museums littered all over the town, an old house, well tended, with a silhouette of a stylized witch in the fanlight over the door. There is a pot of bright bronze chrysanthemums in front of the door, but someone's knocked it over.
''The Salem Which Museum,''reads Kelsey from the dripping black letters on the sign swinging off the house. 'They didn't even spell witch correctly.'
I'd noticed, but the Salem Which Museum has the great advantage of, well, being only two steps away from me and so conveniently easy to disappear into. 'It's fine. It'll be something for me to do until they get tired of''I look at Mike and Jake. 'Throwing things,'I finish, because they've now moved on to throwing popcorn at each other. At least that works a little better than the cotton candy had. I decide not to think about where they'd gotten the popcorn.
'Are you sure?'Kelsey asks.
I nod. Now that I've seized on the idea, I kind of really want to explore this misnamed museum.
'I think I'll stick with them,'says Kelsey, blushing. The reason for this blush is clear: Kelsey likes Jake. She thinks I haven't noticed this. It's silly because Kelsey has liked Jake for a while now. Maybe that's why Mike thinks I should like him. Maybe he thinks we should all just couple up.
'Okay,'I agree amiably. 'I'll hang out here and meet you
guys at the ferry.'I reach for the door then pause, my hand on the doorknob, and look back at her. 'Don't let Mike come in after me.'
'You got it,'says Kelsey, and then she hurries to catch up with Mike and Jake, who have tired of the popcorn throwing and are looking around for the next thing they can throw. Before they find it'or can spot me'I duck into the museum.
I'm in a tiny room with tiny windows and a short ceiling, typical for a house this age. The house is at least three centuries old, and I feel at home in it immediately. The light is murky, but that's because there really is no light today, more of a non-light. There's an open shoebox on an old wooden table right next to me, and there's an index card taped to it with 'Donations Appreciated'written on it in the kind of proper Bostonian cursive that my aunts use. Except that the final flourish is a smiley face, and I think my aunts would die before using a smiley face. There is a single dollar bill in the shoebox and several dusty coins. The coins don't even look American. Next to the table is a softly ticking grandfather clock. As I walk in, it's just finishing up chiming nine o'clock. Not the right time. Grandfather clocks never tell the right time in my experience. My aunts'is the same way.
'Oh!'exclaims a voice to my right. The floor creaks in that way old wooden floors do, and I look up, startled. A man is bustling into the room from a doorway on the other side. He's dressed in gray corduroys and a bright red cable- knit sweater, and he's possibly in his early fifties, between my
father and aunts in age, I'd estimate. He has glasses and graying brown hair that's sticking up a little, and he makes me think of professors and naps and my father, all at once. I have that feeling I get sometimes, of odd familiarity, instinctive comfort, being in this museum with this man. It's almost like d'j'vu, although surely I've never been here before, never met this man before. 'I'm Will,'he says. 'Welcome to the Salem Which Museum?'
He says it like it's a question, like he's not sure whether or not I am, in fact, welcome there. 'Thanks,'I say awkwardly, and then, because he looks so thrilled to have a visitor and because I feel bad, I dig my collected coins from the day out of the pocket of my jeans and drop them in the shoebox.
Will absolutely beams. Then he says, 'What would you like to hear about?'