Miss Santos was there that night when the female constable brought her to Rose’s big house on Island Park Drive. An eight-year-old wearing a pink nightie under a yellow polka-dot raincoat. It was four in the morning. Took three rounds of bell ringing before Miss Santos came to the door wearing a black raincoat she’d thrown over the shoulders of her long nightgown. The wind curled inside the house. The coat billowed like great black wings. Miss Santos stared at the small child on the stoop. Then at the policewoman. Not understanding at first. Then listening, narrowing her eyes, then stepping aside to let them in. She terrified Gus.
From the get-go, Yanna insisted that her new charge call her Miss Santos. And she had other rules. Gus was not to bother her with runny noses or scraped knees or tears or appeals for rides to visit her best friend, Amy. She was to make new friends in her new neighborhood or she was to learn to keep herself company. Augusta was given the periwinkle guest room, all made up with matching bed skirt and wallpaper. But none of her own things. Not her feather pillow, not her doll, Sunny, not her blue toy trunk. Nothing from her old house except a few clothes and her toothbrush. And the puppy her mother had just brought home that summer.
Gus started grade three at a new school and did her best to pretend everything was normal. Like she was happy. For a while, she thought she was. She even made a new friend named Shelly.
But she shouldn’t have bothered pretending.
The summer before grade five, voices were raised in Rose’s room. Yanna said she wasn’t hired to babysit. Threatened to quit. Rose said something about family obligations. Then Yanna said it.
Her or me.
A week later, Rose made her choice. Ten-year-old Gus was told she would be attending boarding school in St. Catharines for a “proper young lady’s education.” Rose’s words. Her feeble attempt to pretend this was for Augusta’s own good and not her own. Gus had never heard of St. Catharines. She didn’t want to be a proper young lady. She wanted her mother and pizza nights. She wanted to play I Spy in her room with her new best friend, Shelly. She wanted a home that felt like a home.
But no one asked her what she wanted.
Once Augusta left for boarding school, she thought she’d never see or hear from any of them again. Not Shelly. Not Rose. Especially not Miss Santos.
And yet here is that familiar crow voice squawking from her phone.
“Hello? Olá? You on phone? You there?”
Gus can’t speak. She manages a croak.
“Shannon, you her dodder, no?”
Gus gently closes the bathroom door. She hasn’t heard her mother’s name said out loud in over a decade.
“Yes, I’m Shannon’s,” she whispers. Hoping Lars doesn’t hear. He doesn’t like it when she’s on the phone without his say-so.
“Dis Miss Santos. Yanna Santos. Rose, she gone.”
“Gone where?”
“She pass.”
“Oh.”
Gus stares at the phone. She feels a deep pang of regret that the last tiny thread strung out into the world that connected her to her mother, however frayed, has now been severed.
“How did you get my number?”
“You leave on machine.”
Gus vaguely remembers calling Rose a few months back in a red wine funk. She and Lars had been drinking cheap bordeaux in a box. Lars got particularly nasty when he drank wine. But he was also a lightweight so his tirades never lasted long. Usually he ended up puking or passing out. This time he was out cold, and Gus found herself curled in a ball in the corner of the motel room dialing Rose’s number. Perhaps hoping her only living relative might ignite in her some courage that would nudge her toward leaving Lars. But no one picked up so she left a rambling message and her phone number. No one called her back. Until now.
“You come home, miss. You come now.” And with that Miss Santos hangs up, leaving echoes of the past reverberating in Augusta’s ear.
1
The Ballerina
GUS REMEMBERS HOW THE LIE CAUGHT IN HER MOTHER’S throat.
Back soon, Sugar Bunch. I promise.
Shannon had those worry lines on her forehead. Gus wanted to smooth away those lines with her eight-year-old hands, but there were too many words in the way. Too many laters and back soons and promises. Too many when you get olders and neverminds for her to get close enough to her mother to rub them away. Gus wasn’t strong enough to make things better. Her mother was the strong one. The brave one.
A police officer like her father. A widow. A single mother.
Sometimes Gus spied on Shannon. Listened to her muttering as she scratched notes in her notebook or read newspaper clippings or tapped the keyboard of her laptop. Gus watched her mother’s eyes dart up to the photographs and articles pinned on the corkboard above her makeshift desk. Shannon created that desk from her dead husband’s tool bench in the garage. It was her sanctuary. Her office. Where she did her secret work. Not for children’s eyes. Out of bounds.
But when Shannon was asleep, Augusta would tiptoe into her mother’s sanctuary. Gus had one rule. Once she entered that place of secrets, she never stayed longer than it took to count to twenty. She’d stare up at that corkboard and try to see what her mother saw there.
1–2–3
None of it looked like it belonged together. Bits and odd scraps.
4–5–6
A photograph of a boy with his parents.
7–8–9
A page torn from a newspaper.
10–11–12
A Polaroid of a little girl in a tutu and leotard wearing glasses.
13–14–15
A web of red lines drawn across the board from one scrap to another.
16–17–18
A spidery collage that didn’t make sense to an eight-year-old.
19–20
One time her mother was working in the garage with the door closed. Gus slowly opened the door and poked her head inside. Her mother was bent over her laptop, bathed in orange light from a lamp clipped to the workbench. Without letting her toes cross the threshold, Gus leaned in to ask her mother a question she’d been pondering for weeks. Using as small a voice as she could muster, Augusta asked who the girl with the glasses was. The ballerina in the photo. She pointed. Shannon slowly looked over at her daughter, eyes sad. Then she rose from her stool, walked toward her, and quietly closed the door. The sharp click of the knob as it settled into place pricked Augusta’s eardrums. The orange glow extinguished, she was left on the other side of the door, standing barefoot in a cold blue pool of light from the kitchen stove. A terrible loneliness washed through her chest.
She didn’t know who that ballerina was or where she lived or what her name was, but she did know one thing. The girl in the picture was more important to her mother than she was. Gus hated that ballerina and, in that moment, Gus hated her mother even more for shutting that door.
But she’s not that little girl anymore.
Augusta pulls her hands away from her face and pushes the past into the farthest recesses of her mind. She’s all grown-up and she’s sitting on the edge of a bathtub staring at a brown stain ringing the toilet bowl in front of her. She rises and looks at her reflection in the mirror. Her face is partly hidden by her long auburn hair, frizzy from tossing and turning all night. Her freckled cheeks are flushed and hollow. She looks older than her twenty years. Doesn’t recognize the weary face looking back at her. But she does glimpse the smallest of flickerings dancing deep in those green eyes and she knows what she must do.