A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [15]
I couldn’t understand how one day we had servants and cars and pantries bulging with food; and the next, our Los Angeles house was gone, and so was our apartment overlooking Central Park. And so was my father. But it was all gone, as if sunlight had burned it up. As if we had awakened from a long and beautiful dream.
Now we had less than nothing, and I was hungry for everything I used to have, for my future, for my life. We tried everything, but we simply had no money.
We began to starve. We didn’t even know how to buy food; and I think the greengrocer and the butcher cheated us, because they thought we were still rich. We didn’t know how to haggle or bargain. We’d had people to do all that.
And so, my mother took me to the orphanage, where they had people.
I was only fourteen but as we stood before the door, I felt as tired as the woman who had dragged herself down the palm-lined avenues of our exclusive neighborhood up in the hills. We had seen her many times since the crash. She was once quite beautiful, but her desperation stole her beauty from her day by day. Wrinkling and aging, she sold apples on some days, pencils on others; and all her jewelry after the apples and pencils got no takers. I didn’t know who she was, but the sight of her somehow pleased my mother. She would laugh rather crazily, watching the woman from the window of the home that soon would be gone.
Once, as the woman stumbled along the street, my mother turned to me and said, “You can never trust other women, Bess. Remember that. They will want what you have. Your husband. Your home.”
Then she stared at the woman with pure hatred on her face.
I called her Our Lady of the Vampires, because vampires had killed my father, and ruined us, and I sensed that once upon a time, she had been a threat.
“You won’t be hungry,” my mother whispered, her voice breaking, as we waited at the door of the orphanage.
As the door to Our Lady of the Angels Home for Girls creaked open, the same dried-out woman glowered down at me, or so it seemed. But this woman was different—older, thinner, and dressed in the black and white habit of a nun.
By the watery light of a ceiling lamp surrounded by the motionless blades of a fan, the withered old woman glared at the two of us as if she hated us. I began to panic, and I grabbed onto my mother with both hands.
“Please, no,” I begged. “Mother, don’t leave me here.”
My mother burst into tears, and I did, too. She clung to me, and ground out in agony, “How could they do this to us? How could he do this?” and I hugged her so tightly I thought her pencil-like spine would crack.
My stomach growled.
“Come now,” said the nun, grabbing my forearm. “Stop that. This is difficult enough for your mother without your dramatics.”
As we entered, I heard more sobbing.
And when my mother left, still more.
A girl named Annabelle had been found dead in her bed the morning of the day that I went to live at Our Lady of the Angels. I could still hear the wailing and sobs as the ancient nun, whose name was Mother Mary Patrick, directed me to lug my beautiful crocodile hide suitcase down a labyrinth of passages to my dormitory room.
“Whatever is in that, you won’t be needing it here,” Mother Mary Patrick said, as I set it down and wiped my brow. Then she handed me a uniform—baggy blue dress, white pinafore—that looked like something out of a Victorian novel. My suitcase contained everything I owned in this world—several smart outfits including my lovely silk pajamas; my silver brush and mirror; my fox stole; and my bride doll, Angelique. Draper, our former driver (now let go) had tried to persuade my mother to sell all my clothes and trinkets, but she had refused. Now I wondered if I was about to lose them anyway.
“Here’s number four, your bed,” she said, still holding my suitcase.
I stared in disbelief at the metal cot