A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [72]
Why should she remain invisible to this hired person? How dare she pretend that Annabelle was not close at hand, breathing the same air, walking up and down the same staircases? Did she not have two legs—one shorter than the other, it was true—and a nose, and hands and a heart, just like this other girl? She was determined to exist, to take up some space—whether wanted or not—in Marie’s mind, along with memories of Orphan Island, of her journey to that destination, throngs of other splendidly independent orphans, children with no fathers obsessed by nautical calculations and the distribution of timber, and no distant mothers bent under the weight of the memory of green fields too far away to matter. She would have murdered her parents at that moment had it guaranteed a nod of approval from the girl, had it guaranteed an entry into the brotherhood, the sisterhood of those fortunate enough to be orphaned.
But that moment passed and Annabelle realized that a less dramatic method of gaining the girl’s attention and approval would have to be discovered. Late afternoon found her a solitary, bundled creature engaged in frantic activity mere feet beyond the kitchen window. She lay on the ground, scissoring arms and legs, making angels in the snow deposited by a late March squall. She created snow men and women, hurled snowballs, lifted armloads of snow from the ground and flung them toward the sky, creating her own private, contained blizzard. As it grew darker the kitchen became a colourful, warmly lit stage where the girl, Marie, carried out her tasks under the instructions of Mackenzie or, when the cook left the room, on her own. During one of these latter periods Annabelle threw a snowball at the kitchen window. The girl gave absolutely no indication that she had heard the sound of the impact.
Then, just as Annabelle was thinking of re-entering the house, Marie approached the kitchen window with a saucepan of hot water in her left hand. When the glass was sufficiently clouded, she extended her free hand and with one thin finger wrote the words No I will not on the steamy surface. Infuriatingly, Marie wrote the words backwards so that Annabelle would have no trouble reading them, and even more infuriatingly, she never once looked in Annabelle’s direction.
Annabelle marched inside and tramped snow all over the house looking for her brother. When she found him in his room upstairs, she said indignantly, “That girl downstairs can read, and she can write backwards and forwards. How about that?”
“So what,” Bran said, not looking up from a novel entitled Ralph, the Train Dispatcher. He did not seem interested in the least. But he was absently pulling on his ear, a nervous habit he had developed in early childhood, and Annabelle knew, therefore, that any information concerning Marie was not something he was likely to forget.
The attic where Marie slept was not heated like the rest of the house by fireplaces and Quebec stoves, but it was made almost habitable by the fact that the two huge chimneys, through which the smoke of the half-dozen hardwood fires passed, were fully exposed and their bricks were warm. Despite this, one night, after everyone else in the house was asleep, while Annabelle ascended the steep stairs with a combination of anticipation and misgivings, her entire body was covered with goosebumps as the cold slipped under her nightgown and up her legs. It was dark as pitch on the stairs and she believed that she had not made one sound, yet when she emerged into the attic, which was partially lit by a quarter moon, she could see that Marie was sitting up in her bed.
“Get in here,” the girl said. “Get in here or you’ll freeze.”
Annabelle made her way quickly across the room, then scrambled under the covers. Marie shifted to one side to allow some space and Annabelle was aware, for the first time in her life, of the warmth that the recent presence of another body lends to flannel sheets. “Have you been to sleep yet?