Searching for Yesterday (2 page)

That accomplished, she turned to me with a warm smile. “She'll be right down,” she said cheerfully. “You must be a classmate of Annie's, are you?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Oh, never you mind that “ma'am' business! Makes me feel old. You just call me Pearl.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering if I should have added, “Pearl.” It didn't quite seem called for. I smiled instead,
feeling awkward and wishing Annie would hurry up and come downstairs.

“So, Lucas tells me your name is Shelby.”

“Yes, m... uh, yes, it is. Shelby Belgarden.”

“You're not Darlene Belgarden's daughter, are you?” Pearl peered more closely, as if the answer was on my forehead. It strikes me as odd when someone says you're
not
such-and-such a person. Makes it feel kind of strange to say yes you are, like you're contradicting them or something.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“Well, small world!” Pearl said. “I knew your mother in high school. Only, I was Pearl Somerville back then.”

I smiled politely.
Where
was Annie?

And then I saw her. She'd made her way to the top of the stairs and was looking down, but she made no move to actually descend the steps.

“Hi, Annie!” I called. I gave a little wave.

“Shelby.” Her shoulders sagged ever so slightly. Made me feel enormously welcome. “What do you want?”

“I, uh ...”

“Annie, honey, come on down here. You can't expect your friend to shout back and forth, now, can you?”

Annie obeyed, but she dragged her feet and looked so glum that I felt like telling her not to put herself out, I'd be happy to leave her to her misery.

Luckily, with her foster parents standing there, I couldn't do that, so I just waited, feeling foolish, almost
wishing I hadn't bothered to go there and wondering how soon I could politely make my escape.

“It's really nice to have met you, Shelby,” Pearl Norton said. “You come back again anytime.”

Then she and her husband faded off down the hall and into another room as Annie reached the bottom step.

“Uh, did you want something?” Annie said. There was no spark in her eyes and her face looked sad and empty. I was instantly reminded of why I'd come, and I resolved to do the best I could to be a friend to her.

“I was just wondering if you were doing anything this afternoon.”

“Not really.”

“Great!” I said, forcing a smile onto my face. “Maybe we can hang out then, since you're not busy.”

“You mean, here?”

I didn't, of course. I wasn't in the habit of showing up at someone's door and inviting myself in. But Annie's face told me that trying to persuade her to go somewhere else wasn't likely to be an easy task.

“Wherever you like,” I told her. “Here, or my place ...”

“My room's kind of messy,” she said, but I thought she looked just a little bit pleased.

“Mine too,” I said. “It's pretty well
always
messy, except when my mom gets on my case.”

“Yeah, Pearl does that sometimes too.” A faint smile.
“You can tell that she can't take it anymore when she asks if you need a shovel to clean up.”

“My mom's not nearly that subtle,” I said, which got another smile from her. “She yells and uses words like barn and pigpen and goes on about how she
can't believe
any
young lady
would let her room get into such a state. And on and on. I think it's probably PMS.”

“Well, come on upstairs then,” Annie said. “Judging from that, it sounds like my room is probably in better shape than yours.”

“No doubt.” I followed her up the stairs feeling really good. After the initial resistance, it looked as though Annie had warmed to the idea of a friend visiting.

As we made our way into her room (which, while a bit untidy, wasn't nearly as messy as mine) I wondered if we'd find anything to talk about.

Turns out that was the least of my worries.

The first ten or fifteen minutes were a bit awkward. It felt like Annie was responding to everything I said with as few words as possible, though I don't think it was deliberate. It didn't take long until I was feeling the strain of trying to keep a conversation going pretty much on my own.

Things took a turn when I asked her how long she'd been living with the Norton family.

“Almost three years,” she said. “It's pretty much the best foster home I've been in.”

“How long will you be here?”

“Until they decide they don't want me anymore.” She delivered this comment as though it had very little to do with her.

“What do you mean?”

“I figure at some point it will end like every other place I've been. I'll come home one day and my social
worker will be sitting on the couch and my suitcases will be packed beside her on the floor. It will be obvious that it's already been worked out. I used to wonder why no one ever said anything to me until it got to that point. Judy — my worker, told me once that it was because people are worried if foster kids know they're going to be leaving they might wreck things or steal stuff or whatever.

“I don't think that's really it, though. I think it's just easier to get rid of you like that than it would be to tell you you're going and then have to face you every day.”

“How do they explain it to you, when that happens?”

“The foster parents I've had would say something like, “We're sure you've noticed that things haven't been going very well lately,' or “We feel we're just not able to give you what you need,' and then they'd tell me I'm being moved.”

“That's
horrible
,” I said.

“I'm used to it,” Annie said with a shrug. “I try not to get attached, no matter how nice the people are. But I really hate it when I go somewhere where there's a cat or dog. It's hard to leave them behind.

“The Nortons have a cat,” she added. “Believe it or not, his name is Pepo the Magnificent. He's big and orange and kind of goofy. The Nortons' kid, Keenan, taught Pepo to flush the toilet, and now you have to keep the bathroom door shut or Pepo is in there, flushing away like a madman. I'll really miss him when I get sent packing.”

“Do you
really
think the Nortons will ask to have you moved?”

“Probably. I don't know. I've been here longer than anywhere else, and the twins have been here since they were six, so you never know. But I'm not counting on it. I could go any time. Or my mom could come for me.”

She added the last part quickly, throwing it in like a detail that isn't terribly important but that has to be mentioned anyway.

“Where's your mom now?” As soon as the question was out, I wished I could pull it back. Not that I wasn't curious, but what if Annie's mother was in jail, or a mental hospital or something?

“I don't know.”

“You don't
know
?”

“Nuh uh. She took off with her boyfriend, Lenny Herbert, when I was seven. Haven't seen her since.”

I found myself unable to speak. I mean, what do you say to someone who's just told you her mom left her and never came back? But Annie was ready to talk, with or without prompting.

“She left a note saying she'd be back for me as soon as they were settled.” She let out a short, humourless laugh. “Seems that unpacking a couple of suitcases is a bigger job for her than it would be for most people. It's been over eight years now.”

“She left you a
note
?”

“Uh huh. I guess it's not easy to look your kid in the eye and say you're taking off.”

“Do you remember what the note said?”

“Are you kidding? I know it by heart. In fact, I still have it. You want to see?”

Of course I did! A few seconds later, she'd pulled a worn piece of paper from her jewellery box and I was reading it.

Dear Annie,

Me and Lenny are going to the city to make a better life for ourselves. I'll send for you soon as we get a new place and get settled. Go to your grandma's house and tell her you will be staying with her for now.

Love,
Mom

What a shock it must have been for Annie to find that note. “Where were you when she left?”

“At school. I was in grade three, and I remember I struggled to read the note. I was sure I'd gotten it wrong, that it couldn't mean what it seemed to. But it did.”

“So you went to your grandmother's place like the note told you to?”

“Yeah. Back then she lived just around the corner from us. Now she's in a nursing home. Alzheimer's. Anyway, I went to her place and she read the note and then we both cried and cried for the longest time.

“We walked back to my house and went in and looked around, in case my mom had changed her mind. But her suitcases and clothes were gone, all right. So, over the next week we packed up my stuff and the few things that were still there and I started waiting for her to come and get me.”

“Where did you live then? Before your mother left?”

“On Pendle Road, in an old place a couple of houses down from the car wash. The one with the huge willow tree in the front yard. Know where I mean?”

“I think so.” I could picture it easily — a sagging old two-storey house that stood out from the more modern homes in that area. “Does the house have purple shutters?”

“That's the place,” Annie said. She rolled her eyes while her mouth formed what could have been either a sad smile or a grimace. “They were purple when we lived there, too. You'd think someone would have painted them by now.”

I couldn't help thinking that a better solution would involve a bulldozer. Of course, I didn't say that to Annie, just in case she had some kind of attachment to the place.

“Anyway, I don't think anyone lives there anymore,” she was saying.

“Is it boarded up?”

“No, but it has a still, empty look.” Her eyes had drifted, past the walls of her room, off to a place where she'd been a small child who still had a mother.

I wondered how often Annie went by her old house. It was obvious that she was thinking about the times she'd spent there with her mother, but I had no way of knowing if those memories were happy or not. I didn't seem likely that a mother who could take off and leave her kid and never look back would have been a great parent even when she was still around.

“You'd think she could have dropped a postcard or made a quick call or done something, even one time in all those years,” she said, confirming my suspicion that her thoughts had shifted from the house to her mother.

“Maybe something happened that she didn't want you to know about,” I said. It sounded pretty lame.

“Or maybe she was glad to get rid of me.”

There was such hurt and bitterness in her voice that I didn't even try to come up with anything reassuring. It would have sounded absurd anyway. What her mother had done was inexcusable.

“I just wish I knew, for sure, though. I mean, if I could find her, maybe she could explain it to me in some way that makes sense. It's really hard for me to accept that she just didn't care enough about me to come back.
If I could talk to her, even one time, I think I'd feel better than I do always wondering.

“See, it's not like she was a terrible mother before she left. She might have done some things wrong, but she read me stories and made me cookies and if I heard a noise at night she'd lie down with me until I fell back to sleep.”

“Have you ever tried to find her?”

I almost felt foolish asking that. It seemed impossible that she wouldn't have done whatever she could to locate her mom. So it was a shock when she shook her head “no” and stared at the floor.

“I guess part of me was scared to,” she said after a moment of silence. “If I found her and she admitted she didn't want a little kid in the way, that having a good time was more important than I was, then that would be it. If you know what I mean.”

I did, to some extent. It's almost impossible to really know how another person feels. I did think that, in Annie's position, I too would want to keep hoping and praying that somehow there'd be a happy ending.

Thinking about this, I almost missed what she said next, especially since she said it so quietly.

“But then Lenny came back.”

“
Lenny came back
?”

Annie's announcement had so surprised me that I found my mouth hanging open. (Trust me, this does not make a person look particularly sharp.)

“Uh, huh.”

“I take it that your mother wasn't with him?”

Annie swallowed, blinked, and took a deep breath before saying, “No. She wasn't.”

“But maybe he knows where she is.”

No answer. I could see that it had become difficult for her to keep talking about it, but I just couldn't make myself stop. I tried a slightly different approach.

“Have you talked to Lenny?”

“Once, for a few minutes.” Another deep breath, and then her chin came up and she looked me right in the eye. I could see her pulling herself together and when she spoke again her voice was a little stronger. “I didn't even
know he was around until I saw him coming out of the rink one day a few months ago. At first I wasn't even sure it was Lenny — he'd lost most of his hair and he didn't look as tall as I remembered. But it was him, all right.”

“So, what happened?”

“I called out to him and he turned and looked at me. He had no idea who I was until I told him. I asked him right out where my mother was, and he told me that they broke up not long after they moved away and he'd lost track of her.”

“Lost track of her,” I echoed. “So he must have known where she was for a while. If we talk to him again, we can find out where she was the last time he was in touch with her. Maybe we can pick up the trail.”