Far From Home by Nellie P. Strowbridge Page A

her. Besides, all the water must be drained out of her. She hadn’t had a drink since lunch. She held herself tight as she lay in bed, feeling mortified that the other girls knew she had wet her bed when she was on the lower floor.
    That night she dreamed of a pretty young woman in a white gown, her hair braided around her head. She floated above a wild sea with her hands outstretched. Clarissa reached her hands as far as she could, even her weak left one, hoping to have her small hands clasped in the hands of the woman she knew must be her mother. She strained and strained, but her fingertips could not reach her mother’s. Tears filled the woman’s eyes and spilled down a face that stayed as still as if it were carved out of wood, like the face of the statue of the Blessed Madonna. The tears dripped into the sea and mingled with it. “You have beautiful hands, Mommy,” Clarissa said. But it was as if she had not spoken. Her mother did not answer. Then she drifted away into a black fog.
    In the morning when Clarissa woke up, she fancied she could see herself being lifted into a large boat while her mother cried. She tried to bring the image close, but it stayed veiled – unreal. Something appeared real. A string of beads linked to a tiny cross had hung from her mother’s wrist: the same string of beads she had in her treasure bag. Housemother Simmons had seen Clarissa playing with the beads. She told her: “These are not for playing with; they are beads Catholics say prayers on, prayers to Mary, the Mother of God. Protestants don’t need beads to speak to God.” She raised an eyebrow, her mouth set.
    Clarissa got her treasure bag and poured the beads out into her hand. She tightened her fingers over the cross on her palm for a moment before she put the beads back in the bag. Then she sat pondering her past. She knew there had to be a reason why she was kept at the orphanage. Perhaps Dr. Grenfell knew what it was. Maybe it was his secret. A dark question mark made sickle swipes inside her mind.

9
WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS
    â€œA few more days of the blistering voices of grownups splashing vinegar into the cuts of children’s lives and it will be Christmas. ” Clarissa looked up from the pages of Just Looking At You , and the complaint of the book’s forlorn heroine. “That sounds like this orphanage,” she muttered.
    Clarissa loved Christmas, not only because of the gifts, but because it came with a glad spirit that moved through the orphanage, touching even the mistresses and making them laugh.
    The Saturday before Christmas, Clarissa and Cora were on their way to their dormitories when they heard voices coming from the Grenfell shop on the first floor. Clarissa sneaked along the hall slowly, trying to avoid tapping her crutches too loudly on the wooden floor. The door to the shop was open a few inches, and the girls could see barrels of clothes and goods that had been gathered from the kind people of the United States and Canada and shipped to St. Anthony weeks ago. Miss Elizabeth’s and Missus Frances’s heads were down in the barrels; they were busy pulling out tuck-away gifts for the children. “We had better not let them see us, or we’ll get nothing,” Cora cautioned Clarissa. She slid quietly past the door and up the stairs to go to her dormitory. Clarissa followed, her brown eyes alight with the anticipation of a Christmas surprise that would not come from Canada or the United States – or even the North Pole.
    The girls stopped at a window near the stairwell, both of them wrapped in thoughts of Christmas gifts. Outside, in the dusky afternoon, a light shimmered up from the harbour. “’Tis a glim – a reflection the ice throws off on its way to shore,” Clarissa had overheard Uncle Aubrey tell Miss Elizabeth as they stood on the orphanage steps last week. Now the bay lay silent under ice thickened into a seascape, as