And then she finds it, the answer to the “MWP” serial code, at the top of the first invoice from when the contract began in 1959:
Mercer Women’s Prison
1155 King Street W., Toronto
DECEMBER, 1982
Mary came back again at Christmas when Rachel was fifteen.Unusually, she’d called ahead, and it had been Rachel who’d answered the phone.
“Hey, so can you tell Dora I’m going to be coming for Christmas?”Mary had said, sounding for all the world as though she and Rachel had weekly phone calls and she was merely updating her on a recent development.She was in St.Catharines, she’d said, and she’d gotten some time off from her job at Zellers in the mall.She’d arrive on the twenty-third, and head back on Christmas night in time for her Boxing Day shift the next morning.
“Well, that’s promising,” Dora had said when Rachel walked into the kitchen to relay the news.“She hasn’t had a job since she was your age.”
“Where did she work?”Rachel asked as she took a seat at the kitchen table.
Dora was chopping apples she’d stored in the cool crawl space back in the fall, to be boiled down for her homemade applesauce.She always made it chunky, with an overload of cinnamon and a pinch of cardamom.It was one of Rachel’s favourite things to eat, especially spooned over the vanilla ice cream she brought home from Two Scoops.It had become a Christmas tradition.
“She babysat,” Dora said, furiously chopping for another moment before scraping the apple chunks off the wooden cutting board into a large copper pot.“Anyway, as always, her coming does throw a bit of a wrench into things.We can stretch dinner to three, and maybe you could pull out her stocking?It won’t be in the usual bin because, well…it’s probably up in the attic.”She sighed.“I don’t have anything for it, so it’ll have to just be chocolate from the grocery store.”
Rachel had seen, over the years, the toll it took on Dora every time Mary dropped back into their lives, however temporarily.When she was younger, Rachel was more ambivalent about Mary’s visits, at once fearful of her mother and curious about who she was.It was an intrigue that had never been satisfied, because her mother was unknowable.But the older she got, the more Rachel resented the impact her transience had on Dora, who was her true mother in every way that mattered.
“Sure, Gran,” Rachel said, then hesitated over the question she’d circled around a dozen times, like a boat caught in a whirlpool.Dora glanced back, then put a lid on the pot with aclankand came over to sit across from her.She could always tell when Rachel had something to say.It had been that way her whole life.All it took was a sidelong look from Rachel, and Dora knew.She never pushed, though; she’d just sit and wait.
Rachel held eyes with Dora, who was fifty-seven now, with ample wrinkles and loosening skin around her jawline.Her chin-length hair was entirely grey, curled every night with teal and pink foam rollers and set in the morning with a liberal application of Pantene Firm Hold.Rachel knew the smell of hairspray would forever bring her back to hergrandmother’s house, to the wooden-framed antique mirror on the vanity in her bedroom at the end of the hall where Rachel would sit on the swivel stool, playing with the rollers in the morning light as Dora removed them and passed them into her granddaughter’s little hands one by one.
“Why is she like this?”Rachel asked now, heart hammering.“What the hell’s wrong with her?”
Dora kept Rachel’s gaze.“I don’t know that there’s really a word for it, little one,” she said.“Thereissomething wrong with her, but I don’t know what.She’s been like this nearly her entire life, since she was at least your age.”She looked away from Rachel, just for a moment, her eyes landing on the photo of her late husband, his military portrait in pride of place above the fireplace mantel in the living room.“Maybe longer, I don’t know.She had a terrible time after you were born.”
Rachel felt cold, her memory tugging her back to that conversation between her grandmother and mother that she’d overheard years before, when Dora had all but said it was Rachel’s fault that Mary was so messed up.
“Some women go a bit…funny, after they have a baby.For a while anyway.But Mary was already…” Dora paused, turned back to her granddaughter, and her tone was harsher now.“She’s selfish and irresponsible and impulsive, and as changeable as the damn weather.And I don’t know that there’s any fixing a person like that.”
“So is she crazy?”Rachel pressed, frustrated and imploring, but also fearful of a confirmation.“Is she, I don’t know…Has she seen a doctor, or a shrink or something?”
Dora sighed deeply and shrugged her small shoulders.“Perhaps.I think so.And no, she hasn’t seen a doctor.Not that I know of.”
“But if she’s like that, will I be like that, too?”Rachel asked, finally voicing her greatest fear.
Dora reached out a hand, covering Rachel’s, whose nails were painted a Hard Candy sparkly black, just like her friends’.
“Well,thatI can answer with more conviction, and the answer is no, little one.I don’t think you’ll be like her,” Dora said.
The pot on the stove hissed in the silence of the kitchen.
“How do you know?”Rachel’s voice was a miserable mumble.
“Because you’re very different from your mother.You’ve had different experiences, and made far better choices.”Her nostrils flared on a deep breath that she quickly huffed out, as though trying to be rid of it.“Your mother is sick.Youaren’tsick, Rachel.You’re just as a teenage girl ought to be.And half the battle in life is knowing what youdon’twant to be like.Figuring out what youdowant to be will come easily from there.”
She patted Rachel’s hand and stood up to stir the pot.
After taking a moment to collect herself, Rachel headed out of the kitchen and up the stairs onto the creaking landing, then around the corner to the attic access at the end of the hall, where she stood on a desk chair borrowed from her bedroom to lower the folding stairs.
It had been one of her favourite rooms to play in during the winter as a child, full of old trunks of clothes to dress up in, and treasures from bygone times that were only otherwise glimpsed in history books: wooden dolls with creepy painted-on faces, brass compasses, boxes of old cardboard-backed photographs.A gramophone.It was as though that attic had remained sheltered from the aggressive, pushy hands of time, left to collect dust and reluctantly entertain visits from Rachel every once in a while.But now that she was mostly grown, those visits were limited to when she was dispatched by Dora to fetch something.
It only took a few minutes to find the boxes.They were beneath a white sheet covered in a thick layer of dust, a representation of all the Christmases Mary had been absent, all the years her stocking was left undisturbed.
Rachel lifted the folded flaps to find the stockings right on top.Her mother’s was a fine-gauge knit in dark red with a capital “M” sewn on in a cream-coloured fabric.But there were two others beneath it: one larger, forest green, with a scrolling “W” intricately embroidered with gold thread; and another smaller one in the same colour, with another gold “W” above a red-and-white train engine.It looked like a child’s stocking, not unlike the one Dora had made for Rachel when she was a baby, and which currently hung from a nail on the stair banister.Hers was the same size, onlymade of red knitted yarn like Mary’s, with a cream “R” on it.She wrinkled her nose, seeing how similar hers was to her mother’s.But she was quickly distracted from her distaste by curiosity about the others.Why had her grandfather Walter seemingly had two stockings?
