Far From Home by Nellie P. Strowbridge

coat, and I would feel warm even if it wus cold.” Her finger moved to a small, delicate button. “Dis sparkly one come from me little sister Sarah’s dress; she died of the fever.” Treffie’s eyes clouded with loss. “Dis pearl button wus from me mudder’s favourite dress. Me buttons reminds me I wasn’t always an orphan.”
    â€œI’m not a real orphan,” Clarissa said with a lift of her chin, “even if Dr. Grenfell made me one by bringing me here and leaving me. I have parents and sisters and brothers beyond the waters.” She looked at Cora. “And you’re only half an orphan. You got your mother, your sister Suzy and your brother Owen.”
    Cora nodded, and the girls sat together staring ahead as if they were thinking things too deep to lift in words from dark places inside them. No one spoke for a long time.

6
A MORNING FRIGHT
    C larissa surfaced from sleep with a jerk, not sure if it was the morning bell or the elephant that woke her. She had been rushing to close the dormitory window against a creature that was big enough to crush the orphanage. She smiled in relief. The elephant chasing the orphanage as it rolled down over a hill on cartwheels wasn’t real.
    The senseless dream flew out of her mind and a shudder slid down her curved spine. She had wet her bed, something she hadn’t done in a long time. Narah and Alice, whose beds were next to hers, used to spy on her. They would wait until they thought she was asleep. Then they would reach their hands under her bedclothes. In the morning they would rush off and tattle to the mistress that she had peed. Clarissa could see the glint in their eyes when the mistress pulled her nightclothes back and whipped her wide awake with a doubled rope.
    Now her long fingers came away from a warm, moist spot beneath her. She stared ahead, motionless, alarmed that any movement would waft a scent through the cold air, and the tattlers’ senses would stir to it.
    â€œYou must try harder, Clarissa. Pull your muscles tight down below.” That’s what Miss Elizabeth said to her time after time, standing there with the rope slapper dangling on her arm. She had stared back at the mistress, feeling the after-burn of the rope on her bottom, angry that the woman had added red marks to the white scar Dr. Grenfell’s knife had left on her hip.
    She had strained to pull her in-between place up inside her like a stopper on a hot water bottle, wanting to pull tight enough to hurt it for betraying her. She had promised herself over and over that she would never wet the bed again, but when her mind went to sleep, it seemed that her body forgot the promise, and she would awake to the feel of wetness and a dread creeping through her whole body.
    Now she waited for the morning bell to clang, and for the other girls to finish in the bath and toilet room. When they had gone down to breakfast and there was silence, she slid out of bed. She gasped at the sight of red stains on her nightclothes, and a red dribble down her lame leg. Her insides were leaking out from her in-between place. “I’m dying,” she told her wide-eyed face in the mirror. “I will probably be gone before Cora and Treffie, and the children in the infirmary who have consumption.” Her eyes stared back at her like dark pools she could drown in. “I’ll probably go to the Protestant side of Heaven and my parents won’t ever find me.”
    She hurried to wash herself with thick, brown toilet paper, thinking she would come back after breakfast and wash out the stains on the sheets – if she didn’t die first. There was a mesmerizing stillness inside her head as she folded a brown handkerchief and put it in the crotch of her flannelette drawers.
    She made her way as fast as she could downstairs before the mistresses had a chance to send her back to her room for being late. The bully boys and the busy noshers would