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rain, Mr. Prescott held the umbrella over my head and guided me to the car. I looked back once and thought I saw Tillie Mae staring out a window, rubbing the shoulder that Madame Annjill had dislocated. It was something she always did when she was frightened or sad. In the window she looked as if her face was made of candle wax, with her sad, hot tears melting it away. A few moments later we turned into the driveway and were off, me supposedly to a brand-new hopeful life.
It began to rain harder and quickly became one of those early spring downpours that had decided a moment before it fell not to turn to snow and sleet. The raindrops were heavy, pounding the roof of the Prescotts' car so hard it sounded more like steel balls rolling back and forth above us. There was a clap of thunder, and a stitch of lightning made Mrs. Prescott squeal and jump in her seat.
I sat in the rear, my hands folded over my lap, and stared ahead. Because I was so silent, Mrs. Prescott was fidgety and nervous and couldn't stop talking. She asked me one question after another, and when I didn't answer one, she just went on to the next as if she had never asked the first.
"Give the child a chance," her husband kept telling her. I had yet to say a full sentence. All of my answers were monosyllabic. I was still thinking about how fast I had gone from what had been my home for so long to this new home.
All the time I had lived at that first orphanage under Madame Annjill's iron rule, I was never truly afraid. Her meanness made me stronger, her threats, more defiant. I was in a pond with the rest of the helpless fish, only I had my faith, my secrets, my brother, Noble, at my side when I really needed him. It all kept me well above the swirling waters of unhappiness and well out of danger.
Madame Annjill wasn't all wrong about the things she had told the Prescotts about me, however. She did not exaggerate everything. I was truly more independent than most of the other girls at the orphanage, and I was not a problem at school. I did do well, and I was very neat and organized.
But as I was being ripped out of this orphanage world almost as quickly and dramatically as I had been torn from my family years ago, I felt myself sinking back into the cocoon that had been woven around me at birth. Once again, silence became a warm, protective blanket to wrap around myself. That was why I didn't want to talk very much.
What frightened me the most was the idea that I was not going home. I was being detoured, perhaps forever, and I would lose the only family I had ever known. Success here and in this world would push my past back further and further, until it would be as buried as my ancestors in the little old graveyard where Noble's body had rested.
Can families replace families? I wondered. Can Nana Prescott and Papa Prescott really become my grandparents? Would I inherit all of their ancestors, their stories, their likes and dislikes? Was it like a blood transfusion after all? Is it finally true that someday for me blood would once again be thicker than water?
And how would my spiritual family feel about all this? Wouldn't they feel betrayed? Wasn't I betraying them simply by being here and pretending I wanted to become part of the Prescott family?
"Please, dear," Mrs. Prescott said again and again, "call me Nana and call Mr. Prescott Papa."
It was almost like asking me to speak profanity. What about my real Nana and Papa? Would they sulk in the shadows, be forced to disappear? And then how would all my other real relatives feel? Surely they would think me ungrateful, deserting them, and they would take away my visions and my strength. I would never be able to go home again, inheritance or no inheritance. What was Ito do?
"We're home!" Nana Prescott cried the moment we turned into the driveway, as if she had feared we'd never arrive.
Their home was much as she had described. It was a modest but very pretty house with Wedgwood blue shutters and a walkway bordered by