Brodie's Notebook

Brodie shifts the knapsack across her shoulders again, and I flinch. Inside, the rounded corners of my empty pages scrape across the canvas of her worn knapsack. I've spent years inside Brodie's packs moving between foster homes, hoping that she would put words on my pages and make me live.

Today Brodie wanders the streets armed only with the short dirk she hides in her knapsack. The sun sets and April air dims and cools. We burrow into a hidden place in the brambles. The gray kitten we found mews, and Brodie pulls him under the tartan plaid with her. The plaid and me, a small black notebook, were her only companions in the woven basket when the priest found her on the doorsteps of the brick church.

Hidden in the thorny underbrush, Brodie rests her head on her knapsack and sleeps lightly in the cast-off sleeping bag. I never sleep, and feel Brodie startle. A shaft of light touches me through a small rip in the canvas. The kitten springs at the intruder who tumbles back. A flashlight falls and rolls. Light leaps and silhouettes the corkscrew halo of hair around Brodie's high forehead as she rears up and aims her blade. Brodie is bold, but carrying a baby has made her careful.

The intruder stammers. "I'm Anna." Her voice quivers. "Will you put down your knife?"

The intruder named Anna recovers her flashlight and aims the beam at herself. Brodie lets out her breath. Anna is a Black woman, like Brodie. Brodie lowers her arm and sits. The night air is chilly and she pulls the tattered bag up around her strong shoulders.

"What do you want."

"I want to help."

"Why."

Frogs and crickets make the only sounds.

"I'm from the youth shelter." Gray has returned to Brodie's lap and the flashlight wavers and catches his eyes.

"We have showers."

There is silence again. "Do you have cat food?"

"How old are you?" The woman doesn't answer Brodie's question.

Brodie strokes Gray. "I'm eighteen. My foster parents ditched me when I graduated high school." She exhales. The morning after Brodie's graduation was harsh. Brodie came downstairs to find there was no place set for her at the breakfast table. She glares into Anna's eyes. "I got pregnant and lost my track scholarship."

Brodie stands in the shower. Hot water skids off her smooth skin. She caresses her belly, holding her hands under her rounded abdomen where a thin line of black hair leads downward from her navel. In the dormitory Brodie has her own bed and a bureau. Though there is little to entrust to its drawers. The tartan plaid, two tie-dyed wrap skirts she made herself, tee shirts, denim jeans, panties. I'm pressed in with it all, still empty save for my mutilated first page. Brodie has never looked past the words there. "To my daughter Brodie O'Connell, with love, your Mommy."

In the safety of the fenced backyard of the shelter, Brodie sits folded on the damp grass watching Gray stalk a grasshopper. She holds an envelope with DNA results from the test funded by the shelter. Does it hold answers? Will she trust me? Even when Brodie's adored first foster mom and dad died in a wreck, and the agency moved her to another foster home, she didn't put words on my pages.

Brodie sighs and finally opens the envelope. She skims her genetic origins. Mostly Scottish, Irish, and the rest Congo, Bantu, and something she doesn't recognize. Brodie focuses on the list of DNA matches and finds two close cousins.

We stand in a small, stuffy room, and beside Anna, Brodie clutches her knapsack. We have driven quite a way to meet Brodie's cousins. An elderly man and middle-aged woman wait on shabby floral-patterned armchairs. Mary Blain and Kenneth O'Riley. Their skin is sleet white. Eyes like an empty sky. Her mother's cousins, they say. Brodie sits, and Anna begins to excuse herself. At Brodie's panicked look, she takes a seat.

Mary and Kenneth are not surprised by Brodie's appearance.

"Your mother wasn't married either." Mary stares at Brodie's swollen belly before she drags her eyes back to Brodie's face. No one speaks. Finally, Kenneth inhales, and tells her what she dies to know.

"Your mother was an artist. She died. Just this past month." He stares, as if Brodie should have come sooner. "Sheila knew the cancer would take her." He nods at the wooden cigar box Mary holds on her lap. He licks his lips, and his words inch out. "She would be glad you came."

Brodie is her mother's heir and the new owner of a modest home in a safe neighborhood. The cousins are Sheila's next heirs, and Mary's sour face says more than her words. Mary holds out the cigar box and it seems to stick to her fingers when Brodie takes it.

The house is not far. Anna watches from the car while Brodie stands on the curb. The overgrown lawn softens the edges of the sidewalk, and deliberately, Brodie walks toward the house. The yellow paint is fresh and the covered porch welcoming. The key slides easily into the deadlock, and the white trimmed door swings inward on its hinges without a sound.

In the entry the stale air overwhelms Brodie, and she leaves the door open as she moves through the shrouded furniture in the downstairs rooms. Drapes pulled across the tall windows block the autumn sun, but even in the dimness the vivid paintings on the walls gleam. Brodie runs her fingers across her mother's signature.

Anna calls from outside, and Brodie hurries to her.

"I've got to get back to the shelter, but I'll bring you out tomorrow." We drive away and Brodie twists her head, watches the house grow smaller in the rear window.

The next morning Brodie shoulders her knapsack and carries Gray's crate as Anna drives away. Upstairs are two bedrooms and a studio, and a second bathroom. But it is the dusty attic with its boxes and trunks that seizes her imagination. Brodie is up to her elbows in one of the leather-bound trunks when pounding shakes the front door. Holding her knapsack, she grasps the railing, and we rush down the stairs. A burst of knocking rattles the door before we can reach it. Brodie is out of breath and stands in the open doorway. Dirt streaks her white apron, and dust smudges her cheeks. Her dark hair has loosened, and tendrils spiral down her neck.

"What can I do for you?" She brushes a twist of hair from her face and looks up into the visitor's eyes. He is bulky and impatient and wears a dark woolen overcoat.

"Fetch the lady of the house, the new owner, if you please." Though the day is cool, sweat trickles down the deep creases of his fat pale cheeks. He doesn't remove his hat.

"That is me."

There is a significant pause. The visitor coughs. He speaks through throaty phlegm. "Well, I knew Sheila and, begging your pardon, I would not have guessed you to be her daughter." I have heard this condescension before.

"I am Sheila O'Riley's daughter." She waits for him.

He clears his throat and finally frees it. "Sheila owes me $2,600," he says. "If I'm not paid, I will have no choice but to sell this house for the debt."

Brodie takes the card he hands her. I feel her heart hammer, like it does when she's meeting new foster parents. We trudge back upstairs. Brodie is brave, but this is huge.

In the attic, the sun streams through the uncovered windows. Brodie sits, watches the dust motes float in the light. Once stillness returns to her, Brodie unclasps the largest of the leather-bound trunks. Inside are dozens of small black notebooks. They are the same as me. Brodie falls to her knees and seizes one at random. She reads the words aloud.

"I'm afraid. Afraid of high school. They say I'm ready. But I wish the deaf school didn't stop at eighth. Will they laugh at the way I talk?"

She has found her mother's journals. She pulls them from the trunk by the handfuls, until dust troubled by her frenetic movement hangs thick, and she is ringed by a pile of the notebooks. Gray purrs and weaves his way through the mound as Brodie dips into this one, and that one. Words on one page, sketches on the next. My sister notebooks are Brodie's window to her mother's heart.

"He's meeting me at the library. He's working on his history PhD. I'm so excited--I can't wait to see him!!!!!! I think I'm in love."

Brodie slows. I wait. Is it Brodie's father that her mother writes of?

"I can't tell Daddy. He will be mad I don't take the art scholarship. I think he wants me to go to Carnegie Mellon more than I do. He would say Glenn is 'unsuitable.' But I just want to be with him! He is so funny, so smart, and he LOVES me!!!!"

Little hearts dance across the page. Brodie regards the unpainted wall in front of her before she returns to the notebook and the charcoal drawing of a smiling young man in a beret. His skin is as dark as Brodie's.

"I told him everything. He agrees. My parents will never accept him. There's no way around it, I can't stay here much longer."

I hurt for this girl, Sheila, this future mother of Brodie's.

"He says we'll marry. In two months when I'm 18 we'll elope. He'll have his doctorate. At only 23!! Dr. Glenn O'Connell!!!! He's from Scotland and is going to take me back with him. I just must make it until then. I just have to!!!"

It's the last page. Brodie's haste has put the notebooks out of order, and she must search for the next one.

"Mum knows. She says Daddy will kill him. Or report him for statute rape. She says it's got to be over. If I don't make him leave me, he'll be dead or in prison. Mum's going to take me to Cousin Mary's. After I write The Letter. Telling Glenn to leave. Can a broken heart kill? Because I feel like I'm dying."

Tears burn down Brodie's cheeks. She gathers the scattered journals and finds the one dated the year of her birth. She turns to the end. The words waver across the page.

"I'm still too weak, Cousin Mary will take little Brodie to the orphanage, she says we must, but the orphanage will send us updates. I've told Mary, the baby's own little black notebook will go with her, with my name and the address of the house Glenn bought with the prize money. So she'll know where I am.

"But I didn't tell Mary about my letter to Glenn, or the savings book he sent me. It will be safe in Brodie's book."

Brodie searches for a notebook dated this year and flips to the last page.

"Brodie will be 18 this year. And maybe I'll live to see her, and maybe I won't. She'll find out someday that I was faithful to her father. That he believed my lies and finally made a new life, one that I wouldn't, couldn't, interfere with. The money he left for Brodie will be there, even if I'm not. Waiting for her at the bank. Safe from everyone, from me, even."

Brodie tugs me from her knapsack. For the first time, she sees that my title page, with her name, is cut so that the lower half is missing. She flips through me to the end. Tucked away in my pocket, formed inside my back cover, is a thin bank book. Inside, her name. A single deposit. Twenty-thousand dollars. Brodie's nose runs and she weeps without sound.

Now, at last. Will she trust her words to her own small black notebook?