Silver for Silver
On a frigid February night, two kitchen workers at a Spanish restaurant in Newburgh, New York insist to the chef they can hear a baby crying outside.
The three men retrieve a lumpy canvas tote bag from one of the dumpsters.
Inside is a newborn infant girl, the stump of her umbilical cord still attached.
The bag has no clothing, no diapers, no bottle, no note.
Just the pathetic scrap of a baby and, inside a piece of many-times-folded paper, a thin silver chain.
Someone at child services puts Naomi Misteria on her birth certificate.
God only knows why. Maybe they’re up to the Ns in arbitrary name picks.
As for the surname, ostensibly they mean mystery, but misteria isn’t a word in any language.
The closest is the Spanish word, misterio.
And perhaps they, whoever they are, change the O to an A because this is a girl.
She remains Naomi Misteria as she’s shuffled through four foster families, none of whom work out for one reason or another. She stays long enough with the fifth family to gain a new surname, Silver, and it’s as Naomi Silver that she attends kindergarten and first grade.
The Silvers live in Rhinebeck, in an old farmhouse on a quarter-acre of rambling land that Judy Silver made into stunning flower gardens surrounding a huge vegetable patch.
Judy not only grows produce but cans and preserves it.
She takes jars of pickles, jams and relish to county fairs where she wins blue ribbons.
Jerry Silver, who clocks long, hard hours as a chemical engineer and recharges his batteries in amateur woodwork, builds a colony of birdhouses for the garden, painted in vivid colors and mounted on trees and posts.
At the Silvers, Naomi not only has a garden, she has a grandpa.
Andy Silver, who lost an arm in the Korean War, is a quiet man with a somewhat haunted air, forever suspicious of the world and its uncertainties.
In this way, he and Naomi suit each other, for already at four years old, Naomi is slow to put eggs of love and loyalty into any one basket.
She’s small for her age, although she hits all her developmental milestones, and teaches herself to read simply as a means of reliable companionship.
She and Andy feel each other out a few months, taking each other’s measure.
Andy eventually allows Naomi to look at the stump of his arm without its prosthetic, and Naomi reveals to the old man that she’s taught herself to read at an astonishing level.
Andy gives Naomi a very solemn, very grownup gift: a personalized embossing stamp so she can mark her books.
“Ex libris,” he says, demonstrating the press on a piece of scrap paper. “It means, From the library of. You write your name and address on these lines here.”
In return, Naomi tries to give Andy the silver chain that was found with her in the dirty tote bag. Silver for Silver.
“Oh no, honey,” Andy says, crouching down and closing Naomi’s fingers around the necklace, then closing the little fist in his one strong hand.
“Lord in Heaven, you’re such a darling girl, but this isn’t a thing to give away.
Not to me, not to anyone. This was your mother’s necklace, understand?
It’s treasure. Family treasure. Don’t ever give it away. Promise me.”
With the exchange of these tokens of trust, Andy and Naomi become friends. Then soulmates.
Andy is haunted by war, both injured and insulted.
He seeks comfort and solace in the ground, in the reliability of the changing seasons and predictable life cycles.
Whether he plants these values in Naomi or whether she plants them herself is hard to say.
But the first time a child attaches emotion to an event, memory is born, and Naomi’s memory blooms on the day Andy takes her to a local garden center.
He waits patiently as she picks out a dozen seed packets.
Daisies because they’re familiar. Zinnias because they’re irresistible.
Sunflowers because they’re tall. She picks corn, because she likes corn.
And pumpkins, because what little kid doesn’t want to grow their own pumpkin?
Other packets she picks simply for the color of blossoms or the curl of leaves or a name she can sound out herself.
Back at home, in the four raised beds Jerry builds especially for the child, Naomi follows Andy’s terse, simple directions in preparing the soil, scratching furrows and dropping the seeds into the rich dirt. She lugs her little watering can back and forth, then spreads a layer of hay over the beds.
Her next lessons are more philosophical.
She learns patience from her daily, anxious trips to the beds, searching for signs of life.
When the first sprouts and their tiny nursery leaves push through the soil, she’s inducted into the most simple and elemental acts of life.
Thinning out the dense mat of seedlings teaches her about survival of the fittest. Battling weeds and pests is a lesson in competition.
Even the failures serve a purpose: Some seeds don’t sprout, or die despite the tender loving care.
And this happens sometimes. Life isn’t always fair.
The chopped up stems and foliage of dead plants are worked into the soil, along with the tin of vegetable scraps, coffee grounds and eggshells that Judy keeps on the kitchen counter.
Little is wasted at the Silvers. Everything has a purpose.
Everything begins in the dirt and ends in the dirt.
This last lesson is driven home when Andy Silver dies at the end of Naomi’s second summer with the family.
She cuts a dazzling bouquet of zinnias to put on his gravesite.
She’s devastated when her nine cornstalks produce only a single inedible ear, and a little comforted when her pumpkin patch yields three respectable jack-o-lanterns.
Two are displayed on the porch steps and the third made into a pie, which Naomi desolately picks at, crying over the seed catalogs she and Andy won’t order from.
To comfort her foster daughter, Judy buys a book called Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls. It quickly becomes the girl’s favorite and she embosses the first page with her treasured stamp:
EX LIbrIS
Naomi Silver
560 Violet Hill Road
Rhinebeck, New York
The Silvers’ property is bordered by woodlands.
Once a little house stood among the trees, but it’s fallen to rubble, leaving only the stone chimney, the remains of a fireplace, and mossy slabs of the broken foundation.
For Naomi and her next-door playmate Katie, it’s a palace.
They spend hours playing in the woods, dragging long logs to make walls, short stumps to make tables and chairs.
Begging cast-off pots and pans so they can make all the things in Mud Pies and Other Recipes.
In her spare time, Judy makes little dolls with acorn hats, bead heads and pipe cleaner bodies.
They’re dressed in felt clothing, embroidered with tiny patterns, or in puffy skirts made from silk flower petals.
Naomi is given a dozen dolls of her own.
She and Katie pose them around their playhouse and work them into their imaginary games.
One day, the girls discover a loose brick in the chimney.
Behind it is a tantalizing space begging for hidden treasure.
Katie finds an old file card box with a hinged lid and they each comb their rooms for suitable tribute.
Katie puts in a little ring with a red stone, and a beautiful geode polished smooth on its open side, the cavity sparkling with crystals.
Naomi puts in three of the acorn-cap dolls and her silver chain.
The girls parade the box through the woods and around the house foundation, making up ceremony as they go.
They put their reliquary in the secret space in the chimney, sprinkle it with rose petals from Judy’s garden, and replace the loose brick.
They visit the box frequently. Then less so. And little by little, as young girls often do, they forget about it.
Not long after, Jerry Silver receives a plum promotion at work which unfortunately comes with relocation.
Naomi finds herself back in the system with her suitcase, her small library of books, an embossing stamp and a basket of smashed eggs.
Hurt beyond her capacity to express. Dying of longing for her garden beds, the birdhouses, the jars of preserves, the woods and her playhouse.
She’s been kicked out of Eden, yanked from the earth like a weed and discarded, not good enough even for compost.
Most of all Naomi feels robbed. Robbed of a mother and father to name her something significant.
Robbed of a surname with history. Robbed of security.
Robbed of consistency. Robbed of love. She knows love and consistency and security are things to give as well as receive, but then and there she vows not to give them until she is Somewhere, with a capital S.
And Somewhere will not be a place chosen for her, but a place she chooses for herself.
She vows the same for her name. She returns to being Naomi Misteria, but not forever.
One day, when she is Somewhere, she’ll rename herself.
She’ll know the name when it’s time. Or maybe someone else will know.
This hardened little girl isn’t entirely without a sense of romance, and all the books she’s read include a Someone in a Somewhere.
Someone to love. Someone who might look at her and call her what she is and who she is.
Someone who might both claim and name her.
But all that is for Someday, with a capital S.
Right now, Naomi Misteria retaliates against the system by never again giving a foster family a fair chance.
She resolves to plant no more seeds in dirt that isn’t her own, and assigns little emotion to anything that happens to her.
So becomes her mission to prepare herself as a gardener prepares soil.
To enrich herself with a compost of knowledge and self-sufficiency, building a barrier against pests.
To develop eggs that might be put in baskets, and to weave a basket into which one day she might receive eggs.