The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty

How could she not love Mother Kaufmann, who sang “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” as she and Cora pulled weeds in the garden, who could get very mad sometimes, but who had never laid a hand on her with anything but softness? How could she not love being in the kitchen with her, the scent of the cake in the oven, the sound of their slicing knives?
    “She said it was scientifically proven.” Mother Kaufmann plunged two more potatoes in the bucket of water, rubbing off the mud with the pads of her thumbs. “But then we got you, and you wanted to be cuddled from the start. Not at the very first, but fairly quickly.” She looked down at Cora and smiled. When Cora was younger, she’d thought of Mother Kaufmann’s front teeth as little people, leaning into and against one another. “We’d hug you, and you’d hug back. We’d kiss your cheeks, and you’d kiss right back. You’d come up and sit in my lap. In Mr. Kaufmann’s, too. Mrs. Lindquist said someone must have held you when you were a baby. But you said the nuns didn’t hug and kiss.”
    Cora had to laugh at the thought of it. Mother Kaufmann reached over to steady the knife. Even with all her work in the sun, her skin was much paler than Cora’s.
    “Maybe the other girls then?”
    Maybe. Cora remembered holding hands with Mary Jane. And there was the earliest memory, the one of the dark-haired woman with the knit shawl. Was she a real memory, then? And not just a lonely dream? Was that who had held her, and taught her to be held? She’d known her own name when she first came to the orphanage. That’s what the older girls said.
    She glanced up at Mother Kaufmann. She’d never told her about the woman with the shawl. She’d worried the telling would hurt her, this woman who fed her vegetables but also cake and made her clothes and tied ribbons in her braids and stayed by her bed when she had a fever. She was betraying her now, perhaps, even thinking about the woman with the shawl. Cora leaned her forehead against Mother Kaufmann’s shoulder as a silent apology, and breathed in the lavender smell of her dress. When she looked up again, Mother Kaufmann’s blue eyes were bright and blinking fast.
    “It doesn’t matter,” she said, smoothing Cora’s hair. “We’re here for you now.”
    But one day, all at once and forever, they weren’t.
    It happened in early November, when the days were still warm, but the cool evenings were lovely, the mosquitoes gone. Two cuttings of hay were stacked neatly in the barn, and Cora was back at school. On that day, she’d made a map of the solar system, writing each planet’s name neatly beside it. She was sixteen, the oldest student by far, and she spent a good part of her time at school helping the teacher with lessons for the younger children. She was good at drawing and explaining things. Mother Kaufmann had said maybe she could be a teacher herself—not in this town, but maybe one close by.
    One of the hired workers found her as she was walking home. He was a young man, a Norwegian with good English who could lift a squealing hog, full grown, as if it were nothing, but when he stopped in front of Cora he was sweating, panting. He’d run toward the school to find her, and now that he had, he didn’t talk.
    “What?” she asked. A perfect breeze, cool and light, moved across her face, kicking up dust farther down the road. She could see the windmill, the top of the barn. It had never occurred to her this new world could be lost, just as quickly and permanently as the old one.
    He was so sorry to tell her. There’d been an accident.
    She backed away, and he followed, making sure she understood. Just an hour before, he had climbed up the silo, looked in, and seen their bodies already blue, but peaceful-looking, lying on top of the grain, her right next to him. As if they had fallen asleep in the cold. He didn’t think they had fallen. Or maybe one fell, and the other went in after. It was more