Chapter 1

Gracie Lemieux wasn't thinking about her mother or Christmas or even about any of the cute boys in her class until her father mentioned the face on the side of the milk carton. She wasn't thinking about that stuff at all. He started it. He started the whole thing.

"There's a story behind what happened to that boy," he said one morning at breakfast. "Want me to tell you?"

She glanced at the photograph on the carton. Her father probably did have a tale about the boy, or else was busy thinking one up, and she bet it would be a doozey—without a moral or ending or even a point. If nobody stopped him, he'd keep telling it for days. If shown the slightest encouragement, he'd reshape things from real life until they fit into fiction.

"His name is Jimmy Nofolks," he added, "and he's the leader of the Milk Carton Kids."

"Father... " He had that look, the one that said: I'm going to entertain you, please you, make you forget all the bad stuff that is happening, if it kills me. Gracie hated the look, not because it was mean or scary, but because it was sad-under-the-skin. He was sad, her father. A sad postal worker-slash-poet.

"He's an undiscovered hero, Gracie," he said. "Most of the kids you see on cartons were kidnapped by ex-sailors working as school janitors. The children wind up on cargo ships sailing from port to port. They peel potatoes and clean toilets and write letters for grown men who can't do it themselves. Who ever boards those boats to search for missing boys and girls? Who ever cross-checks the resumes of janitors, to find out if maybe they all once had the same job?"

Clink, clink—the sound of Lulu's spoon against her bowl. Her little sister would keep right on eating her cereal, never mind the incredible conversation. She would, being only eight, and Lulu.

Gracie examined the photo more closely. The boy had a name, not Jimmy Nofolks, and a hometown about a thousand miles from here. He'd disappeared from his house during the summer. His nose was crooked but his smile was sweet. His spiky hair reminded her of a singer in a band.

"Ex-sailors always wear tattoos," her father said. "Along their forearms and shoulders and sometimes on their chests."

Lulu stopped eating. "Mr. Kowalyk has tattoos," she said. "A hairy heart with an arrow through it."

Mr. Kowalyk was the school janitor.

"The heart isn't hairy," Gracie said, "his arm is." *Stupid,* she did not need to add.

"Also, there's a ship sailing across his chest."

"What?"

Her sister explained. Mr. Kowalyk, whose unshaven cheeks and yellow fingernails scared children, was fixing the toilet in Lulu's class the other day.

Lulu found him bent over the bowl with his shirt off and his undershirt drooping. Covering the right side of his chest was a ship, smoking curling from its stack.

"So?" Gracie said in a voice that meant: *I'm interested.* "I told Dad about this tattoo."

"And I suddenly remembered how the police had decided the kidnappers were men who'd gotten close enough to the children to find out which ones came from messed up families, and so could go missing for days before anyone noticed. They figured it had to be the guys who mopped the hallways and cleaned the cafeterias. Those men could easily overhear conversations and learn secrets. The police believe the ring has a mastermind, a janitor at a school right here."

"In Montreal?"

Her father sipped his coffee.

"At Sacred Heart Elementary?"

He said nothing.

"Mr. Kowalyk?" Lulu asked.

"Look at the time, girls. We'd better move."

"Oh my God," Gracie said.

In the hallway he told Gracie something else. Police had been tipped-off that the next shipment of kids would be smuggled out of the Port of Montreal on Christmas eve, when nobody would be paying attention. He also mentioned the metal door at the end of the corridor off the main hallway at Sacred Heart.

Gracie knew the corridor, and the door. She, along with everyone else, knew Mr. Kowalyk smoked cigarettes in the furnace room, even though smoking was forbidden on school property. As well, she remembered the last time her mother and father went to parent-teacher interviews together. The night after the first snowfall in November. The night before he drove her away with his poetry, and his bad habit.

Matter of fact, hadn't he made a joke to Mr. Kowalyk that same evening, and snuck off with him for a cigarette? Her father, breaking the rules by smoking with the janitor, now exposed as a napper of kids. He would.

She was ready first, as usual, gloves on and jacket zipped, hat pulled down to her brows. The radio had warned about the cold, minus sixteen and dropping, but Gracie had figured that out already. The frigid walls had alerted her. So had the water in the faucet and the hardwood floor. Hardwood creaked differently in winter. A crisp creak, like dry wood snapping.

Smiling, her father wrapped her scarf around her neck—once, twice, three times.

"Just like Mom does," Gracie said, not exactly meaning it.

The smile fell away.

"You should have quit when she asked."

"Sorry?"

"She knew you snuck off to smoke with Mr. Kowalyk. She always knew when you snuck one."

Next, his eyes flooded with hurt. It didn't take much to get him, Gracie had noticed. He was always prepared to feel bad.

"And she'll be back for Christmas, right?"

"It's the plan."

"She called?"

"It's the plan," he said again. Then he turned away, shouting at Lulu to please hurry up.

Gracie's sister hopped into the hallway. Lulu had one boot off and one boot on, a zipper stuck part-way, and gloves she'd turned inside out the night before and now couldn't push back in. As for her hair, which was thick and shimmering and 'luxuriant,' whatever that meant, it was a disaster. Five weeks, three days, and nine hours since anyone had properly brushed Lulu's hair properly.

"Give me the gloves," he said to her.

As though her father could ever fix the fingers. As though he could ever tidy a girl's head or choose outfits that matched.

"I haven't had a cigarette in ages," he said to Gracie.

"Five weeks, three days, and nine hours," she answered.

She opened the front door. The cold stung first her eyeballs and then her cheeks. "Don't tell me anything more about the Milk Carton Kids," she said, her words ghosting from her mouth.

"But we've just started."

"I don't need your help." Got him again, Gracie realized, also without really intending it. "I'd rather tell the story myself."

"Okay," her father said quietly. He stepped onto the landing in only his shirt, hugging himself for warmth. "It's a blizzard," he said. "Think you girls are all right to walk?"

"Nice tie, Dad," Lulu said.

Chapter 2

"Why'd you say that about his tie?"

Lulu smiled, despite the air needles pricking her face. "I wanted to make him feel better. Mom always said he wore funny ties to work, and he always laughed when she said it. Dad seemed so sad."

"You made him feel worse."

"Did not."

"Did so."

Lulu would never make her dad feel worse. Gracie would, given half a chance. Everyone said Gracie Lemieux looked like their mother, and everyone said their mother was beautiful. No one said that about Lulu. Her dad, she'd been told, resembled an exclamation mark—straight and skinny with a dot on top. She hoped she didn't look like punctuation. She definitely had his eyes.

She probably also had his nose.

The girls lived with their father at 5766 Esplanade, three buildings south of Bernard. They occupied the ground floor of a triplex. Upstairs was Lena Buber, a scary old lady who creaked down her hallway late at night and never went out, even for food. Lulu's dad said that Lena had a story, one that would break your heart, and couldn't life be unfair. She owned a cat named Sallyann, and every morning Lulu checked the balcony above to make sure Mrs. Buber hadn't forgotten the kitty out there, leaving it to get soaked by rain or buried in snow. Upstairs of her lived Mister and Missus. They had a story too, but Lulu didn't know it, and didn't know if her father did either. They'd recently arrived from China.

"Did you bring your gym stuff?" Gracie asked as they passed Kim's grocery at the corner. Poor Mrs. Kim—too freezing for her to line her doorway with bouquets of roses and irises and lilies, the flower their mother loved.

"I forgot."

"And your lunch?"

"It was just bagels and cream cheese again," Lulu answered. She still couldn't get her fingers into the glove.

"He didn't fix the glove, did he?" her sister asked, watching her.

"Can you?"

"He's useless."

"He is not," Lulu said. "He's a poet," she added, because when people said that about John Lemieux, it sounded significant.

"He works at the post office."

"He writes poems."

"He sells stamps and weighs packages."

Gracie was bullying with her words, because she could be. "I love our dad," Lulu said in frustration.

"Why should you? He drove away our mom."

Lulu was about to tell her big sister that their mother wouldn't have let her out of the house with soaked hair—all the girls in Grade Six slicked their hair, even on days when the water froze into icicles—when they ran into Missus at the corner of Rue St. Urbain. St. Urbain was her corner; Mister patrolled the crossing over at St. Lawrence. Missus wore the yellow sash, the same as other guards, and carried the ARRETE sign. But that was it for the similarities. No other crossing guard commanded children and bossed grown-ups like her. No other guard hammered on the hood of cars turning the corner when they shouldn't. For sure, no other guard in Mile End scolded Montrealers in a language they first thought was broken French, and then broken English, although it was something else again.

Mister and Missus worked at Sacred Heart Elementary as crossing guards and yard monitors. They'd started the jobs a week before Labour Day, fresh off the boat from China, as one teacher put it, about the same time they rented the top floor of 5766 Esplanade. The couple had real names, which no one could pronounce. Kids had begun saying "Hey, Mister" and "Hi, Missus," and those names stuck.

The other thing different about Missus was her coat. It was made of soft grey wool lined with fur, and it fell nearly to her ankles, burying her hands in sleeve. The coat belonged to a taller woman. It belonged, more exactly, to Lulu and Gracie's mother, until she went away and their father, noticing his tenant leave in sub-zero weather dressed in a windbreaker, gave it to her.

"Morning, Missus," Lulu said.

"So much snow," she answered.

"It's called winter," Gracie said.

"How is your father, girls? How is Mister John?"

Lulu was about to reply that her dad had seemed sad this morning when a man carrying a briefcase stepped off the curb.

"Children wait, you wait also, please," Missus called to him.

"Easy, lady," he said.

The light turned green. Missus extended her arms to show the children, and the disobedient grown-up, how she expected them to keep within the crossing lines. "Happy Christmas," she said to the man as he huffed past her.

Then she smiled at Lulu. "You see the cat up on balcony this morning?"

"Sallyann?"

Missus checked that traffic was at a standstill. She squatted before Lulu, her black eyes shimmering. "'Meow, meow,' all the night, until I go downstairs and knock on Miss Buber door. No answer. 'Cat is outside,' I call. 'She will freeze.'"

"I didn't see her."

"We're going to get run over," Gracie said.

A car honked.

Waving the girls ahead to the far curb with her sign, Missus puffed a final request. "Tell Mister not to be snowman. Tell him to move his arms and feet."

Though Mister's corner was only two blocks away, it lay behind a curtain of snow.

"Don't be so nice to her," Gracie said.

"Why not?"

"She's wearing our mom's coat."

The second block was a white-out. To keep from being scared—Gracie wouldn't hold her hand—Lulu counted the shops: the Thai restaurant and the store that used to sell cheese, the barber shop with the A LOUER sign and the one offering everything for a dollar. The dollar store was at the corner of St. Lawrence.

Lulu looked up and saw... more snow. Now it jabbed her eyes and scraped her cheeks. Now her nose was running.

Her sister took her hand. "There he is," she said.

Mister stood head-bowed by the curb, as though unaware that a dozen kids waited on the sidewalk, or that cars and buses were roaring up the boulevard. Snowflakes stuccooed his coat and hat.

"Cold," he said to the girls.

Lulu repeated Missus's instructions.

"Cold," he said again.

"The light is green," Gracie said.

The truth was, Mister wasn't as good a crossing-guard as Missus. He may even have been a bad one. He didn't intimidate drivers or impress pedestrians.

He seemed to be pleading with cars to stop and praying that children would survive. His face showed all the wrong emotions, including fear. His eyes struck Lulu as heavy with a sorrow no child could understand.

He escorted them to the far sidewalk, and the side-gate of the school.

Lulu had had an amazing dream the night before, one featuring all the people in her building. The dream had been so simple—a question she had posed to the adults—that she bet she could duplicate it in waking life. Something about how Mister guided her to the curb, his gloved hand on her shoulder, made her want to try.

"Where do you keep your dreams, Mister?" Lulu asked.

He squinted and, asking her to repeat the question, smiled for the first time she could remember.

Chapter 3

It was a good metaphor, a good start. Balconies swollen with snow, like bread rising in an oven. The image was clean and simple and true to where he lived.

John Lemieux watched bread rise in the ovens of Pain Dore over on Laurier.

Balconies the length of Mile End, including the two off his own building, were already railing-high with snow, and it only mid-December. He might not be much of a poet—as a writer he was more a question mark than an exclamation point, he figured—but he knew what he was a poet of: balconies and bread and children and families, the neighbourhood he'd called home most of his life, the city he adored.

"Dad?... " A city, Montreal, which adored him back, even in bitter winter. Children, bright, self-impressed Gracie and sweet, insightful Lulu, who revered their father for his care and his cooking. How could such a man be unlucky in love? By abandoning these girls and this town, she had left the love, not him. He was staying right where he belonged.

"Earth to John Lemieux? Earth to-- " "I'm listening," he said. And thinking: Your mother used that exact taunt, in those exact words.

"What did I just say?"

"How you didn't want Lulu to follow you into the furnace room at school.

How you wanted to find Jimmy Nofolks and free the Milk Carton Kids by yourself. And don't get smart with me," he added.

She stared at him. He held her gaze and then forced hers to drop.

Ashamed of himself—Gracie was eleven, and confused; he was thirty-five, and should be composed—John swallowed a spoonful of the lentil soup from the Lebanese restaurant on Park. Too much cumin. No wonder the girls had barely touched it.

"Can I tell my story?" she asked.

"We're all waiting."

"I'm not," Lulu said.

John watched his youngest daughter pick cheese lumps off her toast. Lulu was still sulking about the dinner, which she'd called lunch-all-over-again.

Cheese toasts and lentil soup were different from cream cheese bagels and instant noodles, he had argued. "Hope we don't have soup and cheese on Christmas," Lulu had said. "Mom will cook us a delicious meal," Gracie had offered. "Won't she, Dad?"

"The danger was too great," Gracie was saying now. "I had to go alone.

So I turned the knob and slipped into the furnace room. It was hot and dark and stank of cigarettes, and all I could see was glow from the furnace. Then a voice called to me. 'No children allowed, Missy.' I answered that I'd just transferred from a school in Laval. My father was in prison and my mother had run off with a famous poet. I could be gone from our apartment for days and no one would know or care."

"A famous poet?" John said. He thought of a name or two, and then pictured them with his wife. He needed a smoke, bad.

"You're in jail, Dad," Lulu said.

"Mr. Kowalyk cleared his throat and spat. 'Maybe you should meet some friends of mine,' he said. 'They're super-smart kids who also don't need their dumb parents any longer. Instead of sitting at home watching TV, they travel the world having adventures. Sound good, Missy?' When I said it sounded great, he told me to cross the room to a door next to the furnace. To get there, I had to walk through a spot on the floor lit by a bright light. He could see me then, but I still couldn't see him. 'Stop!' Mr. Kowalyk said. 'I know who you are.'" "You're Gracie," Lulu said helpfully.

John Lemieux didn't say a thing. What had he started? He'd meant to take Gracie aside the other morning and tell her to forget about the Milk Carton Kids. Missing children were no joke. Each face on each carton represented a real life drama, often a real life tragedy. He hadn't been thinking clearly. And Gracie, of all children, required no spur to quicken her imagination. The girl had a fierce one already, and the verbal skills to voice it.

"'You're that poet guy's daughter,' Mr. Kowalyk said to me. 'He and I smoked a cigarette in here while your mom talked to your teachers. You're not who you say you are, and I don't want you to meet my friends.' I had noticed something and kept walking. But then the furnace roared, flames blasting from its mouth. 'Okay,' I said. 'I'll leave.' An envelope was sticking out beneath the door. Bending to retie my shoe, I slipped it under my sweater. Then I bolted from the room."

John was impressed. No way he would ask, though.

Lulu would. "What was it, Gracie?"

"A letter."

"From?... " Gracie took an abrupt interest in her lentil soup.

"Was it from Mom?"

"What?"

That was enough for him. "Come on, girls. I want to string Christmas lights over the balconies."

Gracie called her sister stupid.

"I didn't know," Lulu said, nearly in tears.

"It's from Jimmy Nofolks."

"Enough, Gracie," John said.

"I have the letter in my room. It explains everything."

"Okay."

"They're down there, Dad. The Milk Carton Kids. Dozens of them, locked in a concrete room under the school until the ex-sailors come for them on Christmas eve and put them on ships. Once they leave Montreal, no one will see them again."

"Okay."

"Think of the poor parents," she added.

If he'd had more hair, John would have pulled some of it out. Instead, he noisily collected dishes. So much for his cooking. So much for the poem in his head. "What was the father put in jail for, Gracie," he said, hoping to throw her off. "Writing a bad sonnet?"

"Smoking on school property," she answered, her eyes back on him.

He nodded and lowered his gaze in surrender. What a girl was his Gracie. Her mother would be proud.

Chapter 4

Gracie wasn't sorry for making her father feel bad about dinner. How did he think she was feeling right now? Her mother wouldn't have stayed away so long, and called only once, and sent just two postcards from Vancouver—the morning the second card arrived, he took his wife's coat from the closet and gave it to Missus—if he hadn't been a lousy husband and a worse dad. She didn't know much about the husband stuff, and actually missing hearing laughter from their bedroom and finding wine glasses and melted candles on the end table the next day, but she could comment on his skills as a parent. He couldn't boil an egg without cracking it. He couldn't match outfits or fix gloves. As for helping with their hair, like their mother had done, five minutes each morning before the mirror, forget about it. Gracie and her sister were hair orphans, and looked the part, especially Lulu, with her nest-for-a-head.

Now he was hauling them upstairs to string lights across the second and third floor balconies. To make the building more festive, he said, more like a house occupied by a family instead of rental units of strangers. Who cared? He knew Gracie wanted to stay near the phone. He knew she wanted to shut her door and lie on her bed and re-read the letter from Jimmy Nofolks, who desperately needed her help, especially with time running out. He knew all this, and still was making her go. *That's* the kind of father John Lemieux was.

Visiting Lena Buber would be okay. Lulu was scared of her—Lulu was scared of most things—and preferred her cat, Sallyann. Her father pitied Lena, who had lost her only child long ago and whose husband, an ancient man with a gold tooth named Yehiel, had died in the spring. Gracie didn't feel pity and wasn't scared. Instead, she found Lena Buber and her apartment interesting.

Ignore the musty stink, and the strange comments, and there was plenty to think about in there. Lena's spotted skin and underwater eyes, for example, and the scarves she wrapped around her head. Also, how she called the cat a "pusspuss" and John Lemieux a "boy scout," right in front of his daughter. And how about the way she sat day after day in her living room, the TV on with the sound turned down, a radio murmuring in the kitchen. And those photos on the table next to her chair, all in black-and-white and all of the same boy. Except for one photo, that is, taken on the deck of a ship, with the boy standing between his young parents, her hand on his right shoulder, his on his left.

She didn't feel the same about Mister and Missus. Gracie never liked visiting their apartment, even though it was clean and bright and smelled of incense and cooked rice. Kids made fun of the couple at school, thinking up rhymes and saying that they stir-fried dogs, the national dish of China. None of her friends even knew the crossing-guards lived upstairs of her. Missus called her "Gaysee" and said she was "boodyful." She always seemed ready to hug her.

Once, the Chinese lady reached out to draw hair from her eyes. Gracie pulled back and tied the hair herself.

Missus shouldn't be wearing the coat. Winter lasted forever in Montreal, and the person who owned it would need it again soon. Her mother would have to march upstairs and demand the coat be returned, smoothed and ironed and as beautiful, as perfect, as before.

The building had two stairwells. Though a circular fire escape ran down the back to the alley, with rear doors off each unit, most people used the enclosed front stairs. They were also circular and opened onto Rue Esplanade. Gracie followed her sister and father out their door to a landing beside it big enough for mail boxes, shovels, and a bag of salt. She swore the air was too cold to breathe.

She swore it tried choking her. The stairwell wasn't much warmer, and she rubbed her arms.

He knocked on Lena Buber's door first. She didn't answer.

"Lena? It's John Lemieux. We spoke last evening about the Christmas lights. Would now be a good time?"

Cracking the door, he repeated his name. The stench invaded the stairwell.

"My husband is not here," she finally answered.

"We'll only be a minute. I've brought the girls."

"Hi, Mrs. Buber," Gracie called.

Her father instructed Gracie and Lulu to talk to Lena Buber while he strung-up the lights. When Lulu refused, Gracie promised they'd ask about Sallyann. Lulu held her nose, even in the living room, even when Mrs. Buber, who sat in the same chair in the same gloom, slowly turned her head to examine them.

"You are your mother," she said.

Gracie, for some reason, wasn't shocked by the comment. "Everyone says I look like her."

"Where's Sallyann?" Lulu asked.

"Your younger sister has her hair, and maybe her mouth," Lena Buber continued in the scary voice of someone who hasn't spoken aloud in a while.

"But you are her, as she is you." She refocused on Lulu, her gaze suddenly clearing. "Stop pinching your nose, child. The smell is not so bad."

Lulu recoiled.

"Did you let Sallyann in from the balcony last night?" Gracie asked on her behalf.

Mrs. Buber shifted her attention to the curtained window overlooking the street. "It snows again?"

"It's freezing out."

"My husband is not home at the moment."

*Because he's dead,* Gracie did not say. She was fascinated by Lena Buber. Was she a person gone strange in the head from loneliness and grief, like her father thought, or maybe a ghost pretending to still be alive? Her father reappeared, his hair salted with snow. "I've run an electrical chord under the door to the plug in the room off the balcony, Lena. There's a timer on the lights. You don't need to touch them." Noticing Lulu cowering in the doorway, he asked her if she was all right.

"She's done something with Sallyann," Lulu whispered.

He turned to Lena Buber. "Do you need anything? Cat food, maybe? Clean litter?"

"Your oldest daughter, she will break hearts."

"Indeed she will."

"Young men will make fools of themselves to win her. They do such foolish things, young men. And boys. They take such risks."

He motioned to her and Lulu to withdraw.

"I'll check in again a bit later," he said to Mrs. Buber. "Maybe Sallyann will be back by then."

"The new people upstairs," she answered, "they are cry babies. Sob at all hours. Have they no shame? Everyone suffers. Everyone grieves."

In the landing, her father sighed and told the girls to ignore Lena Buber's comments about the Huis.

"Who?" Lulu asked.

"Mister and Missus," Gracie said. She was being patient with Lulu.

"Oh."

When Gracie said she thought Mrs. Buber might be a ghost, he told her to stop talking nonsense. She's just a sad old lady, he said. As far as he'd been able to learn, Lena and Yehiel Buber had lived at 5766B Esplanade for more than forty years. It was the only home they'd known in Montreal, and in Canada. A cousin mailed a cheque every month from Toronto and arranged for weekly cleaning and grocery delivery. Otherwise, with Yehiel gone, Lena had no one.

"But I shouldn't even be telling you this," he added, following them up the stairs. "It's grown up stuff."

"It's okay, Dad," Lulu said.

"Maybe I don't have enough adults to talk to anymore. Maybe I'm going strange in the head as well."

"You're a poet," Gracie said.

"And you're cheeky," he answered, tickling her under the arm.

Gracie considered telling her father she wasn't a little girl anymore, but didn't. Treating her like this made him feel better.

Chapter 5

"The family name is Hui," he explained to them outside the top-floor door.

"Pronounced 'Who-way,' I think."

"Who-way," Lulu said.

"That's not a name," Gracie said. "It's two words—'who' and 'way.'" "He's Hui Kaifeng and she's... " Dad frowned. "Actually, her last name is different. It's Zhao Xiaorong. 'See-ow-wrong.'" "See-ow-wrong," Lulu said.

"Two words and an ouch," Gracie said.

Mister answered the knock.

"Evening Kaifeng," Dad said.

"Good night," Mister answered.

"Hey, Mister," Lulu said.

"Beautiful girls!" Missus said. She glided down the hallway towards them, her walk so floating the hardwood sighed beneath her, instead of its usual squeaks. The sound reminded Lulu of what Mrs. Buber had said about the "people upstairs." To someone living below, especially an elderly person waiting for her husband to come home, wood sighs could easily be mistaken for sobs.

Lulu watched her sister hide behind their Dad for protection. Worried that Missus might feel hurt, Lulu rushed to her. When Missus, her eyes registering surprise and delight, extended her arms, Lulu walked straight into the hug, not caring what Gracie thought. Her sweater was bristly and also smelled like rice.

Missus made a funny sound, almost a hiccup. At once Lulu felt a tightening in her chest as well, and let go. She suddenly remembered what her own mother always smelled like—lemons.

"Well," Dad said, smiling at the couple. "How are you two holding up?"

Mister, who always kept his hands in his pockets, shrugged. Missus said they were holding up fine.

"My old man ran lights around the windows and along the porch railings of our house in Verdun," Dad said, raising the bundle of lights. "He also put a creche on our tiny lawn, with plastic figures of Mary and Joseph and the three wise men. We had a baby Jesus, a doll about the size of my hand, but someone kept stealing it.... " There was a silence. Lulu glanced at Gracie, who was chewing a clump of hair. Then she looked at Missus, and wondered why she wanted to hug her again, and maybe stand before a mirror while she combed *her* hair, which was a mess. Lulu didn't understand how kids at school could say Mister and Missus had no facial expressions. Mister, who'd been a doctor in China, had a forehead that wrinkled when he was puzzled and turned smooth when he was sad. His smile put his mouth inside brackets. Missus, who'd been a dancer, had cheeks that flushed pink and red and even purple when she got emotional. Her blackas- tar eyes laughed all the time, no matter what the rest of her face showed.

His name was *Who-way.* Her's was, what had her Dad said—*Awayouch- wrong?*" "Can I help?" Mister finally said.

The men went off together.

Lulu felt someone touching her hair. She spun around.

"Your hair, so lovely," Missus said. Her cheeks were flooding.

"A bird's nest," Gracie said.

"What are you doing for Christmas, Missus?" Lulu asked.

"Doing?"

"Our Mom is cooking us a huge meal, with candles and a tablecloth," her sister said, her tone almost angry.

"Your mother is home?"

"She called... I talked to her on the phone."

"You talked to Mom?"

"Shut up, Lulu."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I mean, she said so before she left. A turkey and mashed potatoes and a *buche Noel.* I know she'll be back."

"Good girls," Missus said.

Lulu wanted to cry. She also felt like messing up Gracie's hair until it was worse than her own. Luckily, she had a better idea.

"Missus," she said. "Can I ask you a question?"

Missus nodded.

Lulu asked her question.

"Sorry?"

"Where do you keep your dreams?" she asked again.

"Stupid," Gracie said.

But Missus didn't think so. She extended her hand, which Lulu was pleased to take. "Come," she said. "You also, Gracie. I show you."

Behind the kitchen was a small room with a window onto the alley. In their apartment, the room was reserved for Dad's poetry writing. Mister and Missus, who slept in the large bedroom, had put a single bed and a desk in there.

Also a blue rug and curtains. The walls were decorated with posters of Pokemon and Digemon and Hello Kitty.

"Here," Missus said, now flushed.

"What?"

"Where I keep my dreams."

"Under the bed?"

"Oh my God," Gracie said, covering her mouth.

Dad called from the hallway. The lighting job was done. They still had homework to finish.

"Don't you get it?" Gracie whispered to her.

"The house will look great now," he said to Mister and Missus. "Warm and welcoming, like a family home should." Lulu didn't get any of it, not a thing. She wanted to cry again.

Chapter 6

John Lemieux couldn't believe what he was seeing and hearing. His eldest daughter sat at the kitchen table two nights later, sharing the letter she had found under the door in the furnace room at school. The letter written by Jimmy Nofolks, leader of the Milk Carton Kids. Hand-written, no less—he could makeout the script through the paper—and sounding very much like the thought processes of an adolescent boy. Grace was reading it without a giveaway grin or nervous laugh. She wore a red scarf over her head, oddly enough, tied into a knot at the base of her skull. The effect was to pin back her blazing eyes.

Give him credit: no bagels or cheese for this meal. Instead, lamb gyros and fries from the Greek place on Fairmount. He'd begged off work after just three hours of overtime—his supervisor had pleaded with him to stay longer, claiming they'd never sort through the Christmas mail—and ridden the Park Ave bus home in the dark. Lulu was picking at the lamb. Gracie was eating hair.

"'Dear Sir/Madam/Fair Youth,'" she read. "'Stop what you are doing.

Stop this instant. Emergency! Children are vanishing from their houses. Kids are being napped from schools. Think it's a bad dream? A ghost story? Sorry, it's true. It's true, and it's happening right here in Montreal, right this December, right now. Christmas is for family togetherness? Emergency! Families are being destroyed this holiday season. Dreams are being shattered.

"'My name? It doesn't matter. If you really need to know, it's Jimmy Nofolks, and I'm only one of dozens of kids trapped in the chamber below your school. Some of us are boys and some are girls. Same have pale skin and some more colour. There's a girl here who speaks Spanish and French but no English.

There's a boy from China who speaks only Chinese. We call him Pokemon Boy.

"'Christmas eve is when our hopes expire. We're praying Mr. Kowalyk will catch cancer before then, but I doubt it. He's too evil to get a disease. The sir or madam or fair youth who rescues us will have to deal with Mr. Kowalyk. It won't be easy—his breath is like an ashtray—but it can be done. And it MUST be done, before midnight on the 24th. Who is brave enough for this task? A boy with a hockey puck for a brain? Or a girl so smart she could probably skip a grade. I'm betting on the girl.

"'Your servant, JN.'" "Can I see?" Lulu said, reaching for the letter.

Gracie held it to her chest. "You'll get meat grease over it," she said.

"If you don't show," Lulu said, "I'll tell Dad about Pokemon."

"I'll kill you."

"I'll tell."

"Pokemon?" John said. "Isn't that the Japanese cartoon kids are so wild about? What's the character—some kind of mouse?" He watched, mesmerized, as his daughters glared at each other.

Without a word, Gracie slid the letter across the table. First Lulu examined it, and then John. No doubt now: the handwriting wasn't hers.

"What made you say it might be a ghost story?" he asked innocently.

Grace started to answer, but caught herself.

"And what's this about a Chinese boy?"

She repositioned the scarf on her head. "How would I know? I haven't even met Jimmy yet. But I will," she said. "And I'll save the Milk Carton Kids, since you obviously don't care."

The phone rang.

"I'll get it," Lulu said, bolting from her chair.

"I will," Gracie said.

They collided in the doorway. Gracie shoved her sister into the wall.

"Hello?" she said into the receiver. Lulu snatched the phone from her. Someone pulled someone's hair. Someone started to cry.

John roared at them. Not a yell—a roar so raw it scalded his throat. The girls froze. At once he felt nauseous, both for the terror he'd caused, and because of a thought: suppose the caller *was* her? She'd be deciding he'd lost it entirely.

She'd be hanging up and dialing the police to demand that they remove her daughters from the clutches of her estranged, and probably demented, husband.

He ordered them into their rooms. Lulu was trembling, tears streaking her cheeks like rain on glass. Gracie was defiant, but she'd also changed over to chewing her lip—a prelude to crying. She slammed her door.

After holding the receiver to his chest for maybe ten seconds, unconcerned that the caller might hear his heart pounding, John raised it to his ear. His voice sounded less chastened than exhausted, used up.

It was Hui Kaifeng.

"Sorry about that," John said.

Kaifeng apologized for bothering him. Was tomorrow afternoon still convenient? His mind was blank. "Tomorrow?"

His tenant reminded him.

"Of course," John said, recalling the arrangement. "Two o'clock at Immigration Canada on St. Catherines. We'll meet downstairs, like last time."

Hui Kaifeng was worried that John might get into trouble for leaving work early. He assured him they weren't busy at the post office. Then he asked that the couple remember to bring all their documentation, along with a certified cheque. That started Hui Kaifeng talking about the rent. John cut him off, saying he figured Kaifeng would be a successful doctor of herbal medicine one day soon, and he would pay him back then, with interest.

He had meant to bundle Lulu up and take her out to look for Sallyann in the alley behind the building. The cat had been missing for five days now, if you believed Lena Buber, which John wasn't sure he did. He'd noticed fresh paw prints on her balcony when he'd strung the lights, and heard meows from within the building the previous night. Why Lena would lie about Sallyann was a mystery. But perhaps she wasn't lying. Perhaps she was just muddled, her thoughts scattered across the continents and years.

Hours after the incident with his daughters, he still brooded, seated in his room behind the kitchen, not writing a poem, not even a single line about how a child's tears were like streaks of rain down a window pane. How easy it was to bully kids. How easy, and how shameful. The phone rang again at midnight, and though John should have raced into the dining room to snatch it up—both Gracie and Lulu had fallen asleep only after baths and bowls of cereal and abject apologies from their dad—he couldn't. Midnight in Montreal was, what, eight in the evening in Vancouver? The caller didn't leave a message, as usual.

Chapter 7

She had to talk to someone. She had to. Lulu, she couldn't trust. Her father, he'd revealed his dark heart the night before, screaming at his own children and blaming Gracie for what had happened. Now he was working late at the post office—he'd called and said he might not be back until nine or ten, and asked her to slip out to Lee's grocer and pick up some ham and cheese and a tin of soup they both liked, and yes, he realized she didn't turn twelve until January, and yes, he realized it was illegal to leave children alone under that age, and no, he wouldn't blame her one bit if she dialed 911 instead—which probably meant smoking cigarettes on the loading docks with other posties, and opening letters to Santa Claus, having a good laugh, and then destroying the evidence with their lighters.

Her best friend, Marie Lelievre, might be home, but Gracie hadn't told Marie, or anyone else at school, about her mother. The only people who knew the truth lived at 5766 Esplanade.

Ordering Lulu to watch TV, she snuck out the front and crossed to the landing. A split-second outside was enough to set her teeth chattering. The stairwell was just as cold, and she banged on Lena Buber's door like a child fleeing soldiers and snarling dogs. When Lena didn't answer she copied her father and cracked the door, saying: "Mrs. Buber? It's Gracie Lemieux, the one who looks like her Mom."

"My husband is not here right now."

"I'm alone."

There was a silence. Gracie slipped into the apartment. The mildew stink wasn't as bad this evening. She barely heard the radio.

"The puss-puss has come to no harm," Lena Buber finally said.

"I'm not here about Sallyann."

Another silence. Twice, Lena Buber began a question. Gracie could almost visualize the old woman arranging the words in her head.

"What... what do you they teach you in school... these days?"

Gracie sat on a foot stool. Only then did she remember that she'd tied her hair with another scarf. A blue one, Lena's favourite color. Noticing the scarf, Lena Buber raised a hand to her own covered skull. A smile flitted across her features. Her swimming eyes struggled to calm.

"I read *The Diary of Anne Frank* a couple of weeks ago," Gracie said to her own surprise.

"Yes?"

"I didn't leave my bedroom for two whole days. My father left sandwiches outside the door."

"Children suffer for the sins of their parents."

"He tried to feed me," Gracie explained, "but I was too busy reading. He says I'm a bit intense," she added, thinking of her father preparing all those hamand- mayo sandwiches, the crusts cut off, for her.

The old woman asked if she wanted to sit on the couch, which was covered in plastic. But Gracie decided she was happier on the stool. She liked gazing up at Lena. It felt right, sitting at her feet studying her, as though before a statue in a church—of a saint or an ancient Virgin Mary.

"Is that your son?" she said, indicating the photographs on the table next to her chair.

"Uri," she answered. A name, apparently.

"Did he die?"

"He was lost."

Words that Gracie suspected her father would call 'inappropriate' raced out her mouth before she could stop them. "Was he taken away? Or did he try and hide?"

When Lena Buber buried her face in her hands, Gracie thought she'd gone and done the worst thing imaginable—made an old person cry. A minute went by. The radio nattered. TV light flickered across her back. There was a knock, probably upstairs, and floorboards sobbed as Mister or Missus answered it.

But then Lena dropped her hands, and Gracie understood she had it wrong.

In a clear voice, her gaze unblinking, Lena Buber told her a story. It took ages, and didn't always make sense, but Gracie thrilled to every detail. There were Nazis in the story, and trains to camps, like the one where Anne Frank died, and hiding places, and then another kind of camp, this time for 'displaced persons,' called DPs. There was a different train to Italy and a boat crammed with DPs, bound for Palestine, a country where they might be allowed to stay.

Among the DPs were a mother and a father and their nine-year-old boy. The ship had to pretend it wasn't carrying human cargo. It had to slip across the Mediterranean unnoticed. Three days out of port, the boy, who was curly-haired and monkey-limbed, busy climbing ladders and dangling from railings, stepped on a nail. A sharp, rusty nail. A few hours later a doctor who had no medicine, not even a kit, diagnosed an infection. Lockjaw, a funny word. The boy couldn't keep water down. His muscles began to seize up. Medicine, simple medicine, would cure the lockjaw. He had to hold on until Palestine.

Once Lena Buber had finished, Gracie chewed her hair and adjusted her scarf. Then she started telling a story of her own. It was about the Milk Carton Kids and evil Mr. Kowalyk , Jimmy Nofolks and the letter she found. She even talked about what was going to happen on Christmas Eve at the Port of Montreal, and how someone had to do something.

Before Gracie could tell if this was a good idea—and she really wasn't certain, and might have asked her parents for advice, except neither of them were around—she had Lena Buber convinced they had to save those kids together.

"The boy is dying," Mrs. Buber said.

"Dying?" "He must be saved!" "It's an incredible story," Gracie agreed, a little confused.

Chapter 8

Lulu was scared. Her sister had gone out without telling her. Her Dad was working late to make sure Santa got all his letters in time. She'd eaten almost no dinner—Gracie had bought cream of broccoli soup and smelly cheese—and now she sat abandoned in the apartment, listening to the ceiling groan and the walls whisper. As well, Lulu had been waiting since breakfast to share the dream that had shaken her awake during the night, trailed her back to sleep, and still been there when she opened her eyes in the morning. She really wanted to tell her Dad, who would call it "interesting" and maybe write it down in his notepad.

Telling the dream to Gracie wouldn't be as enjoyable, but she'd do it, because she was lonely.

Missus answered the knock almost before she had finished knuckling the wood. Her pink cheeks cheered Gracie at once. So did her hug, which was still unexpected, though less so than the other day.

"Have you got any rice?" Lulu asked, figuring it was a safe bet.

"You are hungry?"

"My Dad is still at work."

Missus raised a hand to her mouth, as though in shock at the news.

Mister appeared in the doorway. She spoke to him in Chinese. He winced.

"Our fault," she said. "Sorry, Lulu."

Lulu had no idea what she was talking about. Both Mister and Missus seemed cheerful and excited this evening. Mister had lost his slouch and kept touching his wife on the arm. He smiled for so long that Lulu eventually realized it wasn't at anyone in particular—just a smile, because he was happy.

Missus was certainly paying attention to her, first fixing her a bowl of rice with salt—they had no butter in their fridge—and then sitting across from her at the table.

The rice, from a cooker on the counter, was fluffy and delicious. Lulu asked for more.

"Your father, he is kind man."

"Mrs. Buber says he's a boy scout."

Missus crinkled her eyes.

"He can't really cook," Lulu said, not exactly an explanation.

"Okay."

As Missus placed a second bowl on the table, she cleared the hair from Lulu's face and looped it behind her ears. That felt nice.

"Please," Mister said.

Please what? Eat rice? The way the couple were watching her, Lulu swore they were proud that she was eating food in their kitchen.

"I had a dream last night," she said.

"A nice one?"

"Dreams can't come true, can they?"

"Yes they can!" Missus said. Mister looked puzzled, and she spoke again in Chinese. He laughed, a sound Lulu had never heard him make before. The laugh, along with a smile, changed Mister into a younger man. He excused himself to go buy a Christmas tree and decorations, including a what-do-youcall- it, a stocking, for Santa to fill with presents.

"I dreamed that an orange and white kitty wants to be fed," Lulu said, the images once more before her eyes. "It comes to our alley door. I give it food to make sure it keeps returning. It meows. It also holds onto the door screen and rattles it so I know it's out there. But then Dad says I have to stop feeding Orangey-the-cat. He says its claws are wrecking the screen. He also says that whenever I let the animal into the apartment it sprays stuff, causing a stink."

Though her cheek's darkened, Missus kept quiet.

"It's winter," Lulu said, "and every night the cat rattles the screen door so I'll feed it and bring it in from the cold. Dad says I can't do this any more. He says he'll punish me if I open the door. After a few weeks the rattling stops. He won't admit it, but he knows something bad has happened to Orangey. He knows it has frozen or starved. Then one night I hear the rattling and sneak down the hallway. I open the door, but there's no cat hanging off the screen. I go back to bed. Next night, I hear it again. This time, I bring a flashlight and shine it into the alley. The snow is piled as high as the screen, and I see paw prints. Orangey is out there! It's freezing and starving and it needs my help... " Lulu had stopped eating the rice. She'd stopped being sure where she was and who she was talking to. Was she even telling the dream out loud? She'd told it inside her head all day.

Suddenly a brush was being drawn through her hair, not tugging, despite the branches and twigs. Missus ran the brush across her scalp and down to her neck, over and over. Lulu purred.

"I have to rescue Sallyann," she said, yawning.

"Your father and mother love you," Missus said into her ear.

"The cat... at the door... " Missus, whose real name, she remembered, was See-ow-wrong, had once been a dancer. That explained how she could lift an eight-year-old and carry her to the bed in the room behind the kitchen.

Chapter 9

For a moment, he'd thought it was all over. His life, his hopes, in ruins. At tenthirty the night before, a weary John Lemieux had stepped off the bus into a prairie blizzard. The two blocks along Bernard had been pure white-out, and he'd walked with his head down and his scarf up to his eyes. A crew had been clearing Esplanade. Behemoths with funnels like Saskatechewan combines had inhaled snow mounds and showered them into dump trucks. The child-waking clangor, the menace of machines operating in the dark, had agitated him. It would be good to get inside. Make tea and check the messages. Kiss his sleeping girls on the cheeks.

Instead, he'd found an empty apartment and no note. Blame Gracie's lunatic obsession, and his own fatigue, for his next thought: his daughters had been abducted. Gracie Lemieux, age 11, and Lucille Lemieux, age 8, of Mile End, Montreal, gone missing the night of December 22nd from their ground-floor apartment. Emergency! How was this possible? Easy. A mother wallowing in her unhappiness in British Columbia. A father befuddled equally by responsibility and poetry, neither his strength.

The message machine had been blinking. Sure enough, it was her.

Finally. Calling from a pay phone in Surrey. Asking about her darling girls, who she sorely missed, but not about him, who she apparently did not miss.

Wondering how it was they'd all be out so late on a weeknight. Wondering if everything was okay. She was okay, but lonely for her children, and so sorry she wouldn't be home for Christmas. She'd call, though. On the day. She wouldn't forget to-- The machine had cut her off. Just as well, for her voice had gone soft and self-pitying. John had erased the message. He didn't want Gracie or Lulu to hear it. Only later that night had he realized how badly *he* wanted to listen to her voice, the voice of his wife, once or twice or maybe a hundred times more.

And his girls?... Panic had surged back into his brain, displacing the anger. Mercifully, a knock on the door had spared him further anguish. Hui Kaifeng had assured John that Lulu, asleep in their apartment, was fine. Then, climbing to the third floor, he had noticed that Lena Buber's door was ajar. He collected Gracie on the way back down, Lulu sprawled over his shoulder like a rolled-up rug. What a tableau he had framed in that grim living room: a young girl wearing a blue scarf curled on a plastic-covered couch while an old woman in similar headgear slumbered in a chair. Light bathing them both, from a muted television and Christmas bulbs flickering outside the window.

Now it was dinner on the 23rd, a respectable meal of sausages and macaroni, and Gracie was out of control. She'd donned a costume for today's performance: a white sweater streaked with dirt, pebbles in her hair and scratches on her cheeks. (He didn't want to know how she'd managed the scratches.) Lulu found her sister so riveting she held a sausage aloft on her fork, forgetting it was there. John's own attention was divided, for his younger daughter had never looked more beautiful to him, and he couldn't figure why.

"I went right up to Mr. Kowalyk in the cafeteria this morning and told him I knew everything," Gracie was saying. "I knew about the Milk Carton Kids and I knew about their courageous leader, Jimmy Nofolks. I even knew about the Pokemon boy, and shame, shame on him for doing that to Mister and Missus, who are helpless immigrants basically freezing to death here in Canada."

"What in the world?... " John managed to say.

"Mr. Kowalyk grabbed my sweater and pulled me to his face. His eyes were bloody and his breath reeked. He said he knew a few things as well. Like how Lulu and me had been abandoned in the apartment last night, and could easily have disappeared. How we could have ended up in the cavern with those other kids, and maybe we could end up there still. 'One more night and more day, Missy,' he said. 'Plenty of time to snatch up two extra neglected brats.'" Lulu's sausage rode high on her fork.

"I told him to come get me anytime. I said you were always either at work or lost in some poem. I said my Mom had given up hope and left us. I also told Mr. Kowalyk he wouldn't get away with it. I told him the Port of Montreal wasn't big enough to hide what he and his ex-sailor friends were going to try tomorrow night. I told him I'd be there, and so would *my* friends, and we'd stop him. Then I raced out of the cafeteria to make contact with Jimmy."

Make contact with Jimmy? Why not. Why not bring the boy back for dinner, once this was over. "Don't wave your food, Lulu," John said without much authority, even to his own ears.

Once again, Gracie was dining on hair only tonight. "I'd spent hours squatting next to different drain covers in the school yard. One of them had to open onto the cavern. It had to. Otherwise, how could the Milk Carton Kids breathe down there? I'd heard voices coming up from the drain directly behind the furnace room, and had jammed a stick under the cover. At lunch hour I waited until everyone had gone back in and then pried off the lid. 'Hello?' I shouted. The hole was narrow, but I forgot about the cold and removed my coat.

I wanted to slide head first, to see Jimmy's face, but I knew if I did I wouldn't be able to climb back out."

John, who now held his head in his hands, murmured: "Good thinking."

"You're so brave," Lulu said.

"I was maybe ten feet down when a voice answered my calls. 'Are you Jimmy Nofolks?' I asked. 'It doesn't matter who I am,' he replied. 'I'm the girl who found your note,' I said. 'Sorry to have to tell you, but Mr. Kowalyk hasn't caught cancer.' He went quiet for a second. 'Can *you* help us?' he said. 'I'll try,' I said. 'Are you smart?' he asked. 'My teacher says I could probably skip Grade Six,' I answered. 'I'm Jimmy,' he said at last. 'And I'm Gracie,' I said.

'Nice to meet you.'" "Wow," Lulu said.

"Then," Gracie said after a pause, "I told him our plan."

John looked back up. "Plan?" he said.

"We're going to intercept the shipment at the port tomorrow night. We're going to stop this tragedy from happening."

"We are?"

"Mrs. Buber wants to come with us."

"Dear God."

"She knows how important it is."

"What did you tell her, Gracie?"

"Her apartment smells funny," Lulu said.

"Not a chance," John said. He looked at Lulu, who once again struck him as transformed, and then at Gracie, whose smile made him want to throw his plate against the wall.

"Her hair," Gracie said.

"Sorry?"

"Missus fixed Lulu's hair."

"That's it. It looks great. She looks so much like her-- " "Six o'clock tomorrow. You can be back from work then, can't you, Dad? It's Christmas eve."

"Not a chance, Gracie."

"Has our mother called yet?" Gracie said, staring at him. "She didn't by any chance leave a message last night, did she—one that somehow got erased?"

Chapter 10

The driver was confused about where he was supposed to take his passengers.

Gracie explained twice, and the cabbie finally drove to the church in Old Montreal where sailors prayed before heading out to sea. "You're looking for sailors, right?" he asked. According to his identification tag, his name was Emile Dupuy. In answer to Lulu's rude question, he said he was from Haiti. Emile Dupuy wore a red sweater and a Santa hat with a pompon. Not many drivers in his company had volunteered for the Christmas eve shift, he said. But he figured this was a night for adventures. Though Emile Dupuy tried to make eye contact with her father, using the rear-view mirror, Gracie insisted on giving the instructions. It was her mission, after all. Her father was here only because they needed his cash. Lulu was here only because there'd been no one around to babysit. (Even Mister and Missus had gone out.) Lena Buber was seated next to the cabbie, staring at the snowflakes bombing the windshield, because?... Gracie wasn't sure, and worried it had more to do with a boy who'd stepped on a rusty nail than the Milk Carton Kids.

"This is totally crazy," her father said.

She chewed her hair.

"We haven't trimmed the tree. I haven't bought food for tomorrow." He whispered his next sentence into her ear. "And Santa isn't even quite ready to visit the house tonight."

"Santa," Emile Dupuy said, "he is ready all year!"

His booming laugh shook snow off the roof. The car still idled outside the church on Rue Bonsecours.

"Is he Santa Claus?" Lulu asked.

The driver roared again.

Finally, Gracie unfolded a piece of newspaper and passed it up front.

"We're looking for this," she said.

Emile Dupuy switched on the light and examined a photo of a ship docked along a pier. Visible on the prow was the name ANASTASIA.

"Where'd you get that, Gracie?"

"Jimmy told me to check yesterday's Gazette for a story about a Russian ship leaving Montreal today. He said it was the one."

Her father's face drained of expression. He leaned forward and scanned the paper, looking, she suspected, for a date. But Gracie had been careful to cut out only the photograph.

"Big boats like that," the cabbie said, "they dock in the container port in East Montreal. Miles from here."

"Take us," he said.

Though she had not moved or swivelled her head to glance at the photo, Lena Buber spoke. "The Romanovs were no better or worse than other aristocrats of their era. An entire family wiped out, without a trace."

Even Emile Dupuy went quiet at those words. He removed his hat and drove with both hands on the wheel. Fifteen minutes later, having negotiated snow-blown streets lined with factories and storage depots and industrial buildings, they passed an unmanned guard's booth onto a wharf. Massive shadows, like giant statues under cloaks, lined one side of the road, each with its own pier and its own guard booth. Few of the piers showed activity. Few had lights trained on them. To Gracie's surprise, her father encouraged the driver to keep searching for a ship that resembled the one in the newspaper. When they finally found a pier in use he demanded the cab try driving onto it. A guard blocked them.

"This man," Emile Dupuy said, "he will not let us through."

"I will speak to him."

Amazingly, Lena Buber opened her own door. The driver got out and slipped around the hood. He took her arm. Gracie, along with her sister and father, watched through the windshield. Mrs. Buber seemed to do most of the talking, her breath, illuminated by the lights, like tassels of smoke.

"The guard gives us ten minutes on the pier," Emile Dupuy reported, after he'd assisted her back to her seat. "This lady spoke his language."

"French?"

"Romanian," Mrs. Buber answered. "The man, whose name is Shotz, emigrated a few years after Yehiel and myself. Thirty-six years he works the same job. Retires in March to a house in Ville Saint Laurent. Two daughters and two sons. Three grandchildren, so far."

She sighed, for her own reasons.

The cabbie drove slowly for a hundred feet, stopping short of where a crane, barely visible through the snow, was transferring container boxes across an expanse of darkness into, presumably, the belly of the ship.

"Let's go," her father said.

Lena Buber spoke again. "A child plays because a child dreams of play," she said, apparently to him. "It is grown-ups who must be awake all the time."

Lulu decided this was her cue to speak. She would. "Where do you keep your dreams, Mrs. Buber?"

Gracie groaned.

But Lena Buber treated the question as normal. "On that boat," she answered, her gaze settled back onto nothing. "On the ANASTASIA."

Everyone, including Emile Dupuy, hunched over to peer up at the ship's prow. There was a name up there, but the snowfall obscured it.

"Five minutes, Gracie," her father said. "Lulu, stay in the car with Mrs.

Buber."

The driver turned off his meter. When her father thanked him, he wished him a Merry Christmas in French.

Outside, the cold slapped Gracie's cheeks. The darkness, not of the night but the boat, a mountain of black steel, made her shiver. "They're here somewhere," she said in a smaller voice than intended.

He turned up his collar.

"I bet Mr. Kowalyk and the others are pretending to be loading it," she said. "The kids are probably in one of those boxes."

"Chinese people sometimes attempt to flee their country by hiding in cargo containers," he said. "They spend weeks locked inside, no escape possible, praying they won't run out of air."

She didn't know how to answer. She also didn't like how he was studying her.

"Lena Buber and her husband barely survived a world war, and then had to be smuggled in a derelict ship to start their lives over again. Their son died when he was younger than you are now."

"So?" Gracie said, meaning: *Why are you scolding me?* "Look, Gracie," he said more kindly, "if you run behind that container there you'll find Jimmy Nofolks and the other kids. You'll have no trouble breaking the lock and setting them free. If you're quiet, and quick, Mr. Kowalyk and his evil friends won't even notice."

She hadn't noticed the solitary container on the pier, maybe fifty feet from the cab. In the dark, the box was barely visible. How had her father spotted it? At first, Gracie thought his eyes were brimming with the usual sadness. Then, fixing on them shyly, she decided it was alertness, almost energy, causing them to shine. He was a handsome man, she decided. She hoped she looked like him as well.

"I'm proud of you," he said.

"I'm scared."

"I'll wait right here."

"It's so dark."

"You have the courage, and the grace. It's in your name. Go on."

Gracie stepped beyond the rim of the taxi light, into the black, towards the container.

Chapter 11

Something about how her Dad draped his arm around her older sister in the back seat, and how Gracie tucked her head into his shoulder, warned Lulu not to ask any questions. All he said was, "It's done now," and told the driver to return to Mile End. Lulu was glad it was done, and that Gracie seemed happy and safe.

But she wished they'd include her in their happiness. She wouldn't mind not feeling scared for once. She could use a hug right about now.

She started talking. "Mr. Dupuy plays drums in a club on St. Lawrence Boulevard, not far from our school. He was telling me and Mrs. Buber. He works until nine o'clock on Fridays and Saturdays, and then bangs drums with his friends until late, even if he has to drive the cab the next day. Don't you, Mr.

Dupuy?"

The cabbie drummed on the wheel.

"And Mrs. Buber's boy, Uri, he was given a harmonica by a passenger who'd been a gypsy musician before the war. He played it on the boat, driving everyone crazy, and cutting his lips. You can't slide a harmonica over your mouth all day. Did Uri know any songs, Mrs. Buber?"

Lena Buber stared out at the night, and the snow, as though she hadn't heard her name called.

"Did he dance while he played?"

"My husband," she finally said, "is not home at the moment."

Lulu glanced at her Dad. He shook his head.

They drove the rest of the way in silence.

"Well, I sure got my adventure," Emile Dupuy said as the cab pulled up in front of their building. His laugh tinkled the icicles hanging from the window frames.

Her Dad asked her and Gracie to wait in the landing while he saw Mrs.

Buber up the stairs. Then he walked them to the corner of Bernard. Lee's grocer was closed, but a light glowed in the apartment at the rear, where the family lived. He knocked on the door until Mrs. Lee appeared in a housecoat.

"Sorry, Mrs. Lee," he said. "I know what hour it is, and what night. But I'm desperate."

"You need one or two things?"

"We need everything."

They each carried a grocery bag. Back outside their building, Lulu stared up at the balcony, hoping she might spot Sallyann poking her head between railings or licking an icicle. Her Dad told her the cat was probably fine.

"Have you seen her in the last week?"

"Not exactly."

"Did you notice footprints in the snow in the alley?"

He looked at her.

"Were there rips in the backdoor screen?"

"What screen?"

"It's her dream, Dad," Gracie said.

He asked.

"Never mind," Lulu said, running inside. She felt strange about the dream now, in part because it didn't have anything to do with her Mom, and in part because she doubted it would end as well as Gracie's story.

"Tell me," her Dad said. "You know how I love to hear your dreams."

She hesitated.

"It's where I keep mine."

"What?"

"Where do I keep my dreams, Lulu? In yours, of course. And in your sister's."

"Weird," Gracie said.

But Lulu didn't think it was weird. She thought it was lovely. Asking him for a big hug, she cried when he wrapped his arms around her and raised her up, his smell, of damp earth and hair cream, so cozy and warm. For the next hour they trimmed the tree together, using lights and tinsel and the glass bulbs their mother had always bought each of them at Christmas. Lulu talked the entire time, stopping only when the creek of footsteps in the stairwell—a lot of footsteps, it seemed to her—caused her Dad to glance at the ceiling, and to smile.

The phone rang.

"Please don't fight over it," he said.

Gracie answered. "It's just Mister."

*His name is Hui Kaifeng,* Lulu told herself.

The longer he listened to Hui Kaifeng talk, the more her dad smiled. "A perfect ending," he finally said. Before hanging up, he invited the couple to share Christmas dinner with them.

"What is it?" Gracie asked.

"A secret."

"Mom?"

Even Lulu knew that was dumb. "It's the cat," she said. "Missus must have found Sallyann."

"Santa will be here any minute," he said, chasing them to their rooms.

Lulu listened while he dialled a phone number, inviting someone else to dinner as well. Gracie was taking a shower, and didn't hear.

"A second secret," he said to her. "Don't tell your sister, okay?"

"I won't sleep all night," Lulu said.

"Your hair looks beautiful, Lulu. *You* look beautiful. Both of you. Both my girls."

"Won't sleep a wink," she said again.

Chapter 12

He wrote through most of the night and cooked for most of the morning. The meal was a mess but the poem was tidy. His head was heavy but his spirits were soaring. She was gone, and had left the love. He was right here, basking in it.

Okay, he had wept a little in the wee hours, and drank rum. Okay, the bottle was a third empty before he remembered to add the eggnog. How he missed her voice, and her touch, and her scent. He rifled through her closet again before dawn and debated tossing her remaining clothes into the alley.

Instead, he spread them over their bed, and passed out on top.

John Lemieux was ready as he ever would be for Christmas dinner.

Mike Kowalyk arrived first.

"Oh my God," Gracie said. "How did?-- " "The only M Kowalyk in the phone book," John explained.

"Are these your girls?" the school janitor asked. He had shaved and combed his hair and put on a wrinkled suit with a red tie. At once, John knew he had been right to invite him.

He introduced Lulu first, Grade Three, Mrs. Etting, and then Gracie, Grade Six, Mrs. O'Brien. Gracie dove behind the sofa.

"I recognize the little girl," Mike Kowalyk said, smiling his smoker's smile.

"Quite the chatterbox. But the older one... Gracie, is it?"

No sound came from behind the couch.

"She's a bit shy," John said.

The guest sat in the chair next to the tree. "Can't say I wasn't surprised to get your invitation, John. Surprised and pleased. Lucky for me I shared that cigarette with you back in November, eh?"

"He's quit," Gracie called out.

"Is that so?"

John shrugged.

"A better man than me."

"You can't smoke in here," Gracie offered as well. "It's not allowed."

John addressed his daughter by name.

"I won't light up, I promise," the janitor said. "But only if you show me your sweet face."

"Eggnog?" John asked him.

He hesitated.

"Spiked?"

"Now you're talking," Mike Kowalyk said.

Mister and Missus arrived next. John ordered the girls into the hallway to greet them. He wanted to see their reactions.

"Gracie and Lulu," Zhao Xiaorong announced, "this is our son Gianbao."

She ushered in a small boy who'd been hiding behind her. He was four, with a mop of black hair and his mother's eyes. He kept his gaze lowered and his hands at his side, like a toy soldier.

"My boy," Hui Kaifeng said. He beamed, and his wife was smiling so hard her chin quivered.

The girls were speechless—a moment John would savour forever.

"He speaks only little English," Xiaorong said.

Gianbao glanced up at his mother, pleadingly.

"Did he come by boat?" Lulu asked.

"Airplane," Hui Kaifeng answered. "From Shanghai. Just last night."

"I figured he'd be wearing Pokemon pyjamas or something," Gracie said.

"Pokemon!" Gianbao said.

"Welcome," John said. "Welcome, everyone."

A half hour later, he slipped out the front door and up the stairs. Two knocks and then John turned the knob. The door was locked. It was never locked; Lena was always home, in her chair, waiting for her husband, and perhaps her son, to return. He tried again with mounting unease. Then he felt something brush against his leg.

"Sallyann!" Lulu said when he presented her with a warm, well-fed, obviously healthy cat.

"I found her in the stairwell."

"Is Mrs. Buber coming to dinner?" Gracie asked.

"Lena doesn't feel well," he replied without hesitation. "But she wishes you both a Merry Christmas."

"Kitty," Lulu explained to Gianbao, who'd already taken to following her around. "K-I-T-T-Y."

"*Mao,*" the boy answered.

After dinner, John announced that he'd like to read a poem. His voice cracked even as he said those words and his heart thumped against his chest.

Before he could change his mind—she'd been right about one thing: he had trouble opening up to people, especially about personal matters—he unfolded a sheet of paper. Were the stains on the paper tears or rum? It hardly mattered now.

"Bakers work and balconies rise-- soon the snow will turn to loaves outside our swelling house.

By day I watch the tears on a pane and feel the pain that tears a loving hand from a child.

At night I hear the call of ships in the seaway. Are their sailors lonely for a missing son? A cat keeps rattling the screen.

I ask the darkness if a man abandoned can drown himself in sheets.

But who said farewell to love? The land we live on is never frozen.

There was polite applause. John could expect no more, and was content to have committed the lines to the scrutiny of those he loved. So what if the poem was bad. He had experienced wholeness while writing it.

Oddly, when the phone rang maybe ten seconds after he had finished, no one sprang to answer. Except for Mike Kowalyk, no one even seemed to hear the ring, as though all were caught in pose, actors at curtain fall. The janitor picked up the call on the fifth ring, just before the machine kicked in.

"Yes, he's here," Mike Kowalyk said. "Yes, they're here as well... You're calling from where?... Okay, I'll tell him... " John was on his feet and crossing to the phone.

END