When did we get a piano?
“Enough,” cries Mama, loud enough to hear through the glass. She comes into the room, both children following her. I take in my breath at the sight of her. She looks younger than I ever remember her looking, and her hair is smooth and styled. She’s wearing lipstick and a dress with a skirt that stands out around her legs like a bell. She speaks to Tad, then Sally, then closes the lid of the piano over the keys. Sally’s face brightens in response to whatever my mother is saying; the warmth of her joy radiates from her like heat. I can almost feel it through the windowpane.
They’ve decorated for Christmas: there’s a big tree in the corner of the room, with tinsel and colored lights on it, a star at the top. A store-bought star, not the one I made last year out of tinfoil. Last year Clyde drank the money for our tree, drank the money for all of Christmas. I put my clumsy star on the mantel, and we put our homemade presents under that. Sally believed in Santa then. The next day, after Santa brought nothing, I told Sally the truth. Clyde whipped me when he found out. I’d known he would, but how could I let Sally believe that Santa was punishing her?
“You said by Christmas,” I say in a low voice. The glass stops my words; no one hears them. “You said.”
And that’s when my mother turns in profile to me, and I can see that under her skirt is a baby, pushing her stomach out. Like Tad did before he came; like Sally.
I still have the matches. I strike a flame, hold it licking against the shutter. It makes an oval dark spot, growing until the heat reaches my fingertips, the paint bubbling up. I shake out the match, light another. I hold this match for a long time, letting my fingers burn too. It almost feels like more cold; it doesn’t bother me at all. The fire doesn’t catch; a house doesn’t burn as easily as a rosebush. A muffled boom of regret deep inside at that thought. I drop the dead match from between my blistered fingers. My greatest power proven weak and foolish, a small fist against the chest of a giant who doesn’t even notice the blow.
* * *
I HEAR A voice rising and falling. I am not at the house anymore, I am somewhere else. My heart pulls toward the voice. More than sequins, it says. More than kangaroos and twilight. It is an answer, to a question I didn’t know to ask.
* * *
“YOU’RE WAKING UP. . . you’re feeling refreshed.” Dr. Jellicoe’s voice narrates me up and away, back to the hospital and the squishy blue chair. My eyes unstick slowly, like they did the time I had pinkeye; I scrub at the lashes with a finger but there’s no gumminess there, just the hard crumbly stuff my mom calls sleep. My mom: a fuzzy pang, but then it’s gone.
“You need to try to describe more of what you’re seeing,” says Dr. Jellicoe. He taps the pad of paper in his lap with the point of his pen. “The only words I understood clearly were piano and cold. I need more to help you process.”
If you look closely at the poster in my room, you can see the ghosts of my previous Xs, faint lines where the marker didn’t get completely wiped away. Nothing is perfectly clean; there’s always a trace of what came before. If the poster were in this room now, I would X over all the faces. All of them, over and over again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
* * *
Lucy
ANTIBIOTICS OR NO? I CONSIDER as I carry a throat swab to the tube station in Trauma Alley. The rapid-strep test was negative, and sore throat without fever is most likely viral, meaning antibiotics would be pointless. But the patient told me she’s convinced it’s strep, and after waiting two hours to be seen she’ll want something more than a list of instructions.
I load the bagged specimen into one of the capsules and press one for the lab. A rumble of suction starts deep in the building, the machine shuddering as the pressure builds. I decide: I’ll write for three days of antibiotics and then the primary doc can extend the prescription if the two-day culture is positive. As if in agreement, the valve in the tube station opens, and the capsule is sucked away.
There’s a tweedy man lurking just inside the double doors to the ambulance bay. A plainclothes detective?
“Are we getting more vics?” I ask him. We had a shooting earlier in the night. With gang violence there’s always the possibility of a retaliative second round.
“Are you Dr. Lucy Cole?” he asks.
I’ve barely said yes when he hands me an envelope and says the words I have dreaded for my entire professional career.
“You’ve been served.”
And he’s gone, leaving me to rip open the envelope, every nurse and tech in earshot eyeing me, while trying to appear not to. They want to know what case it is, did they work on that patient, will they be named too.
I pull the sheaf of paper from the manila enclosing it, enough to read the front page: REIDY vs. COLE. Confusing me for a minute. My husband’s suing me for malpractice?
Of course not.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
* * *
Clare
A SPELL OF MILD WEATHER BLEW in from somewhere, an Indian summer. It was Roscommon’s slack season, when even the squash plants were done and the cemetery needed little care. The garden patch had already been sown with winter rye to protect the soil from the long chill ahead. If Leo had been there, he’d have found a dozen things for us to waste time on, pestering me to teach him more French or to let him try to fix the broken radio. He had been talking about making a kite.
I gave the cottage a thorough airing, opening all the windows and the front door and dragging the furniture out onto the grass. I deep-cleaned the rooms from top to bottom, poking with a dust-cloth-wrapped broom at the cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings and boiling gallons of water to scrub a long season’s dirt out of the floors. While the floors were drying, I turned my attention to the pathetic assembly outside, the bed frame and settee and nightstand and kitchen table and rocking chair jumbled in the front yard.
I was lying on my back under the bed frame, ruthlessly disrupting the home of a spider with my dust cloth, when a pair of legs appeared to my right. I put my head out and peeked up to see the underside of the mending-basket, and far above that, the farmer’s face.
“Have you been burning leaves?” he asked, sniffing, with a slight frown; bonfires were inadvisable in a dry spell.
“Just leave the basket on the step,” I told him. “I’ll have the mending for you by day after tomorrow.”
He didn’t move, despite the dismissal in my tone. His face was puzzled.
“Do you need help getting any of this inside?” he asked.
“No, thank you.” I went back under the bed frame, and after a minute or two I heard the basket placed on the step and footfalls moving away.
Moving the furniture back inside, I caught a glimpse of myself in the window glass. With my face streaked with soot and the leaves caught in my hair, I looked like a madwoman. No wonder the farmer had been bemused. The embarrassment I felt was followed quickly by defiance: I could look as I wished; that’s part of the luxury of living alone.
After three days I stood in the middle of the house, with nothing left to do. The place was clean, even the insides and outsides of the windows. I had waxed the kitchen drawer that had squeaked for half a year; I had scrubbed and polished the cutlery and glassware and put it back onto freshly washed cupboard shelves. I’d even poked a broom up the chimney to knock the soot loose. I had mended and laundered and folded my entire meager wardrobe; the farmer’s clothing was laundered and mended and folded too, and was stacked neatly in the basket waiting to be collected. Outside, the woodpile stood taller than my head. I was clean too, having taken a long bath and washed my hair, combing it out and letting it dry in the sun before pinning it back up again.
The little house seemed much emptier and quieter than it ever had before; the hours ahead stretched empty. The cat was dozing by the fire; the sun was low in the sky. I was exhausted. I should go to bed. But instead I bundled myself up and hurried outside as though I had an appointment.
A quarter of an hour late
r, I stood on the front step at St. William’s, waiting for a minion to fetch Prior Charles.
“I’ve come about Leo,” I said when the door opened again. But then I didn’t have any next words: Why had I come?
“I’m not surprised,” Prior Charles said. “Well, send him back then.”
“He’s not with me,” I said. “I thought he was here.”
He sighed. “I expect he’s run away again. I thought all that had stopped.” I remembered what he’d told me: he tends to wander. Was that what he’d meant?
“He’s been gone days. You didn’t notice?”
“I thought he was with you.” His voice was casual. Perhaps having charge of so many boys made a person relaxed about having misplaced just one. “I’ll send someone to Waite to get him tomorrow.”
“He could have gotten to Boston by now.”
“Oh, I doubt that. We’ll find him where we always do—at his mother’s house.” I must have looked surprised, because he went on: “Leo’s not an orphan. His mother gave him up to the state earlier this year. But he keeps going back there. We even shaved his head at one point, to make him easier to spot in town.” He paused, thoughtful. “Maybe we should have kept it shaved.”
I had a sudden sharp memory of Leo, squinting in the summer sunlight, telling me that story about lice. The truth shamed him. Of course it would: his mother, his own mother, had given him away. And she was nearby enough to tantalize him, but always out of reach. No wonder he’d been so angry when he thought I was trying to replace her. I felt sorry for the woman I didn’t know; it must have been a desperate thing to give up her child. I wondered what dire circumstances had forced her into it.
“I don’t know why she hasn’t brought him back yet,” said the prior. “We’ll go get him tomorrow, and send him on over to you. After suitable punishment, of course.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want him.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I’ve given it more thought,” I said. “There’s not enough work to be done in winter. And the cottage really is too small for two.” The bells rang from the chapel: Vespers. I had no idea it was that late. “I’ll let you get to your praying.”
The time with Leo had been only an interlude, I told myself. It had been a brief passage, now closed, like a set of parentheses, in the life I had made for myself. I had chosen an isolated road deliberately; the deviation to take in Leo had been a misstep. I did not need to look again at the carnage of the roses to tell me that.
I could still smell them as I walked in that singed air up the path to the cottage. I slammed the door behind me, too quickly; the little wooden bar that fit into the latch hadn’t fully dropped, and it hit the iron bracket so hard that it split, a chunk like a large tooth falling to the floor. I knelt to collect the fallen piece. It was old wood, brittle, cleaved along a diagonal. The remaining point of wood just barely reached into the bracket; one good gust would break it and swing the door wide open.
“Damn it,” I said.
“Are you all right?” I heard from behind me. I wheeled around: James, the farmer, was standing by the hearth.
“What are you doing here?” Surprised into rudeness, and embarrassed that he’d witnessed my cursing.
“I came for the mending—”
“It’s right there where it always is.”
“—and I heard your cat crying from inside the chimney.” That silenced me. He made four legs with the fingers of one hand, put the other hand, flattened, beneath it. “He was on top of the flue.”
“He likes to climb things.” I had left the fireguard ajar after washing the hearth; Kitty must have pushed past it and, ever curious, climbed up through the flaps of the flue and then they’d fallen closed below him. “Is he all right?” It must have been a job getting him out. I noticed the soot on the farmer’s sleeves.
“He was a little scared, but he’s fine now.” He took a step to the side; I could see the fuzzy, exhausted curl of black-orange on the cushion of the settee, sides heaving slowly in sleep. I looked up and saw telltale smudges of soot on the thighs of the farmer’s trousers: he’d taken the cat onto his lap.
On a farm, dogs and cats had their uses, but they weren’t viewed as companions; they weren’t indulged and they certainly weren’t cuddled. I hadn’t expected that a farmer could spare pity for a small frightened cat, would take the time to comfort him.
“That was very kind of you,” I said. “Thank you.”
He nodded; he took the basket of mending from the table and carried it outside, shutting the door behind him so gently that the frail latch fell into place, the sliver of wood just long enough by a hair to keep the door closed.
“Kitty,” I said when the farmer was gone. I went over to the cat, put my hand on his back. He twitched his ears in his sleep. “You do have a talent for focusing the heart.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, TURNING over in bed, I heard a mew of protest, felt a set of warning claws against my foot. The cat was under the blankets. “Sorry,” I said, pulling my foot back. My breath made a cloud of fog that hung in the air. The temperature had dropped precipitously since the sun had gone down. I lay awake most of the night despite my weariness, with the cat warm and soft against my shins and the darkness pressing like a frosty hand against all the windows and the roof. I couldn’t stop the thought: where was Leo?
* * *
THE MONK APPEARED when I was outside adjusting burlap over the charred rosebushes in the crisp bright morning. They wouldn’t survive; I knew that. But I wasn’t able to bring myself to leave them naked and alone in the cold.
The monk loomed over the wall, his shadow falling across me. This is what it is, I reminded myself, to know people. They know where to find you to bring bad news.
I pulled the rough cord around the last bush and snipped the end with my shears, looping the two pieces together in a double fisherman’s bend. This wouldn’t be easy to untie again; it would have to be cut apart in the spring. But simpler knots often don’t hold.
“It’s about Leo, isn’t it?” I said.
The monk nodded, the top of his shadow bowing back and forth over my hands.
Quickly, I forced the images through my mind again, the ones I hadn’t permitted myself to linger on before. As if freshening them now would prepare me. Leo beaten, or trampled under the wheels of a motorcar. Frozen to death in an alley.
I looked up: it was Brother Silas. He’d been an oblate when I first met him, when he’d nursed me back to health. He was only a little younger than Prior Charles, but the years had changed him much less. He still had the thin frame and unlined face of a boy.
“What happened?” I asked. Steeling myself.
“He’s in the infirmary. He’s asking for you.”
Not dead? Not dead! And asking for me. My heart, which had felt stopped in my chest, was beating again. I got up without another word and followed Silas.
The infirmary had curtains tacked around the bottoms of the windows. All the beds were empty.
“Quarantine,” said Silas. He handed me a cloth from a bowl just inside the door. He took one also and placed it over his nose and mouth. I did the same and followed him across the room.
I could see that what had appeared to be a solid wall jutting into the corner of the room was actually a bedsheet, strung from a line along the ceiling to meet another sheet perpendicularly, making a rippling white box against the wall. Silas pulled at one of the sheets, making an inverted V opening for me to slip through.
There were no windows in the stone walls that made up two sides of the enclosure. A bedside table held a lamp and a ceramic pitcher and basin; in the dim light I could see Leo’s dark head against the pillow. His body made a tiny lump under the bedclothes and his hair was matted against his forehead. His eyes were closed. There was nothing else here: just the boy and the bed and the little table.
I went to the bedside, put my hand on Leo’s forehead. There was a rough quality to his skin, like sandpap
er.
“Clare,” he said, opening his eyes. His voice was a croak.
“Shh,” I said. “Don’t try to talk.”
“I killed your roses.”
“Never mind,” I said.
“They were a hundred years old,” he said with a glassy insistence. “From all the way across the ocean.”
“I made that up,” I said. “I don’t know where they’re from.”
“You loved them,” he said. He closed his eyes; the tears streaked down his cheeks.
There was a rustling noise behind me. I turned to see the upper part of Prior Charles’s long face, a cloth covering his nose and mouth, poking through the opening in the sheets. He motioned; Silas and I followed him out and across the room, into the hallway.
“I want to ask your help,” he said, taking the cloth down from his face. “I’ll understand if you refuse.”
“What is it?”
“He has scarlet fever. As you must know, it’s contagious,” said the prior. “We’re taking the usual precautions, but it could be a long ordeal. Weeks in bed.”
I wasn’t sure what he was proposing. Did he want me to come to the priory and nurse Leo?
“I’m not a nurse,” I said. “I don’t know what to do for scarlet fever.”
“There’s nothing really to do,” said Silas. “I’ll give him penicillin injections, but other than that, he just needs rest and basic care.”
“He can’t stay here,” said Prior Charles. It was not unkindly said, and I did see the sense in it: a hundred boys’ lives could not be put at risk for the comfort of one. “We could send him to the contagious ward in the hospital in Providence.”
I imagined Leo alone in a hospital. No visitors, no familiar faces. The nurses wearing cotton masks to tend him, only their eyes showing, no one breathing too deeply or touching him more than she had to.
“What about his mother?” I asked.
“She has other children,” said the prior.
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