As Bright as Heaven

by Susan Meissner

  I didn’t think to call out to Mama, who was still inside the woman’s house. I just turned toward those cries like I was a fish hooked on a line. It drew me down a side alley with tall, skinny houses on either side and front doors with all their paint peeling off. Trash was strewn about and there were little pots of dead plants and rusted bicycle parts and broken glass and the sour smell of pee. No one was in the alley, not even a dog, even though there was dog poop everywhere.

  The baby’s cries tugged me to the first stoop on the left, where the front door was ajar. I walked toward it and saw through a busted front window that a girl about Willa’s age, maybe, lay on a sofa, sprawled out like she’d been tossed there. The baby cried out to me again as I looked at her.

  I pushed the door open the rest of the way. There were stairs to the upper floors with sacks of trash on them, and another door; this one was half-open also and led into the room where the girl on the sofa was.

  I didn’t stop to think if I should; I just stepped inside. The room stank like garbage and outhouses, even with my mask on. I turned to the girl. She was whitish blue like someone had painted her that color. Dots of blood had pooled below her nose, like a mustache. Her eyes were closed and I couldn’t tell if she was breathing. My own breath started to come in short gasps and I turned away. Across the tiny front room was a cradle and the baby who had called out to me. I crossed the room in only a few steps.

  The baby looked to be nearly the age Henry had been just before he got sick. Four months or so. The baby had curls the color of dark caramel and the same sweet rosebud mouth Henry had. His eyes were half-open as I drew near and the baby poked a little fist at me as if to say, “What took you so long?” The rag that had been pinned around the baby’s bottom hadn’t been changed in probably days and the weight of it had made it slide down around his knees. I moved a tiny corner of the soiled blanket half covering the baby. He was a boy. He had a little birthmark shaped like a heart by his belly button.

  I tossed my coat to the floor, and in one swift move I had that baby out of his filthy bed and wrapped in the folds of my coat. His disgusting diaper fell off at my feet. I scooped him and my coat into my arms and cuddled him against my neck. I didn’t stop to consider that perhaps he was sick with the flu. But his skin felt cool to mine, so I was sure he had no fever.

  For a couple moments, I just stood there in that little house and held the baby in my arms like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t think about the girl on the sofa behind me or where this baby’s parents were or what I was even going to do next. I just held him and swayed a little bit with him, the way Henry had liked.

  I would have stayed that way a little bit longer, but I suddenly remembered Mama would expect me to stay where she had left me. I turned toward a door by the kitchen area that I figured led to a bedroom. I tiptoed toward the half-closed door to see if there was a mother inside who was simply too weak from illness to get to her child. I poked the door open. On the bed, curled up like a rag doll, was a woman. Her splotchy skin was gray and her open eyes were unblinking. The front of her nightgown was covered in black goo that I knew she had coughed up from her lungs. Uncle Fred’s bodies had been arriving wrapped in sheets, with the arms and legs neatly tucked in. Sometimes their heads weren’t covered but their eyes were always closed. His bodies were dead people whom other, living people had noticed and taken care of. This woman was dead and forgotten. Her hands clutched at her nightgown like she knew she was dying all alone and her children lay in the other room. There were no signs that a father lived in this house. No boots in the corner, no coveralls draped over a chair, no can of shaving powder atop the bureau. Something deep inside me was roiling about and I knew I had to get the baby out of this house of death before I threw up on him.

  I turned from the baby’s dead mother and went back into the main room. I looked at the girl on the sofa one last time and, to my surprise, her glassy eyes were now open. I stood there for a second, staring at her because Papa had told me sometimes the eyes of the dead inch open as the body starts to decay.

  Then the girl blinked, slowly. She was still alive.

  Our eyes held each other’s for a moment.

  I wondered if she knew her mother was dead.

  I wondered if she knew she was also dying.

  Had she staggered to her front door earlier this morning to open it, hoping someone would hear her baby brother crying?

  She lifted a finger toward me and pointed at the bundle I held in my arms. Poor thing. I knew the sister love that was breaking her heart in two.

  “He’s safe with me,” I whispered, one sister to another.

  And then the girl closed her eyes, and her chest seemed to heave a little. Her hand fell limp.

  I couldn’t get out of that house fast enough.

  • • •

  When I get back to the step where Mama told me to wait, I can see her way up the street, calling for me. She sounds both mad and scared. I start running toward her, but I don’t want to shout to her because the baby has fallen asleep against me.

  I am out of breath when I finally reach her and when I call for her in a gasp, Mama whirls around like she is a ballroom dancer and her eyes are as wide as I’ve ever seen them.

  “I told you to stay right there and wait for me!” she says in a half yell because there are a few other people about now, and she glances at them at the same time she is glaring at me. But the very next second she sees the bundle in my arms. “What have you got there?”

  “It’s a little baby, Mama. His mother is dead,” I say, still out of breath.

  “Good Lord!” Mama heaves her basket to the ground and snatches the baby and my coat out of my arms. He makes a little sound, like he’s not happy about leaving my arms for hers.

  “He’s not sick,” I say. “He doesn’t have it.”

  “You don’t know that! I told you to stay right on the step!”

  “But I heard him crying, Mama. I heard him. I could tell he needed help. I couldn’t just leave him.”

  Mama looks closer at the baby. She sees how weak he is, smells his skin and spit-up. She makes a face, a sad one.

  “The door to his house was open and he was just lying in a cradle in the front room,” I say. “His mother was in the bedroom and she was dead.” For the first time since I’d found the baby, tears are forming in my eyes. They are hot and they sting.

  Mama’s face goes pale. She is no doubt thinking she should never have brought me with her. “Show me where you found him.”

  I grab her basket and we turn to walk the way I’d come. I begin to worry that Mama is going to put the baby back. She almost looks like she is mad at me for finding him, even though I know she isn’t. How can she be? I was meant to find him. I was supposed to have come with Mama today. That baby would have died if I hadn’t come.

  I don’t want to take Mama back to the baby’s house. I don’t want to see his dead mother and dying sister, but I know I must prove to Mama that this baby needs us. We near the stoop with the half-open door and I glance in the broken front window.

  What I see makes me freeze.

  The girl who’d been lying on the sofa is gone.

  She isn’t there.

  “What’s the matter?” Mama says, her question pricking me like a stick.

  I only have a second to decide what to do. It’s not a very long time when there’s so much to ponder. That girl was near to dead. I am sure of it. That’s all I can think of. She was dying. Is dying. We aren’t.

  “I . . . I don’t think this is the right alley,” I say.

  “What color was the front door? Think.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t remember.” I move away from that first stoop to the second one, to the third one. To one across the alley.

  “Well?” Mama says.

  “I don’t think this is the right alley.
”

  We make our way back out to the street and then down the next alley. The alleys all look alike. Even Mama can see this.

  “I don’t know which one it is now,” I say, thinking only that I was meant to find this baby.

  He is crying in Mama’s arms now, but it is a frail cry, like a sighing wind.

  “We’ve got to get him some food and attention,” she says. “Come on.”

  I follow her back out to South Street and Mama hails a taxicab that is driving by.

  We settle into the seat in the back and Mama draws the baby close to her chest to shush him. He smells even worse inside the taxi. Mama looks at me and her face softens a bit. “It’s all right, Maggie. We’ll figure out where he belongs. One thing at a time.”

  Her words echo in my head the whole time we’re in the cab. I can’t seem to understand what she said. It isn’t until we’re getting out of the taxi at the funeral parlor that I realize I decided the moment I first held him that I will never let this child go.

  CHAPTER 24

  Evelyn

  Mama’s instructions when she and Maggie left for South Street were that Willa and I should not bother Uncle Fred and that we were to stay upstairs. She’d cocked her head toward the part of the house that was the funeral parlor, where we were forbidden to enter now anyway, and said, “It’s very busy in there this morning.”

  That meant more bodies were being delivered and Uncle Fred would be pulling his hair out with where to put them. I already knew he had no more room for any. He had tried to turn some away the day before, but the people who’d brought them told him they couldn’t possibly take them back home. The city morgue is full. The hospitals didn’t want them because they are full, too. You’d never think in a city this size there could be a shortage of anything until people start dying every day by the hundreds and suddenly there’s no place to put the bodies. That’s all they are when there are that many. Bodies. Or not even that. The health department sent out a bulletin that they will begin sending around trucks to private homes to pick up the dead off the porches because undertakers like Uncle Fred are refusing to come for them. The dead—that was what they called them, as if it is too sad and too hard to think of them as singular beings who had names and addresses. The dead sounds like the flu. But they aren’t the same. The flu is one entity who’s seemingly been given a key to every house. The dead are people by the thousands—fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters.

  Mama wanted us to be home in Quakertown instead of here, but Grandma and Grandpa were afraid we’d bring the flu there. I guess they didn’t know they could get it from their mailman or the fellow who delivers their vegetables or the woman who stops at the restaurant to ask for directions. Anyone who breathes is a potential carrier. I said as much to Mama after she told us we weren’t going and when she and I were alone with the washing.

  “Grandma is afraid for Baby Curtis and Aunt Jane,” Mama replied, as if I had said something completely different. “I shouldn’t have asked and put her in the difficult place of telling me not to come.”

  “But she’s not afraid for us?” I said as I hung one of Uncle Fred’s nightshirts to dry.

  “Of course she is. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Uncle Fred needs us here.”

  I truly didn’t want to go back to Quakertown, but I could see how much it weighed on Mama that she had no choice but to have us stay. Even though we’ve been out of school for nearly a week and no churches are meeting and no theaters are showing movies, the flu shows no signs it’s letting up. The number of people dying just keeps getting bigger, not smaller. We wake up each morning wondering if maybe today’s the day the flu begins to tire of us.

  Willa complained at first about being relegated to the bedrooms after Mama and Maggie left this morning, but she quieted down soon enough. In fact, she is now uncharacteristically quiet. I imagined I would need to have a long list of activities with which to keep her occupied for the several hours Mama and Maggie would be gone. But once we settle into her room to look at books, that’s where we stay. I let her page through my favorite book, the one with the Latin names of all the flowers and beautiful drawings of what they look like. I tell her she can find her four favorites and then we’ll draw a bouquet of them and fill in the sketch with colored pencils. I am half reading a book of my own, Anne of the Island by L. M. Montgomery—a novel I’ve read twice already. My mind begins to wander and because Willa is being so quiet, I lose track of time.

  I start thinking about how different everything is now with this plague covering all the earth and killing so many people, and all the while Papa and Jamie Sutcliff and so many others are off fighting in a war where more people are dying, but not from influenza—from mortar rounds and mustard gas and bullets. It is like there are two wars. And what does war even accomplish? How does one country win over another by simply killing its people? None of it makes any sense. I am missing school and Gilbert, and even the silly girls in my class who care more that all the handsome young men are coming home from the front with missing limbs than that all those limbs were lost in the first place. I am tired of sitting in the house and pretending I can’t see how busy Uncle Fred is downstairs. I am tired of meatless Mondays and wheatless Wednesdays and I want Papa home with us and not heading off to France. I’m peeved that Maggie got to go with Mama when it should have been me. I’m fifteen. Practically an adult. Maggie is still just a child. When Mama came to tell me she was letting Maggie accompany her, I asked her why.

  “She just needs to get out of the house for a bit,” Mama had answered. “She is only coming along to keep me company. That’s all.”

  I would have liked to get away from the funeral home for a stretch of hours. I would have liked to keep Mama company on her errand. I would have asked to accompany her if I had known she was of a mind to let one of us go.

  I am ruminating on all this when Willa says she doesn’t want to look at books anymore.

  I pull myself out of my irritated reverie. “Shall I get us something from the kitchen?” I say to her. I toss my book onto her bed behind me. We’ve been sitting on the rug in her room with books all around. Morning sunshine is slanting in on us and it is almost like we’re sitting outside on a day before the flu. Almost.

  Willa peers up at me. Her eyes are glassy. “I don’t feel good,” she says.

  A tiny arrow of alarm slices through me as I move to her and put my palm on her forehead. She is hot with fever.

  She coughs and makes a face. “I want Mama,” she whimpers. “I don’t feel good.”

  “Where do you feel bad, Willa?” I ask.

  “All over. I want Mama.”

  I stand and fold back the coverlet on her bed, tamping down the temptation to assume the worst. It is just a fever, I tell myself. A bit of a cold. The kind people used to get all the time. Willa can’t have the flu. We’ve taken every precaution with her. “Let’s get you into bed, and I’ll make you toast and cocoa.” I turn back around to help her to her feet.

  “I don’t want toast,” she grumbles. I expect her to fight me on getting into her bed, too. But she goes to it willingly and climbs in.

  “How about just the cocoa, then?” I say, faking a cheery tone as I pull off her shoes.

  She shakes her head. “I’m cold.”

  I pull up the coverlet around her, and my thoughts are all aflutter with what I’m supposed to do next. I dare not go ask Uncle Fred for advice. Not only would he not know what to do; he has been with the dead all morning, touching them, lifting them, moving them.

  “I want Mama,” Willa murmurs.

  “She’ll be home soon,” I say reassuringly. But Mama and Maggie have been gone less than an hour. They were going to walk all the way to South Street and likely have only just arrived. Mama hasn’t yet served up the soup and sympathy, and they aren’t on their way back home. It will be several hours before they return. “I’ll be ri
ght back,” I say to Willa.

  I go downstairs to get a basin of cool water and a rag for a compress. I open the pantry to get the bottle of aspirin, figuring I can crush one into some warm water if Willa refuses to swallow it, but the Bayer bottle is gone. Mama took it with her.

  Maybe a warm drink will soothe Willa. I warm a little apple cider, pour it into a cup, and then take the basin and drink to Willa’s room. She is already asleep and breathing heavily, as though being chased in a dream. I put the cup down and sit down on the side of her bed. I plunge the rag into the basin, wring out the excess, and place it over her forehead. The cloth is warm under my hand in an instant. The speed with which the cool cloth becomes hot scares me. I take it away and soak it again in the water. And then again.

  Should I call for someone? I wonder. Should I go tell Uncle Fred? Should I run across the street to Mrs. Sutcliff? Will she have aspirin? But that would mean leaving Willa alone. Should I go? Should I stay? Is it just an ordinary fever Willa has? Or has the invader swept down on us like it has on everyone else? I refuse to admit that of course it has.

  But I can’t leave her to go across the street to the Sutcliffs’. What if Willa wakes and gets out of bed disoriented and feverish and falls down the stairs? What if she wakes and calls out and there is no one here?

  I can’t leave her. All I can do is plunge, squeeze, press—over and over and over—as I pray to God that Mama won’t stay on the south side for as long as she said she would.

  The Almighty surely must be looking down on me with pity, because in just a little while I hear the front door open and Mama’s voice. She and Maggie have come back.

  I practically fly down the stairs.