I’d written Jamie yesterday and told him about the baby, but we hadn’t settled on Alex yet. I told him the same story I told everyone else. Writing it down made it seem more like the truth than how I’d really found Alex. As I wrote down the words that the baby was alone in the house except for his dead mother, I felt as though my story of how it happened was really how it happened. He was alone. I couldn’t find the house a second time. And no one has called the police about him. I also wrote that Willa had the flu but was much better, and that Mama had it now but would certainly start feeling better very soon. I didn’t tell him Charlie was sick with it now. I figured that was something Mrs. Sutcliff was supposed to tell him. Or not tell him.
I’m so very sorry Charlie is ill, but I’m not sorry Dora Sutcliff couldn’t take Alex when Mama came down with the sickness. Alex doesn’t know her. She’s a stranger to him. It’s us who feel like family to him now.
Uncle Fred seems to have forgotten that three days ago he said that Alex had to go. Or maybe when he found out Charlie Sutcliff had the flu he realized our house is as safe as anywhere at the moment. I don’t care what his reason is for not demanding to know why Alex is still here. If Evie tries again to send Alex away, I’m going to take him and board the first train to Quakertown. He and I can wait out the flu in the curing barn among the leafy tobacco dresses. I dare anyone to send us back here if it comes to that.
Alex has just made a little cooing sound, and now he’s smiling at me, breaking the seal he has on the nipple of the bottle. A bit of milk dribbles down his chin. It’s like he knows I am thinking of him.
“You’re mine,” I whisper to him, and he smiles wider as I kiss his forehead. I let my mind pretend that I am eighteen, not thirteen, and I’m married to someone kind and brave like Jamie Sutcliff and Alex is our child. We live in a big house in the country with lots of apple trees. And there is no war and no flu.
Willa’s voice above slices into my imaginings. She is calling out for Evie to come to take her to the toilet. I can do that for Evie. Alex is fed and has a clean diaper, and Evie’s been up all night with Mama. I don’t think Willa is in danger of giving the flu to anyone anymore, but she still can’t walk more than a few paces without help.
I make a cozy place for Alex on a blanket by the hearth, surrounding him with toys and the fronts of picture books that I set up against the side of the bureau drawer I’ve been using for his crib. He likes all the pictures on the book covers. He kicks his legs and tries to punch the pictures with his little fists. He thinks they are real and that if he just tries hard enough he can pluck them off.
At the second-floor landing, I see that Evie has just emerged from Mama’s room. The door is partially open and her hand is still on the knob. Evie pulls down her mask. She looks terrible.
“What are you doing up here?” she says.
“I can help Willa to the toilet. I’m sure it’s fine now if I go in. You can go back to bed if you want.”
Evie opens her mouth to answer me, and I bet she’s going to send me back downstairs, but it’s Mama’s voice that fills the little stretch of silence between my words and Evie’s.
“Maggie.” I know it’s Mama’s voice, but it sounds so strange. Like an old woman’s. Like a scary witch’s.
Evie turns toward the sound, and her eyes fill with tears.
I don’t know that voice and I take a step away from the door. Evie lays her hand on my arm as if to stop me from running away.
“Maggie,” Mama says again, in a whispery growl.
I look up at Evie.
“Just stay by the entrance,” she says.
And then Evie crosses the hall to Willa’s room.
I take a step toward Mama’s door and then another one. I push it open, and as my eyes adjust to the dimness, I see that Mama is propped up with pillows. Her hair is slick with sweat, and she’s as pale as Alex’s dead mother. Her skin is splotched with dark spots that look like berry stains. I cannot take another step.
She turns her head toward me and raises a hand. “Don’t come any closer, Maggie.” Mama’s voice floats across the room to me like fireplace smoke. I don’t think she realizes I am frozen where I stand by the sight of her. Something heavy is swelling inside me, ballooning like bread dough. It feels like fear, and yet it’s bigger than fear.
“Are you feeling better?” These words tumble out of my mouth because I woke up thinking she would be. She should be. But I don’t think she is. I don’t think she is feeling better.
“Maggie, listen to me,” Mama says, and then she coughs into a handkerchief spotted with something dark. I don’t want to think about what has made those marks.
“Maybe you should rest, Mama.” The heavy thing inside me wants to push me out the door and back down to the sitting room where Alex is cooing and kicking and trying to grab happy pictures off the covers of books.
“Listen.” Mama takes away the cloth from her face. “You did the right thing, Maggie. That baby . . . he would have died if not for you. You did the right thing. I should have told you that the first day. I’m sorry. . . .”
Her words fall away and a barking cough takes their place. I can’t think of a thing to say. I want to reply, “It’s all right, Mama. I’m not mad at you. You don’t have to say you’re sorry.” But it’s like there’s a door at the back of my throat where the words get out and it has just slammed shut.
“Tell your papa I said that,” she says. “Tell him I want the baby to stay. I want him to be ours.”
Why can’t you tell him? These five words just won’t come. I think them but I cannot say them.
“I want you all to raise him and care for him and never let him think for a moment that there was a time when someone did not love him,” Mama says. “All the love you still hold in your heart for Henry, you give it to that little boy. Will you do that?”
Tears are spilling down my cheeks. I want to say yes. I want to say, “Stop talking like that!” Nothing gets past that door in my throat except a sob. Just one.
“You’re my brave girl, Maggie,” Mama says when I say nothing.
Inside my head I am shouting “Mama,” but no sound comes from me. In an instant and before she can tell me not to, I run to the foot of her bed. The only parts of her that I can reach are her feet. They barely shudder under her blanket when I fall across them. One of her big toes fills that triangle spot at the end of my neck and as I cry, it feels like that toe is trying to help me stop. I know I can’t stay here. I know for Alex’s safety I must leave her. I must.
“Don’t go!” I finally sputter, as if she is the one about to leave the room.
“You’re my brave girl,” Mama whispers, and then she pulls her feet up and away from me. The front half of my body is now lying across just bed and blanket. Mama has curled up into a ball and turned to the wall.
She will get better, I say to myself as I back away from her bed. It’s the fourth day. Later today she will start to feel better. I turn toward her door.
I am almost at the doorframe when I turn back around. “We named him Alex. Is that all right?”
I wait for a response. It seems like a long time goes by before I get one.
“It’s perfect,” Mama whispers, and then those two words are lost in an avalanche of coughs that chase me the rest of the way out of her room.
• • •
Papa arrives by train from Fort Meade, near Baltimore, in the late afternoon. The army let him get on the first train to Philadelphia after Uncle Fred’s phone call. He is wearing a uniform that makes him look like he belongs to other people in some other place. When he left for the camp in September, we all went to the station to see him off. Today, Uncle Fred went alone to pick him up. When I hug Papa, he doesn’t smell like my father; he smells like new wool and metal and train smoke. He has only been gone from us for a month, but it seems like so much longer.
“
Mags,” he whispers into my hair when he puts his arms around me. His embrace is light and quick. He has an eye toward the stairs, and the bedrooms, where Mama is.
He hugs Evie next. Tears spill from her eyes at his touch, and she pretends that she’s not starting to cry. She’s trying to be brave. He breaks away quickly from her, too.
Next, he bends down over Willa, who is lying on the sofa in a pile of blankets and whimpering for him. He bends down to kiss her forehead and says, “How’s my little Willow?”
His voice sounds stiff with emotion. Willa starts to cry, too. “Did you bring me a present?” she says. And Papa smiles and says she can have the Hershey’s bar in his travel bag if she takes a little rest.
Baby Alex, lying awake in his bureau drawer by the hearth, had been kicking his little legs quietly when Papa came in. Now he makes a gurgling sound that is nearly a laugh. He is amused by his own feet. Papa looks down at him now and I can’t read what my father is thinking.
“This is the poor orphan baby Mama and I found,” I say, sensing the need to come to Alex’s defense.
“I told your father all about this child on the way home from the train station,” Uncle Fred says, frowning. I can just imagine what Uncle Fred said about Alex.
“We don’t know his name, but we’ve been calling him Alex,” I continue.
“I named him,” Willa says in a hoarse voice from the sofa.
“Yes,” Papa says, but he’s just staring at the baby with no expression on his face. He’s not angry or happy. I don’t know what he is.
For a second everyone is just watching Papa watching Alex.
And then the silence is broken by terrible coughing from upstairs.
We all turn our heads toward the staircase. A second later Papa is on the steps and heading up to his bedroom, pulling out of his pocket a white surgical mask that the army must have given him.
• • •
At sunset, Evie takes up a tray of food for Papa and Mama, but when she brings it back down after we’ve eaten our own supper, the food on the tray looks untouched.
The next few hours slink by as we wait in the sitting room for Papa to come back down. Alex falls asleep, but I keep him in my arms rather than put him in the bureau drawer by the hearth. Willa dozes curled up on Evie’s lap.
Just after the clock in the hall strikes nine o’clock, we all notice that it’s suddenly very quiet upstairs. Uncle Fred goes up to Mama’s room. He comes down some minutes later and stands at the entrance to the sitting room. He exhales long and slow like he’s smoking a pipe. But there is no pipe.
“I think you girls need to come up and say your good-byes,” he says softly.
“No,” Evie whispers.
“What?” Willa says, half-asleep. “Where are we going?”
I don’t say anything. A tingling sensation instantly creeps all over my body and a rush of hotness fills my ears. Alex startles and then slips back into deep slumber.
“You can bid her farewell from the bedroom door,” he continues. “She won’t want you to come any closer.”
The three of us just stare dumbly at Uncle Fred.
“Come on, then,” he says, trying to sound gruff, but his voice is high and airy, like an old woman’s. He steps over to Willa and scoops her up to carry her up to our parents’ bedroom. Evie trails behind them, crying into a handkerchief.
I get up off the sofa and lay Alex in the drawer and tuck the blanket in around him. He is so little and helpless.
My feet feel leaden as I climb the stairs. Evie and Uncle Fred with Willa in his arms are already just inside the bedroom when I get to the second floor. A single table lamp is on and its faint light throws tall shadows over the room. “We’re here, Mama. We’re all here,” Evie is saying.
As my eyes adjust to the dimness of the room, I can see that Papa is at Mama’s bedside, his mask over his face. He’s still in his uniform, like he only just got here. He is leaning forward in his chair as he holds one of Mama’s hands. The breath in Mama’s lungs doesn’t sound like air but rather sloshing water. She is so pale she looks like a ghost.
Willa, in Uncle Fred’s arms, can’t seem to believe the figure on the bed is Mama. I can scarcely believe it. Willa stares at the bed and Mama, frowning. After a second or two she lays her head against Uncle Fred’s chest. “I want to go back downstairs,” she murmurs.
As Uncle Fred and Willa leave, Evie takes another step into the room, filling the empty space. Tears are running down her face. “We love you, Mama,” she says. “You can go. We’ll be all right. We’ll always remember you. You were so good to us.”
If there is a word of farewell I am supposed to add to this, I can’t find it. I can’t think of one thing I want to say. Mama turns her head slightly toward Evie and me, and she raises a finger on the hand my father isn’t holding. But that’s all she does. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t raise her head. Doesn’t do anything but hold up that one finger. Maybe she is saying “Hello” with it. Maybe she is saying “Good-bye.” Maybe she is just pointing to the ceiling, where on the other side of the roof is the starry October sky and beyond.
Or maybe she is saying, “Just one second there! Uncle Fred is wrong. I’m not going anywhere.”
I want to believe this is what she is saying. I think about all the kind words she has spoken to me over the years of my life, all the motherly touches, the gentle corrections. I think of how she said I could have the room in the attic when we moved to Philadelphia, how she let me join her in the embalming room so that I could help give back to all those poor dead souls the look of life, and how she allowed me to go with her to South Street, where I found and saved Baby Alex and brought him home to us.
I think of all these things and I choose to believe she is telling us Uncle Fred is mistaken. He is mistaken.
I raise my hand in return. I think she sees it. She lowers the finger lifted off her coverlet, and every part of her save her lungs goes still again.
Evie is weeping.
I turn from the room without saying anything.
CHAPTER 35
Pauline
I had no idea the gap between earth and heaven is narrow, no wider than a jump over a brook. I’d always thought heaven was so far from the living, no one could measure its distance from earth. Even the wisest person ever born couldn’t look up at the night sky through the most powerful telescope and catch a glimpse of heaven—it was that far off.
That was the only part of knowing there is a heaven that used to frighten me—how far away it was. And when Henry died, that was what pained me the most. I was his mother and he was just a baby and how could heaven be Paradise for him if I was so far away no mortal could gauge the distance that separated us?
This is why Death stayed with me after Henry left. Not to haunt or accuse or disturb me, but because I was always meant to follow my little boy. Death knew that in just a short time, I would cross over, just like Henry did, and so it has been hovering, gentle and benevolent, waiting for me. All this time my companion has been trying to show me that the space between the two worlds is not so vast. Heaven is just on the other side of waking.
Death is not our foe. There is no foe. There is only the stunningly fragile human body, a holy creation capable of loving with such astonishing strength but which is weak to the curses of a fallen world. It is the frailty of flesh and blood that causes us to succumb to forces greater than ourselves. We are like butterflies, delicate and wonderful, here on earth for only a brilliant moment and then away we fly. Death is appointed merely to close the door to our suffering and open wide the gate to Paradise. If we were made of stone or iron, we would be impervious to disease and injury and disaster, but then we could not give love and receive love, could we? We’d be unable to feel anything at all, and surely incapable of spreading our wings and flying. . . .
Henry is near to me now. I can feel the canopy lifting, an
d I am not afraid. If I were orchestrating the events, I would have us all be together at this moment I join my baby boy. But I shall fly ahead of Thomas and the girls, just as Henry did, and I know with all my heart that we shall all be together again. Perhaps on that fine day it will even seem that we’ve drifted heavenward only moments apart from one another, not years or decades. . . .
Oh, Thomas!
I see you there at my bedside, holding my hand, saying my name. The army let you come home to me! How I’ve missed you. I wish I could tell you how much, but I am strangely not inside that shell of a woman whose hand you are holding. I am right beside you, leaning in close. Can you feel my arms around you? Can you hear me? I am going to our precious Henry. Don’t weep. You and I had a happy life. We had seventeen good years. Some people never see seventeen days of the same measure of happiness. I don’t think my parents were ever as happy as we were. Don’t hate them now, my darling, for stopping us from going home. They did what they thought they had to.
The girls will be all right, Thomas. I know you are already worried for them, but Willa has Evelyn, Maggie has Alex, and you all have the love that I leave here for each one of you. It is spilling out of me even at this moment and finding its way to you all. There is even love for Alex that is gushing out of me, Thomas. I held him for just a short while, but in those few minutes my heart was linked to his.
That child needs you and the girls, Thomas. And you may not know it yet, but you need him, too.
Tell the girls this, will you? Tell them that all the love that had been tucked inside this mortal heart of mine remains with you all. That’s how I will stay close. My love for you all is right there now. Just under your skin. And there it will always—
Oh! Oh, Thomas!
Look! Can you see it? It’s so beautiful! Look!
So beautiful!
Beautiful.
CHAPTER 36
Evelyn
I keep thinking I’m having a bad dream and soon I’ll wake up and everything will be back to the way it was before the flu.
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