“Let’s not stay long,” Papa said quietly on the way, Alex still in his arms. “Jamie looks tired.”
“Yes, I agree,” I said.
Maggie said nothing.
It is so obvious to me how lovestruck she is. Perhaps no one else can tell. At least no one else let on today that they could. And I can’t help feeling some concern for Maggie. I don’t want her to get hurt. It is one thing to have written letter after letter to Jamie during the war; it is another to have him home again, living right across the street, and yet with such a spread of years between them. Even newly at fourteen, Maggie is still a child. She has seen more horrors than any young person should—we all have—but her being infatuated with a twenty-one-year-old man is proof to me she is still just a girl.
Maggie sat next to Jamie at the meal, hanging on every word that he said—not that there were many. She barely ate anything herself. She behaved as one who had something important to tell Jamie and was just waiting for the right moment. Having us all in the room with her was messing with her plans.
Jamie saw none of this. He didn’t seem to be seeing anything. If possible, his eyes were more empty now than when he had stepped off the ship that morning.
After the meal, Dora asked Maggie to come help her get the desserts ready. Willa and Alex started playing on the floor with some of Charlie’s old toys, and Papa and Roland went into the living room to smoke cigars Papa had brought to mark the day. They had invited Jamie to join them, but he’d declined.
In a matter of seconds, I was alone at the table with Jamie. He was staring at the children playing on the rug in the other room.
“We’ll leave right after dessert,” I said, wanting him to know I could tell how much he wanted to be alone.
He looked up. “Thank you for coming.” There wasn’t an ounce of genuineness in his words, and yet he was not being insincere, either. He hadn’t heard what I’d said. Not really.
“Maggie made a pie,” I added, those words popping out from nowhere other than that I wanted him to be mindful of Maggie’s tender feelings.
“She didn’t have to go to that trouble.”
“Maggie’s very fond of you, Jamie.” I locked my gaze onto his. Or tried to. His eyes seemed made of paper. What in God’s name had he seen over there? I knew the trenches had been awful. I had read what the Allies had been up against. I knew that Jamie’s regiment, like so many others, had been exposed to mustard gas—a quiet poison that could blister the inside of your throat and lungs so that you’d suffocate on your own tissue if you breathed enough of it. I also knew the Germans’ mortar shells could rip a man in two. I knew Jamie had marched with a rifle, and that he’d likely had to fire it again and again and again.
“Maggie doesn’t know me,” Jamie replied quietly. “She doesn’t know who I am.”
“You’re a man who has miraculously come home from the war in one piece and to people who love you.”
“In one piece,” he said vacantly, as though he were still a world away from us. “Is that what you see?”
Words of response froze in my throat. I could think of nothing to say.
Maggie came in then and placed the pie she’d made in front of Jamie.
“Would you like to cut it?” Maggie held the knife toward him. Jamie looked at the handle of the knife for a long moment and then shook his head.
“You do it,” he said. “I’d just make a mess of it.”
I saw then, as clear as crystal, that Jamie still had his arms and legs, still had his sight and hearing, but he’d been gravely wounded somehow, and the wound must have been so deep inside him, none of us could see where to press a hand and stop the bleeding.
And then with equal clarity, I realized that all of us in that room were like that, in one way or another. All of us. Me. My sisters. Papa. Little Alex. Roland and Dora. And Jamie. We were all wounded inside where no one could see. None of us had survived the last year unscathed.
We had all been dealt crippling, devastating blows that had crushed us to the core. Jamie was the only one of us brave enough to admit that we’d all been transformed.
The world was different after the flu and the war. And so were we.
CHAPTER 46
• June 1919 •
Willa
I am dreaming of Mama, and it’s like she is alive again. I’m so happy to see her I call out her name, and my own voice wakes me up.
When I open my eyes, I don’t know at first that it was only a dream. I get out of bed and look for Mama on the stairs, in the kitchen, in the sitting room.
She isn’t in the house, though, and I feel so empty inside.
But then I see Gretchen’s father through the sitting room’s big front window. He is walking that little white dog even though the sun is barely up. After the flu, I walked up the street several times to stare at the apartment above the bakery where Gretchen had lived. I hoped each time that I’d see that little dog in the window barking down at me, or on the street as Gretchen’s mama or papa took him outside to pee. But I never did see him. And now there he is.
I run to the front door, unlock it, and walk outside. Gretchen’s father is walking fast. He is already stepping onto the next corner. I want to chase after him so I can pat that dog. I want to so very badly. But I don’t have any shoes on and I can’t think of Gretchen’s last name, so I can’t call out for her papa to wait, and I’m mad that he can’t tell I am behind him on my top step wishing he would stop and turn around.
He just keeps walking.
I stand there in my nightgown, watching them. I suddenly remember his name is Mr. Weiss, but it’s too late. He’s too far away. I’m sad now and I wish I was back in my bed again dreaming of Mama.
Then I hear a door opening across the boulevard from me.
Jamie Sutcliff is coming out of his house. He carries a fat duffel bag and he’s wearing his cap. He looks like he is going on a long trip. He closes the door quietly and then turns around. Jamie is surprised to see me standing there across from him, and he startles like he’s been caught doing something he’s not supposed to be doing.
We look at each other for a second, and then he just tips his hat to me and starts to walk away without saying anything.
“Where are you going?” I yell.
He turns toward me. “Go on back inside, Willa. It’s too early to be out.”
“But where are you going?”
I can tell he is off for somewhere. No one carries a duffel like that unless they are going on a trip. Jamie just got home after being at the war all that time. And now he’s leaving?
He stares at me for a moment. Then he looks back at his house and then up at the bedroom windows of my house. He crosses the boulevard easy and quick because it’s too early for streetcars and automobiles and carriages. Only the milkman and Mr. Weiss are out and about.
When he gets close he hikes up his duffel onto his shoulder and looks up at me. I’m taller than him because I’m on the top step and he’s on the bottom one.
“I have to go away.” He looks sad.
“But you just got here.”
Jamie looks down the boulevard for a second. Gretchen’s dad is so far away now. The dog is just a little white dot.
“I can’t stay here,” he says.
I know for a fact that Jamie still has his old bedroom and his father still has a desk for him in the bookkeeping office. “Why not?”
He shakes his head. “I just can’t.”
“But your mama has waited all this time for you to come home.”
For a couple seconds, he doesn’t say anything. “I’m not the person she has been missing. I’m not him.”
I don’t know what he means by that, so I ask him again where he is going.
“Good-bye, Willa,” he says, not answering my question at all. His eyes are shining into mine. “Be good.”
/> And then he turns and walks away.
I watch him go in the opposite direction of Gretchen’s dad and her dog. Pretty soon he is a speck, too. And then he is gone.
What a rotten morning this is turning out to be.
I sit down on the top step, hoping Gretchen’s dad will be coming back this way so I can pat the dog on their way home. I wait and wait, but they don’t come. Autos and people and streetcars start to go by. A lady walking past our house sees me sitting on the stoop and she stops and frowns at me.
“Child, does your mother know you’re sitting out here in your nightdress?” she calls out.
I don’t know. I don’t know if Mama can see me here.
So I stand up and go back inside the house. I’m hungry now. I go into the kitchen, and I’m glad Maggie is up with Alex, because she’ll make me something to eat. Her eggs aren’t as good as Evie’s, but they are better than nothing.
She frowns at me, too, when I step inside.
“Was that the front door?” she asks. “Were you outside just now?”
I nod. “Can we have breakfast? I’m hungry.”
Maggie sets Alex into his high chair. He picks up a wooden spoon that he likes to play with and bangs it on the tray. He is one year old now. We gave him Maggie’s birthday—May 15—because he needed to have one and she wanted him to have hers. I wanted him to share mine with me—I’m eight now—but my birthday was in February and it wouldn’t have worked for him to be one back then. His birthday had to be in May or June, Maggie and Evie said. Even Papa said it.
“What on earth were you doing outside in your nightgown?” Maggie says.
It occurs to me right then that Maggie might want to know Jamie has left. She is friends with him. I saw all the letters she posted to him when he was in the war.
“Jamie’s gone,” I say.
Maggie is opening a box of Post Toasties. I guess we aren’t having eggs. “Gone where?”
“He didn’t say.”
Alex points the spoon at me and says, “Gah da!”
“What do you mean, ‘he didn’t say’?” Maggie is frowning again. She puts the box of cereal down.
I pull out a chair at the kitchen table and sit down. “I mean, he didn’t tell me.”
Maggie looks from me to the front door and back to me again. “You talked to him out there in your nightgown?”
Jamie didn’t say a word about my being in my nightgown. He hadn’t even noticed. Why was everyone else making such a big commotion about it?
“I was watching Gretchen’s dad go by with her dog, and I saw him come out of his house. And then I talked to him.”
Maggie looks like she wants to send me to my room, but she can’t because I haven’t done anything wrong. But that’s the look she has on her face.
“You’re not making any sense,” she says.
I’m done with her. “You’re not making any sense.” I get up out of the chair. I’ll go back up to my room and wait for Evie to wake up and make me breakfast.
“Wait!” Maggie says, grabbing hold of my arm. “What do you mean he’s gone? Tell me.”
I pull my arm away from her. “I mean, he said he can’t stay here. He went away. He had a duffel bag, and it was full.”
Maggie’s eyes get wide and the mad look slips away. Another look comes over her, but I don’t know how to describe it.
“What did he say to you?” Maggie’s voice says please even though her words don’t.
I can’t quite remember what Jamie said about his mama not missing him. I try to think of how he said it, but I can’t.
“He told me to be good.”
Maggie slowly turns toward the front door. Alex babbles some made-up words, but it’s like she doesn’t hear him at all. Maggie tears out of the room, into the foyer, and throws open the door. I follow her.
A second later she is the one standing on the stoop in her nightgown in the full light of day, instead of me.
She is the one staring up the boulevard.
She is the one wanting so very hard to have something that’s not hers and not having any way of getting it.
Part Two
CHAPTER 47
• September 1925 •
Maggie
She’s the same age Mama would have been, this woman lying before me. Forty-two. Papa has already glued the eyes shut, but the photograph the family provided hints that the deceased’s eyes were the type to catch sunlight, just like my mother’s were. Mama’s were blue, like Henry’s had been.
I remove the last curling rod from the woman’s hair and position the lock with an heirloom comb before bending close for one last check on the cosmetics I applied. Papa reduced the swelling on the woman’s forehead and reshaped the delicate socket bone above her left eye. I covered the fix and the sutures from the embalming process with flesh-colored foundation. The penciled, chocolate-hued eyebrows make her look like she’s very much enjoying her third day in Paradise. There are no telltale signs of the injuries that claimed her mortal life.
“You look lovely, Mrs. Goertzen.” The rigor has finally released her after three days of stiffness, and I’m able to fold the woman’s hands across her bosom without any bodily resistance. “No one will see that nasty bruise from your fall. And the hair comb your daughter brought is beautiful.”
I hear a noise just outside the half-open embalming room door. Alex is peering in. His coffee brown curls are tousled and his shirt untucked, and I wonder what he and Willa have been up to while I’ve been busy with the morning’s work.
“Aren’t you done yet?” All four words are laced with breathy impatience. He hangs on the door, one foot sneaking over the threshold. Papa and I have kept the same rule about the embalming room that Uncle Fred had insisted on. No children inside. I’d been annoyed with my great-uncle when we first arrived in Philadelphia and he’d been so worried about my sisters and me being in that room. I understand his caution so much better now that Alex is seven and curious about nearly everything. The world can be a dangerous place. Even so, I’d wanted Alex never to feel afraid or unwelcome to come to me or Papa while we are working back here. When the embalming room door is closed, however, it means he must knock. When it’s half-open, like now, he can hover at the doorframe as long as he wants.
“Nearly,” I answer.
“You’re taking too long. You promised we’d go to the park after lunch. I already had lunch. A long time ago.”
I glance down at the watch pendant just below my collar. One o’clock. The morning has flown. “I just need to wash up, and I’ll be right out.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
The front bell rings from far down the hallway and past the kitchen, and he scampers off to answer it.
I toss the curling rod into the basket with the rest of them and push my cart with all my restorative tools to the corner of the room so that Papa will see that I am finished with Mrs. Goertzen when he returns from the cemetery. I pat the dead woman’s hand. “Nice chatting with you.”
I wash up and then hang my apron on its peg next to Papa’s. I’ll grab an apple or a slice of bread on my way to find Alex so that I can keep my promise. We’ve a playdate at the park.
Most days Alex seems as much a child of Papa and Mama as I am, and it’s not until someone says something like “Did your mother have those dark eyes, too?” that I suddenly remember he is not. It’s when I’m jolted by a random question like this from someone who never knew Mama that I’m reminded Alex had another name for the first four months of his life, and that his real mother was a European immigrant. Foreign. Croatian, maybe. Only God knows.
God knows.
I have never again gone back to that building off South Street where I found him, but I visit it in my mind now and then. The remembrance of that time in my life always leads to nightmarish images of Alex’s dea
d mother and dying sister, closely followed by those of my own mother. Uncle Fred. Charlie. It’s an effort to push away the unwanted visions from the last days of the flu and replace them with happier images of the heart-shaped birthmark that winked at us every time we bathed Alex or changed his diaper, or the way he’d reach for my father at the end of the workday and how we all cried when the first word Alex said was “Papa.”
I don’t know what would have become of us—of me—had we not had Alex during those first years when we were all learning how to live again. It was Alex who gave us reasons to get up in the morning, to sing silly songs and play games, to forget how the flu and the war had twisted every notion we had about the sacredness of life. When I missed Mama so much it physically hurt, Alex soothed the sting. When I wanted to run away to wherever it was that Jamie Sutcliff had escaped to, Alex made me stay. When I wanted to just close my eyes and never wake up, having Alex persuaded me to welcome each new day like a fragile blessing instead of a curse.
He was and is the only good thing to come to us after the flu and after the war. Or maybe it’s just that he showed us good things still existed. And while it’s obvious he loves us all, and Papa especially, I am still his favorite.
When he was four, I told him that he’d been brought to our doorstep like a precious gift and that I was the one who found him. We had decided—Papa, Evie, Willa, and I—that Alex didn’t need to know he’d been found a few feet away from his dead mother. It was bad enough that I still had that horrific image of her in my head, so it was my idea that he be spared the worst of the details. We’d decided when he was old enough we’d tell him his sweet mama, when she knew she was dying, had secretly picked us out special because she was certain we would love him and give him a happy, forever home.
Sometimes when I’m tucking him in, he’ll say, “Tell me how you found me.” And I’ll tell him I got up early one morning during the terrible flu, and there he was on our doorstep, all snug and warm in a basket. Willa, who sorely wanted to embellish that story, had to be told we weren’t going to be making up any more particulars than those basic ones. We were able to get our way with her when she asked if she could at least give him the rocking horse rattle that was Henry’s and tell Alex that he’d had it in his hand when I found him, and we conceded. It turned out to be a good idea, because the little rattle is the only thing Alex has of his first life—or so he thinks—and it comforts him.
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