In the Shadow of Blackbirds(77)

Every square inch of my skin went cold at the way she described the flu like one of Stephen’s blackbirds. “I’ve got to help you, Aunt Eva.”

“Go.”

I laid my palm against her forehead. “You’re hotter than that match that just burned me.”

“Don’t touch me.” She tried to swipe her hand at my arm. “Pack your things and leave before it gets you, too.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Go. Leave. Get out of the house.” She shut her eyes against a violent bout of shivering that gripped her the same way Mae Tate had convulsed on the floor of our high school English classroom.

“I’m going to make you some tea and onion soup—”

“Go!”

I jumped backward at the force of her words. “Who’s going to take care of you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t face your mother and tell her I let you die. She’d never forgive me. She’d want you to live.” She grimaced through the pain of her chills. “Go. Go!”

I backed out of the room, unsure what to do. At any second I might drop to the floor with the same convulsions. My life could end in a matter of hours. Stephen would never be free.

But I couldn’t leave my aunt. I couldn’t—not when I could possibly save her.

The day before my father’s arrest, I read an article about a Portland woman who cured her four-year-old daughter of the flu by burying her in raw onions for three days. The mother had fed the child onion syrup and smothered her in pungent bulbs from head to toe. Dad had remarked, “It’s like the Gypsies hanging garlic above their doors to ward off evil,” and I shook my head in dismay at the woman’s desperation.

But that Portland girl survived. She lived. Her mother saved her.

I could save Aunt Eva.

I ran downstairs, switched on the main gas valve outside the back door, and poked matches inside the globes of the kitchen wall lamps to set them glowing. Light burned through the darkness in that cold, still room.

The pile of onions delivered the day before sat in a crate on the kitchen floor. Eleven of the dozen remained. I plunked three of them on the kitchen worktable.

“The knives!” I smacked my forehead. “She hid all the kitchen knives.”

I charged back upstairs to Aunt Eva’s room. “Where are the kitchen knives?”

“Go away.”

“I need to chop onions. Where are they?”

“Wilfred’s violin case.”

“I don’t see a violin case.” I pulled at my hair. “Where is it?”

“Under the bed.” She groaned through her spasms. “It’s so cold in here. Why is it so cold in San Diego? The weather was supposed to cure Wilfred.”

“I’ll get more blankets. I’ll be right back.” I dashed away and tugged my blankets and Grandma Ernestine’s quilt off my own bed, dragged them down the hall, and laid them over Aunt Eva’s twitching body. “Here you go. Nice and warm.”

“Kalt.”

“What?” I asked.

“Kalt.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying, Aunt Eva.”

“Eiskalt.”

“Are you speaking German?”

“Don’t speak German, Mary Shelley.” She whimpered through her chills. “They’ll arrest you. Gef?ngnis.”

“I’ve got to find the knives. Where’s his blasted violin case?” I dug through shoes and boxes stuffed beneath the bed. “Here it is. Cripes, you really wanted to hide it, didn’t you?” I popped open the latch of a curved leather case.

The knives and scissors were tucked around Uncle Wilfred’s cherrywood violin. I snatched a knife with an accidental strum of the E string and returned downstairs, so fueled by fear I didn’t yet feel tired from being up so early.

My fingers chopped those golden bulbs as fast as they could without severing a thumb. I stuck an onion wedge in my mouth and sucked on its potent fumes to keep my own body from breaking down. Water blurred my eyes.

“Wait—why am I chopping them?” I spit the onion out of my mouth. “She needs to be buried in them. This is crazy. What do I need to do?” I paced the kitchen floor and yanked my hair again until my scalp hurt. “All right … let’s make the chopped ones into soup and syrup and cut the other ones in half to stir up the odors. We’ll put the halved ones in her bed. Her feet—oh, damn, I forgot to check her feet!”

Another frenzied dash upstairs. I flapped the ends of her blankets off her legs and fell to my knees in thanks at the sight of shivering white feet.

“Oh, thank God. They’re not black.”

But some of the victims die within a matter of hours, I remembered the newspapers warning. Some last for days before a deadly pneumonia sets in, and there’s nothing you can do to free their lungs from that suffocating blood-tinged fluid.

Aunt Eva coughed a wicked cough that rattled inside her chest. Her nose bled into her pillowcase.

“Why is there blood?” I mopped her up with a handkerchief, but the flow kept coming. “Hold this against your nostrils with as much strength as you can give. I have to get the onions. We’ve got to get you covered.”

I took off again, and I heard my father’s words of advice from his letter in the rhythm of my footsteps pounding through the halls.