In the Shadow of Blackbirds(79)

“Miss, you sound tired. Are you ill as well?”

“I’m fit as a fiddle. I’ve never been better. It’s lovely weather we’re having, too, isn’t it? A grand day for a cup of tea with my beautiful dead boy and my dying aunt.”

“Miss, get some sleep. We’ll send an ambulance.”

“He was just eighteen.”

“Get some sleep.”

“She’s twenty-six.”

“Miss …”

“All right.” I rested the earpiece on its hook and tottered on my feet. “All right.”


I STRUGGLED TO STAY AWAKE, TO KEEP HELPING AUNT Eva, but my arms and legs refused to move at a normal rate. A snail of a girl was what I’d become. An old woman shuffling about in the stooped body of a sixteen-year-old.

Candlelight illuminated a little porcelain clock on Aunt Eva’s bedside table. The morning ticked its way toward five o’clock. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since I’d first found her with the flu. The oil for her lamp had run out, so I hunkered down on her floor in the shadows with my arms wrapped around my bent legs.

“I wonder how that Jones boy is doing, or whatever his name was,” I said to my aunt’s wheezing, weakening body. “The one who unsettled me at the convalescent home. Is his flu as bad as yours? And I wonder about Carlos and Mr. Darning, and Stephen’s friend Paul. Are they still alive? Is my dad alive? Will today be the end of the world? Because it sure feels like it.” I sank my head against my knees and smelled onions and blood on my black skirt. “It wasn’t all that frightening to die, come to think of it. Returning was the hard part, landing back inside this broken body and waking up to the war and the flu and people who do cruel things to other people.” I bit my lip and tasted dry skin. “Why did I even return? What a nasty joke to send a girl back inside her body, only to show her there’s nothing she can do for anyone in the world.”

Aunt Eva muttered something in German and gibberish.

“Hmm … maybe the onion syrup is ready. I should give that a try.” I grabbed the side of her bed with one hand and hoisted myself off her floor. “Let’s give that a try, shall we?”

A cry of shock escaped my lips.

My aunt’s face was brown. Those mahogany spots—the purplish, brownish signs of a body losing oxygen—were overrunning her cheeks and ears. She gurgled and sputtered, and blood again leaked from her nose.

“No, that’s not fair!” I dug my fingers into her mattress. “I’m trying my hardest to save you, so you can’t turn purple. Don’t you dare let this beat you, Aunt Eva. Don’t you dare—”

An ambulance wailed through the neighborhood outside.

What would happen if I jumped in front of the vehicle to make it come to a stop? What would happen?

“Let’s find out.” I left my aunt’s side and galloped down the stairs in the dark, somehow arriving at the bottom without breaking my neck. Outside a salty breeze blew through my hair and skirt, and the moon was a thumbnail sliver in the still-black sky. A cluster of voices murmured down the street, and I turned and smiled for the first time that day.

There would be no need to jump in front of an ambulance, for there an ambulance sat—one block down.

“Thank you!” I took off running to make sure I reached the driver before he could drive away or fade from sight. “Don’t be a hallucination. Please don’t be a hallucination.”

Two uniformed policemen hauled a young woman out of an adobe-style bungalow with a red-tiled roof. Her unshaven husband ran his hand through his tousled brown hair while holding a toddler in his other arm. A grandmotherly woman beside him rocked a crying infant.

“Please take my aunt, too!” I ran at the officers at the speed of hurricane winds. “Take my aunt; she’s in my house.”

“There’s no room,” said one of them—an ugly man with squinty eyes and enormous ears.

“She’s not very big. You can make room.” I was aware of my arms waving around me as if they had a mind of their own, but I couldn’t control them. “Please! Stop telling me to wait twelve more hours. This woman here isn’t nearly as sick as my aunt. Her face isn’t even close to turning purple.”

“We don’t have another stretcher.”

“Then I’ll carry her myself, you lazy, useless—”

“I can help.” The flu victim’s husband put down the toddler and came my way. “I’ll help you carry her.”

I stepped back, caught off guard by his kindness. “What?”

“Stay right here,” he told the officers. “Where is she?”

“This way. Thank you. Thank you.” With tears turning the road ahead of me into a blurry, bobbing streak, I led the man to our house, and we tore up the dark stairs together. “Thank you. She’s in here. She’s turning that brownish-purple color.”

The man scooped my shivering aunt into his arms by the light of the candle.

“Kalt,” she muttered. “So kalt. Grippe. Wilfredededed … mein Liebchen.”

“Don’t speak German, Aunt Eva. She’s not even German, she’s Swiss.” I followed the man and my aunt out of her room, back into the blackness of the upper hallway. “She was born in America, and I killed her Swiss cuckoo clock. I kicked it clear across the kitchen as though it were causing our problems. Just like Oberon and those scissors that nearly got him.”