As Bright as Heaven(30)

I look at my children—my flesh and blood—and my arms ache for Henry, gone from me for nearly a year now. What will my companion do if I take my girls and speed back to where my baby boy lies? Will it notice I have left when there is so much else to occupy itself with here?

What will it do if I stay?

There is a terrible moral rending when so many people start dying all at once and bodies begin to accumulate like plowed snow on the curbs. My girls are surely feeling this injury to humanity even though they perhaps cannot name it outright. I should have taken them the first day the schools were closed.

“I’m thinking we should go to Quakertown to sit out the flu,” I say, and my voice trembles a little.

“What do you mean?” Maggie asks, her brow puckered.

“I mean, your papa and I think it’s wise to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s until the flu has passed. Just until the flu is gone. Unless . . . unless we want to stay longer.”

“Why would we stay longer?” Evelyn studies my face, looking for unspoken clues as to why I suddenly want us to flee. She won’t want to leave her school and the downtown library; Willa won’t want to abandon her friend Flossie; and even Maggie, who has had the most trouble making new friends, won’t want to leave the city, the Sutcliffs, and her attic room.

“Well, then, until the flu has passed,” I say.

“Will we have to go to school there?” Willa asks, and I tell her not to worry about that right now.

Maggie and Evie wear twin looks of uneasiness at the thought of returning to the country life they left nearly a year ago, and for who knows how long.

“Uncle Fred said this can’t last forever,” I announce, wanting them to hear those words like I heard them. It can’t last forever.

I send them to their rooms to pack, and I head to the kitchen to take inventory of our stores. If need be, I’ll go to the market before we leave to make sure the shelves are well stocked for Fred. The restaurant will be busy until sundown. I’ll wait to place the call to my parents until then.

I open the pantry and step into its shadows to count the jars and packages. Alone, but not alone.

I do not fear Death for myself, but I will not allow its cold fingers to touch my girls. Not even in a slow caress.

They are mine, I whisper.





CHAPTER 20



Willa


Flossie’s brother has the flu. I went to her apartment yesterday, and she told me she’s not allowed to let anyone in. She’s not allowed at my house because her mother is afraid of all Uncle Fred’s dead bodies. We played for a little while on her stoop with her Humpty Dumpty Circus Set. It has twenty pieces, with a giraffe and a polar bear and an alligator I was afraid to touch. But it wasn’t much fun, and she’s supposed to stay near her house in case her mother needs her, so we ran out of things to do.

When I came home and told Mama about Flossie’s brother, she said I can’t go back over there until Flossie’s brother is better, even though I didn’t even go inside.

So there’s no school, but I’m not allowed to play at Flossie’s place and she’s not allowed to play at mine.

Gretchen, the German girl I don’t play with, has the flu, too.

There’s nothing to do here at the house, and everything is closed, like there’s a snowstorm. Evie just reads her books, so she doesn’t care. Maggie will sometimes play with me, but she’s cross because she’s not allowed past the kitchen door into the business anymore. There are dead people inside the viewing parlor now, and Uncle Fred ran out of caskets again. The place where he usually gets them hasn’t had any for days. The cabinetmaker down the street is working to make some, but he says he only has two hands. The bodies in the parlor are just wrapped up in sheets and blankets. Two days ago when the kitchen door was left open a bit, I saw men bringing one in. There was black blood where the nose is. I didn’t like seeing it. That night I had a nightmare that everyone had black blood coming out of their noses and nobody could stop it. I woke up before I found out if it was coming out of my nose, too.

Yesterday Mama told us we were going to go to Grandma and Grandpa Adler’s to stay with them until the flu is gone. But then today Mama said she’d changed her mind. She said she’d thought about it and decided Uncle Fred would be too lonely here by himself and he doesn’t have his housekeeper anymore, so he wouldn’t have anyone to cook for him and do his laundry. She cried when she told us, though.

“That’s because that isn’t the real reason we’re not going,” Maggie told me later.

The three of us were in the sitting room working on sums. Mama said just because there isn’t school doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be learning.

“Grandma Adler said we can’t come because of Aunt Jane’s baby,” Maggie went on. “We might bring the flu to Quakertown and give it to Baby Curtis.”

“But we don’t have the flu,” I said.

And Maggie said, “The first couple days after people catch it, they don’t know they have it.”

Evie told her to please be quiet. Maggie said she didn’t have to be quiet—it was the truth.

“But Willa doesn’t need to be hearing all that,” Evie said. “And you shouldn’t have listened in on Mama’s telephone call to Grandma. You don’t know that she said we couldn’t come because we might bring the flu.”