As Bright as Heaven(32)

“I’ll be careful,” I say. “I won’t let anyone cough on me.”

Mama doesn’t answer right away, but her eyes are locked on mine. I reach out to touch her arm. She looks down at my hand on her sleeve and it’s like she is measuring the length of my fingers and my ability to be of any help. She stares at me for a moment and it’s as if she heard my thoughts, knows I need a glimpse of something good today.

“If I say yes, you must promise me something,” she finally says.

“All right.”

“You do exactly what I say. You understand me, Margaret?”

I’m not Maggie to her in that moment. I am Margaret. It’s as if she is reminding me who I am. Margaret Louise Bright. Second-born daughter. Alive.

“Yes,” I answer.

“If I say you can’t come inside a house, you will wait outside. No arguments.”

“I promise.”

She hands me the basket, and I see what else she has put inside to do battle with the flu. Clean washcloths. Lavender soap. Rolls of cotton. Bayer aspirin. A little brown bottle of antiseptic. A flask of water.

“Get your mask and your coat,” she says gently as she brushes past me. “I’ll tell Uncle Fred and Evie I’m taking you with me. Wait for me on the front stoop.”

My mask is in my coat pocket from when we went to the market a few days ago. It’s just one of Mama’s lace scarves, doubled over. It looks pretty, even wrapped around my face like I’m a bandit bent on robbing a bank. I tie it on.

I step outside holding the basket by its handle and my coat over my other arm because it isn’t that cold and the morning air is so fresh and clean. When Mama joins me a few minutes later, she just looks at the coat over my arm and doesn’t insist I put it on.

“We’re going to walk,” she says, taking the basket. “It’s a bit of a ways.”

“I don’t mind.”

She has on a new mask that was delivered with the soup a little bit ago. It makes her look like a nurse. As we step out onto the street, I look up in the upper-story windows of Sutcliff Accounting, and I see Charlie gazing down at us. I wave to him and he waves back. He looks like he wants to come to wherever it is we are going. I would ask Mama if he can join us, but I know Dora Sutcliff would never let him come. I’ll go over to see him when we get back from the south side, though, and I’ll tell him about it. I can ask him what he’s heard from Jamie. Mrs. Sutcliff was over a couple days ago for a cup of flour—she was out—and I heard her tell Mama they’d finally gotten a new letter and she was so thankful to hear Jamie wasn’t injured or sick. But she didn’t say anything else about his letter and Mama didn’t ask. Charlie or Mrs. Sutcliff would probably let me read the letter if I asked. I am still waiting for a new letter from him.

We turn south down Broad Street to join other people who have somewhere to be and must walk if they don’t own a car or buggy. The streetcars have stopped running because people stand too close to one another on them and their breath mingles. It’s not safe. People glance up at us as we walk. But nobody says, “Good morning” or “Where are you headed this fine day, Mrs. Bright?” They just nod as they take note of which direction we are headed. Most people have masks on; a few don’t. Some stores we pass are open; some aren’t. Some doors have red-lettered placards that read INFLUENZA tacked to them—which means there is flu inside—some don’t. Some doors have crepe banners tacked to them—white if a child died, black if it was an adult, and gray if it was an old person whom the flu had killed—and some don’t. It is like any other day, except it isn’t. Broad Street is half the way it always is and half ghost town.

It’s as if Philadelphia has been cut in two like an apple, and one side looks just the way the inside of an apple should and the other side is dark and wormy and makes you gasp when you see it. That side isn’t an apple at all anymore but something sinister and wrong.

And the worst thing is, no one’s sure which side of the apple they’re going to get.

I’m thinking that maybe you don’t know you got the wormy side of the apple until you’ve already eaten half of it. You can’t see the flu coming for you. You can’t see when it skips you and picks someone else. You can’t see anything at all except one shiny red apple that looks just fine.

Even though I’m thirteen, this thought makes me reach for my mother’s hand for reassurance. And she just lets me clasp it, without so much as a glance down in wonder.

I’m not wishing I hadn’t come with her. I want to be walking down this street with Mama, headed where we’re headed. But her hand in mine makes me feel like I’m not alone in this world where you can’t always see what’s in front of you.





CHAPTER 22



Pauline


If Thomas weren’t off training for war, he would ask why in the world I am taking Maggie with me to South Street. “Do you really think that’s a good idea,” he would have said, in a way that wasn’t a question at all.

Truth be told, I’m not sure there are any good ideas right now. Perhaps I should turn around and take Maggie back home, but I admit I was too moved by her desire today to reconnect with life and the living. The sick people who we’re off to minister to may be hovering at death’s door, but they are still breathing; they are still fighting. They are still alive.