As Bright as Heaven(35)

“God bless you,” she whispers.

As she says this, I sense that my companion is so very near to me, close as my breath, but it is not here for this woman. It does not have her name on its lips. It had hovered over her, considered her perhaps, but then it had pulled away, even before I got here.

I am suddenly overcome by my inability to understand why some will survive the flu and some won’t. Why some babies live and some don’t. Why some people pass away in a warm bed full of years while others have their breath snatched from them before they’ve earned so much as one gray hair.

I bid the woman good-bye and head quickly back to the dark, chilly foyer. I close her door behind me and lean my back against it for a moment, unable not to imagine that there is probably a person like Mrs. Abramovic in every row house on this street, and on the next street over, and on every street in this neighborhood, and in my neighborhood, and in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, in America, in France, in Spain, and in all the countries whose names I don’t even know. This flu is like a black shroud that has been flung across everything that breathes under the canopy of heaven, and if you could stand back far enough, you wouldn’t see all the people it touches, only the immense length and breadth of its expanse.

For no reason that I can see, Mrs. Abramovic was able to crawl out from underneath that shadowy veil.

“You took her brother and his wife, but you didn’t take her,” I whisper. “Why didn’t you? Why?”

There is not so much as a tremble in the air about me. No sound or movement. No indication that I have even been heard. And then there is a startling whisper of a thought resonating deep within me: that my companion never chooses. It merely responds.

I don’t know what to make of this revelation. And I don’t know how I will manage coming back to Mrs. Abramovic every day until she is well enough to care for herself. But I know I must try. I’ve no doubt the others on the list will affect me just as greatly.

My hand is on the front door and I throw it open, eager now to see Maggie and the face of innocence. But she is not on the bottom step.

I step outside and pull the door closed behind me, gazing about for my daughter. “Maggie?”

I see the cat that had been walking toward her when I went inside Mrs. Abramovic’s building. He is sitting on the sidewalk licking his paws and washing his face, paying me no mind whatsoever. There is no other living thing on the narrow street.

“Maggie!” I shout, and my heart starts to thrum inside my chest.

My daughter is nowhere in sight.





CHAPTER 23



Maggie


I never would have heard the baby if I hadn’t followed the cat to the street corner and the front window of the row house hadn’t been broken.

The infant’s little cries were like the yowls newborn kittens make or a creaky step at the top of the stairs or a little bird in a far-off tree. But I knew the second I heard it that it wasn’t a kitten or a stair or a bird that made that noise. I knew it was a baby. It was as if that sunken part that had been a sister to Henry suddenly burst out of me and swirled around like a waterspout, reminding me what that sound was.

I didn’t think to call out to Mama, who was still inside the woman’s house. I just turned toward those cries like I was a fish hooked on a line. It drew me down a side alley with tall, skinny houses on either side and front doors with all their paint peeling off. Trash was strewn about and there were little pots of dead plants and rusted bicycle parts and broken glass and the sour smell of pee. No one was in the alley, not even a dog, even though there was dog poop everywhere.

The baby’s cries tugged me to the first stoop on the left, where the front door was ajar. I walked toward it and saw through a busted front window that a girl about Willa’s age, maybe, lay on a sofa, sprawled out like she’d been tossed there. The baby cried out to me again as I looked at her.

I pushed the door open the rest of the way. There were stairs to the upper floors with sacks of trash on them, and another door; this one was half-open also and led into the room where the girl on the sofa was.

I didn’t stop to think if I should; I just stepped inside. The room stank like garbage and outhouses, even with my mask on. I turned to the girl. She was whitish blue like someone had painted her that color. Dots of blood had pooled below her nose, like a mustache. Her eyes were closed and I couldn’t tell if she was breathing. My own breath started to come in short gasps and I turned away. Across the tiny front room was a cradle and the baby who had called out to me. I crossed the room in only a few steps.

The baby looked to be nearly the age Henry had been just before he got sick. Four months or so. The baby had curls the color of dark caramel and the same sweet rosebud mouth Henry had. His eyes were half-open as I drew near and the baby poked a little fist at me as if to say, “What took you so long?” The rag that had been pinned around the baby’s bottom hadn’t been changed in probably days and the weight of it had made it slide down around his knees. I moved a tiny corner of the soiled blanket half covering the baby. He was a boy. He had a little birthmark shaped like a heart by his belly button.

I tossed my coat to the floor, and in one swift move I had that baby out of his filthy bed and wrapped in the folds of my coat. His disgusting diaper fell off at my feet. I scooped him and my coat into my arms and cuddled him against my neck. I didn’t stop to consider that perhaps he was sick with the flu. But his skin felt cool to mine, so I was sure he had no fever.