As Bright as Heaven(36)

For a couple moments, I just stood there in that little house and held the baby in my arms like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t think about the girl on the sofa behind me or where this baby’s parents were or what I was even going to do next. I just held him and swayed a little bit with him, the way Henry had liked.

I would have stayed that way a little bit longer, but I suddenly remembered Mama would expect me to stay where she had left me. I turned toward a door by the kitchen area that I figured led to a bedroom. I tiptoed toward the half-closed door to see if there was a mother inside who was simply too weak from illness to get to her child. I poked the door open. On the bed, curled up like a rag doll, was a woman. Her splotchy skin was gray and her open eyes were unblinking. The front of her nightgown was covered in black goo that I knew she had coughed up from her lungs. Uncle Fred’s bodies had been arriving wrapped in sheets, with the arms and legs neatly tucked in. Sometimes their heads weren’t covered but their eyes were always closed. His bodies were dead people whom other, living people had noticed and taken care of. This woman was dead and forgotten. Her hands clutched at her nightgown like she knew she was dying all alone and her children lay in the other room. There were no signs that a father lived in this house. No boots in the corner, no coveralls draped over a chair, no can of shaving powder atop the bureau. Something deep inside me was roiling about and I knew I had to get the baby out of this house of death before I threw up on him.

I turned from the baby’s dead mother and went back into the main room. I looked at the girl on the sofa one last time and, to my surprise, her glassy eyes were now open. I stood there for a second, staring at her because Papa had told me sometimes the eyes of the dead inch open as the body starts to decay.

Then the girl blinked, slowly. She was still alive.

Our eyes held each other’s for a moment.

I wondered if she knew her mother was dead.

I wondered if she knew she was also dying.

Had she staggered to her front door earlier this morning to open it, hoping someone would hear her baby brother crying?

She lifted a finger toward me and pointed at the bundle I held in my arms. Poor thing. I knew the sister love that was breaking her heart in two.

“He’s safe with me,” I whispered, one sister to another.

And then the girl closed her eyes, and her chest seemed to heave a little. Her hand fell limp.

I couldn’t get out of that house fast enough.

? ? ?



When I get back to the step where Mama told me to wait, I can see her way up the street, calling for me. She sounds both mad and scared. I start running toward her, but I don’t want to shout to her because the baby has fallen asleep against me.

I am out of breath when I finally reach her and when I call for her in a gasp, Mama whirls around like she is a ballroom dancer and her eyes are as wide as I’ve ever seen them.

“I told you to stay right there and wait for me!” she says in a half yell because there are a few other people about now, and she glances at them at the same time she is glaring at me. But the very next second she sees the bundle in my arms. “What have you got there?”

“It’s a little baby, Mama. His mother is dead,” I say, still out of breath.

“Good Lord!” Mama heaves her basket to the ground and snatches the baby and my coat out of my arms. He makes a little sound, like he’s not happy about leaving my arms for hers.

“He’s not sick,” I say. “He doesn’t have it.”

“You don’t know that! I told you to stay right on the step!”

“But I heard him crying, Mama. I heard him. I could tell he needed help. I couldn’t just leave him.”

Mama looks closer at the baby. She sees how weak he is, smells his skin and spit-up. She makes a face, a sad one.

“The door to his house was open and he was just lying in a cradle in the front room,” I say. “His mother was in the bedroom and she was dead.” For the first time since I’d found the baby, tears are forming in my eyes. They are hot and they sting.

Mama’s face goes pale. She is no doubt thinking she should never have brought me with her. “Show me where you found him.”

I grab her basket and we turn to walk the way I’d come. I begin to worry that Mama is going to put the baby back. She almost looks like she is mad at me for finding him, even though I know she isn’t. How can she be? I was meant to find him. I was supposed to have come with Mama today. That baby would have died if I hadn’t come.

I don’t want to take Mama back to the baby’s house. I don’t want to see his dead mother and dying sister, but I know I must prove to Mama that this baby needs us. We near the stoop with the half-open door and I glance in the broken front window.

What I see makes me freeze.

The girl who’d been lying on the sofa is gone.

She isn’t there.

“What’s the matter?” Mama says, her question pricking me like a stick.

I only have a second to decide what to do. It’s not a very long time when there’s so much to ponder. That girl was near to dead. I am sure of it. That’s all I can think of. She was dying. Is dying. We aren’t.

“I . . . I don’t think this is the right alley,” I say.

“What color was the front door? Think.”

“I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t remember.” I move away from that first stoop to the second one, to the third one. To one across the alley.