As Bright as Heaven(37)
“Well?” Mama says.
“I don’t think this is the right alley.”
We make our way back out to the street and then down the next alley. The alleys all look alike. Even Mama can see this.
“I don’t know which one it is now,” I say, thinking only that I was meant to find this baby.
He is crying in Mama’s arms now, but it is a frail cry, like a sighing wind.
“We’ve got to get him some food and attention,” she says. “Come on.”
I follow her back out to South Street and Mama hails a taxicab that is driving by.
We settle into the seat in the back and Mama draws the baby close to her chest to shush him. He smells even worse inside the taxi. Mama looks at me and her face softens a bit. “It’s all right, Maggie. We’ll figure out where he belongs. One thing at a time.”
Her words echo in my head the whole time we’re in the cab. I can’t seem to understand what she said. It isn’t until we’re getting out of the taxi at the funeral parlor that I realize I decided the moment I first held him that I will never let this child go.
CHAPTER 24
Evelyn
Mama’s instructions when she and Maggie left for South Street were that Willa and I should not bother Uncle Fred and that we were to stay upstairs. She’d cocked her head toward the part of the house that was the funeral parlor, where we were forbidden to enter now anyway, and said, “It’s very busy in there this morning.”
That meant more bodies were being delivered and Uncle Fred would be pulling his hair out with where to put them. I already knew he had no more room for any. He had tried to turn some away the day before, but the people who’d brought them told him they couldn’t possibly take them back home. The city morgue is full. The hospitals didn’t want them because they are full, too. You’d never think in a city this size there could be a shortage of anything until people start dying every day by the hundreds and suddenly there’s no place to put the bodies. That’s all they are when there are that many. Bodies. Or not even that. The health department sent out a bulletin that they will begin sending around trucks to private homes to pick up the dead off the porches because undertakers like Uncle Fred are refusing to come for them. The dead—that was what they called them, as if it is too sad and too hard to think of them as singular beings who had names and addresses. The dead sounds like the flu. But they aren’t the same. The flu is one entity who’s seemingly been given a key to every house. The dead are people by the thousands—fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters.
Mama wanted us to be home in Quakertown instead of here, but Grandma and Grandpa were afraid we’d bring the flu there. I guess they didn’t know they could get it from their mailman or the fellow who delivers their vegetables or the woman who stops at the restaurant to ask for directions. Anyone who breathes is a potential carrier. I said as much to Mama after she told us we weren’t going and when she and I were alone with the washing.
“Grandma is afraid for Baby Curtis and Aunt Jane,” Mama replied, as if I had said something completely different. “I shouldn’t have asked and put her in the difficult place of telling me not to come.”
“But she’s not afraid for us?” I said as I hung one of Uncle Fred’s nightshirts to dry.
“Of course she is. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Uncle Fred needs us here.”
I truly didn’t want to go back to Quakertown, but I could see how much it weighed on Mama that she had no choice but to have us stay. Even though we’ve been out of school for nearly a week and no churches are meeting and no theaters are showing movies, the flu shows no signs it’s letting up. The number of people dying just keeps getting bigger, not smaller. We wake up each morning wondering if maybe today’s the day the flu begins to tire of us.
Willa complained at first about being relegated to the bedrooms after Mama and Maggie left this morning, but she quieted down soon enough. In fact, she is now uncharacteristically quiet. I imagined I would need to have a long list of activities with which to keep her occupied for the several hours Mama and Maggie would be gone. But once we settle into her room to look at books, that’s where we stay. I let her page through my favorite book, the one with the Latin names of all the flowers and beautiful drawings of what they look like. I tell her she can find her four favorites and then we’ll draw a bouquet of them and fill in the sketch with colored pencils. I am half reading a book of my own, Anne of the Island by L. M. Montgomery—a novel I’ve read twice already. My mind begins to wander and because Willa is being so quiet, I lose track of time.
I start thinking about how different everything is now with this plague covering all the earth and killing so many people, and all the while Papa and Jamie Sutcliff and so many others are off fighting in a war where more people are dying, but not from influenza—from mortar rounds and mustard gas and bullets. It is like there are two wars. And what does war even accomplish? How does one country win over another by simply killing its people? None of it makes any sense. I am missing school and Gilbert, and even the silly girls in my class who care more that all the handsome young men are coming home from the front with missing limbs than that all those limbs were lost in the first place. I am tired of sitting in the house and pretending I can’t see how busy Uncle Fred is downstairs. I am tired of meatless Mondays and wheatless Wednesdays and I want Papa home with us and not heading off to France. I’m peeved that Maggie got to go with Mama when it should have been me. I’m fifteen. Practically an adult. Maggie is still just a child. When Mama came to tell me she was letting Maggie accompany her, I asked her why.