As Bright as Heaven(4)

I think he’s wrong about that. Maggie told me they have everything in the city.

The train is coming toward us now, whistling and huffing as we stand on the platform. I grab Evie’s hand, and I remind her that I want to sit by the window. I want to watch the outside zip past like it’s trying to catch us and take us back to where we used to be.





CHAPTER 4



Evelyn


I’ve been on this train once before, when Mama and I took Henry to see a special doctor. Until that day I’d never seen streets that stretched as far as the eye could see or endless rooftops that tiled their way to the edge of the skyline or so many people on the sidewalk that your elbows touched when you passed one another. I had never ridden a streetcar or seen a building twenty stories high or gone for a whole afternoon without seeing a patch of grass.

I remember thinking as we stepped off the platform that Philadelphia was so modern and big that there had to be a hundred doctors who could figure out why Henry was sick. I wasn’t wrong. That special doctor told Mama just an hour after we met him that something was amiss with Henry’s heart. Just like that, the city doctor knew what was wrong. He also knew there was nothing he or anybody else could do to fix it. What Henry needed was a new heart, that doctor said, as if all we had to do was step across the boulevard to Wanamaker’s Department Store and pick one out. The doctor didn’t even seem that startled by his diagnosis. He was sad for us, but he wasn’t surprised. Answers to big questions are so plentiful in the city that nobody is astounded by them.

You’d think I would have hated the city after that day. But it wasn’t long after that train trip—even before Henry died—that I started wishing I could always live in a place where all the answers are, even the answers I don’t like hearing.

In Philadelphia, I’ll be able to go to a good school, and college if I want to. There’s a library the size of a cathedral that I’ll be able to walk to every day but Christmas, and I won’t have to spend long afternoons smoothing out tobacco leaves anymore. When Papa told me these things, it was the first moment since Henry died that I felt that warm jolt of joy that comes when something good happens.

I look at my parents now across the aisle from me as the train chugs along. Papa is clearly happy. And Mama? She seems to be in a state of dreaming. Henry died in her arms and she wept for days, just like we all did. But then one day she came home from visiting his grave and she was different. She was able to sleep at nights again, and cook the meals, and read Willa bedtime stories. She does all the things she used to do, but she’s not the exact same person she was before.

Maybe this is what losing a child does to you. It peels off the top layer of who you are, like a snake shedding its skin, and underneath is new skin, and because it’s new, it’s not the same. I don’t mind that she’s not curled up in her bed anymore, wrapped up in sorrow, but it’s strange to me that she wants to live above a funeral parlor and be the wife of an undertaker.

I’m not like her. I didn’t get new skin. Underneath my clothes I am still the same girl who wants to know why every feature about my baby brother was perfect except for the one thing he couldn’t live without.

I want to know a lot of things.

Quakertown is falling away behind us now.

I feel like a new world is opening up to me. Scary and wonderful and amazing and fearsome. Maybe my skin is waiting for me there, in the city, in the place where answers abound.





CHAPTER 5



Pauline


Philadelphia has always been that faraway city at the end of a long road—distant and unknowable. It’s a place where I would occasionally step out of my everyday life to see a show or buy a wedding dress or bring a sick baby and then I’d step back.

Even as the five of us emerge from the train station onto the very same sidewalk where I’d stood a few months earlier, holding Henry in my arms, I’m struck by how immensely foreign the city’s smells and sights and sounds are to me.

I’m not thinking we shouldn’t have come, but I am overcome by the sensation that we Brights will never be from here. Fifty years from now, when I am an old woman who hasn’t been back to Quakertown in years, I will still feel like an outsider. We are to be lifelong strangers to each other, this city and I.

This is what I’m thinking as I get into the backseat of Uncle Fred’s Overland, a shining beetle black automobile that he’s only had for a week. He didn’t want to collect us from the station in the funeral coach—thank the good Lord—and his Model T was too small for what is now to be a family of six, he says.

A family of six.

So, he told us, he sold the T and bought the Overland touring car, as though we needed any kind of explanation. He relays all this as he maneuvers his way into the commotion of just another busy day in the city. Willa, on Thomas’s lap in the front seat with her blond mop of curls springing to and fro, clings to him as Uncle Fred wildly negotiates the streets teeming with other autos, streetcars, horses, and buggies, as well as people. Maggie, with sandy brunet hair like Thomas’s, stares out a window that is half-fogged with our breath, and with the same wide-eyed expression I see on Willa’s face. Evie, golden-haired like Willa, but with far fewer coils and twists, is less astonished, as she came with me and the baby to see that specialist, but she’s never ridden in an automobile as fine as this one, and amid an endless stream of other vehicles all wanting the same bit of road. Fred is an old man at seventy-two, but he winds through the streets as though he’s been driving an automobile all his life, jauntily and repeatedly pressing the horn if a peddler or cart or pedestrian strays perilously close to the lanes of traffic, and all without losing his place in his narration.