As Bright as Heaven(40)
“Who’s Mrs. Arnold? What am I supposed to tell the police?” Uncle Fred says.
“She’s the woman from the Ladies’ Aid who told Mama about the sick people who live off South Street. She’s the one who sent Mama down there,” Evie replies. “And I guess Mama wants you to tell the police what Maggie told us.”
At this she turns to look at me again, and it’s like she is giving me one last chance to make sure I’ve not left anything out.
But I just hold her gaze and tell her that she can take out one of my bureau drawers for the baby’s bed: a little reminder that he is supposed to be taken to my room, not hers.
Uncle Fred goes to make the call and I grab an apple and start for the front door, stepping over my coat as I give it a glance. The lining is smeared with filth from the baby. I have no idea how to clean it off or if it can be cleaned.
“Leave it,” Evie says, nodding to my coat. “I’ll see what I can do for it while you’re gone. Take mine if you want.”
But I don’t need a coat. I step outside and turn up the boulevard. In my mind, I picture that dying girl sliding off the sofa and crawling to her mama’s room to tell her that someone had come to take care of the baby, so they didn’t have to worry about what will happen to him when they die. Maybe she made it as far as the bedroom and saw that her mother had gone to heaven ahead of her. Maybe she made it only as far as the kitchen before she breathed her last. But it wouldn’t have mattered either way. She and I had looked at each other and I’d assured her that her brother would be safe with me.
And she had died knowing that he was.
? ? ?
A few more people are out and about now that it is early afternoon, but the boulevard still isn’t busy. Not like it usually is. People peer at me as I walk past them, munching on my apple, perhaps because I’m not wearing a coat or my mask, and I’m not with Mama or some other adult. I see other children my age as I make my way to the church, but they are either in the company of their parents or looking out windows.
Mrs. Keller, whose family owns the stationer’s, is sweeping her front step, but she stops as I near her store.
“And where you off to, Margaret Bright?” She tries to sound only slightly curious, but it doesn’t work. She sounds very curious.
“To the church.”
Her eyebrows float upward. “Everything all right at home?” As in, why am I trotting toward the church when it’s closed unless something is wrong? I don’t want to think about Willa. I can’t. And the baby at the house isn’t a wrong thing.
“Yes,” I reply, and I just keep walking. “Everything’s all right.”
The church we attend with Uncle Fred is as big as a castle, and when you are inside it, you are like a mouse in an echoing cavern. The hymns we sing there on Sundays are the same ones we sang at the little church in Quakertown, but here the enormously tall ceiling makes everyone sound like they are trying too hard to be opera singers. Our first Sunday I found out the reverend’s name is Pope. I thought that was funny because he’s not Catholic; he’s Methodist. He looks like Grandad, and when I met him, he smelled a little bit like Grandad’s sweetest blend of tobacco, the one that reminds me of oranges and cloves.
The week before, on the last Sunday before everything was shut down, Reverend Pope asked us all to remember in our prayers all those affected by this devastating flu. I sat there thinking that if God could split an entire sea in half so a million Hebrews could walk across dry land, couldn’t he stop a little germ? Which naturally led me to pondering again why God hadn’t saved Henry when we all prayed he would, knowing full well he could.
“Why doesn’t God just make the flu go away?” I’d whispered to Mama that day in church, when the reverend was done praying. “He could if he wanted to.”
“I don’t know why,” Mama had answered. She wasn’t looking at me, though. I don’t even know if she was talking to me. She was looking straight ahead at the bright altar where the choir stood in gold robes.
It all seemed so simple to me, I remember thinking. If I were God, I’d put a stop to it. Just like that.
But now as I step inside the quiet church, I suddenly realize sometimes things aren’t simple. Sometimes you do a bad thing for good reasons. Sometimes you do a good thing for bad reasons. The full weight of what I had done this morning seems to root me to the holy floor for a moment. I lied to Mama about not knowing which house I’d found the baby in and I didn’t tell her that a sick girl had been there with him. But what if I had? What if I had shown her the dead mother and the dying sister? What would it have changed? We wouldn’t have left the baby there. We still would have taken him. And he’d still need a home now. He would still need a family that could love him and take care of him and give him a place to grow up in. Why shouldn’t it be with us? He had been born in the part of the city where the poor lived with hardly anything to call their own. Even before the flu came, it was a sad, dirty place to live. Why shouldn’t we give him what every little baby deserves?
As my eyes adjust to the dimness, I see that there are a handful of other people in the sanctuary. They are scattered across the pews, bent over in prayer, doing what the reverend asked us to do. I ease my way to one of the rows and sit down. I look up at the altar, shimmering in the half-light, and I clasp my hands together. I keep my eyes open as I whisper my prayer to God.