As Bright as Heaven(45)

“No, Fred. Willa is strong. She is brave,” I said, wanting my little girl to hear those words and be nourished by them. “Her papa will see her when the war is over and he comes home.”

For several seconds there was no movement outside the door, and then I heard Fred taking the first step back down the stairs.

I must have dozed after he left, because twilight fills the room now and I hear far-off sounds of pots and pans in the kitchen.

Willa is moaning softly in her sleep, a dreadful murmuring that I can almost not bear to hear.

I start to sing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” to fill the air around us with a sound other than that one. She quiets and my tears tap her coverlet like raindrops.





CHAPTER 27



Evelyn


Uncle Fred’s friend Dr. Boyd is upstairs with Willa now, but I doubt he will suggest anything different than what Mama is already doing. He will probably tell her to just keep applying cool compresses for the fever. Give Willa aspirin. Smear Vick’s VapoRub on her chest. Get her to eat and drink. Pray. There is no magic pill for the Spanish influenza, though everyone wishes there was one. I was on the landing earlier to leave a tray for Mama and Willa. I could hear Willa’s strange new cough from behind the door. She sounded like an old woman and it scared me.

“Is the baby all right?” Mama asked, her voice floating out to me from the tiny seam of space between door and frame. “Did he eat something? Did you take care of that rash?”

“Yes. He’s sleeping with a full tummy,” I said. “We dressed him in a few things that were Henry’s. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

She paused only a second. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

The baby already looked and smelled so much better than he did when Mama and Maggie first brought him home. The diaper rash was not such an angry red anymore and he hadn’t howled when I changed him the second time. He even smiled and cooed at me at one point, though mostly what he had done today was sleep.

“He’s resting quite comfortably now, Mama. Truly.”

She thanked me and sent me away, not opening the door for her tray until I was on the bottom step.

After his supper, Uncle Fred came into the sitting room while Maggie, the baby, and I were playing on the floor. He decided after lunch that with the baby here and Willa coming down with the sickness, he would start eating all his meals in the hallway off the kitchen. He doesn’t know if the flu that killed all the people he has been attending clings to his work clothes. He is taking no chances.

I had brought him clean trousers and a shirt earlier, which he hung on hooks that funeral-goers used to hang their coats on, and which are as far from the bodies as they can be. He had come into the sitting room because he’d wanted to hear for himself what Mrs. Arnold told Maggie we were supposed to do with the child.

Maggie repeated to him what she had told Dora Sutcliff and me when I was boiling the baby bottles. I already knew that Mrs. Arnold had said there were more orphans in Philadelphia than people willing to take them, so I watched Maggie’s face instead of listening to her words.

A girl can always tell when something is not quite right with her sister. I know there is something Maggie is not telling us about how she found the baby. She says she can’t remember in which row house the baby lay crying because finding his dead mother upset her. Mrs. Arnold, Uncle Fred, and even Mama believe her. But I don’t. I think she does remember where she found him. I just can’t figure out why she is pretending she doesn’t.

At first I thought maybe it was because she did see evidence that a father lived there, and she’d lied about not seeing any. I was thinking all the rest of the afternoon we’d hear from the police that a distraught father had come home from work to find his poor wife dead and his baby missing. But there has been no telephone call like that. No father has contacted the police to report a missing baby and apparently no grandparent or aunt or neighbor or friend has, either.

I’ve been wondering how that can be. When that woman’s body was carted away by the authorities—surely someone noticed she was dead—didn’t they see the cradle in her front room and wonder where her baby was? And since there has been no telephone call from the police, does that mean no one has found her yet, or have they found her but no one cares that there is an empty cradle in her house? Or maybe they think her baby already died. Uncle Fred told me seven thousand people in Philadelphia are dead from the flu. Seven thousand people in just eleven days. What’s one more immigrant woman and her fatherless child?

The baby grins at me now and gurgles a sweet, little sound. Maggie leans down and snuggles him, and his smile widens. He is so very much like Henry. Not in the shape of his nose or chin or mouth. It’s that smile and innocent gaze that are Henry’s. I look at this baby and I want to forget what I’ve been pondering all day. I want to push away any and all questions about why no one has reported him missing and why Maggie says she can’t remember where she found him. I want to forget that the plague that so disinterestedly brought him to us is at this very minute wanting to snatch away Willa. I just want to forget every terrible thing that is happening in the world right now and love this little child whom Maggie rescued.

Maggie looks up at me. “Isn’t he precious?”

And the words “Tell me why you’re lying,” which sit unspoken on my lips, just fall away like they’d never been there at all.