As Bright as Heaven(50)
He is right, he is right, the voice of reason whispers to me.
“But he has nowhere to go,” Maggie says again, her voice softer this time. She, too, is on the verge of tears. Uncle Fred doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t have an answer for any of our problems. A second later he turns for his bedroom. He closes the door, no doubt to dress for another appalling day in a funeral parlor that is more of a mausoleum now than anything else.
My insides feel like they are being pulled in all directions. Our house, filled with the dead and now the flu itself living here, clearly is unsafe for the baby. But are there completely safe places anymore? And who else can take a helpless orphaned child? Dora Sutcliff could probably care for him for a little while, but she already said she didn’t think she could care for a baby along with Charlie. The thought of handing this child over to some stranger—even only temporarily—fills me with dismay.
Maggie looks at me with pleading eyes.
“We can’t just think about what we want,” I tell her, knowing what I will have to do. I will have to go across the street and beg Dora to take him.
I brush past my sister to go into the kitchen and start warming the milk. “Maybe Mrs. Sutcliff should take him for a while,” I say as I take a bottle off the draining towel.
“I don’t want her to,” Maggie mutters.
The baby is now fully distressed at the delay in getting his breakfast. Maggie is cuddling him close and bouncing up and down to distract him. “We can keep him safe here. I won’t take him upstairs anymore. At all. I’ll sleep on the sitting room sofa. I won’t take him anywhere near Mama and Willa. Or Uncle Fred’s bodies. I can keep him safe!”
I pour the milk in the pan and say nothing. I don’t tell her that no one can guarantee anyone’s safety. Not the way death is swarming this city, this house. We can only do the best that we can at the moment we can do it.
When the bottle is ready, I hand it to Maggie and she takes the baby into the sitting room to curl up in Uncle Fred’s big armchair and feed him.
I fix oatmeal for Willa, of which she eats only half while telling me she wanted pancakes. I upright her fallen bedside table, pocket the bottle of aspirin, which had fallen off it, and pick up the pieces of the broken cup. I help her to the toilet and then tuck her back into bed. I assure her that Mama is resting and I tell her that when she is all better Maggie will show her the sweet little baby we are taking care of. She then drifts off to sleep.
I leave Willa and return to the kitchen. I pour cool water into a basin, grab some cotton wool, and put on my mask before heading back upstairs. When I step into her room Mama is sleeping, which I’m glad of because she can’t command me to leave. But it also means she isn’t awake to take the aspirin. I set the bottle on her bedside table.
I sponge away the bit of dried blood on her forehead and then I sit with her for a long while, cooling her fever with the compress, just as I had done with Willa. And just like Willa’s, her fevered skin heats the cool cloth with terrifying rapidity. This flu is like Goliath—enormous and evil and strong—and I am like David but without a slingshot, without a stone. I have only the desire to fight it and no weapon. Mama moans as if to tell me my observations are correct.
Ours is not a safe house.
I rise, wash my hands in the upstairs bathroom, and then head downstairs, grabbing my cape off the hook by the front door.
Maggie, playing on the parlor floor with the baby, calls out to ask where I am going.
I don’t answer her.
I yank open the door and run across the street. Dora Sutcliff answers the bell looking like she hasn’t slept in a month. Her clothes are rumpled, her hair askew, and her eyes are shadowed by dark circles.
In tears she tells me she cannot take the baby.
Charlie has the flu.
CHAPTER 32
Pauline
In my dream, I am back home in Quakertown. I am young again. Seventeen. Thomas Bright, the son of the cigar maker, is looking at me from across the straw-strewn dance floor.
I know him from school and church socials and from the times his family has occasionally come to my parents’ restaurant. He is nice-looking. Tall. Taller than his three brothers even though he’s the youngest by five years. I’ve seen him staring at me before. He doesn’t stare at any of the other girls, only me. And that makes my heart pound a little. My friend Carrie whispers to me that I’m probably going to have to be the one to ask him to dance because everyone knows he’s too shy and quiet to come over and ask himself. She says that because she thinks I won’t do it. But I do. I walk over to Thomas Bright. And his eyes grow wider with every step I take toward him.
“Are you going to or aren’t you?” I say when I reach his side of the barn. I look down at my clothes and I see that I’m wearing a yellow dress with tiny white flowers all over it. It’s the one I saw in a store window in Allentown and that Mama said was too expensive.
“Am I what?” Thomas Bright says, and when I look up again, I see that he is also more handsome than his brothers.
“Are you going to ask me to dance?”
“If . . . if I did, would you say yes?” he asks.
“Ask me and see.”
He smiles at me and says, “Will you marry me, Pauline?”
I look down at my clothes again, and I’m wearing a creamy white dress with lace trim and pearl buttons. The one I bought in Philadelphia. I have a bouquet of asters and mountain laurel in my hands. We’re not in the barn anymore; we’re in the Quakertown Community Church and Mama is sitting in the front pew with my daddy. She is dabbing her eyes with a pale violet handkerchief.