As Bright as Heaven(53)

“You’re my brave girl, Maggie,” Mama says when I say nothing.

Inside my head I am shouting “Mama,” but no sound comes from me. In an instant and before she can tell me not to, I run to the foot of her bed. The only parts of her that I can reach are her feet. They barely shudder under her blanket when I fall across them. One of her big toes fills that triangle spot at the end of my neck and as I cry, it feels like that toe is trying to help me stop. I know I can’t stay here. I know for Alex’s safety I must leave her. I must.

“Don’t go!” I finally sputter, as if she is the one about to leave the room.

“You’re my brave girl,” Mama whispers, and then she pulls her feet up and away from me. The front half of my body is now lying across just bed and blanket. Mama has curled up into a ball and turned to the wall.

She will get better, I say to myself as I back away from her bed. It’s the fourth day. Later today she will start to feel better. I turn toward her door.

I am almost at the doorframe when I turn back around. “We named him Alex. Is that all right?”

I wait for a response. It seems like a long time goes by before I get one.

“It’s perfect,” Mama whispers, and then those two words are lost in an avalanche of coughs that chase me the rest of the way out of her room.

? ? ?



Papa arrives by train from Fort Meade, near Baltimore, in the late afternoon. The army let him get on the first train to Philadelphia after Uncle Fred’s phone call. He is wearing a uniform that makes him look like he belongs to other people in some other place. When he left for the camp in September, we all went to the station to see him off. Today, Uncle Fred went alone to pick him up. When I hug Papa, he doesn’t smell like my father; he smells like new wool and metal and train smoke. He has only been gone from us for a month, but it seems like so much longer.

“Mags,” he whispers into my hair when he puts his arms around me. His embrace is light and quick. He has an eye toward the stairs, and the bedrooms, where Mama is.

He hugs Evie next. Tears spill from her eyes at his touch, and she pretends that she’s not starting to cry. She’s trying to be brave. He breaks away quickly from her, too.

Next, he bends down over Willa, who is lying on the sofa in a pile of blankets and whimpering for him. He bends down to kiss her forehead and says, “How’s my little Willow?”

His voice sounds stiff with emotion. Willa starts to cry, too. “Did you bring me a present?” she says. And Papa smiles and says she can have the Hershey’s bar in his travel bag if she takes a little rest.

Baby Alex, lying awake in his bureau drawer by the hearth, had been kicking his little legs quietly when Papa came in. Now he makes a gurgling sound that is nearly a laugh. He is amused by his own feet. Papa looks down at him now and I can’t read what my father is thinking.

“This is the poor orphan baby Mama and I found,” I say, sensing the need to come to Alex’s defense.

“I told your father all about this child on the way home from the train station,” Uncle Fred says, frowning. I can just imagine what Uncle Fred said about Alex.

“We don’t know his name, but we’ve been calling him Alex,” I continue.

“I named him,” Willa says in a hoarse voice from the sofa.

“Yes,” Papa says, but he’s just staring at the baby with no expression on his face. He’s not angry or happy. I don’t know what he is.

For a second everyone is just watching Papa watching Alex.

And then the silence is broken by terrible coughing from upstairs.

We all turn our heads toward the staircase. A second later Papa is on the steps and heading up to his bedroom, pulling out of his pocket a white surgical mask that the army must have given him.

? ? ?



At sunset, Evie takes up a tray of food for Papa and Mama, but when she brings it back down after we’ve eaten our own supper, the food on the tray looks untouched.

The next few hours slink by as we wait in the sitting room for Papa to come back down. Alex falls asleep, but I keep him in my arms rather than put him in the bureau drawer by the hearth. Willa dozes curled up on Evie’s lap.

Just after the clock in the hall strikes nine o’clock, we all notice that it’s suddenly very quiet upstairs. Uncle Fred goes up to Mama’s room. He comes down some minutes later and stands at the entrance to the sitting room. He exhales long and slow like he’s smoking a pipe. But there is no pipe.

“I think you girls need to come up and say your good-byes,” he says softly.

“No,” Evie whispers.

“What?” Willa says, half-asleep. “Where are we going?”

I don’t say anything. A tingling sensation instantly creeps all over my body and a rush of hotness fills my ears. Alex startles and then slips back into deep slumber.

“You can bid her farewell from the bedroom door,” he continues. “She won’t want you to come any closer.”

The three of us just stare dumbly at Uncle Fred.

“Come on, then,” he says, trying to sound gruff, but his voice is high and airy, like an old woman’s. He steps over to Willa and scoops her up to carry her up to our parents’ bedroom. Evie trails behind them, crying into a handkerchief.

I get up off the sofa and lay Alex in the drawer and tuck the blanket in around him. He is so little and helpless.