As Bright as Heaven(70)
Maggie is opening a box of Post Toasties. I guess we aren’t having eggs. “Gone where?”
“He didn’t say.”
Alex points the spoon at me and says, “Gah da!”
“What do you mean, ‘he didn’t say’?” Maggie is frowning again. She puts the box of cereal down.
I pull out a chair at the kitchen table and sit down. “I mean, he didn’t tell me.”
Maggie looks from me to the front door and back to me again. “You talked to him out there in your nightgown?”
Jamie didn’t say a word about my being in my nightgown. He hadn’t even noticed. Why was everyone else making such a big commotion about it?
“I was watching Gretchen’s dad go by with her dog, and I saw him come out of his house. And then I talked to him.”
Maggie looks like she wants to send me to my room, but she can’t because I haven’t done anything wrong. But that’s the look she has on her face.
“You’re not making any sense,” she says.
I’m done with her. “You’re not making any sense.” I get up out of the chair. I’ll go back up to my room and wait for Evie to wake up and make me breakfast.
“Wait!” Maggie says, grabbing hold of my arm. “What do you mean he’s gone? Tell me.”
I pull my arm away from her. “I mean, he said he can’t stay here. He went away. He had a duffel bag, and it was full.”
Maggie’s eyes get wide and the mad look slips away. Another look comes over her, but I don’t know how to describe it.
“What did he say to you?” Maggie’s voice says please even though her words don’t.
I can’t quite remember what Jamie said about his mama not missing him. I try to think of how he said it, but I can’t.
“He told me to be good.”
Maggie slowly turns toward the front door. Alex babbles some made-up words, but it’s like she doesn’t hear him at all. Maggie tears out of the room, into the foyer, and throws open the door. I follow her.
A second later she is the one standing on the stoop in her nightgown in the full light of day, instead of me.
She is the one staring up the boulevard.
She is the one wanting so very hard to have something that’s not hers and not having any way of getting it.
Part Two
CHAPTER 47
? September 1925 ?
Maggie
She’s the same age Mama would have been, this woman lying before me. Forty-two. Papa has already glued the eyes shut, but the photograph the family provided hints that the deceased’s eyes were the type to catch sunlight, just like my mother’s were. Mama’s were blue, like Henry’s had been.
I remove the last curling rod from the woman’s hair and position the lock with an heirloom comb before bending close for one last check on the cosmetics I applied. Papa reduced the swelling on the woman’s forehead and reshaped the delicate socket bone above her left eye. I covered the fix and the sutures from the embalming process with flesh-colored foundation. The penciled, chocolate-hued eyebrows make her look like she’s very much enjoying her third day in Paradise. There are no telltale signs of the injuries that claimed her mortal life.
“You look lovely, Mrs. Goertzen.” The rigor has finally released her after three days of stiffness, and I’m able to fold the woman’s hands across her bosom without any bodily resistance. “No one will see that nasty bruise from your fall. And the hair comb your daughter brought is beautiful.”
I hear a noise just outside the half-open embalming room door. Alex is peering in. His coffee brown curls are tousled and his shirt untucked, and I wonder what he and Willa have been up to while I’ve been busy with the morning’s work.
“Aren’t you done yet?” All four words are laced with breathy impatience. He hangs on the door, one foot sneaking over the threshold. Papa and I have kept the same rule about the embalming room that Uncle Fred had insisted on. No children inside. I’d been annoyed with my great-uncle when we first arrived in Philadelphia and he’d been so worried about my sisters and me being in that room. I understand his caution so much better now that Alex is seven and curious about nearly everything. The world can be a dangerous place. Even so, I’d wanted Alex never to feel afraid or unwelcome to come to me or Papa while we are working back here. When the embalming room door is closed, however, it means he must knock. When it’s half-open, like now, he can hover at the doorframe as long as he wants.
“Nearly,” I answer.
“You’re taking too long. You promised we’d go to the park after lunch. I already had lunch. A long time ago.”
I glance down at the watch pendant just below my collar. One o’clock. The morning has flown. “I just need to wash up, and I’ll be right out.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
The front bell rings from far down the hallway and past the kitchen, and he scampers off to answer it.
I toss the curling rod into the basket with the rest of them and push my cart with all my restorative tools to the corner of the room so that Papa will see that I am finished with Mrs. Goertzen when he returns from the cemetery. I pat the dead woman’s hand. “Nice chatting with you.”