As Bright as Heaven(71)
I wash up and then hang my apron on its peg next to Papa’s. I’ll grab an apple or a slice of bread on my way to find Alex so that I can keep my promise. We’ve a playdate at the park.
Most days Alex seems as much a child of Papa and Mama as I am, and it’s not until someone says something like “Did your mother have those dark eyes, too?” that I suddenly remember he is not. It’s when I’m jolted by a random question like this from someone who never knew Mama that I’m reminded Alex had another name for the first four months of his life, and that his real mother was a European immigrant. Foreign. Croatian, maybe. Only God knows.
God knows.
I have never again gone back to that building off South Street where I found him, but I visit it in my mind now and then. The remembrance of that time in my life always leads to nightmarish images of Alex’s dead mother and dying sister, closely followed by those of my own mother. Uncle Fred. Charlie. It’s an effort to push away the unwanted visions from the last days of the flu and replace them with happier images of the heart-shaped birthmark that winked at us every time we bathed Alex or changed his diaper, or the way he’d reach for my father at the end of the workday and how we all cried when the first word Alex said was “Papa.”
I don’t know what would have become of us—of me—had we not had Alex during those first years when we were all learning how to live again. It was Alex who gave us reasons to get up in the morning, to sing silly songs and play games, to forget how the flu and the war had twisted every notion we had about the sacredness of life. When I missed Mama so much it physically hurt, Alex soothed the sting. When I wanted to run away to wherever it was that Jamie Sutcliff had escaped to, Alex made me stay. When I wanted to just close my eyes and never wake up, having Alex persuaded me to welcome each new day like a fragile blessing instead of a curse.
He was and is the only good thing to come to us after the flu and after the war. Or maybe it’s just that he showed us good things still existed. And while it’s obvious he loves us all, and Papa especially, I am still his favorite.
When he was four, I told him that he’d been brought to our doorstep like a precious gift and that I was the one who found him. We had decided—Papa, Evie, Willa, and I—that Alex didn’t need to know he’d been found a few feet away from his dead mother. It was bad enough that I still had that horrific image of her in my head, so it was my idea that he be spared the worst of the details. We’d decided when he was old enough we’d tell him his sweet mama, when she knew she was dying, had secretly picked us out special because she was certain we would love him and give him a happy, forever home.
Sometimes when I’m tucking him in, he’ll say, “Tell me how you found me.” And I’ll tell him I got up early one morning during the terrible flu, and there he was on our doorstep, all snug and warm in a basket. Willa, who sorely wanted to embellish that story, had to be told we weren’t going to be making up any more particulars than those basic ones. We were able to get our way with her when she asked if she could at least give him the rocking horse rattle that was Henry’s and tell Alex that he’d had it in his hand when I found him, and we conceded. It turned out to be a good idea, because the little rattle is the only thing Alex has of his first life—or so he thinks—and it comforts him.
He believes that rattle is something his sick mother had placed in his little hand when in tears—he’s asked if she cried when she left him and I always say that of course she did—she’d set him on our stoop and then run away, perhaps coughing into a handkerchief. Papa and the others can tell Alex the made-up story of how he came to us. Even Dora Sutcliff, who adores him, can relay the account we concocted. But Alex never asks them to retell it, only me. I guess it’s because I’m the one who found him.
For the first year and a half he was with us, he slept in a crib in my room. When he was two, he moved across the hall to share a room with Willa, but only for a year. She wanted a room of her own again when Alex turned three and she was eleven. She took my old room on the third floor. Evie’s at the university or the asylum most of the time these days, and Papa’s on the first floor in Uncle Fred’s old room, so it’s often just Alex and me on the second floor. When he has a bad dream, I’m the one who goes to his bedside to console him. I tuck him in at night. I make his breakfast in the morning. I’m the one he runs to when he’s scared or hurt. Evie is like a mother to him, too, when she’s around, but she’s not the one he calls for first. It’s my name that flies off his tongue when he’s got something important to say. Last year, when he was six, he asked me if I could be his mama instead of his sister. And it took me several seconds to find my voice and tell him that I loved him just like a mama would.
“But I don’t have a mama and I want one,” he’d answered.
“You did have one, though,” I’d said. “And she loved you very much.”
“She’s not here!”
“Oh, but she is.” I’d placed one hand over his heart. “Right there. Just like my mama’s right here in my heart.” And I’d placed my other hand over my own chest.
He had asked to see my mother’s photograph then, the one in a gilt frame and sitting atop the mantel in the sitting room. I went and got it and he took it up to his room.
Papa asked about the photograph later that night when he noticed it was gone and I begged him to please just let Alex have it for a while. “You have other photographs of Mama,” I’d reminded Papa. Alex has nothing by which to remember his mother’s face.