House of Rougeaux(22)

The day is interminable, or so it seems. After the final bell has rung, the shadows follow Nelie along the bricks and pavements home. Her mother has her watch some of the younger children, and Nelie sits hugging her knees on the stoop until it’s time to come in.

In the Montgomery apartment, a card table has been added to the usual supper table to accommodate the Hubbard children. When supper is served Edwin says grace and Violet adds a prayer for Azzie, that God help her to get better quick and come home, and Rosalie, the baby, bursts into tears. She carries on so that Violet takes her into the next room and rocks her little niece until she is calm enough to eat. What would normally be a boisterous meal is naturally subdued.

The next afternoon Nelie’s mother has devised to keep her busy with errands. Nelie has spent the day again with the shadows. The ticking of the clock has taunted her, the round face an adversary lording over her with a threatening hand.

Nelie presses her mother’s list into the pocket of her dress and buttons her coat. A box of soda is needed, a quart of dry beans, some green thread from the Five-and-Dime, a bread pudding is to be delivered to Mrs. Snowflake who is having difficulty with her rheumatism.

Nelie shifts the warm parcel in its wax paper into the crook of her elbow and knocks on the heavy, brown-painted door. The aged woman has been resting on the sofa by the window in the front room. The apartment has a similar plan to Nelie’s home, but differs in most every other way. She feels suddenly suffocated by the smell of mothballs.

Mrs. Snowflake has heard about Azalea, what her poor mother must be going through. Have mercy. She tugs at an earlobe, an ancient habit that reaches as far back as her own girlhood, way back to a sunny meadow when a boy cousin had tickled her with a feather.

Something has stolen her gaze now outside the window, the few stark trees and the white sky. Nelie perceives anew the snowfall, somewhere behind the milky eyes, or at the glass that divides the sitting room and the street outside, somewhere between now and a long time ago.



* * *



Wednesday afternoon: Nelie rides the streetcar with her mother, on their way to the hospital with several shopping bags for Aunt Ginny. Nelie is carefully transporting a large, rolled-up piece of paper tied with a string, the picture of the magical birds that she has just before unpinned from the wall above her bed.

Azzie’s room is at the far end of a soap-green corridor. A starched nurse leads them there and Nelie is not permitted inside. She sits on a small bench opposite the door after her mother disappears into the room with the nurse and the shopping bags and the rolled-up picture.

The door opens again a few minutes later when the nurse comes out, and just before it closes Nelie glimpses something she wishes she hadn’t. It’s only Azzie’s arm, just from the elbow down, visible from behind the half-drawn curtain and lying atop the white sheet. But the color is wrong, ashen where it is usually rich and warm, and worse, as Nelie’s mother and aunt are just moving her upward in the bed, the arm slightly jiggles, as if there is no resistance, no life in it at all.

Nelie stifles a scream with both hands, and keeps it down during this one time that she will sit on this bench, in this green corridor, as far away from Azzie as she has ever been. She keeps it in all the way home, until she can’t hold on anymore. Her mother gets her up off the floor and onto her lap, big as she is, sobbing like little Rosalie, but more terribly, because she is too old to be that innocent.

For a time. For a time.

Finally, Nelie is lulled by the faint smell of lavender, her mother’s cheek against her braids. Her mother says, Remember that day at the shore?

Nelie recalls the long, hot train ride two summers ago, the children bouncing on the seats between the adults and the picnic baskets, clear down to Atlantic City. The ocean was a marvel of sand and shells and darting fish, and way out beyond, of fishing boats and soaring gulls. She and Azzie had waded out along a sandbar, so far it seemed they might cross the whole Atlantic. Most marvelous was the refraction of the sun on the water, on the small waves and in the air as the children splashed and screamed. Azzie was a laughing silhouette amid all that glitter.

Let’s remember that day, says her mother, it was an especially happy day. There’s going to be a lot more. Don’t forget.

Thursday morning Nelie awakens from a dream of refracted light. A glint of sun pierces the edge of the curtain, ringing from the windowsill. This is the change Nelie notices all day, a light coming in and sucking the ink from the dark places. All day at school she floats, subsumed in a dry bubble that muffles the raucous voices around her to a distant murmur. What is loud is the light. She almost can’t tell the time above the classroom door, the numbers are so faded from a glare over the clock face. It is neither cold nor warm, but expectant, so that she has begun to jump at small movements, turning quickly to see what has flickered at the corner of her eye.

By Friday the gleam has grown in intensity and spread. White surfaces seem powdered with glitter dust, a passing automobile burns hot, even though the white sky is still clouded over. There is a bare branch that scrapes an insistent finger against a classroom windowpane.

Nelie sits still at her desk, gripping the metal ring on the end of her pencil. One might think her tense attention is for the arithmetic lesson, intent on the blackboard floating before her in its white ether, but it is not. She is waiting.

It comes.

A movement outside the window. She whips her head around, her heart pounds. It was there, she is sure, the flash of an iridescent wing, silver, blue and purple feathers. She doesn’t know if it is joy or terror she feels.