But having heard the story a second time now, Evie has another round of questions.
“Was there no neighbor you could have asked?” she asks. “Other tenants in the building? Nobody on his street knew if he only had a mother and no one else?”
“His house wasn’t on a street. It was in an alley, and I couldn’t recall which one it was when Mama and I went back. There are a lot of alleys and the houses all look alike.” The lie is easier to say. It is getting easier all the time.
“How could younotremember which house?” Evie says. “You had just left it.”
“I told you they all look alike!” I shoot back. “And in case you’ve forgotten, I had also just seen his dead mother covered in coughed-up blood.”
“All right, all right. Stop arguing,” Uncle Fred says. “What are we supposed to do with him? Where’s your mother?”
“Mama wants you to tell the police what happened so they don’t think we kidnapped him,” Evie replies.
Uncle Fred frowns like she’d just told him he is going to have to change the baby’s dirty diapers for all eternity. “Why didn’t your mother do it?”
“She’s upstairs,” I say. “Willa’s sick.”
Uncle Fred narrows his eyes. I see the worry there. “Sick with what?”
“She’s got a fever.” Evie wraps the sleeping child in the blanket as she stands up with him. She turns to me. “Go on to the church like Mama said and tell Mrs. Arnold what happened.”
“Who’s Mrs. Arnold? What am I supposed to tell the police?” Uncle Fred says.
“She’s the woman from the Ladies’ Aid who told Mama about the sick people who live off South Street. She’s the one who sent Mama down there,” Evie replies. “And I guess Mama wants you to tell the police what Maggie told us.”
At this she turns to look at me again, and it’s like she is giving me one last chance to make sure I’ve not left anything out.
But I just hold her gaze and tell her that she can take out one of mybureau drawers for the baby’s bed: a little reminder that he is supposed to be taken to my room, not hers.
Uncle Fred goes to make the call and I grab an apple and start for the front door, stepping over my coat as I give it a glance. The lining is smeared with filth from the baby. I have no idea how to clean it off or if it can be cleaned.
“Leave it,” Evie says, nodding to my coat. “I’ll see what I can do for it while you’re gone. Take mine if you want.”
But I don’t need a coat. I step outside and turn up the boulevard. In my mind, I picture that dying girl sliding off the sofa and crawling to her mama’s room to tell her that someone had come to take care of the baby, so they didn’t have to worry about what will happen to him when they die. Maybe she made it as far as the bedroom and saw that her mother had gone to heaven ahead of her. Maybe she made it only as far as the kitchen before she breathed her last. But it wouldn’t have mattered either way. She and I had looked at each other and I’d assured her that her brother would be safe with me.
And she had died knowing that he was.
•••
A few more people are out and about now that it is early afternoon, but the boulevard still isn’t busy. Not like it usually is. People peer at me as I walk past them, munching on my apple, perhaps because I’m not wearing a coat or my mask, and I’m not with Mama or some other adult. I see other children my age as I make my way to the church, but they are either in the company of their parents or looking out windows.
Mrs. Keller, whose family owns the stationer’s, is sweeping her front step, but she stops as I near her store.
“And where you off to, Margaret Bright?” She tries to sound only slightly curious, but it doesn’t work. She sounds very curious.
“To the church.”
Her eyebrows float upward. “Everything all right at home?” As in,why am I trotting toward the church when it’s closed unless something is wrong? I don’t want to think about Willa. I can’t. And the baby at the house isn’t a wrong thing.
“Yes,” I reply, and I just keep walking. “Everything’s all right.”
The church we attend with Uncle Fred is as big as a castle, and when you are inside it, you are like a mouse in an echoing cavern. The hymns we sing there on Sundays are the same ones we sang at the little church in Quakertown, but here the enormously tall ceiling makes everyone sound like they are trying too hard to be opera singers. Our first Sunday I found out the reverend’s name is Pope. I thought that was funny because he’s not Catholic; he’s Methodist. He looks like Grandad, and when I met him, he smelled a little bit like Grandad’s sweetest blend of tobacco, the one that reminds me of oranges and cloves.
The week before, on the last Sunday before everything was shut down, Reverend Pope asked us all to remember in our prayers all those affected by this devastating flu. I sat there thinking that if God could split an entire sea in half so a million Hebrews could walk across dry land, couldn’t he stop a little germ? Which naturally led me to pondering again why God hadn’t saved Henry when we all prayed he would, knowing full well he could.
“Why doesn’t God just make the flu go away?” I’d whispered to Mama that day in church, when the reverend was done praying. “He could if he wanted to.”
“I don’t know why,” Mama had answered. She wasn’t looking at me, though. I don’t even know if she was talking to me. She was looking straight ahead at the bright altar where the choir stood in gold robes.
