CHAPTER 30
Pauline
Three days after falling into the abyss, Willa climbs out. She had at last heard me calling, felt my strong arms around her, and obeyed my command that she find her way back to me. I haven’t left her side except to fetch food and water and use the toilet. It was my duty to stay at the very edge of where she’d fallen and, if need be, dive in after her.
When she wakes just now, I can tell the sickness has released her. She has come back to me.
The scarlet glassy-eyed stare is gone, and her eyes once again shine clear like the sky, blue and beautiful. The gray tinge to her skin, which is now cool to my touch, is gone, too. The cough lingers, but it no longer sounds like the screeching of a wounded animal. The worst is over, and though she is as weak as a newborn kitten, my darling Willa has survived.
As I cry tears of joy at her whispered request for pancakes with blackberry syrup, I know this time I have not failed. I battled for my child and I prevailed. With Henry I had beseeched the heavens—for days on end—that he might be spared. But it was as if I had voiced noprotest at all. Death had come for him anyway. Willa returned to me is the proof that I have somehow convinced my companion to leave her be. Perhaps during these months that Death has trailed me, and as I’ve labored to understand its nature, it has grown to care for me. Is such a thing even possible? It seems profane to even think it. After all this time together, and despite all that has happened, I am sure now that Death is not the enemy, but something else surely is. My companion has been suggesting to me month after month since Henry died that it spreads its reach with the tender embrace of an angel, not the talons of a demon. But I still don’t understand why.
I am so grateful Willa was spared, but why does it come for the young and innocent at all? Why does it not wait until the body is old and gray and full of years? As a dull ache in my bones and heat under my skin starts to spread, I want to call out to the room, “What is it youwant?”
Because I still do not know.
I can feel the fever creeping over me as just outside Willa’s door, the orphan child makes a happy, cooing sound. Maggie or Evelyn is taking him downstairs for a bottle or breakfast or maybe just to hold him and sing nursery songs to him.
“I hear a baby,” Willa whispers now. “Is it Henry? Am I in heaven?”
I smile down on her. “No, sweetheart. You are not in heaven. You are home. And we have a guest with us. A little baby. He’s not Henry, but he’s very sweet. He’s staying with us right now.”
Interest gleams in her eyes. “I want to see him.”
“When you’re all better.”
“What’s his name?”
I shake my head, the simplest of moves, but arcs of pain spiral across my head and shoulders. “I don’t know. We might have to give him one while he’s here.”
Willa thinks on this for a moment. The room begins to sway.
“I like Alex. Can we call him Alex?” she says.
I want to grab Willa’s blanket and wrap it about me. A chill in theroom has turned to an icy blast. “Alex is a nice name,” I mumble as I try to stand.
“Mama?”
“I need to see about your pancakes, love. You just stay put and I’ll—”
Then I hear the shattering of porcelain.
I’ve fallen across the nightstand where a teacup had been sitting. As the room tilts, I remember it had been one of Fred’s mother’s teacups and I am sad that I’ve broken it.
The flu has released my daughter, but now it has sunk its teeth into me. I feel its jaws tightening, and my body’s inability to deflect it. As the world goes sideways, my companion seems to lean toward me as if to cushion my fall.
Just before my head hits the floor, I whisper the question I had seconds earlier wanted to shout. “What do youwant?”
And as the room darkens I hear the answer.
I will show you.
