I fix oatmeal for Willa, of which she eats only half while telling me she wanted pancakes. I upright her fallen bedside table, pocket the bottle of aspirin, which had fallen off it, and pick up the pieces of the broken cup. I help her to the toilet and then tuck her back into bed. I assure her that Mama is resting and I tell her that when she is all betterMaggie will show her the sweet little baby we are taking care of. She then drifts off to sleep.
I leave Willa and return to the kitchen. I pour cool water into a basin, grab some cotton wool, and put on my mask before heading back upstairs. When I step into her room Mama is sleeping, which I’m glad of because she can’t command me to leave. But it also means she isn’t awake to take the aspirin. I set the bottle on her bedside table.
I sponge away the bit of dried blood on her forehead and then I sit with her for a long while, cooling her fever with the compress, just as I had done with Willa. And just like Willa’s, her fevered skin heats the cool cloth with terrifying rapidity. This flu is like Goliath—enormous and evil and strong—and I am like David but without a slingshot, without a stone. I have only the desire to fight it and no weapon. Mama moans as if to tell me my observations are correct.
Ours is not a safe house.
I rise, wash my hands in the upstairs bathroom, and then head downstairs, grabbing my cape off the hook by the front door.
Maggie, playing on the parlor floor with the baby, calls out to ask where I am going.
I don’t answer her.
I yank open the door and run across the street. Dora Sutcliff answers the bell looking like she hasn’t slept in a month. Her clothes are rumpled, her hair askew, and her eyes are shadowed by dark circles.
In tears she tells me she cannot take the baby.
Charlie has the flu.
