The Sisters of Summit Avenue Page 15

  At last I picked up the baby and faced my father. He held out his arms. The baby gazed up at him with those kittenish eyes.

  My voice caught. “She can’t be without her blanket.”

  “No.”

  I leaned down and inhaled the smell of the baby’s corn-floss hair, her scalp, her breath—medicine to hold me until we were together again.

  She cried when Father took her. She only knew one word, though that was smart for a baby her age. She called it as he took her out the door.

  “Maa!”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934

  Ruth fanned herself in the late morning heat. Too many people were packed in her kitchen. Every single living relative was crammed in this oven—well, except Mother, always the odd man out. Heaven knows where she wandered off to. Even without her, a person could suffocate to death in here, as buried alive by chattering family as Mr. Poe’s black cat, bricked up inside a wall. Why did Margaret have to mention that story? Now Ruth kept picturing bricks being plunked down, the mortar oozing between them while she watched, bound like a mummy behind them.

  For crying out loud. What is wrong with you?

  She scowled up at Nick, loaded down like a pack mule with June’s luggage as he plodded up the stairs. Then she swung her frown back down at Richard, yammering at her with that big head of hair. He was saying something but all she could hear was what he’d said earlier. Encephalitis lethargica patients can attend to everything going on around them, even when seemingly asleep. They are fully awake.

  She refocused in time to see that June and her ridiculous yellow suit were halfway down the hall to John’s bedroom.

  “Hey!”

  June stopped.

  “Let me make sure that everything’s all right first.” Ruth could smell her sister’s expensive perfume when she squeezed past her.

  Over the years, Ruth had gotten used to John sleeping in the background as she lived her life. Sure, Nick and she had talked outside John’s window, plenty of times. They had laughed. There was that time he’d picked her up and ran her kicking and squealing around the yard, after she had teased him.

  And the time he’d lifted his shirt for her to scratch his back and he ended up taking it off.

  And the time they had kissed under the clothesline, sheets billowing around them like angel wings.

  And all those times that she had followed Nick to the barn.

  Her tell-tale heart sunk like an anvil dumped into a lake.

  She slowed her steps but it was a short hall. The posse arrived at the closed bedroom door before she was ready to deal with it.

  She blocked the way in. “A big crowd might be too much for him.”

  “I’m going in.” June shifted forward in her sunshine suit as if she might actually ram past her.

  “Not without me you aren’t.”

  “I won’t hurt him, Ruth.”

  Anyone else would have thought that June’s sweet smile meant she was joking. Ruth knew better.

  Maybe Ruth had hurt John. Maybe she had meant to. Maybe she was so furious at him for leaving her that she was punishing him. And maybe by punishing him, she was punishing her own guilty self. Because she loved him. Loved him more than she could bear. She had from the moment she’d first seen him.

  She flung the door open.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Chicago, 1922

  June pushed her way through the crowd of the Dil Pickle Club, the slashes of people’s mouths and eyes blurring in her vision. John was kissing her sister. Her John. Her sister.

  She stumbled into a dark-skinned man, who then held her wrist to steady her. “Are you all right, Miss?”

  The kindness in his voice swelled the salt lump in her throat.

  She nodded, plunged on, then ricocheted from a staggering woman in fox furs and into the arms of a man fuming of alcohol.

  “Hey, what’s a pretty girl like you doing crying?” He clung to her as he blinked to clear his eyes. “Wow. You are pretty. Anyone ever tell you that you have kitty-cat eyes? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  She tried to break free.

  “Hey! Hey! Where you going, kitty? I’m trying to help you.”

  “Let go!”

  A man shaggy with raccoon fur stepped up. As June shrank back from him, it registered that he was handsome and young. He wore his mass of light brown hair combed back in a pompadour.

  “Now let her go, Bob. That’s a good boy.” He pried the drunk’s fingers from her sleeve. “Let—her—go.”

  He escorted her toward the hat-check counter. “Are you okay?”

  She rubbed her arms and looked over her shoulder.

  “Sorry about my friend. Would you believe it, he’s a physician here in town. I’m afraid we were slipped some rather wicked booze. He’s not a bad fellow—most of the time. He’s actually saved a few lives in his day.”

  June looked over her shoulder again. John wasn’t even trying to find her.

  Her rescuer raised his voice above the scream of a trumpet. “Are you here with someone?”

  The wooden floor seemed to have developed a magnetic force that was dragging her downward. How luxurious it would be to give in and sink down into it. She forced her mouth to move. “I’m all right.”

  “Well, Miss All Right, I’m Mister Okay. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He stuck out a neat hand.

  She moved her own hundred-pound hand toward his. Had she imagined what she’d seen? Hope fluttered in the iron cage of her ribs. Could that be it? She’d only imagined that she’d seen John kissing her sister?

  Through the crowd, she saw John staggering past a white-thatched man in a bow-tie. When he caught her glance, he raised a floppy hand then plowed her way.

  “Say, Miss All Right, you’re looking a little green. Did you get some of that coffin varnish, too?”

  John stopped heavily behind her. “Hey.”

  “Do you know him?” asked her rescuer.

  Oh, for the release of tears. Healing, cleansing tears. If only she knew how! She stood there, erect and quiet, as her heart clawed through her chest.

  “June,” John slurred.

  She turned around. “Where’s Ruth?”

  John rotated woodenly to look behind himself then stumbled back. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “I know! It’s hitting me hard. I don’t know what I had.”

  June’s rescuer smirked. “Liquor, by the looks of it.”

  “I’m not much of a drinker,” John slurred.

  “No lie.”

  “I’ll take Ruth home,” June said coldly. “If I can find her.”

  Her rescuer put out his hand to John. “I’m Richard Whiteleather. I was helping your friend—”

  “Girlfriend,” John said thickly. “Fiancée, if she’ll let me.”

  Richard looked between them, raising his brows. “You two?”

  “I don’t know him,” June said. This, she realized, was the truth.

  John reached out for her.

  She shied away from him. “Stay away from me. I mean it.”

  “Okay!”

  “And stay away from my sister. She’s just a kid.”

  “Okay!”

  He was so beautiful, and dejected, that she wanted to relent. Maybe she had imagined it after all. Maybe they could just forget it.

  But at that moment, Ruth pushed her way through a circle of Picklers crisscrossing hands over knees in the Charleston. She shouted over the riot of trumpets, laughter, and shuffling feet. “June!”

  She trotted up, breathless. “June! I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have happened that way.”

  That way?

  Richard put out his hand. “Hi there. Can I help you?”

  “Who are you?” Ruth snapped. He withdrew his hand as she turned to June. “Junie, we need to talk.”

  “It didn’t mean anything to us,” John slurred. “I swear, it didn’t mean a thing.”

  Ruth looked u
p at him, stricken. It obviously meant something, very much, to her.

  June felt all emotion bleed from her, all sorrow, all pain, all disappointment, gone. Nothing could hurt her if she did not feel.

  “Take care of him,” she told her sister. She walked away.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Indiana-Michigan Line, 1926

  The sky had been as crisp and clean as a freshly ironed handkerchief that September day in ’26. Even with her pregnant belly grinding on her pubic bone (she should have known she was carrying twins), three burnt black coffins of bread smoldering on the stove, and her two kids crying in the house, Ruth’s heart had soared at the perfect bluebird-blueness of it as she strolled in the barnyard (well, as much of a stroll as she could muster, being more of a charger). She could actually feel her youthfulness pulsing in her twenty-two-year-old cells. She broke into the song that had been playing on the radio.

  “ ‘When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along. Along!’ ”

  She stopped when she came to John, then shifted the basket she was carrying against her protruding stomach. “Hey, you.”

  He was sitting on a bale of hay just inside the barn, his knees jutting out like a grasshopper, his dusty hat pulled low on his head. He rarely sat still—never, when he was working.

  “Gorgeous out, isn’t it? Who wants cre-am?” Their private joke.

  He kept his face pointed at his work boots.

  He didn’t have to be so serious. He was twenty-seven years old and all sinews and muscle. Just looking at him made her blood rise.

  “Oh, come on, old man!”

  He looked up. Under the brim of his hat, his Abe Lincoln face, with those high cheekbones, was blank.

  She raised her voice over the chickens who had spied her basket of scraps and were squabbling at her feet in a flurry of down feathers. “You okay?”

  A long moment passed. “Throat hurts.”

  Strange. John never admitted when he was ill.

  “Why don’t you go in the house and lie down then?” She knew that he wouldn’t. “At least go gargle with some salt water. Go on in and I’ll be there in a minute.”

  When she returned from gathering eggs in the henhouse, he was still sitting in the entrance to the barn.

  “John, aren’t you going to get up?”

  It took him a while to lift his face. “Yes.”

  The rest of him didn’t move.

  Unease slid through her guts, but she had to go in the house. Margaret and Jeanne were only three and two years old then and she’d left them in the playpen. Later, after she’d baked a cake, put some clothes in bleach to soak, frosted the cake, and given the girls lunch before laying them down for a nap—with the ridiculous “Red, Red Robin” stuck in her mind all the while—she went back outside with a sandwich for John since he had not come in to eat. The hair on her arms prickled. He was perched on the same bale, in the same position.

  “John!”

  He kept his gaze on his boots.

  Her pulse thumping in her ears, she stepped closer. She thought the question bizarre even as she blurted it.

  “What are the names of your daughters?”

  In the distance, cowbells clunked sedately. She was aware of the acrid smell of animal drifting from the barn.

  When he raised his head, his pupils were blank with fear, as if he knew what not knowing their names meant.

  Terror blazed through her. “John!”

  He yanked free when she tried to pull him to his feet, then he scrambled on all fours into the barn and curled up in a corner.

  “John, what are you doing?”

  When she touched him, he bunched tighter.

  They had no phone. She ran through the yard, chickens flying up shrieking, then she snatched the girls from their bed and ran with them, still clinging to their blankets, to the Model T. They cried from the front seat as she pulled the choke by the radiator, hopped in the car to jam in the key and adjust the throttle, hopped back out to crank the car, then threw herself back inside. Cats galloped for cover as she sped from the yard and toward neighboring farms for help.

  John was balled up asleep in the barn when the neighbor men came. They approached him slowly.

  “Now, John.” George Squibb reached out his hand. “Let me help you.” He touched John’s shoulder.

  John’s eyes flew open. He screamed like an animal that would bite if cornered.

  They surrounded him warily, menfolk around a rabid dog, when Dr. Akin roared up in his Buick. He jumped out and ordered the men to lash John down to keep him from hurting himself. Upon a signal, they leaped on John and dragged him to the back bedroom, where they bound his wrists and ankles as Ruth watched, her two-year-old straddling her hip and her three-year-old burrowing into her leg.

  They hadn’t needed to tie him up. He was asleep before they were done, and could not be awakened.

  * * *

  Five days later, Ruth had pressed Jeanne to her hard gob of pregnant belly as Dr. Akin positioned then repositioned the cupped end of his stethoscope against John’s chest. Ruth stroked her daughter’s satiny hair and grasped for any distraction: organ music, wheezing from the parlor, the wedding march that signaled the start of Betty Crocker’s radio program; Margaret in the kitchen talking to Mother, who’d come to help; Aunt Edna’s cuckoo clock yodeling from the dining room. HOO-hoo. HOO-hoo. HOO-hoo. Ruth fought the sudden impulse to jump up, snatch that little birdy, and smash it.

  Dr. Akin straightened his wiry body with a sigh, then slowly unclipped his instrument from behind his ears. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Ruth, but I believe that John has encephalitis lethargica. That’s—”

  Ruth had held up her hand to stop him. The newspapers had been talking about the mysterious disease that turned people into zombies since she was back in high school. When the Spanish flu came a few years later, doctors thought the ailments might be related. But Spanish flu had come and gone in two years, taking a chunk of the world’s population with it, while the sleeping sickness kept churning on. Nobody knew what caused it, nor who it would attack nor why. Not even the richest lady in America had escaped it—Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan, Jr., had died of it last year. But it always attacked other people’s wives, other people’s husbands. Not Ruth’s.

  Behind smudged glasses, Dr. Akin blinked lashes the beige of milky Sanka. “The fact is, he might not ever fully recover. Few with this type of encephalitis lethargica do. From what I’ve seen, they can go on like this for years. The issue isn’t that the patients can’t do things. John’s muscle tone and reflexes are normal. Why, he’s probably physically capable of running a mile. It’s just that they drop off to sleep before they can finish a task. As much as they might want to do something, they can’t without falling asleep.”

  She pulled Jeanne’s thumb from her mouth. The baby inside her kicked. “There has to be a cure.”

  Dr. Akin put his stethoscope in his bag. “At times he might be able to sustain a response. He might be able to talk to you some, perhaps take a few steps. There isn’t much rhyme or reason to this. Remember—he wants to do things, it’s just that he’s too sleepy.”

  From the parlor, Betty Crocker recited a recipe in her fruity voice. What a prissy know-it-all! Why didn’t Mother turn that thing off?

  “At least we can make him comfortable.” Dr. Akin shut his bag. “There are institutions that can take him if it gets to be too much.”

  Ruth stared at him even as the world changed under her feet, vast stony plates grinding to a halt.

  The doctor patted her arm and left.

  She would make John comfortable. She would make her children comfortable. She could even make the unborn baby ramming against her tailbone comfortable. But dear God, what about her?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934

  Like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, Mother shot up from where she’d been sitting by John’s bed when the posse entered the bedroom. She faced Ruth, eyes bugged behi
nd her glasses. “He’s still sleeping.”

  And yet Mother had been chatting away to him. Ruth led in John’s examiners: June, Old King Cole, the kids. Nick didn’t come, which was wise of him.

  She looked down at her husband. His skin, draping over his sharp cheekbones, had thinned from being mostly bedbound all these years, but his features were much the same. June would still find him attractive. He was, Ruth realized as they gathered around his bed, still attractive.

  Truth was, Ruth avoided looking at him whenever possible. For good reason. When she gazed down at his arms, she didn’t see motionless lumps under the patchwork quilt. What she saw were veined and muscular powerhouses in the act of hoisting up hay bales, digging postholes, or pulling breech calves from the womb. In her eyes, his legs, useless now, were towers of strength that tramped up and down fields, paced the floor with baby Margaret when she nearly died from scarlet fever, or ran toward Ruth in the rain. His body, still as a log, she saw sliding under the Ford with a wrench, hunching against a blizzard in an open wool coat, or moving against her, filling her with holy delight. This was what she saw when she looked at him. And so, she did not often look.

  She glanced away before glaring at the wall. “John, wake up. June’s here.”

  * * *

  “John, wake up. June’s here.”

  June winced at her sister’s tone. Did she have to be so rough?

  She tried to keep her gaze on John, sprawled on the bed below her, but it was like clinging to a hot baking dish with bare hands. Dear God, who was this silent ruin of flesh and bones? John looked nothing like himself, nothing like the man for whom she’d yearned all these years. Until this moment, she had not believed that his illness could be this . . . complete. She knew he slept a lot. She knew he hadn’t the strength to run the farm. But she had not known that he’d been robbed of any kind of livable life. He was a living dead man. Her John. Ruth should have told her. Didn’t she know she would have dropped everything and come?

  He opened his eyes. She flinched as if jabbed.

  His flesh blossomed with color when he found her. Life surged into his eyes, into his bones. He struggled to move his mouth, as if it had been glued closed and he had to fight to break the seal.