Fever

Page 26

Maddie latches herself to my leg. I can’t tell if it’s in affection or fear.
There’s a young man standing on the threshold, shirtless, a pair of sweatpants hanging from his hip bones. His light curls are frizzy and disheveled, but somehow they complement his angular face. His eyes go immediately to Maddie, who has tightened her fist around my pocket, causing Rowan’s note to crinkle.
There is something in the young man’s expression that darkens. Something like suspicion, then pain. But when he opens his mouth, all he calls back into the noisy room is “Claire! We’ve got another one!”
Claire is a first generation, tall and heavyset, with dark skin and a deep, mellow voice that spills out like molasses. There is a cloud of children at her feet wherever she walks, her feet artfully dodging wet paint projects left to dry on the floor, roller skates, teddy bears, xylophones.
She calls everyone “baby,” and she smells like fresh laundry. Her paisley peach dress has long sleeves that funnel out like bells.
She does not ask us about Maddie right away, or how we came to acquire her. Instead she offers us green tea in chipped, mismatched mugs.
The children at her feet multiply and dwindle, scatter and assemble. One of them pulls out a chair for her, and she sits across from us at the folding table in her kitchen. She offers us sugar for our tea, but we both refuse, used to the blandness for our own separate reasons. Gabriel was never allowed the luxury of sugar when he worked in the mansion, and I never cared for it. In fact, the only sugary things I liked were the desserts at Linden’s parties, and the June Beans.
“Did you hear about us from one of our signs?” she asks.
“Signs?” Gabriel asks.
“We don’t have anything so high-tech as a printer,” Claire says. “So we handwrite them and tape them to streetlamps.”
I don’t remember any signs, but then again, I had my head down so much that I don’t remember a lot about the trek other than the street names.
“It was in a book,” I say, my voice surprising me with its frailty. It’s the voice of a spirit that has been crushed, a girl one tenth her normal size. I look into my tea.
“A book?” Claire says. “That can’t be it. We’ve never advertised in the phone book.” She looks at the young man who opened the door for us. He’s leaning against the refrigerator now, arms crossed. “Silas, baby? Did we?”
Even without raising my eyes, I can feel him staring at me with his sleepy, distant gaze. I feel judged for some reason, and hunch my shoulders to my ears. “No,” Silas says.
“It wasn’t a phone book,” I say. I reach into Lilac’s bag, extract the book, and slide it across the table for her. “In here.”
The book is called Pram’s Ponies, and it’s about a little girl who can speak to foals, and a little boy who doesn’t believe her. In the end the boy drowns and the girl grows a pair of wings. Morbid, but Maddie never seems to tire of it.
Claire does not take the book at first. She presses her fingertips to it, withdraws them, presses them to her chest.
Maddie, who has been crawling under the table, now forces her way into my lap. Silas’s eyes bore into me. My vision flutters with strange metallic bits of light. My chair rattles with a laboratory explosion that nobody else can feel.
Apparently I missed the part where Claire asked how we got this book, because next thing I know, Gabriel is answering. “It belonged to her mother.” He indicates Maddie.
Maddie is wriggling against me, burying her little fists in my armpits, the bones in her face pressing on my neck. I don’t understand why. We have never shown each other much affection. But it helps me back to reality.
Claire leaves her seat and kneels beside me. In a soft voice she’s asking Maddie to look at her. And at first the response is a head shake that grates on my collarbone, but eventually she looks.
Claire extends one finger and doesn’t quite touch Maddie’s forehead, but manages to brush away a wisp of that smooth dark hair. “What’s your name, little one?” she asks.
“Maddie,” I say, surprised by the protective tone in my voice. “Her name is Maddie. She doesn’t speak.”
“And where do you come from?” Claire is still directing her questions to Maddie, but her eyes dart to me for a second.
“A scarlet district in South Carolina,” I answer. Or was it Georgia? Even though it was only a few days ago, my memory of it is muddled and oddly lacking in color. Even Madame’s scarves and jewels are registering as gray and chalky when I think back on them.
I know that this is grief, creeping up on me. I am grieving my brother. The notion astounds me.
“Her mother’s name is Lilac,” Gabriel says.
“No,” I say. “All the girls were renamed for colors.” I can see where this is leading now. Maddie clinging to me. The anxiety on Claire’s face. Claire’s resemblance to Lilac. Claire’s resemblance to Maddie.
G-R-A-C-E L-O-T-T-N-E-R in blue crayon. Claire’s daughter. Lilac’s real name.
Lilac’s book has found its way home without her.
“How is this possible?” Claire whispers. It’s a question I’m getting used to myself.
It takes Maddie more than half an hour to release her grip on me, and it’s only because Claire has set a dish of oatmeal cookies on the table.
There’s an empty can in the corner of the room, collecting drips from a blackened patch in the ceiling. One drop, then another, pieces of thoughts that never pool into anything substantial.
I know Gabriel is feeling better, because he grabs a cookie immediately. But I am feeling nauseous as Maddie twists herself around in my lap and reaches for the plate. Claire’s eyes are red and weepy, and so the orphans look weepy too. They tug on her dress like they’re trying to climb her.
While the cookies were baking and cooling, Claire began the story:
Once upon a time there was a girl named Grace Lottner who wanted to be a teacher. She helped care for the orphans that lived with her and her mother. Read to them, cooked for them, tucked them into bed. By age twelve her pretty eyes and easy smile, coupled with her long limbs and coffee-dark skin, had made her a thing of beauty.
She left for school early one morning and never came home.
The rest Claire cannot bring herself to say. But that’s all right. I can figure it out myself. Lilac—Grace Lottner—was Gathered and sold into prostitution. She wound up pregnant, and maybe she tried to escape, but she only made it as far as Madame’s.
I watch the water plinking into the can. Claire sits across from me and watches me until I raise my eyes to her. Then she says, “You all right, baby? You look flushed.”
For some reason I’m unable to respond. I don’t think I have the strength to so much as open my mouth, and suddenly all I want to do is cry.
Gabriel comes to my rescue and says that I am probably just exhausted. Then he gets into something about how far we’ve walked, about Lilac—no, not Lilac—Grace having tried to escape with us but not making it over the fence.
Grace. At first I cannot see Lilac as a Grace. Rubbing glittery lotion on her arms and long, long legs, sweeping up her hair, smiling a bright red lipstick smile. But then I think of how cooing she was with Maddie, and how gentle she was when arranging my hair, and I start to just ache for her. How alive she was compared to Madame’s rainbow of other girls. How intelligent, lovely. And how destroyed.
Silas, who never approaches us, is now standing elsewhere in the room, watching me. “Why didn’t you go back for her?” he says.
I can feel Gabriel bristling at the accusatory tone, but the question was for me, and he lets me answer it.
“She covered for us,” I say. “We were hidden, and she told them we’d gotten away. She knew we had Maddie and that it was better for us to take her than to risk her being caught.”
Silas makes a sound that is between a laugh and a sob. When I look at him, his pale face is red, his light eyes are shiny with tears that don’t come. “Noble,” he snorts.
“Madame was going to kill her!” I snap. I’m not sure where this anger comes from. It’s like sitting back and listening to some other girl who sounds like me. “You didn’t see that place—I did! We did the best that we could; if you want to go after her, you’re more than welcome to try.”
The room throbs, twice as bright, and I force myself to calm down before I black out again, or cry. Silas turns away, muttering about weakness and Grace only having less than a year to live.
Claire sits back, one hand resting on the other. She does not let her emotions get the better of her. She does not force Maddie to acknowledge her as her grandmother, nor does she make a fuss about Maddie’s broken arm. She does not tell Silas to stop muttering, nor me to stop breathing so angrily.
Instead she takes a long moment, then says, “I would love for Maddie to stay with me. Is that why you brought her here?”
And there lies the heart of my anger, and this persistent heartsick feeling like a lead weight on my chest. “We brought her here,” I say, very carefully, working through my disbelief, “because we have no place else to go.”
Chapter 18
CLAIRE’S HOUSE reminds me of my own.
It’s one story higher, but the structure is about the same. Crumbling. Vaguely colonial. The floors and door hinges creak with the presence of past lives. My parents grew up at a time when houses like these were robust, the wallpaper not peeling. How were they to know what would happen to their children? And to the world as a result?
Maddie clung to the table when Claire offered to lead us on a tour of the house. Maddie was absolutely unwilling to budge, when a moment before that she wouldn’t let go of me. I will never understand that girl. I left her sitting there, gnawing pensively on cookies.
Claire leads Gabriel and me up the steps, past toys and art projects and a piano with sticky keys, on the first floor. The second floor is mostly bedrooms, but the main area holds a chalkboard on its wall and more than a dozen chairs arranged into a classroom setting. Papers everywhere. More tin cans and glass jars catching drips from the pipes that leak through the ceiling.
The attic makes up the third floor. The ceilings are slanted into the upside-down V shape of the roof, and there’s a double bed, a dresser, and a bathroom. This is where Claire sleeps, and it is the only room not entirely overrun with children’s things. There is also a mattress on the floor, made up with sheets and a threadbare comforter. It’s under a stained-glass window that fills the whole room with warm pink and yellow light. “When one of the little ones is very sick, I let them sleep up here with me so I can care for them,” she says.
Up here the cacophony of piano keys and child shrieks and leaky pipes is far away and subdued. I would love nothing more than to collapse into Claire’s double bed and sleep. Or turn my thoughts off for a while.