Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 39

I got her laid out on the rug in the living room. I tried to get her up on the sofa, but I couldn't budge her. So I gave her pillows from the sofa and water and then I tried tea, but she couldn't take it. She threw up once, and I soaked it up with a tea towel that had fussy roses on it.

She took my hand and her grip was weak, her strong hands suddenly thin and shaky.

It took an hour for her to die.

When she died, she made a rasping, rattling sound and then she shat herself. I could smell it.

It was all I could smell, as I sat there in the little apartment, six years old, hot as h.e.l.l outside and stuffy inside. I opened the windows and watched the Hasids walk past. I felt like I should *do something*

for the old lady, but I didn't know what.

I formulated a plan. I would go outside and bring in some grown-up to take care of the old lady. I would do the grocery shopping and eat sandwiches until I was twelve, at which point I would be grown up and I would get a job fixing televisions.

I marched into my room and changed into my best clothes, the little Alice-blue dress I wore to dinner on Sundays, and I brushed my hair and put on my socks with the blue pom-poms at the ankles, and found my shoes in the hall closet. But it had been three years since I'd last worn the shoes, and I could barely fit three toes in them. The old lady's shoes were so big I could fit both feet in either one.

I took off my socks -- sometimes I'd seen kids going by barefoot outside, but never in just socks -- and reached for the doork.n.o.b. I touched it.

I stopped.

I turned around again.

There was a stain forming under Auntie, p.i.s.s and s.h.i.+t and death-juice, and as I looked at her, I had a firm sense that it wouldn't be *right*

to bring people up to her apartment with her like this. I'd seen dead people on TV. They were propped up on pillows, in clean hospital nighties, with rouged cheeks. I didn't know how far I could get, but I thought I owed it to her to try.

I figured that it was better than going outside.

She was lighter in death, as though something had fled her. I could drag her into the bathroom and prop her on the edge of the tub. I needed to wash her before anyone else came up.

I cut away her dress with the sewing shears. She was wearing an elastic girdle beneath, and an enormous bra.s.siere, and they were too tough -- too tight -- to cut through, so I struggled with their hooks, each one going *spung* as I unhooked it, revealing red skin beneath it, pinched and sore-looking.

When I got to her bra, I had a moment's pause. She was a modest person -- I'd never even seen her legs without tan compression hose, but the smell was overwhelming, and I just held to that vision of her in a nightie and clean sheets and, you know, *went for it*.

Popped the hooks. Felt it give way as her b.r.e.a.s.t.s forced it off her back. Found myself staring at.

Two little wings.

The size of my thumbs. Bent and cramped. Broken. Folded. There, over her shoulder blades. I touched them, and they were cold and hard as a turkey neck I'd once found in the trash after she'd made soup with it.

"How did you get out?"

"With my wings?"

"Yeah. With your wings, and with no shoes, and with the old lady dead over the tub?"

She nuzzled his neck, then bit it, then kissed it, then bit it again. Brushed her fingers over his nipples.

"I don't know," she breathed, hot in his ear.

He arched his back. "You don't know?"

"I don't know. That's all I remember, for five years."

He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs, making her shudder and jerk her wings back.

That's when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George.

He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed all the brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fed them a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gathered up their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave and put them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on a spring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down the mountainside in rivulets, and new gra.s.s and new growth drying out in a hard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutes after it rose.

They held hands as they walked down the hill, and then Elliot-Franky-George broke away and ran down the hill to the roadside, skipping over the stones and holding their belly as they flew down the hillside. Alan laughed at the impatient jig they danced as they waited for him and Brad to catch up with them, and Brad put an arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek in a moment of uncharacteristic demonstrativeness.

He marched right into Mr. Davenport's office with his brothers in tow.

"We're back," he said.

Mr. Davenport peered at them over the tops of his gla.s.ses. "You are, are you?"

"Mom took sick," he said. "Very sick. We had to go live with our aunt, and she was too far away for us to get to school."

"I see," Mr. Davenport said.

"I taught the littler ones as best as I could," Alan said. He liked Mr. Davenport, understood him. He had a job to do, and needed everything to be accounted for and filed away. It was okay for Alan and his brothers to miss months of school, provided that they had a good excuse when they came back. Alan could respect that. "And I read ahead in my textbooks. I think we'll be okay."

"I'm sure you will be," Mr. Davenport said. "How is your mother now?"

"She's better," he said. "But she was very sick. In the hospital."

"What was she sick with?"

Alan hadn't thought this far ahead. He knew how to lie to adults, but he was out of practice. "Cancer," he said, thinking of Marci's mother.

"Cancer?" Mr. Davenport said, staring hard at him.

"But she's better now," Alan said.

"I see. You boys, why don't you get to cla.s.s? Alan, please wait here a moment."

His brothers filed out of the room. and Alan shuffled nervously, looking at the cla.s.s ring on Mr. Davenport's hairy finger, remembering the time that Davey had kicked him. He'd never asked Alan where Davey was after that, and Alan had never offered, and it had been as though they shared a secret.

"Are you all right, Alan?" he asked, settling down behind his desk, taking off his gla.s.ses.

"Yes, sir," Alan said.

"You're getting enough to eat at home? There's a quiet place where you can work?"

"Yes," Alan said, squirming. "It's fine, now that Mom is home."