In the Shadow of Blackbirds (33 page)

I hung up on the man and pressed my forehead against the telephone’s sharp wooden edge. “This can’t be happening. It’s too much.” I whacked the green wall with my fist. The sensation felt exquisite, so I whacked it again until the cuckoo clock bounced off its nail and splintered on the floor. The second hand still ticked, so I stomped on the clock’s face with my bare foot and kicked the contraption across the kitchen, where it cracked against the icebox with a terrific
crash.

The ticking stopped.

I had killed a clock.

I should have been saving my aunt and my dead first love, but instead I had murdered a beautiful Swiss timepiece, handmade in the nineteenth century by one of my greatgrandfathers up in the Alps. My fist throbbed. Little clock handprints bruised the sole of my foot.

Death gave a good chuckle.
I’m beating you, little girl. You see? You can’t fight me. Why even try?

I grabbed clean cloths and returned upstairs to Aunt Eva.

THE REST OF THE DAY UNFOLDED MUCH THE SAME:
nonstop running up and down the stairs with soup and tea and cold compresses. Fruitless telephone calls to find doctors and ambulances. Bloody noses. Rasping coughs that sounded like the last gasps of a drowning person. Skin color checks. Onions.
Vomit. Curse words that would have made my father cringe. Clothing changes when I couldn’t stand the mess of fluids on my own skirts.

I opened a cookbook and learned how to make onion syrup by filling a jar with alternating layers of onions, brown sugar, and honey, but the concoction would need to sit overnight to be ready to consume. When my stomach growled, I stopped to eat an apple and drink a glass of water, but my breaks couldn’t have lasted more than two minutes apiece. There was no time to slow down.

Somehow, night returned before it seemed due. Aunt Eva had made it onto a list for an ambulance, but every time I called for an update, the dispatcher added another twelve hours to the wait.

“I’ll pay you money,” I told the man near midnight. “I’ll pay you to pick her up sooner. I bet you’re fetching rich people faster than the poor souls who slave away in the shipyard. That poor woman worked her fingers to the bone to keep the navy safe, and you’re just letting her die up there.”

“Miss, her name is on our list. We’ll get her as soon as we can.”

“You’re not a true patriot. You’re not one hundred percent American.”

“Miss—”

“I’m sorry, that was a terrible thing to say. I hate when people say that. I’m sure you’re a fine person.”

“Miss, you sound tired. Are you ill as well?”

“I’m fit as a fiddle. I’ve never been better. It’s lovely weather we’re having, too, isn’t it? A grand day for a cup of tea with my beautiful dead boy and my dying aunt.”

“Miss, get some sleep. We’ll send an ambulance.”

“He was just eighteen.”

“Get some sleep.”

“She’s twenty-six.”

“Miss …”

“All right.” I rested the earpiece on its hook and tottered on my feet. “All right.”

I STRUGGLED TO STAY AWAKE, TO KEEP HELPING AUNT
Eva, but my arms and legs refused to move at a normal rate. A snail of a girl was what I’d become. An old woman shuffling about in the stooped body of a sixteen-year-old.

Candlelight illuminated a little porcelain clock on Aunt Eva’s bedside table. The morning ticked its way toward five o’clock. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since I’d first found her with the flu. The oil for her lamp had run out, so I hunkered down on her floor in the shadows with my arms wrapped around my bent legs.

“I wonder how that Jones boy is doing, or whatever his name was,” I said to my aunt’s wheezing, weakening body. “The one who unsettled me at the convalescent home. Is his flu as bad as yours? And I wonder about Carlos and Mr. Darning, and Stephen’s friend Paul. Are they still alive? Is my dad alive? Will today be the end of the world? Because it sure feels
like it.” I sank my head against my knees and smelled onions and blood on my black skirt. “It wasn’t all that frightening to die, come to think of it. Returning was the hard part, landing back inside this broken body and waking up to the war and the flu and people who do cruel things to other people.” I bit my lip and tasted dry skin. “Why did I even return? What a nasty joke to send a girl back inside her body, only to show her there’s nothing she can do for anyone in the world.”

Aunt Eva muttered something in German and gibberish.

“Hmm … maybe the onion syrup is ready. I should give that a try.” I grabbed the side of her bed with one hand and hoisted myself off her floor. “Let’s give that a try, shall we?”

A cry of shock escaped my lips.

My aunt’s face was brown. Those mahogany spots—the purplish, brownish signs of a body losing oxygen—were overrunning her cheeks and ears. She gurgled and sputtered, and blood again leaked from her nose.

“No, that’s not fair!” I dug my fingers into her mattress. “I’m trying my hardest to save you, so you can’t turn purple. Don’t you dare let this beat you, Aunt Eva. Don’t you dare—”

An ambulance wailed through the neighborhood outside.

What would happen if I jumped in front of the vehicle to make it come to a stop? What would happen?

“Let’s find out.” I left my aunt’s side and galloped down the stairs in the dark, somehow arriving at the bottom without breaking my neck. Outside a salty breeze blew through my hair and skirt, and the moon was a thumbnail sliver in the
still-black sky. A cluster of voices murmured down the street, and I turned and smiled for the first time that day.

There would be no need to jump in front of an ambulance, for there an ambulance sat—one block down.

“Thank you!” I took off running to make sure I reached the driver before he could drive away or fade from sight. “Don’t be a hallucination. Please don’t be a hallucination.”

Two uniformed policemen hauled a young woman out of an adobe-style bungalow with a red-tiled roof. Her unshaven husband ran his hand through his tousled brown hair while holding a toddler in his other arm. A grandmotherly woman beside him rocked a crying infant.

“Please take my aunt, too!” I ran at the officers at the speed of hurricane winds. “Take my aunt; she’s in my house.”

“There’s no room,” said one of them—an ugly man with squinty eyes and enormous ears.

“She’s not very big. You can make room.” I was aware of my arms waving around me as if they had a mind of their own, but I couldn’t control them. “Please! Stop telling me to wait twelve more hours. This woman here isn’t nearly as sick as my aunt. Her face isn’t even close to turning purple.”

“We don’t have another stretcher.”

“Then I’ll carry her myself, you lazy, useless—”

“I can help.” The flu victim’s husband put down the toddler and came my way. “I’ll help you carry her.”

I stepped back, caught off guard by his kindness. “What?”

“Stay right here,” he told the officers. “Where is she?”

“This way. Thank you. Thank you.” With tears turning the road ahead of me into a blurry, bobbing streak, I led the man to our house, and we tore up the dark stairs together. “Thank you. She’s in here. She’s turning that brownish-purple color.”

The man scooped my shivering aunt into his arms by the light of the candle.

“Kalt,”
she muttered. “So
kalt. Grippe.
Wilfredededed …
mein Liebchen.”

“Don’t speak German, Aunt Eva. She’s not even German, she’s Swiss.” I followed the man and my aunt out of her room, back into the blackness of the upper hallway. “She was born in America, and I killed her Swiss cuckoo clock. I kicked it clear across the kitchen as though it were causing our problems. Just like Oberon and those scissors that nearly got him.”

“Do you have the flu, too?” asked the man on our way down the stairs. “You sound feverish.”

“No, I’m fine. I just haven’t slept in twenty-four hours, and no one would come get her, and Stephen’s waiting for me.”

He maneuvered Aunt Eva out the front door. “Where is someone waiting for you?”

“He’s probably shivering down in the shadow of blackbirds again … um … Coronado, I mean. Did I just tell a stranger about the blackbirds?”

Something rustled in the white branches of the eucalyptus when we passed beneath its long, fragrant leaves, and I wondered if Oberon was perched up there, waiting for the door to open again so he could fly inside.

“Where are your parents?” asked the man. We were halfway back to his house.

“Gone. Dad said the flu wouldn’t be so bad in San Diego with all the warm, fresh air, but that’s not the first time he made a mistake. Why are you helping my aunt when you must be sick with worry about your wife?”

“It’s better than thinking I allowed someone to die.”

“That’s good of you.” Goodness—there was still goodness in the world. “I started thinking I was the only one left alive.”

The ugly officer waved at us to move faster. “Hurry up—we need to get going.”

The man nestled Aunt Eva in the back of the ambulance, squeezing her between his shaking wife and a white-haired woman with a face too young for her hair. They all wore dainty ivory nightgowns. Three sleeping angels. The last thing I saw before the officers shut the door was three pairs of bare feet, lined up in a row. Aunt Eva’s looked darker than the others.

“Wait!” I lunged for the door. “Her feet looked black.”

The ugly officer grabbed my arms and pushed me away. “We can’t wait any longer.”

“Her feet looked black.”

“It’s too dark to tell.”

“They looked black. Let me see.”

“We’ve got to go!” He forced me down to a seated position on the street. “Stay right there, and don’t you dare get up. You’re not helping anyone right now.” He took off toward the driver’s seat.

“Let them go.” The man who had carried my aunt seized my elbow before I could shoot back toward the ambulance. “Your aunt is in good hands.”

“Her feet looked black.”

“It may have just been the lack of light.”

“I didn’t even say good-bye.”

“She’ll be all right … It’s all right.” The man put his arm around my shoulders and led me over to his crying children and the grandmotherly woman, while the sirens blared. “Do you want to come inside with us? None of us are feeling well, but at least we can be sick together. You seem to be alone.”

I shook my head. “Stephen told me in that letter about the war to be careful offering my trust to people. He’s waiting for me. If I’m going to drop dead from the flu, I need to go to his house while I’m still able. I’m so tired.”

“Why don’t you get some sleep before you find this person? You really look like you’re getting the flu.”

“I’m not sick. I’m just tired.” I pulled myself out from under the man’s comforting arm and backed away. “Thank you. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to help someone before I die. My mother didn’t lose her life just so she could send a useless girl into the world. There’s got to be something more.”

BACK IN MY BEDROOM, I STUFFED MY MOTHER’S LEATHER
doctor’s bag full of my treasures—Stephen’s photographs, his letters, my goggles,
The Mysterious Island,
my mother’s coin purse, Dad’s note. I crammed everything inside the cloth-lined compartments with the same urgency as when I had packed for San Diego the night my father warned me people might be coming for him. The brass gear necklace with the lightning burn went over my head and shimmered on the bodice of my best dress—the black silk taffeta one I’d worn to Stephen’s funeral. The garment still smelled of sulfur and sorrow, but my plans for the morning required my finest clothing.

Downstairs, I put on my coat and tucked an onion in my pocket. And a potato. Our next-door neighbor in Portland,
Miss Deily, insisted a potato in the pocket would scare away the flu, and I was willing to do absolutely anything to buy a few more minutes. I tied my flu mask in place and lifted my leather bag by its handles.

Outside, the sky to the east blushed pink, a color that would have looked brilliant in a chemist’s glass flask. I pulled my coat around me and headed south to the center of the city, feeling like the earth’s sole survivor. Smoke hung across the sky in a cloud that sprinkled ashes on the silent streets and sidewalks. I didn’t know if I was smelling chimneys battling the November chill or crematoriums disposing of the dead, but the city looked and felt like the Germans had just bombed us. The stacks of coffins in the undertaker’s front yard spilled out to the sidewalk, and the stench was overwhelming. I held my breath and kept walking.