The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [49]
Mama sank forward as in a deep prayer, her head nearly on the ground, and she cried out the names of her lost children.
“Olaf,” I said. “Come help her.” My sweet brother came around from the back of the hedge of sisters and brothers and squatted beside Mama. “I’m not sure I should touch you,” he whispered. “I might carry—”
She leaned against him, and he put his arms around her. “I’m so sorry you had to hear it like this, Mother. So sorry.”
“Where was she when we needed comforting?” Ida said. My sister had been harboring this anger for months, covering her own pain and grief, and now she had Mama to vent it on. She was a child; I could forgive this. But my stepfather should stop this disrespect of Mama, this pounding of nails into a coffin of grief. Where was his kind nature; what held him back? Couldn’t he see that Mama was sick with sorrow? Someone had to defend and diffuse.
“Ida,” I said quietly. “That’s not fair.”
“You know nothing of fairness,” Ida spit the words at me.
Lillian fussed now to be let down from my stepfather’s arms, and she trotted over to Mama before Ida could haul her back. “Lillian, you come here this instant!”
But Lillian reached Mama and patted her on the shoulder. “You stand up?” she asked. “Are you sick?”
Sick at heart, I thought. She’s sick at heart.
“Mama needs to rest a little longer,” Olaf told his youngest sister. When he looked at me again, his eyes held pity.
Both Arthur and Billy moved in a little closer but looked warily in Ida’s direction. They stood on either side of me and let me put my arms on their shoulders and pull them to me. Lillian with her wide gait found me too, and I bent to pick her up.
“She doesn’t want you to hold her,” Ida snapped.
“Oh, well, it looked like she wouldn’t mind.”
“You don’t know her,” Ida said. “She doesn’t know you in those ridiculous costumes.” She ran her eyes up and down my reform dress and snorted. “You have no idea what she’s been through, and all for what?” She scoffed.
“She’s my sister,” I said and patted the child’s back as the girl leaned into me, seeking comfort. They all needed comforting.
“Mama grieves deeply for your children, Ole,” I said. I heard Ida gasp with my use of his name. “And for what you must have all gone through with our not being here.”
I saw a flicker in my stepfather’s eyes, acknowledgment a change between us. “She will grieve a long time before she catches up with us,” he said.
“But at least we’re all together again,” I said. “We can help each other.”
My words fell like rocks into deep water.
Mama looked beaten, an old rug with no luster. I helped her into the house, helped her undress, removed her shoes, pulled a light sheet up to her neck, browned from our walking in the summer sun. “Rest now, Mama,” I said. “Rest.”
Grief has many siblings. Anger, isolation, sadness, guilt, and, yes, distraction, avoidance, pretense. I met them all in the weeks that followed. So did our family.
“I should have sent you away once we saw the quarantine sign,” Mama told me a few weeks later when she felt a little stronger and we’d disinfected the rooms yet again to be sure no new diphtheria would steal into the house. “You weren’t exposed. You could have gone on to find work until you return to New York.” She poured generous amounts of the Labarraque’s solution the doctor had brought out. We had manganese peroxide to mix with muriatic acid to create chlorine gas.
“Be careful not to breathe the fumes,” the doctor said. “Leave the room and close the door.” Mama had Olaf show us where he and my stepfather had buried the body fluid of Bertha and Johnny so we could put additional lime on top. Then we resteamed all the sheets and clothing, the hot water boiling on a July day, creating a penance I hoped would bring Mama relief. She sank further into despair.
Glimmers of light reached me unsuspecting. If Ida