The Uninvited (17 page)

I sat stock-still and opened my mouth to mutter drivel about the American Protective League watching out for all types of subversive activity, but before I could utter a word, Nela jumped out of the ambulance with the motor still running, and marched toward a two-story house beside us that looked like nothing more than a home-shaped shadow.

“Don’t wake them up.” Addie leapt out of the truck and ran after Nela. “Stop it, Nela! If we make them mad, they’ll report us. We won’t be allowed to help.”

“Let’s go to Polish Hall and ask if they want our help.” I scooted over to the driver’s side. “I’ll drive again so if anyone catches us . . .”

“I don’t give a damn if they catch me,” said Nela, shaking herself free of Addie. “They need to know we don’t have enough care down here. We need at least two more emergency hospitals and care for children with sick parents. We need doctors and translators and medicine. We need a way to convince people hiding in their homes to seek help when they need it. We need Americans like you to push the high and mighty to open their blind eyes and see us struggling down here.”

“I’ll do what I can, Nela. I swear I will. But, please, for now, let’s start by checking on Polish Hall. Let’s ask the volunteers who are knee-deep in assisting the ill what they need. There’s nothing else we can do out here in the dark.”

“Come on.” Addie took Nela by the hand and led her toward the ambulance. The hems of their gray Red Cross skirts swayed below their knees.

Nela came to a stop beside me at the driver’s-side door. The smell of gasoline from the Ford began to bother me, as did the whole difficult venture.

“We volunteered to fetch people from their homes,” said Nela again. “We’ve got to keep doing what they sent us out to do.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remain calm. I wanted to tell her again how useless we seemed, puttering around in the dark, not knowing where to find patients, but the entire conversation seemed circular and endless.

“Fine.” I opened my eyes. “I’ll drive for another half hour. And then I’ll drop you back off at your house, where patients are already lying, in need of your help. Will you promise to only be out here for a half hour?”

She screwed up her face and shook from head to toe, and I worried for a moment that something might not be right with her head. Maybe she experienced skull-splitting moments of terror similar to the ones I used to endure whenever I attempted to leave home.

“All right.” She relaxed her shoulders. “We drive for another half hour. And then I help Liliana with the people in my house.”

“Good.” I grabbed hold of the steering wheel. “Jump inside. Let’s get going.”

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find one additional influenza sign during that half hour. We knocked on a thin wooden door, and no one answered, so Nela—more determined than ever to discover someone to transport—handed me her end of the stretcher and pushed her way inside.

Another darkened house. More smells of sickness and dirty diapers. Addie and I carried the stretcher upstairs, behind Nela, and we poked our heads into the rooms of the sleeping.

How frightening it would be to wake up,
I thought,
delirious with a fever, to find two masked females and an exhausted American woman peeking into one’s bedroom
.

We roamed the hallways and scanned each bed of sleepers, but only one person stood out: a girl around the age of eleven, with honey-blond hair. She huddled in a dim corner of a hallway in a nightgown, her bare toes sticking out from beneath the frayed white hem.

“Hello.” Nela hurried over to her and embarked upon a few questions, all spoken in Polish.

The girl stared up at her with enormous dark eyes that made me shiver. Something about the child’s lost expression and motionless body gave me gooseflesh and set my heart galloping in my chest. I remembered May sitting over her Ouija board, saying to me in her calm and steady voice,
Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died
.

“Is she alive?” I asked before I could even think how odd my question sounded.

Nela peeked back at me. “Of course. She’s just ill and frightened.” Nela spoke in Polish again, and the girl shook her head and pushed her away.

Addie lowered the front end of the stretcher a few feet from the child. “Tell her we have music at your house, Nela. Tell her there are other sick children there, and they’ll want to play with her when she feels better.”

Nela translated Addie’s words with encouraging little nods of her head, and the girl eased her stiff posture against the wall. Finally she spoke, also in Polish.

Nela turned on her heels toward Addie and me. “She’ll come, but the stretcher scares her. She’d rather walk.”

“Is she able?” I asked.

“She says she is.”

Addie and I picked up the stretcher and carried it away, while Nela slid her arm behind the girl’s shoulders and helped her to a standing position.

“Are there any others here who are sick?” Addie called over her shoulder.

I heard more exchanges in Polish, before Nela answered, “She says the others are recuperating.”

We lugged the empty stretcher down the unlit staircase, careful not to bang the walls or walk with too loud a tread.

I backed out the front door and asked, “How is that poor girl going to ride in the back with the stretcher if it frightens her?”

“I can ride back there,” said Addie. “I don’t mind. She can ride in front.”

“Absolutely not!” I stopped in my tracks. “If you haven’t contracted the flu yet, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a compartment where we carry the sick.”

“I’m near the sick all the time, and I’m doing just fine.”

I glanced over my shoulder to see where I was going and heard someone call the name “Wendy Darling.”

Across the street a figure in an army tunic and breeches stood beneath a lamp and smoked a cigarette.

Billy
.

“No!” I dropped my side of the stretcher, and the handles crashed against the sidewalk.

“What’s happening?” asked Addie.

“No, no, no!” I crouched on the ground and covered my ears, closed my eyes, shook from head to toe.

“What is it?” Nela’s Red Cross boots clomped over to me, and I heard the shuffle of the girl’s bare feet beside her. “What is wrong?”

“Will you look across the street”—I stayed on the ground with my hands pressed against the sides of my head—“and tell me if you see a United States soldier smoking a cigarette beneath that lamp.”

“There’s a training camp—”

“I know there’s a training camp not more than ten miles away, but this soldier looked familiar to me.”

“Your brother?” asked Addie.

“Please, tell me if you see him.”

No one answered for a moment, which made me tremble all the harder.

“Well?”

“I see no one,” said Nela.

“Are you certain?”

“Look for yourself. No one is standing under that lamp.”

With utmost caution, I stretched myself back up to a standing position and shifted toward the street.

He was gone.

“Go home.” Nela nudged my arm. “Your eyes are looking—how did you say it? ‘Bleary’? I remember that hedge you killed the last time you were like this.”

“But . . . you’re all still working so hard. All those people at your house . . .”

“You going home to rest will give us room to put the girl in the front seat,” suggested Addie.

“Let me at least . . .” I grabbed up my end of the stretcher. “Let me help you put this back in the ambulance. I don’t . . .” I glanced back at the empty streetlamp where I thought I’d seen Billy. “I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t see them. I really do.”

Addie and I returned to the back of the ambulance and slid the stretcher inside the dark compartment that smelled of sickness and damp canvas.

“Go”—Addie tapped my shoulder—“before Nela changes her mind and gives you any guilt. We know where to find you if we desperately need you again.”

“But—”

“Go! This isn’t where you need to be right now.”

I turned and left, and the knife blade of guilt tried to dig its way back into my gut, but I pushed it away as best as I could.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

Chapter 18

I
walked through the midnight streets on my own with my arms clasped around my torso. The echoes of my footsteps ricocheted off the Southside houses and sounded as though a second pair of feet traveled through Buchanan with me, and I worried I’d hear Billy’s voice again, calling to me,
Wendy Darling
.

From the eaves of one of the homes, another barn owl hissed—a disturbing noise akin to leaking gas. Across the street, a couple argued on their front porch in Russian, and their tension sliced straight through me. I pressed onward, glancing over my shoulder every half minute. Thankfully, no one stepped out into the road behind me, but that didn’t stop me from checking with obsessive regularity.

On the northern side of the railroad tracks, the music of the jazz band enlivened the slumbering businesses lined in their neat and organized grid of brick and stone. The sound sizzled like static across my skin. The piano beckoned. Seduced. It tempted me to turn toward the direction of Daniel and the Masonic Lodge.

Don’t be a stranger, Ivy sweetheart,
I remembered Ruth Sellman calling to me across the dance floor.
Next time, wear your dancing shoes and stay for a while
.

I turned west on Willow, however, ignoring the pull of music and rapture, and continued onward until I reached May’s house.

My cheeks warmed with shame. I stared up at the dormer window that belonged to my new room in the attic and thought back to the man lying below May on her bed. My brain now could not convince my eyes that they had genuinely viewed Eddie Dover. A fair-haired man had lain with May, it’s true, but, honestly, Eddie wasn’t the only blond male who ever graced that part of the world.

I still carried my key in my coat pocket, but I found the front door unlocked, just as Daniel’s front door often sat free of any protection—which deepened my concern over Buchanan residents’ naïve trust in their neighbors.

No lights lit the front room, but my eyes adjusted to darkness after my trek through the nighttime streets. With my upper body stiff and my lungs tight, I managed to steal across the house, past the closed doorway of May’s silent bedroom, and up the staircase.

I navigated my way through all of May and Eddie’s belongings on the attic floor, lifting my knees high in the air as though wading through mud, and reached for the cold base of the gold lamp standing next to the bed. I pulled a chain and clicked on the light.

A surprise awaited me.

Across the white ruffles of the bedspread lay a pair of human-sized butterfly wings made of shimmering periwinkle fabric. Someone—May, I assumed—had sewn little jeweled bracelets to the tops of the wings so that the costume could be slipped over one’s arms to be worn. A note rested on top of the creation:

Where did you fly off to, little butterfly?

I picked up the small piece of white paper and pressed my hand against my forehead to dim another wave of humiliation.

“Well?” asked a voice from behind me.

I spun around, finding May at the top of the attic stairs, dressed in the red silk robe I remembered from before. She wore her hair down, and her thick motion-picture star curls fell to her waist.

“Where
did
you go?” she asked with a lift of her dark eyebrows.

“I’m sorry I took off like that.” I grabbed my leather handbag from the floor below the chest of drawers and clicked open the gold clasp. “I just . . . um . . .” I pulled several dollars out of the purse. “Let me go ahead and pay you. I’m really sorry I’ve been a terrible boarder, but I—”

“Ivy.”

I snapped my face upright and fully met her eyes for the first time since I had caught her with the man who looked like Eddie.

May stepped farther inside the room with her hands on the black sash of her robe. “Are you leaving me?”

“Yes.” I handed her the bills. “Here’s some rent money.”

She wrinkled her nose. “That’s more than enough. You weren’t even here a full week.”

“Take it, for your troubles.” I held out the money with the tips of my fingers until she grabbed hold of the bills.

She folded her arms across her chest. “Where are you going to live?”

“Um . . . a friend . . .” I scratched at my ear. “A friend invited me to stay.”

“A friend?” The right side of her mouth edged into a grin.

“Yes. A close friend.”

“You said your only good friend in Buchanan moved away over the summer.”

“Yes, well . . .” I turned back to the dresser and slid open the top drawer. “There’s another friend.”

“The German?”

I didn’t answer.

“Ivy?”

“What?” I peeked back at her.

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

“No, I’m not, but—” I stopped and raised both my hands in the air, for a terrible realization occurred to me. “Oh, Christ! I’m covered in germs. I can’t touch my clothing and then wear it around him. Why have I been going near him afterward?” I spun toward May, my hands still raised. “I shouldn’t be near you either. I’m going to kill everyone. This is why I saw Billy.”

“Who’s Billy?”

“My brother, the one killed in the war. Why do I keep going near all of you after being around all those sick people we’re transporting?
I’m
the reason someone is going to die.”

“Come downstairs.” May waved me over to the top of the staircase. “You can take a bath before you go to your German Romeo. Wash your hair, disinfect your shoes with my bottle of Lysol, and throw those clothes you’re wearing out to my leaf piles I’ll eventually burn. But don’t panic so much, Sarah Bernhardt.”

My feet refused to budge. “May.”

She turned back toward me. “What?”

“Who did I see you with in your bedroom?”

She sank down to the topmost step, and her dark eyes grew large and childlike. “Does it matter?”

“Is he here right now?”

She shook her head, her dark curls wobbling. “No. Not until three o’clock. He always arrives at three in the morning. The witching hour.” She disappeared down two more steps; all I could see were the tops of her eyes and her head of black hair, and she made my blood run cold peering at me that way. “You have two and a half hours to bathe before he arrives,” she said. “Flap your wings and get flying off to that bath if you don’t want to see him.”

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bathwater in her plumbed downstairs bathroom, while I shivered outside on her back porch for fear of infiltrating her house with influenza. I longed to dunk my entire body into scalding water and burn away every last trace of the germs.

With a deep moan of the wood, I lowered myself down to a seated position on the top step, and I leaned my head against a post. Out in the backyard rose silhouettes of trees with thick autumn leaves waiting to plummet to the earth. I feared a shadowed figure in an army uniform would step out from behind one of the trunks, and I’d see the glow of Billy’s cigarette. Or Lucas’s eyes behind his glasses.

May opened the bathroom window behind me and called out, “It’s ready. Take off your clothes and toss them into one of the leaf piles.”

I stood up and craned my neck to survey the proximity of the backyard to the nearest windows of the neighboring houses. “Will any of your neighbors be able to see?”

“It’s dark. They’re asleep. They’re other widows anyway, with children.”

“Are you sure you’re alone in there?”

“Yes. I’m alone right now. Don’t be so modest, Ivy. Take off your clothes.”

I flung my beloved green overcoat into the yard and heard it splat across the brittle leaves. Not wanting to risk wearing one stitch of flu-infested clothing, I stripped all the way down to the buff, hurled my garments into the night, and ran inside.

May stood in the kitchen and held open the door to the adjoining bathroom for me. I covered my chest and my privates and hurried past her on bare feet that squeaked against the tiled floor.

“Don’t be such a prude,” she said with a laugh. “You’ve got a body like the Venus de Milo’s. Flaunt it.”

I climbed into her claw-foot bathtub, and before she could say another word about my nakedness, I sank down on my back and submerged my head in the warm and silent waters, watching my long hair drift to the surface above me like undulating blades of river grass.

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May’s front room chimed one thirty in the morning. Dressed in fresh clothing and Lysol-disinfected shoes, I meandered downstairs with my packed-up bags in hand and the butterfly wings tucked beneath my left arm. I managed to pin up my wet hair, but it still dripped plump drops onto the back of my clean white blouse.

May stood up from her armchair, a mug of steaming tea in hand.

“Well.” I set down my bags by my sides. “I guess this is good-bye.”

“I guess so.” She lowered her mug to a table. “That was an awfully short stay. We were supposed to have heaps of fun.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just . . .” I tried my best not to glance back at her bedroom door. “Thank you for housing me, even if it was so temporary.”

“You’re welcome.”

I grabbed up the handles of my bags again and hoisted the luggage to the front door.

“I know it doesn’t make any sense,” she said from behind me before I could reach for the knob.

I shifted around to face her.

She pulled her robe a little farther over her chest and folded her hands together. “I can’t explain how he arrives, but his presence doesn’t ever frighten me. We’re happy as clams during those heavenly moments in the early-morning hours.” She smiled. “Truly we are.”

I stood there and gawked with my mouth tipped open too far.

“You don’t need to feel frightened for me,” she said. “Or worried. I’m fine. Just”—she raised her shoulders to her ears in a sort of shrug—“a little lonely during the remaining hours of the day.”

“I’ll come visit again,” I offered. “Once it’s not so dangerous to be outside. I feel I should hole myself up with Daniel in his apartment for a while until the rapid spread of infection passes. I want to keep him safe.”

“I understand.” She nodded, and her smile looked strained. Her eyes moistened.

“Will you be all right?”

“Oh sure. I’ve got company coming soon.” She wiped her eyes and glanced at the clock. “I’ll be fine, Ivy. Go. Take those wings and fly.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. You deserve a little zig-zig.”

“A little what?”

She winked and nodded toward the door. “Go. I’m sure he’s waiting.”