The Uninvited (22 page)

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PUBLIC NOTICE

In response to the recent epidemic of influenza, the local Board of Health and Committee of Public Safety, in conjunction with the Buchanan medical community and Mayor Hoyt, has decreed that after October 12, 1918,

1.
Schools, churches, chapels, meeting halls, theaters, and moving picture houses shall be closed and remain closed until further notice.

2.
Individuals caught spitting, coughing, and sneezing without a handkerchief in public shall be arrested and lectured on the dangers of influenza.

3.
Public dancing and public funerals shall be prohibited.

4.
Hospitals shall be closed to visitors.

5.
The Board strongly advises against public assembly at any time.

L. G. Carlisle

Medical Health Officer

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Chapter 25

M
ay had said so much at her kitchen table. She said so much and knew about all of our secret habits, and yet she seemed to remain as ignorant as I.

Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died,
she had told me as she sat before her Ouija board with the love for her husband swimming in her eyes
. Some struggle to complete a task they didn’t finish when they were alive. Others, they roam the earth, unsettled, restless, unsure what to do or where they belong. And then there are the lucky ones. . .

Beneath the starry sky of that black and bitter-cold October night, I traversed downtown Buchanan via River Street, parallel to Willow Street. The jazz danced its way around the dark corners and leapt over the brick buildings with unbridled bursts of energy. It beckoned. It tempted. It pulled with all its musical might. The notes wiggled through my blood and pumped through my heart and told me that people still found the strength to pick up instruments and dance and drink as if the world hadn’t cut off their lives in their prime of youth and health.

They accept their fate and just enjoy themselves.

Everything seemed so clear out there on the streets. Somehow, the music made it all make sense. If I just let everything go—if I abandoned my troubles and stopped worrying about the world collapsing into a pile of rubble if I wasn’t there to save everyone—I could go to the party. And I could stay.

Because I could not stop for Death,
wrote Emily Dickinson, long ago,
He kindly stopped for me. . .

I passed a portion of town from which I could see the back side of the Hotel America and its little flag tower that shot toward the moon-streaked clouds. I thought of Mr. Greene, still working for people like Lucas and me, despite what he’d said:
I had that same illness myself. Knocked me clear off my feet right here at the front desk.
His son Charlie had swept the lobby floor, not paying Mr. Greene or me any mind, and we went about our business as if nothing had changed—as if none of us were stuck where we perished. Or wandering, waiting to be told what to do and where to go.

I
W
I
P
E
D
M
Y
eyes with the back of my sleeve and knocked on May’s tapioca-colored door, which looked slate gray and almost stone-like in the unkind darkness of night. The three o’clock hour must not have arrived yet, for she opened the door, alone, in her red silk robe, and she smiled at me with a genuine look of hospitality that managed to warm my blood a small tad.

“You’re back.” She reached out her hand and held fast to my fingers. “What a lovely surprise.”

“Oh . . . May . . .” I wrapped my free arm around her and broke into tears against her shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” She patted my back above my spine. “Oh, poor butterfly. Did you and your German quarrel?”

“You said that you had a sharp headache,” I said into her perfumed silk below my lips, “and that you sat down for a spell. You said you thought God might have sent this flu to help all the Widow Street girls join their fallen husbands.”

“Yes.” She nodded, her head against mine. “That’s what I did—and still do—believe.”

“Oh, May . . .” I choked on the words that tried to push through my tears. My throat closed up, and I imagined Daniel with that rope squeezed around his windpipe until he couldn’t manage another breath.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong, Ivy?”

“It’s not a haunting. Eddie’s not coming back to visit the living.”

Her fingers went still on my back, and I felt her entire body grow cold against me.

“What are you talking about?”

I swallowed. “You never got out of that chair.”

She pulled away from me.

I took hold of both her hands before she could back out of reach. “We’re both like Eddie, May. Both of us—the flu saw to that. My mother just told me. I saw our names in the newspaper. And my German . . . he’s the one . . .” I nodded as if the gesture would fill in for my unspoken words, but May’s brown eyes remained wide and utterly perplexed. Her irises darted back and forth, scanning my face. “Daniel is the one who was in the store when my father and brother attacked,” I continued. “They killed him. They killed my Daniel—because of me. Because I had the flu, and they blamed the Germans.”

“I don’t . . .” She wrinkled her forehead. “What are you . . . ?”

“Ninety-seven people have died in Buchanan during these first two weeks of October.
Ninety-seven
. . . and counting.”

“But . . . I don’t . . .”

“It seems we’re part of those ninety-seven, May.” I swallowed. “This killer flu, it granted your wish. It did indeed help you to join your fallen husband.”

“No.” She breathed a small laugh. “That’s not true. You’re terribly confused, Ivy.”

“My mother told me. She gave me those statistics. We’re part of those statistics.”

“Eddie wouldn’t keep leaving me if I were like him. He’d take me with him.”

“Come with me.” Still holding her hands, I tugged her toward me and the open doorway, managing to move her two steps forward. “Please, come out of this house for a while and join me for some music and drinks. And when Eddie returns, you can tell him where you’ve been. Maybe you’ll both become the lucky ones—the ones who accept their fate and just enjoy themselves.”

“I can’t leave.”

“Yes you can.” My own feet crossed the threshold to her porch. “There’s a party every night, just down the street. Can’t you hear the jazz?”

We both craned our heads in the eastward direction of the lodge, but only a soft bleat of the horns traveled the distance to May’s residence.

“I’m not going anywhere without Eddie.” She wrenched her hands out of mine. “He’s coming back soon, and I’m going to be here. I’m going to be here and pretend like nothing is wrong.” She turned and whisked toward her bedroom with her red silk swishing across her calves.

“No, don’t pretend.” I followed after her. “Daniel pretended, and it only made things so much worse for me.”

“Eddie!” May tore inside her room and yanked down the covers of her empty bed. “Eddie, where are you? Where are you? I need you—now!” She dropped to her knees on the floor with her eyelet bedspread clutched in both hands. “Eddie!”

I knelt beside her, resting my knees against a fuzzy rug of black and gold. “It’s all right.”

“Eddie!” She bent over at the waist and cried into the fabric.

“It’s all right.” I rubbed her back, above the hard ridges of her curled spine and quaking shoulder blades. “He’ll be here soon, and then you can speak to him about what you learned. Both of you can free yourselves and accept your fate, and he’ll likely stay with you for as long as you both want to be together.” I brushed loose curls off the nape of her neck. “But don’t pretend like Daniel and my mother did. It only makes the truth so much harder to swallow. It feels like poison and betrayal when you realize you’ve been sheltered like a child.”

May eased her cheek against the floor, her chest still bent over her knees. Her lungs expanded and contracted with spasms that jerked her whole body. “We were supposed to have a baby,” she said in a small voice I could just barely hear, “before he left. We kept trying and trying, but I just couldn’t find myself . . . I couldn’t get . . .”

“I’m so sorry, May.”

“It’s not fair at all. We had so many plans.”

“I know.” I nestled a hand over her right shoulder.

“What’s the point of it all? Why were we born if we were all destined to be snatched away so soon?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “But I think we’re meant to make the best of it now that we are where we are. And maybe . . . just maybe”—I wound a strand of her black hair around my right pinky until the finger looked stained in ink—“those who survive will come to realize that too much time is spent on killing. They’ll figure out that time is far too precious for all that hate and murder. Maybe, if we do our best to enjoy ourselves, they’ll sense the force of our love and feel the emptiness of our absence, and they’ll be sorry they ever whooped for joy over the idea of war.”

May closed her eyes and sank her face farther against the snowy-white eyelet.

“Do you want me to leave, May?” I asked. “Or do you want me to stay until he arrives?”

She slowed her breathing. “Your father and brother gave him to you, then.”

I sank back on my heels. “I beg your pardon?”

“They gave you the German . . . if he’s the one they killed.”

I swallowed down a dry patch as sharp as a razor blade. “That wasn’t their intention, I can assure you of that.”

“But it happened just the same. I like that.” She smiled. “I like that love sprang out of murder. It makes me feel a little better.” She closed her eyes again, and her lashes fluttered against her skin. “I’ve always enjoyed love stories. Men might call them silly and sentimental, but they all just want to be loved too.” She inhaled a long breath through her nostrils. “Tell me your whole story before you leave.”

“What story? My life is so dull, May. I’m sure, compared to you—”

She took hold of my knee and tucked it beneath her right arm. “Tell me the story of you and your German. I want to hear about two people not meant to find each other who ended up tangled up in each other’s lives and deaths. And give it a happy ending, even if you don’t believe it will come true.”

I pulled a stray piece of my hair away from my mouth. “I don’t know if it will truly make you feel any better . . .”

“It will. Please . . . tell me.”

With a sigh, I stretched my legs out in front of me and leaned back on the palms of my hands. As she wished, I sat with her for a spell, and I told her a war-torn love story about an American recluse and a German deserter who had never once crossed paths in life.

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Chapter 26

A
nother love story required completion.

It involved two young women compelled to save as many lives as they possibly could, even though they lost their own lives on a pair of lonely railroad tracks the week before.

Some struggle to complete a task they didn’t finish when they were alive.

I roamed a Southside neighborhood of crowded clapboard houses that all looked like duplicates of one another, all painted the same dung shade of brown, with identical square windows and tired front porches that sagged from time and wear. The waxing moon graced the rooftops with a weak and ethereal light that appeared almost violet.

I strained my ears, in search of the rumble of the ambulance’s engine, and I pressed my lips together and forced myself to refrain from shouting out Nela and Addie’s names, out of fear of frightening children or anyone else who might awake from the sound. To certain ears, my voice might resemble the keening of the wind or the desperate cry of a train charging down the tracks.

Back on Lincoln Street, I gave up and perched myself on the edge of a curb. A light shone in a top-story window of one of the shadowy textile mills that reigned over Southside with hawklike vigilance. A small part of me longed to creep inside the structure to see if some late-night mill worker hunched over his desk or his loom, struggling to complete a task he hadn’t finished while he lived. I wondered if he hated Germans and wished men like Daniel dead. I imagined him as a round fellow with a cigar jammed between his lips, who overworked and underpaid the immigrants subordinate to him—and caused strife to Nela and Addie’s families. Or maybe he possessed compassionate eyes and a worried brow. Maybe he mourned a son struck down overseas or fretted over his wife and children, who shivered in bed from the flu. Perhaps he was peeking out of his fourth-story window at that very moment, spotting me staring up at him, just as I often saw Billy and Lucas watching from the shadows.

I stood up and headed north, toward the tracks, while an eastbound train whistled across the fields a mile or two to the west. A Model T of some sort traveled up one of the nearby streets. The echo of the motor bounced across the houses and rumbled in my bones, and I thought of both the APL men and the Red Cross ambulance sneaking through the nighttime roads of Buchanan. I stopped and turned, squinting to see through the darkness, hoping for the latter possibility.

A large vehicle peeled around a corner. Headlights blinded my eyes, coming closer at too fast a speed, swelling as large as two bright suns. I put up my hands and shrieked, and the vehicle screeched to a halting stop a mere four feet away from where I stood, quaking, my arms frozen in the air in front of my face.

“Ivy?” Nela turned off the engine and, with it, the headlights. She leapt out of the driver’s side in her usual gray uniform and wiggled her mask down below her chin. “What are you doing in the middle of the street down here?”

I lowered my hands to my hips, bent forward at my waist, and blew a relieved gust of air through my lips—although I wondered,
Would I have truly gotten hurt if that ambulance had struck me down? Could I have stood there and let it pass straight through me?

“I was . . . looking for you,” I said, gasping to catch my breath as I spoke. “I’d just . . . given up.”

The eastbound train clacked closer, the whistle screaming and hollering at us to stay off the tracks. Nela covered her ears and sank to her knees, and beyond the windshield, Addie did the same, disappearing from my sight. I crouched down next to Nela and braced my arm around her back, feeling the fear inside her hammer across my body. A squall of wind and the force of the locomotive’s power tore straight through us—I tasted the sting of death in its fury of metal and steam. The whistle blew directly next to us, the cries blaring across my brain, making my eyes water, warning of broken glass and twisted metal and bodies tossed through the air.

The train passed. It wreaked its havoc and sped off to the eastern farms of Buchanan, chugging, whistling, clacking-clacking-clacking.

“Addie . . .” I kept hold of Nela, but I lifted my face toward the passenger who hid inside the ambulance. “Please come out here. The train is gone. I need to talk to you both.”

The whistle faded into the pitch-black distance, and Addie slipped out of the truck, her hands still clamped over her ears. Nela rose to a standing position and removed her flu mask. I backed up to properly face them both, and Addie lowered her mask and cleared her throat.

“Tell me,” I said, a tremor in my voice, “that night I first found you stalled on the tracks, how long had you actually been there?”

Addie and Nela glanced at each other with their lips half open. I heard the nervous beating of their breaths, but they did not answer.

“Do you remember what day it was when you first tried driving across those tracks?” I asked. “Was it Saturday, October 5?”

“I think . . .” Addie gulped and winced. “I think it was a Wednesday . . . or a Thursday. The flu was just getting bad.”

“It was Wednesday, October 2,” said Nela without hesitation. “That’s when we tried driving Liliana to the emergency hospital and stalled.”

“You . . .” I clutched the buttons of my blouse above my chest. “You stalled on the tracks on October 2?”

“Yes.” Nela averted her gaze to her Red Cross boots down below the thick hem of her skirt.

“And a train came?” I asked.

Nela’s chin shook. She wiped at her right eye with a knuckle. “Yes, a train came.”

“Did it—”

“Yes.” Nela looked me straight in the eye. “It hit us. I tried and tried to crank the engine back to life, and I jumped back in, while Addie was just about to jump out—and it hit us.”

I turned toward Addie, whose lips shivered. She hardened her jaw and blinked back tears brewing in her eyes.

“Do you both know what happened to you, then?” I asked. “Have you known all along?”

“We don’t talk about it,” said Nela, bracing her hands on her hips. “After you leapt into the ambulance and helped it off the tracks, there seemed no point questioning what had happened. We just wanted to keep going. To keep fetching and helping.”

“The people you’re helping”—I swallowed—“do you know . . . ?”

Both of them turned their eyes away from me, peering instead at the dark patches of weeds that filled the land between the tracks and the houses.

“They already lost their lives,” I said, my arms hanging by my sides like two bars of iron. “Do you know that?”

Both of them kept their eyes averted. The moon kissed their cheeks, and a silent wind plucked at their skirts and their sleeves.

“Their souls got stuck in their houses,” I said. “Or else they didn’t want to leave—that’s why some of them yelled at us to go away with so much passion.” I trekked over the pebbles in the road and wrapped my right arm around Addie’s thin shoulders. “You don’t need to keep fetching them unless you truly believe some of them are trying to get out.”

“I don’t know . . .” Addie covered her eyes and quaked against me. “If this is true, then why I haven’t found my sister?”

“Didn’t you say she succumbed to the influenza?” I asked.

“Yes.” Addie nodded with her lips pressed together. “Our Florence. I can’t find her anywhere here in Southside.”

I squeezed her against my side. “Does she like to dance?”

Addie sniffed, and, out of the corner of my eye, I caught Nela cocking her head at me.

“Does she?” I asked. “Could you imagine her dancing to jazz?”

Addie nodded.

“Come along.” I steered the girl back to the passenger side of the ambulance, my arm still tight around her. “Both of you. I’m going to show you another place where you can potentially take your transports. I have a strong suspicion Florence might already be there, discovering what happens when people bid good-bye to earthly troubles.”

I
SWEAR, THAT
Masonic Lodge ballroom had ballooned to twice its previous size in just a matter of hours. A saloon-style bar, topped with polished wood and rows of bright-colored bottles, now stretched the entire right side of the room at the far end. Three well-groomed men in white coats and bowties served drinks to a line of Guests bellied up to the marble countertop, their feet resting on a brass foot rail.

I had to laugh a little, for in the middle of the bar stood a pyramid of crystal glasses, which Ruth Sellman turned into a fountain of champagne by standing on the counter in her blue fringed dress and pouring a bottle into the topmost glass. Golden liquid splashed and bubbled, and a small crowd of men and women, army boys included, cheered her on in a variety of languages, from English to Polish, Russian, and Norwegian. The more she poured, the more the music gathered speed.

The five windows that watched over the street and Daniel’s store seemed to stretch twenty feet farther across the room, the exterior wall no longer made of bricks, but of glimmering golden paper with flecks of silver and swirls of crimson that resembled bodies intertwined. The Guests danced in their jewels and bandeaus and pinstriped suits with long tails, and some of them kissed and caressed each other.

I noticed that a freckle-faced redhead had joined the band, and his enormous brass tuba belched a vigorous bass line to “Livery Stable Blues,” which inspired a whole slew of popular animal dances among the crowd: the fox-trot, the grizzly bear, the turkey trot, the bunny hug. Everyone wiggled and waddled and clasped one another and beamed bright-wattage smiles that made the crystal chandeliers burn even brighter. All the bedazzling colors of the place—the gilded coating of the walls, the deep red of the velvet curtains, the blues and the blacks and the greens of the gowns—gleamed with the warm hues of a Renoir painting.

I stepped farther into the room on the sweet bubbles of champagne, flanked by Addie and Nela, and I gaped at all the familiar faces I hadn’t seen in the place before. Sigrid—dressed in white silk, a pearl comb shining in her pinned blond locks—now danced with her Wyatt. The synchronization of their feet in their polished black shoes, the gaze they shared as they stepped and turned across the floor, made my heart beat with a contented patter. I didn’t see their children anywhere, as hard as I looked among all the faces gathered together in that room, and I hoped the absence of the little ones meant they had lived. Perhaps the abandoned rag doll in their house would be reunited with its tiny owner.

Mr. Greene from the Hotel America leaned against the bar with a flute of champagne in one hand and the other hand tucked in one of his trouser pockets, his position awkward, slightly tilted backward, as if he hadn’t yet decided whether he belonged within those walls.

Addie looped her arm around my elbow and pulled me close. “I see our Florence.”

“Where?”

“Over there.” She pointed toward one of the windows. A pretty dark-skinned girl in a lime-sherbet-green dress turkey trotted with Benjie.

“Go.” I patted Addie’s hand. “See her.”

Addie stiffened.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “She’ll be so happy you’ve found her. Go to her.”

“I don’t know . . .” She untangled her arm from mine and inched toward the door. “I’d rather just get back into the ambulance and keep going.”

“As would I,” said Nela, also making an abrupt turn for the exit. “We’ve got work to do. People to help. This party here has nothing to do with us.”

“Nela,” called a fellow coming our way from the crowd around Ruth—a uniformed soldier, a tall one with pale-blond hair and hazel eyes that obviously recognized my friend. He removed a cloth army hat from his head and tucked it beneath one arm.

Nela stopped and pivoted on her heel toward him. A whispered Polish phrase slipped from her lips, along with a gasp of shock.

Without missing a beat, “Livery Stable Blues” slammed into “Jelly Roll Blues,” and in the same amount of time, Nela and the soldier clamped each other in a firm embrace that warmed our side of the room with an unexpected blaze of heat. Nela squeezed her eyes shut and murmured the name “Freddie,” and the soldier cradled the back of her head with his fingers embedded in her strands of fair hair.

Addie bolted from my side and left the room.

“Addie?” I followed after her, but by the time I exited the double doors, she had made it halfway down the hallway.

“Addie, where are you going?” I called after her.

“I’m not ready for this. I don’t want to be here.” She turned the corner in a streak of Red Cross gray, and the soles of her boots clomped down the steps of the lodge’s side staircase.

“Addie!” I swung around the bend and chased after her, clinging tight to the slick rail. “Don’t be frightened, please!” I rounded the bend in the staircase, not seeing her anymore.

The glass-paneled door of the lodge swung shut before I even reached the middle steps. I pushed the door open and found Addie in the driver’s seat of the ambulance, the engine already rumbling, ready to go.

“Addie.” I grabbed hold of the bar running up the right side of the passenger entrance. “I’m sorry. I should have spoken more delicately about what happened.”

“I’ve got to go.” She shifted the clutch lever into neutral, exactly as I’d instructed. “Please stop hanging onto the ambulance.”

“It’s not fair—I know. I feel too young for this, too. But it happened, and we might as well enjoy ourselves in the ways we still can. Don’t you think?”

She peered out from the vehicle with wide, dark eyes. “We’re just going to be numbers in the newspaper. ‘Statistics,’ my daddy called it whenever he read about the war over the breakfast table.”

“Addie, no, that’s not—”

“On the day Florence died, the
Sentinel
said six Buchanan residents lost their lives. They didn’t even print her name. Just a number.”

“But—”

“Have you heard about any motion picture stars or world leaders dying from this disease?” she asked, her left eyebrow cocked.

“Well . . . I-I-I’ve only read two newspaper articles in the past week . . .”