I SQUEEZED A dishtowel over an aluminum bowl of hot water. The droplets struck the silvery surface.
“I don’t need you to do this,” Fritzi said.
“Does it feel nice?” I asked.
She tapped my hand away and unfolded the towel over her face. “The tip of my nose has been cold all day like a puppy’s.” She lifted the corner and peeked out at me. “What happened to your mouth?”
“An old cut split back open.”
I had not told her what happened at the Bellrose estate. I had meant to, truly I had, but when I arrived home that evening from Jackson Street, the first sound I heard upon opening the front door was Fritzi hacking a wet crinkle of a cough, and when I ran upstairs to check on her I found her with a clammy chill purpling her lips.
Her snore soon whistled from underneath the dishtowel. I placed it on the bedside table, and tilted her jaw to quiet the sound that had interrupted so many of my and Connie’s nights that we had resorted to alternating turns in waking her up. I continued to soak the towel and dab along my sister’s neck, but my eyes kept swerving to the right, where I had stashed Amy Bellrose’s journal in my satchel, and shoved it behind the bedroom door.
The heat thickened as the afternoon wore on. I took off my sweaty blouse and threw on another one. It smelled of dried sweat, unwashed, but was crisp against my skin and that was as good as clean. The small fan whirred, propped on a chair by the bed. The spot beside Fritzi had never looked so inviting, sucking me toward it, every muscle in my body softened to dough. It had been so long since I had truly slept. I let my eyelids close an inch, and for the first time in weeks my limbs filled with a warm-boned, melting ease. I rose to walk it off and the head rush nearly knocked me over. It was almost narcotic, the drowsiness, like a sleeping pill. I touched my forehead and was shocked by the heat; there was a burning frenzy on the other side, percolating in a bubbling dew against my skin.
“Your forehead is as hot as a stove!” Connie would have said, like she always did when I had a fever.
“Hot as a witch’s cauldron,” I would say back. For a snap I closed my eyes and in the watery darkness I saw her, waterlog pale in a yellow dress dripping onto the floor. She was speaking only one half of a conversation, as if she were on the hallway telephone.
“Bewitching,” she said.
“Bewitching,” I said.
“Your eyes.”
“My eyes.”
She had said this to me before. That I had bewitching eyes, their deep grey-blue almost like violet. When had she said this?
I remembered collecting round stones with Connie and the sound of gulls. “You have misty spring eyes.”
Lake Pontchartrain, that was it. We had been sitting on a rocky beach. She had a sketchpad on her lap, the one that Mama bought her for her birthday, same as Fritzi’s. I was eating an apple and feigning sultry poses, the gloomy sunlight diffused by cloud and stringing silver through my hair as I laughed and crossed my eyes and ruined the composition, asking what exactly about me she wanted to draw.
I remembered how she wrapped herself in a picnic blanket, as though it were a shawl, and looked out happily at the water. She had let out a laugh like silver bells.
My head twitched up with a jolt. Where was I? My eyes adjusted to my bedroom, but the angle was odd. How had I gotten on the floor? My head was sore, and there were books toppled uncomfortably under my midriff. I must have fainted again. I slapped my own face like I had seen people do on television, but it did not do a thing to stir me; it only made me feel ridiculous and aggravated the split in my lip. I shook the sleepiness loose from my hair, my head, blinked until my eyes stayed wide.
I looked at Fritzi’s bed and whispered her name.
She moaned.
“Fritzi. You awake?”
“No, quit askin’.”
She needed to sleep in her condition, but our bedroom felt haunted when she was not awake. I usually tempered it by sleeping next to her; now her bed was too rife with pneumatic germs, and the untouched bunks were no better, saturated with a different sort of infection.
I pulled myself onto my feet. Evening came on and winged over the room, and I caught my reflection in the moonlit window, my fist to my chin and a single finger curled against my lower lip. Fritzi’s worry face. Mama’s, too. A smudge of blood had dried along the corner of my mouth and a bruise blued my cheek. I had walked home looking like this, all the way home from Jackson Street, for everyone to see.
I was talking myself in and out of opening Amy’s journal. Part of me thought no, not tonight, not without Fritzi. But this pneumonia could take days to pass, even weeks, and I could not sit still. The shadows in the corners of my eyes took on shapes lately, and I heard violins in the air vents, voices chattering in the noise of the fan. My bones buzzed whenever I stopped moving, and sometimes I thought a hummingbird had swallowed my heart.
I held my hand out in front and watched it shake. I looked at Fritzi dissolving in her blankets. She had gotten thinner since the sickness. How had I allowed that? I unbuckled my satchel and took out Amy Bellrose’s journal. I did not open it. I set its spine on the desk, and both sides of dampened pages fell open onto a face with a scraggly lion’s mane. It had been scribbled in pencil, its mane coloured by dried brown streaks it took a moment for me to realize were blood. Beneath it Amy had written: COLD MAMA. I lingered on those words. They did not appear again.
Over and over came the scribbled eyes and mouth, floating without binding contours, surrounded only by the reddened mane, until a second face began to darken the corners. I leaned close to it, my nose hovering over the page; I knew that face. I threw open the top drawer of the desk and pulled out Connie’s matching journal. I swept through the pages until I found the cracked face like a broken doll’s. I sat entirely still. Everything disappeared but for the electricity shooting up my arms. Parnella Bellrose had died in one of the tucked-away antebellum rooms. It had been a room with toys, a waxen doll at Dorian’s feet.
Fritzi coughed painfully from her chest. I moved to the edge of her bed and watched her. Even when her breathing calmed it was strained. I followed the coils of her dark hair, long enough now to tangle. I touched a single end, springing up below her chin, curling into a gentle hook like mine and Connie’s. I brought my hand to her cheek and let it sit.
She would have been sick over what I was thinking, sicker than she was, by far. She would have slapped me to knock some sense into my head.
There was the matter of the fence. I would need something to help me up without Fritzi. I spun around, eyes washing over everything with an unfocused swoop. They dropped to the green pail peeking out from under Fritzi’s bed. It was bigger than most sand pails, a novelty — Mama won it playing the tin horse race at the carnival — and it had a white plastic strap that I could sling over my shoulder as I biked. I reached under the mattress. Slow, easy, careful not to cause a creak. I could never tell how deeply Fritzi slept; her nose could be pushing out weak, wheezy snores and she would still answer you if you asked her a question. I reached the rim of the pail and rolled the rest free, eyes still on Fritzi, who lay still but for her chest’s fragile rise and fall.
I looked out the window at the paling dark. Two, maybe three hours from dawn. If I hurried I could beat the daylight. Get far enough that Fritzi could not catch up and haul me back.
I rode my bike through the lonely sounds of empty roads, all wind and chafing palm leaves, made lonelier by the occasional car, the dreary sight of its white headlights in the distance. I felt like some squirrely detective in a film noir, sneaking off in the dead of night. The reckless one, who always ends up sweating in a rain-beaten telephone booth, about to get shot. I sped past tailors and soap shops and an endless stream of cafés, grateful for the occasional all-night lights of expensive boutiques and the Dauphine Orleans.
It was a long, long while before I reached the riverfront. I stopped every hour to drink water from my satchel, rest my legs, feel the river-swept breeze and blink away the building spots of grey against my eyes. My fingers slipped in sweat against my handlebars, and with nobody in sight, no building for miles, I tore off my blouse and let my skin breathe, mopping up the sweat with a handkerchief. When I slipped my blouse back on and buttoned it, the cotton clung coolly to my skin.
Finally, when my legs had long been shaking with exhaustion, and ached so tenderly I stumbled and scraped my knees when first setting my foot on the ground, I reached the Lasalle’s shrouded pond-and-willow street. Clutching the pail’s strap around my shoulder, I hurried my bicycle to the bushes and made my way through the oak tunnel to the locked pinewood fence.
I tried to even my breaths. I set the pail on the grass and stepped onto it, lifting myself close enough to the base of the fence spikes that with a few jumps, the pail teetering against the grass, I grabbed hold. My feet slipped against the planks as I pulled myself up. My arms strained until I thought they might snap.
The ground hit harder this time. I had to sit for a moment, unsure if I could walk, pain tightening around my knees. The yard was empty. There was a cold twinkle to it, and the trees loomed under the last chilled stars before dawn.
I moved slowly between the rows of trees, orange orbs hovering above me like fattened fireflies. The two busted cellar doors were tucked now beneath a big blue tarp, but Candy was surely there. She would help me, the way she had before. I began to pull the tarp up, but there was a hand on my back, and a twist between my shoulder blades. Darkness struck like a hammer and a sweet, halting scent covered my mouth.