Sixteen

The rain started that afternoon and made me feel itchy and restless. When Helen quieted, I tried to sit beside her, but every few minutes I’d get up and walk around. Over and over in my mind, I pictured Helen walking into the kitchen and discovering Dorothy with Mr. Streeter’s body. She’d kept the truth from me because she’d known I’d have tried to save her. I wondered if I would have been as selfless.

Gil and I had eaten little all day. So that evening, when Helen seemed to be sleeping, I heated soup that Mrs. Howell had sent to us. I set the bowls on the kitchen table, then went to get Gil, but he had fallen asleep on the davenport. He needed rest more than food, so I left him there.

Perhaps if I had sewing to work on I would not be so restless, I thought. I took out my boxes and bags of lace and trims and old fabric and found a crazy quilt that was almost finished. I had forgotten about it. Mother had tried to teach Helen and me how to quilt when I was ten or eleven. We had dutifully fitted the shapes together, and the three of us had stitched the top to the back. Helen did not care for sewing, and back then I had considered all quilts dumpy and old-fashioned, so we had never finished it. I had almost tossed it out when we moved from Iowa, but the three of us had worked on it together and I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Now I took the quilt into Helen’s room and sat down beside her to work on it.

It wasn’t a quilt, really, just a throw. We had done everything except for the binding, which was a long gold ribbon, faded now to a dull color. It was strange that I had forgotten about the quilt, because now I loved piecing together bits of old silk and velvet and lace.

I ran my hand over the patches, which were odd pieces—some scraps, others cut into shapes to fit the quilt. We had included ribbons with lettering on them. There was one that Father had worn at an Elks convention and another that Helen had gotten for achievement in science. She told us how her teacher had been upset that a girl had won first place. There was leftover lace from a dress Mother had made for me when I was in first grade as well as a plaid hair ribbon, a piece of velvet with a duck Helen had drawn on it, a fan made from silk ribbons, and two patches with the outline of a small hand—one Helen’s, one mine.

I put my hand over the outline of Helen’s hand. My hand was much larger than that tiny shape. Now Helen’s hand was curled up, birdlike, on the coverlet, and I thought of her touching my forehead when I was hot with fever. How odd that her hands, which were so precise at her nursing chores, were clumsy with a sewing needle.

I, on the other hand, had been fascinated with the way we stitched the pieces to the paper backing, which we tore off later, and I loved seeing how the quilt came alive when we embroidered over the seams with gold floss. I had learned to embroider on that quilt, experimenting with different stitches.

Helen had learned to embroider on that quilt, too, but she had never liked it, and her stitches were lumpy and knotted compared with mine. “I think embroidery was the only thing I was better at than you,” I said as I sat beside Helen now. Gil had told me to talk to her because she might hear me, and indeed, Helen’s voice had come through my own delirium. “Look at how you knotted this up. Why, you didn’t even fasten the thread before you cut it, and now it’s pulled out.” I laughed a little. “No wonder you became a nurse instead of a seamstress.”

I had felt foolish talking to Helen when Gil was there, but now that he was in the living room asleep, it seemed natural. “Of course, I wouldn’t make a throw like this now. It’s too much of a hodgepodge and the colors are gaudy.” I thought a minute. “I remember that you actually thought this quilt was pretty. It was stitching on it that you didn’t like. You wanted me to complete it, but you wouldn’t work it, and I was too stubborn to finish it by myself. Silly, isn’t it? Well, I’ll finish it now, and you can keep it in your bedroom.”

I cut a length of thread and inserted it through the eye of the needle, knotted one end, and pulled it through the binding. As I did so, I spotted Helen’s initials, HH—three upright lines and one cross-line that ran from end to end. I touched them, feeling the roughness of the embroidery. Helen Hite. It was such a pretty name. I smiled. “I used to wish I’d been named Helen, you know. I always thought you were the lucky one,” I told her. “But really, I’m the lucky one because I have you for a sister.”

I stitched for a long time, then set down the quilt and stood and stretched. Because I was stiff from sitting, I wandered around Helen’s room, looking at her things in the dim light that came from the lamp on the table beside the bed. I picked up the formal photographs of our parents and grandparents and the aunt Helen was named for, all taken in studios. Faded now, the pictures were displayed in silver frames on a white dresser scarf. As I looked at the portrait of our grandmother, I saw that Helen favored her. I’d never noticed that before. There was also a picture of the two of us, little girls in starched party dresses, Helen with her bright golden hair and me small and dark.

In front of the portraits was a snapshot of Helen and Gil, the two of them sitting on a rock in the mountains. Peter had snapped the picture the day the four of us took the train to Georgetown for a Sunday outing. We had gone there to gather columbine, and the boys had picked bunches for us to take home. Of course, most of the flowers died on the train, but Helen had kept one and dried it, and it lay on her bureau next to the picture.

That trip was one of the best times we four had had together. We’d wandered around the town looking at the quaint houses, one of them a mansion with a tennis court that had gone to seed. The house was seedy, too. A woman sat on the porch with a book, and Helen and I speculated about her. Peter knew who she was, a spinster whose father had lost all his money.

I opened Helen’s jewelry box, a glass casket with pink silk lining, moving her few pieces with my finger—some nursing pins, plain gold earrings, Mother’s wedding ring, and another ring that had belonged to our grandmother, gold with rubies in it. Mother and Grandmother were partial to rubies, and Helen liked them, too, although she rarely wore jewelry. And there was the small gold cross that she had received when she was confirmed.

Helen’s bedroom was plain. Mine was filled with pillows and throws and scarves hanging on the walls, with pictures and paintings and a collection of pretty rocks and bits of driftwood and objects I had picked up in junk shops. But Helen’s room had only the things on her dresser—the jewelry box, the photographs, an old California Fig Syrup bottle turned purple from the sun that Gil had found on that same trip to Georgetown. The only picture on the wall was one I had painted, a bench beside a pond with weeping willows around it. I had not liked the picture much, had thought it too sentimental and was going to paint over it, but Helen wanted it. I offered to paint a figure on the bench because the scene was lonely, but Helen said no. What had she seen in it that I hadn’t?

Toward morning, Helen woke me when she cried out, “No! Dorothy!… Oh God!”

I sat up, disoriented, not remembering at first where I was. When I did, I touched Helen’s forehead, which was hot. Her eyelids were inflamed. Helen had beautiful eyes, like pale blue silk, and I wanted her to open them; I wanted her to look at me and know I was there. But she didn’t. I went to the bathroom and ran cold water over a washcloth, then returned to Helen and wiped her face and neck and chest. She had spots on her cheeks the color of mahogany. She coughed again, and suddenly she coughed so hard that she threw up. I held her while she vomited into the basin. There wasn’t anything solid in her stomach, because she’d taken only a little water with the Aspirin Gil had given her. But there was blood in the bowl.

“Gil!” I called, but he was already at the bedroom door. Helen’s spasms had awakened him.

“I fell asleep,” he said, as if chastising himself.

“She’s only now started coughing. But there’s blood.”

Gil pushed me aside, sitting on the bed with his arms around Helen. “She’s chilled,” he said. Helen was shaking now.

“But she was hot only a few minutes ago.”

“It’s that way.” He thrust a thermometer into her mouth, and when he withdrew it, he said, “A hundred and three.”

Helen began gasping for breath and crying, and Gil pounded her on the back. “She’s congested, and she’s in pain.”

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know.” His voice was raspy. “I’d give her morphine, but I don’t have any. We can try more Aspirin, but I don’t think it will help much.”

Helen moaned then, and I shook four Aspirin into my hand and put them in her mouth, then forced her to drink some water. I sat down on the other side of the bed. “Tell me what to do. Please, Gil, isn’t there something?”

“Rub her back. Sometimes they have back pain.”

I placed my hand on the small of Helen’s back and began to knead the muscles, but Helen only cried more. “Shouldn’t we call someone? Another doctor?”

“If we could get one. But what could he do? Nobody knows how to cure this, Lute.”

Blood began to spurt from Helen’s nose, and Gil washed it away with the cloth. Then he stopped, his finger on one of the spots I had seen earlier. He touched each one.

“What is it?” I asked. “I meant to point them out to you.”

“Cyanosis.” He laid Helen against her pillow and put his hands to his face to catch the tears.

“What is cyanosis?” The word was familiar, but I couldn’t remember its meaning.

“She’s begun to turn color.”

I gasped. “That obscene blue? That horrid color you told me about? Oh my God.” I touched my sister’s face. “Does that mean…?” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Gil nodded.

“No!” I covered my face with my hands, and now I really was crying. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

“Pray.” Then he added, “We can make her comfortable.”

All of Helen’s nightgowns were soiled, so I got one from my room. Gil and I removed the old one and washed Helen gently. We dressed her in the clean gown, and I brushed her hair and tied it with a ribbon, then put a dab of scent behind her ears and on her wrists. Gil had given her the perfume, a lily of the valley scent, and Helen wore it on special occasions. I put on fresh pillowcases, but we left the sheets because we would have had to move Helen to change them, and we thought that might hurt her.

Gil told me I should sleep. He would call me if there was any change. Perhaps he wanted to be alone with Helen, so I went into my room and lay down, and I did not wake until it was morning.

I got up and washed my face and went into Helen’s room. Gil was stretched out on the bed beside her, just as I had been. He was not sleeping, however. He was brushing a strand of Helen’s hair out of her eyes. The ribbon had come undone, and Helen’s hair was around her face like long grasses that had been blown about by the wind.

“She didn’t like her hair color, you know,” Gil said, which surprised me, because Helen had beautiful hair that shone gold, only now it was dull, the color of maple syrup. “She wished it was dark, like yours.” Gil must have sensed my surprise. “She told me you had always been the most beautiful creature in the world. From the time you were a little girl, she thought of you as a china doll, with dark hair and eyes and white skin. But she loved you too much to be jealous.”

“Jealous? What could she be jealous of?”

“Your talent. Your spirit. Your way with people. She was very protective of you, and she worried about you all the time. Worried about the way you were treated at work. Worried at first that you would fall for Peter, then worried that he wouldn’t come home. One of the reasons she put off marrying me was she didn’t want to leave you alone.” He thought that over. “At least I think that was a reason.” He looked unsure of himself. “Maybe she just didn’t want to marry me.”

“Of course she did,” I said quickly.

Helen coughed, and Gil, who was still lying next to her, sat up.

“She hasn’t coughed much, has she? Isn’t that a good sign?”

“No, Lute, don’t.”

“But she could get better. It would be a miracle, but she could.”

“You don’t believe in miracles. I don’t either. Besides, look at her color.”

I studied my sister and saw that her skin, especially on her lips, was darker now. “Will it keep on turning blue like that?”

Gil nodded. “Sometimes a patient’s skin actually turns black. It stops when…” He didn’t have to add “the person dies.”

“Why don’t we try those methods that were in the newspaper? Maybe they’re not really quack remedies. One of them might work. Dover’s powder or Epsom salt.”

“Lute,” Gil said. “Let her die in peace.”

“If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,” I said. “Peter said that about the war.”

“Macbeth.” Gil and Helen had attended the play with Peter and me.

There was blood on the pillow and on the sheets, and the bowl of water beside the bed was red with it. I told Gil to go into the living room and lie down on the couch while I sat with Helen, but he wouldn’t leave. “It won’t be long,” he said, standing up.

While he went into the bathroom to get fresh water, I straightened the bed and fluffed the pillow. I combed her hair and tied it again. Then Gil sat down on the bed beside Helen while I took the chair. We were there for a long time, not talking. Our telephone rang, but I didn’t answer it. Someone knocked on the door, but I didn’t answer that either, only heard the door open and the Howells’ chauffeur call that he had left a basket for us.

The sky was light outside now, although there was no sun. The room was stuffy and smelled of sickness, and I went to the window and opened it. The rain had stopped. Water dripped off the trees onto the dead hollyhocks. Rainy days made Helen nervous, and now I knew why. It had rained the night the minister attacked her. She had liked Colorado because of the sunshine. The rain gushed out of the downspout, pooling on the sidewalk. In winter that spot was always slippery. The wind came up and blew drops of water onto the curtains and the floor, and the cold air felt good in the hot room.

Behind me, Helen gasped. “Dorothy!” she cried. “Lutie!”

I rushed to the bed and took my sister’s hand, holding the bluish fingers in mine. “She’s gone,” Gil said after a minute, but I already knew that. And then he said, “Oh God! She’s gone,” and began to cry—sobs that shook his body.

I didn’t cry, however. Not then. I only felt a great weight pressing down on me. “Why?” I asked. “Why Helen and not me? Why Peter and Maud and not me?” I reached out my hand to Gil and he clutched it, then stopped crying and apologized for breaking down. Doctors weren’t supposed to do that, he said. But he was not a doctor then. He was a man who had lost the girl he loved. I was sorry Helen had not said his name at the end.

We sat like that for a long time. The telephone rang again, but I stayed beside Helen. At last, Gil stood and said, “There are things we have to do. There are papers to be signed. And we’ll have to dispose of the body. I’ll take care of it, Lute.”

“Don’t leave her on the street,” I said suddenly, recalling the bodies of influenza victims that had been left outside for the death wagons. I thought of Mr. Streeter’s body abandoned in a vacant lot. I couldn’t let that happen to Helen. “Promise me you won’t.” I was a little hysterical.

“Of course I won’t.”

“Call Fairmount Cemetery. That’s where the Howells are buried. Maybe we can get a plot near theirs. Maybe if you mention their name, they’ll find us a space.” Then I added suddenly, “A plot for two graves.” I would not let Helen sleep through eternity alone. Death would not separate me from my sister.

Gil made the calls, and late that morning, two men wearing masks came for Helen’s body. Gil and I had dressed Helen in a clean uniform. She was proud of being a nurse and would have wanted to be buried in it. Gil reminded me there wouldn’t be a service, because they were still forbidden. I had forgotten.

The men carried Helen’s body to a wagon. They were about to leave when I remembered the throw I had been stitching, and I told them to wait while I ran back inside to fetch it. “This should go into her coffin,” I said. She should sleep with it forever.

“They might lose it,” Gil told me. What he meant was that the quilt was likely to be tossed aside. Perhaps there weren’t even coffins now. For all I knew, people were being buried in shrouds. But I wanted Helen to have something we had made together wrapped around her.

“That’s real pretty, lady,” one of the men said. “We’ll keep it with her. We got orders she’s somebody,” and I knew mentioning Mrs. Howell had helped. The man had taken off his cap when he saw Helen’s body, and now he put the cap back on. I was grateful that all the death he had seen had not deadened his compassion.

The two men climbed into the wagon and one picked up the reins, but I told them again to wait. I went to the back of the wagon and lifted Helen’s hand and held it until the driver turned around to show he was impatient. “Good-bye, my sweet Helen,” I said. Then I whispered, “Dream about clowns.”