After the wagon pulled away, Gil left, his shoulders slumped as he walked down the street. I knew he wanted to be alone, and I did, too.
I went back into the house and stripped the bed and carried the bedding to the ash pit, along with Helen’s nightgowns and underwear and the uniform she had worn the day she got sick. I struck a match and dropped it on top of the clothing, but I could not bear to see her things consumed by the flames, so I went back into the house. I washed Helen’s room with soap and water and vinegar, wiping down the bed and the other furniture. Then I scrubbed the floor. The boiling water scalded my hands, and my back and knees hurt from kneeling on the wood with the scrub brush, but I was glad; I wanted pain in my body instead of my heart.
When the room was clean, I changed my dress and put on my coat and hat, and impulsively I fastened Helen’s gold cross around my neck. Then I walked to the trolley stop, because I would have to tell Dorothy that Helen was dead. I could have called a taxicab. I could even have called the Howells and asked them to send Melvin. But I was in no hurry. There was nothing I could do for Helen, and Dorothy would have a few more minutes to play with the dollhouse before she heard the news.
I did not know how to tell her about Helen or how she would react. It might be too much for her, losing her mother and her “sister” so close together. And coping with having killed her father. I knew that now. Helen must have taken the ice pick from Dorothy’s hand when she heard me come into the house.
The streetcar rumbled in the distance, the metal wheels screaming against the metal rails. I wasn’t far from the stop, but I didn’t hurry. I would let the streetcar go past, and there would be another one. Perhaps I would not take the streetcar at that stop but would walk to the next one. The cold air was cleansing. Drops of water fell onto my neck as I continued to walk. It had begun to drizzle, and I had not brought an umbrella. I went on past the second streetcar stop and the third one as rain splashed onto the black streets, drops falling on me and falling on the cast-iron fences that surrounded the old houses. The cold numbed me. I walked too near a curb, and a driver sprayed water on me and yelled, “Watch it, dearie,” but I barely heard him and did not even look up.
I held out my hand and caught the raindrops and rubbed the moisture onto my face, and I remembered how Helen and I once had been out in the rain when we were girls and had walked through the mud, watching it squeeze up between our toes. Helen and I would never do anything silly again. We would never do anything together again at all. I had never felt so abandoned. I remembered what Peter had written in his letter: “Where is God?” And for the first time since Helen died, I cried, tears running down my face and mixing with the rain.
I walked along weeping, not caring if people turned to stare at me. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe with the war and the influenza, death was so ordinary now that no one paid attention. I walked all the way to Grant Street, to the Howells’ home, and stood on the sidewalk in front of it to get control of myself. I went to the door but could not raise the knocker. I walked around to the side of the house and sat down on the stone bench in the rose garden. The roses were Mrs. Howell’s pride, but they were gone, of course. The bushes had been cut back so that the sharp stems were thrust into the air. The little gravel path between the bushes was muddy. I sat on the bench in the rain until the side door of the house opened, and I heard footsteps. Mrs. Howell hurried toward me, with George behind her holding an umbrella over her head.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, sitting down beside me, even though the bench was wet and she was wearing a silk dress. “She is gone, then?” She took the umbrella from George and nodded at him to leave.
“Yes,” I replied.
Mrs. Howell put her free arm around me. “I am so sorry. It is quite a trial for you, coming so soon after Peter.”
“I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t with me. I knew Mother and Father would die one day, but Helen…”
“I know. You feel as if you have lost your heart.”
“Yes,” I said, forcing myself to remember that I was not the only one who had suffered a great loss.
“Come inside. George has gone to prepare tea for us. He is the one who saw you from the window, and I knew. Dorothy is out with Cook. They have gone to market.” She helped me rise, and we went inside. George took my damp hat and coat, saying he would dry them in the kitchen. Then we went into the library, where there was a fire. We had sat there after Peter died, and I wondered if the room would always mean death to me.
“She died at home?” Mrs. Howell asked.
I nodded.
“Yes, I would want to die in my own bed surrounded by those I love. You have made arrangements for the body?”
“Gil called the cemetery. I asked for a plot near yours.”
“Of course. I shall telephone them myself to make sure of it.”
George brought tea, and we drank it without talking. Suddenly I was very sleepy from the warm drink and the hot fire. George came to say that Mrs. Howell was wanted on the telephone, and after she left, I fell asleep. When I awoke the room was very dark, and someone had covered me with a blanket. The fire had gone out. My clothes were dry, but when I took out my hairpins and shook out my hair, it was still damp. I knotted my hair again, then stood and tried to brush the wrinkles out of my skirt. I stirred the fire.
George must have been listening for me, because he knocked at the door, then entered.
“It must be late,” I said.
“Only four. The rain makes it dark outside. Mrs. Howell is upstairs with Dorothy. She said to let her know when you woke.”
He left me and fetched Mrs. Howell, who said that Dorothy was in Louise’s room with the dolls.
“You haven’t told her?” I asked.
“No. I thought it was your place. Would you like to tell her alone, or do you want me to go with you?”
“Please, Mrs. Howell,” I said.
“Anne,” she said. “I would like you to call me Anne.”
She reached out her hand, and together she and I went to tell Dorothy that our sister was dead.
“Helen is with your mother. And Peter,” I said.
“But I want her here,” Dorothy whispered. She broke into sobs, and her little body shook. I took her in my arms.
“What if you leave me, too, Lutie?” she asked through her tears.
“I won’t.”
“But Helen wasn’t going to leave, either.”
She was right, and I didn’t know what to say to that. I held her for a long time. Judge Howell came in and took my hands and said he was sorry. “So much death,” he said. Then Mrs. Howell asked us to stay for supper, but I could not sit in that formal dining room and make conversation. And I did not think they could, either. They had suffered enough with Peter’s death. I said we must get home.
Cook gave us a container of soup, and Mrs. Howell took us to the side door, where Melvin was waiting with the touring car. “I hope you can accept that the Lord is with you in your sorrow,” she said.
But I couldn’t.
On the way home, Melvin told me, “I am sorry, miss. It is so hard.”
And because I remembered that Mrs. Howell had told me his son had died in the war, I reached up and patted his back and asked, “How do you cope with it?”
“You don’t. You just go on.”
“Does God help?”
He didn’t answer, but instead said, “You have the little girl.”
When we got home I lit a fire in the fireplace. Dorothy and I ate the soup Mrs. Howell’s cook had given us, and then Dorothy put on her nightgown. She had not let me out of her sight since I had told her of Helen’s death. We knelt beside her bed, because it seemed the right thing to do. I did not say a prayer, and I did not know if Dorothy did, either. She took her treasure box, which she had brought home from the Howells’, and set it on the table beside her bed. When I saw how carefully she lifted her mother’s beads and ran her hands over them, I took off Helen’s cross and put it around Dorothy’s neck. That pleased her, and she gripped it until she fell asleep.
As tired as I was, I did not want to sleep. I went into Helen’s room and sat on her bed. The room was sterile now, antiseptic, the bed stripped, Helen’s robe and nightgown and uniform burned. Nevertheless, Helen’s presence was so strong that I couldn’t stay there. I wandered through the house, picking up the cup Helen used for coffee and setting it down at her place at the kitchen table. In the living room, I touched the leather pillow with the Indian in his feather headdress. We’d thought it was tacky, but it had made us laugh so we’d bought it. I lit a cigarette from the silver box. The cigarette was stale, but I smoked it anyway as I went out onto the porch and sat on the swing, where Helen and I had spent so many summer evenings—with each other and with Gil and Peter. The night was very cold after all the rain. I threw the cigarette butt into the yard and shivered, but I did not go inside. We had loved this house, the two of us. No matter how long I lived here, I would always think of it as our house.
There was so much to do. I’d never been good at planning. Helen had always been in charge, and I had been happy just to let things happen. I couldn’t do that any longer. I was the big sister now.
I wanted another cigarette, but I was too tired to go back into the house, so I stayed in the swing, putting my arms around myself to keep out the chill. I had not seen Gil since that morning, and I thought he might come around.
I was about to go inside when I saw a figure far away, and I knew it was Gil. I watched as he came onto the porch and tapped on the door—softly, in case I was asleep.
“I’m here,” I told him, and he sat down beside me on the swing.
Gil was beat, and I put my arm around him. “A bad day,” I said.
“They’ll all be bad days.”
“I know.”
“At least you have Dorothy to keep you going.”
“We do,” I said. “She’s yours, too. She loves you.”
Gil turned to look at me.
I said, “I thought you and Helen would probably take her when you married. She’d have been better off with two parents.”
“I thought she’d stay with you. Helen never talked about children. I don’t know if she wanted them.”
“She’d have been a wonderful mother. She helped raise me.”
“You might have been enough.”