Getting Near to Baby (14 page)

“I can't, Willa Jo. Not the way you want me to be sure. I can't be sure of heaven the way I can be sure of eclipses and giant squid, but someday we'll know more. And I can trust that Baby has moved on to that understanding before we have.”

I sat quietly with this for a while, watching as Mom finished the work she was doing on Baby's wings. I was feeling better. I couldn't really say whether it had to do with what Mom believed. Also, I was ready to fall asleep.

Mom cleaned her brush and set it aside. “Come on,” she said in a soft voice that meant things would seem more hopeful in the morning. “We're both tired and we ought to get some sleep.”

“I'm glad you're painting these pictures of Baby,” I said as we stretched out on the bed in the darkness on either side of Little Sister. “And not because they're the best paintings you've ever done.”

“Why, then?” Mom said.

“Because it will remind us,” I said. I could feel myself already sinking into sleep.

“Remind us of Baby?” she said.

“Remind us that she can always be with us.”

That night I had the dream again.

When I woke I was panting like a dog. I had that feeling I had done a terrible thing, I had somehow lost Baby. Mom and Little Sister were right beside me, soundly sleeping. Mom had fallen asleep with the bed lamp on, so the room was not in darkness. Mom's first painting hung right overhead. I twisted around in the bed and let my whole self sink into the sight of angels opening their arms to Baby, to erase the scary dream-picture of Baby walking into the darkness of the tent.

I
t was coming on sunrise when Mom finished the biggest and maybe the best picture of Baby, as a full-grown angel watching over Mom and Little Sister and me. That morning was particularly beautiful and we went outside to sit on the steps. Mom and I leaned against each other comfortably as we watched. Little Sister sat between Mom's knees. Mom ran her fingers through Little Sister's hair.

The sky was cloudy as the sun was rising over the ridge. The clouds covering the edge of the sun looked like they were on fire; they burned like hot coals. The clouds above were bathed in a heavenly glow. They shone soft and golden and were shot through with a glorious light. And suddenly I saw it as more than a sunrise, however beautiful it might be. I saw it as Baby's new home. I saw it, I suddenly thought, the way Mom had been seeing it all along.

“All these pictures you been painting, Mom,” I said. “They're really true? I mean, do you think Baby's with angels now?”

“I do,” Mom said. “I really do.”

“So you think it's like you painted?” I said, swallowing down a kind of pain in my chest and in my throat. But I wasn't unhappy. Just uncertain, in some way. Hoping that it could be true, and yet afraid that I would never find my way, all the way, to this belief. “That Baby will grow up to be an angel herself?”

“I think they've taken her in,” Mom said. “I believe that Baby rests in the arms of the angels. But I've painted it the way I think of it. Being something like we have here on earth. It may be altogether different. It may be sweeter than we can imagine.”

I nodded. Still I couldn't bring myself to believe as wholeheartedly as Mom did. All I could allow, I was relieved that Mom didn't feel Baby was all alone. Baby would've hated that.

Mom sighed as the sky settled into full morning. She was pale and weary-looking. Milly had come over the night before and scolded her for letting herself get so thin and tried to tempt her with blueberry coffee cake.

“I picked these berries myself,” she said. “Why don't you and the girls come picking with me tomorrow?”

“We might,” Mom said. That was what she always said, but the paint always drew her in. Away. Mom painted, and hardly slept, and didn't eat, and sometimes forgot that we needed to eat. She didn't bother with so much else that I began to be angry with her, the way I was in the few months right after Baby was born. I don't know for sure about Little Sister, but I always felt like I was waiting, waiting for Mom to come back to us.

So I knew Milly was right to scold Mom. I just didn't expect things to change. “I'm tired,” I said.

“I think we should go back inside and get some sleep,” Mom said. “You girls have been up all night. Even Little Sister.”

Little Sister regarded this as praise and grinned. Most nights we stayed up, Little Sister would fall asleep on the couch after hours of pinching herself to keep awake. But this time she'd made it. She'd made it all the way to sunrise. She hated to fall asleep without Mom and me.

When Aunt Patty arrived later that day, it was some relief to me. I expected she would know what to do for Mom. I expected she could make a difference. This expectation was not one I could share with Mom or Little Sister. Or Aunt Patty. Her forward manner made it hard to share such hopes with her.

I became her secret accomplice as we went from the first necessary cleanup to the beating of rugs and airing of bedstuff and finally to cleaning out the closets. Mom slept through much of this. I made it my business to be on my feet if Aunt Patty was on hers. I was her secret cheering section when Aunt Patty insisted that Mom eat everything she put on Mom's plate. I even went cheerfully—if also genuinely tired enough to go—off to bed as dusk fell. At first.

But when Mom could not be shaped up so easily as the house or the garden, I began to lose faith in Aunt Patty's methods. She would not stay forever, and when she went, I was afraid we would go back to our slipshod ways. When I heard Aunt Patty say, “Maybe I should take the girls with me,” I felt like a traitor. Not just because I felt that Aunt Patty was taking too much upon herself, but because in that secret place in my heart, I wanted to go.

I
t gets pretty hot on the roof along about the middle of the day. Little Sister doesn't complain. And I'm not yet of a mind to go back inside. I'm wondering if I shouldn't get Little Sister out of the sun over there next to the chimney, although the chimney is some higher than we are now. Steeper too, that section of the roof. I'm still wondering when Uncle Hob pokes his head out the dormer window.

“Say,” he says. “You girls look like you could use a drink of water. And maybe a cheese sandwich.”

“We might,” I say. It never occurred to me to ask for such a thing. I figured we're in enough trouble, we might as well think of ourselves as sent to our rooms without supper.

“You don't mind if I come out and keep you company, I hope,” Uncle Hob says as he passes me a quart-size mason jar filled with chilled water. I notice he is wearing a tie. This makes me notice that he is wearing a white shirt, his Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt. Most days he likes a plaid shirt, which doesn't need a tie.

“Little Sister,” he says, “can you take this umbrella from me?”

She does.

“Hold it there,” Uncle Hob says. “Don't let it slide off the roof.”

He sets a picnic basket out on the roof and climbs out.

He does not stand up, but kind of squats in the little patch of shade beside the window. I see he is altogether dressed for church in his blue pants and best shoes.

“Why are you all dressed up, Uncle Hob?”

He pushes his glasses back up on his nose. “Well, now, I always dress up for special occasions.”

He reaches back inside for his guitar. But he doesn't bring the guitar out on the roof because the sun isn't good for the strings. He props it in the window. Now he stops and takes off his black leather shoes and peels off his black nylon socks. His feet are pasty white under those socks, and his toenails are so clean even Aunt Patty wouldn't find fault. Then he scooches over to sit beside us, whispering, “Ooh, ouch, hot, ooh.”

Little Sister and I move aside and make room for him. It is just slightly cooler in the spot where we have been sitting. “Like sitting on a tablecloth where someone's left the iron for too long,” he says. “How are you girls standing it?”

Little Sister shrugs. I say, “We're used to it by now, I guess. It doesn't seem all that hot anymore.”

Uncle Hob takes the umbrella from Little Sister and puts it behind him so it can't roll away. Then he fills cups from the picnic basket with cold water. While we drink our fill he is getting out sandwiches that are wrapped in paper napkins. All of this without saying one word. I guess I should be wondering if this is a trick of some kind. Like, if Uncle Hob is trying to get us to come inside, he figures to do it by feeding us and softening us up some. But all that happens is we eat and drink and he holds that big black umbrella over our heads.

“It's mighty hot up here,” he says. “Don't reckon I ever gave much thought to sunbathing, but if'n I did, this would be the place to do it.”

“Guess so,” I say. “Had three brand-new freckles break out on my left foot since morning.” Little Sister immediately holds out her left foot to be compared.

Then I tell him how well Little Sister is coming along with her multiplication tables and how many green roofs we counted and all. And he points out the business district and says which rooftops are the drugstore and the dime store and the movie theater. Any rooftop you point out, Uncle Hob knows what store it is on top of. This, he says, is because he used to work as a roofer when school let out in summer.

“Are you too old to do that now?” I say. I used to think he was older than he is because of the glasses he wears. But now I'm older and I realize that not all grown-ups are old. It just seems that way because they're tall.

“Oh, no,” he says, like he's surprised at the thought. Right away I'm worried I've said something wrong.

“What I mean is,” I say, “why'd you quit?”

“Your aunt Patty got too nervous about me working on rooftops all day long. That's when I took to painting houses.”

“I don't remember you painting houses,” I say.

“Well, I don't anymore. Patty got to worrying about whether I'd fall off of the ladder.”

“That Aunt Patty is a powerful worrier,” I say. Which reminds me that I haven't seen her out here for a while. I'm almost missing her.

That's a joke, that last part about missing her, the kind of joke Aunt Patty has very little appreciation for. None, to be exact. Since there isn't much joking in Aunt Patty's house, I don't even know whether Uncle Hob enjoys a joke now and again. So all I say is, “Where do you think she is?”

He tells us not to worry overmuch about Aunt Patty. “She isn't crying anymore,” he says.

“Aunt Patty cried?”

“Only for a while,” Uncle Hob says. “Then she took two aspirins and laid down with a cold cloth on her head. She's sleeping now.”

This doesn't make me feel any better. “I guess she's afraid we'll fall off the roof,” I say.

“She was afraid of that at first,” Uncle Hob says. “But when you didn't fall off and you didn't fall off, she got used to the idea that you could sit out here without falling off.”

“Then why did she cry?”

“Why, her feelings are hurt, Willa Jo.” Uncle Hob looks as if he is surprised I haven't thought of this. Fact is, I haven't. He gives a deep sigh, the way some men draw on a pipe. In fast, out slow. Then he says, “Plus she's afraid your mother will find out and accuse her of some kind of neglect.”

“We'd tell Mom Aunt Patty didn't neglect us,” I say.

“Not if you had fallen off the roof, you wouldn't,” he says. And then he wobbles the umbrella he is still holding over our heads. “Then, too, sunstroke is known to hamper the powers of speech something awful.”

He holds that umbrella over our heads for the better part of an hour. I guess he would be holding it still but for the fact that the sun went behind some clouds and a little breeze picked up. A little breeze is all Uncle Hob says it is, but it feels pretty gusty up this high. It tried to take the umbrella. “We could go in if that's what you want,” he says.

“No, I don't think so,” I say. Little Sister shakes her head. She doesn't want to go in either. So Uncle Hob closes the umbrella and gives it to me to hold. Then he scoots back to the window and takes out his guitar to do a little picking.

He picks out a tune I remember hearing before. It's one of those that sound the same over, and over, like a nursery rhyme, so I hope he isn't planning to sing it for too long. But Uncle Hob doesn't sing the song, he sings out math problems. Of course Little Sister holds up the right number of fingers. This is more interesting than the song would have been, but after a while, we have all had enough of that. Uncle Hob stops singing and just picks. I don't know what he is playing, but it sounds nice.

I
know that sooner or later we will get around to talking about why Little Sister and I are sitting out here on the roof all day. And whether we are ever coming back in. I don't yet know what I will answer to either question. I mean, we have to go in sometime, but it seems more than I can think about just now. I think instead of all that happened before I climbed out here.

After supper last night, Aunt Patty made several phone calls to friends. Or maybe just to people she knew had children at home. “We must be able to find you some suitable little playmates,” she said after the third call didn't pan out. She didn't seem to notice that Little Sister and I were not especially eager for her to find us any little playmates.

The next calls she made, she didn't come right out and ask anyone to come over. She asked if their little darlings were home for the summer. Little darlings, no less. Most of them were either away for a while or attending Bible school during the day. Most, because Aunt Patty did come up with one girl about Little Sister's age. They invited us over for the evening.