She thinks of it as a pirate’s treasure cove. (‘Trove’ her mother corrects, but Kirby imagines it as a magic hidden bay, one you can sail into, if you’re lucky, if your map reads right.)
Dresses and scarves are tossed around the room as if by a gypsy pirate princess throwing a tantrum. A collection of costume jewelry is hooked onto the golden curlicues of an oval mirror, the first thing Rachel puts up whenever they move in somewhere new, inevitably whacking her thumb with the hammer. Sometimes they play dress-up, and Rachel drapes every necklace and bracelet on Kirby and calls her ‘my Christmas tree girl’, even though they are Jewish, or half.
There is a colored glass ornament hanging in the window that casts dancing rainbows across the room in the afternoon sun, over the tilted drawing table and whatever illustration Rachel is working on at the time.
When Kirby was a baby and they still lived in the city, Rachel would put the play-pen fencing around her desk, so that Kirby could crawl about the room without disturbing her. She used to do drawings for women’s magazines, but now ‘my style is out of fashion, baby – it’s fickle out there.’ Kirby likes the sound of the word. Fickle-pickle-tickle-fickle. And she likes that she sees her mother’s drawing of the winking waitress, balancing two short stacks dripping with butter, when they walk past Doris’s Pancake House on the way to the corner store.
But the glass ornament is cold and dead now, and the lamp next to the bed has a yellow scarf half-draped over it, which makes the whole room look sickly. Rachel is lying on the bed with a pillow over her face, still fully dressed, with her shoes on and everything. Her chest jerks under her black lace dress like she has the hiccups. Kirby stands in the doorway, willing her mother to notice her. Her head feels swollen with words she doesn’t know how to say.
‘You’re wearing your shoes in bed,’ is what she manages, finally.
Rachel lifts the pillow off her face and looks at her daughter through puffy eyes. Her make-up has left a black smear across the pillow. ‘Sorry, honey,’ she says in her chipper voice. (‘Chipper’ makes Kirby think of chipped teeth, which is what happened to Melanie Ottesen when she fell off the climbing rope. Or cracked glasses that aren’t safe to drink from anymore.)
‘You have to take off your shoes!’
‘I know, honey,’ Rachel sighs. ‘Don’t shout.’ She pries the black-andtan slingback heels off with her toes and lets them clatter to the floor. She rolls over on to her stomach. ‘Will you scratch my back?’
Kirby climbs onto the bed and sits cross-legged next to her. Her mother’s hair smells like smoke. She traces the curly lace patterns with her fingernails. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘I’m not really crying.’
‘Yes, you are.’
Her mother sighs. ‘It’s just that time of the month.’
‘That’s what you always say,’ Kirby sulks, and then adds as an afterthought, ‘I got a pony.’
‘I can’t afford to buy you a pony.’ Rachel’s voice is dreamy.
‘No, I already got one,’ Kirby says, exasperated. ‘She’s orange. She has butterflies on her butt and brown eyes and gold hair and um, she looks kinda dopey.’
Her mother peeks back at her over her shoulder, thrilled at the prospect. ‘Kirby! Did you steal something?’
‘No! It was a present. I didn’t even want it.’
‘That’s okay then.’ Her mother rubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand, dragging a smudge of mascara across her eyes like a burglar.
‘So I can keep it?’
‘Of course you can. You can do almost anything you want. Especially with presents. Even break them into a million billion pieces.’ Like the vase in the hallway, Kirby thinks.
‘Okay,’ she says, seriously. ‘Your hair smells funny.’
‘Look who’s talking!’ Her mother’s laugh is like a rainbow dancing across a room. ‘When was the last time you washed yours?’
Harper
22 NOVEMBER 1931
The Mercy Hospital does not live up to its name. ‘Can you pay?’ the tired-looking woman in the reception booth demands through a round hole in the glass. ‘Paying patients go to the front of the line.’
‘How long is the wait?’ Harper grunts.
The woman inclines her head towards the triage waiting area. It is standing-room only, apart from the people who are sitting or lying half-collapsed on the floor, too sick or tired or plain goddamn bored to stay on their feet. A few glance up with hope or outrage or some unsustainable mix of the two in their eyes. The others have the same look of resignation he’s seen in farm horses on their last legs, ribs as pronounced as the cracks and furrows in the dead earth they strain the plow against. You shoot a horse like that.
He digs in the pocket of the stolen coat for the crumpled five-dollar bill he found there, together with a safety pin, three dimes, two quarters and a key, worn out in a way that feels familiar. Or maybe he has become accustomed to tarnish.
‘Is this enough for mercy, sweetheart?’ he asks, shoving the bill through the window.
‘Yes.’ She holds his gaze, to tell him that she is not ashamed to charge, even though the very act of doing so says otherwise.
She rings a little bell and a nurse comes to collect him, her practical shoes slapping against the linoleum. E. Kappel it reads on her name-badge. She is pretty, in an ordinary sort of way, with rosy cheeks and carefully ironed cherry-brown curls under her white cap. Apart from her nose, which is turned up too much, so it looks like a snout. Little piggy, he thinks.
‘Come with me,’ she says, irritated that he’s there at all. Already cataloging him as so much more human trash. She turns and strides away so that he has to jolt after her. Each step sends pain shooting up to his hip, like a Chinese rocket, but he is determined to keep up.
Every ward they pass is crammed to capacity, sometimes with two people to a bed, laid head to foot. All the sickness inside spilling out.
Not as bad as the field hospitals, he thinks. Mangled men clustered on blood-stained stretchers among the stink of burns and rotting wounds and shit and vomit and sour fever sweats. The incessant moaning like a terrible choir.
There was that boy from Missouri with his leg blown off, he remembers. He wouldn’t let up screaming, keeping them all awake, until Harper sneaked over, as if to comfort him. What he actually did was slide his bayonet in through the idiot boy’s thigh above the bloody wreckage and neatly flick it up to sever the artery. Just like he’d practiced on the straw dummies in training. Stab and twist. A gut wound will drop a man in his tracks every time. Harper always found it more personal than bullets, getting right up into someone. It made the war bearable.
No chance of that here, he supposes. But there are other ways to get rid of troublesome patients. ‘You should break out the black bottle,’ Harper says, just to rile the chubby nurse. ‘They’d thank you for it.’
She gives a little snort of contempt as she leads him past the doors of the private wards, tidy single-occupant rooms that are mostly vacant. ‘Don’t you tempt me. Quarter of the hospital is acting as a pest-house right now. Typhoid, infection. Poison would be a blessing. But don’t you let the surgeons hear you talking about no black bottle.’
Through an open doorway, he sees a girl lying in a bed surrounded by flowers. She has the look of a film star, even though it’s been over a decade since Charlie Chaplin upped and left Chicago for California and took the whole movie industry with him. Her hair is sweat-plastered in damp blonde ringlets around her face, made paler by the wan winter sunlight struggling through the windows. But as he falters outside, her eyes flutter open. She half sits up and smiles at him radiantly, as if she was expecting him, and he’d be welcome to come sit for a while and talk with her.