Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (13 page)

“I love you more than anything,” she whispered into his broad, striped back.

Through the wall Harriet could hear Adam in his room. His favorite record of John Philip Sousa marches began to play. Under the thump of the familiar music, she could hear the sound of his voice, and she knew he was reciting titles of Jerry Lewis movies in time to the music. She looked out her window, and from her bed she could see the side of Mrs. Marshall’s house. The Antlers’ house, Harriet corrected herself. Two fair maidens. She got up and went over to the window. She raised her hand and moved it back and forth, tentatively at first and then with a more intentional motion, as she practiced waving.

The humidifier made the paint peel. Hot steam came out of the dark green glass cylinder in a constant gush. The noise made Harriet uneasy; it reminded her, especially when she was feverish, of people screaming far away. The mirror on her closet door clouded and ran with the medicated vapors that filled Harriet’s room. When she was sick this way, a special night-light was left on; the shade revolved slowly on a pointed stand, from the heat of the bulb inside, and the sinister circus parade that went around and around was not soothing but additionally terrifying.

The barking cough that lodged in her throat was called croup. Just lying in her bed, Harriet could hear the rasp of her breathing, as if every breath had to pass through something she had swallowed that was stuck.

When she had croup, it was always night, and everything was wet; her blankets were beaded with moisture from the steamy vapor, and her sheets were damp and clammy from her fever sweat. Her mother would come in and give her sips of ginger ale, and then Harriet would doze with the taste of it souring in her mouth. Strange, rasping sounds would yank her awake through the night; the noise of her mother opening the door and shuffling in to check on her would rouse Harriet
further from strangled half-dreams, and she would realize then that the sound was her own. Croup.

Tonight, for the first time Harriet could remember, Adam had it, too. Harriet’s occasional cough, always much diminished after the first night (and this was her third night with it) would be answered by Adam’s croupy bark, which she could hear through the wall between their rooms. Her room, though still slightly steamy, was silent for once, as her mother had come in to move the vaporizer into Adam’s room an hour before. The circus-parade light twirled slowly: the cartwheeling clown, the ringmaster in a top hat, the lion behind bars, the elephant, the seal with the ball on his nose, the clown again. The steam was clearing, too; Harriet could see in the mirrored closet door a cloudy reflection of herself sitting up in bed.

Adam’s cough repeated and repeated, like hammering, like a broken alarm. Harriet listened for her mother’s steps, but heard only the wall-muffled coughing. She looked at the clock that hung next to her door; it was shaped like a cat, and the tail was supposed to swish back and forth, but that part was broken. She couldn’t really tell time, but she knew that when both hands were bunched on the right side of the dial, it was the middle of the night. She got up and opened the door to the hall. Adam’s coughing was louder. She walked toward his room and stood outside the door, listening.

The coughing continued, if it could be called coughing. It was like the rasp of a saw going through wood, though sharper, more urgent. Harriet turned the knob and eased the door open a crack. Through the mist of hissing steam that rose from the vaporizer in the middle of the rug, Harriet could see Adam’s illuminated globe (a seventh-birthday present from Gay) glowing on its stand. In the bluish light of the world Harriet could see Adam lying under his covers in his bed on
his back with his mouth open. He coughed again, and again, and she watched to see if he noticed her, but his eyes remained closed. A medicinal wetness was in the air. She began to breathe through her mouth, which made her taste the menthol in the mist. She coughed a nearly normal cough. Harriet made a mental note to report to her mother in the morning that her croup was over.

Adam started to cough again, a new whooping sound, and his hands went up to his throat, though he seemed to be asleep. Harriet tiptoed over to the side of his bed and stood over him. Sweat, or condensation, was beaded all over his face. Ordinarily, she wasn’t allowed in his room, she wasn’t supposed to bother him, there were rules about getting out of bed at night, but this was different. Where was their mother? Harriet couldn’t remember if her father was home or away on one of his business trips. If he was home, he had come in after her bedtime. Adam’s cough sounded again, louder, and then, in midwhoop, it stopped, as if cut off. Adam writhed in the bed, his face darkening with effort. His eyes flew open, and he looked at Harriet for an instant, and then he looked away and closed his eyes.

The hiss of the humidifier seemed suddenly loud. Then Adam started to cough again, and Harriet realized that he hadn’t been breathing at all for that moment.

“Adam?” She poked his arm. “Adam? Are you okay? Do you want me to get Mommy?” His face looked less red; it was more bluish white. She could hear his breathing now because it was loud and fast. It stopped again for a long moment—Harriet held her breath too, until Adam’s chest dropped and rose again; then she let her own lungs empty—and then Adam began to thrash under his covers as if something were holding him down, while emitting a new and frightening choking, gagging sound.

Harriet left him then and ran to her parents’ room, where
she found her parents cuddled together like spoons, asleep in their bed, a radio inexplicably playing scratchy jazz, faintly, on the bedside table: this moment was to become fixed, like a snapshot, in Harriet’s earliest memories.

Everything after that happened very fast but in slow motion, like the circus light, like a fever dream. Her parents racing to Adam’s room, from which now came no sounds of coughing or choking. Stinging like a slap were Ruth Rose’s words: “Why didn’t you come to us sooner, Harriet? What’s the matter with you? How could you wait?
How could you?
” Harriet retreated to her room then and sat on her bed listening while her father yelled into the telephone about sending an ambulance and her mother kept saying, Adam, Adam, come on, Adam, but Harriet didn’t hear an answer or even any more of that hideous coughing.

Then ambulance men seemed to fill the house, although there were only two of them. Harriet sat for a moment on the carpet in the hallway and pressed her face to the bannisters so she could see down through the slot next to the stairs. There were two policemen, and another policeman who was a doctor, and at one point Dr. Morris the pediatrician was sitting at the kitchen table with Harriet’s parents, although Harriet didn’t know when he arrived or who had called him. For some reason Mr. Antler was there, too.

The police doctor stood in the doorway of Harriet’s room and asked Harriet to come downstairs into the living room, where he said he had some questions to ask her and would she help him? He let her go down the stairs first and stopped, two steps behind her, when she stopped to draw a circle with her fingertip in the dust on the molding that paralleled the staircase. Scrabbled in the dust were a series of hieroglyphic circles, squares, and triangles. What were these marks for? he
asked Harriet, who didn’t answer, too shy to explain the way she made promises to herself that were witnessed in the dust: By the time I draw another square it will be my birthday. By the time I draw another triangle I will be in first grade. By the time I draw another circle they will have told me about Adam.

The police doctor followed Harriet as she led the way to the living room, the room for important guests. She was how old, seven? Six. Her name was? Harriet Gibson Rose. He kept asking her about how much time had passed while she was in Adam’s room, and what time she had last seen her mother, and did her parents drink a lot of whiskey or wine, and did they ever hit her, and what time was it when she first heard Adam coughing, and Harriet had to admit that she couldn’t tell time. It made her feel like a baby.

“So, do you think you waited ten minutes before waking up your mommy and daddy?” he asked her, his pen poised to write down her answer on his clipboard that was like the one Mrs. DelVecchio the gym teacher carried out to the recess field.

Harriet nodded her head, hoping that was the right answer. She heard the ambulance men in the hallway talking about some other child in Oxbridge Gardens who had died of something called Rice syndrome, and she wondered if eating at Lucky Garden had poisoned her brother, although Adam didn’t like rice and couldn’t have eaten very much. Maybe Harriet should never eat rice again.

She knew Adam was dead, though nobody said it to her. Why didn’t they say it? She didn’t really have to know it, though, until she was told.

Harriet sat there in the big armchair in the living room, her bare feet tucked under her. She had put on her fuzzy blue bathrobe, but had forgotten her slippers. She shivered with cold. The police doctor asked her to describe how Adam was coughing, and when she imitated the sounds he had made,
the doctor nodded his head up and down while he wrote more things on the clipboard. It didn’t have a whistle on a string attached to it like Mrs. DelVecchio’s.

Mr. Antler came into the living room and exchanged looks with the police doctor, who stood up and put the cap on his pen.

“I’m a friend of the family,” Mr. Antler explained, and then he sat down beside Harriet in the chair and shifted her up onto his knees. She leaned back tentatively, and he put his arms around her. She settled into this unfamiliar lap.

The Antlers, especially the children, were a familiar part of her everyday life now, but she hadn’t ever thought about how she would describe her connection to them. They were the family next door. People were friends with each other, but she had never thought of it that way, that a person could be friends with a whole family. While Mr. Antler patted her shoulder in a pleasant, soft way she had never seen him use with any of his own children, Harriet repeated the words
friend of the family
silently, over and over, until they made no sense. Mr. Antler usually wore dark suits with neckties, but he was wearing a soft, gray sweater and old, soft corduroy pants. The police doctor waved to her as he left the room, shrugging into his jacket.

“You stay in here with me for a little while, sweetheart,” Mr. Antler said gently, now stroking her arm with one of his big hands. Harriet looked down at his hand and was fascinated by the clumps of hair growing out of his wrist; there were even a few little dark curls growing down his knuckles.

Harriet could hear a lot of footsteps slowly coming down the stairs, all together. They were carrying Adam out. She could feel Mr. Antler’s arms tighten around her, though she had made no attempt to get up. They were not hurrying. There seemed to be no rush about anything now. Harriet could hear the sounds of the front door opening and shutting.

Simon had his hands on his wife’s shoulders. They were both in bathrobes, and as he steered her into the living room, they seemed to sag together, like two lightning-struck trees. Harriet thought they looked astonished at the sight of her snuggled in Mr. Antler’s lap, and she sat up, feeling that she had been caught doing something wrong, or that they had forgotten she was here.

Dr. Morris stood behind them, and he shouldered past them now and crouched down in front of Harriet. She liked Dr. Morris, though his accent made him hard to understand sometimes. When he said
this
, it came out
zees
, and when he spoke her mother’s name to his nurse, he gargled the two
R
’s in a comical way that embarrassed Harriet.

He had a little blue row of numbers on his left arm, up near his elbow. Harriet knew he had escaped from a prison camp run by Nazis a long time ago, though she wasn’t sure what that meant. She always felt ashamed when he asked her to describe symptoms of her own illnesses, considering the things her mother told her Dr. Morris had been through. How could the itch of chicken pox or the pain of a sore throat be bad enough to complain about to someone who had lain in the snow all night pretending to be one more dead body, not moving even when a guard walked on his hand?

The last time Harriet had seen Dr. Morris was a few weeks before when she had been rushed to his office because she had swallowed a twig. Harriet had been pretending to smoke it, like a cigarette, and Barbara Antler had probably only meant to knock the stick out from between Harriet’s lips, but instead the stick had gone down her throat and lodged crosswise. Harriet had been unable to croak a sound and had run into the house and gestured frantically to her mother, who had rushed Harriet (with Adam humming beside her in the backseat) to Dr. Morris.

All the time the twig was in her throat and she could hardly
breathe, Harriet had thought of Dr. Morris pretending to be dead and had tried to be as brave as he had been. While Dr. Morris rummaged in her throat in order to grip the twig with his frightening tongs, and blood filled her mouth, Harriet stayed quiet and still, so the soldiers wouldn’t know she was alive; she had been praised for her good behavior.

Now Dr. Morris took her face in both of his hands and said to her, “It was a freakish thing, Harriet. His windpipe swelled and closed completely because of the croup. He did not have the usual defenses, I think.” Harriet breathed in his warm coffee breath. He studied her face for another long moment, then added, “Your parents are lucky they have you. My brother died also when I was a child. We share that now, you and I.”

Harriet didn’t know what she was supposed to do. She looked toward her parents, who stared back at her. Mr. Antler cleared his throat and said, “Why don’t I take her next door for the rest of the night?”

Harriet didn’t want to go. She enjoyed playing at their house, but the Antler children slept in beds without top sheets, under blankets that were pilled and grubby, like old stuffed animals.

Dr. Morris smiled at her and tousled her head. “I’ll call tomorrow, okay?” Harriet nodded, though she had no idea what they would talk about. Having dead brothers? She scrambled off Mr. Antler’s lap and crossed the room to the sofa where her parents were sitting side by side, holding hands. They looked like tired strangers waiting all night for a bus that would never arrive. Harriet stood in front of them. She wanted to wriggle in and sit between them. She wanted to tell them that she was fine, all better, that they didn’t have to worry about her. She wanted them to put their arms around her and tell her it wasn’t her fault, that there wasn’t anything she could have done.