with his brother. I don't know why Chris and I didn't
come down with the same thing.
All night long we jumped up and down, to run for
water, for orange juice kept cold on the attic stairs.
They cried for cookies, for Momma, for something to
unstop their nostrils. They tossed and fretted, weak and uneasy, worried by bothersome things they couldn't express except by large fearful eyes that tore at my heart. They asked questions while they were sick that they didn't ask while they were well . . . and
wasn't that odd?
"Why do we stay upstairs all the time?" "Has downstairs gone away?"
"Did it go where the sun hides?"
"Don't Momma like us no more?"
"Anymore," I corrected.
"Why are the walls fuzzy?"
"Are they fuzzy?" I asked in return.
"Chris, he looks fuzzy, too."
"Chris is tired."
"Are you tired, Chris?"
"Kinda. I'd like for you both to go to sleep and
stop asking so many questions. And Cathy is tired,
too. We'd both like to go to sleep, and know the two
of you are sleeping soundly, too."
"We don't sound when we sleep."
Chris sighed, picked up Cory, and carried him
over to the rocker, and soon Carrie and I were seated
on his lap. There we rocked back and forth, back and
forth, telling stories at three o'clock in the morning.
We read stories on other nights till four in the morning. If they cried and wanted Momma, as they incessantly did, Chris and I acted as mother and father and did what we could to soothe them with soft lullabies. We rocked so much the floorboards started
to creak, and surely below someone could have heard. And all the while we heard the wind blowing
through the hills. It scraped the skeleton tree branches,
and squeaked the house, and whispered of death and
dying, and in the cracks and crevices it howled,