“Oh.”
I looked at her. She thinks Grandpa Arnold is simply being charitable, I thought. She doesn’t get it. “He’s putting him in Willie’s room.”
Now her eyes widened. “Why? You have guest rooms. This house is bigger than ours.”
“And giving him Willie’s things, Willie’s clothes, Willie’s toys, everything.”
She was silent, her mouth slightly open. Lila was far from beautiful. However, she had what Myra called a comely face, a face that could be called pretty but not extraordinarily so. To me, that sounded unflattering, and I hoped nobody ever thought of me that way. If there was one word I had learned to hate, it was “average.” It sounded like everything you enjoyed that was exciting would be through someone else or because you tagged along with someone who truly enjoyed it, someone beyond average.
Did that make me snobby?
“Can he fit into Willie’s clothes?” she asked.
“That’s not the point! I don’t care if he can or can’t. Those are Willie’s things.”
She nodded, trying to look as outraged and disturbed as I was but so obvious about it that I had to turn away.
“Well,” she offered, “if he’s just borrowing them for a while . . .”
“Oh, Lila,” I moaned, “once he uses any of it, it’s his forever.”
“That’s terrible. I have an idea,” she said after a moment.
“What?”
“If there are some things you don’t want him to have, why don’t you go in there now and get them and keep them hidden in your room?”
I thought for a moment. There were many things of Willie’s that I wouldn’t want anyone else to have, but going in there to retrieve them suddenly seemed intimidating. Would I just start crying uncontrollably? Would I feel guilty taking them? Would it be another way to convince myself of Willie’s death, not that I needed much more to do that? What would Grandpa think? How angry would he get?
“I suppose if I chose carefully, I wouldn’t need to take that much,” I said, working on convincing myself.
“Were you in there . . . since . . . ?”
“Just the first night.”
She nodded. “I’ll go in there with you,” she said. I could see she was a little scared of the idea but was willing to do it for me. She was a good friend after all.
“Thanks. Let’s do it,” I said firmly, and got up. She nodded, and we walked out together, suddenly moving slyly, like burglars or something. I certainly didn’t want Myra or My Faith catching me doing this.
At Willie’s doorway, I paused to make a list of what I would retrieve. It began with the windup train set that our parents had given him when he was only five. Even though Grandpa had replaced it with an electric train set we would bring out every Christmas and set up around the tree, Willie cherished his simple train set.
There was his favorite winter hat, the one with the built-in earmuffs. It was hard to think of him on a sled or playing in the snow without it on. He never seemed to outgrow it. He wasn’t the sort of boy who would ever play with dolls, but he had a Superman doll that he kept on the shelf built into his bed headboard. Although I hadn’t heard him doing it lately, I could clearly recall overhearing him talk to Superman about some imaginary villain they were both going to get. And, of course, there was his copy of The Complete Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen that our mother read to him and that I read to him after she was gone.
I feared that once I was in his room, however, I would be like someone told to evacuate their home because a terrible fire was bearing down on it. In a panic, what would they grab to save? Surely, I was in a very similar place. I looked at Lila, nodded, and went in. I went directly to the things I had listed in my mind, piled them on his bed, and paused to look around. There were other toys and books that I knew he treasured. Of course, the Slinky, I thought, and went for it. And what about the paddle ball with the target on it? Yes, and his bag of marbles. There was his baseball bat and the glove Grandpa had bought him last Christmas. He and I had played with it in the snow, which made everyone laugh. I knew I could go on and on, but I didn’t have room in my closet for much more.
“Okay,” I said. “For now.”
Lila and I gathered it all and brought it to my room. I put as much as I could in my closet but decided to keep the Superman doll on my desk with his winter hat beside it.
“If you want to go get more, I’ll go back with you,” Lila said.
“No, this is enough for now. There’s a lot downstairs that belongs to him, but I can’t imagine the poisoned boy ever getting his hands on any of it.”
“Sure. He’ll probably be out of here once he gets well enough, anyway,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“His family has to be looking for him, right?”