Michelle Hoover - Bottomland

When Lee went to fight, Mother stayed in her room. She kept an oil lamp by her bedside so she could knit when she was awake. Father hung blue crinoline for her curtains, and through the end of October, the room filled with a watery kind of light. When Mother seemed bedridden for good, we sat with her with our schoolbooks. Agnes read aloud and Esther acted the stories out, but for me, I stayed close enough I could curl a length of her hair around my finger and feel the rise and fall of her chest. “Where I come from,” Mother said, “words have juice to them. Die Heimat. Die Sicherheit. Die Liebe .” She repeated the sounds like a chant. When she caught us listening, she wiped a hand across her mouth. “Beautiful, yes?” she said. “Now be sure to forget them.”

Agnes copied the words on a page of her book. I couldn’t make sense of them. Die, die , I read over her shoulder. “That’s not what it means,” Agnes said.

“Don’t you worry,” Mother told us, clutching our hands. “You’ll have Nan, as good as any mother. Girls should have their mother when they are young.”

Before Agnes could stop her, Esther tore out the page and threw it into the fire. Agnes stopped copying Mother’s words then.

It was late in November when Esther and I found Mother in her bed. She lay as she always did, her head turned to the window. Though her mouth was open, she wouldn’t speak to us. We stood in the doorway pinching our fingers. “Mother,” I whispered, as if I could wake her. Agnes broke through and dropped an ear to Mother’s lips. “Hurry now,” she said. “Get Father.” The smell of Mother’s room was close and sweet. She looked small as a pile of sticks under her blankets. “Go,” Agnes shouted. Esther gripped my wrist and together we ran. We called for Father in the fields and the stables. We called for him in the barn. When at last he heard, he rushed straight to their bed and held Mother’s hand. Nan hurried in, her face drawn. “Go on, you three,” she said, her voice strange. “Get yourselves dressed.” She gave us a kiss on the forehead and squeezed our shoulders, waving us off as if squeezing was enough. Father sat in their room and Ray came in from the fields, holding his hat. The three of us girls waited in the hall. We had dressed in our best, and Esther didn’t tug at her collar or shuffle her feet. Nan shook her head. “I think we’re to wear black,” she said. Then she whispered to herself. “She never taught us this.” Nan hurried into the room with a bowl of water and washcloths, but Father had already pulled the sheet and blown out the lamp. When he stepped into the hall, he drew the door closed behind him.

Later that night, we sat in the kitchen with the plate of cookies Mrs. Clark had brought. The plate had pretty white birds painted on the rim, but no one could eat from it. Mrs. Clark wept a bucket, or so Ray later said. But for himself, Ray hid his face for most of that day and the next. Mrs. Clark asked to sit with Mother in the parlor, but we brought her to Mother’s bed and carried in a chair. “Where are the others?” she asked. “Who?” we said. Nan brought in another chair and sat with her herself. I watched them as quiet as I could from the door. While Mrs. Clark’s shoulders shook, the sunlight fell through the window and crossed the room. I wondered if my shoulders should do the same, while my head felt swollen and my ribs were aching. Soon there wasn’t much sun in the room at all. After the woman left, Nan took the plate full to the pantry and covered it with a cloth. Father stayed at the table, lifting his face from his hands. “ Mein Gott ,” he said. “I was in the barn.” “What about Lee?” Esther asked, but Nan shushed her. “We’ll be sending a message to the hospital,” Nan said. “Then he’ll come home.”

In the early dark of the next morning, I went to Mother’s door. Father snored in the kitchen. The others slept in their rooms. Mother lay in her bed, her eyes closed and her hands crossed over her stomach. Nan had washed and dressed her and tied her hair from her neck with a ribbon. Under her chin, another ribbon kept her mouth shut. I touched her cheek. It was stiff. Twins, they had called us, though I’d never let myself hope it. Still seeing her in that bed, I wondered if one day I might look the same. The thought should have worried me, with her skin so still and gray, but it didn’t. Often I had pictured her face in a mirror when she was young — like mine but different. She had never told us why she left home back then. Was it a boy? A sister? Had she felt locked in a place, never alone enough for breathing? She had always seemed the staying kind. Same as me. But there was something now in the way she slept — as if she could go anywhere she wanted and by her own choosing. No one need ask her the reason why.

A knock on the door. These days, I open it no matter how late. A girl stands shivering on the steps in a jacket made for spring. She looks at me like the old woman I’ve become. The sign on the door says: women’s house of boarding. Almost seventy years I’ve been in this place.

“I’m here for a room,” she says.

I show her into the parlor where the couch has been re-covered more times than I can count, always white. The girl sits on the edge of the cushions with her fingers between her thighs. She’s thin as a lily, her shoulders wings. With her dark coloring and eyes, my own hand looks bloodless in my lap. The girls these days wear their hair straight and long to their waists. They dress like men with their flat fronts, their legs as bare as faces, but they are good girls all the same.

“The board is two hundred a month,” I start. “You get breakfast with that and your evening’s supper. You’ll have your own room and a bath down the hall. ” Something flits in the corner of my eye and I turn to see it. Nothing is there.

“You okay?” the girl asks.

“Oh yes, dear. I just lost track.” I wash a hand over my eyes. “Do you have your papers?”

“Papers?” She looks around. Code of the Boardinghouse Keeper . The letters on the wall have faded in the frame, but still the girl covers her mouth. Her laugh is the first sign of pleasure in her I’ve seen.

“Maybe tomorrow?” I ask.

“Sure thing,” she says.

I show her upstairs to her room. She takes a breath at the door before stepping in.

“You’ll have time to rest before supper. When the others come off their shifts. That’s about seven o’clock.”

“Thank you, Mrs.?”

“Byrne.”

“Mrs. Byrne,” she says. She stands as if chilled to the bone on the old rug. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself. She’s sixteen, seventeen, not a day more.

“Why don’t you unpack your things. Take a little lie-down.”

She nods but doesn’t make a move. I close the door between us as softly as I can.

At suppertime, the girls crowd around the table and talk. They don’t usually wear uniforms anymore, and they don’t care about keeping their voices down. Charlotte and I think that’s good enough. Factory work can still be had by the river, round the clock. But ours work as clerks in the shops, or maids and nannies. Some don’t seem to work much. “Runaways,” Charlotte whispers. We let them stay without their papers more often than not. Morning and night, we give them their meals, though the other houses have long ago stopped. The others aren’t even houses anymore but tenements with hot plates, and no common rooms to speak of. “Full of criminals and addicts,” Charlotte says. “Wards of the state.” Charlotte is soft on our girls all the same. She leaves a chocolate on their pillows, keeps supper for anyone who’s late. The house is ours to do with as we please. We needn’t the money from renting. Still we answer the bell. A girl should have a good meal and a clean bed no matter what she’s come from.