Chapter 5 - Ghosts of St. Jude's
The Green Street house smelled of lemon wax, archival paper, and disuse.
It was four thousand square feet of silence. When Michael flipped the switches in the foyer, an alabaster chandelier illuminated herringbone hardwood floors, oil paintings of marine landscapes, and a sweeping curved staircase that rose toward a skylight gray with sea fog.
The girls stood clustered on the Persian rug in the entryway, paralyzed by the scale of it. Emma had left one of her duct-taped shoes on the doormat because she was convinced the leather was too clean for outdoor rubber. She stood in her mismatched socks, her toes curling into the wool pile.
"Upstairs," Michael told Eleanor, who was leaning heavily against the mahogany console table. "Second floor, first door on the right is the master suite. There is a king-sized bed. Across the hall is a guest room with two queens. Scarlet, take your sisters up. There are towels in the bathroom cabinets. Turn the brass handles to the left for hot water."
"Hot water?" Lily whispered. "Like, all of it?"
"All of it," Michael said. "Until the pipes get tired."
Scarlet took Emma’s hand and led Lily up the stairs, their socks making soft whispering noises against the polished wood. Eleanor lingered, her hand still resting on the table, her breath shallow.
"There's a doctor," Michael said, pulling out his phone. "Dr. Sarah Chen. She's a personal friend. She does home visits for people who don't want their names on hospital logs. She’ll be here in twenty minutes."
"I don't have insurance," Eleanor said, her voice small, almost defiant.
"Sarah doesn't need your insurance. She owes me for three research laboratories I funded at UCSF." Michael stepped toward the kitchen. "Go get clean, Eleanor. Let the girls sleep. We'll talk about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here."
She stared at him for several seconds, as if trying to find the trick—the hidden camera, the transactional ledger that every poor person knows is hidden somewhere behind an offer of charity. Finding none, she bowed her head, whispered a thank you that Michael barely caught, and followed her daughters up the curved staircase.
When the sound of the upstairs bathroom door closing echoed down through the stairwell, Michael walked into the dark kitchen.
He did not turn on the lights. He stood by the marble island, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling windows into the tiny, walled garden where Japanese maples dropped crimson leaves into a dry fountain. The silence of the house settled over him like water.
He reached into his pocket, drew out his wallet, and opened the small leather flap behind his credit cards.
Tucked inside was a faded, creased black-and-white photograph, three inches square. A little girl with dark hair and oversized teeth, wearing a hand-me-down coat with missing buttons, sat on the stoop of a brick tenement.
His sister, Clara.
Clara had not survived that winter in South Boston. She had developed pneumonia three weeks before Arthur the dry cleaner started bringing the bagels. The hospital in Dorchester had made their mother wait four hours in the cold intake hallway because she couldn't provide proof of residence. Clara had died in an ambulance three days later on the way to the state sanatorium, her small lungs filled with fluid, her fingers gripping Michael’s wrist with the exact same desperate, unyielding strength Scarlet had used at the car window twenty minutes ago.
Michael set the photograph on the marble island.
His hands began to shake.
It was not the polite, subtle tremor of fatigue. It was a violent, convulsive heave that started in his diaphragm and worked its way up into his throat. He leaned his palms flat against the cold stone, his head hanging between his shoulders, and he began to weep.
He wept without sound, the way people learn to cry when they grow up in shared rooms with thin plaster walls where tears are considered a complaint against survival. He cried for Clara, whose grave in St. Jude’s cemetery had not had a stone until he was thirty years old and rich enough to buy the entire plot. He cried for the twenty-six days in the Buick Regal. He cried for the three little girls who had sat on the terrace of Lucent Sky looking at seven dollars' worth of flour and yeast as if it were the only mercy left in the western hemisphere.
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The tears fell onto the polished Calacatta marble, clear drops spreading on the cold stone, until the doorbell rang, sharp and low, announcing the arrival of the doctor.
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