learned, since then, how to care for my father. How to prop him up and pour soup slowly, carefully, into his mouth, just drops at a time so he wouldn’t choke. How to tuck his chin down close to his chest and stroke his cheek and massage his throat to help him swallow.
How to turn him, again and again, in an endless battle with the horrible, leaking bedsores that came from lying still for so long. Esther always took Samuel outside to play when I helped my mother clean those sores with vinegar. We couldn’t know if my father felt the terrible pain of that acid on his raw flesh, but I worried that he did, though he was not the one who cried.
Most of all, we learned how to make his little room into a world apart.
As soon as there were spring flowers in the world beyond the cabin, there were flowers in my father’s room, too. Jonquils and crocuses and snowdrops in little vases everywhere.
My mother had dragged in the gramophone, the one impossible thing she had insisted on keeping from our town house, the horse struggling to haul it up the mountain on a sled, and she played it for my sleeping father as she once had, though there’d been no dancing since we’d come to the woods to live.
When I asked why she no longer played her mandolin, not once since nearly giving it to the doctor in trade, she answered by sighing and shaking her head. Laying her hand flat on her chest. And I didn’t ask again.
Before the accident, Esther had read to me and Samuel at bedtime each night. Now, she read to our father instead, though Samuel and I lay at the foot of the bed and listened. She read nothing sad. Only happy stories.
Samuel’s part was to lie next to our father and tell him about the day. Funny episodes filled with dog-play and mountain business: a moose stranding Mrs. Anderson in the privy; Mr. Peterson, with only a weak lantern for light, mistaking a skunk for Dinky, his mouser. Things like that. Harmless. Gentle.
I had always done likewise, taking nothing into that room but light and loveliness, all of us sworn to tempt my father back into the life he’d had before. The life we’d had before he’d been hurt.
But I brought him something different on the day when Quiet was born.
Sun slanted through the window by the bed to light his thin, still face.
I watched him breathing.
And then I dumped the pitcher of cold water on his head and chest and waited for him to revive, as Quiet had.
“Mother!” Esther shrieked from the doorway, dropping her book and rushing to the bed.
My mother flew in behind her.
Saw me with the empty pitcher hanging from my hand.
Saw my father drenched, the wet bedclothes glued to his bones.
“Ellie!” she cried. “What’s the matter with you?”
She rushed to the bed and pulled my father into her arms, warming him against her chest, while Esther tugged away the wet bedding behind him . . .
. . . and I stood frozen in place, riveted by the sight of my father’s right hand.
It was twitching, just slightly.
Chapter Eight
“They aren’t the same,” my mother said when my father was once again dry and the room once again a place apart. “The puppy . . . what happened just now . . . they’re not the same.”
“But why not? I saw his hand twitch. The water woke him up a little!”
I knew how tired my mother was. I knew how much she wanted my father back. And I knew that it vexed her if anyone shook what she tried so hard to make calm. But I was sick and tired of calm. “He moved, Mother. For the first time since he got hurt.”
I wanted her to be hopeful. To say, at least, “Maybe. It’s possible.” But instead she took me by the shoulders and said, “A body does things with or without our say-so, Ellie. Your father’s hand twitched because you made it cold. That’s all.”
But I wasn’t convinced.
“What if he’s trapped in there and we could give him a way out?”
She looked half sad, half impatient. “We do that every day,” she said. “Every day.”
She meant by speaking softly and reading to him. The feel of his small son tucked up against him. My hand in his.
“All we give him are lullabies,” I said, though I didn’t want to make things worse. “Why would