the house—those four neat windows high above the back-porch roof, the rusted grate of the attic fan disturbing their symmetry. Somewhere up there, Leela worked. She was the one I needed to talk to.
I climbed the stairs to the top floor and knocked softly at her door. When she opened it, her kind face wore a businesslike, somewhat irritated expression. The magnifying lens on its dull yellow cord rested against her chest. It came back to me right then, the way she had looked when Candy dumped Lucia’s cookies in the trash, her gaze stoic and impenetrable. She was one of them, after all. They had cast off a brother forever, simply because he disagreed with them on a point that, to me, barely warranted a bump in a conversation. I loved Leela and I believed she loved me, too, but if I asked her a question that challenged the uprightness of her family, she would align with them, not me.
“I think TJ’s getting another ear infection,” I said. Her face softened, and I added, “And we’re out of wood, and it’s cold, and I can’t split any because I can’t find the right tools. I think the furnace is broken.”
She reached out and cupped my chin. Her face had gone blurry. “Well, there, don’t cry about it. Dodge’ll be back in a bit, and we’ll get him to look at it. Surely we’ve got some of those fire-starter logs in the cellar. Did you take a look?”
I rubbed my cuff beneath my nose, and she pulled me to her. Her hug pushed my face against her shoulder, and I choked a sob. “I know, I know. It’s hard when your baby’s sick. He’ll be all right, now.”
I nodded and pulled in a shaky breath. It made me so terribly weary, this business of having family that I loved but could so easily lose. Whatever I had seen in their shed wasn’t worth a rift with Leela. Nothing would be worth it, I thought, except TJ, and I tried not to think about how it might come to that, the way things worked in this family.
* * *
It was three-fifteen in the morning when Cade and I loaded TJ into the Saturn and drove to the emergency room, navigating the pitch-dark roads to the furious soundtrack of TJ’s squalling. In an hour his fever had spiked to 103, and Cade, bouncing the purple-faced baby against his chest, had cast ever-more-frequent glances at the road beyond the front window before asking me, in a defeated and vaguely frantic tone, to bring him the car seat. Now he raked his fingers back through his hair with his left hand, flexed his right against the steering wheel and mumbled that he was going to lose his mind if the kid didn’t quit screaming.
“He’s in pain,” I reminded him. I had to speak up to be heard above the baby. “He’s not doing it to be obnoxious.”
“I know, but God. It’s as bad as the night he was born. Remember?”
“No. I was unconscious when he was born.”
“I mean Eli. Well, you wouldn’t remember that, either. The way he just kept screaming and screaming until I was ready to punch him in the face just to make the noise stop.”
I glanced at him. Only half-seriously, I said, “Okay, well, don’t punch the baby.”
“I’m not going to punch the baby. Jeez, Jill. I feel sorry for the poor kid.”
He pulled into the circular drive of the hospital and I carried TJ inside. By the time Cade had parked and followed us in, TJ was nursing desperately at my breast in a plastic chair in the hallway, awaiting a promised shot of antibiotics. Cade sank into the chair beside me with weary grace, letting his head drop back against the wall so that his ball cap popped partway off, and stared up at the acoustic tile of the ceiling.
“I’m so freakin’ tired I can’t see straight,” he said. “And I gotta get up for work in two hours.”
“Call in sick.”
“I can’t. Not after what this hospital visit is gonna cost.”
“The state has a program for—”
“Fuck the state. C’mon, Jill. You know we don’t do stuff like that.”
I looked away. TJ gulped noisily, but at least he sounded contented. I pulled his feverish body more tightly against me, less for his comfort than for mine.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“You sound like Dodge.”
“Oh, please. Not everyone wants to sponge off the government, is all. Dodge didn’t invent that concept