Chapter 22 Clara
CHAPTER 22? CLARA
London, England
We were lost.
Desperately lost.
By moving quickly past the accident and running down the pavement, we’d become turned around. People rushed by, their faces covered in scarves and masks. Tall woolen hats loomed like towers on top of dark figures. Long black coats billowed like the wings of a crow. The white marble of a building glowed to my left. Wynnie coughed again, and this time the telltale wheeze whistled through the exhale. If I didn’t find my way, we would be standing here on a sidewalk in London while Wynnie was having an attack.
“Mama,” she said softly, “Emjie says to turn left at this corner.”
Street signs were hidden, appearing as creamy unreadable rectangles fastened to the sides of buildings, high enough to be shrouded in the veil of smoky air, the letters blurring together.
“I can’t see the street sign on the building,” I told her. “I don’t know if this is Garrick. We need to turn on Garrick.”
“It is,” she says.
I usually didn’t argue with Emjie, but now, how was I to rely on my daughter’s invisible friend? It seemed absurd, but one thing I’d figured out through the years—Emjie was the part of Wynnie that knew things, and Wynnie wanted Emjie to get the credit.
“Why does Emjie think this is the street?”
“There, that.” She pointed at a small garden statue of a gargoyle on the stoop of a doorway. “She noticed that when we passed it before.”
“Yes,” I said. “Good girl.”
I felt sick and dizzy as we bowed our heads through the fog toward our flat. Would my daughter need to save her own life, since I could not?
Voices swam through the air, slow and distorted. Help me. Where am I? Leave. Please let me in. It’s an emergency.
I need to get into number seventeen.
Charlie’s voice.
We walked directly into him. He stood at the front of our building, hollering into the intercom speaker.
“Oh!” He grabbed me by the shoulders with his leather-gloved hands and drew me so close that his forehead nearly touched mine. “Clara, it’s you. Thank God. Are you all right?”
The sound of breaking glass, the holler of a man: Come back here, you scoundrel .
I clung to Wynnie’s hand. “I need to get her inside.”
The buzz of the door—someone had heard Charlie’s plea. We stumbled down the hallway, smoke curling behind us, the cold snapping at us with a bitter bite. We reached number seventeen. “Do you have the key?” he asked.
I fumbled through my purse and looked up in despair. “The key…”
“Mama, you put the key in your pocket when we left. Not your purse.”
I reached into my pocket and felt the cold weight of the brass.
I shook off the dread and we made it inside. Wynnie’s breath whistled in and out, hands splayed on her knees as she leaned forward in that terrifying posture of air hunger. I unbuttoned her coat and removed her scarf.
I ran for the bedroom and the little wooden box with the adrenaline and the syringe. I jabbed the needle through the plastic top and drew up the lifesaving clear liquid with shaking hands. I caught my reflection in the mirror and gasped: my face was streaked with dark soot, and it looked as if I’d crawled inside a chimney, cleaning it with my cheeks and nose. My hair hung in greasy strands. This was what the air was made of. This was what my darling daughter was breathing into her fragile lungs. I had exposed her to it again. I was a fool.
Back in the living room, I knelt before Wynnie. “Please take a deep breath,” I said, and held the syringe, unsure if we’d need it.
Wynnie smiled. “I’m all right, Mama, honestly. Now that I’m inside.”
Charlie was pale beneath his soot-covered face. “Are you okay?”
“I am,” she said, looking up at him. “I am.”
She didn’t need the shot, and we all sat in silence as Wynnie breathed quietly and the sounds of horns and sirens blared outside. Charlie watched Wynnie closely; his hair was freckled with flakes of soot, and it covered the shoulders of his woolen coat. His handkerchief was looped around his neck, where he’d pulled it down, and there was a demarcated line where his lips and chin had been protected.
Finally he asked, “What happened?”
“I thought we were fine,” I said. “I did. I’m such a fool. I listened to the broadcast, but I didn’t know…”
“I’ve never seen it this bad. It’s the bloody cheap coal that Churchill allows.” Charlie perched on the coffee table and leaned forward to wipe my face with his thumb, rubbing off the soot. “I’m going to call our family doctor, Maycombe; he can help us.”
“Charlie, listen to me. This air is poisonous to her.” I pulled Wynnie close, and she allowed it. Tears clogged my throat, and anger burned in my chest. I wasn’t exactly sure where to direct the anger. Possibly toward Mother? Or Charlie’s father, for leaving behind these papers without explanation? Or at myself? The anger flamed in me and at me.
Charlie spoke slow and steady, bringing me back to the room. “The city is clamped down. Railroads aren’t running. Bridges are closed. Police and ambulances can’t get through—”
I interrupted his litany. “Listen to me,” I said. “I must get her out of here. I don’t care how.”
Wynnie walked over to the window and pressed her forehead against the glass.
Charlie told us, “I would normally suggest we take her to hospital, and they might give her oxygen there, but the wireless says they are overwhelmed and don’t have enough staff or oxygen.” As if to reinforce his point, a siren squealed, halted, and rose again outside.
Nothing existed alone; it always tangled with something in the past. Here I remembered when I was twelve years old, and Dad and I had visited New York City for an adventure to see the tree at Rockefeller Center and the store windows. We’d been on the long ride up in the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building when halfway there it screeched to a halt. We’d all been crowded in the small space. The lights blacked out. A woman began to cry. I needed to find the bathroom. Dad murmured words of comfort that the elevator would start up again soon. He sang “You Are My Sunshine,” and the trapped crowd joined in, alleviating the panic. The elevator lurched and rose again, but the few minutes trapped felt exactly like this moment in our rented flat: desperate helplessness, a sense of impending danger.
“I am going to ring Maycombe.” Charlie went into the kitchen, where he used the black phone to dial a number he knew by heart. I followed him and heard the dull ring of it for a long while, ten chimes at the least. I thought Charlie might hang up, but he stood there with a fierce look on his face, as if with his sheer determination he could get the doctor to answer.
“Maycombe,” he said. “We have an emergency. I have a friend visiting from America, and her little girl, who is…”
“Eight,” I said.
“Eight years old, and she has…”
“Asthma,” I told him.
“She has asthma, and this air is making her sick. Can you help us?” A long pause and I heard only the mumble of the other man’s voice. Then Charlie again. “Yes, she has shots and some pills.” He looked at me.
“Aminophylline,” I said, and he repeated the word.
Charlie nodded as the other man spoke, and then he turned away from me. Panic rose like a tide that washed onto the beach, scooped up the flotsam and shells, and then receded, only to force its way farther onto the shore with the next wave, seizing more of the land and shoreline, bringing in more debris.
Charlie hung up and exhaled. I grabbed his sleeve. “What did he say? Can he help us?”
“He said we must leave. No one can help us, and it won’t get better. The hospitals are full. Doctors can’t make calls—many of the streets are shut down. He said to give her Liquifura when we arrive at my house.”
“Liquifura?”
“It’s a cough medicine.”
“That is not what she needs.” A pressure built in my chest, a need to exhale in a scream, but I controlled it.
“I’m only telling you what the doctor said. We must leave.”
“Okay, what next? What can I do?”
“We’re going back to my house now. It’s only a few blocks away and I can walk it with my eyes shut tight. Wynnie just took her medicine, so we can make it, am I right?”
I nodded while pressing my fingers into the corners of my eyes. I could cry later. I could cast blame when we were safe.
He continued, “We’ll get out of here and go to the countryside, to my mother’s house.”
I nodded.
“We’ll leave now,” he said. “Bring only what you can carry.”
I ran to the bedroom and packed quickly, thinking of my mother and her midnight escape. I grabbed my tote with the easily accessible meds, and one change of clothes for each of us. Then I took the satchel with Mother’s papers and my small purse with cash, tickets, and passports. This gathering took less than five minutes. I took one last glance at our large suitcase, packed with all our clothes and sundries, with the things we thought we’d need.
Wynnie and I were leaving with a stranger to a place I’d never heard of, and yet it was an easy choice.