Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

I knew they must be dead still.

Jerrick sat beside me in another chair, and he talked to Lashawna a lot, but sometimes he just stared at her like I did. He was worried. He told me she had to eat, and drink water, but she couldn’t because she was asleep and he couldn’t wake her. If he couldn’t wake her she would die because there were no hospitals or doctors, but if there had been we could take her to one and they would feed her even though she was sleeping.

Jerrick brought me things to eat, and a few times I got up after eating and went to the potty. But that was the only time I left Lashawna. I wasn’t so scared anymore about the man who murdered Munster, but I was scared about the cloud. It got into everyone’s house and killed them, and I thought maybe it would find the church and Father’s house where we lived and get in to finish us all off. I told that to Jerrick on the first day, the day after he put Lashawna in our bed.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told me.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I don’t want to get killed!”

“If Lashawna dies, then I don’t want to live either. But I don’t think the cloud is coming anyway. It didn’t come after us in the park, it only hurt Lashawna when she went to it and touched it.”

And after that he didn’t say anything else. Jerrick just stared ahead, with his hands in his lap, and he was quiet until that night.

He slept beside his sister, but I slept in the chair because it was big and had big arms and a cushion. I didn’t want to sleep beside her until she woke up again. Jerrick touched Lashawna’s face and sometimes her shoulder that night, and he said things to her very quietly. I couldn’t hear what he said because he whispered, but I think he was telling her to wake up, that she had to eat and drink. She wouldn’t wake up, though.

After that night we woke up. Jerrick was already up when I woke up, and he brought me Rice Krispies and some water. I ate the Rice Krispies and drank some of the water in between bites, and as I was eating he said that one of us had to leave and go find the hospital. I would have to be the one because he couldn’t look for it because he couldn’t see.

“She’s going to die unless we find the hospital,” he told me.

That frightened me for lots of reasons. One, I didn’t know where the hospital was to begin with. Two, I was afraid the murderer might be out there somewhere, and he would see me if I went to look for it. Three, I might see the cloud again, and I didn’t want to ever see it again. I didn’t know why Jerrick wanted me to go. There were no doctors or nurses even if I found the hospital. I told him that.

“You have to try. We don’t know that there aren’t doctors or nurses alive. We just assume there aren’t. Maybe there are, but we won’t know until we find the hospital. And even if they’re all dead, it’s still a hospital, and they have medicine in them,” he said.

“Do you know which one she needs? How would I find it?”

“No. I don’t know what was in the cloud that made her sick, so I don’t know what medicine to give her. But she has to eat and drink, and I know what she needs to do that, I think,” Jerrick said to me.

“What?” I asked him. He told me, and I was more scared. He said he wanted me to go into the hospital, and if no one was alive, find a room where a smelly body was lying in bed, but it would have to be a smelly body with a bottle hanging up and a tube going down into the dead body’s body. Probably the arm, he said. I would have to yank the tube out, but not the needle. The needle was no good anymore. I’d have to look all over the hospital and find another needle that would fit on the end of the tube, and then bring the bottle and the tube and a new needle back to our house at Father’s.

“But the bottle has to be full, or almost full, and if it isn’t, you have to find more. The food might be in a plastic bag hanging up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t matter, I don’t think. It’s liquid and the food will keep her alive until we can figure something else out. Still, maybe you’ll find a doctor or nurse alive. I don’t know. But you have to try, Amelia. If you don’t, Lashawna will die for sure.”

“I don’t want her to die. Can’t we do something else to make her not die?” I asked.

“No.”

“We could light more candles and say more prayers.”

“No. She needs food and water.”

I sat very still and very scared for a long time. I was thinking, but I was mostly thinking that there was no way I could go. Going out alone would scare me to death. I thought and thought and thought, though, trying to remember in my mind where the hospital was. I remembered going there a few times with Momma, because Daddy cut his finger really bad one time when he was working in the garage, and we had to get him to a doctor. Momma took me alone one time with her, too, when Daddy was out flying somewhere at work. It was a check-up was all, and so the doctor didn’t have to put stitches in her like they’d done to Daddy.

Where was the hospital, where, where, I wondered? It was a big building with lots of floors, that’s all I could remember. It was white. I remembered that. In the name there was a W, too. So, I remembered a lot as I thought harder and harder. It wasn’t too far from our old house on Birch Street, and I knew this because Momma didn’t drive very long when we had to go, and it was away from Munster’s, but past the park where the cloud was. That’s all I could remember. I could never walk there because I just didn’t know the way, and then I looked over at Lashawna again, and I knew I would have to try or she would die, and that would be my fault, and I’d be very, very, very sad.

“I don’t know the way to the hospital, Jerrick. I think I know kind of where it is, but I’m not sure. If Father Kenney’s computer worked I could maybe find a map there, but no one’s computer works.”

Jerrick pointed his head and his eyes upward when I said that. That’s how he thought, and he was thinking very hard, but not for long.

“You have to find a map, then. One that shows the streets on a piece of paper. That’s how they used to find out where to go before computers. There must be one here somewhere. Look in all the drawers.” Jerrick was still looking up when he said that, and his eyes didn’t move because it wouldn’t have done any good if they had. He was blind, but he knew about maps somehow. He put his hand on my arm and squeezed it.

I jumped out of the chair and ran to Father’s dresser that had a mirror on top of it and some other things in front of the mirror on the top. I opened every drawer and searched for a map, but there were only clothes and one drawer with lots of papers, but nothing with a map like I could find at Google. I ran to the kitchen and looked in all the drawers, but no map, and I was discouraged. After that I ran back out of the kitchen and down the hall toward the front of Father’s house where the desk was, and I looked in all those drawers, except one that wouldn’t open because it was locked. I yanked on it and yanked on it, but it still wouldn’t open, so I thought maybe I could find a hammer and hit it until I broke it open. Maybe Father hid his maps inside that drawer. So I turned to run back to the kitchen, and then I stopped. Right behind Father’s messy desk was a map on the wall! It showed streets!

“Jerrick, I found the map,” I yelled very loudly. “It’s on the wall!”

Jerrick came, and when he got there I was already on the chair with wheels on the bottom, and I had to be very careful when I pulled the tacks out of the corners of the map because the chair rolled on the wheels. The map wasn’t a paper map, it was a map made out of plastic, but it had all the streets in Marysville on it, and it had tiny building pictures, like Monopoly pieces. Churches had a cross on top of their tiny building, and once I had gotten the map down and pushed the chair away, and Jerrick was standing asking me, “What, what, what?” I put it on top of the messy desk and started looking for the hospital Momma had taken Daddy to, and the one she went to for a check up later. I didn’t see a big W on any of the tiny buildings, but I saw a picture of a church near my street that was called Birch Street on the map. The church was called Saint Andrews, and so I knew where Jerrick and Lashawna and me were on the plastic map, and I would find the hospital.

“Do you see a hospital?” Jerrick asked me.

“I don’t know what they look like on a map,” I answered. “I see Saint Andrew’s and the park up there.” I pointed on the plastic map at the green park, but that was stupid because Jerrick couldn’t see what I was pointing at. “The hospital must be one of the buildings up here,” I said.

“What does it say by the buildings you don’t recognize?”

I leaned down closer and tried to read the little teeny letters, and then I saw one that had the word hospital in it. Western Medi-cal Hospital. That was it!

“Here it is! I found it, but it’s at least an inch away from the park.”

“North or south,” Jerrick asked.

“Up.”

“Okay, that’s north.”

“How do you know that?” I asked him.

“I’ve seen maps with my fingers. Braille. North is always at the top of the page.”

“Braille?”

“Books for blind people.”

“Huh?” I was confused.

“Never mind. I can explain it later. For now we have to figure out a route for you to take,” he said.

And so he helped me find big streets that were larger than small streets on the map, and he made me find a black marker and make an X on them so that I would be able to find them easier later when I left. But always to “reference” (I had to ask him about that word) where I was by the streets I marked with an X. That was confusing, but I knew Western Hospital was north, so that was up on the map. When I had gotten the food from the hospital for Lashawna, I would have to go south, or down.

Jerrick took me to the kitchen. He got crackers and the almost-empty jar of Skippy peanut butter and some sardines from the pantry and we put them inside the backpack that Lashawna used to have when we had gone to the park. And then he did something that made me blush. He put his big fingers on my head, on both sides, and then he kissed my forehead. He said, “Good luck. Don’t be frightened. Lashawna and I will be waiting for you. Hurry, now.”

I