Etta and Otto and Russell and James Read Online Free PDF Page B

love,
    Alma
    And,
    Etta,
    Very, very, very close now. In fact, we have passed over close, as I’m now one week and two days overdue. The nuns are keeping a quiet but close eye on me, all the time. They have assigned Sister Margaret Reynolds to sleep with me, in my room, beside my bed on a tiny, and one can only assume uncomfortable, mattress on the floor. I have offered to share my (also tiny, but, still) bed with her, but she has refused. Perhaps she thinks, with my current enormousness, she wouldn’t fit. Or perhaps she thinks other things. She doesn’t say much. Just waits silently until she thinks I’m asleep each night before sleeping herself. But I’m too huge and strange and hot to sleep now, so I lie there and pretend to sleep while she does the same. In the morning she is always first up, with her mattress folded and pushed under my bed, praying next to my sink.
    I am so, very, completely ready for this to be done now. I have tried to think of it not as a child but as something that is happening to my body, just my body, not me, something that will be over soon, but the longer it draws out, the more I think about what it really is. I think of names, Etta, while I pretend to sleep, listening to Sister Margaret Reynolds’ attentive, awake breathing. I have realized what a nice name Etta is. Or James.
    There’s a rock I found on the beach that’s so ocean-smooth it’s almost soft. I keep it under my quilt, usually, but, sometimes, if Sister Margaret is late or away in the bathroom, I’ll lift its round coolness to my face or neck or chest. It’s the size of, maybe, two fists together. It is so small but so heavy.
    I hope to visit soon. Mother and Dad might have told you. In just over one month. Everything will be wonderfully normal then, and maybe, if we can find somewhere to do it, I will teach you to swim.
    Love,
    Alma
    The next letter was from the same address as all of Alma’s others, with the same type of stamp and postmark, even, but it wasn’t from her. There was only one envelope this time. It was addressed, To the Immediate Family of Sister Alma Kinnick .
    Toxemia . A word that starts so harsh and ends so gently. A word whispered from Etta’s mother to her father before they had a chance to recognize all that they were learning. A word carried by Etta’s father up the stairs, oh so carefully, like a baby bird, to Etta’s room. He gave it to her more softly than she’d ever heard him speak. Etta took it and held it in her ears at first, and then her head, and then, suddenly, and horribly, her heart. Her mother crept through the doorand they, all three, realized how little it meant to know things, to know the truth of things, now.
    It took them longer, a week or so, to notice the hole in their language that this new word had made. To grasp that there was no term for a parent without a child, a sister without a sister.
    Etta signed up at the teachers’ college one month after this.

5
    S he had been in Manitoba for three days, three dry days, when Etta’s boots started leaking. Not letting liquid in, but letting it out, leaving a rust-colored trail behind her. In the morning it was just a mist of fine dots, hardly distinguishable by sight, only slightly more noticeable by scent, for those that notice scent. But by noon the dots had become a constant, if thin, trickle: the trail of them conjoining into two fine lines, like spider silk pulling from Etta’s feet. And by midafternoon the trail-lines had spread into tracks like a burgundy cross-country ski path. The scent, for those that live by scent, was overwhelming. At six o’clock in the evening, Etta noticed that her feet hurt. These are good boots, she whispered to nobody, to Manitoba, these are very good boots. But her feet hurt. And the boots were leaking, and she was starting to feel faint. Damn, she said. Etta didn’t think there was any part of herself stronger than her boots. If her boots broke, anything could. She sat down, and untied