Free Autumn Street by Lois Lowry Page B

He cried less now, smelled of spitup less often, and held his head high, looking around with blue, unfocused eyes. Sometimes he smiled at me. The grownups said that he looked like Daddy, and I wondered how they knew that, how they could remember, when I couldn't, my father's face.
    Of Gordon's few baby skills there was only one that I admired. Sometimes, when Mama bathed him, I watched as he lay squirming and naked in her arms, and sometimes he peed into the air, high and arched like a rainbow, the thin stream bright against the sunny window behind him.
    "I wish I could do that," I confided in Mama. She smiled.
    "Well, you're a girl.
Girls
can't do that." I already knew that they couldn't. I had tried, myself, privately, in the bathtub, and met with humiliating failure.
    "Can Daddy do that?"
    "Goodness. I suppose he could."
    "Charles can."
    "Elizabeth! You haven't..."
    I caught my error quickly. "Oh, no. I haven't
seen
him do it. But I meant that I suppose all boys can."
    But I was lying. I
had
seen Charles do it, often, behind the lilacs. He aimed at ants.
    I held Gordon, drowsy and powdered, on my lap, and played with his hands in the firelight. The flames licked the dry logs and snapped; sparks drifted up the chimney; a log shifted and fell.
    "Do the magic, Grandfather. Do the magic for Gordon."
    So Grandfather leaned forward, took a handful of his magic sand from its box, and sprinkled it onto the fire. For a few moments the flames turned blue, green, purple—for a few moments I saw in the fire all the colors of my paintings, my skies and mountains and hills, moving, alive, flickering and dancing against each other. Blending, the way I had blended my landscapes. There was sky in the fireplace. There was the Pacific, the horizon, the war, the past: the pale blue of places I had dreamed of; and the dark, awesome greens of places to which I was frightened to go.
    The magic was over so quickly. It always was. The baby shifted in my lap and whimpered.
    "Grandfather, do you want to hold Gordon?"
    But Grandfather was standing, as startled as if the magic were new to him, as puzzled as if he had seen none of us before, as if the firelight were frightening and strange. His face was a face I had never seen.
    "I am not well," he said slowly. He turned and left the room.
    From the hallway, as the clock on the stairs struck, we heard the sound as he fell.
    Stroke.
    Stroke.
    When I was told, the next day, after the hushed voices, the confusion, the fear were over, that Grandfather had had a stroke, I associated it with the clock. He had had a stroke of eight.
    I avoided the clock as much as I could. Its strokes, which had always signaled news time, bedtime, now were connected with the evil, the fear I felt when I heard Grandfather fall. The clock measured out dying, I knew, although Grandfather was not dead; the clock waited, and one day it would strike—STROKE—again.
    The painted face of the moon at the top of the tall clock continued to smile.
    The fire had faded untended, and I had not thrown my pine cone in. And the magic, Grandfather's magic, was sealed in the small box still. I opened it secretly, alone in the parlor while Grandfather was in the hospital, and looked inside; there was only gray sand, no
colors, none of the bright blues and greens. It took a magic Grandfather to make the fire colors happen; and Grandfather had crumpled on the hall rug. His powers were gone.
    I watched new powers come to Grandmother, who had never had a child. Now, when Grandfather came home and the big house was newly equipped with hospital bed, with wheelchair, and all the chrome trappings of illness, Grandmother became a mother for the first time.
    "Try this, dear," she said, in a soft, mother's voice that I had never heard her use before, as she held a spoonful of applesauce to his lopsided mouth. She wiped his chin with a cloth napkin. She looked at him with the fond look that Mama gave to Gordon, and Grandfather's eyes were as