Page 24 of Mad Mabel

“What…,” I started, before having to clear my throat. “What happened to her?”

“Poliomyelitis,” Mum said. “She was only a year old. Darling child.”

I knew about polio, of course. Everyone did. Rose Keaney, down the road, had been relegated to a wheelchair because of it. Cate McDonald from three doors down had died of polio, and so had her brother Garry.

“I had polio too,” I said.

Mum nodded. “When you were three and a half. You must havepicked it up at kindergarten. It was a terrible time. It spread through contact, so everything was closed for weeks on end—public swimming pools, libraries. But trying to stop kids from playing—you might as well try to stop water from flowing downstream.”

She fished a packet of Peter Stuyvesants from her purse and lit one with a shaky flick. Her red lipstick blurred at the corners as she exhaled. She wasn’t a smoker—not really. Only at parties. Usually.

“I remember walking down the street and seeing all the neighbors’ kids out on their porches,” she said. “That’s what the doctors told us to do. You had to be isolated from the family, but especially from other kids.” She took a deep drag. “So when you got sick, we set you up on the patio with some picture books and dolls. You were a good child, you never complained, just sat happily out there in your own imaginative little world. Cess or I ferried out food and water when mealtimes came around. Do you remember this?”

I gave the faintest shake, barely more than a tremor.

“Well… one day, I came outside and found you on your knees, playing with Kitty.”

A nurse appeared in the doorway, hesitated at the sight of Mum, then quietly retreated. Mum took another slow drag, unfazed.

“How did she get out there?” I asked.

Mum turned her head and blew smoke over her shoulder, then gave a small, helpless shrug. “We’d locked the door, so we don’t know how she got out.” Her eyes fixed on a point beyond me—distant, unblinking. For a moment, she looked like she might say more. Instead, she gave her head a slow shake, like trying to clear a fog.

“Anyway… she caught polio. It got into her brain and spinal cord. By that night, she was paralyzed. She died within the week. And you made a complete recovery.”

“But why? Why did I recover, and she died… if she caught it from me?”

“That was the thing about polio,” Mum said, stubbing out her cigarette with slow, deliberate pressure. “No one knew why one child recovered and another didn’t. Maybe she was younger. Smaller. Who knows?”

She rose and walked to the window. I sat with the weight of it, trying to piece it together. As heartbreaking as it was, the story wasn’t unfamiliar. It was the 1950s—everyone knew someone who’d died or been left crippled by polio.

“But… why didn’t you tell me?”

Mum glanced back at me, just for a second, then turned away again. Her eyes found something far off, something safer than my face. “You were so young. A year or so after she died, you seemed to forget she existed. I didn’t see the point of forcing you to remember.”

The words of the woman at the dinner party—Susan—floated back into my mind—woven into the clink of glassware, the polite murmur of guests, the scrape of dishes—when she’d said, “I expect you regret what happened to Kitty.”

“What did I do?”

Mum glanced at me. “Pardon?”

“A woman said to me once… ‘I expect you regret what happened to Kitty.’ What did I do?”

Mum looked away. She was quiet for long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. As I was about to repeat the question, she spoke. “As I said, the door was locked. Dad says he heard you calling her. He believes you unlocked the door.” Mum walked away from the window and to my bedside. “Perhaps you did call her? You were three and it wouldn’t have been criminal for you to want a playmate.”

There’s a slightly pleading tone to Mum’s voice. As if she’s trying to make herself believe it.

“He blames me?”

“It’s the grief talking. He was besotted with Kitty.”

(All these years later, that comment still cuts hard.)

“We told him you couldn’t possibly have unlocked the door from the outside. Even if you’d been tall enough to reach, you didn’t have a key!” my mother continued. “But he thinks you were jealous of her.”

I took in this new piece of information. “Wait… he thinks I unlocked the door because I wanted Kitty to get sick?”

Mum lifted her hands, and then let them fall back to her sides: a nonanswer. I stared at her in disbelief. “Do you think I wanted her to get sick?”