“Samuel! For God’s sake. Don’t be a coward.”
Samuel’s hands move to my waist. He lifts me into the air and hauls me toward the Garland range that hulks along one wall of the kitchen, and that’s when I begin to scream. This time I don’t spare Evelyn. I yell for help in a frenzy, flinging my arms and my legs against the barrier of Samuel’s body, draining God only knows what reserve of energy.
With one hand, Lydia whips a handkerchief from her pocket and strides to Samuel. “Here. Put this around her mouth. I can’t stand that awful racket.”
Samuel drives me to my hands and knees on the linoleum floor and straddles me, pinning me in place with his great weight. My strength is failing now. He whips the handkerchief around my jaw and forces it between my teeth, the way you force a metal bit into the mouth of a reluctant horse. Calls to Lydia for some butcher’s twine, on the double, and the drawers and the cabinets rattle softly, at some distance beyond the ringing of my ears, as Lydia obeys him. I can’t seem to get enough air. The kitchen starts to darken around the edges. Fill with spots. My elbows buckle, my chest and head crash to the floor, and while I remain just conscious, I can’t seem to move anything. Can’t seem to summon anything more. Like a doll, a rag doll stuffed with folded paper, unable to tell anybody what’s inside her.
As I sit on that linoleum floor, limbs splayed, tied to the sturdy iron leg of the range by several loops of butcher’s twine, I watch the scene before me as you might watch a scene in a play. As you might watch a film flickering on the screen of a cinema some Saturday night. It is not real. I am not really myself, I am not this person inside this room. There is no kitchen, no range; there is no massive man before me, straightening, taking the kerosene lamp in his hand.
Turning to the woman who stands in the doorway, holding a sleeping child in her arms.
The woman says, down the length of a long, narrow tunnel: “Hurry, for God’s sake. She’s getting awfully heavy.”
“Get back, then. It’s going to catch quickly.”
“I want to watch you do it.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Come on!” Her voice turns shrill. “What the devil are you waiting for? The sun’s coming up!”
“All right. Just get out of the doorway.”
She steps back a few paces. Her gaze remains pinned to the man in the center of the kitchen.
“Now,” she says.
The man lifts his arm and hurls the lamp against the baseboard of the opposite wall.
The glass explodes in a shattering crash. A flame erupts from the floor, licking along the pool of spilled kerosene, making a strange whooshing sound as if all the oxygen in the world has been sucked instantly away.
The woman holds out her hand to the man. “Let’s go.”
“Just want to make sure it’s catching.”
“It’s caught! Come with me!”
He stands there, staring at the gathering flame, the gray smoke as the plaster wall catches fire. The heat lands like a burning palm against my cheek, and I try to cry out, but the sound disappears into the damp handkerchief straining the corners of my mouth. I yank against the leg of the range. Eyes watering. Throat stinging.
“Samuel! Now!”
The man turns at last and strides toward her. Takes her hand and starts to bolt through the doorway to the hall beyond, the parlor and the front entrance and freedom, carrying the child, the beautiful child, into the night.
But as he does, he reaches into his pocket and pulls something out, some compact object he tosses behind him, so that it skitters across the floor to the leather soles of my shoes.
And in my confusion, in the smoke and heat and terror, I find myself staring at this object for several seconds before I realize it’s a pocketknife.
Stretching. Sweating. Shoe reaches the tip of the knife. Try to push it up, try to knock it toward my knee, closer, please God, help me.
Flames now spreading along the wall. Smoke filling the kitchen, curling around the furniture. Shoes too clumsy. Left foot to edge of right shoe. Push, push. Shoe flies off. Stretch again. Grasp knife between toes. Coughing now. Careful. Guide the knife upward, upward. Now a little push. Sweat trickling into eyes. Knife hits hip. Stretch hip, nudge, up, up, up to fingertips.
Can’t get it.
Can’t get it.
Please, God. A miracle, a miracle. Not for me. For Evelyn. My daughter.
My daughter.
And then my fingers find the tip of the knife. Scrabble to gain hold.
Got it. Flick it open. Saw, saw, saw. Fire crackling now, lungs bursting with the effort of breathing so small.
The twine is tough. Of course it is. Made to hold flesh in place. Saw and saw and saw, blood trickling fingers, bandage ripping and tearing, stitches bursting, FREE
FREE
I try to spring upward, but all I can do is stagger, crippled, along the hot linoleum to the kitchen door, the door that leads outside, the service door. The metal knob burns when I touch it. I snatch a handful of skirt and try again, and this time the door opens, and the fire pauses and then roars in ecstasy at all this fresh, new oxygen flooding in from the pink-rimmed dawn.
And I think the heat actually propels me out, like a hand to my back, and I fall into the grass outside the door and breathe in massive, painful gusts of air that cut my throat with their cleanness.
Can’t stay here. Have to get up. Have to get up and—
Help!
A human cry. A female cry. Streaking past the roar of the fire from somewhere behind me.
Somewhere inside the house.
And I do not know what instinct commands me to rise and turn, wet with blood, choked with smoke, and stare back into that hell. I mean I can hardly stand, I can hardly see at all. My limbs are made of liquid, of the thinnest possible jelly, sapped of all sap, bruised and torn and dirty. My daughter waits for me somewhere outside, in the arms of a monster.
But you can no more ignore a cry like that than you can ignore the urge to breathe. You can no more withstand that kind of raw human fear than you can withstand tomorrow. There is something inside the note of that voice that makes you cover your face with your skirt and plunge back through the doorway into the rising inferno, and maybe it’s a kind of something you didn’t realize you heard at first, because the sound reaches you again, as you tear across the floor, and this time you really do hear it, in yours ears and chest and blood: the wail of a hysterical young child.
I scream Evelyn’s name and run down the hallway to the parlor, now filling with smoke, but nobody’s there, the cry’s now behind me, and I beat back to the kitchen, or what should be the kitchen, now crackling with fire along one side, spreading across the floor and walls, and that’s when I see the other doorway, the one between the cupboards and the icebox, covered in smoke, and the pair of figures huddled just outside.
I think, The back stairs. The back stairs leading from the kitchen to the floor above. The children’s wing.