I turn around, coughing, and retrace my path. The air is full of cracking, thunderbolt crashes: Whole houses are engulfed, standing like shivering ghosts, burning white-hot, doors gaping, skin melting from flesh. Please, please, please. The word drills through my head. Please.
Then I spot the sign for Wynnewood Road: a short three-block street, fortunately. Here the fire has not spread so far and remains caught up in the tangled canopy of trees, and skating over the roofs, an ever-growing crown of white and orange. By now, the people in the trees have thinned, but I keep thinking I hear children crying—ghostly, wailing echoes.
I’m sweating, and my eyes are burning. When I ditch the bike, I struggle to catch my breath. I bring my shirt to my face and try to breathe through it as I jog down the street. Half the houses don’t have any visible numbers. I know that in all probability, Grace has fled. I hope she was one of the people I saw moving through the trees, but I can’t shake the fear that she might be trapped somewhere, that Aunt Carol and Uncle William and Jenny might have left her behind. She was always curling up in corners and hiding in hidden, recessed spaces, trying to make herself as invisible as possible.
A faded mailbox indicates number 31, a sad, sagging house, smoke churning out of its upper windows, flames licking across its weather-beaten roof. Then I see her—or at least I think I do. Just for a second, I swear I see her face, pale as a flame, in one of the windows. But before I can call out, she vanishes.
I take a deep breath and dart across the lawn and up the half-rotted steps. I stop just inside the front door, momentarily dizzy. I recognize the furniture—the faded striped couch, the rug with its singed tassels, and the stain on the old red throw pillows where Jenny spilled her grape juice, still barely visible—from my old house, Aunt Carol’s place on Cumberland. I feel as though I’ve stumbled directly into the past, but a warped past: a past that smells like smoke and wet wallpaper, with rooms that have been distorted.
I go from room to room, calling out to Grace, checking behind furniture and in the closets of several rooms that are totally vacant. This house is much larger than our old one, and there is not nearly enough stuff to fill it. She is gone. Maybe she was never here—maybe I only imagined her face.
Upstairs is black with smoke. I can only make it halfway to the landing when I am forced back downstairs, heaving and coughing. Now the front rooms, too, are on fire. Cheap shower curtains are tacked to the windows. They go up in one lick, letting off the stink of plastic.
I back into the kitchen, feeling like a giant has its fist around my chest, needing to get out, needing to breathe. I heave my shoulder into the back door—swollen with heat, it resists—and finally go stumbling into the backyard, coughing, eyes watering. I’m not thinking anymore; my feet are moving me automatically away from the fire, toward clean air, away, when I feel a shooting pain in my foot and I am falling. I hit the ground and look back to see what has tripped me: a door handle, a cellar, half-obscured by the long grass on either side of it.
I don’t know what makes me reach back and wrench open the door—instinct, maybe, or superstition. A set of steep wood stairs runs down to a small underground cellar, roughly hacked out of the earth. The tiny room is fitted with shelves, and stocked with cans of food. Several glass bottles—soda, maybe—are lined up on the ground.
She’s squeezed so far into a corner, I almost miss her. Luckily, before I can close the door again, she shifts, and one of her sneakers comes into view, illuminated in the smoky red light pouring in from above. The shoes are new, but I recognize the purple laces, which she colored in herself.
“Grace.” My voice is hoarse. I ease down onto the top step. As my eyes adjust to the dimness, Grace floats into focus—taller than she was eight months ago, thinner and dirtier, too—crouched in the corner, staring at me with wild, terrified eyes. “Grace, it’s me.”
I reach out to her, but she doesn’t move. I ease myself down a step farther, reluctant to go into the cellar and try to grab her. She was always fast; I’m afraid she’ll duck and run. My heart is throbbing painfully in my throat, and my mouth tastes like smoke. There’s a sharp, pungent smell in the cellar I can’t identify. I focus on Grace, on getting her to move.
“It’s me, Grace,” I try again. I can only imagine what I must look like to her, how changed I must appear. “It’s Lena. Your cousin Lena.”
She stiffens, as though I’ve reached out and shocked her. “Lena?” she whispers, her voice awed. But still she doesn’t move. Above us, there is a thunderous crash. A tree branch, or a piece of the roof. I have a sudden terror that we will be buried in here if we don’t move now. The house will collapse, we’ll be trapped.
“Come on, Gracie,” I say, invoking an old nickname. The back of my neck is sweaty. “We’ve got to go, okay?”
At last Grace moves. She strikes out clumsily with a foot, and I hear the tinkle of glass breaking. The smell intensifies, burning the inside of my nostrils, and suddenly I place it.