Had it been one of our neighbors whose home was burning, my father would not even go so far as to come out of his own gates to see what the fuss was. He had coached us to mind our own businesses all our lives; other peoples' troubles were for them to deal with. I knew the attitude was born from the false sympathy offered after my birth mother's death: people who had hardly known her, or who had looked down on Father's merchant status, had appeared to shower him with false solicitiousness and to look greedily on his three motherless daughters. In his grief, it was possible he had turned away those whose sympathy had been genuine as well, but the habit of keeping to his—and our—own had been long established before I was old enough to notice it at all.
Still, had our neighbors been in such straits, Opal would have gone anyway, unless Father barred the door to her. She would have gone, carrying blankets and soup and comfort, and I would have followed, because since my memory began, I'd always known that Opal did the right thing for others. Pearl might have been shamed in to coming along by Opal's generosity, but perhaps not. The boys were too young to expect much of, but for the first time in my life, facing a moment of need, I realized that my family had not necessarily won themselves the place in the hearts of others that would compel others to offer a helping hand.
Then a stout woman I vaguely recognized, a cook from one of the homes nearby, came through the smoke with blankets and shoes and an expression of loss greater than my own, and under her mothering wing we were escorted away from the ruins of our lives.
I didn't sleep. The boys puddled around Opal, who, soothed and soothing, drifted into sleep with them. Not even our home burning to the ground could keep Pearl from her own rest; provided with a bed, she returned to slumber before even the boys had. Maman sobbed herself into exhaustion and my father never left her side, so I assumed that he, too, had escaped reality for dreams, but I couldn't. I sat in the window of the bedroom we children had been given, surrounded by a blanket and the wet scent of smoke, and watched until the orange light rising from our burning home was swallowed by the pale blues and pinks of sunrise creeping over the tops of black leafless trees. A hint of icy fog hung in the near distance, but when I went out into it, even the fog had an orange tint, smoke particles clinging to the air.
The smell of smoke was stronger outside, making me realize what I'd smelled inside was my clothes and hair. Remnants of the fire, not its actual strength. I passed through our rescuers' garden, my blanket dragging behind me through thin snow and thicker frost crystals on shards of grass that had not yet succumbed to the snow's weight. A film of ice had coated the street and I was grateful for the ill-fitting shoes I'd been lent as I walked silently toward the smoldering remains of our home.
A tremendous heat still radiated from the ruins, putting paid to any thought I'd had of searching them for surviving trinkets or knick-knacks. Instead I hitched my blanket higher so it wouldn't drag through soot, and paced the perimeter of where the heat-induced melt had reached, venturing closer where I dared. At that distance, the only thing that had survived were the occasional shards of glass, glittering blackly against scorched earth. A flutter began under my heart, wild and frightened, and I dragged in deep breaths of smoky air, trying to quell it. There was no need to be afraid now, when we had all lived through the fire, and I had already known everything we owned had been lost.
Rationality did nothing to calm the rising fear, or to slow my heart. The morning's cold fled beneath my heating blood and I moved faster, faster, until I stumbled at a run around the grounds, searching for anything, anything that might offer a link between what we had been, and what we would be. My chest hurt from the effort and the smoke in the cold air, and my eyes burned with tears born from grief and the rising wind.
A brick or a branch or a frozen lump of earth finally brought me to my knees with a wailing thud. I bent forward, fingers scrabbling at blackened earth and forehead pressed against half-thawed soil, and I cried until the ground beneath my face, at least, had softened with tears and mucus. There were brittle, burned branches in the softer soil, all that remained of the roses I'd tended in our garden.
I felt no better at all when I finally lifted my head again. There was no catharsis in sobbing; I didn't feel lighter or emptier or more able to move on. I felt cold, my shins and forearms numb against the ground, and thirsty. I sat up stiffly, wiping my arm across my nose, and gathered myself to stand. Glitters of glass shone against the soot in front of me. In them, a spot of color caught the light. I reached for it, and found, half-buried, a piece of glass the size of my palm. I recognized it instantly as a survivor of the stained glass window in our library. It had looked out over our rose garden, though its height was such the garden couldn't actually be seen through it. Still, it reflected the blooms it had faced: glass roses had spilled rich shades of colored sunlight onto my pages for all the days and months and years I'd spent reading in our library.
Our library was gone.
I closed my hand around the edges of the rose, as if the heavy lead could cut away the ache that suddenly rocked through me, and stared hard at the little piece, trying to will away any more tears. The exterior of the rose was entirely lined in heavy lead, probably explaining its survival: its smaller interior pieces had been protected by the heavy lead, and supported by the finer threads of lead between them. The colors were filthy now, but they would wash, and it was something, at least, from our home.
I rose awkwardly, the glass rose in my hand, and returned to my family.
Father, as tidy as a man could be after a house fire and no bath, was sitting with the rest of the children in our borrowed bedroom, when I returned. I did not often see all of us together, and hesitated in the doorway with a smile despite it all. Father was in his fifties and hearty, with carefully applied color in his hair that left his temples grey and a sense of reliable solidity about him. His features were excellent, deep eyes and a craggy nose set above a patrician mouth and a still-strong jaw. He had fought in the Border Wars as a youth, using his meager pay to buy a ship of his own when the war ended, and as an older man retained most of the broad build he'd developed as a soldier. Age had not yet stooped his shoulders, and his sight remained keen, save for the glasses he wore to read.