Requiem

Page 45

 

  Just as I’m placing a hand on a door handle, she calls to me in a whisper.

  “I almost forgot. ” She moves toward me, her dress rustling, and for a moment I am struck by the impression that she is a ghost. “Grace is in the Highlands. 31 Wynnewood Road. They’re living there now. ”

  I stare at her. Somewhere, deep inside this stranger, my best friend is buried. “Hana—” I start to say.

  She cuts me off. “Don’t thank me,” she says in a low voice. “Just go. ”

  Impulsively, without thinking about what I am doing, I reach out and seize her hand. Two long pulses, two short ones. Our old signal.

  Hana looks startled; then, slowly, her face relaxes. For just one second, she shines as though lit up by a torch from within. “I remember. . . . ” she whispers.

  A door slams somewhere. Hana wrenches away, looking suddenly afraid. She pivots me around and pushes me toward the door.

  “Go,” she says, and I do. I don’t look back.

  Hana

  I have counted thirty-three seconds on the clock when Fred bursts into the kitchen, red-faced.

  “Where is she?” His armpits are wet with sweat, and his hair—so carefully combed and gelled at the ceremony—is a mess.

  I’m tempted to ask him who he means, but I know it will only infuriate him. “Escaped,” I say.

  “What do you mean? Marcus told me—”

  “She hit me,” I say. I hope that Lena left a mark when she slapped me. “I—I cracked my head on the wall. She ran. ”

  “Shit. ” Fred rakes a hand through his hair, steps out into the hall, and bellows for the guards. Then he turns back to me. “Why the hell didn’t you let Marcus take care of it? Why were you alone with her in the first place?”

  “I wanted information,” I say. “I thought she was more likely to give it to me alone. ”

  “Shit,” Fred says again. The more worked up he gets, strangely, the calmer I feel.

  “What’s going on, Fred?”

  He kicks a chair suddenly, sending it skittering across the kitchen. “Goddamn chaos, that’s what’s going on. ” He can’t stop moving; he clenches his fist, and for a moment, I think he might go for me, just to have something to punch. “There must be a thousand people rioting. Some of them Invalids. Some of them just kids. Stupid, stupid. . . . If they knew—”

  He breaks off as his guards come jogging down the hall.

  “She let the girl get away,” Fred says, without giving them a chance to ask what’s wrong. The scorn in his voice is obvious.

  “She hit me,” I repeat again.

  I can feel Marcus staring at me. I deliberately avoid his eyes. He can’t possibly know that I let Lena escape. I gave no indication that I knew her; I was careful not to look at her in the car.

  When Marcus’s eyes pass back to Fred, I allow myself to exhale.

  “What do you want us to do?” Marcus asks.

  “I don’t know. ” Fred rubs his forehead. “I need to think. Goddamn. I need to think. ”

  “The girl bragged about reinforcements on Essex,” I say. “She said there was an Invalid posted at every house on the street. ”

  “Shit. ” Fred stands still for a moment, staring out at the backyard. Then he rolls his shoulders back. “All right. I’ll call down to 1-1-1 for reinforcements. In the meantime, get out there and start combing the streets. Look for movement in the trees. Let’s rout as many of these little shits as we can. I’ll be right behind you. ”

  “Got it. ” Marcus and Bill disappear into the hall.

  Fred picks up the phone. I put a hand on his arm. He turns to me, annoyed, and hangs up.

  “What do you want?” he practically spits.

  “Don’t go out there, Fred,” I say. “Please. The girl said—the girl said the others were armed. She said they’d open fire if you so much as put your head out the door—”

  “I’ll be fine. ” He jerks away from me.

  “Please,” I repeat. I close my eyes and think a brief prayer to God. I’m sorry. “It’s not worth it, Fred. We need you. Stay inside. Let the police do their jobs. Promise me you won’t leave the house. ”

  A muscle flexes in his jaw. A long moment passes. At every second, I keep expecting the blast: a tornado of wooden shrapnel, a roaring tunnel of fire. I wonder if it will hurt.

  God forgive me, for I have sinned.

  “All right,” Fred says at last. “I promise. ” He lifts up the receiver again. “Just stay out of the way. I don’t want you screwing anything up. ”

  “I’ll be upstairs,” I tell him. He has already turned his back to me.

  I pass into the hall, letting the swinging doors close behind me. I can hear the muffled sound of his voice through the wood. Any minute now, the inferno.

  I think about going upstairs, into what would have been my room. I could lie down and close my eyes; I’m almost tired enough to sleep.

  But instead I ease the back door open, cross the porch, and go down into the garden, being careful to stay out of sight of the large kitchen windows. The air smells like spring, like wet earth and new growth. Birds call in the trees. Wet grass clings to my ankles, and dirties the hem of my wedding dress.

  The trees enfold me, and then I can no longer see the house.

  I will not stay to watch it burn.

  Lena

  The Highlands are burning.

  I smell the fire well before I get there, and when I’m still a quarter-mile away, I can see the smudge of smoke above the trees, and flames licking up from the old, weather-beaten roofs.

  On Harmon Road, I spotted an open garage and a rusted bike mounted on the wall like a hunter’s trophy. Even though the bike is a piece of crap, and the gears groan and protest whenever I try to adjust them, it’s better than nothing. I actually don’t mind the noise—the rattling of the chains or the hard ringing of the wind in my ears. It keeps me from thinking of Hana, and from trying to understand what happened. It drowns out her voice in my head, saying, Go.

  It doesn’t drown out the blast, though, or the sirens that follow afterward. I can hear them even when I have made it almost all the way to the Highlands, cresting like screams.

  I hope she got out. I say a prayer that she did, although I no longer know who I’m praying to.

  And then I’m in the Highlands, and I can think only of Grace.

  The first thing I see is the fire, which is leaping from house to house, from tree to roof to wall. Whoever set the fire did it deliberately, systematically. The first group of Invalids breached the fence not far from here; this must be the work of regulators.

  The second thing I notice is the people: people running through the trees, bodies indistinct in the smoke. This startles me. When I lived in Portland, Deering Highlands was deserted, cleared out after accusations of the disease made it a wasteland. I haven’t had time to think about what it means that Grace and my aunt are living here now, or consider that others might have made their home here as well.

  I try to pick out familiar faces as they blur past me, darting through the trees, shouting. I can’t see anything but form and color, people holding bundles of their belongings in their arms. Children are wailing, and my heart stops: Any one of them could be Grace. Little Grace, who barely made a sound—she could be shrieking in the half dark somewhere.

  A hot, electric feeling is pulsing through me, as though the flames have made their way into my blood. I’m trying to remember the layout of the Highlands, but my mind is full of static: An image of 37 Brooks, of the blanket in the garden and the trees lit gold by the dipping sun, keeps playing there. I hit Edgewood and know I’ve gone too far.

  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 s
ign 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.