1910
Opal staggered from the burning building, sooty, her dark shawl draped over her face. She was accustomed to over-warmth, to shortness of breath. She reached for the handrail to brace her weight.
“Somebody, help her!” a voice yelled, a woman’s voice in front of her, one of the Earthshine workers.
Opal rasped. Her throat felt like she’d swallowed walnut husks.
“Take deep breaths. Keep breathing.”
She thought of her laboratory now, engulfed in flames, the vat of powders turned black with smoke and heat.
She imagined the combustion, the explosion.
She thought of the times she helped Jagr with his work, how he cautioned against breathing in the vapors.
Opal had become accustomed to working with a handkerchief tied about her face, her breath held, so her memories of helping Jagr were ones of lightheadedness.
Her skirt was soaked. Her body cramped. The baby was here.
Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, Opal silently commanded.
Just a while longer. If she ever held the ability to commune with the Other Side, let her child hear her words and listen.
The police officers were forming a barricade around the scene.
She searched for the Colonel in the crowd, but she didn’t see him.
Flames now escaped from windows, licking at the brick. The EARTHSHINE SOAP sign toppled. Her legs wobbled like a foal’s.
“Madame Doucet, sit. Sit!”
Opal gasped and held her stomach. The smoke had stolen her air. Her eyes stung with needling dryness. Kneeling in front of her now was Ruth. In a horseshoe behind her stood other Earthshine workers. Their outlines glowed from the fire. Their white uniforms were sooty from ash.
Then, the sound of bursting glass. Fragments of crystal rained to the ground.
Opal felt her body being lifted again, moved back, away from the building and the heat, which was making her feel fevered.
A tightness seized her belly. Where was Amanda?
Maria? Gilly? The others? Opal allowed the women to help her to her feet again.
She wished she were like the great Houdini who could escape even a sunken milk can.
She’d seen advertisements: Failure means drowning to death.
She had to hurry.
She searched again for the Colonel, for his hat with a small blue feather she assumed was from a grouse. I will not lose you twice, he’d told her. Now he was the one who was lost.
Opal tried to stand, but Ruth wouldn’t let her. “You must sit,” she was saying.
She tried to see past the row of Earthshine Girls gathering around her, but more immediate concerns drew her attention to her body, to the pain now searing through her, threatening to cleave her in two.
A newspaper man stood too close to the building, taking photographs. A burst of glass drew him back. The world was no longer silent. The sound boomed in layers: the crackling of fire, the chants of the crowd, the wailing of sirens drawing nearer.
Another explosion. Then soon an automobile, then two, then three. A fire engine. The flash of a camera. Maria hung from the window, screaming.
“Save her!” someone yelled.
Opal knew she couldn’t save her—or the others—and she couldn’t run. She doubled over. A pain seared through her middle and would not release, not until the baby came.
“Save her!” someone yelled again.
The papers had predicted that today would find the citizens gazing skyward. Finally, the yellow press had been right about something. But the comet that blazes by every seventy-some years would be overlooked by the spectacle of the moment, by the earthbound fire that was licking at the sky.
“Save her!” the crowd chanted then, not a protest but a plea.
Soon, the crowd formed a wall around her, and from somewhere behind them Bertie Tuttle emerged, her skin glistening with sweat. She held Sudsy on a rope.
“Bertie,” Opal whispered. From the factory came a loud boom, then frenzied screams from the onlookers, who were moving backward, away from the building.
Bertie didn’t flinch. When she spoke, her voice was breathy, like she was speaking to a man she was trying to seduce. “We can go away. Tonight.”
The wind had shifted and pushed the smoke sideways, away from them. Opal crouched forward in pain, then reached for Bertie’s arm to brace herself.
Bertie dug into her handbag until she found what she was looking for: Jagr’s formulary. She held up the gray notebook for Opal to see, then shoved it back inside her bag. “For you.”
Her fingertips were blackened from the matches. She smelled of kerosene. Her eyes held in them a terrifying dullness, like a specimen that’d been pinned to a mounting box. Bertie didn’t have to use words to admit it. Opal knew she was the one who set the factory on fire.
“Why, Bertie?” Opal asked.
“It was all I could do,” Bertie whispered. “He’d have taken it from me. I didn’t know. I didn’t know they were inside.”
Opal’s eyes stung. Everywhere hung smoke like souls that refused to rise.
Opal had heard that during yellow fever outbreaks, so many people died that some cities had to bury their dead beneath the streets.
Carriages and horses and automobiles ran above them now, unaware of the piles of bones beneath them.
Bertie put on her gloves. She adjusted her barrettes. She looked exactly as she had atop those factory stairs when Opal first laid eyes on her. A mix of loneliness and desire, a woman trapped in the space between.
Time belongs to the dead. For the living, it’s an illusion.
In Opal’s mind, an entire lifetime unfurled.
Oren. Madame de Fleur. The Colonel. His warm skin.
The scar beneath his eye that would soften as he aged.
How when she embodied Hazel he reflected back to her the new person she could be, a new possibility.
No choice is final, except death. She’d go with the Colonel to England, then she’d find her way to France.
To Madame de Fleur. Eventually, she’d see the woman again.
Another explosion. The heat. The women were pulled back by a group of Earthshine Girls, toward safety.
A car pulled up on the street in front of them.
The flashes of a camera. The smell of kerosene and rubber and smoke.
Tuttle stood before her. Jagr now, too. They’d arrived together, the two men, as though they’d been acquainted all their lives.
At the sight of Jagr, the world went hazy, like Opal was witnessing it from across a vast distance, the vantage point of the Other Side.
How small she’d have to fold herself to fit back into that life.
How impossible. She doubled over in pain so intense she felt dead already.
She searched for the Colonel in the crowd.
She couldn’t see past Bertie, who looked at Opal as though to say, Trust me.
“It was one of the Earthshine Girls,” Bertie said. “I saw her. I tried to stop it, Charles. And, she … She helped them. She told them to do it. It was awful. All of it. And in my condition.”
Opal wiped ash from her eyes, surprised to find Bertie pointing in her direction.
Tuttle stepped forward and embraced his wife.
“Oh, Charles. All that you’ve worked for.” Her voice contained tears even if her eyes did not.
“Let’s get you away from here,” he said. He pulled his wife farther back from the flames, then he turned and watched the factory burn.
The pain intensified. Opal listened to sounds of crackling as though she herself were on fire. Her whole body burned in pain. Jagr grabbed hold of her arm. She managed only a grunt of resistance. “We need to get her to a bed,” he said.
“She’ll face charges,” Tuttle said.
“Even so,” Jagr said. He eased his grip. “She’s in labor. She’s sick.”
A loud boom forced Tuttle to look toward the factory, toward Maria and Amanda and the other girls now standing at the windows, begging for help. The smoke puffed and curled in the light, like the elaborate hand-painted wallpaper pattern Opal had seen in Bertie’s house. There was nothing to be done.
“Those poor girls,” Tuttle said. “My God. They’ll burn alive.”
He stared up toward the window, toward Amanda Mahooney, who waved her cap.
The cap looked like a frantic moth, but then the wind shifted, and the smoke grew thick, and the facade of the building was entirely covered in black.
They couldn’t see the Earthshine Girls after that, but they could still hear their cries.
Opal hadn’t thought Tuttle to be the kind of man capable of crying, but he did now, quiet sobs. He squeezed his temples; he fell to his knees.
“Those poor girls,” Bertie said to her husband, now kneeling to comfort him. “You’ll rebuild.” She drew her arms around him and pulled his head to her lap. Now she was crying, too. Sudsy sat down beside them.
The roar of the fire magnified, then Opal’s world grew quiet.
She couldn’t hear the fire or the sirens or the burst glass.
Her attention turned inward, toward the pain.
Pain has a sound. It sounds like the desperate whooshing of water, like the opening and closing of the rusted hinge of her mail slot, like the mechanical whirring of the soap plodder—all the sounds of the world at once on a pinpoint.
She couldn’t contain the baby much longer.
A police wagon pulled up. Now the policemen formed a circle around them.
Tuttle extended his arm. “Her,” he said. A single sound, no more than a huff of air. “The others are…” A policeman moved toward Opal. Now her arms were cuffed, her wrists touching. She could hardly balance.
The details came to her later, not in pictures but in sounds: her heels rough against the pavement.
The heavy breath of Jagr who carried her body.
Then Bertie’s voice above the crowd: I’ll go with her.
To help with the baby, Charles. I must. The poor child shouldn’t suffer.
As they lifted Opal into wagon, the world went sideways.
Finally, she caught a glimpse of the Colonel.
He was holding his hat with that small blue feather to his chest, as though he were taking an oath of some sort.
The Colonel was a man of science, not poetry, which limited his depth of expression, but not his feeling.
He was accustomed to disappointing experiments and results.
They placed her on the blankets in the back of the wooden wagon.
Through the smoke and the dark she tried to see Halley’s Comet.
Opal knew it was up there somewhere, a beautiful ball of gas and dust, an ancient, illuminated rock hurtling across the sky, cold and dirty, but looked to be set aflame.
She listened for that voice, but she heard nothing save the sound of her own labored breathing, of her body’s own drumming.
Her ears filled with noise, and she opened her mouth, but she couldn’t speak. Not a word.
IN THE BACK OF THE wagon, it was just the three of them. Soon four.
Jagr instructed her to push. Her spine was a fault line. Her entire body quaked.
Later, somewhere else, Clara Dowd brought medicines.
And then the greatest surprise of all: Her baby was a boy.
A boy.
Who, then, was she to save?
She couldn’t think of it now, because the baby rooted for her breasts.
Opal named him Halley, after the comet, after Edmond Halley, who hadn’t lived to see the truth of his prediction, that this object in the sky would return again and again and again.
Opal held the baby and kissed the tufts of hair that felt like willow wisps.
She pressed his cheek to her own, and she’d never felt anything softer in her life.
Her body responded to his presence. Her nipples stung with the urge to be useful.
He was wrapped in a blanket. He brooded in his sleep.
The baby was so warm against her skin. All she could feel in this moment was love, as potent as any drug she’d ever taken.
She wished she could bottle it. He clawed her breasts because he wanted something that only she had.
He wanted Opal. He wanted her very existence.
Years later, moments before her death, this is the memory she chose to hold in her mind: the baby.
He looked like Madame de Fleur. Wide brow.
Eyes dark and deep. In this way, she saw the woman again.
She’d held her to her chest. She felt the relief of her presence as she stepped off the ledge of the hospital’s turret and jumped.
For an instant, she believed she was flying. Free.
In the other room, voices. Bertie’s.
A child needs a mother.
I’ll pay you. Name your price.
More drugs to take. Darkness again, and in the morning Opal awoke, bumping along in the back of Bertie’s Franklin next to Jagr.
Her shirt was wet. She’d bled through her skirt.
She looked out the windows, up ahead. She recognized the sandstone towers in the distance, the turrets rising up like an ancient castle.
That hospital where her husband worked, where Oren once lived.
The vehicle came to a stop near the doors.
Two nurses stood at the ready. Jagr wiped his hands on a handkerchief.
Opal heard something, a sound that saturated the world, a noise so loud it forced her to draw her fingers to plug her ears.
She finally recognized that voice, the voice.
The same voice she’d heard in the river. Not someone else’s voice, but her own.
She was screaming.