31. Arielle
ARIELLE
The blast moves through me before I have finished crossing the gravel, and the next thing I am sure of is that I am on the slab inside the east entrance and the door behind me is no longer a door.
I do not remember walking through it. I do not remember whether Nolan was behind me on the gravel or beside me at the threshold.
The pressure of the explosion has rung my ears in a way that makes the inside of my own head sound like the inside of a metal trash can, and there is a high white whine over everything, and somewhere behind the whine I can hear myself making a sound that is not language but is, I notice with the small clean part of my brain that is still working, my own voice.
"Nolan."
The whine does not answer. The building does not answer.
I am inside the first-floor corridor on the east side of the south parcel, in the building I have drawn for two and a half years, and the corridor is filling with smoke from the second floor with the slow, certain confidence of smoke that has somewhere to go.
I drew this part. I know where the smoke is going.
I drew the air handling on the east riser to vent up and out through the roof louvers, which means it is going to take the easy way and cook the second floor before it comes for me, which buys me four minutes, maybe five, and I do not have five minutes because the floor underneath me has, somewhere in the half-second between the blast and now, decided not to be a floor anymore in a six-foot section twelve steps in front of where I am standing.
I take one step forward and my right boot catches.
I look down. A length of rebar lies across my calf, and a section of what used to be a stud wall is folded over it.
The studs haven’t pierced anything yet, but the weight of the collapsed wall has my leg pinned to the slab from the knee down.
When I try to roll the wall off with my hip, it doesn’t budge — because sitting on top of the folded wall is an HVAC duct that’s come down from the ceiling and is now part of the geometry of the problem.
"Okay," I say, out loud, to nobody. "Okay. Okay. Okay."
The baby moves. Not a kick. A shift. She is rearranging herself against my ribs in the small impatient way she does when I have been on my feet for too long, and the shift inside me lands at the same instant as the next concussive sound from the second floor, and I have my hands flat on my stomach before I have understood that my hands have moved.
"Hey," I tell her. "Hey, baby. Hi. We are fine. We are fine. We are going to be fine. Mama is fine. Mama is going to get us out of this. Mama drew the building. Mama knows where the doors are."
I have, in my entire adult life, never used the word mama about myself in any sentence, and saying it now is, somehow, the part that makes me start crying.
I pull the phone out of my coat pocket. The screen lights.
There is one bar of signal in the top left corner, and then there is none, and then there is one again.
I open the keypad with my thumb and I dial nine-one-one and I get a half-second of ringing and then the call drops, and I dial again and I get nothing, and I dial Terry and I get nothing, and I dial Nolan and the call connects for a full second of silence before it cuts.
I put the phone on my stomach, face up, so I will know if the signal comes back. I do not turn it off. I do not have the time.
I take my coat off. I am thirty-eight weeks pregnant and the coat does not really come off anymore so much as fold around me, but I get one arm out of it and then the other, and I roll the coat into a long bundle and I wedge it under the section of folded wall above my calf the way I have seen Patel's crews wedge canvas bags under heavy panels when they need leverage at an angle a body cannot give them.
The coat does not move the wall. The coat raises the wall by half an inch.
Half an inch is not enough. Half an inch is what I have.
I drag my leg.
I drag my leg the way you drag a foot out of a snowbank when you have stopped feeling it, slow, with the small constant attention that keeps the bone from doing something stupid, and the boot slides through the half-inch I have made for it, and somewhere along the line of my shin the rebar finds the canvas of my pant leg and tears it, and the tear is hot, and I do not look down, because if I look down I am going to lose the part of my brain that is, against odds, still in the room.
The leg is out. The boot stays on. The pain arrives a beat later, the way pain does, and I let it have its half-second and I do not, in that half-second, give it any more of me than that.
I push up to my feet.
It is the wrong sentence. I push up to my hands and knees, and from my hands and knees I push up to one knee, and from one knee, with my hand on the corridor wall that I drew the dimensions of in the summer of 2022, I push up to my feet.
The corridor wall is warm under my hand.
The wall is warm because the wall, on the other side, is on fire, which is information I file in the part of my head that is keeping the list of which way I am going next.
Not east. East is the riser. East is what just exploded.
Not up. Up is the second floor. Up is where the smoke is going.
The west service stair is forty feet down the corridor and around a corner I am not, by my own calculation, going to make on this leg in under two minutes.
The loading dock is past the west service stair.
The loading dock has the freight roll-up door I personally argued with three different general contractors about for three months, because I wanted it manual-operated, because I do not, on principle, trust electric roll-ups in a corridor that has had three change orders on the panel work.
The loading dock door is the one I am going for.
I make it ten feet down the corridor before the next thing comes apart over my head.
It is not a beam. It is a stretch of ceiling tile and the conduit running through it, and it folds down on a hinge of itself and lands four feet behind me on the slab in a way that, if I had been four feet slower, would have made the rest of this chapter someone else's problem.
I do not turn around. I keep walking. My phone is still face up against my stomach where my coat used to be, against the warm bare strip of skin where my shirt has ridden up because my shirt has not fit me since the second week of March, and I am holding the phone there with my palm because I cannot put it back in a pocket I am no longer wearing.
The first contraction lands when I reach the corner.
It is nothing like the books Bianca insisted on. Not a tightening at all. It’s a fist that clamps around my entire center, from deep in my pelvis up to my ribs, sudden and sure of itself, like something that’s been biding its time for a reason — and the reason has just arrived.
"No," I tell her, out loud, to the baby, to the corridor, to the building. "No, baby. No. Not now. Not here. Not yet. Hold on. Hold on. We are going to get out and then you can come, and not before. Mama is asking. Mama is asking nicely."
She does not listen. She is, after all, her father's daughter.
I get around the corner with my hand on the wall and my other hand flat on the curve of her, and the smoke is thicker on this side because the smoke has, as I drew it to, found the louvers above the loading dock and is going up through them, which means the corridor between me and the dock is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to be the path the smoke takes.
Which is, this afternoon, also the path I am taking.
We are taking the same path, the smoke and me, and the smoke is faster.
I drop to one knee. I get under the worst of it. I crawl.
I am crawling on a slab I drew the camber of, in a building I drew the bones of, in a coat I no longer own, with my hand on a stomach I drew nothing of, and I am, for once in my life, asking out loud for help from somebody who is not in the room.
"Nolan."
The corridor does not answer.
I reach the end of the corridor just before the contraction catches me, and I drop my forehead to the slab, breathing through the three seconds it demands. Under the static in my skull, a fact is forming: I’m not making it to the loading dock alone.
And then I hear it.
It is not the alarm. The alarm has been going since before I came around the corner.
It is not the rumble of the floor above me, which has been going since the conduit came down behind me.
It is a voice, deeper than the alarm, coming from somewhere on the east side of the building, behind me, in the direction I came from, in the direction of the door that is no longer a door.
It is my name.
"Arielle."
I lift my head off the slab.
"Arielle."
I push up to my hands. I push up to one knee. I do not push up to my feet, because my feet are not going to hold me for the next sentence, but I push up to one knee and I open my mouth and I use every piece of air the smoke has not yet taken from me.
"Nolan. I'm here. I'm here. Nolan?—"
The corridor takes the rest of it. The contraction takes the rest of me. I go back down to the slab with my hand flat on her, and I keep my eyes open, and I listen for him to say it again, because as long as he is saying it I know which way is out.