Chapter 19 #2
When Hatch finally joined me, settling into his chair with an expectant look, I had a hard time finding the words I’d just practiced in the parking lot. My throat was suddenly thick. It took everything in me not to lose control, because Hatch deserved steadiness for this conversation.
I couldn’t do anything except pass the ring box across the desk. Hatch took it warily, as if it was a jack-in-the-box that might spring up and pop him. When he met my eyes with a hesitant look, I gave him an encouraging nod.
He opened it, stared at the ring, and gave me another doubtful look—but the quickest flash of hope was there, too. “What is this?” he asked gruffly, clearing his throat. “Where did you find this?”
“In Uncle George’s closet, on the hidden shelf.” I steeled myself. “Hatch, it’s engraved.”
He blinked rapidly, rotated the ring in his fingers, and inhaled like someone bursting the surface of the ocean. “Jesus Christ, George.”
I gave him a moment. He wiped his hands down his face and pushed away from the desk, as if taking space from the ring might help him gain control of himself.
“Did you know?” I asked. “That he was proposing?”
Hatch swallowed. “I didn’t take him seriously. He made a passing remark about ‘after the sale goes through,’ but I’d stopped believing him a long time ago.”
I gave him a wry smile. “I guess he was serious this time.”
And what was there to say? Neither one of us understood Uncle George’s motivations at the end of his life, but here was incontrovertible proof that during his final days, he had been thinking of Hatch. He had been reaching toward beautiful things for him and Hatch together.
“Hatch, I owe you a gigantic apology,” I said.
“We’ve been talking about how Uncle George made everything about himself, but I’ve done the same thing.
I ignored your wishes—everything you’d been through—because I was so caught up in fulfilling my own.
I guess I felt … that if people really saw Uncle George, they’d somehow see me. ”
Hatch looked me in the eyes. His were piercing, striking. “I knew on Pride night,” he said suddenly. “I knew I was going to sign the papers. Ask me why.”
I took a deep breath. “Why?”
“Because I saw how happy you were that night, how much you came into your own, and I knew it wasn’t going to get better than that.
I tried to do this without him, Louisa. The Pride party was his favorite day of the year, right up there with the Rustin home opener.
He looked forward to it for months, always coming up with some scheme to make it better than last year’s.
The big surprise, he called it.” Hatch chuckled, his expression drifting away.
“Last year he got a dunk tank for the back. We had all these old queens, ten drinks deep, out there throwing the ball at the bull’s-eye. ”
I already knew this from Hannah and Midas, but I kept quiet and listened.
“I wanted to keep it going this year,” Hatch continued.
“For our patrons’ sake, but also for his sake.
It’s what he would have wanted.” His chin trembled as he cleared his throat again.
“So voilà … the mechanical bull. And it was a hit. I could see how happy everyone was. How happy you were. I thought, This is it. This is the best I can do. I’ve got nothing left in me. ”
“Hatch,” I whispered, and we simply looked at each other, and I felt I was seeing this man for the first time, the way Uncle George must have seen him.
“You were wrong the other night, you know,” he said softly. “When you said I never needed you.” His eyes flickered to meet mine. “For the sale, no. But I needed you this summer in ways I didn’t expect.”
I swallowed. “I needed you, too, even if I didn’t want to admit it. I needed everyone here.”
Hatch sniffed suddenly. At first I worried he was crying—but no, he was smelling something. And then I smelled it, too.
Something was burning.
Hatch was out of his chair in a heartbeat. He clasped the doorknob, feeling it for a moment, then wrenched the door open. Thick, black smoke filled the air.
“Oh my god.” I jumped up, my brain short-circuiting and my body revving with adrenaline. “Fire extinguisher. Where’s the fire extinguisher?”
I tried to rush into the hallway, but Hatch shoved me backward and slammed the door against the invading smoke. “Too late for that, Louisa. We’ve got to get out.”
“No! We’ve got to stop the fire!”
“The smoke inhalation will take us down first,” he said, hurrying toward the window. He snapped the lock open and tried to heave it upward, but it was sticking from the heat. My stomach bottomed out.
“Grab”—Hatch heaved—“the cat—”
RuPaw struggled in my arms, writhing and scratching with primal fear. I clasped her to my shoulder and tried to comfort her through the pressure of my hand on her fur. Hatch was still shoving at the window with all his might, his face flushed and quickly perspiring.
“Look around,” he grunted through his teeth, “find—something—to break it—”
I flew wildly around the room, my eyes darting over everything and nothing.
Smoke started curling under the door, creeping toward us like the bringer of death.
I coughed and tucked my face into my arm.
“There’s nothing!” I joined Hatch at the window, panic clogging my throat, RuPaw clinging to me so tightly that her claws were drawing blood. “Let me try!”
“I tried it already!”
I shoved uselessly at the window, my palms aching from the exertion. It wouldn’t budge. I shifted RuPaw on my shoulder and felt along the window sashes. “It’s the paint!” I shouted. “Where’s your utility knife?!”
Hatch dragged the knife out of his pocket and began to saw along the window sashes, digging into the paint.
We were both coughing, and the smoke was getting closer and thicker, and Ru was nearly crushing my windpipe.
Hatch’s blade cut and moved, and I shoved upward again, and the window’s resistance gave way.
Together, we wrenched the whole thing upward until the open air flushed against our skin.
RuPaw sprang off my body, darting through the window and into the night. I felt Hatch’s hand on my back, urging me to follow her.
“Wait,” I said wildly, moving back to the desk.
It was so dark I could hardly see it; I had to feel for its shape, feel my way to the drawer, and then I could hardly pull the drawer open because I was shaking so hard.
I dug my hand into the drawer like a crab into a sand burrow and scuttled through the contents, feeling for the right texture.
“LOUISA, NOW! LET’S GO!” Hatch screamed.
At last, I felt that glossy material I was searching for. I plucked the old photo of Uncle George from the drawer, went sprinting back to the window, and heaved myself onto the sill. I tumbled onto the grass before I could think twice about it, coughing and sputtering, my throat ripped raw.
“MOVE!” Hatch yelled, and I scrambled backward, clearing a landing space for him. He shimmied over the sill and crumpled down next to me, and I reached for his arm and tugged him away from the building.
“Call 911,” he panted, struggling to turn over.
I dug my trembling fingers into my shorts pocket, pulled out my cell phone, and dialed the emergency line.
A woman’s clear, tinkling voice asked me a question, but I couldn’t process what it was, and my ears felt clogged and my eyes were burning, and where had RuPaw gone?
What was she going to eat for breakfast tomorrow if her food burned?
You’re not thinking straight, said a dull voice in my head. Ha. Or gay.
I rolled onto my side, lolled my head against my shoulder, and passed into nothingness.
My first thought, sometime later, was that heaven sounded screechy.
My second was that I’d finally get to talk to Uncle George.
Something was strapped to my face, steadying my breathing. An oxygen mask. I pulled it off and sat up on the stretcher.
“Hold on, now,” said the EMT. She was a hefty white woman with an auburn ponytail, and I recognized her immediately. I’d served her drinks a few times. Rosé over ice. How did I remember that? Her face was pale, but her eyes were red-rimmed like she’d been crying.
“The bar,” I said, sitting up straighter.
The EMT wrestled the oxygen mask over my head. “You need to rest. Focus on your breathing.”
I acquiesced to the oxygen mask but sat farther forward, trying to get a glimpse of the Frisky Cricket. It was impossible to see around the fire truck blocking my field of vision. The police were here, too. Flashing red lights bounced off the trees, the cars, the endless black sky.
“Is it okay?” I asked desperately, bracing myself for the worst.
The EMT steeled herself. “It’s gone, honey.”
Gone. Her voice cracked on the word.
“How gone?”
Her wet eyes met mine. “Miss Wade, it’s ashes.”
It seemed impossible that I was still breathing. “But I never saw the fire. I never saw the fire. How can it be gone if I never saw the fire?”
The smoke. That was all there had been. The all-consuming smoke that settled in my throat and nostrils, so that for days afterward, I’d find bits of soot in my tissues.
The smoke was so pervasive, so overwhelming, the one thing that spread and could not be contained.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, as the saying went, and so many of us had seen the smoke around Uncle George’s life but refused to see the fire.
Dad raced over, his face white as a sheet. He yanked me into his arms and held me tight. “Louisa,” he croaked. “Louisa. Thank God you’re okay.” He started sobbing, and I was too shocked to do anything but hold him, my hands sticking to the moist sweat on his back.
“Dad,” I said, my voice breaking, “it’s gone.”
“I know, jellybean, I know. I’m so sorry.”
“Where’s Hatch?”
Dad pointed to a stretcher a few yards behind me. Hatch lay there with an oxygen mask of his own, his hands folded over his belly and his eyes on the stars.
“Is he okay?”
Dad pawed a hand over my hair. “Fit as a fiddle.”
“He got me out,” I told him. “He got the window open.”
Dad swallowed gravely. “Of course he did.”
And then Hannah and Baker were there, wearing old T-shirts and drawstring flannels just like that night I’d taken Aubrey to their house. Hannah was crying without bothering to wipe away the tear tracks. Baker had an arm around her.
“You’re all right?” Hannah asked, setting a hand on my arm.
I couldn’t answer the question. “RuPaw,” I said instead, and Hannah’s eyes showed a moment’s terror, “she ran off somewhere. She was trapped in there with us. I’m worried—”
Before I could even finish the sentence, Baker was hurrying away with a determined look in her eyes.
“She’ll find her,” Hannah assured me, sniffling.
The minutes passed in a whirl of flashing lights and scraping voices, and the police taking statements from Hatch and me, and Dad gripping my arm so tightly I thought he might cut off the circulation.
At long last, the fire chief made his way over to our group.
“Still too early to know for sure…,” he began, and in some strange, preternatural way, I knew the cause before he even said it.
“Faulty breaker box,” he said solemnly. “You shoulda had an electrician out here.”