Betrayal. He Saved Everyone but His Own Children

CHAPTER ONE

It wasn’t the smell that woke me.

It was the coughing. Short and dry, over and over, like somebody in the next room was trying to tear a sheet of cardboard and couldn’t get it started.

“Mom.”

I was sitting up before I knew I was sitting up.

The bedroom was dark. Not our dark, the one where you can make out the dresser and the pale strip under the door. This was thick and it moved. The air had weight to it. It didn’t come into my lungs so much as get pushed in, the way you push cotton down the neck of a bottle.

I turned on the lamp.

The light hung under the ceiling in a yellow smear and showed me exactly one thing. The room was full of gray, and the gray was coming down.

“Danny?”

I whispered it. I still don’t know why. Like I was afraid of waking whatever had already let itself into our apartment and hadn’t noticed us yet.

My legs took me into the hall.

The hall was somebody else’s. Everything was where it belonged. The coat hooks. The umbrella nobody used. Danny’s jacket with the loop torn off, hanging by one shoulder the way it had hung since October. All of it in the right place and none of it right.

Under the front door, out of the thin black gap where every fall I wedged a rolled bath towel, something was coming in. Not creeping. Running. Flat and businesslike, the way water runs out from under a refrigerator, and it was already up past my knees.

I put my hand out and touched the door.

The door was warm.

A steel door. We paid on it for three years. He hung it himself on a Saturday with the drill borrowed from the guy in 2A, and when he was done he stood back and knocked on it twice with his knuckle and said, this one’ll outlive us, Ren.

It was warm the way a sick child’s forehead is warm.

I went up on my toes and looked through the peephole.

The peephole was white. Not dark. White and clouded, like somebody had breathed on it from the other side.

I touched the knob and pulled my hand back.

Behind that door was the landing. Behind that door were the stairs. Behind that door was the way out of the building.

Behind that door was fire.

“Ivy!”

I went into my daughter’s room and ripped the blanket off her and caught myself in a wild, shameful little wave of relief, because she was asleep. Warm and sour and furious, the way any ten-year-old is furious when you wake her in the middle of the night. Asleep meant breathing.

“Mo-om, what.”

She opened her eyes and saw my face.

There are things you don’t have to teach children. Ivy didn’t ask a single question. She sat up, put her feet in her slippers, and her small nostrils moved. She was smelling the air the way an animal smells it, and at ten she understood that air better than I did at thirty-five.

“Are we on fire?” she said. Like she was asking about the bus.

“Yes.”

Danny was standing in the doorway of their room. Dinosaur pajamas. Bare feet. He had one hand on the frame and he was rubbing his eye with the other, and in the yellow light I could see how fast his chest was going.

“Mom, there’s sand in my throat,” he said, and then he coughed so hard he folded over.

I picked my son up. Seven years old, fifty-one pounds, knees like doorknobs, and something about how light he was made my wrists ache all the way to the elbow.

The back bedroom. Ours. Window over the lot. The farthest point in the apartment from that black gap under the front door.

I laid him down on the pillow that still smelled like his father, and I turned around and said to Ivy, in a voice I didn’t recognize:

“Bathroom. Every towel we have. Soak them. Go.”

The water came out ice cold and hit the sink with that cheerful ordinary racket, like the world was still having a Wednesday and I still had to be up in six hours to make lunches.

I shoved towels under it. A sheet. Danny’s Spider-Man shirt off the hamper.

Wet cloth gets heavy and slick and it kept sliding out of my hands, and I caught it and dropped it and caught it again.

Four steps from the bathroom to the bedroom. Through the corner of the kitchen.

And on those four steps I turned my head.

The refrigerator. Ours. White, humming, covered in magnets. The rec league schedule. A receipt from the pediatrician’s office. A coupon for the car wash that expired in August.

And down under the handle, the piece of newspaper.

There he is, in turnouts, his face black to the eyes, carrying somebody else’s kid.

HERO.

Ivy put that up. Herself, three years ago, on her favorite magnet, the dolphin from the Dells.

The smoke went past the picture and up, folding itself along the ceiling.

I stood there for one second with an armful of dripping towels and I had a thought so stupid I’ve never told anyone. I thought I ought to take that down before it got ruined.

Then I went into the bedroom.

Ivy was on her knees beside the bed with her hand flat on her brother’s chest.

“Mom,” she said. “Listen.”

We sealed the door.

Ivy took the bottom, I took the top. We packed the towels into the gap along the floor, and I stood on the mattress and jammed the sheet into the space over the frame, and we worked without saying much of anything, quick and even, like two women who had been unloading trucks together for twenty years and not like a mother and a ten-year-old girl I had gotten after the day before for a ninety-two on a spelling test.

“Mom, it’s still coming in here.”

“Hold this. Push it in. Harder.”

She pushed it in. Her fingers were red from the cold water and she didn’t mention it.

Somewhere underneath us, down through the floor, something heavy let go and slid. It sounded like a wardrobe going over in a basement. The building answered it. I had my palm flat on the parquet and I felt the whole thing take the sound and hold it, the way a table holds a knock.

Ivy looked at me.

“That’s downstairs,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

She had already worked out that downstairs was where it was and that downstairs was between us and the sidewalk.

She was ten and she’d done that arithmetic in about four seconds, and she filed it and went back to the towel, and I have never been able to decide whether I’m proud of that or whether it’s the worst thing that happened to her all night.

Danny coughed behind me and I turned around.

He was sitting up. Sitting up on the edge of the bed with both hands locked on the frame, and he wasn’t making that cardboard sound anymore. This was lower. It came from somewhere further down.

“Lie down,” I said. “Lie down, the air’s better at the bottom.”

“It’s better sitting.”

“Danny. Lie down.”

He lay down. I put the wet shirt over his face.

“Breathe through it. Just breathe through it.”

Ivy came back from the bathroom on her hands and knees with another towel, and her hair had gone dark and stringy and stuck to her cheek. She looked up at me from the floor.

“Mom, is Dad coming?”

I was already reaching for my phone.

And here is the thing I have gone over a thousand times since, the thing I still can’t get to sit right in my mouth when I say it out loud.

I hesitated.

My son was on a pillow three feet away making a sound like a bad hinge.

The front door was giving off heat like a stove.

And I stood in the middle of my own bedroom with the phone in my hand and I hesitated, because somewhere in the back of my head was a neat little rule I had been issued years ago at my own kitchen table.

Ren, if my phone’s off, that means I’m working. That means I’m in smoke, not at the movies. Don’t panic and don’t call me nine times.

He said it calmly. He was pouring himself coffee when he said it. He said everything calmly.

And I apologized.

I actually apologized to him, standing at the counter in my own house, for having called twice in one shift on a night I couldn’t sleep.

That was four years ago and I hadn’t thought about it since, and it came back to me right then, whole, with the sound of the coffee going into the cup, and it cost me.

I don’t know what it cost me. Two seconds.

Four. Somewhere between two and four seconds of a night that we would later measure in minutes, out loud, in a room full of men in uniform.

I pressed his name.

There was no ringing.

Not one ring. It went straight through to a recording, and the recording was a woman’s voice, and she was pleasant about it. She had the exact tone people use to tell you about a sale on ground beef.

“Mom?” Ivy said. “Is he coming?”

“In a minute.”

I hit it again.

The same woman. The same pleasant, unhurried, professionally sorry voice, telling me that the party I was trying to reach was unavailable.

I got down on my knees, and then onto my stomach, and I crawled to my son along the parquet floor we saved six months for, the floor I had yelled at both of them about for three years because the cars scratched it.

Down there, in the last clean band of air between the wood and the black, Danny turned his head toward me.

His lips had gone the wrong color.

“Mom,” he said. “Something’s whistling in my chest.”

“That happens,” I said.

“Can you hear it?”

I could hear it.