CHAPTER TEN
It didn’t break the way glass breaks in a movie.
Something came through it in one place, low on the pane, with a hard flat punch, and then it went along the frame and raked, and the rest of that window came down in sheets and pieces onto my dresser and onto the floor and into my hair, and it was not a beautiful sound at all.
It sounded like somebody dropping a load of scrap.
And then the cold came in.
I have thought a lot about how to describe what cold air is like after forty minutes of that.
It was November and it was probably thirty-five degrees out and it came into my apartment like something with an opinion.
It hit my wet back and my wet arms and it was so clean and so mean and so cold that my whole body seized up around it, and I made a sound I had no control over.
The room woke up.
That’s the only way I can put it. All that smoke that had been lying on top of us like a lid started to move, fast, toward the window and out, and behind me, back toward the hall, something that had been quietly getting on with its work suddenly got a great deal more interested.
The light on the far wall changed color.
I felt the temperature come up on the back of my neck.
I got over my son with my whole body.
“FIRE DEPARTMENT.”
He was in the window.
He filled it. Helmet, hood, mask, a light on his shoulder that swung across the room and blinded me and then came off my face, and behind him and below him the ladder, and behind that, nothing, black air, four floors of it.
He put a leg over the sill and came in.
I found out later how long he had been out there working on it.
That window was vinyl. Two summers old. Twenty-two hundred dollars we did not have, put in by a guy with a van, and it had a locking mechanism in the frame that was not like the old wood ones and did not do what he expected it to do when he tried it, and there was a storm panel on the outside that he had to deal with first.
There is a line about it in the report. It is one sentence long and it has the word delay in it.
We paid for that window ourselves. We chose it. I sat at the kitchen table with a brochure and picked it because it had a better rating and it was going to save us on heat.
“How many?”
His voice came out of the mask flat and buzzing and much too loud, the way a voice sounds on a bad speaker at a drive-through.
“Three. My son’s seven, he wasn’t breathing, he’s breathing now.”
“Him first.”
“Yes.”
I don’t know why I said yes. He wasn’t asking.
He came down on one knee next to us and got his arms under Danny and I did not let go.
That is the part.
I had my hands locked in the front of my son’s pajama shirt and I could not open them.
My arms had been shaking for ten minutes and now they had gone completely rigid, and there was a man in full gear kneeling over me with both hands under my child, waiting, and I was holding on, and I could see myself doing it and I could not stop.
“Ma’am.”
“I know.”
“Ma’am. Let go.”
I got one hand off. The other one had to come off a finger at a time, and I did it looking at the ceiling.
He took my son and stood up with him like Danny weighed nothing.
He got him against his shoulder with a hand behind his head, the way you hold a baby, which is not a thing I expected and which I have never forgotten, and he went to the window and swung out onto that ladder backward with one arm and my son in the other, and then they were gone out of the frame.
I found out three weeks later, in a hospital hallway, from a nurse who was making conversation, that the man who came through my window was Ray Duarte.
Twenty-seven years old. The one who kissed my hand at a Christmas party and went red to the ears.
He never told me. Not that night, not at the hospital, not once in the year and a half since.
He has walked past me in a parking lot carrying a bucket rather than say hello to me.
He carried my son down forty feet of ladder in the dark with one arm and he cannot look at my face, and I have never worked out whether that is shame or grief or whether at some point those stop being different things.
The window was empty.
I want to say something about that second, because there was one, and it is not a good look for me either.
My son was outside in the cold air where the air was, and I was on my knees in my bedroom, and for about a second and a half I was completely and totally alone, and I have never been that afraid before or since. Not during any of the rest of it.
“Mom.”
Ivy.
I had forgotten my daughter.
For a second and a half, in my own bedroom, I had forgotten she existed, and she was three feet away from me looking at the empty window with her hands in her lap.
Behind us, out in the hall, the front door came in.
That is what twenty-one minutes sounds like at the end.
A tearing crack and then a heavy metal clatter as the whole thing let go of the frame and swung and hit the wall, and then boots and light and men’s voices in my hallway, filling it, three of them at once, shouting things at each other about a line and a room and a count.
The window and the door, ten seconds apart.
Ten seconds. There is a version of that night where those two things happen twenty-five minutes earlier and I am a woman who tells a story at parties.
A second man came up over the sill.
“Sweetheart. Come on.”
He was talking to Ivy. She was already getting up.
“I can do it myself,” she said.
“I know you can.”
“I’m not being carried.”
“Okay.”
And he let her.
He picked her up under the arms and set her on the sill facing in, and she got her feet onto the rungs herself with him holding both her wrists, and she went down two steps under her own power in her socks, in November, on an aerial ladder, and then he came over the sill after her and got above her and took her weight, and my daughter went down that ladder like she was walking down to the mailbox.
Somebody grabbed me from behind.
I fought him.
I am ashamed of it and I did it anyway, for about two seconds, before my brain caught up with my arms. Some part of me that was no longer taking instructions decided that a large man in the dark had gotten hold of me from behind, and I twisted and got an elbow into something hard and hurt my arm on it.
“Erin. Hey. Hey.”
He knew my name.
They all know my name.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re done.”
I let him move me. My legs had quit somewhere around the last set of breaths and I have no memory of standing up. I remember the sill under my hands and a piece of glass still in the frame that somebody put a glove over so I wouldn’t put my palm on it.
And then I was outside.
The cold went straight through me and out the other side. The air smelled like metal and wet stone and diesel, like the river in the morning, like nothing at all, like the cleanest thing that has ever existed.
I got both hands on the rails and I went down two rungs and stopped, because my arms did not want to.
“Keep going. I’m right here.”
I looked down.
The lot was white with light. Two engines, the truck, a rescue, an ambulance backed in with its doors open and its lights going, and a hundred and some people from my building and the buildings on either side, in coats, in blankets, on the sidewalk and out in the street and up on the low wall by the dumpster.
Every single one of them had their head tipped back.
Half an hour ago I had stood at that window and hit the glass with both hands and screamed at these people and not one of them had raised their eyes above the second floor.
Now they were all looking up.