50. Delilah
DELILAH
On the last day of April, I find myself closing up the shop alone.
It’s my own fault. Wendell’s compressor bill put a dent in the month, so when a caterer in Park Slope called Friday afternoon needing eight dozen mini quiches by seven in the morning, I said yes.
Priya offered to stay, but I told her to go home to her daughter, because Zara had a thing at daycare with a paper crown involved and Priya had already missed one of those in March.
So it’s ten ‘til two on a Saturday morning and I’m alone with eight dozen quiches cooling on racks.
I do my closing walk. Front door locked, chain on. Case wiped. Deposit bag in the safe. Croissant dough in the refrigerator for the morning. Alarm panel by the office door, ready to be armed once I go out the back.
I’m shrugging into my coat when I smell something burning.
Not the oven smell. Not the good caramel edge of something that stayed in two minutes too long.
It’s sharper. Chemical, with a wet-garbage note under it. It reminds me of the day Connor stood at my kitchen sink feeding paper into a fire.
I stop with one arm in a sleeve.
“Hello?” I say, which is stupid, because who’s going to answer?
Then I see the smoke. It’s coming under the door in a low gray sheet, spreading along the floor like water, and there’s a light behind the frosted glass panel that shouldn’t be there.
Orange. Moving.
For about two seconds, my brain does nothing at all. It just stands there and looks.
Then it starts working very fast.
I rip my arm back out of my coat, get my phone out of my apron pocket, and dial 911 while I’m stumbling backward, away from the door.
“Fire!” I tell the woman. “There’s a fire at 4412 Fourth Avenue. Sunset Park. It’s a bakery.”
She asks if anyone’s inside.
“Just me. It’s after closing. There’s nobody else, there’s no apartment upstairs, it’s storage.”
She asks if I can get out.
“Yeah. Yes. I’m going now.”
She tells me to leave now and stay on the line.
I wouldn’t say I’ve prepared for this exactly. I’ve thought about how I’d handle a grease fire, a fryer fire, the electrical panel finally giving up—but the answer is the same answer. The main shutoff for the ovens is behind the bread rack on the wall to the left of the range.
I duck under, get my hand on the lever, and haul it a quarter turn until it stops. Then the breaker panel in the little closet by the office. I flip the big one and the shop goes dark except for the exit sign and the orange behind the back door glass.
The radio dies mid-saxophone. It’s very quiet after that. The only sound is a crackling I can hear through the wall, and a hiss like a hose.
“Ma’am? Are you outside?”
“Working on it.”
Smoke doesn’t behave the way it does in movies.
It’s not a polite cloud you can wave off.
It comes in like it’s filling a bathtub and I’m standing in the bottom of it.
My eyes go hot and start streaming and my throat closes down to the width of a straw.
I get my apron up over my mouth and breathe through it.
Keys. Phone. That’s all I need. I pat my hip for the keys and they’re there.
I go for the front.
Sixteen feet from the office door to the front of the counter. I know this shop in the dark. I know where the corner of the case catches your hip if you cut it too close. I get my hand on the front door, turn the deadbolt, slide the chain, and push.
It doesn’t move.
I push harder, put my shoulder in it. It gives maybe an inch and then stops with a dull groan.
Something’s against it out there, wedged low and tight.
It’s hard to see, but through the smoke and the glass, I can just barely make out a dark shape across the bottom third of the door.
Long. Heavy. Something laid up against it on the sidewalk side.
I hit the glass with the heel of my hand on some crazy whim of breaking it. Shockingly, that doesn’t work.
“Ma’am, are you out?”
“The front’s blocked,” I say into the apron. “Somebody blocked my front door.”
I don’t remember what she says next. I’m already turning.
There’s only one other way out of this building.
The smoke is thicker by the time I’m back through the kitchen.
I can feel the heat of it, a wall of spiky heat pressing at my face like an open oven.
But the fire’s still outside. I can see that.
The door is hot but it hasn’t burned through.
Whatever’s going on is happening in the alley, against the brick, in the trash area by the plywood ramp where my curb used to be.
I crouch down low, plaster the apron over my face, and I run the last of it.
Heat and light and a roar, and then air. Cold air. I stumble out over the threshold into the alley coughing so hard I’m bent double. My eyes are running so bad the whole world is smeared into watercolors.
The fire is to my left, up against the wall, in a pile of what looks like pallets and rags. Something about it looks organized, in a way I can’t explain at first.
That’s when I understand. It comes painlessly, clearly, like how you can cut yourself and there’s a moment of delay before the blood arrives.
Someone planned this whole thing.
The fire isn’t in the building. It’s away from the front. Right beside the only other door.
It was meant to direct me.
Right.
Here.
There’s a van at the mouth of the alley with its lights off and its side door open. Two men stand between me and the street. One’s already moving.
I turn to go back inside, which is when I see that there’s a third one coming around the corner of the fire.
I try for the street anyway. I make it about four steps before a hand closes on the back of my coat collar.
I’m yanked backward hard enough that my feet come out from under me and my shoulder hits the brick.
My phone goes out of my hand and skates across the wet concrete and slides under the plywood ramp with the woman still talking on it.
I hear her saying, “Ma’am? Ma’am?” from under the wood, tinny and far away, and then somebody’s arm is across my chest.
I drive my heel down on the top of his foot with everything I have.
I’ve got clogs on, professional ones, steel shank, nasty enough that he makes a surprised noise.
I twist in the coat, which gives me just enough room to drive my elbow back into him and hit something soft. He grunts and lets go with one hand.
I’ve got my keys in my fist. When the second attacker swoops in from the night, I rake them across his face.
There’s a hot, wet snag and he screams, then falls back with both hands up over his gushing eye.
“Get her, get her—”
I run.
Twenty feet of alley. That’s all it is. Twenty feet of alley and then Fourth Avenue, where there are streetlights and a bodega that never closes and a bus that runs all night. People will see. They’ll help.
I make eleven of the twenty.
Then somebody takes my legs. The concrete comes up and knocks the wind out of me, and then there’s weight on my back, a knee between my shoulder blades, and my arms are being folded up behind me by two different people.
I bite. I thrash. I scream at the mouth of the alley, at the streetlight, at the bodega, but it comes out as a shredded, smoke-ruined whimper that doesn’t carry ten feet.
Somewhere far off, there are sirens.
They’re coming for me.
But they won’t get here in time.
Not to save my life. Nor to save my bakery.
A hand goes over my mouth. It’s holding a cloth, damp and acrid. One inhale of whatever it’s soaked with and my world starts going gooey at the edges.
The last thing I see clearly is my own back door standing open, and the orange light on the brick, and the smoke pouring up past the fire escape and into the dark.
Then they lift me off the ground, and they carry me to the van.
When they close the doors, it’s like an oven being sealed shut.
Except this time, I’m the one on the inside.