32. Nolan
NOLAN
Iam on the gravel when the second-floor window goes, and the next thirty seconds of my life happen out of order.
I do not see Arielle.
"Terry. Where is she."
"Ari was — she went — she said the panel?—"
"Terry. Look at me. Where. Did. She. Go."
"Inside, Nolan, she went inside before the blast, she was through the east door, she was — she was already inside the corridor when the second floor went?—"
I am running before he has finished the sentence.
The east door is no longer a door. It is half a doorframe and a sheet of buckled metal hanging crooked off the top hinge, and there is heat coming out of it the way heat comes out of an oven you have just opened too fast. Malcolm is at my heels.
"Mr. Ashford."
"Get the fire department on the perimeter. Get Patel ready to talk to them about the structural load on the east column. Get Terry on the phone with Dr. Ellis and tell her thirty-eight weeks, contractions possible. Don't follow me in, Malcolm."
"Sir, I am?—"
"You have a wife who left you in 2009 and two boys, and you are not going through that door tonight. Hold the perimeter. That's the assignment."
He does not argue. He is the only man I have ever met who knows the exact second to stop arguing with me, and that is a quality I am, on this gravel, profoundly grateful for.
He plants himself between me and the responders who are starting to scream at me from the gate and he lets me through the door.
The corridor on the other side is not a corridor anymore. It is a tunnel of brown smoke at chest height and clean air at knee height, the way they teach it in the brochures in elevator lobbies. I drop to a crouch. I cover my mouth with the inside of my elbow. I shout her name.
"Arielle."
The smoke takes it. I hear it land somewhere about six feet in front of me and stop. I shout it again.
"Arielle."
A sound comes back. Not language. A sound. From the west end of the corridor, maybe forty feet away, around a corner I cannot see past.
I move.
The slab under my hands is warm in places and hot in others, and there is a section twelve feet in where the floor is no longer where the floor is supposed to be, and I find it the way you find the edge of a swimming pool at night, with one hand reaching and then with my whole body stopping.
I work around it on my left. The conduit she walked under is on the slab where she said it was.
I step over it. The wall to my right is hot enough to burn me through the sleeve of my jacket, so I keep low, and I keep moving, and I keep saying her name.
"Arielle. Where are you? Sweetheart. Sweetheart, tell me where you are. Anything. A word. A breath. I will find you. Just give me something to point at."
The sound comes again. Closer. Smaller. A word this time.
"Nolan."
I find her around the corner.
She is on her hands and one knee at the end of the corridor where it opens into the loading dock vestibule, in the soft cotton shirt she has been wearing under the canvas coat that is, I notice with the kind of irrelevant clarity grief gives a man, not on her body anymore.
Her phone lies on the slab beside her, screen glowing.
Her hair has slipped all the way free. Her pant leg is dark on the right side from the knee down in a way that is going to need to be a problem for somebody else later.
Her hand is flat on the curve of her stomach.
"Arielle. Look at me. Look at me, sweetheart."
She lifts her head. Her eyes are streaming from the smoke and her mouth is moving and the sound she is making is half my name and half something I do not have a word for, and she is, by the small ruthless math my brain is doing without my permission, breathing.
"Tell me where you're hurt."
"Leg. Right one. Pant tore. I can walk. I cannot — Nolan — I cannot walk fast enough, the contractions started, I?—"
"Don't talk. Save your air. I'm going to lift you. Tell me yes."
"Yes."
"Tell me if I hurt her."
"You won't. You won't. Move."
I get one arm under the backs of her knees and the other under her shoulders the way I did in the entry hall of my penthouse in December, and she is heavier than she was in December because there is more of her now in the most literal way two people can mean that sentence, and the weight of her against my chest is the only thing in the building I am willing to feel.
The corridor behind us is louder than it was a minute ago.
Above us, somewhere up the east riser, something gives — not the floor we just left, not yet, but the steel that holds the floor we just left to the floor above it — and the sound it makes is the sound of a building deciding which way it is going to fall.
I do not run. I cannot run with her. I walk fast. I walk fast and I keep my body between her and the right-hand wall because the right-hand wall is the wall on fire, and I keep her face tucked against my neck because the air at the height of my face is the air she should not be breathing, and I count the steps to the loading dock door under my breath the way a man counts the stairs of a building in a power outage.
"Nolan. The roll-up door. The manual one. I made them install — it has a chain, it has a chain, Nolan?—"
"I know. I see it. I see the chain. I have you. Don't talk."
The loading dock door is forty feet away and then thirty and then twenty, and somewhere behind us the sound the building has been making changes registers from deciding to decided, and Arielle's hand fists in the front of my jacket and her breath catches against my throat in a way that has nothing to do with the smoke.
"Another one's coming. Nolan. Another contraction, it's coming, it's?—"
“Sixty seconds, Arielle. Just sixty. We get through the door in one minute, and you can have it once we’re past it. Stay with me. Stay with her.”
“Don’t drop me.”
“I won’t. Neither of you is leaving my arms. Sixty seconds.”
I reach the roll-up door. The chain is exactly where she made them put it.
I cannot pull the chain with my hands full of her, so I set her down on her uninjured side against the wall of the vestibule and I yank the chain with both hands until my shoulders scream, and the door comes up in the slow ratcheting way manual doors come up, and the cold gray late-afternoon light of the parking lot floods into the smoke at knee height, and the sound of sirens that has been on the other side of the building this whole time finally reaches us.
I get my arms back under her. I lift. I am two steps through the open dock door and onto the loading apron when the sound behind us in the corridor turns into the sound I have been waiting for, and the east riser, and the conduit she walked under, and the section of slab I stepped around, and the wall on fire, and the corner where she said my name, and the building we drew and bought and fought over and defended in front of Vega and Walter Holcomb and the city's deputy chief of staff comes down on itself with the long slow crack of something that no longer has a reason to stand.
I keep walking. I do not look back. I do not stop until I am twenty yards onto the gravel, where Malcolm is already running toward me with his coat off and Terry is already on his knees with a paramedic, and I lower Arielle, slow, careful as I have ever been with anything in my life, onto the open jacket Malcolm has laid on the ground.
"She is thirty-eight weeks. She is in labor. Right leg is torn, knee down. Smoke exposure under three minutes. Her name is Arielle Sutton. I am her — I am — get the gurney, get the gurney."
The gurney comes. The paramedic's hands move. Arielle's hand finds mine and holds.
"Don't let go, Nolan."
"I'm not letting go, sweetheart."
"You came in."
"Of course I came in. Of course I did. I would have come in if you had told me yourself never to come in. Don't talk. Breathe with the mask. Look at me. I'm here. Both of you. I'm right here."
Behind us, the east wing of the building I bought because her name was on it folds in on itself with a sound like the end of an argument.
I do not turn around. I keep my eyes on her face.
I keep my hand in hers. I let the paramedic do his job, and I follow the gurney across the gravel, and I do not, for one second, let go.