Fire on the Island #2
Even as these questions tore at her, she saw the flashlight extinguished and she fell back into her desk chair.
She was too late. In front of her, the uneven ends of her colored pencils stood silent witness to the fact that this was all Tess’s fault.
If she had only obeyed the voices. They had told her something bad would happen.
If she didn’t sharpen the pencils properly, something bad would happen.
And she hadn’t sharpened the pencils properly and now her happy childhood was over, her family rent apart, and the man she had loved and trusted most in the world stood at the center of that betrayal.
She threw her head down on the desk and cried, finally falling asleep in the chair to the smell of pencil shavings and the rumble of thunder.
Tess started awake to the sound of voices shouting.
Vivian and Marie shouting. One word, over and over: “Harry!” Not shouts of anger or frustration like Tess heard from each of them at times.
No, these shouts bore the emptiness of utter despair.
They sounded, at first, as if they came from right outside her window, but they quickly faded.
Marie and Vivian were running away from the house.
Tess lay on the floor. She must have woken when she slipped out of the chair, she thought.
Sweat poured down her face, as it sometimes did when she awoke after a nightmare, but her sleep had been dreamless as far as she could remember.
While the voices in the distance continued shouting, the voices in her head were uncharacteristically silent.
Tess felt breathless, hot, confused, and disoriented, but the absence of those voices calmed her, and she reached for the leg of the chair to pull herself up.
As soon as she wrapped her fingers around the metal she jolted into a higher state of alertness.
The chair leg was so hot it burned the flesh of her hand.
Tess let go immediately and tried to sit up.
Only then did she realize that the room was filled with smoke and flame.
If she hadn’t slipped to the floor, she thought, she might already be dead.
The bed where she ought to have been sleeping was ablaze and she watched in horror as flaming scraps of blanket fluttered to the floor.
In trying to listen for the voices, she hadn’t noticed the roar of the fire but now it pounded in her ears as she began to choke on the smoky air.
She squeezed her eyes shut and felt panic welling up in her throat.
Only the floorboards were slightly cool, and she pressed her cheek against them.
Why didn’t Vivian and Marie come and rescue her?
Why were they moving away from the house instead of toward her?
And where was Harry? Harry would know what to do.
And then Tess realized, Harry did know what to do.
“What kills you in a fire?” Harry had asked one night as he sat before the fireplace with Tess watching the flames leap up to welcome a new log.
“Why do you frighten her like that?” Marie had said from across the room.
“I’m not frightening her,” said Harry. “I’m keeping her safe.”
“By giving her nightmares,” said Marie. “‘How does a fire kill you?’ ‘What happens to your head if you don’t wear a bike helmet?’ ‘What are your chances of surviving a crash without a seat belt?’ It’s morbid.”
“Have you noticed that she wears her bike helmet and her seat belt?” Harry said.
“The smoke,” Tess said, loudly, hoping to end the spat between her parents.
“Yes,” said Harry. “The smoke. And where does the smoke go?”
“It goes up.”
“So, to escape a fire…”
“Stay low and crawl,” said Tess.
Stay low and crawl. Harry had repeated those words hoping to keep Tess safe.
Now she had a chance to prove that she had been listening, that he had not been wasting his breath.
She pulled her T-shirt over her nose and mouth and began to shimmy across the floor toward the door, squinting to see through the smoke and her tears.
The poster of Einstein by the closet peeled off the wall and landed next to her, spurring her on as his eyes charred and flaked away.
Through the door and into the hallway. The smoke was just as bad here, but there was less fire, making navigation even more difficult as she moved in near darkness.
Twice Tess bumped her head into the wall, but finally she made it into the open space of the living room, where flames licked the walls and spread out across the ceiling.
She wanted nothing more than to stand up and sprint for the door, but Tess kept hearing Harry’s voice.
Stay low and crawl. The braided rug in front of the door was already ablaze.
Tess wasn’t sure she could stay low all the way to the door, but she did her best, choking and wheezing from the smoke, her eyes burning, snot flowing from her nose.
She made her way across the room until she reached the rug, then stood and dived toward the flame-filled doorway, hoping the door was open.
She burst onto the front porch and stumbled down the stairs, still feeling the intense heat behind her.
She looked down to see the left leg of her sweatpants on fire and remembered the other thing Harry had told her about fire. Stop, drop, and roll.
She fell to the grass and rolled down the hill toward the dock, coming to a stop about halfway between the house and the lake.
She checked to see her clothes were no longer burning and turned to see the entire cabin blazing so fiercely the yard was lit up brighter than daylight.
To one side of the cabin, she saw something that froze her to the ground.
The circle of trees that enclosed Harry’s private spot were burning like torches, crackling loudly and sending black smoke high into the sky.
What had Harry done? Had he taken candles into the trees to light his assignation with Vivian?
Had the radio malfunctioned, sending off a spark unnoticed by either of them because they were in each other’s arms?
And had Harry escaped from that ring of fire that must surely be visible from miles away?
Then she turned toward the lake, where the reflected flames made impressionistic patterns on the rippling water.
On the dock she saw two figures—Marie and Vivian. Harry was nowhere in sight.