5

I would breathe, I told myself, but just once. Just one deep breath.

That single breath filled my lungs with poison. I could not hold it. I coughed painfully, calling her name. I clawed the floor, digging forward on my elbows and knees. I groped and found the sofa. The coffee table was on its side, and I felt something plump and soft, a pillow.

There was a sizzling sound from the recesses of the house, her record collection, the shellac seventy-eights frying, the quilt smoke by now, the piano a flaming altar. I was breathing her possessions, inhaling and exhaling what was left of her. I gagged, bawling her name, and dragged myself forward.

The bedroom was gone, fire, terrible heat. I fought my way to the kitchen, the linoleum blistering. I thought I heard her voice. I couldn’t be mistaken—it was her.

Finding the stove helped me—I knew where I was. I knocked something over, a clattering mop, and an electric cord caught me as I crawled. Something fell, a coffee maker, a blender.

I knew where I would find her, where she would go if she was hurt. And she was. She was sprawled on the bathroom floor. Blood splashed around me. The smoke was not as bad there, and she lay beside the bathtub, the water running, the slop of blood and lukewarm water pooling, the drain plugged by a washcloth.

She did not open her eyes. Her hands were ice. I could not stand to see what he had done to her. A human voice kept repeating the single word No.

I dragged her, the flames thundering, the low ceiling of smoke pressing me to the floor. No. My voice, the only word left to me. And the thought came to me, with the resonance of a tune I had finally recalled, something with the sweetness of a childhood memory. I might as well stay here.

I might as well die with her.

When help arrived, goggles and a gas mask bending over the two of us, it could have been a hallucination brought on by the venom in the air. It could have been an apparition boiled up from the rupture of my own synapses as I sprawled there. The smoke cleared with the blast from a fire extinguisher.

A cup was pressed over my mouth.

I shook my head, hard. But the hand pressed all the harder. “Breathe!” said a voice.

There was the bleary impression of daylight, emergency lights flashing, the engines of the firetrucks rumbling, people in the distance. I turned on the wet lawn and Rebecca was there, but I could only see one hand thrust out between the bodies that knelt over her.

I almost didn’t recognize her nightgown, the flimsy cotton soaked with blood. I wanted to hide her near-nakedness from these earnest strangers as they strapped her into a stretcher. I wanted to shield her from the eyes of spectators, neighbors in clothes thrown on over pajamas, joggers, eyes hopeful and afraid, and fascinated.

I found myself standing, facing the growing crowd. I was soil, dirt, ash, and sweat, standing there in the morning sun. At my feet was the garden hose. The firefighters had trampled the lawn and pressed the green coil deep into the turf.

“You’ll want to go with us to the hospital,” said the fireman. He held no grudge against me for the struggle. His eyes were compassionate, and I was surprised again at how men and women used to calamity can still express kindness. This time he kept a good grip, arm around me.

She was already in the rear of the ambulance, the paramedics not bothering to turn back to check on my condition. But that arm around me led me to the ambulance, pushing me forward, not for my sake, but for hers.

Because we wanted to go fast. We wanted to hurry. Speed would do the job. That’s all we needed. Haste, and all would be well.

The ambulance had to swing around a car parked in the street. My car, I thought dully. My own car is in the way.

The siren was on, although in the morning sun there was no sense of flashing lights, no sense that we were clearing the street ahead of us of traffic. I found the sound of the siren exciting and reassuring in a disconnected, boyish way.

I took her hand, outthrust again between the bodies of the people working over her. A syringe plunged into her chest. I held her hand and looked out at the receding image of parked cars, cars easing back into the flow of traffic.