Silhouette of a Sparrow

In my white cotton nightdress I hovered there, suspended above the panic and pain, the chaos and confusion. The whole scene paused for a single moment and my desperate childhood wish for flight was granted. I felt the wind against my skin and turned my eyes to the stars. The brightest ones burned calmly through the smoke and the wavering heat.

In that moment I knew that wanting was not the same as selfishness. Wanting was pure and right and beautiful. And the real me could not change shape to suit the needs of others—not even loved ones, not even family. I knew who I was. The rest could be worked out. I could find a way. If Miss Maple had done it, so could I.

And then, I crashed to the ground. The pain came rushing in with a breathless jolt. My knee burned, and a stabbing ache pierced my shoulder. Every inch of me was on fire, like the hotel on fire, threatening to collapse.

Mother appeared beside me then. She must have followed me out into the night air. I didn’t see her jump, but there she was. She clutched her ankle, but her relief seemed to overpower the pain. She took me in her arms and we lay there, on the ground, rocking each other amid the panicked crowd.

It might have been mere minutes later that I regained rational consciousness, but it felt like hours. Mrs. Harrington’s voice cut through the bustle.

She gaped at him, appalled. “Young man, those dresses and hats and jewels are worth more than your annual salary—more than twice your annual salary, I should think—so march in there and retrieve them. Room 209—”

“Not worth it?” Her voice lowered then, but I could hear her still as she lectured her daughter. “It’s all we have, Hannah. You know that—you told everybody all about it this morning. What do you want, the poorhouse? Do you want us to have to sell the estate? We’ll never get you a husband without at least the trappings of wealth. The credit’s run out. Lord help us, Hannah, it’s all we have.”

“It is not all we have, Mother. We have each other, don’t we? If you go in there and that building collapses, then we’ll have nothing—or at least I’ll have nothing. No finery and no husband and no mother. If that’s what you want, fine. Go.”

The singed woman stood staring at her furious child for a long moment, her own anger turning ever so slowly to incredulity. The whole scene around us seemed to pause, to hold its breath.

“What’s gotten into you today?” Mrs. Harrington said sharply, but then her scolding tone shifted, softened. “You’re not my little girl. You’re a young woman. A fierce, beautiful young woman. What on earth am I going to do with you?” Then she gathered Hannah up in her enormous arms and sobbed.

As if someone took a piece of charcoal and decided at that moment to redraw her, Hannah’s hard angles all melted. I watched, and finally I saw the two of them for what they were: a pair of people facing the world together, trying to do right by one another without losing themselves in the process. Just like me. Just like all of us.

“Garnet, you’re shaking.” Mother rocked me in her arms as the firemen and medics rushed around us in a blur of frantic activity. A bright red fire truck blared its two-note siren like a cardinal gone mad. “We have to get away from here,” she said. She coughed and clutched her ankle. “But where? Where can we go?”

I knocked, sheepishly, on the door of Isabella’s apartment. After I’d yelled at her and called her names and made her cry, here I was, knocking on her door in the middle of the night, asking for a place to stay.

At least I hadn’t brought the Harringtons. They’d vanished in the bustle and we’d decided to go without them. We needed to find shelter quickly, and we trusted they’d find someplace to go too. And as Mrs. Harrington had so graciously pointed out, we were “no longer family” In any case, I was grateful to be spared their company at this moment as I waited for Isabella to answer her door, hoping that she’d let us in, dreading that she’d shut us out. She had every right to turn me away.

At last, she answered. Isabella, in a slip and smudged eye makeup and the detested night gloves. She stood there, her irritation at being woken up turning to surprise and then concern at the sight of us.

We stumbled inside. Isabella slept on the sofa and gave us her bed. Mother and I dropped into that narrow bed and slept instantly. Deeply. Side by side.

I didn’t wake up fully until Sunday. It was late afternoon when I sat up in Isabella’s bed, groggy and disoriented. Mother still slept, so I tiptoed out of the bedroom and shut the door quietly behind me. The apartment was empty, but I found a note from Isabella on the kitchen counter. Gone to rehearsal and then a show—manager scheduled one last minute on my day off, bastard. Back late. Help yourself to a bath and anything you can find in the icebox and the pantry. Left fresh clothes out on the sofa—should fit. Isabella

My stomach let out a vicious growl. I opened the pantry door and then stopped—my hands were stained black with soot. The bath would have to come first.

In the tiny bathroom I ran hot water into the cracked claw-foot bathtub and stripped off my once-white nightdress. I found a washcloth in the cabinet and a bar of soap on the edge of the tub. I lowered myself into the bath slowly, catching my breath at the sting of the water on little cuts and scratches I didn’t realize were there. Heat welled up from my burned hand. Half an hour must have passed while I scrubbed at the soot and soaked the sore spots. The water soothed the ache in my knee while I rubbed my stiff shoulder. My head buzzed the whole time . . . The fire. The roof. The words I’d said to Mother. The leap. Mother’s ankle. Hannah and her mother embracing. Isabella opening her door. Opening, opening, opening her door.

Isabella in her slip, with mussed hair and sleep in her darkly smudged eyes, opening her door. And giving us her bed. She must’ve spent the whole of Saturday and most of Sunday creeping around her own apartment so that we could rest. Then she went to work and left a note to offer us everything she had: hot water and soap and food and clothes and a safe place to rest.

When the water was cold and murky, I got out and dried off. Isabella’s towel, I thought, gently pressing the terry cloth against my inflamed skin. Then I rinsed out the washcloth and found a bowl to fill with hot water. After I dressed in a clean shift of Isabella’s, I brought the bowl in to Mother.

A look of recognition passed across Mother’s face as she recalled what Mrs. Harrington had told her. “A friend? Do you mean . . . the flapper?”

I waited to be scolded, lectured, reprimanded for my poor taste in friends, but she just lay there quietly a moment and then said, “Well, we should be very grateful to this Isabella, then, shouldn’t we.”

We were silent for a while as I scrubbed at Mother’s face and hands. Then I took the bowl back to the washroom and assembled a little supper for us in the kitchen. When I brought the plate of bread and cheese and fruit into the bedroom, Mother was sitting up, leaning against the headboard. Her eyes were clearer. She looked more alert.

“About what you said, Garnet . . .” She coughed, her lungs still rattling with smoke. I waited while she recovered, wondering what she’d say next. My shoulders hunched up with nervous tension and the hurt one smarted. Finally she continued. “I guess we’ll have to find a way to make it work. I’m just not sure how. So I thought—Teddy—I don’t know.”

But I thought about it. As we demolished the meal—almost identical to the picnic food Isabella had brought to Big Island—I thought about Miss Maple, and about that sister in Minneapolis and that job at the telephone company. Let me know if you ever need a job, Miss Maple had said, and I’ll see if she can figure something out for you. What if Mother and I both needed jobs? Something full time for her, and something part-time for me while I finished high school and went on to college. Could we make it then? Was it possible?

I waited up for Isabella that night. I paced until I was afraid I’d wake Mother with the creaking of my footsteps on the uneven floors. Then I sat on the sofa, nervously tracing the vines on the upholstery with one finger.

She was late. The world lay in deep, silent slumber when she turned the knob and opened the door and quietly shut it again behind her. She busied herself in the entryway a bit before emerging into the sitting room with her shoes in her hand. She looked tired, and then startled to see me awake.

She just looked at me, her eyes hard and then soft, hard and then soft. She padded over to me in her bare feet and sat next to me on the sofa. She took my hand. “How could I turn you away?” she said at last. “I love you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She let go and reached for the other one instead. “Everyone’s been talking about the fire. No deaths, but plenty of injuries and the hotel is nothing but rubble.” Then the Harringtons must be okay, and Avery too. Isabella would have heard if something had happened to any of them. I knew I should try to find Hannah and her mother, but it could wait.

Besides the twinge in my shoulder and the ache in my knee and the terrible throb of my burned hand and my shame at what I’d done to Isabella and my fear for the future—“I’m fine.”

I followed her and stood in the doorframe of the tiny bathroom while she dabbed at her face with cotton puffs. Gradually, the pallor of her skin and the jet black brows and lashes and the scarlet lips subsided into less extreme beauty. And who was to say which one was the real Isabella? Could they both be real? How many faces can a person have?

“What?” She splashed water from the running faucet up onto her face and then blindly reached for a towel. I handed her a dry one from the rack and she pressed it to her skin.

Her clean face emerged from the towel and bloomed into smiles. She was radiant even without all the paint. And when she looked at me like that, I felt radiant too.

When I finally climbed into bed with Mother, my mind was buzzing with plans and ideas, my heart burning with hope. I didn’t drift into sleep until the first gray light of dawn filtered into the room, and the cardinals whistled their clear songs into the morning air.