Yetta had burst onto the ninth floor shouting, “There’s a fire on the eighth floor! Get out!” But there was so much Saturday-afternoon chatter, so many people crowded in between the tables and machines and towering stacks of shirtwaists. She doubted if anyone heard her.
The fire arrived only seconds later.
“Get out! Go!” Yetta screamed, grabbing shocked girls and shoving them toward the stairs. Having just seen the fire fly through the eighth floor, she could look at a stack of shirtwaist parts and know exactly how quickly that would turn to flame. “Go now!” she screamed. “You’ve only got a few minutes!”
Yetta didn’t know when a second voice joined her own, a deeper voice urging just as loudly, “Don’t stop to get your hat! Don’t stop to get your gloves! Go!”
She looked around, and it was Jacob. He must have followed her up the stairs.
“What are you doing?” she screamed at him.
“The same thing as you!” he screamed back, then kept hollering, “Go! Go!”
Together they shoved girls into the elevator, lifted numb women to their feet. Yetta took great joy in slapping a dazed Mr. Carlotti.
“Snap out of it!” she screamed at him. “Get out of here!”
When the smoke cleared a little with the breeze, Yetta saw Bella and Jane—Jane? What’s she doing here? No time to find out . . . They were standing practically in the fire, so close to the fire escape that Yetta couldn’t understand why they weren’t climbing out. Yetta rushed toward them, ready to scream, “Just go out that window! Now!” So what if the fire escape didn’t go down all the way to the ground? If it got them past the eighth floor they could climb in the windows on a lower floor, escape that way.
But when Yetta got over to the window, the fire escape seemed to have vanished.
There was no time to ask why or how. No time even to wonder.
“Greene Street stairs!” Yetta screamed. “Go!”
That seemed to be enough to bring them back to life, get them moving. But then Bella grabbed Yetta’s hand, pulling her along too. Yetta wanted to go with her friends. In a matter of moments they could be down on the street, walking home. They could walk away from Triangle, this nightmarish place. They’d never have to come back again. They could get other jobs. They could all three hop a train west, live somewhere else. Yetta didn’t have to be a shirtwaist girl anymore.
But people were dying here. Yetta could help now.
Yetta pulled her hand back.
“You go on!” she screamed. “I still have to help the others!”
Bella and Jane disappeared into the smoke. The smoke shifted a little, and for one instant Yetta could see clear across the room to the Washington Place door. Workers were clumped up against that door, just like they’d been on the eighth floor.
“They must think it’s locked!” Yetta screamed at Jacob, who’d suddenly appeared beside her. “They don’t know it opens in!”
How would they know? How many of them had ever used the Washington Place door? Yetta started racing across the room, gasping for breath. She had such a clear image in her head: She would push the panicky girls aside, turn the knob, jerk the door in toward the factory . . . And then everyone would stream out, safe.
“Pull it toward yourselves!” she started screaming as soon as she got close to the door.
Nobody seemed to be listening.
“I’ll try it!” Jacob yelled.
Together they fought their way through the crowd. They took turns grasping the doorknob, yanking it, turning it, twisting it. But their hands slid off the knob; the knob didn’t budge.
“This one is locked!” Yetta yelled in Jacob’s ear. “It’s locked!” she screamed at all the other workers clustered around. “Go another way!” She started pushing the other girls back from the door, yelling, “Take the other stairs! Take the other stairs!”
Jacob slid his hands down around Yetta’s shoulders, pinning her arms to her side.
“Yetta,” he whispered, his mouth right against her ear. “They can’t.”
Then Yetta looked back.
She’d seen the fire take over the eighth floor, starting from one small spark in a scrap bin and advancing throughout the entire room. That hadn’t prepared her at all for the ninth floor, where flames spilled in through the windows on every side. In the brief moments that Yetta had spent tugging on a locked door, the flames had taken over. The route that Yetta and Jacob had used just a minute before was blocked by a wall of fire now—a wall of fire sweeping ever closer.
Yetta and Jacob couldn’t get back to the other stairs, either.
“Jacob,” Yetta said, and she was ashamed that the word came out as a whimper. “I don’t want to burn.”
She remembered what Rahel had said about the pogrom in Bialystok: This one girl—she might have been you or me. One minute, she was just standing there. ...The next minute she was covered inflames. A human torch. Gone in a flash.
“Not me. Not my life. Please. I don’t want to go that way,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure if she was talking to Jacob or to God or just to herself.
“You won’t burn,” Jacob said
It seemed like an impossible promise. What else could happen, with the door locked, the flames beating mercilessly nearer? But Jacob was lifting her up—higher, higher, higher— into unbelievably fresh air.
He was lifting her toward the window.
Yetta remembered the woman with the burning hair who’d jumped out the window on the eighth floor. She squirmed in Jacob’s arms.
“No! Not that either!”
“There’s a ledge,” Jacob said.
And then, somehow, they were both standing on the ledge, just outside the window. The fire still raged behind them, but the cool breezes soothed their faces—the same breezes that had seemed to call and tease her earlier. Odd, how they were a comfort now. Yetta looked straight up into blue sky, into puffy white clouds sailing leisurely toward the horizon. Down below there were fire trucks and firemen and crowds screaming, but Yetta couldn’t hear any of the voices. Her world had shrunk, for the moment, to blue sky and the feel of Jacob’s arms around her.
“Why did you follow me?” she asked him, choking out the words. “You were safe on the stairs. You could be down there right now.”
Jacob brushed a lock of hair away from her eyes.
“I was a scab during the strike,” he said. Even now, there was such shame clotting his voice. “But I saw you picketing. I saw you. You were . . . incredible. I wanted to be on your side.”
If there’d been time, Yetta could have joked, “Then join a strike, already. Don’t go running into fires.” But words were too precious, on this ledge, to make jokes. It was enough to hold on to Jacob, while he held on to her. She saw that she’d misjudged him, thinking he wanted to go dancing only to practice his English.
Right now she couldn’t even think whether they were talking to each other in Yiddish or English.
“Yetta—we can’t stay here,” Jacob said.
She knew that. The flames were lapping at their heels, eager to escape the factory, to ruin the blue-sky world, too. The ledge was so narrow, they could only inch along. It was impossible to move far enough away from the window with its flames and smoke. But Yetta wanted one more moment of staring out into the blue sky.
It’s Saturday, she thought. Still the Sabbath. Yetta knew it wouldn’t be long before devout Jews—her father, Rahel’s husband—would begin the havdalah prayers, dividing the sacredness of the Sabbath from ordinary, everyday life. But Yetta had not had a sacred day. She faced a different kind of divide.
“They’re coming to rescue us,” Jacob said.
And it was true—the fire truck down below had begun unfurling a ladder, reaching higher and higher, in a race with the flames at Yetta’s heels. The ladder was four stories high, five stories high, six stories high . . .
The ladder stopped.
“Don’t they have a longer ladder?” Yetta asked. “Don’t they? Don’t they?”
It was a useless question. The ladder had stopped growing. The flames were going to win.
“We could jump for the end of the ladder,” Jacob said. “Or for the nets on the ground.”
The firemen—impossibly tiny, down there on the ground—were indeed holding out nets, standing there so hopefully. Yetta could have laughed at their hopes. It was not exactly a plan Jacob was offering her, not exactly a chance, in the nets and the ladder. But it was something besides flame.
Jacob bowed to Yetta, as elegantly as if they were about to launch themselves onto a dance floor instead of into thin air. He would have been a good dance partner, Yetta thought with an ache. He wrapped his arms around Yetta; she wrapped her arms around him.
And then they jumped.
It does not take a long time to fall to the ground, even from nine stories up. But it felt like a lifetime to Yetta—she felt like she passed through years worth of Rosh Hashanahs, Yom Kippurs, Hanukkahs, Purims, Passovers. She had her regrets: Oh, Rahel, I am so sorry I was mean to you. I never met your baby, never gave your husband a chance . . . I shouldn’t have expected you to be like me, shouldn’t have thought we had to be the same . . . And, oh, Jacob, what if I’d gone dancing with you sooner? She saw now that so much more was possible than she’d ever believed. She could have danced at a thousand weddings, all at once.
They missed the ladder. Both of them stretched out a hand but the ladder rung slipped past them.
“There’s still the net!” Jacob shouted. Or maybe there wasn’t time for him to shout it; maybe she could only feel him thinking it. She was glad that he had his arms around her, glad that he’d helped her in the fire, glad that she wasn’t alone.
Oh, Bella, you were smart to go looking for love. And, Jane, you were looking for all the right things, too. But oh, God, I tried so hard, I wanted so much to change the world. . . .
The net was right beneath them. Yetta felt a surge of gratitude for the firemen who angled the net so carefully, who ran to the exact right spot to catch two immigrant workers falling from the sky. These men were trying so hard to save her life. She and Jacob landed on the net, exactly in the center.
And then the net broke and they plunged on through.
It does not take a long time to fall to the ground, even from nine stories up. But it took a lifetime for Yetta. It took every single one of the last moments of her life.