“I NEVER THOUGHT I’d see you again.” She shook her head. “But I wondered, we’ve all wondered, what happened to you. Dr. Marsden was the resident on call, and you, Antoinette, were close to being my very first patient. None of us will ever forget.” Nurse Sanchez looked to the gray walls, clearly seeing something other than scuffs and peeling paint. “That old warhorse at the front desk surely remembers. It’s the only reason you weren’t thrown out. But, yes, I was your nurse.”
She smiled at me. “You’re beautiful. I can’t see any…”
“No,” I said, “they’re faded and smaller, but they’re all over my body. A couple here.” I pulled down my turtleneck and craned my neck just so.
“You’re so beautiful,” she repeated. “It’s a miracle. If you could have seen yourself, well, good thing you couldn’t. Dr. Marsden did good initial work on you, before the surgeries.” She nodded approvingly.
Surgeries? Plural?
Unlike the rest of the ward, the room we were in wasn’t air-conditioned. Perspiration raced down my back.
“One of the shards struck your spleen. The blood loss was…and, well, of course, your little body was just covered in blood, slick with it. Not your face. Apparently, your mother covered your face with a towel. You almost suffocated.”
She tried to suffocate me too? I couldn’t go there. The air got thicker, making it more difficult to catch a clear breath. “I’d like to know about my mother.”
“What do you know so far?” she whispered. Why was she whispering?
“Nothing!” Did I yell? Ethan put his arm around me. I shook it off and continued yelling. “I don’t know anything! I was taken to an orphanage, and they don’t know or wouldn’t tell and I have these dreams…Is she alive somewhere? I mean, I know you wouldn’t know where, and I don’t want to get you in trouble, but I don’t know anything. Zero, zilch! Please…”
The water cooler came to life, gurgling so aggressively that we all turned to confront it.
“I’m still not entirely sure that I should be the one to…” She turned back to me. “How could they not have told you?”
“Well, they didn’t!” Ethan shot out of his chair. “It’s crazy! She’s been racing around the city, begging for clues, but she doesn’t know hardly anything about herself! And that’s just not right. It’s 1964 not 1864. Could you please just tell her what you know.”
Nurse Sanchez seemed to be collecting herself. She did not look at me. “She died here, Antoinette.”
Died?
“Toni. I’m called Toni,” I said for no good reason. There seemed to be a faint, low buzz in the room.
Died…
My mother had been dead all these years. But I knew that. Really, I did. Deep in the darkest and ugliest part of my secret self—I knew. I always knew. Was that why I never allowed myself to pretend along with the Seven?
“Your mother succumbed to her injuries eight days after she was admitted.” Nurse Sanchez leaned over and rested her arms on her knees. “We didn’t know things back then like we do now, but I believe she wouldn’t have survived her injuries even today, even in the burn unit. It was…she was too…it was over 80 percent of her body.”
Did she try to kill herself? Kill us both? Was that it? My stomach felt like someone was wringing it out like a wet towel. “Did you—did anyone figure out if she was the one who set the fire?”
She turned sharply. “What? No! Oh, dear Lord, no. It was the owner. The police were all over us and her, looking for a statement. They never got it. She couldn’t remember anything, so he was never charged.” The nurse scrubbed her face with her hands. “I don’t think that either of you were supposed to be in the building at the time, but you were sick with a cold, so your mother stayed at home with you. We got that much. He was some small-time punk who owned a couple of buildings. Both of them were torched. The first one was just three weeks before. For the insurance money.” She got up and went to the gurgling water cooler and filled a tiny paper cone with water.
The cone was a thing of wonder. Why didn’t it leak? It was only paper, after all. Why didn’t it leak? The buzzing got louder, or was it a hum?
“No one got hurt in his first fire.” Nurse Sanchez crushed the cup and tossed it clear across the room. It hit the rim of the wastebasket and landed on the floor. No one moved. “We didn’t even get your full names for days after. The identification was in the building. She was just clutching a couple of pieces of paper, and they went to—”
“The orphanage? It must have been the playbill and the menu.”
“Perhaps. Those papers and your release went with you when you left. Your mother wasn’t lucid enough most of the time before she…”
“Died.” I finished for her.
“Yes. It was a hard passing. I’m sorry, Antoinette, Toni, but it was. Nurse Hamilton never saw anything like it, and she was as tough as nails even back then. Your mother wouldn’t let go, despite unbearable pain.” Nurse Sanchez sat down again. “She should have passed that first night. We stopped procedures, but she hung on and on.” Nurse Sanchez clasped her hands. “You have no idea what burn victims go through. But she wanted to pull through for you, Toni. That’s what Nurse Hamilton said. She had her for five shifts straight. The woman is a concrete wall, but there’s none better.”
I yanked my head out of the tunnel it was in. “For me?” But that didn’t make sense.
“She called and cried for you nonstop. They couldn’t calm her unless they knocked her right out, and she hated being knocked out, despite the agony. It tormented everyone on the floor.” Nurse Sanchez stood up again and walked over to the ambivalent plant, eyeing it like it was an intruder.
“The thing is, we were forbidden to bring you into the critical-care unit of the surgical ward. It was absolutely against the rules. Not only that, but you were in bad shape yourself after the surgeries and all that stitching up.” She slid her fingers over the plant’s few decaying leaves. “But it was crippling the floor. Her…situation touched us all. They couldn’t calm her. Your poor mom only got more and more agitated and desperate. They told her, promised her, that you were alive, but it did no good. As soon as she got out from under the latest drug load, she’d cry out for you. It got worse every day, every hour…”
I wrapped my arms around myself and started to rock. None of this made sense. Nurse Sanchez’s story did not line up with any of my own charred memories.
“So one night, Nurse Hamilton and I arranged the whole thing. Dr. Marsden was off duty, and the other resident was too scared of Nurse Hamilton to be a problem. I took you out of your bed, still attached to the IV pole. You really were a wee little thing. Anyway, I brought you and the pole to the surgical ICU window. Nurse Hamilton and an orderly moved her bed around and cranked it up as high as it would go. The pain must have been excruciating, but your mom wouldn’t let them stop.” She turned away from the plant. Tears slid quietly down Nurse Sanchez’s face. “I held you up as high as I could, and you put your bandaged little hands against the window. And…and your mom tried to raise her hand. She looked…it was…” Nurse Sanchez put her head in her hands. “I don’t know how you weren’t terrified at the sight of her, but you didn’t recoil. It was unbelievable. Somehow you knew her, knew it was still your mom under all of that. Oh God, what a sight.”
Ethan, who had been pacing, sat back down.
“You kept calling out, ‘Mommy, mommy,’ and wriggled like the devil trying to get to her. Your mother wasn’t able to smile, but she kept her hand right up and trying to wave, trying to reassure you. I can’t imagine what it cost her. ‘I want to go home, Mommy!’ I can still hear you in my head. She even tried to nod, she really did. And then you cried, and Lord knows we cried right along with you.”
There was a knock on the door, and we all started. Nurse Hamilton stepped inside and then thought better of it. “I just wanted to check in.”
Ethan produced a fairly clean handkerchief and handed it to Nurse Sanchez, who quickly wiped away her tears.
“I see,” sighed Nurse Hamilton. “Does the child remember any of it?”
They turned to me. No, “the child” did not. How could I not? I was wracked with guilt that I didn’t. “No,” I whispered. “I don’t remember.”
Nurse Hamilton nodded. Just before she closed the door again, I heard her say, “Just as well. It’s just as well.”
The interruption gave Nurse Sanchez a moment to compose herself. “I brought you back, kicking and screaming.” She smiled at the memory. “Your mother passed that night, as peacefully as she could. She was just waiting. Nurse Hamilton understood that. Your mom just needed to see you, to know that you’d live.” Nurse Sanchez sighed. “Nobody knew, or if they did, they didn’t talk. It stayed a secret. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything as important in all the years since.”
It was a story. Just a story. It was a story about a little girl and her mother and a fire. Like the story Scarlet Sue had told. Now the buzzing was in my head, like an electric wire. Oh sure, it was a tragedy, I got that, but still, it was just a story. It didn’t touch me now, not really. It couldn’t. I might as well have been reading it from one of the professor’s books.
Still, I had questions about this story. I wanted to ask them, but my lips kept getting stuck to my teeth. I had to keep licking them and sliding my tongue around before the words, one by one, broke free.
“But then…see…it doesn’t make sense. I…don’t understand. Why did she try to kill me? She hurt me…the glass. I can remember it piercing. I can hear the glass shattering. I remember that part. That part is true!”
Nurse Sanchez stared at me in stark astonishment. Her hand flew to her chest. “Oh, dear Lord, Toni, no! She only suffered through that hell for you. Your mother saved your life.”
“But the glass shattered and—”
“Because she shattered it to get you out!” Nurse Sanchez gripped the arms of the chair as if to hold it in place. “We knew that from the firemen. They said you were in a basement flat with only a small window at street level, high above the floor. Apparently, the fire started in the furnace room and broke through the walls fast. Your mother kept throwing a toaster at the window until it began to shatter, but it wasn’t fast enough. Toni, she put a towel over your face, got on a chair and used your body to finish the shattering, and then she shoved you through it, all torn up, just before she succumbed to smoke inhalation.”
“Stay still! Tight like a ball!”
I was right. I was wrong.
Ethan walked over to the water cooler and offered Nurse Sanchez another cup of water, which she accepted. “It’s over. Don’t you see, Toni? She did do it—she hurt you.” He said it with a gentleness I didn’t know anyone possessed. “But she did it to get you out.”
I could barely hear him, the buzzing in my head was so loud.
“He’s right. She used up everything she had. That’s what the fireman said.” Nurse Sanchez nodded. “They couldn’t get to her in time.”
The universe overturned so violently I thought I’d pass out. I was unmoored. Black was white and up was down. My mother had saved my life by sacrificing her own. My mother held on in unendurable pain until she saw that I was safe. I had hated her for almost fourteen years.
Who was the monster now?
I can’t.
I won’t.
I did.
I ran.
I bolted from the chair before either of them could blink.
I ran down the long, long corridor. I passed the elevators—too slow—and ran down seven flights of stairs, tripping through tears and gasping until I got outside to run some more. I ran and I ran and I ran and still could not outrun myself.
I never could.