“Not if she came through before everyone else, before anyone knew to be on the lookout. I know who she is! She’s the test.”
“There was a test?” Hel let go without thinking. She didn’t understand.
Dwayne had found the camping lantern. He turned it on, pointed it at Teresa Klay. They all looked at her.
“I burned your book. I did. I did it.” Her glasses had been pushed askew, but her eyes did not stray from Hel’s. “I’m not one of you. I wouldn’t go back, not even if it was possible. And believe me, it isn’t.”
A marvel, Hel thought, the ferocity of her determination to destroy all evidence of her past, when her past and Hel’s were as ephemeral as anyone else’s—neither to be held, nor fully released.
Now Dwayne swung the lantern toward the painting. She could see its surface, dappled and marred by streaks of discoloration where the gasoline had touched it. The desperate hand rubbed out. She saw it and wondered: Where was the impact? Staring at the place in the ocean where she knew the artist had painted that drowning sailor, she remembered how it had been for her, the first time she’d thought The Shipwreck gone, in the old school upstate. She didn’t feel that now.
Klay by the lakeside, telling her to breathe. Klay on the bench, her arm around Hel’s shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter, really,” Hel said, not sure to whom she was speaking. She reached out for Klay, who looked as if she were about to bolt for the stairs. She wrapped her arms around her, an authoritarian hug. In that moment, she reminded herself of Seff, comforting Hel and berating her at the same time. The sirens wailed louder now, very near. “You know, oil paint itself is flammable. You didn’t need the extra fuel.”
Something with hard edges poked against her stomach. Hel lifted the tail of Klay’s shirt. Tucked into her waistband, a paperback.
“No! I burned it up,” Klay insisted, even as Hel drew it out.
The paper cover, robin’s egg blue.
Hel held it between them, in the light. After a moment, Vikram reached out, lifted it from her hands.
Vikram waited under the overhang by the entrance of the Home Depot in Jamaica as the snow swept down at an angle. He watched plows clear the lot, watched another inch accumulate, and watched it cleared a second time before he spotted a pickup with an extended cab skidding in from 168th Street and slaloming around the cart corral. Hel stepped out of the driver’s side, bundled up in a parka he didn’t recognize. The wind lifted tendrils of her black hair, sending them dancing. She beckoned at him, then got back in.
Pulling up his hood, Vikram closed the distance between them. All the way, the snow found his unprotected face like a swarm of tiny, stinging insects. He fumbled for the door handle. “What?”
“Still fifteen minutes before they open,” she said. “I thought you might want to wait out of the weather.”
The big cab felt small to him. The two of them hadn’t been alone in a room together since Hel had come to Jerome Avenue to move her things out of his apartment, more than a year ago. They’d both agreed that was a good idea, at the time.
“Thanks,” Vikram said now.
“Thanks for not cancelling on me, like everyone else.”
Before leaving his house, he’d double-checked the online message-board service Hel used now to organize volunteers. There was her post: still on! with no comments. “Not a problem,” he said. He took off his gloves, flexed his fingers. They stung as circulation returned. “Nice ride, by the way. Who does it belong to?”
“Hector. You’ve been to a couple of workdays—I think you must have met him. Tall Puerto Rican guy with glasses? He helped Eden do the power washing.”
“It’s awfully high off the ground. And that little bench seat back there? Is that really necessary?”
“I’ll take what I can get,” Hel said. “Can’t transport a bunch of sheetrock on the subway.”
After that, they sat, not talking. Air from the vents blew on them, painfully hot, and on the other side of the glass, the silent storm progressed without other human witnesses. It would have been nice to think that maybe all the Home Depot employees had been given the day off at the last minute, but Vikram was acquainted with capitalism’s demands and doubted it. He was starting to worry about conditions on the roads back to Brownsville, though. The longer this took, the more dangerous it would be for Hel to drive with her load to the building the FDNY had saved and cleared.
Not that she wasn’t capable. He knew she was.
Hurt, he’d stayed away. When he came to a workday as a New Year’s resolution, he found a different woman, one who knew how to wire a switch and seal a corner. She seemed to be everywhere, delegating tasks to volunteers, defusing an argument she hadn’t even started. Happier than he’d ever seen her. Asking for help, when she needed it.
He tried not to take it personally.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Hel said. “Do you think we should leave?”
Just then, a kid in an orange vest came out and unlocked the front doors.
The cavernous store felt deserted. They couldn’t find anyone to ask for directions, so they walked aimlessly. Each aisle they peered down bristled with objects and tools. Vikram wasn’t sure which should be familiar and which were safely foreign. “Do you know what sheetrock looks like?”
“Yeah. I looked it up. It’s like a big sheet of…” She waved her hands. “I don’t know. Wall.”
“It’s big, right? I feel like it would be with the lumber. Definitely around the edge somewhere.” They circled the perimeter and found it in Building Materials. Vikram helped her load four-foot-by-eight-foot panels onto a low cart, and together, they guided it toward the front.
“You normally have your class,” she said. “On Thursday mornings. Don’t you?”
“It’s in the afternoon. Anyway, it’s cancelled.” He was taking a contemporary poetry class at CUNY in the Heights. It touched him so, the thought of Hel asking after him, that he stopped pushing his end. “How did you know about that?”
She’d stopped walking too. “I’m glad. I’d hate for you to miss out, for this.”
I would do anything for you.
No. Not appropriate. He swallowed the words. “I know the cottage is important.”
At the automatic checkout, she scanned and paid. “Have you ever heard that most couples divorce when their child dies?” Receipt paper from the machine sifted through her fingers. “It’s just too much trauma. Even though they shared the experience, it tears them apart.”
“Yes. I think I’ve read that.”
She put her gloved hand on his arm. “But what happened to us was sort of the opposite of that, don’t you think?”
“If that’s true,” he said, “what do you think it means?” All the aspects of his world and Hel’s that were gone, all the people and places they would never see again. And weighing against these deficiencies, the few things they’d saved. He felt the press of her fingers. “Maybe you and I know too much about each other to ever start fresh. Have you ever thought of that?”
“No,” she said. “You still love me. It’s good that you know me. And I like that you were there with me to see it.” With a heave, she got the cart of drywall moving again.
“To see what?”
Outside the automatic doors, the snow hadn’t paused. It blanketed the expanse of concrete once again. It had swallowed up their footprints. Together, they stepped out into the white.