“Marlinchen!” I yelled, again.
“Sarah!” she called back, and there was relief in her voice. Authority was here. “Help me!”
She didn’t want me to get her out; that wasn’t what she meant by help. She wanted me to come in and fight the fire with her.
“Come to me!” I yelled back. “You’re going to-” I’d been about to say die if you stay here, but cut myself off, afraid Hugh was awake and lucid enough to hear me. If he was, there was little more terrible to imagine than his situation: aware but not mobile, at the mercy of circumstances, wholly dependent on someone else to save him.
I changed tactics. “The firefighters are almost here!” I called to Marlinchen. “They’ll get him down safe! But you have to come out now!”
“I can’t!” she told me, shaking her head again, then swinging a wet sheet at the flames closest to the bed. “Come in and help me!”
Then something happened that nearly made my heart stop: she dropped to her knees, coughing, blinded by smoke. I thought this was it; she was overcome.
“Marlinchen, come to me!” I yelled. But even in her coughing fit, she shook her head.
I glanced up at the bed again. Water was streaming from Hugh’s nearly closed eyes. I knew it was the smoke that was causing it, but it looked to me like tears. A mental image of my own father, dead now, flashed across my mind like a spark of static electricity, and a grief as strong as nausea made my stomach roll over.
I made a decision. I wasn’t going to look at Hugh again. I couldn’t look at him and tell the truth, and if I didn’t tell the truth, Marlinchen might not live.
“Listen to me!” I yelled to her. “Three things can happen here! Three people can die in here tonight. That’s what’ll happen if I go in and try to help you. Or two people can die. That’s what’ll happen if I leave you here. Or just one person can die, and two will be saved.”
Marlinchen probably couldn’t see me through the smoke and her streaming eyes, but her face turned in my direction. She got to her feet. Blinded, she stumbled forward.
As she did, I pried a thumbnail under the bottom edge of the window screen, trying to keep a one-handed balance on the trellis. I forced the screen upward and loose from its track along the windowsill. It gave way, and the bottom corner of its metal frame sliced sideways across my forehead, a quick scratch like that of a fingernail, and then it was bouncing down the bowed-out trellis frame, the leaves shivering wherever it hit.
“Okay, we’re cool,” I assured Marlinchen, who was wedged in the now-open window. “I’m going to ease down a little to make room for you, but I’ll keep my hand here”- I had one hand on her lower leg-“so you’ll always know where I am.”
I hoped I sounded confident. The truth was, I had the beginnings of a Chihuahua shake in my legs from holding my place on the trellis.
“Just put one leg down and find a foothold,” I said, “and we’ll just climb down easy, one step at a time.”
A fine plan, totally worthless. When Marlinchen put her weight on the trellis, the whole thing gave way. I saw a flying white moon, smoke, the lake, and then the whole planet hit my back, then the back of my head. Marlinchen was more fortunate. I broke her fall.
34
The familiar smell of cyanoacrylate glue brought me to my senses, but this wasn’t the lingering scent of old fumes. It was sharp and fresh. My eyes were closed, but I felt someone touching my forehead with gentle fingers.
“I should own stock in the superglue business,” I said, eyes still closed.
“Shh,” a low, familiar voice said. “You’re shaking my hand.”
I opened my eyes and wasn’t surprised to see Cicero. I’d recognized his voice a second earlier. What I was a little less clear on were the events leading up to being on Cicero ’s exam table once again.
I remembered the fire at the Hennessy place, and scattered events after that. I remembered Colm by my side. He’d led me to a safe distance from the burning house, and encouraged me to lean on him, and I did, grateful for his young strength and his disobedience in coming back for me. I remember emergency vehicles at the fireground, and trying to help because I couldn’t grasp the idea that I was at the scene as a patient, not a first responder. A crowded ER waiting room, then a quiet place, someone speaking to me in a low, calm voice. Cicero ’s voice.
“I can’t believe you’re gluing me back together,” I said.
“A doctor’s trick, not to be tried at home,” he said, sitting back.
“I didn’t think I was hurt,” I said. I remembered the sharp corner of the window screen scraping across my forehead, but it had seemed like nothing, a scratch from a kitten’s claw.
“Oh, it’s a pretty bad cut. Don’t touch it,” he reprimanded as I lifted my hand toward my forehead. “I’ll show you.”
He rolled away in his chair, came back with a hand mirror, and held it up in front of me.
“Holy shit,” I said. Only now did I remember blinking blood out of my eyes, more than once. Blood that had dried now on my nose, cheekbones, even my chin.
“It looks worse than it is.” Cicero was rolling away again. “You’ve got a little swelling on the back of your head, also, but nothing too serious,” he said. “You were holding some ice on it for me, do you remember that?”
“No,” I said.
“Otherwise you’re fine. I’m going to get you a little more ice. Can you throw me that cloth?”
I looked around and saw a wet, pale-green washcloth on the exam table next to me. I picked it up and started to rise, but Cicero, at the edge of his kitchen, merely held up his hand. My throw was a little off, but Cicero adjusted and caught it backhanded.
When he came back, he had the ice, as well as a clean cloth in a small, stainless-steel bowl of soapy water. I took the ice pack from him and held it to my head. It wasn’t hard to locate the injury by the dull ache I felt there, as well as the dampness of the hair around it. Cicero set the bowl down and wrung out the rag.
I saw what he was going to do. “I can wash my own face, in the bathroom,” I said.
“I know you can,” Cicero said. “But I want you to sit still and keep applying that ice pack, and in the meantime, I’m tired of feeling sorry for you unnecessarily because you look like you just went ten rounds with Lennox Lewis when it’s nowhere near that bad.”
I submitted to his ministrations, like a child, closing my eyes as he gently scrubbed dried blood from my skin.
“I need to tell you something,” Cicero said. “The last time you were here, you mentioned my brother’s death.”
“We don’t have to talk about that,” I said, opening my eyes.
“Yes, we do,” he said. “You were afraid that I equated you with the officers who shot Ulises.” His voice was soft and level, like always. “I don’t. You’re nothing like them.”
“You’ve never seen me on the job,” I said.
“I never spoke to those men,” Cicero told me. “They never came to me, to explain what happened. You would have come. Am I wrong about that?”
“No,” I said honestly. “I would have.”
Cicero nodded and went on with his work. The sensation on my skin was hypnotic, as was the sound of the soaking of the cloth, the splatter of water falling back into the bowl as he rinsed and wrung the cloth, a second time and then a third.
“You weren’t too clear on how this happened,” he said. “Something about a house fire and falling from a window during a rescue, is that about right?”
“Basically,” I said. “Why?”
Cicero let the cloth float in the bowl and handed me a towel to dry my face with. “You put yourself in dangerous situations a lot, Sarah,” he said. “Pulling kids from a drainage canal, and now this.”
“That’s only twice,” I said.
“Twice in the time I’ve known you,” he corrected. “Which is a little over a month.”