“The firefighters will get your father down,” I said. “They have the equipment and the training.”
I spoke with more confidence than I felt. By the time the fire crew arrived, it would probably be too late for a 170-pound invalid to be borne out of the house. Colm saw that truth in my eyes. He opened his mouth to speak again, but then succumbed to a fit of coughing.
“This is how rescuers get killed,” I said.
With one last, agonized glance into his father’s darkened bedroom, he nodded agreement. I put a hand between his shoulder blades and urged him toward the stairs.
Out on the deck, much of my skin felt as though I’d been lying down on a giant skillet. It was likely that Colm felt the same way. I pushed him down in front of the spigot and turned it on, and he splashed water on his face, chest, and arms. When he moved back, I was about to do the same, when I noticed something that troubled me.
“Where is Marlinchen?” I asked.
Colm, hair dripping, straightened up to look around. Liam had his hands on Donal’s shoulders, and he too looked mystified.
“No! Fuck!” I was so angry, Colm flinched at the sound of my voice, even under the circumstances. Marlinchen had gone in for Hugh. Her words by the graveside-I won’t lift a finger to help him- were just words. When push came to shove, she’d fallen back into the old patterns. Sacrificing her welfare for his.
I faced the three boys. “Okay, you guys get back,” I ordered them. “Way, way back, down the driveway, where it’s safe. And stay there. If Marlinchen or I don’t come out, do not come in after us. Understood?”
They nodded.
Moving as quickly as I could, I dropped to my knees and turned the spigot back on. I put my head under, soaking my hair, the water like ice as it scrawled along my scalp. I pulled off my shirt, soaked that, put it back on. Then I went back in.
As soon as I looked into the house again, I knew I couldn’t get up to the second floor. The stairs were aflame; to try to run up them would be suicide. The only way up to the second floor was blocked off.
I went back out the front door, circled the house to stand under the high window, Hugh’s window facing the lake. The grape blossoms on the trellis were tightly closed, puckered and grayish. The trellis. It had held Jacob’s weight. It would hold mine.
The wooden framework groaned and pulled forward as I put my whole weight on it, but it stayed standing, and I started to climb. The leaves brushed against my face as I did, and even through the smoke I could smell a faint, sweet odor from the closed blooms.
Hugh’s sliding window was open as wide as possible behind the screen. Marlinchen’s work, I thought, getting fresh air in the room. Hugh was on the bed, chest quivering irregularly with what might be little coughs, from the smoke. I remembered the sleeping pill Marlinchen had given him, and wondered how aware he really was.
Light spilled from the master bathroom, and then Marlinchen’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. She held a bunched sheet in her hands. She’d filled the bathtub with water, I realized, and was soaking sheets and towels to fight the flames that had already spread into Hugh’s room.
“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.