She can’t speak; she only nods.
More people keep coming from the stairs. They are screaming and sobbing, some of them bloody. Another crash above them and everyone shrieks; the lights flicker, go out, come back on again. She thinks about the people hooked up to machines, the people they left behind. Soon there is hardly room to sit, bodies pressed so close around her she fights the urge to panic.
Breathe in, she thinks. Breathe out. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine the mountain air, but all she can picture is fire on the mountain too.
The mountain. The ones on the mountain, and fire.
Is he there? she wonders. Is he all right?
When she opens her eyes, B is crouched in front of her, Greta silent in his arms, her eyes wide and searching. “Look at me,” he says. “Heather—it’s all right.”
“It’s not all right.” She wants to scream out loud, but whispers. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He reaches his free hand out and once more grasps her elbow. “But we’re here. We’re okay. Everything will be okay.”
She wants to scream again at this; she only looks at him, then nods. Breathe in, breathe out. She holds Jilly close and breathes in her crumpled newness—the soft velvet of her bright-red head, the folds of skin at her neck.
Mine, she thinks. Mine.
Another crash above them, and the lights begin to flicker. The room fills with screaming.
“Calm down,” B calls out. “Everyone—calm down.”
She feels a hinge of disbelief in the air. She feels people turn their faces to his voice.
“Calm down?” a voice calls. “What do you mean, calm down?”
“There’s nothing we can do right now,” B says. “We just have to wait.”
“Wait for what?” Another voice, this time from what sounds like the opposite side of the room.
Beside her B stands up and clears his throat. “I don’t know,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s safe to go outside.”
There is a moment of silence in the room—she feels them all look up to the darkness above. Crashes—fainter now, but still there.
“Is it an earthquake?” someone says.
“Maybe,” B says.
But Heather shakes her head. “Not an earthquake.” She thinks of the fire raining down from the sky.
“Well,” he says, then he speaks so everyone can hear. “Whatever it is—we can’t go outside. We just have to wait.”
“What if we’re trapped?” someone else says. “How do we get out?”
“We’ll get out,” B says. “We just have to be patient.”
There is another crash, louder than all the ones before it. The lights go out, and do not come back on.
This time there are no screams—only a whimper that reverberates around the room. Nothing else crashes above them. People check their phones again, lose calls. Hello? Hello?
The girls fall asleep, eventually. The sobs of those around Heather gradually soften and go quiet. Above them the wind wails cold and lonely. A tornado, maybe. Or some other kind of madness.
B tries to stretch his legs out in front of him, but there’s no room. “I hate closed spaces,” he mutters. Gone is the man who was so steadfast only a short time before. There’s a vulnerability in his voice that reminds her of the night they met—drunk ramblings at the bar, the sweetness of his palm in hers as they stumbled down the street. They’d gone to the same high school. She hardly remembered him. She hardly remembered anybody. Everyone in the city was a stranger to her, even the people she’d known all her life.
The sweetness of his palm. That sudden rush of animal power as they fell together in the park, the dirt on her knees, the faraway-ness of the stars. She looked up and saw the mountain’s deeper shadow in the dark sky—she felt its power pour down around her as she came, in a rush of rage and longing, and then it was gone and she was only sweaty on the grass, B once more sweet above her, mildly surprised.
He held her hand as he walked her home, and after he kissed her at her door she went inside, sure she’d never see him again. A nice boy, but what was there to talk about? They’d shared one thing, and that was enough.
He sent her texts—she didn’t remember his name, had him listed only as B. She ignored the messages until the day, weeks later, when she found herself staring at a pregnancy test in the dim light of her bathroom.
She would get an abortion, obviously. She was thirty-seven, single—it was the only thing to do. Except that she didn’t and one day passed and then another, and she stopped drinking and made an appointment with her doctor and bought herself the vitamins that she recommended. Then she went to her mother’s house.
Everyone has to grow up sometime, Heather, was what her mother said.
She knew that they were two before the doctors did. Twin girls. She wanted them; she was afraid of them too. She worried about premature births, about a delivery like her mother’s—prolonged and difficult, brain damage from oxygen deprivation in the birth canal. She dreamed about two girls who came into the world with a gait just like hers—rollicking, uneven, one side of each tiny body unable to function quite like the rest. Muscles that didn’t stretch quite the way they should, feet twisted from a brain that gave weak signals. Their twinned futures slices of bullied days on the schoolyard. Cerebral palsy. Cerebral loser. Stupid fucking spaz.
She didn’t want them to grow up without a dad. And so she looked up B’s last text and sent him a message, and then there was coffee, and then dinner, and sometime after that there was a shy proposal and she said yes because there was nothing else to say, and then there was a wedding. She looked surprised in the photos, not quite sure how she got there, her belly big under its covering of grey lace.
His name is Brendan, but to her he is only B. She reaches over, takes his hand, takes her turn at being reassuring. “Everything will be okay,” she says. Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness and she sees him smile a little.
Then Jilly starts to cry. Greta, in B’s arms, lets out a wail. Heather feels the fear in the room spike again, mouths around them open and ready to scream.
In front of her, low to the ground, a fox materializes out of nowhere. Its blue eyes open and blink at her.
Blue eyes, like the sky. Two tiny bodies suckling against her orange-grey fur.
Heather catches her breath, looks around—no one else seems to notice the fox. She watches it stand up as its babies gently fall, then carry them one by one over to the wall, stepping lightly around the people huddled on the floor. No one moves. No one notices.
In front of the foxes, the wall shimmers and then disappears. Beyond it, the green reaches of the mountain, a flash of bright blue sky. No fires. The fox turns to look at her.
She wants to gather up her own babies and run to the wall, through stone and onto mountain grass. She can hardly breathe.
B’s hand on her elbow, again. “Heather.” His voice is urgent. “Heather, please.”
The babies are now wailing at the top of their lungs. She looks at the portal again, at the foxes who wait, and then back at B.
“There was a fox,” she says, and the babies—and the wails of the people around them—quiet. Like magic. The silence that comes after this is puzzled, unsure. The foxes at the wall cock their heads and look at her; the mountain beyond them shimmers grey-green and blue.
“What fox?” It is a child who asks. Heather shifts so that B can put Greta in her lap. She gathers both babies close, takes a breath. The entire room is silent now, waiting.