Jacob twisted the knob and pulled back, the gap in the door showed dark, then yellow and red and blue and white leaped through the opening like twisted and howling sheets of wet metal.
The flames lapped at Jacob, raced over his body, singed the hair on his arms and chest and groin. He fell backward against the hot gale while the fire kicked the door wide. The oxygen lifeblood of the fire pulsed forward in both directions and funneled toward the fuel of the hall. Jacob rolled over, heart heavy as a hearthstone as he crawled once more toward Mattie’s room.
She squatted at the foot of her bed in Winnie the Pooh pajamas, stuffed animals huddled around her for protection. Flames crept from the edges of the ceiling. The wallpaper border featuring Sesame Street characters fell away, showing the darkened faces of Big Bird, Elmo, and the Cookie Monster.
“Stay down, honey,” Jacob yelled, his breath a swarm of razors as it slashed his windpipe.
“Daddy,” she said, pleading, as if she were like the smoke detector and had been programmed for one terrible sound.
He forced himself to rise into a crouch and moved through the orange rectangle of the burning doorway. He could see her eyes now, so wide, so scared, eyes like Renee’s, and then fear for Renee gripped him, sluiced through his bloodstream like menthol, and he wondered why he had left his wife alone.
Because you’re not like him. Because you can’t fail.
He couldn’t fail. Not Jacob Daniel Wells, the man who had it all. Not bulletproof Jake, who could buy his luck and whose ladders led only upwards. Not the man with the Midas touch, who had gold at his fingertips and gold for guilt and gold now eating his house and flesh and family, taking back everything it had ever given.
No. It wasn’t taking Mattie. He wouldn’t let it.
He clawed toward her, blew the smoke aside, huffed and puffed like the wolf in Mattie’s bedtime story. Fire hissed at him, outraged by his defiance. Its insistent voice tickled the dry paper of his eardrums and filled his head: Surrender.
Only one of us can have everything, and it’s not you.
“No,” he shouted, reaching for Mattie. Because he saw her, all of her, the smoke parting as if the fire’s master wanted to play one final, cruel joke of revelation.
Her pajamas had melted to her skin. Her body quivered, cold and hot, her flesh shrink-wrapped to her bones. Her stuffed alligator had dissolved into a goo of synthetic fibers around her hand. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream. Except with her eyes.
And her eyes screamed plenty.
“Wish me,” they said.
He touched her, afraid to touch her, not knowing where she was least damaged. He was oblivious to the fire now, as if it were a Red Sea that had parted, a miracle that allowed him not escape but a single path for his eternal soul.
Then he lifted her, the window exploded from the heat and the stress of collapsed wood, the detector gave a last long wail of agony, the ceiling folded in, the fire stoked itself, the embers made their bed upon his back, the night pressed its black boot upon them both, and his last thought was that he’d forgotten to give Mattie a goodnight kiss when he’d tucked her in.
And he couldn’t now, because she had no lips.
CHAPTER TWO
This dream was one of darkness, set in a cool, timeless place, like the underwater bottom of a grotto.
Jacob found he didn’t need to breathe this time. Breathing had been a bother all along, an endless exercise in futility, air in and out toward no purpose. Suffocating was so much easier. Breathlessness almost seemed a natural state.
Far above, like a distant moon over a thick sky, was a soft circle of light. Its gravity disturbed his peace, a slight but insistent pull that mirrored the moon’s effect on ocean tides. He tried to fight, but his muscles urged him to surrender, to drift upward. His arms and legs floated effortlessly in the cold waters of the grotto, his lungs took their fill, his eyes stared at the hazy circle of light that grew ever larger.
As he ascended, the layers of dreams separated like a series of skins, peeled away until he was pink and naked and raw. And now the moon was brighter, the water warmer, the sky pressing closer. His lungs ached, the soothing liquid rushing out only to be replaced by jagged stones. The tug of gravity intensified, pulling him faster toward a surface of confusion.
Jacob wanted to scream, but the grotto ate his words. The swelling brightness of the moon corresponded to bright feelings in his fingers, sparks of ice, arctic static.
The moon grew whiter, took over the world, and he recognized the energy that now flowed through his body.
Pain.
He awoke to razors and needles and shards of glass and the dull crush of tons. For a panicked moment, he thought he was being cremated alive, that he’d been brought back to consciousness for one final torment before the deliverance of eternal slumber.
Then the pain lost its thousand sharp edges and became a giant cresting wave of agony, one whose amplitude rose ever higher. The wave turned into a scream that crashed with the echo of his daughter’s name.
Matilda Suzanne Aldridge Wells.
Matilda after Renee’s mother, a woman who had hated her own name. Suzanne because that was Jacob’s first choice, and they’d haggled about hyphenating Mattie’s last name. Aldridge-Wells. But Renee pointed out that she herself had taken the Wells name and the hyphen wouldn’t make sense unless she changed back to her maiden name. Or else Jake would have to take Renee’s name. In either case, the paperwork was too daunting: social security forms, credit cards, insurance policies, Jake’s business records, trappings of a modern American society where every person had a number and too many parents were making up confusing names for their children.
And Matilda became Mattie, though Jacob called her “Matilda” in the soft twilight of her room, in the space between bedtime stories and night-night kisses, or on those rare occasions when Mattie’s misbehavior ranked as a full-name offense. She was Matilda at both extremes of emotion, in deep anger and gentle, aching appreciation. And that was the name that crossed his lips now, as he plunged up through the surface and the moon exploded around him.
“What’s that?” came a foreign voice, probably the voice of that strange moon pushed by a dry wind.
“Matilda.” His own ears couldn’t recognize the sound that passed his lips.
“Don’t speak, Mr. Wells.”
Jacob tried to speak anyway, but felt the tube that lay on his tongue and snaked down his throat. He blinked into the bright lunar face but its haziness remained. Gauze lay across his eyes. He shivered in the white light, afraid of everything, wishing the grotto would suck him back down into its placid waters.
A gentle hand touched his arm and he yelped at the contact. A machine hissed in a rhythm that both mimicked and mocked life. It was breathing for him, sending oxygen into the tube, through his lungs and heart and bloodstream. Jacob tried to lift his head, but it felt impossibly heavy, a chunk of charred granite.
“Relax, Mr. Wells.”
The voice was soothing, distant. Jacob licked his lips around the tube. Through the gauze, he could make out the brown face, the white coat, the spotlight he’d mistaken for the moon.
“Thirsty,” Jacob said, having trouble with the sibilant due to the dryness of his mouth.
“You’ve got an IV,” the distant voice said. The voice was richly accented, West African or something equally exotic. “It may be a day or two before you can drink again.”
Jacob blinked against the gauze, his eyes stinging. After a moment of looking at the vague shapes of machinery and the tubes dangling around him, he closed his eyes. “Where am I?”
“Littlejohn Memorial.”
Hospital.
Kingsboro, North Carolina.
Where he’d once lived and probably still did.
So this wasn’t heaven, or even an antechamber to the land of the dead. Or perhaps it was. Maybe this was his punishment, a purgatory of pain and equipment, a life sentence for his failures.