Erin hauled him to his feet by sheer force of her indomitable will. Dale’s dismembered brain snatched frantically at images, all of them disconnected and painful. From the hallway, the smoke alarm gave off the high-pitched peeping of a terrified mechanical bird. In the distance he might have heard a baby screaming, which should have had him flying down the hall. But his legs didn’t seem to want to connect with his thoughts.
Erin let him go, and he bounced off the bed’s corner post before slamming into the hardwood floor.
His two old injuries both started flaming again. For an instant, as the pain thudded louder than the shrill peeping, he wondered if somehow the dream had managed to finally breach the barrier and enter his nighttime world.
Erin slapped his face and screamed at him. “Move!”
This was something she had never done. Not even in their worst moments, right after her arrival in Wilmington, two months pregnant and panic-stricken at becoming just another has-been, a woman who once was famous. Back when he finally realized his love could never compete with her voice and her career.
Then he smelled the smoke.
Dale lurched to his feet. He almost fell, but caught himself with a two-armed embrace of the bedpost. Erin was only half dressed and her hair hung tangled about her face. The baby was there in the room with them. Celeste lay upon a towel on the floor, squalling and kicking in panic. His daughter watched him with eyes that pleaded for him to pull himself together.
“Hurry!”
Then he saw the smoke.
Somehow he managed to get into his pants. He struggled with a shirt Erin handed him, then flung it aside. He slipped into the first shoes he found, from two different sets and on the wrong feet. But it didn’t matter, because the smoke was pouring under the bedroom door.
Erin had the baby in her arms, wrapped in a wet towel with another draped around her head. Erin handed him a third, but he couldn’t make it work and still see where he was going. So he tossed it down. Then he had to pick it up again after he opened the door and met a solid, billowing wall.
The smoke was acrid and it burned. He peered down the hall but saw no flames. He started forward, pulling Erin along behind him. The smoke’s heat was something unexpected. His mind remained disconnected, like sparks flying up and disappearing into the final night.
He moved on reflex alone. Dale entered the guest bedroom over the slanting sunporch roof and rushed to the window. When he could not get it open he broke it with a chair, tearing out the entire frame and terrifying his baby girl even further.
He stepped onto the roof, almost lost his balance, then turned back for the child. Erin refused to hand her over, but instead let him help her step out. Together they scrambled around to the north side, where the smoke was less intense. They slipped over the lip of the roof and climbed down the trellis.
They stumbled across the back lawn and down to where his yacht was moored on the canal dock. It seemed to take forever to quiet the baby, but it had to be done before he could even hear what Erin was saying. “You have to call the fire department.”
Even now that his heart no longer threatened to shatter his ribs from the inside, he still could not make his brain connect properly to his tongue. “Automatic.”
Though the word came out slurred and distorted to his own ears, it was enough to catapult Erin to her feet. “What?”
“They installed a new security system after the break-in.”
She turned panic-stricken eyes toward where flames began pushing through the kitchen window. “I can’t be seen here! Not by anyone, not now! The press will eat me alive!”
Erin cupped his chin with both her hands, weaving her head so that it stayed centered upon his wandering gaze. Or perhaps it was merely his internal focus that moved. “You can’t take care of the baby in all this, not without a home. You understand that, don’t you? I’ll go and take the baby until things are settled down. Can you understand what I’m saying?”
Dale was trying his best, but the drink still had his brain in a vise that squeezed all thoughts into a boiling mash.
Erin took a moment to pull her clothes right. Then she picked up Celeste. Their daughter immediately started to fret. Dale’s one last coherent thought, before he slipped back into the welcoming blankness, was the fury that crossed his former wife’s face as the baby began to squall.
CHAPTER 2
The first time she sees the darkness revealed, the child is seven years old. It will be another seven before she has a name for what she sees. If she has to name it now, it would be terror.
She has to dress up for dinner, and beneath her sky-blue dress she has on a starched petticoat and white socks and polished black shoes. She wears a matching velvet-silk ribbon in her hair. Her mother comes in at precisely six-fifteen to make sure she is dressed. Her mother has a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. She leaves lipstick stains on the rim of her cigarette as she smokes. The ice tinkles in her glass as she stands over her daughter and surveys her above the rim of her drink.
“Head up straight. Okay,” her mother says. “Now give me your best curtsy.”
That usually means there will be important people for dinner. Tonight her mother has a flat void in her gaze. Her mother has very pale eyes. But sometimes they grow dark and shadow-filled. Like now. Instantly the child knows it is going to be a very bad night.
The sick fear begins to flood her legs, and she flubs the curtsy. But her mother’s attention is already downstairs. She rolls herself off the doorframe and leaves without another word.
The child knows something is wrong inside her family. People tend to think that a seven-year-old child is not worth noticing. So they show her things they assume she cannot understand. The child has a space behind the parlor sofa where she has built a little corner all her own. A wormwood table with legs narrow as fairy pillars backs up against the pale velour sofa. They know she is there, or at least they should. She crouches there almost every evening before dinner.
There isn’t much the child can do for fun, dressed as she is. So she takes two of her favorite dolls and she slips beneath the Irish linen tablecloth. The table bears two crystal decanters, one for her father’s scotch and the other for her mother’s gin, along with a beaded silver ice bucket and a lead-crystal bowl filled with roses. Her little hideaway is filled with the scent of fresh flowers and light filtered through the damask. It should be a perfect fairy palace. She is supposed to only come in this parlor with her parents before dinner, or when her mother orders her to help serve tea to guests. But on rainy afternoons she sneaks in so she can create a world of soft light and perfumed bliss. But tonight the prince and princess do not transport her to a more beautiful and happy land. No matter how she moves them about or whispers words for them to say, her hands hold two plastic figures with lies for smiles.
“You went out to the tracks again, didn’t you.”
“Of course not.”
The child’s fingers slip, and the plastic man with the sparkling crown and perfect teeth falls to the carpet. She picks him up and tries to concentrate harder. But the words from beyond the damask will not leave her alone.
“I had a conference that took all afternoon.”
“Where?”
Her father rattles the ice in his glass and walks over. She can see her reflection in the polished toe of his hand-stitched broughams. “At the office. Where else?”