“Oh, my Lord!” she whispered.
“What, what is it?”
“Smoke.”
“Is the smoke alarm going off?”
Phone to her ear, Polly swung her legs from the bed and took two steps toward the door.
Like a blind hungry ghost, smoke reached for her feet. Peach-colored paint on the door began to crack, black fissures snapping through, blistering like burned skin. She opened her mouth to scream for the girls but stopped herself. If Gracie and Emma heard her voice, they would wake and try to come to her.
“Don’t open the door. Don’t hang up. I’m coming,” Marshall was saying. Polly disconnected and pushed 911.
“Please, please, please,” she murmured to whatever gods listened as she ran for the bedroom window, the phone pressed hard to her ear. “There’s a fire,” she said when the emergency dispatcher answered and gave her address.
“Get out of the house immediately,” the dispatcher said. “The fire station nearest you was flooded after Katrina and has not been reopened. The closest trucks are fifteen to twenty minutes away. Stay calm.”
The bedroom’s one window was the only way out and it had been painted shut when Polly bought the house. Without hesitation, she picked up her dressing chair and smashed the glass.
The 911 dispatcher was still talking as she threw the phone out onto the grass. Shards of glass the size and viciousness of shark’s teeth razored out from the broken mullions. She’d be gutted like a fish. Using the legs of the chair, she cleared out as much glass as she could. Behind her, all around her, she could hear the fire snickering, licking, devouring, a thinking beast that roasted and ate human flesh. Again and again she banged at the old window, its many layers of paint holding onto daggers of glass like stubborn old gums to the few remaining teeth. Screaming an obscenity she’d grounded Gracie two weeks for using she threw the chair against the wall. Spinning from the wreckage she dragged the bedspread off the bed and shoved it through the opening. Belly on the sill, Polly began pushing her body through the ruined window.
A shard raked her left shoulder. The first hot pierce of glass then the rip as it clawed into her. All Polly felt was fury that it slowed her down. Grasping fistfuls of a rhododendron bush, she wrenched herself free from the window’s jaws and fell. Stiff branches caught at her clothes and grabbed at her hair until, screaming with rage, she made it onto the lawn. Staggering to her feet, she began to run. The house was smalclass="underline" two bedrooms separated by a short hall, with a bathroom on one side and the living room and kitchen on the other. It was no more than forty feet from her bedroom window to that of her daughters. In true nightmare fashion, the distance lengthened. Polly felt as if she forged her way through waist-deep mud, yet when she reached the corner of the house, her speed snatched her feet from under her on the dew-wet grass and she fell.
Two feet, hands and feet, it was all one to Polly. She clawed her way through the dense wall of sharp-spiked holly she’d planted beneath the girls’ window as a natural security fence. Cupping her hands around her eyes to shut out the streetlight’s glare, she peered through the burglar bars she’d had installed on this one window so she could sleep nights, unafraid of someone creeping into her children’s room and taking them, as those girls in California and Utah had been taken.
Billowing smoke pushed down from the ceiling like alien clouds in an old science fiction movie. Wraithlike and malevolent, it poured upward in a sheet from underneath the door. Emma’s Tinkerbell nightlight flickered in and out of focus. Inanely Polly thought, Clap if you believe in fairies.
The girls were asleep, each in her own little bed.
Or dead.
The thought hit Polly’s brain with the force of a wrecking ball, and she cried out, grabbing the ornate cast iron as if she could rip the bars from their moorings. “Gracie!” she shouted. The window was open a few inches, enough to let in the breeze. Polly pressed her lips to the crack, “Emma, Gracie, wake up!”
“Momma?” came Gracie’s sleepy reply.
“Wake up, honey. We’ve got a fire in the house and we have to go outside.” Polly’s voice was higher than usual, but she sounded reassuring. “No need to panic,” she said as much to herself as her daughter.
“Momma? Where are you?” Gracie was sitting up in the bed now, staring at the smoke crawling up the far wall.
“At the window, honey. Here. That’s right. I’m going to get you out. Wake up your sister, but don’t scare her, okay?”
Polly pulled on the bars. They were iron and screwed into the side of the house. She tried to shake them. They didn’t even rattle.
“Firemen will be here in a minute,” she promised. The little house was old: shingled roof, oak floors, walls of wood and plaster. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar tinderbox.
“Gracie, stop,” Emma whined.
“Wake up, Momma said. The house is on fire.” Gracie’s voice quavered, but she was pretending not to be scared. She was being brave for her sister. Polly thought she would die of love for her. With a guttural cry that brought both children to the window, she wrenched on the bars. They didn’t so much as creak.
“Stay by the window, my darlings. You hear me? Put your mouths up to the crack and breathe this good air. Don’t open it any wider, okay? It will make the fire want to come in faster. You just sit tight. Don’t open the door. I’m going to get you out.”
Breaking this tenuous connection with them hurt so deeply, pain knifed through her chest. Praying she wasn’t having a heart attack, Polly tore free of the holly and ran to the front of the house. Orange light danced in waves of heat. Gouts of flame cut through smoke billowing from the windows. Paint on the front door bubbled. Great heat blisters popped and breathed white vapor.
There was no way in. She wouldn’t live long enough to reach her children. The girls would die alone.
Polly howled and heard Gracie scream. Then white light blindsided her. She fell to her knees, images of the house exploding burning behind her scorched eyeballs.
Engine roaring, a truck pounded over the curb and smashed through the azaleas to lurch to a stop on the lawn. The door flew open and Marshall leapt from behind the wheel.
“Where’s the fire department?” he yelled as he ran across the lawn. “My God, you’re bleeding.”
“They haven’t come.” Polly grabbed his wrist and dragged him toward the side of the house.
“Where are Emma and Gracie?”
“Inside,” Polly cried. “Emma and Gracie are still inside. Marshall, I had security bars put in!” The words tore her throat. “I don’t know how to get them out.” Polly’s fingernails clawed into the flesh of his wrist as she pulled him through the slash of leaves to the window.
“Momma!” Gracie screamed. Polly could scarcely see her for the smoke. It was coming out the window now. Behind the glass Gracie’s pale face shone like a ghost.