“Will you help me find a way down?” Her eyes struggle to focus.
“Sure,” he says, “why not,” as if he’s doing her a favor.
She tugs him between the elevators, where the six doors, three on each side, are buckled to various degrees. The woman keeps close to Kevin, tightly gripping his arm; Kevin curls his bleeding hands spastically close to his waist, holding them stiffly so that they don’t shake. The ceiling above is crumpled, too, but it hasn’t fallen in, though Kevin can feel grit under his stocking foot. Together they scuff along like runners in a three-legged race. With only one shoe on, Kevin limps as if one leg were an inch shorter than the other. The hot breeze from the gap presses at their backs, carrying the smell of something burning. Kevin tries to ignore it. The Yellow Rose leads him up to one of the crumpled elevator doors and gingerly taps the warped metal with the tips of her fingers. Her nails are long and bright red, and she bends her fingers back, jerking them away and then touching the metal again. She takes care of her hands, Kevin notices; they look younger than her face.
“We probably shouldn’t take the elevator,” Kevin says, and the woman looks sharply up at him. She’s petite; without her pumps she would come up only to his chin.
“They say don’t take the elevator in emergencies,” he says.
“I know.” She’s placed her palm flat on the buckled door. “That’s good,” she murmurs, then tugs him farther on, past the elevators into the hall beyond, which splits right and left. At the junction they each tug in a different direction, then stop and pull close again, the woman clinging to Kevin’s sleeve. Each direction is the mirror image of the other: a narrow hallway with a high ceiling and a couple of tall, anonymous doors. The Yellow Rose’s hall on the left is full of glaringly lit haze and dust. Kevin’s hall, on the right, is hazy, too, but more fitfully illuminated by a flickering light around the corner.
“This way.” She tugs him to the left, and they hobble together to the first door. The woman tests it nervously with her fingertips, then lays her palm against it before trying the handle, while Kevin hovers at her side. It’s locked, so they scuttle to the next door, which is also locked, and then follow the hall around a sharp corner into the glare of twin emergency spotlights. They stop short, squinting into the white light at a door with a red-lit EXIT sign above it. The haze is thicker here, though not enough to make their eyes water, and without speaking Kevin pulls free of the Yellow Rose and hobbles, sock, shoe, sock, shoe, toward the door. The floor is cool under his stocking foot.
“That’s the way I came up.” The woman hangs back by the turn in the hallway.
Kevin stops inches from the door, hands still curled, hip poised at the crash bar. He looks back at her. In the harsh glare of the emergency lights, her disheveled hair looks like a wig, and her makeup looks like a mask.
“The stairway’s full of smoke.” She’s squinting into the bright light, nervously opening and closing her hands.
Kevin lays the back of his hand against the door. It’s not warm, so he licks his lips, glances at the woman, and nudges the crash bar with his backside. The door clicks open, and black, acrid smoke gusts out of the entire length of the opening. Kevin can feel heat, too, and he recoils from the door. It swings slowly shut and pinches off the smoke, which gathers in an ugly thundercloud up under the high ceiling. Kevin’s already running now toward the Yellow Rose, who has both hands clasped to her mouth, her eyes gone even wider. Forgetting the pain in his hands, he hooks her by the elbow and hauls her around the corner and back to the junction in the hallway, his one shoe grinding dust, his shoeless heel hammering the hard floor. The Yellow Rose’s sharp heels clatter alongside him. They clutch each other panting by the elevators, not looking at each other. Her gaze has gone glassy again, and Kevin’s is wild, glancing all around without seeing much.
“Was it like that before?” His throat is nearly too dry to speak, and when she doesn’t say anything, he rattles her a little. “Was it like that when you came up?”
No, she shakes her head.
“Is it worse now?” Kevin’s almost angry at her.
Yes, she nods.
“You might’ve said something before,” he says. “About, you know, the building being on fire.”
He’s gripping her tightly despite the bitter stinging of his palms. She looks up wide-eyed, almost as if she’s beseeching him.
“I couldn’t go down, so I thought maybe I could come up”—she shakily glides her palm up, across, and down like an airplane—“and then go down the other way.”
“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck.”
She flinches suddenly, looking past him, forcing him to wheel with her. He turns to see what she’s looking it, and the cloud of smoke he let in through the emergency door glides like a shadow around the corner under the ceiling, as if it’s following them. Kevin looks over her head down the other, darker hallway, with its sinister flickering light.
“Wait here.” He lets go of her, leaving two bloody palm prints on the sleeves of her jacket, and he hurries up the hallway to another locked door and pounds on it with his hands. But it stings too much to ball his fists, so he backs up and kicks the door savagely with the toe of his expensive shoe, making black scuff marks along the bottom of the door. “Hello!” He kicks and kicks. “Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me?” He backs up and kicks the door flat with his shoe, like a TV cop, and his stocking foot slides out from under him and he ends up sprawled on his ass, grinding the glass into his palms again. He’s on the verge of tears as the Yellow Rose stoops to haul at his elbow, helping him to his feet.
“We should stick together.” She slaps the dust off his suit.
He ignores her, starting into the haze down the darker hallway, and she clutches at him, trying to hold him back.
“We have to check down here,” he says, breaking free. “There’s got to be another stairwell.”
“Don’t,” she says, but she doesn’t stop him, and around the corner he sees, in the flickering light, that the end of the hallway has collapsed. Not just the ceiling, but a concrete beam from the floor above has come down, along with most of a wall — a heap of rubble like an ancient ruin. A light fixture spits and fumes, floating orange sparks that fade and die in the haze. This is the source of the whip-crack he heard before. The emergency door and lights are buried behind the heap of concrete and drywall. In the maddening flicker of the fixture, Kevin sees an arm thrust out of the rubble a foot or two above the littered floor. It’s hard to tell in the unsteady light, but he thinks it’s a man’s arm, from the blue dress shirt buttoned at the wrist. The arm sticks out from just above the elbow, palm up, the hand limp.
Kevin balances on the balls of his feet, ready to flee. He glances at the ruined ceiling, at the haze all around, anywhere but at the arm. Above the tangle of rubble he can make out the glow of the emergency lights, but he can’t see the exit sign. And he’s glad, because the word EXIT would read like a cruel joke. NO ENTRING is what it would really say.
“Come back!” cries the Yellow Rose from around the corner.
“Don’t go,” said his Aunt Mary from the porch of his grandfather’s house, clutching her elbows in the cold. “Give ’em a chance to clear the roads first.”
“I gotta get back,” Kevin said. “I promised my mom I’d be there for Christmas.”
But it was already early Christmas morning, and he knew as he scuffed through the snow of the farmyard to unbury his Pinto that he wouldn’t get to his mom’s until noon at the earliest, even if the roads were clear all the way back to Royal Oak. But he couldn’t spend another moment in the house with all those rural Quinns and his dead grandfather. Not after having been mistaken for his dead father, not after having slept through the old man’s death, not after having been the last to know. Kathleen loomed behind Aunt Mary, watching him blankly with the sleeves of her massive sweater pulled over her fists. He didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come; she and their mother weren’t on speaking terms at the moment. Go, stay, her look said, it’s all the same to me.