He started to run, clumsily, back toward the road. He threw his arms out for balance and let his jacket flap open, lifting his knees high to punch his sodden, freezing sneakers through the drifts. Halfway across the farmyard it occurred to him that he might tread on something sharp under the snow, that he ought to retrace his original path back around the truck, but there was no way he was going back there. He plunged through drifts up to his knees, caking his jeans with snow, and he struggled past the front of the ruined house without looking back, finally bursting through onto the pavement, gasping white clouds, his whole body shaking, his throat raw. He yanked open the Pinto’s door, fell into the bucket seat, and put the car in gear even before he slammed the door or buckled his seat belt. The wheels whined in the snow, ratcheting Kevin’s panic even higher, but then treads caught pavement and he skidded out onto Dexter Trail and rocketed away from the house and the empty truck, warmed as much by sheer relief as by the car’s wheezing heater. He didn’t look back, he never drove that road again, and he never mentioned what he’d seen to another living soul.
Now, as he hesitates in the smoky, flickering hallway, Kevin thinks, that’s two tests I failed in twelve hours: not staying awake for Grampa Quinn and not reporting the overturned truck. The memory of that Christmas has haunted him for twenty-five years. He’s imagined alternate versions, where his grandfather clutches his hand and calls his name, the last words Grampa Quinn ever said, or where Kevin pulls an unconscious driver out of the truck and drags him through the snow to his car and races him to the emergency room in Stockbridge or Pinckney. Sometimes he thinks he’s exhausted the memories of that day, that they’ve stopped making sense, but now the hand sticking out of the rubble — motionless, fingers curled — is another test, and it’s as if he were standing beside the truck again, in the cold, cruel winter sunlight. His eyes are beginning to sting from the smoke, from the flickering light, and he knows he ought to touch the hand, to see if the guy’s still alive under there. But he’s more scared of touching that hand than he’s been of anything else, ever, in his whole life. What if it has a pulse, or, worse, what if it twitches? What can Kevin do? He can’t lift the beam, he can’t pull the guy out, he’s not sure if even clawing at the rubble would do anything but bring the rest of the ceiling down on top of them both. What if it’s still warm? What if it clenches in pain, like a dying spider in its last throes? What if, in a moment out of a horror movie, it clutches him tightly and won’t let him go?
“He’s dead.” The Yellow Rose is just behind him. She’s edged into the hallway after Kevin.
“Did you check his pulse?” Kevin asks without turning around. When she doesn’t answer, he turns to see her fingers plucking at the air near his sleeve, as if she wants to pull him away.
“Did you?” he says.
“Yes.” Her eyes flicker side to side. “He’s gone.”
Are you telling me the truth? Kevin wonders. Or are you just trying to get me out of the hallway? Before he can think about it, he’s pinched the thumb of the hand between his own thumb and forefinger and waggled it side to side. It’s warm to his touch but completely limp. Kevin puts two fingers on the wrist, the way he’s seen actors do it on television, feeling nothing and leaving a pair of bloody fingerprints. What if he’s doing it wrong? What if the wrist has a weak pulse and he’s just not feeling it, not with his own pulse racing and the woman tugging at his elbow?
“Come on,” she says. “Please.”
At last he lets her pull him away by his elbow, back around the corner.
“I told you not to go down there,” she says, and for a moment Kevin and the Yellow Rose are a longtime couple, bickering but affectionate, strolling arm in arm. But only for a moment, because as they step between the elevators, they both see that smoke is now rising from the gaps between and around all six sets of crumpled doors and pooling in a cloud over their heads. The woman whimpers at the back of her throat, two descending notes, the sound she might make in another context, if she’d just discovered that her cat was on the counter, say, or that her cake had fallen, or some other vexing but minor quotidian disappointment. She sags against Kevin, and he has to slip his arm around her waist to prop her up, planting more handprints all over her nice suit.
“Come on.” He urges her on rubbery legs past the smoking elevators and onto the ledge of flooring where she first found him. She’s positively shuddering now, and the best he can do with his injured hands is grasp her clumsily by the elbows and lower her slowly to the floor against the wall, even as he tries to scuff the broken glass away with his shoe.
“It’s okay.” His own voice is breaking. “It’s all right.”
He drops her the last six inches and she thumps against the floor, nearly toppling onto her side. Her face has crumpled, her eyeliner is running. The stray eyelash is gone, who knows where, and she shivers against the wall, her hand pressed to her mouth, her cheeks streaked with black. Kevin squats unsteadily before her, wanting to dab at the inky tears, but his hands are still stained with blood.
“Oh God,” she says. “I thought if I came up…”
The best he can do is brush her hair with his knuckles. She clutches one of his wrists with both hands and gazes at him with brimming eyes. “The floor was on fire,” she says in a hoarse whisper, as if she’s afraid of being overheard. “So was the floor below me.” She snuffles, swallows. “I could hear people screaming.”
“Jesus.” Kevin strokes her hair with the back of one hand, while letting her cling tightly to the other. He’s almost in tears himself now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
The woman’s sobbing uncontrollably now, and Kevin folds her in an awkward hug, the two of them crouched in the intersection of floor and wall. He can feel her heart beating. Then her sobs subside almost as quickly as they started, and she looks up, their faces close enough to kiss. Behind her blusher and lipstick and runny eyeliner, she’s very pale.
“I didn’t want to lose hope,” she says in a weak but steady voice. Her eyes are glistening, but no longer overflowing. “I believe hopelessness is a sin?” Her rising inflection makes her sound uncertain. Kevin swivels clumsily off his feet to sit beside her, his arm around her shoulders. He sniffles, gasps, knuckles his own tears away. She tips her head back against the wall, watching him.
“There’s always hope in God.” Her voice is weak but steady.
“Unless there isn’t.” Kevin’s not looking at her, he’s watching sunlight shafting through the smoke rising across the wide gap where the conference room used to be. He’s already thinking, this is the last sky I’m ever going to see.
“Don’t you believe in God?” She’s watching him with a childlike intensity.
No atheists in burning skyscrapers, thinks Kevin, but she’s still giving him that innocent look, so he says, “Maybe we shouldn’t get into this right now.”
“If not now,” she says, with a directness that pierces him and annoys him in equal measure, “when?”
Acrid smoke penetrates to the back of his sinuses. He glances back. Black tendrils ripple along the ruined ceiling, struggling against the hot wind blowing from outside. Kevin looks at the woman.
“What’s your name?” He tightens his arm around her.
She presses against him, twisting her knees toward him. “Melody.”
“I’ve never met a Melody before,” says Kevin. “That’s a lovely name.”
“What’s yours?”