“Kevin.”
She pats his lapel and sniffles. “I’m glad you’re here, Kevin.”
“I’m not,” Kevin says before he can stop himself, and he starts to laugh. He squeezes her with his stinging palm.
She laughs, too. “Me neither, I guess.” Then, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“About God?” Melody says, but before Kevin can answer, the phone in his jacket starts to buzz, startling them both. She recoils and clutches him at the same time, digging her polished nails into his jacket.
“You have a phone?” she says.
“It’s not mine,” Kevin says.
“For God’s sake!” Melody yanks at his lapel and plunges her hand inside his jacket. “Why didn’t you say you had a phone!” She plucks out the cell and turns away from him, expertly flipping it open and pressing Talk.
“Who is this?” she demands, her voice suddenly sharp, and Kevin, speechless, can hear the tinny voice of the boy he talked to earlier.
“Yes, I know. I’m in the building.” She listens a moment, then says, “Hang on, I’ll ask.” She presses the phone to her chest so the guy on the other end can’t hear.
“Leslie?” she whispers, and Kevin shakes his head and makes a diving motion with his hand.
“She’s not here,” says Melody into the phone. “I think she got out already.” The tinny voice speaks, but Melody interrupts him. “Sir, what’s your name? Blake? Listen, Blake, could you call 911 and let them know there are two people trapped on… what floor is this?”
Kevin gasps, stammers, says, “Fifty-one, I think. Maybe fifty-two.”
“Go see if it says.” She jerks her chin toward the elevators. Kevin stiffly levers himself up off the floor with his throbbing hands, and steadying himself against the wall, which is beginning to get warm, he peers around the corner into the elevator lobby. If the floor is marked, he can’t see it. Now smoke is pouring out of the hallways beyond the lobby and out of the elevators themselves, trembling against the breeze blowing through the gap.
“It’s the fifty-first or fifty-second floor,” Melody’s saying in a steady voice. “Tell them to hurry, please, won’t you, Blake? We’re counting on you.”
Kevin slides to the floor next to her. “The smoke’s getting worse.”
But Melody’s not listening; she’s cut Blake off and is thumbing in 911 with intense concentration, biting her lip and splaying her legs before her. She lifts the phone, listens, groans in frustration.
“It’s busy,” she says. “How can that be?”
“I think they probably know by now what’s going on.”
She holds up her finger to silence him and enters 911 again, listens, cuts it off, enters it again, cuts it off again. “Damn it all! How can it be busy?”
Kevin feints feebly with his hand toward Melody. He’d like to have the phone back. He’s thinking he might want to call his mom. He’s thinking he might even want to call Stella. The idea that it might be the last time he’ll ever speak to either of them is seeping into his mind like black water. Meanwhile Melody has closed the little phone within her trembling fist, and she’s staring blankly into the smoky sunlight coming through the gap. “If 911 doesn’t work now, when is it supposed to?”
I could ask you the same about God, thinks Kevin, but he doesn’t say it. Melody’s staring into space, sucking in her lips.
“Is there someone you want to call?” he says as he gingerly reaches for her closed hand. He’s wondering if he’ll have to pry apart her fingers to get the phone.
“Take it,” she says, and abruptly pitches the cell at him. He fumbles for the phone, but it thumps off his chest, clatters off the floor, and bounds over the crack in the floor, sliding toward the edge. Kevin and Melody simultaneously catch their breath. The cell phone glitters in the sunlight at the last moment, and Kevin’s not sure, but he thinks it starts to buzz again as it sails over the edge and out of sight. Kevin turns to the woman beside him. She’s pressed one hand over her open mouth, and with her other she’s digging her red nails into his forearm. She looks at him wide-eyed.
“I’m so sorry!” she says from behind her palm.
Kevin just sighs. Now he’s going to die alone, drowned in black water. He clutches her wrist and pries her fingers loose from his arm.
“I’m so sorry,” she says again in a tiny voice. She lays her hand on his upper arm. “Was there someone you wanted to call?”
Kevin lets his feet slide out straight like Melody’s, and he slumps against the wall. Only the friction of his new dress trousers keeps him upright, and any second now he could just melt like wax in the growing heat and ooze across the crack and dribble over the edge.
“Will you forgive me?” She strokes his arm.
“It’s okay.” His sinuses and throat are beginning to feel raw. Even with the wind from outside, the ruined lobby is filling from the ceiling down with black smoke. “I really didn’t want to make that call, anyway.” He looks at her. “You know what I mean?”
“I do.” She wipes inky tears away with the heel of her hand. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Seriously, what would you say?” He can see Stella in her professional suit, the slim, narrow-waisted one that attracted him to her in the first place that morning in Expresso Royale. He sees her striding in her heels across the imperial lobby of some convention hotel in Chicago, the vertiginous atrium of the Embassy Suites or the dim, clubby lobby of the Sheraton. She might even be sharing a midafternoon cocktail with some guy she’s met at the convention; she may even be flirting with him a bit, because flirting is Stella’s default mode, not that it would mean anything, it’s just how she is. And because she’s Stella, and not Beth, she wouldn’t even notice the image of the burning Texas skyscraper on the TV over the bar, but she would interrupt the conversation if her phone rang, and Kevin sees her sly smile of apology to the guy with her at the bar as she dives into her bag for her cell. That’s the age difference between him and Stella in a nutshelclass="underline" he’d shut his phone off in a situation like that, but because she’s younger than he is she answers the thing instinctively, no matter whom she’s talking to. On one of their early “dates,” after they’d already been sleeping with each other for three weeks, she kept answering her phone during dinner one night at a tapas bar on Main Street, so that finally, while she was in the middle of a call, he excused himself, went outside, and called her from his own cell, watching through the restaurant window as she said to whomever she was on the phone with, “Hang on, I have another call,” then looked puzzled as she glanced at the screen and saw it was him. Then he heard her saying, “Kevin?” and he’d said, “Hi, remember me? The guy you’re having dinner with? The guy you’re sleeping with? The guy whose house you moved into?” On more than one occasion he’s glanced at the screen on his own phone and, when he’s seen that it’s her calling, he hasn’t answered, he’s let the call go to voice mail, then lied to her later about leaving his phone turned off. But when she sees it’s him, she always answers his call — always — and that thought pierces his heart. Of course if he’d called her today from Leslie’s phone, she wouldn’t have recognized the number on the screen—“I don’t know this number,” she might even say out loud to the guy at the hotel bar — and then Kevin would have heard her saying her own name in a noncommittal, businesslike voice, and he pictures the mask she makes of her face when she’s talking to someone she doesn’t know. And then he’d’ve said, if he could choke it out, “It’s me,” and the thought of her mask relaxing, of her voice saying, “Hey, you,” and then the thought of what exactly he’d say to her next — it all makes his throat tighten as if someone has just seized him around the neck with two rough hands. Either that, or the increasingly acrid air is choking him.