“Maybe they’re already coming for us,” Melody says.
Kevin coughs. “Who?”
“Rescuers?” Melody’s tears are running clear now. Her eyeliner’s all washed away.
“Didn’t you say the floors below are on fire?”
She nods, weeping.
“Then how would they get to us?”
She’s trembling again, so Kevin rouses himself, pushes himself up on his stinging palms, puts his arm around her.
“I’m sorry about the phone,” Melody says.
“It’s all right.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to make that call either.”
“Who would you call?”
“My kids.” Melody coughs. “My father. My ex-husband.”
The air is hotter and the smoke is thicker, black and roiling against the ruined ceiling above. It’s slowly lowering, filling the room from above, and some of it is beginning to stream through to the outside. He doesn’t hear sirens anymore. In the distance Kevin can still see the construction crane towering above the condo tower. The narrow catwalk alongside the cab, forty stories up, is lined with little figures in orange safety vests and yellow plastic hard hats. They look like figures from a Bob the Builder playset, little round-top wooden dowels painted with bright hard hats and happy faces, plugged into round slots on top of the Tinkertoy crane, watching Kevin die. You guys should get down from there, he thinks, you really, really should.
“I want to talk to my kids,” says Melody, “but I don’t.”
“I know.” He pictures Stella bloodlessly pale on a stool in the convention hotel bar, snapping around to look at the image on the TV. He hears her sharp incredulity: “What are you doing in Austin? Why didn’t you tell me you were going?” If she didn’t put it together right away, she would later on, and he’s not sure what will hurt her more, that he’s about to die, or that he was thinking of leaving Ann Arbor to get away from her. The guy at the bar with her is feeling awkward. He sees she’s upset, but he hardly knows her. The decent thing would be to stick around, but all he really wants to do is make an excuse and hurry away. Kevin pictures Stella clutching the guy’s sleeve the way Melody’s clutching his, and he’s grateful that she’s not alone. He pictures her trembling uncontrollably. He pictures her knees buckling. Would she faint? Do people faint anymore?
“I wouldn’t want this to be their last memory of me,” says Melody, and Kevin says, “I know.” He holds her tight, drawing her face to his chest. “I know, I know.”
She mutters something against his shirt, and he relaxes his grip.
“You smell like coconut,” she says.
He sighs and looks up. The ceiling of smoke is even lower now. If they were standing, their heads would be in the cloud. More smoke is coming from over the rubble that chokes off the hallways to either side.
“We need to get lower,” he says, and before she has a chance to reply, he lifts his arm from around her and starts sliding on his butt toward the crack in the floor, clutching her wrist and pulling her with him. He no longer cares about the glass on the floor but pushes heedlessly through it as if it were sand, hauling with his heels, pushing with his other hand. He feels a resisting tug, and looks back. Melody is balling her fist and trying to pull her wrist out of his grasp.
“No,” she whispers, ghostly pale. “I’m not ready for that.”
“Neither am I,” Kevin says firmly, not letting go of her, “but we need to get lower, away from the smoke. Okay?”
Without unclenching her fist, she looks up. The smoke cascading along the ceiling is a torrent now, a roiling, snaky, upside-down black river. She inches slowly alongside him, and sitting thigh to thigh they hang their legs over the crack and down the slope. Like a pair of schoolchildren they’re holding hands. Kevin’s hand still stings, but he doesn’t loosen his grip.
“It’s not as steep as it looks,” he says.
“Maybe we should take off our shoes,” says Melody. “For better traction.”
Kevin nods, and without releasing hands, they each use a free hand to bare their feet. Kevin lets his remaining shoe drop and it skids to a stop halfway down the slope. He peels off his socks one-handed and tosses them limply after the shoe. Melody bends at the waist, demurely twisting her knees, and takes off one pump and then the other, placing them neatly side by side next to her, at the edge of the crack. They sit with their bare feet brushing the sloping floor, which, to Kevin’s touch, is feeling warmer than it ought to. Waggling their backsides, they press closer together, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, their hands squeezed together between them. This, thinks Kevin, is the last time I’ll ever touch a woman.
From behind them comes a rush of heat, as if someone has opened an oven door, and simultaneously they look back to see orange flame sheeting through the smoke along the ceiling, swelling like a tide up and back, up and back, a little closer to the gap with each surge. Kevin and Melody can feel each rising increment of heat on their backs, can feel it tightening the skin of their cheeks and foreheads. They look at each other, and neither of them speaks for a moment.
“You’re a Christian?” he says.
She nods.
“I know a story about this martyred saint, I forget his name.” Kevin had heard this from Father Vince, his mother’s priest. “The Romans roasted him alive over a fire, and just before he died, he said, ‘You can turn me over now, I think I’m done on this side.’ ”
Melody’s eyes fill with tears. “This isn’t a time to joke.”
“If not now,” says Kevin, “when?” He nudges her. He’s crying, too.
“Will you pray with me?” she says.
What for? thinks Kevin. To whom? And suddenly he’s angry at the God he doesn’t believe in for abandoning them to this, for looking away when they need him, for lying down on the job. Way to go, lord. Nice work, asshole. Thanks for nothing, motherfucker.
“Why don’t you pray for both of us?” he says.
Melody tightens her grip on his hand, making it sting almost unbearably, and as the heat from above begins to sting their backs and singe their hair, she closes her eyes and says, “Heavenly Father, please forgive my sins and the sins of this good man here—”
Actually, I’m not so good, thinks Kevin.
“—and take us both quickly to Your bosom—”
A-fucking-men. As quickly as possible. We’re going to burst like water balloons.
“—and please, dear Lord, look after my family and this man’s family and ease their sorrow and help them know that we reside in Your house now, with You, where there’s no more pain and uncertainty and fear, forever and ever.”
This is unbearable, thinks Kevin. I’d rather jump than listen to this. But at the same time, he thinks, keep talking. Don’t stop.
“In Jesus’ name,” says Melody, opening her eyes, “amen.”
Kevin’s eyes are stinging with tears and smoke. The smoke’s lowering slowly over their heads like a hood, and he can feel the backs of his ears blistering, can feel the heat pounding through his jacket and his shirt and scalding his back. Kevin grips Melody’s hand, and without speaking they scootch over the crack and bump onto the tilted floor below. Right away gravity drags at their ankles, and they slide too fast, their bare feet scuttling like crab legs without purchase.
“No,” whispers Melody, as if she’s afraid of being overhead, “no no no no no no no.” She grips his hand so tightly that his blood squeezes through their fingers. Their feet are scrabbling like cartoon feet, and the edge of the drop slides irrevocably toward them, but at the last moment Kevin and Melody simultaneously plant their feet and skid painfully to a stop, their momentum almost, but not quite, tipping their center of gravity over the edge. Instead they rock back onto their backsides, squatting barefoot a few inches from the drop like a pair of shoeless peasants. Kevin’s heart is pounding, and he can feel Melody’s pulse, too, through the warm, slick grip of their palms.