by Anita Shreve
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“He counsels couples,” says her mother. “Women. And men too, probably. I know for a fact that Dot Truitt and her husband went to see him for counseling.”
“And how did that work out?” Grace asks.
“They’re still married.”
Which tells Grace nothing. “I couldn’t,” she says.
“He’s heard it all, I’m sure. What’s so different about you and Gene?”
Grace, annoyed, says, “We don’t talk, and we don’t have sex.”
Her mother looks shocked and then pained. She purses her mouth in a way that Grace remembers from her childhood and points to Grace’s stomach. “So how did that get in there?”
“That was the last time,” Grace says, “and it was horrible.”
“I don’t want to hear any more,” her mother says, standing and walking out of the room. When she returns, her mind seems to be made up. “Go,” she says. “I’ll watch the children. You get yourself over to the church and see if you can find Reverend Phillips.”
—
Grace leaves Claire and Tom with her mother and walks not to the church, but to Rosie’s. When her friend opens the door, Grace says, “We don’t have sex.”
If Rosie is taken aback by the pronouncement, she doesn’t show it. “Not at all?” she asks, gesturing for Grace to come inside.
“Not since…” Grace points at her belly. “And even then, it was terrible.”
Rosie clears a dessert plate, a rubber duck, and a washcloth from the sofa. “The children are napping.”
Grace can see from the wrappers on the side table that Rosie was reading magazines and eating Tootsie Rolls during her time off.
Rosie hands Grace a glass of water. “I always knew you weren’t completely happy in your marriage. Sometime it used to waft off you in waves. What’s wrong with Gene anyway?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t ever want to see my face. He doesn’t care if I’m enjoying it or not.” She pauses. “Sex, I mean.”
“It’s always been like this?”
“Pretty much.”
Grace can see Rosie try to mask both surprise and dismay. “Have you ever enjoyed it?” her friend asks quietly.
“Maybe I did in the beginning,” Grace answers, but then she realizes that Rosie is speaking of the god-awful joy she once gleefully mentioned. “Well, no. Not in the way you’re thinking.”
Rosie is silent.
Grace can feel heat rising in her face. “I didn’t ever want you to know. You and Tim…”
“Me and Tim,” Rosie says, sighing. “Every marriage has its problems.”
“But you like sex,” Grace says.
“I do.”
“I don’t. At least the way it is now. I don’t even know if I’d like it ever. Gene’s a good man. Well, he used to be a good man. I’m embarrassed I had to tell you this. I started to talk to my mother about it, but that was a big mistake.” When she looks down, an inch of brandy has replaced the water.
“Can’t hurt,” Rosie says, raising her glass. “You’ve been shaking ever since you walked in the door.”
“You’re a good friend,” Grace says.
“I want to be.”
“You are.” The two women clink glasses, and Grace starts to laugh. “Oh, Rosie, you saved me from telling the minister! That’s where my mother thought I was going.”
“You were going to use the word sex with your minister?” Rosie asks, incredulous.
—
Grace reads in the newspaper reports of fires in Waldoboro, Topsham, and Lisbon Falls. The news is always one or two days old, and Grace ponders the fate of the people in the stories. What, for example, happened to the house of the man who soaked it with a hose as the fire approached? Did he save it? Or to the gentleman who fled with his tax returns? Did he lose them in the fierce winds created by the fire? Or to the woman who begged to be allowed to take her refrigerator? By the next day, there are new stories to report and no follow-ups. How did the woman intend to transport her treasured appliance?
Many of the stories mention that there is no early warning system for fire in Maine. Often the first sign is the smell of smoke, followed by a vehicle racing into town with a man in it ordering citizens to evacuate. Houses go up like bombs. Animals, trapped in burning barns, die. The ones freed at the last minute sometimes make it to safety.
Her sweaty arm sticks to the newspaper as she tries to turn the page.
—
The women of Hunts Beach are rarely seen walking alone without a purse or a child or a carriage. Grace, having left her children with her mother, walks out of her house with no destination. In a loose maternity skirt and sleeveless blouse, she lets her arms swing as she moves. Because she always heads south toward the village center, this time she goes north. Most people have left the waterfront cottages for home, school, and work—the natives tend to live two or three streets back, as she does—but occasionally, she sees a window open, a rake leaning against a tree, a carved pumpkin on the front steps. As she strolls, the seashore becomes rockier with surf, a pleasant meditative sound. She is thrilled to be moving faster than she can with the kids, stretching her legs, uncoiling the cat inside. She lets her mind empty, or tries to.
What would she take if someone, this very minute, were to tell her she must evacuate her house? Her children, of course, and bottles for Tom, clean clothes for Claire. Perhaps a change of clothes for herself tucked behind the children in the carriage. A photograph of her wedding? Of the children, when they were younger? Yes, one or two. A picture of her father. The layette for the baby? Her purse. An address book? Cigarettes? But then what would happen? She can’t outrun a fire. Perhaps she might be able to hoist the children and a suitcase onto the back of a truck. But she can’t get rid of the image of herself on foot, pushing the carriage as fast as she can, trying to shush Claire, who would smell and sense, if not actually see, the danger. No one needs to explain a wildfire to a child.
—
Normally, Grace loves this time of year. It’s not just the turning of the leaves or the crisp weather that one expects; it’s more a feeling of relaxation while the rest of the world becomes busier. With fewer people in town, streets are less crowded. Quiet descends. This year, however, that sense of peace has curdled to one of nervous watching. It’s bound to rain sometime soon, they say. It has to rain someday, they moan.
—
“Hey, Missy.”
The name jolts Grace, who turns to look. A man calls to her from inside a black Ford across the street. At first she thinks it might be Gene teasing her, but then she notices that the driver has a straw hat. Gene never wears a straw hat.
“Lady, can you give me some directions?”
“Where do you want to go?” she shouts back, putting a hand over her eyes so that she can get a better look at the man’s face. Middle-aged. A little soft.
“Well, I want to go to Cape Porpoise, and I got a map here.”
Grace hesitates.
But why?
As she approaches the automobile, she discovers that the man’s shoulders are bare. In the heat, many men have shed their shirts. He must not be very tall, she decides, because his neck barely clears the bottom of the window. How does he see out to drive?
“How can I help you?” she asks.
“Well, I got this map here.”
She bends to take a better look. The man is naked and is touching himself. He grins up at her. The missing tooth, the fold of flesh at the belly, the limp penis.
She slowly backs away, ignoring the man’s catcalls. She steps onto the grass, then onto the sidewalk. She reverses direction. She walks with her head bent, her shoulders hunched, praying he won’t follow.
To see a soft naked man inside a heavy metal machine. To have been tricked into having to watch, if only for a second, the man fondling himself. She knows her face is red and that sweat is trickling down the inside of her blouse. Why do men do this? she asks herself. Not the
touching—she understands that well enough—but the stealth, the wanting to hurt women, to trick them. Rosie would have laughed and said something vulgar about the size of the man’s penis. If only she had Rosie’s nerve, her ability to think on her feet.
—
When Grace reaches the beach, she heads for the water. She takes off her shoes and walks in. She did not go home because she didn’t want the man, if he was following her, to know where she lives. If he stops at the beach, she won’t leave the water. If he gets out of the car and starts to move in her direction, she’ll scream and run like hell. But wait, he can’t get out of his car. He’s naked.
She sits on the sand, knees up, only her feet in the shallow waves. She would love to go for a swim. The coolness, the cleansing, her head diving under the water, coming up for air. How good that would feel.
Why not?
Except for the knee length of her cotton skirt, what she has on is not all that different from a maternity bathing suit. What if the baby weighs her down? No, it won’t. With all her extra blubber, she ought to float effortlessly.
The idle thought becomes a desire. The desire takes on a sense of urgency.
She stands and walks into the water up to her knees. She lifts her skirt a bit and runs and stumbles, but then she turns and executes a backstroke the way she was taught so long ago at summer camp. Her skirt floats up beside her, and her legs are free to make any movement they want. She dives, reaching for an underwater breaststroke.
When she comes up for air, she is not at the same place at which she entered. The current has carried her along with it. She squints, and in the distance she sees a black Ford cross an intersection. Lots of people drive black Fords. Her husband for one, the minister for another.
She will never tell anyone—not Gene, not Rosie, not her mother—about the incident with the man in the car.
She floats with her arms out beside her. She lets the waves push her closer to shore. She catches a scent she doesn’t normally associate with the ocean. She stands and sniffs again.
A faint whiff of smoke.
Someone burning leaves? Yes, that must be it. But the air seems slightly hazy to the west. The black Ford rounds a corner and begins to come along the beach road. Grace thinks of ducking below the surface, but then sees that there are two men in the car. On the top of the automobile is a bullhorn.
Fire
By nightfall, a reddish glow appears at the western horizon. With Tom in her arms, Grace gazes at the fearful and exquisite disaster. Even Tom seems riveted, and when she looks into his dark eyes, she can see the unexpected light producing a silhouette: tall pines, maples, an electric tower, a barn. How far away is the fire? How fast is it moving?
She imagines the Indians would have seen the glow as a message of doom from the ancestors and would have taken to canoes along the river. Though Grace and her neighbors live near a beach, few of them have boats of any kind. A motorboat can’t be launched from a beach. Unless the ocean is dead calm, a canoe is useless. Even rowboats are tied up at the town dock a few miles away. Two families that Grace knows of evacuated themselves by car earlier when the black Ford with the bullhorn cruised the streets telling people to take their most important possessions and get out of town. Over the sound of screened doors slapping, voices murmur and then shout.
Reports of fires in Kennebunk preclude driving south. To drive west is to go toward the fire. To go east is to drive into the ocean. And to drive north is not without risk. There are rumors of small fires along the main road to Biddeford. Could she and Gene and the children make it to Cape Porpoise just up the coast? Could a boat be found there?
Many of her neighbors are staying put to protect their houses. Few can imagine a fire advancing to the ocean, deliberately moving toward an absolute lack of fuel. By Gene’s account, they have at least a day before they need to start worrying. This morning at breakfast, he called her an alarmist.
Three words.
She stares again at the glow of red at the horizon. Who lives out there? Have their homes already gone up in flames? There are no newspapers now, and any minute, according to Rosie, they’ll lose power. She urged Grace to assemble candles in every room, which Grace thinks is more likely to produce a house fire than the still distant conflagration.
—
“I’m frightened,” Rosie says when she enters Grace’s kitchen at seven in the evening.
“Don’t be.”
Rosie hunches forward on the kitchen chair to rock Eddie in Tom’s old cradle while Claire and Ian color on paper on the floor.
“If the house goes, we’ve got nothing,” Rosie wails.
Grace remembers the woman who stood in front of her home on the waterfront, worried about tidal flooding. She said the same thing. Does that woman now feel safer than the rest of her neighbors, living so close to the water’s edge?
“No insurance?” Grace asks.
Rosie shakes her head.
“Oh, Rosie.”
“We meant to get to it, we did, but the money was always needed for something else. I suppose it’s too late now?”
“I think it might be.”
“What’ll we do?”
“The fire is still miles away,” Grace says.
“What will you take with you?”
Grace has set aside a pile of belongings on the floor of the living room. Clothes, baby food, canned milk, a few photographs, two of Gene’s most prized surveying antiques, all the important papers in the drawer of the living room desk, blankets, several bottles of water. How she will manage to get the provisions out of the house with two children in tow is an unsolved problem. Gene took the car in the morning, stating that he was going to help other men create a firebreak to stop the wildfire from nearing Hunts Beach. She wishes he would come home. “Blankets, papers, clothes, water,” Grace answers.
“I can’t focus. Do I take the sentimental or the practical?”
“A little of the first. More of the latter.”
“Will there be any warning at all?”
Does a fire roll down a hill with such speed that it catches people before they can run away? Grace thinks of ancient Pompeii. The population was overwhelmed by moving lava. Is a fire faster than lava?
“I heard Edith on the back porch sobbing this morning,” Rosie reports. “I felt sorry for her and almost went over there. And Tim says that the Bakers had the loudest fight he’s ever heard.”
“Tempers are short. All that waiting for rain. And now the fear.”
“We knew in our bones that something bad was going to happen.”
“Did we?” asks Grace. “To us?”
“The drought. The unnatural heat.”
The early warning they didn’t heed. Should they have been more prepared? For catastrophe? Who lives like that?
—
Grace brings the supplies out to the back porch to be closer to the car when Gene comes for them. Something that looks like a bat skims the screen and startles Grace. But its flight is too slow and too close to the ground to be a bat. It seems to float to the sunburned grass and stay there, weightless. With caution, she opens the door to get a better look, and as she does, an insect flutters against her cheek. She slaps the bug away and watches the pieces drift to the ground. Not a bat, not a bug. Fragments of burned paper, carried on the wind.
—
Rosie is back at Grace’s door. Grace steps outside, and the pair move to the halfway point between the two houses so that each can listen for a child crying. “Where’s Gene?” Rosie asks.
“He didn’t come back. Tim?”
“Not back, either.”
“It’s after nine,” Grace says.
“You think they’re still working on the firebreak?”
“I guess.”
“You’d think they’d come home to be with their families,” Rosie says.
In the near distance, Grace can hear motors revving. “If just one of them comes back, we could all cram into a car and get out.”
/> “I can’t believe this is happening to us!”
“It’s not just us,” Grace points out. “If what we’ve heard is true, half of coastal Maine is on fire. There are inland fires, too.”
“Okay,” says Rosie, “let’s be sensible.”
Grace smiles.
“You can fit whatever you have in the carriage, right?” Rosie asks.
“Not all.”
“We have to be able to move.”
“I heard that people were stealing shopping carts from Shaw’s,” says Grace.
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Seriously? Stealing?”
“Do you think that matters when the stakes are the lives of your children?”
Grace guesses not.
Rosie snaps her fingers. “We have a canoe!”
“I don’t know,” says Grace. “Pretty dangerous to push a canoe into the ocean at night with your children in it.”
“No. I’ll put the kids and the stuff in it and drag it.”
“To where?”
“To the beach.”
“And then what?”
“The fire’s not going to go all the way to the beach,” insists Rosie.
“I don’t know.”
“It can’t.”
“Sparks might reach us and our things.”
“Simple,” Rosie says. “We’ll wet everything down.”
“And the kids?”
“Oh, Grace, I don’t know. Does the fire look closer?”
The silhouette has changed. Two houses, an open field. Yes, the fire is closer, but for now she will keep that knowledge to herself. “Do you know where the firebreak is?” Grace asks instead.
“Near Route One maybe?”
Grace turns back to the beach, certain that she has felt something new on her skin. Moisture, a cool breeze. She inhales deeply. The scent is unmistakable. She grabs Rosie’s hand. “Can you smell that?” Grace asks.
Rosie tips her face upward. “An east wind?”
Grace nods.
They stand a minute on the grass, hands clasped, taking in long breaths of refreshing wet air. It seems that other townspeople are just now noting it. Motors stop. Arguments halt midsentence.
“We’ve been saved?” Rosie asks.