Playing with Fire

by April Henry

  NOTHING BUT DARKNESS

  12:22 A.M.

  EVERYONE WAS STARING AT the space where Lisa should have been. Some people were screaming. Ryan’s mouth was so wide Natalia could see the glint of fillings, but he was silent, his empty hands reaching out to the empty air that had once held his wife.

  Lisa had dropped off the trail at a point where the path pinched down. Falling to her knees, Natalia army-crawled forward until her head hung over the edge.

  Her headlamp shone on Lisa’s body. But it wasn’t a hundred feet down, broken on boulders. She was just ten feet below them, precariously cradled in a steeply slanted cleft barely wide enough for her body. She lay on her back, her right leg bent. Three feet past Lisa’s left foot was nothing but darkness.

  Wyatt hurriedly handed the child carrier to Marco and dropped on the dirt next to Natalia.

  As Natalia watched, one of Lisa’s hands twitched. She was alive!

  But there was no time to rejoice. Lisa began to scream. Her hands went to her right knee. As she writhed in pain, she slid an inch closer to the edge.

  “Stay still, Lisa!” Natalia shouted. “Don’t move!”

  “My knee! My knee!” Her voice was choked with tears.

  “We’re going to help you,” Wyatt called. “But right now you cannot move or you’ll slide off!”

  On his knees and one unbandaged hand, Ryan crawled toward the edge.

  Natalia could see two Lisas. The one lying on her back. The other, the one in her imagination, sliding off in a skitter of pebbles.

  Natalia called, “Lisa! What’s wrong with your knee?” So many blood vessels ran through the joint. A broken bone could become a knife. Even if they could get Lisa back up on the trail, Natalia couldn’t fix a severed vein or artery.

  “It just”—Lisa panted between words—“gave out … all of a sudden.” She groaned, and then arched her back so she could look up at Wyatt. “Where’s Trask?”

  “Marco’s got him, honey,” Ryan called out. “Be careful!”

  “Can you turn over and crawl toward us?” Natalia asked.

  “I don’t know.” Slowly, Lisa started to flip over but then rolled back with a shriek. “I can’t. I can’t move my knee at all.” Her voice was shaky with tears and panic.

  “You guys have got to help her!” Ryan said urgently.

  “Do you have a rope?” Natalia asked Wyatt. “If we made a loop and Lisa put it under her arms, we could haul her back up.”

  Wyatt bit his lip. “All I’ve got is some parachute cord. It’s strong, but it’s not nearly thick enough. It would be like trying to drag her up with a piece of twine.”

  “Take Blue’s leash!” Marco called out.

  As it passed from hand to hand, Jason said, “Even if you get Lisa back up here, what happens then? If her knee’s broken, she won’t be able to walk.”

  Ryan’s head whipped around. “Shut up! No one cares what you think.”

  But Jason was right. If Lisa couldn’t walk, then what? Could they improvise a stretcher with Susan’s trekking poles?

  But first they had to get her up. Holding the padded handle, Wyatt dropped the leash down. It was too short. The end landed about four feet above Lisa’s head. And even if she could reach it, how could she use it if she couldn’t even move her leg?

  Natalia thought of SAMPLE. Most of it didn’t apply. But now she seized on the P—Pertinent history.

  “Lisa! Has this ever happened before?”

  “Once. In high school.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “I was playing basketball and my knee just collapsed. Dislocated kneecap. It felt like this.”

  Hope surged in Natalia. “And how did they treat it?”

  “Just pushed it back into place while they pulled my leg straight.” She panted. “It hurt worse than having a baby.”

  Lisa’s cropped pants ended at her calf.

  “Can you do something for me?” Natalia said. “Can you pull up that one pant leg so I can see your knee?”

  With a grimace, Lisa grabbed the cloth at the thigh and edged it upward until her knee was exposed. Even from ten feet away it was obviously misshapen. Instead of being in front, the circle of the patella was now on the outside edge of her knee. It looked like someone had tucked an egg under the skin.

  “Okay, Lisa,” Wyatt called. “I’m going to come down there and try to put your kneecap back in place.”

  Natalia’s stomach dropped at the thought. She pitched her voice for his ears alone. “That space is barely big enough to hold her. You could both go over the edge.”

  “No, Wyatt. It’s not safe,” Lisa said. She had either heard Natalia or had the same thought. “I think I can do it myself.”

  “Are you sure, honey?” Ryan called. “Maybe let Wyatt try.”

  “I’ll try it myself first.” Lisa’s voice shook but she sounded certain.

  “Won’t that hurt a lot?” Wyatt asked Natalia in a low voice.

  “Either way it’s going to hurt a lot.” She pictured the anatomy and then raised her voice. “Okay, use your left hand to massage the muscles on the outside of your right thigh. That’s your quadriceps, and it attaches to the kneecap. Try to get it to relax. Then take the heel of your right hand and as you straighten your leg, push the kneecap back into place.”

  Groaning through gritted teeth, Lisa started to massage her thigh. She set her other hand next to the skewed kneecap, then began to straighten her right leg. But her foot hadn’t gone more than an inch when she stopped. “I can’t,” she panted. “It hurts so much.”

  “You can do it, Lisa,” Ryan said. “Do it for Trask!”

  Lisa put her hands into position again. She started making a high-pitched keening noise. It sounded almost like she was singing, holding a single note that stretched out endlessly. But as she massaged and straightened and pressed, the egg-shaped bump slid over and popped into place. The sound she was making abruptly ended with an audible sigh of relief.

  The entire procedure had taken less than thirty seconds.

  “Can you move it now?” Natalia asked.

  Lisa tentatively bent and then straightened her knee, stopping when she began to slide downhill. “I think so.” Her voice shook. “But how am I going to get back up?”

  “Now that you can move your leg, you just need to get to the leash,” Wyatt said. “I think if you very carefully turn over onto your stomach there will be less risk of you sliding.” Natalia held her breath as Lisa carefully did. “There, that’s it. Now see if you can crawl farther away from the edge.”

  Step by step, Wyatt, with encouragement from Ryan, coached Lisa as she half crawled, half dragged herself nearer to them and farther away from the edge. Finally she got close enough to grab the leash.

  “Now hold on tight, get to your feet, and go up hand over hand like it’s a climbing rope.”

  “Be careful, honey,” Susan called as Lisa slowly began to pull herself up. She was putting weight on her right leg, albeit gingerly. The muscles in Wyatt’s arms bulged as he held her steady.

  Finally with a grunt and a heave, Lisa was back on the trail. She turned so she was parallel with it and then lay on her back, panting. Ryan knelt next to her, stroking her forehead.

  Natalia knelt on the other side. Lisa’s pant leg was still rolled up, exposing her knee. The kneecap was in the right place and it didn’t even look swollen. “I’m going to touch your knee, okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  She palpated gently, but felt no sharp edges, only dampness. Lisa’s skin was covered by a light layer of sweat. “How does it feel?”

  “A lot better. But not completely normal.”

  Natalia looked up at the other woman’s face. “Do you think you could walk?”

  Lisa raised one dark eyebrow. “Do I have a choice?”

  What Lisa needed was a brace, like a person might wear after knee surgery. Natalia’s eyes lit on Marco’s backpack, which he had given to Beatriz. “Marco, do you think I could borrow your backpack and empty it out
?”

  “Sure.” He began to transfer snacks and sunscreen from his pack to Wyatt’s.

  Natalia pointed. “Oh, can I have that T-shirt, too?”

  “It’s not very clean.”

  “I just want to use it for padding.” After undoing the backpack straps, she wrapped it around the knee, padding the bend with Marco’s T-shirt. Then she refastened the straps in front, tightening them until the pack was firmly holding the knee.

  “There.” Natalia got to her feet and held out her hand. “Let’s see what it feels like when you walk on it.”

  With the brace preventing her from bending, it took some effort for Lisa to get on her feet. But once she was up, she took a step, and then another. A smile lightened her face. “That feels a lot better.”

  Ryan hugged her with his good arm. She closed her eyes and leaned forward so that their foreheads touched.

  There was one more thing that would help. Natalia called to Susan. “Is it okay if Lisa uses one of your trekking poles?”

  Susan looked at her with rheumy eyes. “What? Who are you?”

  AJ patted her shoulder. “It’s Natalia, Susan. Can I give her one of your poles to help Lisa?” When the older woman nodded, he gave it to her.

  Lisa put it in her right hand, but then Natalia put it in her left. “Actually you use it on the opposite side of the injury. That way you’ll plant it at the same time you’re putting weight on your bad leg.”

  Wyatt already had Trask on his back. The toddler had been roused by all the noise but now was nodding off again, opening and closing his palms. “I think we should get going as soon as you think you can.”

  Natalia allowed herself to look back. The sky was red from one end to the other with flames.

  Lisa lifted her chin. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER 16

  SUFFOCATING

  SIX YEARS EARLIER

  NATALIA WOKE UP. ALTHOUGH everything felt so wrong, she wasn’t sure that that was what was really happening. She couldn’t even summon the energy to open her eyes. Maybe she was still having a dream. A nightmare. Where was she? She wasn’t even exactly sure who she was.

  Something plastic had been pushed past her lips and jammed down her throat. There was no word for what it felt like. Like she was suffocating, but also like she had put her head out the window of a speeding car and opened her mouth wide. Every few seconds, the noisy hiss changed in a two-note rhythm. Whoosh-whoosh. And each time, the thing down her throat twitched.

  One thought filled her mind. Get it out! She began to scrabble at whatever was stuffed in her mouth, but her hands felt stiff and oddly muffled. Forcing open her swollen lids, she saw she was lying on a white bed in a white room. Her hands were also white—splinted and wrapped in thick layers of bandages until they were as useful as fat white paddles. Still, she tried again to dislodge the foreign thing choking her.

  Someone grabbed her wrists. “It’s okay, Natalia,” a stranger’s voice said. A woman. “You’re safe.”

  Natalia. That was her name. Everything came back in a rush. She remembered flinging herself after her brother when he had twisted himself from her hands. But when she tried to ask about Conner, she realized she couldn’t make a sound, not even a groan.

  The woman patted her shoulder. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to talk for a bit. We had to put a tube down your throat to give you oxygen and medicine and to keep your airway from swelling closed.”

  This had to be a hospital. Conner must be in another room.

  Natalia remembered somersaulting forward. Time had slowed. The air was filled with black acrid smoke. She could not see Conner. But below her there was a sound like a slap. Her body kept turning. Just as she passed the living room window, it shattered. Shards of glass and balls of fire shot past her.

  Screaming Conner’s name, Natalia somehow landed on her feet. Instantly, one of her ankles snapped and she tumbled forward. But it was as if it was happening to someone else. She felt nothing. Not the burns, not the broken bone.

  She had become a ghost, hovering above it all. And then it was as if she had flickered out of existence.

  Only now Natalia was back. She had survived, after all. But what about Conner? She began to thrash, desperate to say his name. Desperate to hear it. To hear him.

  The nurse was still talking, but about nothing Natalia cared about. “You breathed in a lot of smoke and gases, but we should be able to remove the breathing tube in a day or two.” Her voice became a falsely cheerful lilt. “Your parents are going to be so glad to hear you’re awake.”

  It felt like one of those nightmares where you try to run but your feet find no purchase. Where was Conner? Natalia ripped one hand free from the nurse’s and began to hit the bed. Why wasn’t the nurse telling her the most important thing?

  But part of her kept replaying the sound she’d heard before she landed. Like a slap.

  “I’m just going to give you a little something in your IV to help you sleep, Natalia. To help you heal.”

  Slowly, Natalia stopped fussing. When the darkness came, she welcomed it. Her last thought was of her little brother’s chubby hands.

  An hour or a day or a week later, she woke up again. When she forced her eyes open, her parents were sitting next to the bed. They were dressed in clothes she had never seen before, ill-fitting and wrinkled. The skin around their eyes looked bruised. They started up when they saw she was awake.

  The breathing tube was still in her mouth. But when her mom looked in Natalia’s eyes, she saw her question.

  “I’m so sorry, honey.” And then her mom was ugly-crying, snot and tears streaming down her red face. “I killed Conner, and I thought I’d killed you, too.”

  Natalia twisted her head from side to side. Her mom wasn’t guilty of anything. It was Natalia’s fault. All of it. Her fault for urging her mother to go back to the store. Her fault for persisting in trying to light the stove. Her fault for not getting to her brother sooner, or figuring out how to safely get him out. Couldn’t she have tied a bedsheet under his arms and then tied that to another sheet and lowered him to the ground?

  She wanted her parents to scream at her. To tell her she was not their daughter anymore. Even though her dad didn’t say anything, didn’t do much more than bite his lip and look at the floor, she could tell he didn’t blame her, either.

  Which was almost worse.

  “I should have gotten that burner fixed,” her mom continued in a high, strangled-sounding voice. “I should have guessed you would try to help me by starting the pasta water. The fire captain told me modern houses have so many things made of plastic and chemicals that they burn really fast. He said that, thirty years ago, if your house caught on fire, you still had fifteen minutes to get out. Now you’re lucky if you have three.”

  * * *

  Two days later, Natalia was in surgery. The worst of the burned skin on the back of her legs was surgically removed and replaced with a thin layer of healthy skin harvested from her inner thighs. The remaining burns had to be frequently scrubbed to remove dead and dying tissue. Even on painkillers, it was agony. She spent a total of six days on the burn unit, three of them on a ventilator. Days after it was removed, she was still coughing up black mucus. Her days in the hospital were filled with dressing changes, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and as much sleep as she could manage.

  Only sleep offered her a reprieve from the terrible reality. Not only was Conner dead, but she slowly figured out their whole house was gone. Their clothes. Books. Appliances. Furniture. Photos of her dead grandmother. Letters from her great-great-great-grandparents. All turned to ash.

  On the seventh day, she went home to heal. Only there was no home. Just an apartment filled with hastily purchased IKEA furniture and an odd assortment of stuff people called donations but really seemed like things they just wanted to get rid of.

  There were still two months left in the school year, but Natalia didn’t go back to fifth grade. She couldn’t. In fact, she could
n’t go out in public at all. Burns were basically like open wounds, the doctors said, putting her at high risk for infection. The skin was the biggest organ of the body, they told her. It was responsible for keeping the fluid in her body, while keeping out bacteria and viruses. It also helped a person maintain a steady internal temperature.

  Natalia also knew that your skin was the first thing people saw when they looked at you. And it allowed you to touch. To feel things.

  Only she was determined to feel nothing. If you felt things, if you cared about people, then you could get hurt. She couldn’t help caring about her parents, but she withdrew from her friends and was careful not to make new ones. She wasn’t rude, not exactly. Just detached.

  For most of sixth grade, Natalia had to wear compression shorts under her clothes to try to smooth the scars on the backs of her thighs. It only partly worked. The skin there still healed tighter and rougher, the texture and color different from the soft white skin around it. The scars looked like she felt. Like she was the rougher, uglier person surrounded by other people with soft, easy lives. People who had no idea how quickly everything could go wrong. How you could lose it all. Lose it all in a heartbeat.

  CHAPTER 17

  STOP, THINK, OBSERVE, PLAN

  1:43 A.M.

  IN A SILENT LINE, they trudged onward, but now they were finally going downhill. No one had the energy to restart the chant about holding on to the cable.

  Natalia’s toe, which earlier had been burning, now felt wet. The blister must have broken. But it was silly to pay any attention to a toe when Ryan and Lisa must be suffering far more. She had given them pain pills from her dwindling supply, but over-the-counter medications could not make up for the fact that they both needed rest and a real doctor.

  Gradually the sounds of Hideaway Falls faded, replaced by the huff of labored breathing, the scuff of feet, and the faint grumble of the flames behind them. Marco kept up his steady, light cough.

  Eventually, the trail widened so it was no longer just a narrow edge cut into the side of a cliff. The terrain began to flatten out, the rocks giving way to bushes and even small trees. Now if someone missed a step, they wouldn’t fall to their death. They reached the last stretch of cable. After Natalia let go, she had to massage the cramped fingers of her left hand. They felt as if they were permanently shaped into hooks.