by Laura Tucker
“What’s going on?” Maggie asked sleepily from the front seat, at the very same time as Linda said, in a totally different voice, “What on earth?”
I straightened up and looked out the front window. It wasn’t the flashing lights or the hulking fire trucks that caught my attention, but the sky. After four days of sunsets, I’d trained my brain to look out for them, and that’s what I thought it was at first—a strange sunset, an ugly one, the sickly greenish orange purple of the bruise that Manny Weber gave Alex on his arm after Manny’s dad left.
“A fire,” Maggie said. “Wait. Ollie! Is that your building?”
Alex was leaning forward between the two front seats, his head tilted to one side. “The sign,” he said wonderingly to himself. “They won’t know she’s in there.”
Linda couldn’t have known that he was talking about the A.I.R. sign I’d ripped off the wall, but her spidey sense must have kicked in because she turned around to yell “Stay in the car!” at the precise moment that the door on Alex’s side flew open. She reached her arm out into the back seat as if she could catch him, but he was already out of the car, dodging around the blue police barricade set up to block the end of my street. A cop tried to grab him, missed, and then headed over to his car, radio up by his mouth.
By that time, my door was open, too. And I barely heard Linda screaming after Alex or felt the cop’s rough hand slipping off my own shoulder because I had already started to run.
CLIMB
Alex is in front of me, and for once I am not a thousand yards behind, but it doesn’t matter, nothing does as long as both of us keep running past the people gathered to stare astonished at the fire, and now at us. I am too scared to look at the building that is burning which is definitely my building, except for the moment where Alex boosts himself up onto the pale brickwork in front and starts to climb and I force myself to make snapshots in my head of the tiny cracks he wedges his sneakers into so that I can wedge my own sneakers into the same cracks, and then I do.
I am climbing, and it is hard; in fact, if I thought about it I would know that it is the hardest and most frightening thing I have ever done in my life, but I do not think. By the time one of the firemen on the ground sees us through the smoke and darkness and shouts, my fingers are bleeding and one nail is gone, not a hangnail but ripped right off, and my right sneaker is heavy with the blood filling it even though I do not remember smashing the toe that throbs like a heart.
It is difficult to hear the firemen shouting at us because it is difficult to hear anything. The thing you do not know about a fire—the thing I did not know—is the huge angry howl of it that reaches straight into your skull and grabs hold of your brain by both shoulders and screams right into its face. The only sensible response is to turn and run in the opposite direction as fast as your feet can take you, but that is not what Alex is doing: Instead he is moving right into the heat and the smoke and the terrible sucking rage of it, and so turning and running is not what I do, either.
The men below me have started the massive hose. It takes four of them to control it, and I look down at them and then up at the spray of the water on the flames and all I can think of is how beautiful it is, the fire dancing in what looks like wicked delight and the spray from the hoses making rainbows against the bruise-colored sky behind.
None of this matters, either, because we have done it, we are fifteen feet off the ground, at the level of the top of the first-floor windows and Alex above me is reaching out into the darkness to catch a trapeze I cannot see. I am barely holding on but then he is on the bottom rung of the ladder that leads up to the fire escape, and he is calling back for me, one hand outstretched.
I am scared, not just scared that he will not be able to support my weight but that I will not be able to take one hand off the wall, and scared that the rusty bolt that keeps the ladder secured so that burglars can’t climb up from the street into our house will give way and send the two of us plummeting down to the sidewalk like when someone gets off the other end of the seesaw. But this is not the right thing to be thinking because Alex is screaming for me and so I close my eyes and ignore my finger as I take one hand off the wall and then he has it, he has me, and the pain is very bad and there is a sickening moment where I am dangling, but then there is a thin metal bar cutting into my hands, and Alex reaches down and grabs the back of my jeans which used to be his jeans and so are big enough that there’s some fabric there to grab, which he does, and his strong, skinny arm hauls me up.
The ladder should be easy compared to the brickwork, but I am already so tired and there is no time to rest. It is hotter here, which I did not think was possible, and louder, and the ladder shudders horribly under our weight. Breathing is too hot so I sip air through my nose, but there isn’t enough. The people below are not too small to see, and they are coming after us. I can smell the tiny hairs on my face burning as the two of us climb, so close together that Alex almost kicks me in the face.
We’re at my floor now, and Alex swings aside to make room for me on the fire escape which leaves me in front, leading the way as we inch down the narrow walkway next to the building like it’s a tightrope, the open hole of the fire escape stairs gaping open beside. My right foot is not working very well, I notice, and then I stop confused in front of the window of the big room, familiar even behind its curtain of smoke, because there is someone in there, a massive figure weaving through the big room like a minotaur in a maze. But there is no time to find out who or what it is because we have to do what we climbed to do which is to get my mom out of bed.
I keep pushing right into the dragon’s breath, and the fire escape railing bites into my hipbones as I lean out over it to see into her room. The window is closed again but the curtain is where I left it, tucked behind the art books on the sill, and through the heavy smoke I think I see the shape of her in the bed and the shape is not moving. My heart beats like a rabbit’s then, tears of rage and frustration filling my scorched eyes and burning away just as fast, because we have climbed so far and have gotten so close and yet—like always—I have no idea what to do next.
Just then, a fireman shouts from below so I look down, then startle back when I catch a sudden movement from my mom’s room out of the corner of my eye: the wood frame around the French doors splintering as the glass-paned doors fly open. And then the minotaur is there, dropping down to one knee by the bed.
It’s Apollo, a dark bandana over his mouth like an old-timey thief. I cry out to him but he can’t hear, so I watch the silent movie from the noise and heat outside as he scoops my mom up and staggers back through the smoke with his burden towards the broken doors. My mom is not small, but she is small in Apollo’s arms, and the man’s shirt she is wearing trails beneath her.
Desperate to get their attention, I hit the hot glass of the window with my open palms but Apollo does not see or stop and I smell my hands sear like meat.
A millisecond later, the whole world explodes with a blast of heat so intense that my eyelids are no protection against it. I cower away in confusion and fear.
And as I turn my head away from the inferno, I feel rather than see Alex as he falls.
WHAT I SAW
After I get out of the hospital, I lie in the dark for a long time.
The room I’m in belongs to one of Joyce and Peter Walker’s sons. He’s grown and married, but the room is still a boy’s room. The walls are covered with maps. I avoid looking at the map of the moon hanging beside the bed. Even in the half-dark, the vinyl background is a queasy teal, and the Sea of Tranquility looks like a chicken pox scar.
I never know what time it is here. I could ask for a clock, but I don’t.
Joyce brings me soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Sometimes I eat some soup before pushing the bowl away. My throat is too sore from the smoke for sandwiches, even melted American on squishy bread.
Joyce brings me chocolates, too, and eats the
m when I don’t.
Apollo spends most days in the beaten-up armchair on the other side of my room, reading the newspaper or a book by a Polish poet with a name like a sneeze. He sleeps in the chair, too, although I’m pretty sure he has a bed in another room. I do not want to talk, so we do not talk, but I do not like it when he leaves. When I have bad dreams, he tinkers over a little table with a clip-on utility light.
Saint Fall is there, too. She smells like corn chips and sleeps at the foot of my bed and licks my face when I cry.
I do not talk, but people talk to me. That’s how I know my mom is okay. She got out of one hospital for smoke inhalation and went to another one for depression. Depression is why she went to bed.
Alex is also okay, if breaking one of your legs in two places, your arm, and three ribs can be considered okay. Apollo had pretty bad smoke inhalation, which is why he sounds like a bear growling from the chair in the corner of my room when he breathes, but he was out of the hospital first of all of us.
My dad calls Joyce’s house every day, sometimes more than once, but I do not talk to him. Joyce drags her son’s old baby blue slim-line phone over to the bed, and I turn my face to the wall. I want my dad to come home, to wrap me up in the warm leather coffee smell of him, to scratch my back hard the way I like it, and to tell me everything is going to be okay.
If he’s not going to do that, then I don’t want anything from him at all.
It’s not that I can’t talk; it’s that I would rather not. Right now, I see a series of pictures in my mind, complete and fully formed. I hold on to them, tracing the details, wearing grooves in my brain in the shape of the memories. Talking about what happened will spread the story out, and what I remember will get mushy and bloated with other people’s thoughts and impressions.
I need what I remember to stay tight and precise. I need to know what I saw.
Sometimes, late at night, when there’s nobody in the armchair in the corner of the room, I raise my bandaged hands and sketch what I saw into the air, pawing out the corners of these strange drawings I will never make.
I draw the stiff collar of a fireman’s black coat, and the mask that prevents me from seeing his eyes, held on by rubber straps that cut into the grey and black stubble chafing my cheek.
I draw Linda running toward the gurney loading Alex into an ambulance. His feet, the only part of him that I can see, jerk side to side with the rolling wheels. One of his red sneakers is gone.
I draw a forgotten rag, soaked in solvent, as it tumbles down a slanted drafting table before settling onto the seat of a wooden stool.
I draw the rough loose crumple of a cardboard sign wrapped in plastic, trampled on the floor. I draw firemen standing on the street, while a building that should be empty burns.
I draw a broken door, swinging jauntily on its hinge as a massive minotaur lifts a woman from a bed. The oversized white men’s shirt she wears trails behind her like a wedding dress.
This is the hardest memory to draw, because of the smoke that is everywhere, and because of the look in the minotaur’s eyes. The look is none of the things that you would expect. It is not determination, or horror, or fear.
The look is love.
PROOF
Exactly one week after the fire, I woke up again from the dream.
I must not have cried out, because Apollo was still working at the little tray table by the time I’d calmed down enough to speak. A small circle of light illuminated his hands, but his face was in shadow and I was glad; it would be easier for me that way.
“Why hasn’t he come home?” I spoke to the ceiling, in a voice creaky with disuse.
I saw Apollo stiffen in surprise, but he didn’t look up. “Your father is still in France,” he said in an everyday tone of voice, as if I’d been chatting away the whole time.
I knew what he was doing. You get a wary deli cat to come over to you by pretending the whole thing is no big deal—you, the cat—whatever, man. Apollo was the one who taught me that.
I said, “He should have come back.”
The words came out like bullets. Apparently, I was angry.
Apollo didn’t disagree with me. All he said was, “I am not sure that he can, just now.”
“How come?”
“He is in a bit of trouble.”
“Because of the Head?”
Apollo sighed then, one of those massive Polish sighs my dad used to make fun of him for, and placed the small tool he’d been holding back onto the tray. “You know about that?”
“The guy with the accent was waiting for you, in the hallway. Grandjean.”
Apollo shook his big head. “Relentless. I cannot think how he found us.”
“He was buying a Coke,” I said, and Apollo stared at me. “He saw a drawing I gave Mr. G.”
Apollo threw his big head back and laughed, delighted by the coincidence. He hadn’t expected that.
But I wasn’t in a laughing mood. “Was it the wrong thing to do, what my dad did?”
Apollo didn’t say anything for a long time, and I let him think. Finally, he responded, directing his answer to the stamped tin ceiling above us. “Returning the head may have been the right thing to do. But stealing was almost certainly the wrong way to do it.” Another sigh. “By disappearing, he was trying to protect you two—from lawyers, the police—but this did not work, either.” Yet another sigh. “He has made a terrible mess. And for nothing.”
I sat up straight in the rumpled bed. “What do you mean, for nothing?”
Apollo rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Well, she was not destroyed in the fire, so that is something, I suppose. But nobody can prove definitively that the Head came from this church in France. So back it must go, to the Dortmunder.”
I felt like someone had shot an arrow, pinning me to the headboard.
“Art goes missing, art is hidden, art changes hands—this is what happens during wartime, the man at the museum tells me.” Apollo’s voice had ice in it. You wouldn’t want to lecture him about war; he was hungry in Poland for years. “But it is not right.”
I lay back against my pillows, heartsick. So much disruption and confusion and secrecy—and for nothing. Just another stupid mystery, sputtering out.
I couldn’t let it go. “But there must be some people there, who remember her from before she was taken? Don’t they want her back?”
“Of course, yes, the people who live there are sure. But France is not going to pick a big fight with the United States over this—a little piece of art, stolen from a church with three pews in the middle of nowhere and vouched for by a bunch of farmers.” Apollo sounded as bitter as I’d ever heard him. “And your father, well, he is caught in between. In France, he is okay for now. But he cannot come back to the States.”
Ever? I thought but didn’t say.
My plan wouldn’t have worked anyway.
I looked down at my useless, bandaged hands. I’d drawn the Head over and over, dissatisfied every time. Now I wasn’t even sure if my hands would ever heal enough for me to do a drawing I hated. As if he knew what I was thinking, Apollo leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “All of this? You do not have to worry about any of it. All you have to do is get better.” I see him shake his massive lion’s head out of the corner of my eye. “This mess is not your fault, Olympia. None of it. You must understand that. And it will get sorted. Everyone is, or will be, okay.”
He was wrong, of course. The fire was my fault. But I couldn’t tell him that, not yet.
I flipped over onto my side, my face just inches from the wall, while thoughts gathered like thunderclouds.
Fine. So the Dortmunder would get the Head. Maybe it didn’t matter that she was stolen; at least lots of people would get to see her there.
I flipped over again, onto my back.
Except that it did matter. Some Egyptian noble had commiss
ioned careful replicas of everything he’d need in the afterlife—cows for milk and little loaves of bread and a beautiful garden with terracotta tiles. Why was it better for a museum to steal those things than the grave robbers who’d come to take his gold? Because of the fancy glass case and the information card? It wasn’t better—not to the people who’d lost the art, anyway.
I thought of farmers coming to kneel at the foot of a beloved, butchered statue. And I saw the big man’s sad, hopeful face looking up at me from the bottom of the stairs, my imperfect sketch clutched in his fist, the old brown photo under his plump thumb.
A space opened up in the center of my chest and I turned my head slowly toward the chair where Apollo sat, staring moodily off into the middle distance.
“Let’s say there was a photo,” I said. “An old one. Of the Head in the church, with her body. From way back when.” Apollo’s eyes met mine, one side of his mouth starting to curve up into the smile that meant he was ready to make some trouble. “Would that count? As proof?”
MAKE SOMETHING
While he was getting the big man’s business card from my notebook, Apollo told me not to bother getting my hopes up. But he spent a long time on the phone.
When he was done, Joyce came in with plates of lasagna and salad. She tried not to show how happy she was that I was sitting up and talking—in fact, she was practically whistling with nonchalance—but I saw the look she shot Apollo.
We probably hadn’t been fooling the deli cats, either.
I couldn’t hold the fork with my bandages, so Apollo fed me like a baby. I ate every bite of lasagna on my plate, and a big piece of Apollo’s, too. Peter is a good cook, and it was the first time I’d been hungry since the fire.