“After the fire, when everything calms down, I’ll tell you everything. We can decide together what we want to do.” Cadie stumbled; the throbbing in her leg had moved up her torso and her head pounded so that the light from the moon seemed to pulse in sync with her heartbeat. In the darkness, the cheerful gingham curtain had turned black with blood.
“For now, we need to get you to a doctor.” Daniela threaded her arm tighter around Cadie’s waist.
Sal broke into a sprint as they approached the rec center, which had been transformed into an evacuation shelter. Vehicles stuffed with possessions crammed the parking lot and spilled over onto the grass. Disoriented children with sleeping bags under arms, a small boy with a worn stuffed monkey clasped to his chest, trailed behind falsely cheerful parents. People ran to embrace friends, shouting names across the parking lot. Music blared over the chug of a generator. Other than the minimal lighting inside the rec center, the town remained dark from the power outage.
“Dolores,” Raúl shouted as he ran toward them. Sal ran into his open arms. His chest heaved with silent sobs as he opened his arms to Dolores and Daniela. Daniela pulled Cadie in with her. The flood of relief in the knot of bodies made Cadie feel simultaneously safe and entirely alone.
“¿Estas herida?” Raúl examined the cuts on Sal’s hands and guided her toward the rec center.
Sal smiled weakly and leaned against her grandfather as they walked toward the building.
Dolores hung back with Cadie.
“You need medical attention,” Dolores said while staring across the parking lot. She waved to friends and smiled. But her smile faded when her friends looked away.
After a few seconds Dolores let a heavy sigh slip through her lips and tilted her chin toward the sky. “His name was Carlos.”
“Who?” Cadie said.
“There was no Juan Hernández. He took that name after we crossed the border together. He was fourteen.” Dolores folded her arms across her chest. “He carried Daniela on his shoulders like she was a doll. He sang to her.”
Moonlight caught the tears sliding down Dolores’s cheeks.
“You knew him? From before?”
Dolores nodded. “We traveled together for weeks. When Raúl bought papers for us, they took his given name—Juan—from him. He argued with them for a way to keep his name. It was his father’s name. And his grandfather’s. But they wiped it all away. All the history. When he became Raúl, that young boy Carlos took up the name Juan to honor my husband’s family. We went our separate ways, and didn’t hear from him for seven years.
“When he contacted us years later looking for work, Raúl convinced Clyde to give him a job on the farm and he moved here. By then, Daniela did not remember him. We thought it best not to stir those memories. Maybe we shielded her from too much.”
All the air in Cadie’s lungs felt trapped. She couldn’t breathe in. She couldn’t breathe out.
“After I went to their house and saw what Garrett had done, I became a witness. The police would want to talk to me, maybe talk to Raúl. It was too late to help Juan, so I made a choice.” Dolores paused. “And I’ve had to live with it. We both have. He carried my daughter for weeks. I don’t know how we would have made it here without him. And I left that poor boy alone in the woods. It’s unforgivable.”
People milled around them, some crying at having lost their homes, others looking for loved ones, and clinging to the ones they found. Cadie felt like a stranger in her hometown. She longed to get in her car, drive back to Concord, and pretend none of this had happened.
“I should have taken care of you. You were a little girl. I abandoned you when you needed me so I could protect my family,” Dolores said. “But no one protected you.”
“I just told Daniela what we did.” Cadie braced herself for Dolores to be angry. “I thought you should know.”
“I suspected that’s what you were talking about.”
“You need to talk to her. I’m going inside.” Cadie needed to sit down.
“Wait.” Dolores grabbed Cadie’s wrist. Her fingers dug into her skin with desperation. “Let me tell Raúl. He doesn’t know any of this. He had enough regret of his own. I kept this one for myself. Let me tell him.”
Cadie nodded.
Dolores’s back looked so rigid, so strong.
“I’m sorry for all the pain I know you endured.” Dolores stroked Cadie’s face.
Cadie leaned her cheek into Dolores’s hand and closed her eyes. The warmth of Dolores’s touch grounded Cadie. For the first time in hours she wasn’t rushing to something or running from something. She didn’t want to open her eyes and face what came next.
Cadie limped through the clusters of people in the lobby of the rec center. She was so thirsty. So tired.
Ryan sat in a chair while another firefighter cleaned a burn on his face. He jumped up when he saw Cadie.
“Geez. You okay? What happened to your leg?” Ryan pointed to the bloody curtain wrapped around her calf. His sweaty hair spiked up, and dirt smudged his neck. “I thought you were evacuating.”
“I had to find someone first,” Cadie said.
Bandages wrapped around Ryan’s forearms. Raw blisters covered the side of his forehead and his hair was singed above one ear.
Fluorescent lights buzzed above her head. The floor felt spongy, unstable. She grabbed the back of a metal folding chair for support.
“Jesus, what the hell happened to you?” Ryan looked her up and down. His eyes rested on the hilt sticking out of her waistband. Cadie pulled the shirt tight around her.
The dim emergency lights flickered every few minutes as the generator struggled to keep the power on.
“Have you seen Garrett?” Her own voice sounded far away, as if coming out of someone else’s mouth. The fluorescent bulb sizzled in an irregular rhythm then, without warning, changed to a different pitch that screeched in Cadie’s teeth.
“Garrett’s fine. I saw him, like, two hours ago. He’s helping with evacuations.” Ryan kneeled on the floor to look at the cut on Cadie’s leg.
The fabric, stiff with dried blood, stuck to the cut as Ryan peeled it back. Cadie’s vision frayed at the edges and her knees buckled at the pain. Ryan caught her elbow and guided her into a cold metal chair. She shivered despite the heat.
“Hey, I need a blanket over here,” he shouted.
Cadie watched her hands shaking in her lap. Tacky blood clung to her fingers and forearms.
Ryan wrapped a blanket around her. “I’m going to go wash my hands so I can dress your wound until we can get you to the hospital.”
“I’m fine.” Cadie shrugged the blanket off.
Ryan pulled the blanket back around Cadie’s shoulders.
A wave of nausea rose. She swallowed hard.
What if Pip and Pippi went on a date? Garrett had coded into the pages of Tuck Everlasting that long-ago summer. In the years that followed, Cadie had spent hours poring over Great Expectations and Pippi Longstocking, trying to determine whether Garrett had been posing a hypothetical literary question or asking her out. A week after he proposed that Pip and Pippi go out on a date, Cadie heard the gunshot, and she never responded to his question.
Someone knocked over a metal chair with a crash behind Cadie. She jumped. Ryan put a slow hand on her shoulder.
“Sit tight for a minute. We need to take care of your leg.” Ryan leaned close to her ear and whispered, “But first, I need to take that firearm. I’m not going to ask why you have it, but you can’t walk around with that in here.”
Cadie pulled her shirt tight around her waist to shield the gun.
Ryan held both hands up in front of Cadie, as if surrendering. He looked around to make sure no one watched them. Cadie slid the gun out of her shorts. Room-temperature air hit Cadie’s exposed skin with a chill.
Ryan folded a plastic bag around the gun and eased it toward his lap. Cadie put her hand on it to stop him. She had never wanted to see that gun again. But there it was
. Evidence. Proof of what had transpired.
She imagined the fury in Clyde’s chest the day he pulled that gun on the shopkeeper for insulting Juan and stealing his money. That guy sits on his white ass all day while you work hard. He can’t just take your fucking money. Clyde had reasoned with Juan while Cadie had clung to the rock ledge below them. She imagined Clyde’s face red with passion. And Clyde had covered it all up, letting Cadie believe he shot Juan, all to protect Garrett.
She felt Garrett’s fear of losing Clyde emblazoned in the steel. His entire world at stake as he aimed it at Juan. And Sal. The near miss that could have changed everything. Cadie’s stomach lurched at the thought of what could have happened if that bullet had hit Garrett. Or Cadie.
The gun grew heavy in her lap, burdened with fear, hate, and regret. The pressure on her thighs became unbearable.
“Take it,” she said.
“Is it loaded?” Ryan asked.
“I think so.”
“Are you in trouble?” Ryan unloaded it under the tent of the plastic bag and put two bullets in his pants pocket.
“I don’t know.” Cadie waited for Ryan to ask for details. He stared at her with quiet eyes. His lack of judgment or interrogation felt like a kindness she did not deserve. She wanted him to accuse her of something, to get angry with her so she could yell back.
“I’m taking your gun out to my truck. Just for now. We can talk about it later.” He put a hand on her shoulder as he stood up. “And I’m going to find you an EMT for your leg. Don’t go anywhere.”
People gathered in clusters around the room, hugging each other, consoling each other over lost homes and farms. Cadie sat alone on the flimsy metal chair.
Ryan returned with a bottle of water.
Cadie drank the entire bottle without stopping. The water soothed her scratchy throat and washed down the ash that clung to her teeth.
“You lit the back burn, didn’t you?” Ryan’s voice maintained a gentle tone that made Cadie feel slightly drunk. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“Why not? Arson’s a crime.” She imagined the fire she had started swooping through the forest.
“You saved the Garcias’ house and a bunch of other homes on that side of the Hook.”
She imagined the flames consuming her books.
The room felt so crowded all of a sudden. Or maybe it had been crowded the whole time. She couldn’t remember. Loud music pulsed in her ears. Two babies screamed from opposite corners of the room. The thud of her perfectly aimed stone smashing against Garrett’s skull reverberated in her mind.
37
PRESENT DAY
“You sure you want to do this without anesthesia?” a young doctor asked as she cleaned the gash on Cadie’s leg in the triage station set up in the rec center. “If you go to the ER, they can give you lidocaine. You won’t feel the stitches.”
“I’m not going to the hospital.”
Sleeping families on cots and on the floor filled the back half of the room. Small clusters of adults sat in chairs, talking in hushed tones. They would all wake up to an altered Maple Crest.
“Cadie, don’t do this. It’s going to hurt.” Daniela sat in a folding chair next to her.
“Just stitch it up,” Cadie told the doctor. Her body felt too heavy to walk to a car, too exhausted to endure a hospital waiting room. With the cottage and her car lost in the fire, she didn’t know where to go or how to get there.
Daniela ripped the top off of a pizza box from the table behind her and folded the cardboard quadruple thick. “Here, bite on this.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. It’s stitches.” Cadie accepted the cardboard.
“You got this, Cadie Braidy.” Daniela took Cadie’s hand in hers.
Cadie sank her teeth into the cardboard and squeezed Daniela’s hand. The needle stung with less ferocity than she expected. She breathed through it the way she imagined someone would breathe through labor.
“Ready?” The doctor looked more nervous than Cadie felt. “The subcutaneous stitches are going to hurt more.”
“Just do it,” she said through the mouthful of pizza box.
Cadie felt almost grateful for the sharp pain that wiped everything else from her mind. Nothing but pain for a few graceful seconds.
The metal doors at the front of the rec center slammed open with a clatter. “The hardware store’s on fire!” someone yelled. “All the fire trucks are already out at other fires. We need help!”
Later, Cadie would not remember if it had been a man, a woman, or a child who announced the fire. She would remember the half second of utter silence followed by a synchronized wave of people rushing toward the door.
Daniela’s hand went limp in Cadie’s grip. The doctor froze in the middle of a stitch.
“Go help your parents. I’m fine. I’ll find you later,” Cadie said.
Daniela kissed Cadie on the cheek and ran for the door. Cadie watched Dolores and Raúl follow her.
“Don’t move.” The doctor’s hand seemed to move in slow motion as she pulled the thread through Cadie’s skin. About a dozen adults and handfuls of children remained in the room where at least a hundred people had been minutes earlier.
“Can you hurry?” Cadie spit the cardboard to the floor. The pain grew more acute with each stitch. She ground her teeth and rocked her torso in the chair to absorb the waves of pain.
“No running or jumping or anything that could disrupt the stitches, okay?” The doctor tied off the final stitch and dressed the wound. “Try to keep it elevated. If you see any redness or…”
Cadie tried sprinting to the door, but the pain held her to a steady limp.
A crowd had already gathered around the burning hardware store when Cadie arrived. The faint outline of Cadie’s cloud with a silver lining shone through the char on the wood siding. Shards of broken glass glistened on the stairs as water rained through the porch rafters.
Neighbors formed a bucket brigade, throwing water on railings and the side wall. Teenagers with shovels dug around the sides of the building, tossing dirt on patches of burning grass. Cars lined up with headlights aimed at the hardware store.
Ryan and Tino lugged coiled fire hoses from the fire station to a hydrant half a block from the store. Cadie watched Tino struggle to loosen the valve while Ryan directed him with his good arm how to connect the hose, the injured arm strapped to his chest in a sling.
Someone dragged a cooler filled with beer and water bottles toward the bucket brigade. The hum in the air, punctuated by occasional laughter and blaring country music, felt more like a street party than the scene of a fire.
The air crackled with an untamed static.
The horizon line in the direction of the lake glowed red-orange like a stubborn sunset against the dark sky. But instead of west, the incandescence rose from the south, disorienting Cadie, who already felt slightly dizzy. The color danced and rolled, sending up a shroud of smoke to mute its glow.
Tino dug his feet into the gravel and aimed the stream at the porch roof. Ryan backed across the hardware store parking lot, unwinding a garden hose attached to the post office spigot. Ryan’s posture looked different in the moonlight. He didn’t stutter step with his approval-seeking half smile. He moved with purpose and confidence. Cadie hardly recognized him.
Raúl sprinted toward Ryan to help with the hose. The bruise Raúl had left on Ryan’s cheek disappeared in the smoke-filled air.
Cadie turned in a circle, watching the scene. Daniela paced next to Sal, who squatted on her haunches, like a ball of kinetic energy about to burst. The young girl rocked back and forth, chewing on her lip as a reflection of the flames burned in her dark eyes. Soot smeared Daniela’s face, and half of her hair had fallen out of her ponytail.
Behind the swarm of bodies moving around the fire, a figure ran toward them from the direction of the rec center. Even at a distance, the distinctive flop of Garrett’s hair gave him away. A flood of relief that he had made it out of the woods smacked
up against Cadie’s roiling anger.
Something inside the store exploded. Camp stove fuel, maybe a propane tank. A ball of fire swelled inside, and a window on the porch exploded outward. In a matter of seconds the seemingly tame fire morphed into a monster.
Dolores walked up and stood beside Cadie. The flicker of the fire made the silver in her hair shimmer.
“It’ll be okay.” Cadie kept her eyes on Garrett.
Neighbors spun around them, carrying buckets, passing hoses, shoveling dirt. The fire appeared to have started on the porch near the graffiti, near the boarded-up window a vandal had smashed with a rock days earlier. Cadie surveyed the street. No other buildings in town had caught fire. The creeping forest fire burned miles from town.
“Someone did this on purpose, didn’t they?” Cadie said.
“One person lit the fire, but the rest of the town is putting it out.” Dolores’s furrowed brow and wringing hands did not match the optimism of her words. “Our papers are inside.”
Dolores did not need to explain. The forged papers could not be replaced.
“I know exactly where they are. I’m going in the back door.” Dolores wasn’t asking for approval or permission. “I’ll be back out in minutes.”
“You can’t.” Cadie scrutinized the fire, which now consumed the entire left side of the building. She grabbed Dolores’s small hand, in part to reassure her that everything would be okay, and in part to hold on to her in case she tried to run toward the fire. “It’s too dangerous.”
“You don’t get to decide what risk is acceptable for my family.” Dolores twisted her necklace around her finger and took a slow step backward toward the fire. Cadie saw the woman Raúl saw. The strongest, bravest woman I’ve ever known. All the risk and sacrifice. The fear and joys of living in this imperfect place. It had always been a risk. Every day.
Cadie released her grip on Dolores’s hand.
Garrett had stopped to help Raúl and Ryan with the hoses. No one watched Cadie and Dolores.
“Let’s go before anyone sees us.” Cadie took a hesitant step forward, pain shooting up her injured leg.
Waiting for the Night Song Page 30