by Sarra Cannon
“Get in,” he said breathlessly.
“What?”
“Get in, Hallie! It’s a passage out of here. Get in, and there’s a ladder you can use to climb further down. It’ll take you straight down past the fire and into a hidden room in the cellar, where you’ll see another door. Take it and follow the path as far as you can. It’s a long walk, it takes you down the hill. Away from here. When you get out, stay there and don’t go anywhere. I’m going to follow you.”
He stood, and Hallie felt sick as she lowered herself into the hole. “You’re coming right after?” she asked, for reassurance.
“I’ll be just a minute, but yes.”
“Wait, why?” They heard a loud boom from downstairs, which startled her. She realized she’d left her bag upstairs, along with his. And along with the flashlight, and the Belleyre letters.
“Hallie, just go!”
She let go, landing hard in the crawlspace between the first and second floor. She felt around in the dim light for the ladder, careful to step on the first rung. Hands sweaty against the splintery wood, she began her blind descent, hoping desperately that the wooden ladder wouldn’t give way, that if it did the drop wouldn’t be so painful.
At last, her foot hit solid ground. Wet soil, to be precise, which smelled like sewer water and day-old coffee grounds. She held her breath, feeling around for a door. It was pitch dark in the cellar. She closed her eyes against the darkness, which somehow felt better than straining in vain to see something.
She paused, listening hard for Matthew’s footsteps above her. Silence. Not even the roar and heat of the fire could reach her down here. She contemplated waiting, and she did manage to wait for a few minutes—or was it longer?—but something scurried over her foot, which brought bile to her throat. Who knew what other living things were lurking in the shadows beside her? She felt her way to the next door with a lump in her throat, and pressed forward, through the narrow, dirt-lined corridor.
After what seemed like an eternity of walking, of sinking her boots into cold, watery mud and leaning into more dirt walls for balance, of wishing she’d brought a coat and some water, of stopping periodically to listen for Matthew following her—and even calling out, once, for him—she reached the end of the passage. Another wooden door faced her, but the rush of cool fresh air told her that finally, she was one door away from outside. From safety. From the sky and the setting sun and a soak in a long, warm bath.
But she had to wait for Matthew. He was taking a long time. She pushed at the small wooden door and it burst open into a wooded area. She clambered out and sank down beside a nearby tree, watching the open door and waiting.
It was dark, but not quite night; the sky had taken on that cold lavender hue that came just after the sun has set but before the stars really found their way through the clouds. She searched for them through the branches of the tall evergreens that loomed overhead. How far were they from the Westie?
Time inched by, and her stomach grew more and more restless as her imagination began to wreak havoc on her nerves. She imagined Matthew trapped in that old house. She imagined that he’d gone back for their stuff, or that he’d tried to leave some other way. Through the servants’ entrance, maybe. But how could he have made it out unscathed? From what she’d seen, the fire moved fast. It had to have moved fast, for it to have gotten so out of hand so quickly.
She thought of him trapped inside the burning building and she clutched her stomach, unable to follow that train of thought any further. Unable to imagine even for a moment how it might feel to lose him, too.
But she was alone now. Her heartbeat was starting to falter, her pulse growing erratic in her ears. She felt her throat tighten around air that couldn’t reach her lungs. She covered her eyes, trying to will away the impending panic attack, but tears sprang to her eyes as she fought, her lungs burning, her head aching. Where was Matthew?
Then, through the blur of her tears, she saw him there, crawling out of the little trap door. Before she knew what she was doing, she had launched herself toward him and wrapped her arms around him.
“Ahh!”
His yell was one of pain. Immediately, Hallie jumped back, and the horrible charred sight of him was enough to wipe away the last vestiges of her panic attack.
His shirt was mostly scorched away, revealing a stomach and torso mottled with burns. The skin of his arms, which he’d clearly used to defend himself against the flames, looked like it had melted. Every bit of his exposed skin was angry red, bubbling with blisters. Even his ear and cheek hadn’t escaped the horrible bloody burns, and coupled with the dirt smeared into his wounds from his passage out of the house, he looked painfully disfigured. He dropped their bags beside him. So he had gone back. The bags, too, were charred on the outside.
He stumbled forward, towards the tree where Hallie had been sitting, and Hallie hurried to guide him, trying to support him without touching any of his raw, exposed skin.
“I’m going to call 9-1-1,” she said. “Try not to move.” He shivered violently.
“No,” he growled through gritted teeth. “No police.”
“Look, I don’t think it matters now what we were doing up there. You’re really burned, and if you could see yourself—”
“No police!” he shouted, his voice even harder, with more of an edge, than before. “No paramedics.”
His body shuddered, and he stopped arguing. She dug in their bags for a phone. Where the hell were they?
“Hallie…” he moaned, his voice low. “Please.”
She gave up the search for the phones to tend to him. “What is it? What do you need?” She felt her hands shaking as she touched the side of his face that had escaped mostly unscathed. When she spoke, her voice trembled. “I don’t know what to do.”
He simply shook his head, still shivering, his teeth clattering. “Wait,” was his only word of instruction. She did. For a moment, nothing happened. And then, she saw it.
At first, she thought she was hallucinating, driven to delusion by smoke inhalation and the visceral fear that threatened to consume her. But she wasn’t.
Slowly, a little at a time, his skin began to shimmer. The red, angry burns and welts began to glow as though from within, orange like the glow of molten metal, brighter and brighter, until the light flared white and vanished, leaving the skin as smooth and taut and blemish-free as before. Even his occasional freckles returned as his skin glowed and healed, swatch by swatch, from his tender scorched torso to his bloodied arms and his mangled face. Over and over again, his skin seemed to glow from within, flare white and then settle back to normal—until finally, the Matthew that stood in front of her was her same Matthew, fully healed, looking haggard and tired and weak, but otherwise unscathed.
There were a thousand—a million—questions she should have asked, but in that moment, looking into the dark, haunted depths of those cornflower blue eyes, she couldn’t think of one. Before she knew what she was doing, she was standing in front of him. She skimmed her palm along his arm, over his neck and upward, where she cradled his raw cheek, taking his face in her hands as he had done so many times before to her. Her hands were cool and his skin was smooth and hot, and he leaned into her, closing his eyes tight. His throat worked to swallow, and as she watched him, the tiniest murmur broke her lips at the sight of the tears wetting his eyelashes. His jaw tightened, and she knew he was trying to will away the tears before he looked at her again.
The last thing she could imagine doing, in that moment, was ask him questions.
Instead, she lifted her hand and pressed a soft, gentle kiss to his healed cheek, then trailed her hand back down to link their fingers. She felt his body tremble as she leaned her forehead against his chest. She could feel the rapid puffs of his breath on her head and she waited, holding his hands, trying to comfort him with the closeness of her body and resist the impulse to wrap her arms around him. His skin might have healed, but she thought his body might be sore.
; Then, finally, she felt him extract his hands from her grasp. For a moment she thought he meant to pull away, but instead he grasped at her hips, his fingers curling into the loose fabric of her sweater, and pulled her closer, so that she was pressed against his bare torso. With a soft hum she kissed his chest, doing her best to silence the little alarms that went off in her head every time she kissed him, every time she let him inch a little closer to her heart. For what seemed like an eternity, he clutched her, and she let herself be held by him, wrapped in the smoky scent of his skin, until his breathing evened and his grip on her relaxed.
The stars had woken. The orange glow of the Belleyre house rose above the treetops as it burned, illuminating the deep blue evening sky. In the distance, she heard sirens. She bent and gathered up their book bags, then took his hand.
“Matthew…” she said, and he looked down at her with anguish in his eyes, as though he wanted to explain things but couldn’t find the words. She shook her head. His pain hurt her, too, and she was starting to worry that she couldn’t take much more of it. She needed him to smile. Needed him to know that none of this mattered, not just then, anyway.
“You know,” she said lightly, jostling him with her shoulder, “you smell like a burnt toast.”
His pained expression softened into surprise.
“Let’s go home,” she said. “You need a shower.”
Chapter 11
A week passed, and Hallie had heard nothing from Matthew but radio silence. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to contact him. She lost count of the number of times she picked up the phone to dial him, only to remember their ride home that night and lose her nerve.
They had walked back to the bus in silence, Hallie’s attempts at reassurance and levity floundering quickly. With each step they took, he seemed to get farther and farther away from her.
As they drove back out onto the farm road, fire engines sped past them, one by one, and Hallie’s stomach churned with thoughts of that grand old house in cinders… and the possibility that it was their fault. The early winter night seemed to press down around them as they drove, with only her dim headlights to illuminate the darkness rising up around them. She glanced at Matthew, who had turned on his side to face the window. In his reflection on the curved glass, she could see that he had closed his eyes. The black smell of smoke still lingered around him, and she told herself that once he’d gotten home, washed off, eaten and rested, he’d be all right. She just had to get him home.
But as they approached the turnoff to the town square, Matthew shifted a little.
“Turn here,” he said.
“But I’m taking you home.” She wondered if he was still disorientated.
“No. I have to get my bike. I left it at the club last night.”
She glanced at him. “Do you really think you should be driving right now?”
Then he sat up straighter, his fingers digging into his thigh.
“Hallie,” he said, his voice taking on a dangerous edge. “Turn the car around and take me to my bike.”
She had pumped the brakes as they passed the turn, unsure whether to do as he asked or ignore him and drive on to his house. But she kept going, her sweaty palms gripping the wheel, her nerves prickling.
“Hallie!”
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be driving right now.”
“Well, then,” he’d replied bitterly, “It’s a good thing I don’t care what you think.”
It was like he’d struck her. Like his anxious, clenched fist had slammed hard into her belly, knocking the breath from her lungs. Misery clawed at her chest. She just wanted this day to be over. So she turned the bus around and drove him to the club, where happy coeds and lively music spilled out onto the street.
Matthew got out of the car wordlessly and slammed the door behind him. She watched as he swung a leg over the bike and sped off, taking the turn onto the main road so hard and fast that her heart skipped a beat.
He hadn’t wanted her then, despite her efforts to show him that she was still his friend, no matter what had happened, no matter what she’d seen. Now, she couldn’t bring herself to call him, knowing how much his rejection would hurt, how it would rip at an already raw wound.
Was it strange, to miss someone you’d only known for a few weeks? To miss them so much you had to fill your quiet hours with the white noise of old movies on TV, obnoxious music on the radio, just to keep your thoughts from straying to them?
Hallie folded her laptop shut, unable to concentrate on her take-home history final any longer. Once she finished it, she’d be free for the semester, and somehow freedom right on the horizon was worse than freedom in the unreachable distance. She snatched up her phone to text Carla.
Hey. Have you heard from Matthew this week?
No… not since the night you took him home. Did you hear about the fire?? Dr. S freaking out.
Yeah. Has she talked to Matthew about it?
Idk. I think she was having a hard time finding him too. How did it go the other night?
Ok I guess. Long story.
I want to hear about it! After finals though. I’m dying right now.
Me too.
Carla had given Hallie what she needed. If Matthew wasn’t even responding to Dr. Signer, then something was up. Hallie knew he had the letters, that he’d gone back for them. If he’d been desperate enough to risk his life to save those letters, and probably the whole project, then why was he hoarding them?
Hallie tugged on her boots and then shrugged on Matthew’s leather jacket. Enough was enough. He didn’t get to hide anymore.
— —
Matthew’s house was dark and as still and barren as ever… but something wasn’t right.
She peered through the kitchen window and saw that most of the drawers were half-opened, as though someone had opened each one and rifled through them in a haste. Papers were scattered on the kitchen table. Hallie snuck around to the back and tried the backdoor, which clicked open. She stuck her head inside.
“Matthew?”
No response. But the living room looked as disheveled as the kitchen, with all of the couch cushions slightly askew, like they’d been lifted and smushed awkwardly, haphazardly, back into position. Up in the loft, his formerly crammed bookshelves were loose with gaps.
Hallie stood in the doorway, unnerved. Someone had been here, looking for something, then left in a hurry. Was it Matthew? Someone else? She called his name again and then resolved to do a quick sweep of the house, to make sure he wasn’t lying unconscious somewhere.
The house was empty, but all the rooms were in a similar state of disarray. Even the locked darkroom had been left half-open, and several of his photo albums lay scattered on the floor. Her heart skipped a beat at the sight of all those old photographs on the floor, and she wondered whether his preoccupation with the past wasn’t also somehow, miraculously, a preoccupation with his own past, too.
He wasn’t there. As she left, Hallie tried his cell phone but got his voicemail.
“Matthew… call me. Where the hell are you? What happened to your house? I want to talk to you.”
She got in the car and tried to think of where to look for him. But what did she know about him, about where he spent his time? She’d seen him at school, at home, and at the Library—nowhere else. Even his job as a photographer didn’t come with a built-in location she could check.
But ten minutes later, as she pulled into her apartment parking lot, all of that ceased to matter. Because there he was, sitting on the curb, head bowed, with his helmet in his lap. A black leather bag lay at his feet. At the sound of the Westie he glanced up, and the little frown on his face cleared. Hallie parked and approached him, unsure whether to slap him or hug him.
She stopped at a safe distance, far enough that his warmth couldn’t tempt her into doing either.
“What are you doing here?” she said, relieved her voice didn’t tremble. He stood and the decency to look humble.
<
br /> “I’m here to—“ He broke off, staring at her, a smile tugging at his mouth.
“That jacket looks familiar.”
Hallie flushed. She stuck her hands in the pockets and held out her elbows, looking down at it in mock-surprise. “Oh, this? I didn’t even realize. Must have grabbed it instead of my own. What’s in your bag?”
He chuckled, advancing on her. “Why are you wearing my jacket, Hallie?”
He was looking at her like he did the night he’d dragged her onto the dance floor. The look that said he wasn’t going to let this go. She sighed, stepped back from him and tugged the jacket tighter around her before folding her arms across her chest.
“Because I missed you, you witless egomaniac. Where have you been?”
The smile on his face was dazzlingly genuine, and she hated that she liked putting it there.
“Missing you, too.”
Oh, he was very smooth.
“I’m here to take you out,” he said. “Will you come out with me?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. She had been willing to give him time and space. She hadn’t asked any questions. But now he seemed fine, and she deserved some kind of explanation.
“I don’t want to go anywhere with someone who keeps the kind of secrets you kept from me. That you’re still keeping from me… like I can’t be trusted.”
His smile faded.
“I know I owe you an explanation, Hallie. But I was trying to give you time.”
“I’m not the one who needs time. Every minute of this last week has been spent worrying and wondering and waiting. While you… what? Sat at home and read those letters I know you’re hoarding?”
He shook his head. “No. I spent the last week wallowing, telling myself that you don’t need someone like me in your life.”
“Maybe I don’t,” she challenged. He nodded, keeping his face impassive. He scuffed his shoe into the sidewalk and then met her gaze with a sad, wounded sort of look.