A Fireproof Home for the Bride

by Amy Scheibe

  Mr. Davidson leaned forward to see around Ambrose. Emmy met the old man’s eye; she was defiant now, ready to match her inherited wits against his. “How dare you,” she spat. “Take me home now.”

  He scowled. “Did you bring the ether?” he calmly asked Ambrose, who on command reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a small can and a white cloth.

  “Ambrose?” Emmy gasped, realizing that this had been part of his plan all along—the flattened tires, the offered ride, the incendiary display of power—clearly his goal to win her back was to be achieved by either persuasion or coercion, whatever it took. His hands shook, and he bit his bottom lip as he opened the top and spilled a few drops into the cotton. Emmy tried to pull away, to open the door, to scramble up and away from him in her seat, but the sickly sweet smell of the gas seeped into her nose and mouth as he pressed it firmly against her face. As she sunk into the oddly welcome abyss, from a million miles away she heard the words I’m sorry. Then nothing more.

  Twenty-three

  Grace Alone

  The familiar odor of oil-packed earth slipped into the darkness of her dreams. Emmy knew the smell, felt the dirt cold against her cheek, the black ink of the room liquid against her open eyes. A board creaked overhead, where she could barely see a speck of light like a pinprick in the heavy wool of sky. There were voices as well, but they were distant, muddled. Emmy tried to lift a hand to her face but found her arms were linked behind her back. The pain was everywhere: in her temples, the backs of her eyes, the roughness of her throat as she tried to swallow, the interior of her right shoulder, which, given how it felt, had been pressing into the dirt floor for a good long while. Her ankles—yes, these were bound as well, and it occurred to her to be grateful that she had put on trousers at some point during that day. Logic was not there at first, but as shards of memory began to cut at her consciousness, a deep, rattling cough overtook her to the point of nearly vomiting. She rolled over onto her stomach and did as best as she could without covering herself in the mess. The sight of Bobby slung over the shoulder of a fireman was the worst of it. The noises above stilled. Screaming is not an option, she thought as she rolled as far away from the sour smell now permeating the dark. Three rolls in, she came up against something soft and warm, solid, yet quivering. Emmy curled into a ball and pulled away from the thing—the animal—envisioning in her delirium a giant rat, or a number of them perhaps.

  Footsteps again now, swiftly across the floor, and a door creaking open someplace above. Emmy rolled back to where she knew the pool of vomit must be and stopped just short of it, lying on her shrieking shoulder and tipping her head aside, eyes pinned shut. A light passed over her eyelids and she fought the urge to open them, to see exactly where she was and what else was there with her. Cautious, quiet steps down a few stairs—planks—then the prickling feeling of some sort of presence in the room as the light at first moved away from her face but then stayed steadily on it.

  “Emmy, wake up.” It was Ambrose. He gave her a careful shake on her painful shoulder, but she resisted the urge to open her eyes. A low grunt sounded in his throat, the sound of a man holding back fear. “Curtis is preparing to move you. I don’t know where.” Emmy squinted her eyes open a small amount. Ambrose’s face was completely in shadow behind the beam of the flashlight.

  The door at the top of the stairs swung open, slamming against the shelves that lined the wall behind it. Emmy squeezed her eyes shut again but had seen enough to know that she was in the Branns’ cellar.

  “Well?” Mr. Davidson yelled gruffly from above. “Are they ready?” Emmy heard the squealing sound start again, this time more urgent and pain-pitched. It wasn’t an animal; it was the mewling of a woman. Was it Birdie?

  Ambrose stood, his legs shielding Emmy’s face from Mr. Davidson’s view. “She’s still out,” he said. “I think she needs a doctor.” His voice carried away from Emmy now, back toward the stairs and then up, clearly following the stranger’s withdrawal. “We can’t move her in this condition.”

  Emmy heard a sharp slap, followed by the sound of something falling a few stairs onto the floor. Then a harsh rebuke: “You are some kind of ignorant fool. I need them ready to move before dawn. If she dies on the road, it’s God’s plan, not mine.”

  “But they’ll look for her here.” Ambrose gathered courage in his voice. “We need to throw them off.”

  Mr. Davidson remained silent for a moment. “Take her watch,” he growled. “And her boots. Leave the boots on a bridge and throw the watch in the river.”

  Emmy felt Ambrose roll her onto her back, lift her right arm, and remove her watch, letting her arm drop limply to the floor.

  “On second thought, give them both more ether before you leave,” Mr. Davidson said. “I don’t want any trouble while you’re gone.” His footsteps continued up the stairs, where the door swung closed.

  A small whimper came from Ambrose. He rubbed Emmy’s arm and squeezed her hand, the flashlight pointed toward the ceiling joists. “God forgive me, Emmy,” he whispered, anguish permeating his voice. “It was just supposed to be another cross.”

  Emmy opened her eyes and tried to sit up, but a fierce pain in the back of her head forced her to lie down again. “Did you?” she asked, but her throat was too raw to say more.

  “Just the theater.” He sniffed, sounding both twelve and ninety. He took the can and the white cloth from his pocket. “When Frank joined the council, Curtis gave operations to him and preaching to me.” He moved his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel the drops of moisture on his breath as he spoke below a whisper.

  “Did he shoot John?” she asked.

  “No, the Mexican did.”

  Emmy shook her head slightly and ribbons of pain laced her vision. “Were you there?”

  “No, but Curtis was.”

  The door slammed open again, and Ambrose pressed the cloth to Emmy’s face as she closed her eyes, expecting the downward tumble of fractured dreams to reclaim her, but only scant traces of the drug remained. He hadn’t even opened the can.

  “Now!” Mr. Davidson yelled, switching on the overhead.

  “One more minute,” Ambrose said, sounding far calmer than his shaking body indicated. He slipped something hard and cold under Emmy’s side, whispering, “The coal door is open.” Emmy felt him move away. “Go quickly,” he added before pulling off her boots and leaving the room.

  The light clicked off and the wash of darkness made Emmy start to shiver in the dank room, but she wasted no time before rolling in the direction of the other person in the room.

  “Hello?” she whispered, her tongue feeling large and heavy in her mouth. “Are you okay?”

  The woman mewled so softly that Emmy could barely hear her. “I want to die,” she murmured with a sound of defeat that struck Emmy with fresh dread.

  “Svenja?” Emmy said sharply. She counted the months since the beautiful girl had shown up bruised and scared at the office. “Oh, no.”

  “I want to die,” Svenja squeaked, the noise forcing Emmy to wriggle into an upright position and keep her voice low and calm.

  “Shhh, don’t talk like that.” A searing pain spiraled through Emmy’s head, the dizzying aftereffects of the sedative throbbing throughout her body. “Are your hands tied?”

  “No,” Svenja mumbled. How beaten must she be, Emmy thought, if they don’t even bother to stop her from fleeing?

  “Untie mine,” Emmy said as forcefully as she could in an attempt to focus her energy and also to bring Svenja around. Emmy maneuvered her arms to where Svenja could untangle the coarse bale twine.

  “I’ll try,” Svenja whispered, and the girls set about their tasks in silence and darkness, loosening the poorly tied knots and slipping out of the bindings. Emmy rubbed her sore wrists and arms, realizing through her haze that Ambrose hadn’t tied them as tightly as he could have. She reached in front of her and felt for Svenja’s shoulders, lifting her friend into a standing position. Svenja responded by h
ugging Emmy tightly. Through a flimsy layer of silk, Emmy felt the heaviness of Svenja’s belly push hard against her own.

  “I made it to Saint Paul,” Svenja whispered, her stale breath warm on Emmy’s cheek. “They found me and locked me up at John’s. I had to tell him.” Svenja’s voice cracked. “It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t told him…”

  “Told him what?” Emmy said, as desperate to start moving as she was to know what had happened to John Hansen.

  “About Mr. Davidson,” Svenja said, releasing Emmy and sinking into the chair. “I want to die.”

  Emmy leaned forward to where she thought Svenja’s face to be, and laid her hands on her belly. “Is it his?” Svenja clutched Emmy’s hands, and the baby moved within as a low groan funneled up from Svenja’s lungs. Emmy moved her hand to Svenja’s mouth, but the sound was too primal to stop.

  “Shhh,” Emmy warned as they waited for the moment to pass, waited for the sound of men moving to the basement door. No one did. “They must be busy,” Emmy whispered, fresh hope mixing with new fear. She remembered the hard object on the floor, and quickly crawled back to where she had lain, feeling in front of her until her hand landed on the cool ivory of her grandfather’s bowie knife, the leather scabbard smoothly familiar in her hand. Emboldened, she conjured a mental picture of the Branns’ cellar—a place where she had frequently played hide-and-seek as a child, often in the dark. She stood slowly and felt along the wall until her leg bumped into a workbench. Every time a noise sounded overhead, Emmy held her breath, ready to fall on the floor and resume her possum play. She stealthily made her way back to Svenja.

  “Ready?” Emmy asked.

  “Go without me,” Svenja said, resignation coloring her stilted speech. “I can’t…”

  “You will,” Emmy insisted, taking off her coat and slipping it over the flimsy nightgown, buttoning the woolen garment across Svenja’s belly as best she could. “Now listen—there’s storm cellar stairs behind the coal bin that go out the back of the house. It’s only a quarter mile to the church, and another few hundred yards to our farm—we’ll call the police from there. Okay?”

  Svenja didn’t answer, but Emmy could feel her cowering. “Is there a blanket?” She felt around the floor near Svenja’s chair, finding a small quilt. “That’ll do,” Emmy said, trying to be positive even as she knew that without boots her own odds against freezing weren’t much better than Svenja’s.

  “We’ll just have to keep moving, right?” Svenja asked shakily, placing her sweaty hand in Emmy’s.

  “Exactly.” Emmy stuck the leather-holstered knife in her waistband and gathered the quilt under her arm, leading Svenja along the wall to the back of the room and behind the boiler. It was as hot in the corner as it would be cold outside, which Emmy knew was a fortunate thing, as any snow that might have fallen on the cellar doors would have melted away. She placed her stocking foot on the middle step and reached up to feel along the rough wooden door, the oval-shaped metal handle slipping into her hand as it had so many times before. Svenja released Emmy as the girl began that low, ugly groan again.

  “Be strong,” Emmy whispered, sensing that pain in this sort of interval indicated a greater challenge looming.

  “Oh, dear God, please take me,” Svenja said through her gritted teeth.

  “How long has this been happening?”

  Svenja ground her teeth. It sounded like gravel thrown at a brick wall. “Since this morning? I think.”

  “Listen,” Emmy replied, a demand. “This is nothing. Keep telling yourself that. This is nothing.” Emmy knew the alternative was too grim to consider, so she turned back to the large flat door overhead and simply pushed hard at it until one half of it gave a bit and then after more pressure flew all the way open to the perfectly still and starry night. A bank of snow between the door and the house buffered the sound as the two women scrambled up and out into the backyard. A light was on in the kitchen, showing through the window three coffee mugs on the table and nothing else.

  “Stay here a second,” Emmy whispered, grateful for the advantage of having her vision return in the moonlight. She crept around the corner of the large farmhouse and observed two cars and the pickup truck in the yard. The trunk of one of the cars gaped open and Mr. Davidson was there, pushing various bags into the maw. Ambrose appeared from the house and Emmy jerked a bit farther into the shadows cast by the pole light’s blue haze.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said to Mr. Davidson. Emmy could see her boots in his hand.

  “Make sure no one sees you,” Mr. Davidson barked.

  Ambrose ducked his head as if struck again, and climbed into his truck. Emmy used the noise of it rattling down the drive to cover her swift movements back around the house to where Svenja stood, grimacing and trembling. Emmy handed her the quilt.

  “I can’t,” Svenja said, pushing it away. “I feel hot.” The word sent a shock through Emmy. She wrapped herself in the quilt.

  “We need to go now, and fast,” she said, turning from her friend and marching on her already stinging feet through the deep snow toward a bank of trees. The moon was bright, and the temperature near freezing, the only two elements in her favor all night. They made it all the way to the tree line fifty yards from the house before she heard Svenja stumble and cry out.

  “I’m wet!” she gasped. “Everywhere!”

  Emmy spun to see what Svenja was talking about and was pinned in place by the vision of this folly: There the once beautiful girl stood, disheveled auburn hair about her head in a dirty cloud of moonlight, a puddle of dark-streaked fluid coloring the snow at her bare calves. Svenja’s eyes went as wild as the heifer’s once had, and Emmy knew the girl couldn’t make it a mile, much less another hundred yards in this condition. The baby wasn’t about to wait. Emmy tilted her head up to the sky, searching for some sort of solution. One star was brighter than the rest, and it occurred to her that a barn was as good a place as any to welcome a child.

  “We need to work our way through the trees and to the other side of the barn,” she said, taking Svenja’s arm and leading her in that direction. “You won’t make it otherwise.”

  Svenja pulled away and her coat fell open, revealing moon-shaped scars where her pale cleavage showed. “You go,” she hissed. “I don’t care what happens to me.”

  Emmy grabbed her by the arms and pulled her close, whispering just as harshly in her ear, “Well, I do. Now calm yourself and come.”

  It took five contractions to reach the soft hay in the upper loft. Svenja’s labor intensified, a contraction starting nearly as soon as the one before it had finished, and Emmy alternated between holding the girl’s hand and pacing the dusty room. She listened to the falsely comforting sounds of the animals below, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the men in the house made their discovery, followed the tracks out the back, through the woods, and right into the barn. She really hadn’t had the time to try to trick them with deeper tracks in the opposite direction—not that she could have. As she tried to think of what she would need to help Svenja, the girl cried out in shrill pain. She sounded like a rabid cat. Emmy pulled off her sweater and wedged it under Svenja as she arched up with the contraction, the quilt falling away, the coat open and useless. Focus, Emmy, she said to herself. Watch and wait. She grabbed the quilt from the floor and shook it hard, placing it under Svenja’s legs, and then with a flick of the knife, she opened the seam on Svenja’s underpants, ripping them out of the way. A much darker patch of hair showed between her thighs, and Emmy felt a brief moment of gratitude that she wasn’t seeing tiny feet.

  “This next time, go,” Emmy said, laying a gentle hand on the mounded stomach, the other against the right inner thigh. In the dim moonlight through the one window, Emmy moved a hand to the dark center and felt the hard-soft flesh of the infant’s head there, pliant, ready. Inhaling once deeply and exhaling completely, Emmy readied for the moment when her breath would catch. A rumbling started under the hand on Svenja’s stomach,
then a sharp tightening, and Emmy could feel the child’s knee strike out at the flesh that would constrict it even as the circle in her other hand grew into a dome. “Go now, hard,” she commanded, and Svenja propped her body up with her hands behind her on the coat she had shed, her bruised body visibly determined to move beyond the torture, through the demands of birth, and into some sort of relief. Emmy held her friend’s gaze as Svenja’s face contorted, and just as quickly as the small head was out, a look of complete peace swept away her grimace. Emmy inhaled. Exhaled. Svenja mirrored the breathing, and within seconds started the next push, triumph and anger mixing in her expression, making her look as wild as a cornered raccoon and as strong as a lion.

  The baby was out, and Emmy looped a piece of bale twine tightly around the cord that still connected her to her mother, laying the tiny girl on Svenja’s chest. As the new mother wept, Emmy attended first to the umbilical cord, and then to the afterbirth, folding the quilt and cautiously pressing it against Svenja, and covering her and the baby with the coat. Emmy pulled her sweater over her head before swiftly crossing to the window in order to consider their next move. The sky hadn’t lightened in the least; perhaps a half hour had passed, probably less.

  Ambrose had not returned. Emmy felt a jolt of borrowed time course through her, and she turned back to attend Svenja, only to find Mr. Davidson standing in the loft doorway. Every hair on Emmy’s body fired to attention, her hearing sharpened on the protective rush of anger she felt starting at her toes.

  “Thank you, sister Emmaline,” Mr. Davidson said, looking at the baby. “You’ve saved me one piece of trouble.”

  “She needs an ambulance,” Emmy said. “Now.”

  Svenja’s whimpering started anew but deeper in tone as Emmy walked sideways along the loft wall toward the pair, keeping her head low so the roofing nails that stuck through the slanted ceiling wouldn’t catch on her scalp. She dared not look for the knife, sensing in Mr. Davidson a man on the prowl for any evidence of danger.