Before the ruins stands the freckled policeman, testifying that he’s never seen anything like it. He witnessed a flock of birds, dizzy from the heat, fly into the wavering air above the trees and tumble like shooting stars into the fire. He says you could see the smoke from as far away as Buffalo. There’s a shot of Frank Dodd sitting on the back of a fire truck with an oxygen mask over his mouth. The policeman praises Mr. Dodd for his courage in rescuing two American women from the house. Then a reporter’s voice states that the women are now at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in St. Catharines with serious injuries. There’s a distant shot of someone being lifted into an ambulance, and it takes Maggie a moment to realize it’s her.
As the reporter continues to speak, there’s another shot of the rubble. Where the living room once stood, a man is kicking through the remains. The reporter’s voice identifies him as a friend of the tenants who was hoping to find something that survived intact. Finally the man leans down, pushes away a blackened piece of wood, and retrieves a small figure.
The statue doesn’t look the same. It’s glazed by the fire, a deeper, richer hue than before. The features on the face have burned away, leaving it without gender or expression.
The figure stays like that for only a second or two. Then, under the pressure of the man’s hands, it cracks in half. Maggie watches as he tips the thing and pours out a stream of fine grey dust. His face is out of focus, but she’s pretty sure the man is Josef.
Night has fallen outside the hospital. A candystriper in braids enters the room where Maggie lies, asks if she’s comfortable, and offers to change the channel. The girl smells of cigarettes and strawberry gum, a combination that nauseates Maggie and at the same time manages to make her crave both things.
The candystriper asks whether Maggie saw news about the fire on TV. The girl has already made it clear that not all patients get a television; it was a special favour on her part to wheel the set in here so Maggie could be entertained by the sight of her home’s destruction. The girl tells her that reporters appeared at the reception desk not long ago, but they were sent away. She adds that a priest turned up with his sister, too, and they were told to come back tomorrow during visiting hours. Maggie asks the candystriper how Brid’s doing, and the girl says it’s hard to know because they’re keeping her pretty doped up.
Once the girl leaves, Maggie regains an awareness of the patient who shares her room, an old woman hidden from her by a heavy curtain. She and the woman don’t speak to one another except in the form of moans and wheezes. Oddly, the suffering seems to shift between them, as if they’re taking turns with it. In certain moments, when the painkillers ebb and Maggie’s ankle maddens her, the old woman grows silent. Then, as the agony subsides, the woman begins to cry out. To hear her in this state is an ordeal, but it distracts Maggie from her own afflictions.
Later, the freckled policeman shows up to take down Maggie’s account of what happened. He tells her how lucky she is that Frank Dodd came over when he saw the smoke. He says Frank wanted to stop by and wish her well, but his daughter ran off to California yesterday and he’s busy working out how to get her back.
“Are you sure she left yesterday?” asks Maggie, picturing Lydia in the farmhouse with a can of gasoline. The policeman says he’s sure.
Upon his departure, her eye begins to throb beneath its bandage. The doctor has expressed optimism that it will heal, but he’s said they might need to operate on the ankle. The thing is wrapped up sufficiently that she doesn’t have to look at it, only feels it pulsing and aching. She can’t reflect for any length of time on the house, the trees, her film, her father’s belongings—all gone forever. The money, too. And Josef on television, searching for it. She thinks of calling him and Lenka, but she doesn’t have the energy. The drugs kick in again to carry her away on their dark, sweet current.
In the morning, she finds that the curtain separating her bed from the next has been pulled back, and the old woman is gone. Lenka and Josef are standing there instead. From the pitying way in which Lenka looks at her, Maggie gathers she must be quite a sight.
“It’s never a good sign,” Maggie says, trying to smile, “when a priest shows up in your hospital room.”
Josef and Lenka laugh. Then Lenka says how horrible it is and how sorry they are. She explains that after being turned back at the emergency room desk yesterday, the two of them drove out to the farm. She says only the barracks and a small section of the orchard have survived. They hoped there might be something to salvage, but they found nothing.
“I know,” says Maggie. “I saw Josef on TV.”
The priest picks up a brown paper bag at his feet and withdraws the clay figure of Saint Clare. Somehow the statue’s in one piece again, though the cement bottom is missing. When Maggie expresses her surprise, Josef says he glued the figure back together. He has done a better job of it than Maggie did, because this time the crack on the exterior is barely noticeable. When he lays the figure in her hands, it feels smoother than before, and it’s lighter now that its contents are turned to ash.
“I am glad the money is gone,” says Lenka. “For too long it is plaguing you.”
Her brother looks about to argue the point, but Lenka insists it won’t do to talk further of the matter. For now Maggie must simply get better, and the two of them will look after her affairs. Lenka has already called Morgan Sugar to let Fletcher know what happened; he’s on his way. So is Brid’s brother, who’s bringing Pauline. Lenka asks whether Maggie would like her to contact Gran and George Ray too.
No, she thinks. Gran would only come up and overwhelm her with smug care, as if a fire was exactly what she expected. George Ray couldn’t come back even if he wanted to. Thanking Lenka, Maggie replies that she’ll call them herself when she’s feeling better.
Fletcher turns up that afternoon looking drained and ill-shaven, as though he jumped in the car and drove all night, a romantic thought undercut by the fact that he’s had at least eighteen hours in which to complete a nine-hour trip. As he leans over to kiss her cheek, she asks what took him so long, and when he starts to protest, she tells him she’s only kidding. It’s a poor way to begin.
Once he’s sitting on the chair beside the bed, he asks if she’s in much pain. She says it’s not too bad, then asks in turn whether he has stopped in to see Brid.
“Not yet,” he replies. “The doctor says she’s pretty delirious. Third-degree burns on her arms, and she broke her back. Apparently she keeps saying how it’s all her fault because she left a candle burning.”
“She saved my life,” Maggie tells him. He nods but doesn’t ask for details, as if they’d be an embarrassment because he wasn’t around to save Maggie himself. Here he is, finally back in this country, and all he can do is assess the damage to company assets. When she asks whether the farm was insured, he looks uncomfortable.
“I didn’t get around to it,” he says. She wonders if his father has jumped on him for the oversight or if Fletcher’s still bracing himself for that conversation. “Some developer might want the land, at least,” he continues. “Maybe that Dodd guy could buy it to expand his wrecking yard.”
As he says this, she remembers that he doesn’t know what has happened with Lydia. He doesn’t even know about the graffiti, and right now she doesn’t feel up to telling him. It’s hard enough to hear him fall so quickly into talk of business matters, as though she isn’t lying in front of him wounded and drugged. He goes on speaking for some time before he seems to recognize she isn’t listening. Then he hunches over in the chair and falls silent.
“So here we are,” she says.
“Here we are.” Slowly his eyes rise to meet hers. He inspects her face before reaching to touch her cheek. She’s in too much pain to pull away. His fingers on her skin are soothing. “You look good,” he says.
The pronouncement makes the bandage over her eye feel hot and itchy.
“Yeah, I’m a real beauty queen.”
“I mean it,” he insists, the
solemnity in his voice a little disconcerting. “You’ll be out of here soon. If you need money or a place to stay—”
She thanks him without accepting. He’s only being polite. Still, if she’s honest with herself, a part of her feels owed something. She can’t go on like that, though, forever demanding reparations. When she looks at him, she finds him staring back with a pained expression. What’s he thinking? Could there be recrimination on his part? Some nostalgia, even? Perhaps he’s remembering the day they first arrived at the house, just the two of them, with all their belongings and hopes in tow.
“Never thought it would end up like this,” she says, and he offers his agreement, his face shaded by a certain wistfulness that surprises her. “Did you really think it might work out?” she asks. “I mean, back in June, did you really think we might live here forever?” It hurts her to see him nod, regretfully and without hesitation.
“Naive, huh?”
“What happened, then?” she asks. Maybe it’s the drugs that let her pose the question, or maybe it’s the fact that finally she can ask it face to face.
“You know what happened,” he says. The sorrowful expression that overtook him the night of the party returns exactly as it first appeared.
“I don’t mean in the summer. I mean after that, in Boston. Why didn’t you come back?”
He shakes his head in frustration. “I never got together with Cybil again, if that’s what you mean.” He speaks as though pained that she might think as much. He’s always so sensitive to others’ judgment, and at the same time he seems to accept it as inevitable.
Upon having this thought, Maggie says something that until now has only occurred to her in a vague, unformulated way. “Fletcher, you ever wonder if you did it on purpose? The film, I mean.”
His face darkens and he looks confused.
“You ever think,” she says, “maybe you wanted everyone to see it?”
He gives a harsh laugh. “Why the hell would I want that?” His voice is angry, but he waits to hear her answer.
“I don’t know. Maybe you were looking for an excuse to go home.”
He only laughs again, though in an excessive way. Then he regains a look of concern. “You should come back to Boston.”
The words jar her. It’s not the sentiment that’s surprising but the tone in which he utters it. During the fall, his counsel for her to return always seemed like a way to allay his conscience. Now he offers it with a kinder inflection.
Casting her a sidelong glance, he adds, “You could stay at my place.”
Now it’s her turn to laugh uneasily. “You’re just a pushover for a girl in a hospital gown.”
“No, I mean it.” He tries to say it in a lighthearted way, but it’s obvious he isn’t speaking idly. Then he utters something that seems a hallucinatory product of the drugs. “We could try again.”
The sentence seizes her. For a second it manages to blot out the pain, before passing through and taking her defences with it, so that her ankle begins to pulse more sharply than ever. For most of October, after the news of her father’s death, after Fletcher told her he wasn’t coming back, the words he has just spoken were what she most wanted to hear. Then there was George Ray, and her hopes changed.
“Fletcher—” She thinks of telling him about George Ray, except George Ray doesn’t really have a bearing on the matter. What she wants to say isn’t even clear to her, beyond a conviction that the time for what he’s just suggested has come and gone.
It turns out she doesn’t even have to say anything. The way she has spoken his name is enough.
“Never mind,” he says. “It was just a thought.”
He looks about the room as if searching for an exit, then settles his gaze on the blank television set against the wall.
“You watch the moon landing the other day?” he asks, and she says she didn’t. “Last one for a while. You know, in high school I was space crazy. Wanted to be an astronaut. Did I ever tell you that? At least until I found out they can’t wear these.” He taps his glasses with a rueful smile before sinking back to his hunched position in the chair.
He’s travelled a long way to be here; she should be grateful for that. It wasn’t a journey through outer space, only a trip to a foreign country, but still he’s made the effort, even though by now for him this place must be synonymous with disappointment. It’s a marvel, really, to think there was a time when he hoped settling here would be a worthy substitute for earlier dashed dreams, when he thought a life with her might be enough. She lies there sensing the presence of another Fletcher somewhere over them, unfulfilled. She imagines him orbiting Earth, his long body wrapped in a silver suit with a flag on the shoulder, suspended in darkness among pricks of light. His face is illuminated by blinking instruments, and he’s thousands of miles from home, from family, from obligation and disapproval. As she envisions him like that, there’s a pang, because she feels pretty certain the image is similar to one he once invented for himself, and it might come closer than anything else to his picture of happiness.
A certain amount of pleading is necessary before the doctor allows her to venture from the room. Then, as Fletcher helps a nurse move her into a wheelchair, Maggie muffles cries of pain. With her foot propped out front like a tender battering ram, Fletcher pushes her into the hall. The corridor feels ethereal with its abandoned gurneys and strings of Christmas lights. A few yards down, he wheels her into Brid’s room. It contains a single bed, the body on it obscured by a jungle gym of pulleys, straps, and struts. Brid’s face is scratched but free of burns, while her arms are wrapped in gauze. On the windowsill is a bouquet of lilies that produces in Maggie a brief, ludicrous envy, because no one has brought any flowers for her.
Brid manages a smile of welcome. Once Fletcher has positioned Maggie’s chair next to the bed, he excuses himself from the room, as if it’s been arranged that he’s to give them some time alone.
“Sweetie, I’m so sorry,” says Brid when he’s gone. “I think it was all my fault.”
“It doesn’t matter, you shouldn’t beat yourself up—”
“But did Fletcher tell you? I lit a candle while you were out. Then I went into the orchard for a walk. When I came back, there was smoke coming from the house and the camper was in the drive, and that chickenshit from next door was just standing by the porch like a lump. Maggie, I feel so bad about it …”
“I’m the one who should feel bad.” She gestures to the apparatus around the bed. “You saved my life.”
“Guess I did, huh?” Brid manages another smile, then grows sombre. “Listen, I’ve been thinking.”
Maggie fears what’s about to follow, but Brid’s expression brightens as she starts to speak.
“Let’s stay here and start over with the farm,” she says. “We can build a brand new house.”
She must be kidding. Except it seems she isn’t, judging by the enthusiasm on her face. Maggie searches for a response.
“The old place was a dump anyway,” Brid says. “We can live in the barracks until the new one’s ready. And we’ll plant trees. Not just cherry trees, but peaches and grapes—”
“Grapes don’t grow on trees.”
“You know what I mean. Anyhow, George Ray will handle that stuff.”
George Ray? What kind of fantasy has Brid entered? There she lies in a hospital bed while Maggie sits helpless in a wheelchair, neither of them with any job or income, and she’s imagining a whole new farm.
“Brid, I can’t afford to buy the property, much less—”
“I’ll buy it, then. I’ll take care of everything.”
Maggie smiles in bewilderment. Not so many days ago, Brid was on the bathroom floor cursing and screaming. Before that, she was confessing her inability to pay for her keep. Now she looks calmer and more certain than at any time Maggie has known her.
“Where will you get the money?” Maggie asks.
“From Fletcher.” Brid says it as if the whole thing has already been agreed
upon.
“He won’t go for that. It’s too much, even for him—”
“He’ll go for it,” Brid insists. “He’s already been offering me the moon, he feels so bad about everything. You think he’ll say no if I tell him we want to rebuild?” And as she says it, Maggie knows he won’t.
“Sweetie, don’t get worked up,” says Brid in a soothing voice. “Things will turn out fine, I swear. The farm in the summer was a disaster, but this time we’ll do it right.” She smiles and winks. “For one thing, we’ll put the women in charge.”
For a while they just keep each other company and Maggie tries to digest what has been proposed. Then she thinks of something else.
“Have you seen Pauline yet?”
Brid averts her eyes, and the contentment disappears from her face. “Fletcher’s going to bring her in a minute. I wanted to wait till you were here.” For Brid to say this is touching but disconcerting too. Brid seems to register Maggie’s worry, because she adds, “You don’t have to do anything. Just sit there. That’ll be enough.”
“Are you ready for her?” Maggie asks.
“I don’t have a choice, do I?” Brid reaches over to the lilies and brushes one of the petals with a bandaged finger. “She hates me now.”
“No, she’ll be glad to see you.”
Brid gives a little grunt of disbelief.
A few minutes later, the door creaks and the girl peeks in, clutching her curly-haired doll. Its left arm remains attached to the shoulder by only a few threads; its button eyes have fallen off. Pauline glares at Maggie as though holding her responsible for her mother’s condition. Faced with that accusation on the girl’s face, Maggie looks away. Then Pauline rushes into the room, halting at the bedside. Probably someone has counselled her to be gentle around Mommy.
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