by James Hynes
Now, as he hesitates in the smoky, flickering hallway, Kevin thinks, that’s two tests I failed in twelve hours: not staying awake for Grampa Quinn and not reporting the overturned truck. The memory of that Christmas has haunted him for twenty-five years. He’s imagined alternate versions, where his grandfather clutches his hand and calls his name, the last words Grampa Quinn ever said, or where Kevin pulls an unconscious driver out of the truck and drags him through the snow to his car and races him to the emergency room in Stockbridge or Pinckney. Sometimes he thinks he’s exhausted the memories of that day, that they’ve stopped making sense, but now the hand sticking out of the rubble—motionless, fingers curled—is another test, and it’s as if he were standing beside the truck again, in the cold, cruel winter sunlight. His eyes are beginning to sting from the smoke, from the flickering light, and he knows he ought to touch the hand, to see if the guy’s still alive under there. But he’s more scared of touching that hand than he’s been of anything else, ever, in his whole life. What if it has a pulse, or, worse, what if it twitches? What can Kevin do? He can’t lift the beam, he can’t pull the guy out, he’s not sure if even clawing at the rubble would do anything but bring the rest of the ceiling down on top of them both. What if it’s still warm? What if it clenches in pain, like a dying spider in its last throes? What if, in a moment out of a horror movie, it clutches him tightly and won’t let him go?
“He’s dead.” The Yellow Rose is just behind him. She’s edged into the hallway after Kevin.
“Did you check his pulse?” Kevin asks without turning around. When she doesn’t answer, he turns to see her fingers plucking at the air near his sleeve, as if she wants to pull him away.
“Did you?” he says.
“Yes.” Her eyes flicker side to side. “He’s gone.”
Are you telling me the truth? Kevin wonders. Or are you just trying to get me out of the hallway? Before he can think about it, he’s pinched the thumb of the hand between his own thumb and forefinger and waggled it side to side. It’s warm to his touch but completely limp. Kevin puts two fingers on the wrist, the way he’s seen actors do it on television, feeling nothing and leaving a pair of bloody fingerprints. What if he’s doing it wrong? What if the wrist has a weak pulse and he’s just not feeling it, not with his own pulse racing and the woman tugging at his elbow?
“Come on,” she says. “Please.”
At last he lets her pull him away by his elbow, back around the corner.
“I told you not to go down there,” she says, and for a moment Kevin and the Yellow Rose are a longtime couple, bickering but affectionate, strolling arm in arm. But only for a moment, because as they step between the elevators, they both see that smoke is now rising from the gaps between and around all six sets of crumpled doors and pooling in a cloud over their heads. The woman whimpers at the back of her throat, two descending notes, the sound she might make in another context, if she’d just discovered that her cat was on the counter, say, or that her cake had fallen, or some other vexing but minor quotidian disappointment. She sags against Kevin, and he has to slip his arm around her waist to prop her up, planting more handprints all over her nice suit.
“Come on.” He urges her on rubbery legs past the smoking elevators and onto the ledge of flooring where she first found him. She’s positively shuddering now, and the best he can do with his injured hands is grasp her clumsily by the elbows and lower her slowly to the floor against the wall, even as he tries to scuff the broken glass away with his shoe.
“It’s okay.” His own voice is breaking. “It’s all right.”
He drops her the last six inches and she thumps against the floor, nearly toppling onto her side. Her face has crumpled, her eyeliner is running. The stray eyelash is gone, who knows where, and she shivers against the wall, her hand pressed to her mouth, her cheeks streaked with black. Kevin squats unsteadily before her, wanting to dab at the inky tears, but his hands are still stained with blood.
“Oh God,” she says. “I thought if I came up…”
The best he can do is brush her hair with his knuckles. She clutches one of his wrists with both hands and gazes at him with brimming eyes. “The floor was on fire,” she says in a hoarse whisper, as if she’s afraid of being overheard. “So was the floor below me.” She snuffles, swallows. “I could hear people screaming.”
“Jesus.” Kevin strokes her hair with the back of one hand, while letting her cling tightly to the other. He’s almost in tears himself now. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
The woman’s sobbing uncontrollably now, and Kevin folds her in an awkward hug, the two of them crouched in the intersection of floor and wall. He can feel her heart beating. Then her sobs subside almost as quickly as they started, and she looks up, their faces close enough to kiss. Behind her blusher and lipstick and runny eyeliner, she’s very pale.
“I didn’t want to lose hope,” she says in a weak but steady voice. Her eyes are glistening, but no longer overflowing. “I believe hopelessness is a sin?” Her rising inflection makes her sound uncertain. Kevin swivels clumsily off his feet to sit beside her, his arm around her shoulders. He sniffles, gasps, knuckles his own tears away. She tips her head back against the wall, watching him.
“There’s always hope in God.” Her voice is weak but steady.
“Unless there isn’t.” Kevin’s not looking at her, he’s watching sunlight shafting through the smoke rising across the wide gap where the conference room used to be. He’s already thinking, this is the last sky I’m ever going to see.
“Don’t you believe in God?” She’s watching him with a childlike intensity.
No atheists in burning skyscrapers, thinks Kevin, but she’s still giving him that innocent look, so he says, “Maybe we shouldn’t get into this right now.”
“If not now,” she says, with a directness that pierces him and annoys him in equal measure, “when?”
Acrid smoke penetrates to the back of his sinuses. He glances back. Black tendrils ripple along the ruined ceiling, struggling against the hot wind blowing from outside. Kevin looks at the woman.
“What’s your name?” He tightens his arm around her.
She presses against him, twisting her knees toward him. “Melody.”
“I’ve never met a Melody before,” says Kevin. “That’s a lovely name.”
“What’s yours?”
“Kevin.”
She pats his lapel and sniffles. “I’m glad you’re here, Kevin.”
“I’m not,” Kevin says before he can stop himself, and he starts to laugh. He squeezes her with his stinging palm.
She laughs, too. “Me neither, I guess.” Then, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“About God?” Melody says, but before Kevin can answer, the phone in his jacket starts to buzz, startling them both. She recoils and clutches him at the same time, digging her polished nails into his jacket.
“You have a phone?” she says.
“It’s not mine,” Kevin says.
“For God’s sake!” Melody yanks at his lapel and plunges her hand inside his jacket. “Why didn’t you say you had a phone!” She plucks out the cell and turns away from him, expertly flipping it open and pressing Talk.
“Who is this?” she demands, her voice suddenly sharp, and Kevin, speechless, can hear the tinny voice of the boy he talked to earlier.
“Yes, I know. I’m in the building.” She listens a moment, then says, “Hang on, I’ll ask.” She presses the phone to her chest so the guy on the other end can’t hear.
“Leslie?” she whispers, and Kevin shakes his head and makes a diving motion with his hand.
“She’s not here,” says Melody into the phone. “I think she got out already.” The tinny voice speaks, but Melody interrupts him. “Sir, what’s your name? Blake? Listen, Blake, could you call 911 and let them know there are two people trapped on… what floor is this?”
Kevin gasps, stammers, says, “Fifty-one, I think.
Maybe fifty-two.”
“Go see if it says.” She jerks her chin toward the elevators. Kevin stiffly levers himself up off the floor with his throbbing hands, and steadying himself against the wall, which is beginning to get warm, he peers around the corner into the elevator lobby. If the floor is marked, he can’t see it. Now smoke is pouring out of the hallways beyond the lobby and out of the elevators themselves, trembling against the breeze blowing through the gap.
“It’s the fifty-first or fifty-second floor,” Melody’s saying in a steady voice. “Tell them to hurry, please, won’t you, Blake? We’re counting on you.”
Kevin slides to the floor next to her. “The smoke’s getting worse.”
But Melody’s not listening; she’s cut Blake off and is thumbing in 911 with intense concentration, biting her lip and splaying her legs before her. She lifts the phone, listens, groans in frustration.
“It’s busy,” she says. “How can that be?”
“I think they probably know by now what’s going on.”
She holds up her finger to silence him and enters 911 again, listens, cuts it off, enters it again, cuts it off again. “Damn it all! How can it be busy?”
Kevin feints feebly with his hand toward Melody. He’d like to have the phone back. He’s thinking he might want to call his mom. He’s thinking he might even want to call Stella. The idea that it might be the last time he’ll ever speak to either of them is seeping into his mind like black water. Meanwhile Melody has closed the little phone within her trembling fist, and she’s staring blankly into the smoky sunlight coming through the gap. “If 911 doesn’t work now, when is it supposed to?”
I could ask you the same about God, thinks Kevin, but he doesn’t say it. Melody’s staring into space, sucking in her lips.
“Is there someone you want to call?” he says as he gingerly reaches for her closed hand. He’s wondering if he’ll have to pry apart her fingers to get the phone.
“Take it,” she says, and abruptly pitches the cell at him. He fumbles for the phone, but it thumps off his chest, clatters off the floor, and bounds over the crack in the floor, sliding toward the edge. Kevin and Melody simultaneously catch their breath. The cell phone glitters in the sunlight at the last moment, and Kevin’s not sure, but he thinks it starts to buzz again as it sails over the edge and out of sight. Kevin turns to the woman beside him. She’s pressed one hand over her open mouth, and with her other she’s digging her red nails into his forearm. She looks at him wide-eyed.
“I’m so sorry!” she says from behind her palm.
Kevin just sighs. Now he’s going to die alone, drowned in black water. He clutches her wrist and pries her fingers loose from his arm.
“I’m so sorry,” she says again in a tiny voice. She lays her hand on his upper arm. “Was there someone you wanted to call?”
Kevin lets his feet slide out straight like Melody’s, and he slumps against the wall. Only the friction of his new dress trousers keeps him upright, and any second now he could just melt like wax in the growing heat and ooze across the crack and dribble over the edge.
“Will you forgive me?” She strokes his arm.
“It’s okay.” His sinuses and throat are beginning to feel raw. Even with the wind from outside, the ruined lobby is filling from the ceiling down with black smoke. “I really didn’t want to make that call, anyway.” He looks at her. “You know what I mean?”
“I do.” She wipes inky tears away with the heel of her hand. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Seriously, what would you say?” He can see Stella in her professional suit, the slim, narrow-waisted one that attracted him to her in the first place that morning in Expresso Royale. He sees her striding in her heels across the imperial lobby of some convention hotel in Chicago, the vertiginous atrium of the Embassy Suites or the dim, clubby lobby of the Sheraton. She might even be sharing a midafternoon cocktail with some guy she’s met at the convention; she may even be flirting with him a bit, because flirting is Stella’s default mode, not that it would mean anything, it’s just how she is. And because she’s Stella, and not Beth, she wouldn’t even notice the image of the burning Texas skyscraper on the TV over the bar, but she would interrupt the conversation if her phone rang, and Kevin sees her sly smile of apology to the guy with her at the bar as she dives into her bag for her cell. That’s the age difference between him and Stella in a nutshell: he’d shut his phone off in a situation like that, but because she’s younger than he is she answers the thing instinctively, no matter whom she’s talking to. On one of their early “dates,” after they’d already been sleeping with each other for three weeks, she kept answering her phone during dinner one night at a tapas bar on Main Street, so that finally, while she was in the middle of a call, he excused himself, went outside, and called her from his own cell, watching through the restaurant window as she said to whomever she was on the phone with, “Hang on, I have another call,” then looked puzzled as she glanced at the screen and saw it was him. Then he heard her saying, “Kevin?” and he’d said, “Hi, remember me? The guy you’re having dinner with? The guy you’re sleeping with? The guy whose house you moved into?” On more than one occasion he’s glanced at the screen on his own phone and, when he’s seen that it’s her calling, he hasn’t answered, he’s let the call go to voice mail, then lied to her later about leaving his phone turned off. But when she sees it’s him, she always answers his call—always—and that thought pierces his heart. Of course if he’d called her today from Leslie’s phone, she wouldn’t have recognized the number on the screen—“I don’t know this number,” she might even say out loud to the guy at the hotel bar—and then Kevin would have heard her saying her own name in a noncommittal, businesslike voice, and he pictures the mask she makes of her face when she’s talking to someone she doesn’t know. And then he’d’ve said, if he could choke it out, “It’s me,” and the thought of her mask relaxing, of her voice saying, “Hey, you,” and then the thought of what exactly he’d say to her next—it all makes his throat tighten as if someone has just seized him around the neck with two rough hands. Either that, or the increasingly acrid air is choking him.
“Maybe they’re already coming for us,” Melody says.
Kevin coughs. “Who?”
“Rescuers?” Melody’s tears are running clear now. Her eyeliner’s all washed away.
“Didn’t you say the floors below are on fire?”
She nods, weeping.
“Then how would they get to us?”
She’s trembling again, so Kevin rouses himself, pushes himself up on his stinging palms, puts his arm around her.
“I’m sorry about the phone,” Melody says.
“It’s all right.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to make that call either.”
“Who would you call?”
“My kids.” Melody coughs. “My father. My ex-husband.”
The air is hotter and the smoke is thicker, black and roiling against the ruined ceiling above. It’s slowly lowering, filling the room from above, and some of it is beginning to stream through to the outside. He doesn’t hear sirens anymore. In the distance Kevin can still see the construction crane towering above the condo tower. The narrow catwalk alongside the cab, forty stories up, is lined with little figures in orange safety vests and yellow plastic hard hats. They look like figures from a Bob the Builder playset, little round-top wooden dowels painted with bright hard hats and happy faces, plugged into round slots on top of the Tinkertoy crane, watching Kevin die. You guys should get down from there, he thinks, you really, really should.
“I want to talk to my kids,” says Melody, “but I don’t.”
“I know.” He pictures Stella bloodlessly pale on a stool in the convention hotel bar, snapping around to look at the image on the TV. He hears her sharp incredulity: “What are you doing in Austin? Why didn’t you tell me you were going?” If she didn’t put it together right away, she would later on, and he’s not sure what will hurt
her more, that he’s about to die, or that he was thinking of leaving Ann Arbor to get away from her. The guy at the bar with her is feeling awkward. He sees she’s upset, but he hardly knows her. The decent thing would be to stick around, but all he really wants to do is make an excuse and hurry away. Kevin pictures Stella clutching the guy’s sleeve the way Melody’s clutching his, and he’s grateful that she’s not alone. He pictures her trembling uncontrollably. He pictures her knees buckling. Would she faint? Do people faint anymore?
“I wouldn’t want this to be their last memory of me,” says Melody, and Kevin says, “I know.” He holds her tight, drawing her face to his chest. “I know, I know.”
She mutters something against his shirt, and he relaxes his grip.
“You smell like coconut,” she says.
He sighs and looks up. The ceiling of smoke is even lower now. If they were standing, their heads would be in the cloud. More smoke is coming from over the rubble that chokes off the hallways to either side.
“We need to get lower,” he says, and before she has a chance to reply, he lifts his arm from around her and starts sliding on his butt toward the crack in the floor, clutching her wrist and pulling her with him. He no longer cares about the glass on the floor but pushes heedlessly through it as if it were sand, hauling with his heels, pushing with his other hand. He feels a resisting tug, and looks back. Melody is balling her fist and trying to pull her wrist out of his grasp.
“No,” she whispers, ghostly pale. “I’m not ready for that.”
“Neither am I,” Kevin says firmly, not letting go of her, “but we need to get lower, away from the smoke. Okay?”
Without unclenching her fist, she looks up. The smoke cascading along the ceiling is a torrent now, a roiling, snaky, upside-down black river. She inches slowly alongside him, and sitting thigh to thigh they hang their legs over the crack and down the slope. Like a pair of schoolchildren they’re holding hands. Kevin’s hand still stings, but he doesn’t loosen his grip.