by Nikki Roman
Fireworks go off all around me. It’s the fourth of July and I’m standing in the middle of a field of wet grass, watching the fireworks soar into the sky with a whistle and explode in a series of loud pops. Suddenly, everything goes black and I can no longer see. The firework show is over. The sky is dark again, everything silent. Then, the sky lights up like it is morning. Fireworks rain down on me, burning my clothes away and setting my skin on fire.
I fight Holden with all my strength. It must look like a cat fighting a pit-bull, but at least I try. “Bailey, stop!”
I’m going to head-butt him like I did to Spencer in the hospital, when he presses my temple with his fingertips and a stabbing pain brings me to my senses. “It’s almost over,” he cries.
What’s almost over? And then an echoing bang splits the air. It drowns out Holden’s sobbing and the sound of my racing heart. It’s as if we have also been struck with the bullets and not just the sound they reverberate.
“No! Alana!” I howl. In a burst of adrenaline I push Holden off of me.
“Bailey, it’s over! Stay in the van please!” he begs, his words stumbling over a succession of sobs.
I rush to the backdoors, throw them open, and almost fall out; I thought they would be locked. Holden tosses something to me. A leather Jacket. I look at him in confusion, hysteria rising in my chest.
“Don’t wear it, just hold onto it,” he says. “And Bailey, be quick!”
Bailey be quick, Bailey be nimble. And Bailey jump over the Allie fence.
The echoes of gunshots fade as I make it to the fence. I burn my feet on the hot chain-link metal, pulling myself up. I fall to my knees on the other side.
Cairen, Ashtray, and Don are at the end of the alley, gathered around the refrigerator that now lies on its back – a gun extending from Cairen’s fist. I stand and move in their direction; staggering like I’ve got drunk goggles on.
“Looks like someone had a little too much fun at the party,” Ashtray sneers.
I must look pathetic to them.
I lose all sense of balance and give up walking for crawling. I push along to the refrigerator. Red hair pokes out from the airtight door. Don, Ashten and Cairen are unearthly silent as a sob, uncontrollable as a hiccup, jumps from my throat; it shakes my body and takes my breath away.
I touch the tips of Alana’s hair. Gripping the plastic handle, I open the fridge door. Alana’s small body is curled up and turned sideways; crimson staining her blouse like a flattened red rose. “’Lana,” I croak.
Her eyes are closed but her chest rises slowly.
I squeeze one arm under her legs bent at the knees, and another just below her shoulders; I lift her out and lay her down on the asphalt, her head in my lap.
“’Lana, it’s okay,” I manage to say. “I’m here, now.”
My thumbs brush over tears that have fallen before my arrival.
I can’t think straight, see straight, breathe straight, or speak straight—or really do anything straight. I feel like my heart, lungs, and all my organs have reversed their order; blood that should be pumping in me, being sucked backward like the draining of a lake.
“I’m going to take you to the hospital. You’re okay,” I say. “Don’t die. I love you.”
Alana’s eyes open and I throw back my head. I don’t want her to see me crying. I want her to think she is okay and that I am going to save her.
But I’m not saving her.
I was supposed to be her hero; maybe God was planning on me saving her, but I never came. Where was Alana’s angel, her saving grace, as I failed her?
“Bailey…” she says softly.
“I’m here Alana. You’re okay. I love you,” I say. “Everybody loves you-u…”
I break down.
“I am… safe…” I lean my ear next to her lips. “I am safe… here in… the… trees.”
“But you can’t go there yet,” I say, momentarily struck with the image of a heavenly orchard. “Alana, you have to go to the hospital, first.”
She is silent. I kiss her cheek and try to wake her with gentle touches, although it would take a bolt of lightning to kick start her heart again.
“Alana? Alana? Please, don’t leave me and your mommy, and your daddy. They love you. Stay here for us!”
No response.
“You said we would stick together! You can’t leave me, not now, not here, not like this!”
I shake her. Her eyes don’t open and show me she is only playing dead. She coughs blood, and her chest rattles like the dying of an engine. “Alannnaaa!” I hit a high-note I didn’t know my voice was capable of.
Hands grab at my arms, and I feel as if they are tearing through time and space to reach me. I struggle against them weakly, holding onto Alana’s arm with white knuckles. She looks alive still, like I could wipe the blood from her mouth and stomach and she would be laughing and smiling again.
With Cairen’s help, Don pries Alana’s arm free from my grasp. I thrash, the tips of my fingers aching to grab hold of her again. One. Last. Time.
“Come on, Indigo, let her go,” Cairen says, tired of struggling with me. He lets go and I wrap myself around Alana. Protecting her from them—because I couldn’t when she was alive.
“My name is not Indigo!” I yell. “My name is Bailey Angel Sykes and her name was Alana Evelyn Kelly! And she had a family, a mother, a father and friends who loved her. You monster, you monster. Burn in hell!”
“Get the fuck off, or you’ll be the one burning in hell,” Ashtray says.
I shift my eyes from Ashtray to Cairen. Almighty Cobra Cai is leaning against the fence, not saying anything. Why is he letting Ashtray do the talking? Is he so removed from Alana’s death that he has nothing to say? Does he care so little?
He must.
“NOOO!” I thunder.
“Have it your way,” Ashtray says. She walks to the dumpster, opens the lid, and lifts out a red plastic gasoline jug. I position my body over Alana, bending my head down and tucking my chin to my knees. Gasoline trickles over us. I breathe in, my eyes and throat burning from the fumes.
“You can burn with her!”
I hear the flick of a lighter.
Cairen says no. Don says no.
“I’m sorry, so sorry, I couldn’t save you,” I say into Alana’s stomach.
Footsteps come. Arms come. Pull me up. Pull me away. Soft hands and arms that cradle me. I don’t fight them.
A plastic blue lighter lands on one of Alana’s legs. She bursts into flames, her hair the last thing to catch fire. Fire catching fire.
The arms release me. I scramble for the leather Jacket that Holden gave me; thinking I can put out the fire with it. Thinking that a miracle will happen. I stop at Alana’s feet. A brown bundle is melting in the flames.
I fall to my knees. The flames consuming Alana’s body are close enough to catch my own face on fire. I want to hold her while she burns, but my arms won’t come out from inside of me. I’m locked up as tight as a Rubik’s cube and it would take a genius mind to undo me.
The air fills with smoke, thick black smoke, like turpentine. I cough on it and suck it into my lungs because I am howling with my mouth wide-open.
Holden kneels down beside me; he wraps his arms around me. “I didn’t want you to see this,” he says. “I’m sorry. So very sorry.”
I watch the flames devour Alana. She becomes a part of the fire the same way soot mixes with water, flowing without disagreement. Her life extinguished; snuffed out as easily as the flame of a candle.
A hundred thoughts run their course through my mind. Hundreds, but I only catch a few and understand them.
Holden picks me up and rocks me as the fire crackles in the background. I cough smoke into the hollow space between his neck and collar bone—smoke made of Alana’s burning flesh.
Only minutes ago she was alive. Only minutes ago, she was thinking her final thoughts. And, just hours ago, she was sleeping on me at the party, my hand twisted in her ha
ir. How can the end of a life surmise to only minutes and hours when at the beginning it seemed so infinite? How can life resolve itself so quickly when it lasted so everlastingly?
•••
Holden sets me down on Harley, the keys already in her.
“I filled it up with gas last night…” Holden says. “Bailey, you have to understand I thought I could keep you knocked out. I didn’t want you to have to witness that. I knew he was going to box her out for being disloyal.”
I try to speak but nothing comes out. And for once, that’s a good thing, because there isn’t really anything either of us could say to change the way I feel now. No words can cure the searing pain ripping through my heart. Alana, my best friend, no longer. This time it’s for real.
“There are just some things that can’t be stopped,” he says.
Like time, speeding trains, stampedes of rhinos and weather. Murder can be stopped. It should have been stopped. I would have been the one to stop it, if he had given me the chance.
“Just… drive safe,” he says.
We don’t need another casualty.
•••
I try to reconnect with Harley the way Indigo became one with her before, but with smoke billowing over the Allie fence like a distant nuclear mushroom cloud, and my throat sore from screaming, inhaling gasoline, and choking on Alana’s flesh, the bike has become nothing more than metal and plastic beneath me, carrying me away to safety.
I feel like I’m driving in reverse but the decrepit buildings, once ahead of me falling behind my back like Hollywood backdrops, prove otherwise.
The sun is setting early, an attempt to put a cap on today—to blot out Alana’s death, like miswritten words on a type writer. I was knocked out for many hours, unaware that just outside Holden’s van, Alana was waiting for her life to be taken. Unaware that I could have woken up at any moment and saved her.
Maybe it’s wrong for me to think I would’ve been able to save her, but with her last words floating in my mind like fallen leaves into a placid pool of water, I can’t help but think I would’ve found a way to save her.
Stick like wet leaves to a car.
•••
I trample up the pebbled drive to the front door. I had expected the outside of the apartment to look different. As if it could have changed drastically in the short time I was gone…how long was I gone? Days? Weeks? Feels like a multitude of years as I let myself in.
“She’s back! Angel, she’s back!”
I put my keys on the coffee table and stomp into the kitchen, having already pre-destined my actions on the drive over.
I pick up the dining room chair Mom isn’t sitting in and throw it over her head. One of the legs catches on the refrigerator door and snaps off. Junk.
Next, I take all the dirty dishes out of the sink and fling them like Frisbees against the living room wall. I’m good at breaking plates, Spencer taught me how.
“Deceit!” A plate crashes to the floor before it can reach the wall. “Death! Lost opportunity! Indigo! Allegiance! Alana!”
“Mother!” I shriek, in that high-note I didn’t think was possible. Grabbing a vase of dead flowers off the counter, I lift it above my head in the same direction I tossed the dishes but pivot at the last second, smashing it against the wall just inches from my mother’s head.
She sits, cross legged, her cigarette between her fingers and shattered pieces of glass in her lap. “Well shit, Bailey. You almost hit me.” She takes a puff of her cigarette.
I tear out of the kitchen and find new things to break in my father’s bedroom. Picking up an ornamental angel, sitting on the dresser and praying on its knees, I pitch it at the shut bathroom door.
The shower is running. “Hello?” Dad says.
I drag my arm across the dresser and everything clatters to the floor in a broken heap. Picture frames that Mom has set up while I was away, ceramic dog figurines, and a porcelain baby shoe marked with my birthday.
“Hello!” Dad repeats. The shower stops running.
Mom comes into the bedroom but stays near the door.
I stop breaking things and stare out the window. Night has come and with it, the stars. The stars that respectively stayed away in mourning of Jack. They bring insult to Alana.
I punch the window. It shatters.
Blood spurts from my hand, I pick at the remaining pieces of glass jutting off the insides of the window frame.
“Angel, Get out of the shower! Bailey’s lost it. She’s finally snapped.”
Mom comes away from the door and grabs for me, but I push her back with just one hand. One strong, bloody hand.
The bathroom door pops open, Dad charges at me. He is stronger than Mom but hardly as strong as I am, in my state of madness. Either way, he gets me to the ground, his hands clamping around my bleeding hands and wrists. He crouches over me in a bear hug and my tantrum gives over.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. She just came through the door and started breaking things!” Mom says, throwing an accusing hand toward me.
I’m hot. Not hot tub, or steaming-shower hot; but flames and kindling hot. Blazing hot.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” Dad asks. The pressure he’s applying to my wrists has stopped the bleeding; his palms are slick with my blood. “Look, you cut yourself.”
I focus on my little white wrists caged in his bronze hands. “I’m. On. Fire.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m being burned alive. Daddy, I’m on fire!”
Beads of sweat roll down my face; heat building inside of me. I’m overheating like the inside of a hot air balloon, fire making me rise.
“You aren’t on fire,” Mom says, logically.
But I am. Blazing, as Alana was, but on the inside. Flames behind my eyes make it hard to see, they settle in my belly like a dragon preparing to spit fire.
Dad puts the back of his cool hand against my forehead, he shoots a worried look to Mom. “Sydney, she is burning up!”
Chapter 36
Fire meets ice. Dad puts me in the bathtub half-filled with tap water as cold as if it were tapped directly from the Antarctic Ice Shelf.
Mom holds me down, keeping me still, so the water can put out the fire inside of me. I have a fever—a high one. My blood flows freely in the water like I’m having a water birth.
I struggle against my mother, against my own hysterics. My body is no longer mine, my thoughts consumed with Alana’s death. I scream at the top of my smoke-cooked lungs. The scream taking everything out of me, I sink back against my mother.
“Jesus,” Mom says. “Angel, look at her face, it’s caked with blood. Get a rag.”
Dad steps away and returns with a dishrag; dipping it in the cold water he wipes the blood off my face. “She looks like she isn’t even here,” he says. “Bailey?”
If I answer, will they think I’m a little less crazy? Can a calm reply make them forget the lunatic rampage I just went on?
“Yes, Daddy?”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m on fire.”
Nope, still a lunatic.
“Bailey, where have you been?” He drops the rag in the tub and I watch it sink as the water makes it heavy.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Alana’s gone missing, I think she’s dead.” The rag settles at the bottom of the tub and my blood lifts out of it.
“Who’s Alana?” Dad asks.
Mom shakes her head and tears come to her eyes. “Bailey’s best friend since preschool. You remember her, don’t you? Little girl with green eyes and orange hair?”
“Alana…” Dad says trying to bring her to memory. “Oh, Alana! Yes, she was always up in our trees…squirrel girl.” His eyes are seeing her again, her little round face smiling, peering through branches, a crown of dark leaves around her head. “I’m sure she’s okay, Bailey, maybe she just ran away; teenagers do that all the time.”
“How did you find out she’s missing?” Mom as
ks.
I make myself look lost again.
“Can I just lie down, please?” My bottom lip quivers, I’ve got to find a way to stop crying.
“Yes, sweetie,” Mom says. “Angel, can you pick her up? Put her on the bed.”
Mom gets out and dries herself off. Dad grabs a beach sized towel and plucks me out of the water, my wet clothes soak through the towel instantly.
He sets me on the bed and pulls the covers over me. I’m shaking violently, my teeth clanking together like the bones of a dancing skeleton. Mom dresses herself in the bathroom, and then shoos Dad out so she can dress me.
“You have cold chills,” Mom says, rubbing my hair dry with a towel. She helps me out of my wet clothes, and then starts on my sliced hands and wrists. “Good thing I had some leftover tape and gauze from when…” She stares down at my hands, her eyes glistening. “I loved that crazy girl,” she croaks. “Are you sure she’s missing?”
Am I sure? Yes, I felt her heart stop in her chest, a soft fading tick beneath my palm. I saw her eyes close for the last time. Watched as her soul left her body and soared into the terrifying unknown. Hopefully, to heaven—her heaven.
“Mom, when children go missing,” I say, “how often are they found alive?”
•••
Mom finishes bandaging my hands. Going to a box she has yet to unpack, she pulls out a white nightgown- a thick cotton one, with long sleeves and button up collar. Satin blue ribbons tie around the cuffs, pearl buttons travel from neck to scallop trimmed hem.
I immediately recognize it as the gown I used to wear as dress up. I let Mom tug it over my head and do the buttons. She takes away the wet towels and replaces them with Spencer’s quilt and Clad’s baby blankets from the hospital. She calls Dad back into the room.
“Lie down, Sydney, go to sleep. I’ll stay awake with her,” Dad says.
Mom kisses my head, takes a pillow and a blanket, and steals away to the couch.
I begin to sob, uncontrollably. I wail so loud that Mom calls from the living room to be sure I’m all right. But I’m not all right. Nothing will ever make me all right again.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Dad says. “Don’t cry.”