“Trying to share custody from Texas wouldn’t be practical.”
“Practical,” Willow managed, “of course it wouldn’t be.” And after a moment, “Are you saying Derrick went to Texas to get away from Mary?”
“I don’t think Mary really tried to hurt him, certainly not to kill him, like she said. I’m sure she wouldn’t actually hurt your child, either. That day, I believe, she flirted with suicide, trying to show Derrick she’d really do it.”
“Suicide?” She remembered Mary slapping her chest, going crazy over Papa and Derrick seeing her scars. “And she threatened to hurt Prairie?” The window moaned again. “You came to warn me?” She couldn’t stay sitting. She stood and paced back and forth behind her chair. “Yesterday and again this morning, I saw flashes of a yellow car at the end of the street. Does she still drive her convertible?”
“It was her father’s car she wrecked. I just don’t know, without me being here for her. I must go, though. I’m no use to her.”
Willow didn’t need to hear more. She stepped back from the chair and motioned to the bedroom door. “You’re here and leaving for Texas. Do you at least want to see Prairie?”
“That’s really the name you chose?” She stood, pulled her scarf up, and headed for the door leading out. “She’s sleeping. Let’s not wake her.”
“Is that why you came now? Because you supposed she’d be napping?”
The cheeks, just visible behind the wool scarf, turned florid. “I came now because of the storm. I want to get home before the ice hits.”
You are the ice, Willow thought. “You may not like me, but you’re Prairie’s only grandmother.”
Mrs. Crat’s brows yanked inward again. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, haven’t you got any family?”
Willow didn’t watch her walk down the hall. She shut the door as soon as the woman was outside and slid the deadbolt into place with extra force. It would take days to unpack all she’d learned, but a few facts were clear: The months of quiet she’d experienced were because Derrick was in Texas and Mary was in the hospital. Her behavior was so dangerous, or suicidal, it warranted locking her up. Now, she was out and making new threats against Prairie.
Picking up the envelope, she stared at the name again, Crat Construction. She opened it and removed a $50 dollar bill. Her heart sank, and then she laughed. Just as quickly, the window squealed, and her stomach fell again. The apartment felt as if Mrs. Crat had left something evil behind.
Willow opened the door to where Prairie slept and slowly crawled up the bed. She pulled the baby blanket up tighter over Prairie’s small shoulders and then wrapped herself in Mother Moses. With birds and butterflies around her, she watched Prairie and tried to calm herself. Prairie was safe, and Papa would be there soon, ice or no ice. Everything was all right. Wasn’t it?
29
“You’ve got to stay the night,” Willow said to Julian. She nodded toward the sofa Mrs. Crat vacated only a few hours earlier. “I’ll sleep there, and you can have the bed.”
He sat over his second serving of tuna casserole, eating as though the dish were a rare favorite and holding Prairie on one knee. “There’ll be a heap of accidents in that ice. Red’ll be out all night,” he said. Then, wistfully, “Glad it isn’t me.”
“Sure you are.”
He kissed Prairie again on the top of her curly head and looked at the paintings on the wall. Tonight, they arrested him more than did the weather. He pointed with his fork. “You want to try and explain all this to me?”
He hadn’t asked before. He had admired them and often joked about her “museum,” but this time Willow sensed he was asking for some deeper connection. He was nervous, or extra lonely, or feeling the gray she’d been feeling since Mrs. Crat’s visit. Explaining the paintings though would have to include the story of the morning she watched smoke rising from his cigarette, the rose Mémé sent to her wedding, and the thorns she stabbed into her arm. Those wounds, infected for a week, left puffy scars she still carried. And how to explain paintings she only really understood while in the act of creation? Afterwards, she lacked the language.
Julian put down his fork. “They lived in simpler times.”
“Derrick’s mom came to see me today.”
The hand Julian kept around Prairie’s waist tightened. He watched Willow, his eyes some combination of wanting to hear the details and already expecting the worst.
“She came to warn me. Mary is out of the hospital. You knew her father blamed me, at least partially, for her burns. All these years, you’ve never said a thing.”
“The man ain’t worth the effort.”
Willow carried their plates to the sink. Half an inch of ice coated the ledge where pigeons roosted in the summer. No cars crawled along the street below, which was good because Papa wouldn’t slide into anyone, but bad because it proved just how treacherous the streets were. “Please stay the night.”
“I can still get myself two blocks.”
He didn’t hurry home. He built block tower after block tower for Prairie to knock down, her laughter like a cascade that kept him laughing, too. When finally Prairie was asleep, he took up his coat, and despite Willow’s insistence, said good-night. She stood at a window, kneading the ache in her stomach and looking down on trees shiny with ice. He stepped from the building and avoided the slick sidewalk, moving to his car by way of the less-slippery grass, wind gusts billowing his coat and forcing him to lean into the cold, one bare hand holding his hat to his head. He’d lived his life on the seams and edges of society: the years he patrolled the night’s shadowy streets, the years spent with the ghost of Jeannie, the years as a wine-induced hermit with secrets he told no one. Even now, his figure looked less a father and a grandfather and more a man alone in a storm.
Uneasiness kept her at the glass, leaning into the cold pane, straining to see him creep up the block and the last smear of his taillights vanish. Already half-way home and fine, she promised herself.
She still hadn’t studied for the next day’s class, but it was likely to be canceled, and she felt too restless to concentrate on a book. The image of six-year-old Mary writhing on the floor wouldn’t leave her mind.
The pictures on her wall were all crones, even the young faces. They didn’t have hooknoses, warts, or toothless smiles. What they possessed was old wisdom, ancient female wisdom, and in that they were beautiful. Taking down a picture of Mémé, she set it on the easel. The cylinders and cubes of the face had already been worked into cheeks and chin and nose. The rough outline of a towering stack of books had already been sketched in as Mémé’s perch. An hour of work passed, and still Willow’s hand felt heavy, her strokes dull and more weeping daubs of color than fluid additions. She stepped away, looking at the painting from a few feet, then farther back.
“Move on,” her college art instructor said of her obsession with the portraits. “Try something new.” She’d tried, but bowls of fruit and dull landscapes didn’t excite her.
Taking in a deep breath, she tried to shake the tension from her hands. She went back to work. Gradually, her awareness of the apartment faded and even the sound of the sleet striking the windows vanished. Her hands began to move as though to the rhythm of music.
What happened next can best be described as a mental crash or bursting. That quick. One moment her paintbrush was in the air. In the next, she saw Julian, and the horror of the vision knocked the paintbrush from her hand. Papa was consumed in a column of flame.
She jerked toward the nearest window, but stood frozen, telling herself she couldn’t have seen what she imagined she saw. In the distance, the sound of sirens, no more than the whine of mosquitoes, touched her ears. Too far away. But growing slowly. She took deep breaths, the sound of emergency vehicles creeping on the ice, growing louder, finding their way into her body, rising up from her heels, turning her legs cold, mounting into wails that clawed the inside of her stomach and turned savage in her ears.
She still couldn’t approach
the window. For the second time that day, she rushed first to Mother Moses, hurrying into the heavy crocheting as if hurrying into Mémé’s arms. Only then could she force herself forward, approaching the window as she had so many times since moving into the apartment, locating her childhood rooftop. Smoke and a bright orange glow.
She ran for Prairie, scooped her up, blankets and all, and stopped. Taking a warm and sleeping baby into the storm wasn’t just cruel, it was dangerous. She swung Mother Moses across the foot of the bed, added a second thick blanket to the crocheting and then Prairie. She had no other choice.
The bundle was nearly too bulky to carry, but Mother Moses was tied up with Mémé, and Willow needed that good spirit with them. On the street, she jostled her load, trying to jab her keys into her frozen car locks. The ice wouldn’t yield, and after several time-wasting attempts, she took off on foot. Cutting across lawns and between houses, the unwieldy bundle of Prairie and blankets made her running slow and clumsy. Her heart pounded through a surreal world: painted silver streets, grass looking like shards of glass, and the dark wash of ash and smoke rolling sickly over dark rooftops.
She didn’t feel the ice hitting her hands and face, but the wet cold soaked her sweatshirt and added to her stiff and erratic running. She fell twice, three times, taking the spills on her hip or elbow, believing Mother Moses controlled the trajectory of the falls, protecting Prairie who woke and cried and fought to get her head uncovered. “It’s all right,” Willow panted. “I’m right here. I’m right here.” Her voice ragged with terror and cold and exertion.
The screaming sirens quit as they reached the site. When Willow came between the houses across the street from her childhood home, she saw flashing lights and smoke billowing from the open front door. Behind the windows, flames leaped and fell, and then the quick dark shape of a man in thick protective gear.
“Stop!” A male voice rang out at her shoulder. Strong arms grabbed her. “Stay back.”
She wasn’t going any closer, not with Prairie, who at times made muffled crying sounds and at other times let out screams that sliced through the blankets.
“I’ve got her,” a familiar voice called out, his arms circling both Willow and her bundle. “Come on,” Red coaxed, “we’ll wait in my cruiser.”
She fought him, begging, as though he didn’t know Julian was inside, telling him they had to get Papa out, and just let her see, not hearing herself, not able to control the massive fear engulfing her. Red kept coaxing, steering her over the treacherous ice and away from the sound of breaking glass and groaning timbers.
When a fireman burst through the front door carrying a form over his shoulder, Willow nearly sank to her knees in relief.
I felt no relief. The past and the present engulfed me with their ashes and smoke. I arrived too late to save Little Nest from the fire that destroyed it. I stood back, watching it burn while firemen worked in vain. Through its destruction, I held a weeping Julian to my skirts, a boy terrorized by the power of the fire, too innocent to have ever imagined such hellish and quick destruction. Now, here again, was a house in the family burning down.
30
Willow paced in the surgery waiting room, while Prairie slept in her arms and Red stared straight ahead. All around her, she heard the voices of sickness and death, urine and blood, speaking as they gurgled down drains. Death, cleaned up by staff who never saw the deceased, who only rolled up sheets that would go on other beds, and sent antiseptics washing over floors. Spirits rose up out of bodies and lifted away, while carts with defibrillators crashed into rooms minutes too late.
Later, a doctor used so many terms Willow struggled under their weight. “Second-degree burns over twenty percent of his body, third-degree burns over forty percent, unstable blood pressure, severe smoke inhalation, plasma leakage, airway edema, organ shut down …” If Julian survived, “There have been unlikely miracles,” the doctor said without conviction, recovery would mean years of surgeries, severe disfiguration, skin grafts, and amputations.
Red stood and crossed the room, his outstretched hands bracing shoulder-level against the wall, his head dropped between them. “How long?”
There was a slight hesitation, and then the doctor looked at Willow. “My guess is two, three days. It’s impossible to say. We’re doing what we can to keep him comfortable.”
Willow sat in shock and was still that way when hours later she stood in a baggy gown at the door of Julian’s IC unit. A nurse stood beside her. “You won’t recognize him. You should prepare yourself.”
“Is that possible?” she whispered. “To prepare?”
She stepped inside a small room made even smaller by the large pieces of medical equipment. The smell of burned flesh hit her so hard her stomach lurched. She covered her nose and mouth. She couldn’t look at the form on the bed. Only peripherally, a white shape bandaged and sheeted. It wasn’t Papa yet, not until she said so.
Monitors, beeping screens, and tubes ran to and from the bed. The whole of it was terrible machinery. Her gaze inched upward, and she saw the shape of Papa’s feet and calves under a swath of white bandages—only white cloth, she could handle that. Higher, a sheet was draped modestly across his groin. His hands were wrapped to his elbows, and the skin of his upper arms and the shoulder nearest her were crimson with large weeping splotches of open flesh. His chest was bandaged. A face?
She slumped into the chair, willing herself to keep hold of her screams. Tubes up a black nose, another tube, garden-hose width, disappearing into what had to be a mouth, but couldn’t be Papa’s mouth, wasn’t any man’s mouth. Swelling, blistering, red and purple putty rather than flesh, indentations in dough rather than eyes. Maybe not a man at all, a kill, bear-mauled.
She wanted to run out of the room and take her screams up and down the halls. This wasn’t Papa, couldn’t be, but she’d stood in the sleet as smoke rolled from his roof, gold flame lapped his windows, and a fireman carried out his body.
Over the next few hours the world seemed to come at Willow in fragments, and she struggled to process the commotion. Red stood outside the room, Prairie asleep on his shoulder, his uniform dark on the stomach from holding her with her soaked-through diaper. He told Willow he’d take Prairie to his house and be sure she was kept safe, and, yes, his gun was always at hand. A flux of doctors, nurses, chaplains, techs, social workers, administrators with thick pads of paper and questions about health insurance, and religious affiliations and did she want Julian to receive the last rites? There were scraps of new information about Papa’s condition. They’d cut his legs and opened a long seam, from his groin to the arches of his feet, to relieve swelling. A seam on his chest eased the pressure on his heart and lungs.
“Damn pirates,” she imagined Papa saying, “couldn’t save Jeannie, couldn’t fix you, and they can’t save me.”
Hours later, I sensed Red coming down the hall before he tapped on the room’s window. Willow, her eyes puffy from crying, hurried out to him, “Where’s Prairie?”
“She’s with my wife. She’s fine.”
“Mary Wolfe did this.”
Red’s brows narrowed. He held a vase of spring tulips, and a long blue ribbon trailed over his freckled hands. His clothes were clean, and he looked as though he’d gotten a couple of hours of sleep.
“She threatened him,” Willow continued, “and yesterday Derrick’s mom tried to warn me.”
He set the flowers on a table to his right and pulled a small spiral notebook from his chest pocket. “From the initial investigation, and it is just preliminary, it appears the fire started on the sofa with a cigarette. Another was left beside the sink in the bathroom. It burned down and dropped onto towels.”
“Those weren’t cigarettes he lit.” She gasped a deep breath and tried again. “I know how it looks, but my ex-mother-in-law visited yesterday. She warned me about Mary, said Mary was threatening something,” she nodded to the room behind her and Papa, “something like this.”
“What exact
ly did she say?”
“I know she was warning me. Mary’s threatened Papa before.”
“Mary Wolfe.” He wrote the name slowly, writing it down for Willow’s sake. “When exactly did she threaten Julian and why?”
“You have to believe me.”
“How long ago did she threaten him? Were there any witnesses?”
“Derrick, but he was drunk or stoned.” The truth shamed her: her husband in bed with someone else while she was having a baby. She tucked her hands under her arms. “The day Prairie was born.”
Red closed his notebook. Prairie was already crawling. “Nothing since?”
Having sat so many hours in hard chairs, Willow’s legs and back ached, but the fatigue that leaned her against the wall came from not being believed. Again. “It’s like trying to convince Papa.”
He reopened his notebook, read the name. “Mary Wolfe. And what’s her connection to Julian?”
“Mary had, is having,” she couldn’t push herself from the wall, “I don’t know, an affair with my ex. She killed my dog.”
He squinted, “Your dog?”
She closed her eyes, dropped her head back. “What’s the use? I need to get back. Please go home and stay with Prairie.”
“Why don’t you find a cot or couch somewhere and get some sleep? The nurses will find you if he changes.”
“I’m all right.”
“He has a sister. You want me to give her a call?”
For the first time since hearing the whine of sirens in the distance, Willow felt hope. “Tory.” The name didn’t summon great relief, but it called up others that did, and her mind went over the round, soothing sounds: Mable, Jonah, Farthest House. Farthest House, where surely Mémé’s ghost still walked the garden and tended Damask roses. “Yes, please call her.”
By late afternoon, Tory and Mable stood at the window of Julian’s room. Seeing Tory, I felt my energies spiral yet again. Would I soon appear sitting in some strange chair, having taken on such weight that people looked and wondered what world I belonged in? Tory, my grandniece, my daughter, how much I still loved her.
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