The Vacation

by T. M. Logan

  She froze. There was a noise, footsteps on the path. Voices talking, laughing, deep voices. Grown-ups? No. The boys.

  She tried to keep herself very still, as still as a statue like when you played that game at a birthday party, holding her breath until the boys passed by. They were talking in low voices. When she peeped through the gap in the tree trunk she could see their feet on the path, see them walking in a line and whacking sticks on each tree as they passed. Her cheeks burned with indignation. They weren’t supposed to be together, they were supposed to be searching on their own. Doing it in a team was cheating, it really wasn’t fair. Boys always cheated. That was why she didn’t like playing with them.

  She felt like crawling out of her hiding place and telling them off, telling them the proper rules and how sardines was supposed to be played. Making them do it properly. But then she’d have to give away the secret place she’d found inside the fallen tree trunk.

  Their footsteps moved away, farther into the trees. When she was sure they were gone, she shifted position a little bit inside the tree trunk to get more comfortable, resting her back against the smooth curve of the bark. It was actually quite nice in here; she could make a proper little nest with her dolls and have tea parties with—

  The boys were back, coming from the other side this time. They were making a lot of noise again, telling one another to shush and then snickering; and close, so close, they must be standing right next to the tree trunk without even realizing she was in there! Odette had to put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. Boys were so stupid.

  Jake’s voice was loud in the quiet of the woods.

  “She’s not here, lads.” More snorting laughter from the other two boys. “It’s a proper mystery, I don’t know where she could have got to. Maybe she’s gone down into the gorge.”

  The sound of them tramping away through the leaves again.

  Odette kept watch through her little peephole in case the boys came back. They had been right next to her, without even realizing she was there! She was going to win. It would be so funny when she told them how close they’d been.

  It was warm in her secret hiding place. Cozy. And it was so hard to sleep in her vacation bed … it was different from her normal bed at home, too hard; but then sometimes it was too soft, and she couldn’t usually get comfy without all of her toys. Her nest inside the fallen tree was quite comfy, though, even if some of the leaves were a bit scratchy. She actually felt more comfy in here than in her vacation bed.

  Her eyes felt heavy.

  She let them close.

  * * *

  She woke without even realizing she’d been asleep. Her shoulder ached where she’d leaned on it against the bark, and the light outside was a bit different. But no one had found her. None of the boys had guessed where her hiding place was. She was going to win.

  Outside in the woods it was getting noisier.

  Voices, shouting the names of all the children.

  Shouting her name.

  “Odette! Where are you?”

  Odette knew what they were doing: they were trying to trick her into coming out, show where her hiding place was. They were trying to make her look silly.

  She smiled to herself. She was cleverer than them. She would show them. Something smelled bad, though, like when Mum burned her toast and made the alarm go off at home. But Odette wasn’t going to fall for that one—she knew what boys were like.

  She wasn’t going to give up that easily, not when it was her turn to hide.

  She wasn’t going to come out for those silly boys.

  She wasn’t going to come out for anyone.

  63

  For a second, the three of us just stood and stared.

  A pall of billowing smoke rolled across the vineyard, blanketing the hillside in a thick, gray cloud. Orange flames licked up the vines near the woods, creeping from one to the next as we watched. Flames were visible in the woods, too, flaring and dancing in the muggy late afternoon air. Everything down there—everything for miles around—was bone dry after weeks of unbroken summer sunshine. Everything was ready to burn.

  Rowan moved first.

  “Oh my God!” There was panic in her voice. “The kids!”

  She ran headlong down the stone steps, taking them two at a time, with Izzy and I following close behind. Running through the wrought-iron gate out into the vineyard we almost bowled into Alistair coming back up the other way. He was red faced and out of breath, cradling his left arm in his right as if protecting an injury.

  “Got to get my phone,” he said, scrambling sideways. “Call the pompiers.”

  “Are you OK?” Izzy shouted back at him.

  He waved a dismissive hand and stumbled on toward the villa.

  We rushed through the gate and into the vineyard, Izzy in front, then me, with Rowan at my shoulder. Her panicked voice was right behind me as we pounded down the hill toward the flames.

  “Odette!” she shouted. “Odette! I’m coming!”

  I couldn’t see anyone. Any of the children, or the men, for that matter. All I could see was smoke, thick gray smoke rising up from the bottom of the vineyard and in the woods, too. Something stuck in my head about the sight but there was no time to process it, no space in my head for anything except Daniel and Lucy.

  We ran on, tendrils of drifting smoke reaching for us, trying to choke us. My breath rasped loud in my ears and at some point I lost my flip-flops, flying off my feet as we sprinted toward the woods. The stony ground cut into my feet but I barely noticed.

  As we approached the tree line, Izzy shouted over her shoulder, “I’ll find Jen!”

  She veered off left into the woods.

  I went right, cutting across the rows of vines toward the path that wound through the trees, shouting as I went.

  “Daniel! Lucy!” I waved a hand in front of me, swatting at the sheets of smoke. “Where are you?”

  No answer.

  Panic started to rise in the back of my throat like bile. The smoke was a hazard and the flames would be dangerous if they spread much farther, but the real danger was what was hiding on the far side of the clearing. A cliff edge and a hundred-foot drop onto the rocks below, just waiting for one misstep, one confused stride in the wrong direction among the smoke and chaos.

  “Daniel! Lucy! Can you hear me?”

  The heat was strong on my face from the crackle and hiss of flames as they leaped from branch to branch. I pulled in a lungful of acrid smoke and instantly started coughing, trying to call out again before the words were cut short by a retching, choking gag that tore at my throat.

  Smoke drifted between the trees, stinging my eyes. It was getting thicker.

  There.

  A child, shouting. High and terrified.

  I felt a fear I had not felt for years, not since he had been born, tiny and silent and blue lipped, slick and motionless in the arms of a maternity nurse, the cord lifted away from his neck. Willing him to breathe, willing to trade my life for his, just to hear him cry. To hear him breathe. A visceral fear that clutched at my heart, squeezing and squeezing until all the blood was gone and I couldn’t catch my breath because the terror was so close, so close I could feel its hot breath on the back of my neck, the fear that maybe this was the moment when my world would go dark. Silence. Doctors and nurses working fast, skilled hands desperately trying to tether my baby to life. But silence, still. Only silence. Please let him cry. Please let him be OK. I will do anything to hear him cry. Anything. And finally, wonderfully, he had: a fierce gargling cry that pierced me with a shaft of pure love as I lay exhausted in the bed, tears hot on my cheeks. And then he was in my arms, tiny and perfect, his face screwed up and purple and crying hard, the most beautiful sound, his voice strong and high and bursting with life.

  He was crying now.

  “Mum! Mum!”

  I turned toward the sound of my son’s voice, leaving the path and plunging blindly into the woods on my right. My eyes streamed with tears fr
om the smoke.

  “Daniel! I’m coming!”

  “Mum!” he shouted again, his voice taut with panic.

  There was movement to my left, people in the smoke near the clearing, but they were adults. They were not my concern, not right now.

  Daniel was straight ahead. My son. My boy.

  And then he was there, stumbling through the trees toward me, his face dirty and streaked with tears. I grabbed his little hand tightly and we ran, both of us coughing and hacking in the smoke, through the trees and back out into the vineyard.

  “Come on!” I shouted, pulling him as he stumbled along by my side. “We have to get higher up!”

  Halfway up the hill, well away from the smoke and flames, we stopped to catch our breath.

  “Where’s your sister?” I said, puffing hard. My throat was raw. “Where’s Lucy?”

  “I don’t know, didn’t see her.”

  “Are you hurt?” I knelt down next to him, checking him over, brushing his hair back off his forehead and checking his head and arms for any obvious injury. “Does anywhere hurt?”

  “My throat’s a bit sore.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.” He looked at the ground. “We—we left Odette in the fallen tree trunk.”

  “What?”

  “We were playing sardines but Jake said we should do a trick on her, make her hide and then not bother coming to get her.” His words were tumbling out, falling over one another. “We knew where she was but pretended we didn’t and she was in a tree trunk near the gorge. Is she all right? I haven’t—”

  Sean burst out of the smoke, bare chested, his T-shirt tied over his mouth and nose.

  He was carrying Lucy in his arms, her head resting against his shoulder.

  “Sean!” I shouted. “Over here!”

  He ran up the hill to us, laying our daughter gently on the ground. One of her sandals had come off. She was conscious, but her mouth was tightly closed against the pain.

  “Lucy,” I said. “Are you OK?”

  “Twisted my ankle.”

  Sean pulled the T-shirt down off his mouth.

  “Did someone call the fire brigade?”

  “Alistair.”

  “How many are still down there?”

  “I don’t know. But Daniel said Odette’s hiding in a fallen tree trunk—have you seen her?”

  As if in answer, a woman’s voice reached us from within the smoke.

  “Odette!” Rowan’s scream was raw and desperate in full-fledged panic. “Odette! Where are you?”

  Sean stood up.

  “I’m going back,” he said to me. “Look after our babies.”

  He pulled the T-shirt back over his nose and plunged downhill into the smoke.

  64

  I watched my husband disappear into the rolling gray cloud of smoke that enveloped the bottom of the estate. The smoke was getting thicker as the fire spread, long flames licking quickly from branch to branch, fanned by a warm wind coming out of the south.

  Be careful, I should have shouted as he ran back into danger, as he put his own safety at risk to search for someone else’s child. But I didn’t shout that. I don’t know why. I didn’t shout anything. I just sat and watched him go, fearless, heedless of the consequences, back into the woods where everything was hidden from sight.

  I wondered if it would be the last time I saw him.

  Please be OK, Sean. Whatever you’ve done, whatever has happened between us, whoever you’ve chosen over me, I don’t want it to end like this.

  From somewhere over toward the village, the wailing two-tone siren of a fire engine reached us.

  Hurry up.

  The fire danced on, smoke darkening against the blue sky. The wind shifted for a moment, pushing clouds of smoke back toward us, burning throats and making us blink back tears. My head began to pound from breathing it in.

  It could only have been a minute, maybe less, before there was movement again at the edge of the smoke, coalescing suddenly into real flesh and blood. A figure. An adult.

  Russ stumbled out of the smoke with Odette clutched tight in his arms.

  Rowan ran behind him, holding her T-shirt to her mouth and nose, following them up the hill until all three of them collapsed next to us in a heap of panting, crying, coughing relief. Rowan tried to gently loosen Odette’s grip on her father to check her over, but Odette was attached to Russ like a limpet, as if her very life depended on it.

  Sean was the last to appear, an arm out in front of him against the choking smoke. He staggered up the hill and collapsed, exhausted, next to me, pulling the T-shirt down from his mouth.

  “Is everybody out?” he gasped, trying to catch his breath. “Did everyone get out?”

  “Think so.”

  “Good,” he said. “You all OK?”

  “We are. Just need to get some water for the kids, and Lucy will need to have her ankle looked at.”

  I turned to look at him properly. His face and torso were smeared with dirt and shiny with sweat, his eyes wild and bloodshot, and both his knees were cut and bleeding. There were small vertical scratches on his chest and high up on his right cheek.

  He coughed hard and spat on the ground.

  “Sean?” I said more quietly.

  Staring hard into the flames, eyes wide, he didn’t seem to hear me.

  “Sean?” I said again.

  His head snapped around to look at me. “What?”

  “Are you OK? You’re bleeding.”

  He waved a hand dismissively and I noticed that he was shaking with adrenaline.

  “It’s nothing. Fell into a bloody bush, couldn’t see where I was going. Can barely see your hand in front of your face down there now.”

  We stared at the fire for a moment, mesmerized by the flames.

  “Christ,” he said under his breath, “how the hell did it all start, anyhow?”

  “Good question.” My throat was raw and my head was pounding so hard I could barely think straight. But I remembered now what had struck me when I first saw the flames—I just didn’t know what it meant. Not yet.

  * * *

  Jennifer brought a pack of mineral water bottles down from the villa and we sat, sluicing the smoke from our throats, as the fire brigade went to work.

  The sapeurs-pompiers, in their blue protective suits and red helmets, played their hoses over the remains of the fire, damping down the smoldering trees and three lines of vines that had been ablaze only minutes before.

  Daniel watched with the kind of awed fascination that young boys reserve for firefighters.

  “Is there going to be an ambulance, too?”

  “These guys can do that as well, Daniel,” I said.

  “Sick.”

  The senior fireman, a tall, severe looking caporal who introduced himself as Bernard Lepine, brought out a first-aid kit and checked the children over. Rowan, who was the most fluent French speaker, acted as translator while he gave Lucy a heel strap bandage to support her ankle, then applied a dressing to a small burn on Alistair’s arm. Sean waved away treatment for his cuts and scratches, insisting he would clean them up himself. Lepine packed up his kit and strode down the hill to inspect his crew’s work. The fire was out now, all the woods and surrounding area thoroughly soaked to prevent any lingering sparks from restarting the flames. Crewmen tramped through the woods, checking their work, making sure the seat of the fire was well and truly extinguished. The storm had yet to break and the afternoon heat was still brutal, a furnace of humidity that seemed to press down into the top of your head and push against you from every side.

  Lepine returned a few minutes later, talking and gesticulating at Rowan at some length. From the rapidity of his speech, and his grim expression, I guessed that she was being given a talking-to on French fire safety measures.

  Eventually, Rowan turned to the rest of us with a rueful smile. “He says not to have barbecues or discard cigarettes anywhere outside. Not to allow open fires, not to discard glass bo
ttles anywhere apart from in the recycling, and to keep children away from matches, lighters, and cigarettes.”

  “Of course,” I said, giving the fireman a nod.

  “Oh,” Rowan added, “and he’s asking if everyone in our party is accounted for.”

  In all the panic and confusion of the last twenty minutes, I realized that had slipped my mind. I was so wrapped up in making sure my children were OK, the drama of the sapeurs-pompiers arriving, and the disorienting effect of breathing in smoke, that it had not occurred to me to check.

  I did a quick head count to make sure all twelve of us were present and correct.

  Counted once.

  That can’t be right.

  Counted again.

  Eleven.

  65

  I shook my head to clear it.

  Only eleven of us. Not twelve. The radio on the breast pocket of Lepine’s uniform crackled into life, a young voice, breathless and urgent, calling his name over and over. Lepine answered it and was met with a torrent of French from one of his crew members. He fired two questions back. Two quick answers.

  Rowan’s hand flew to her mouth.

  Lepine gestured to her to come with him, quickly. I stood up, too, icy fingers starting to curl around my heart.

  Daniel took my hand, as if to come with me.

  Lepine waved a finger and shook his head.

  “Non, madame,” he said. “Pas avec le garçon.”

  Not with the boy.

  The world felt as if it were falling away beneath my feet.

  Daniel looked at me uncertainly. “What did he say?”

  “You stay here for now,” I said, my voice shaky. “With Daddy.” I let go of Daniel’s hand and followed Lepine down the hill toward the blackened woods, scorched by flames and soaked with water, the nearest small trees twisted and black. The Frenchman led the way, with Rowan, Alistair, and me following close behind in single file.