“Father?” she whispers tentatively.
My heart knocks against my ribs like a little bird hitting window glass. “He’s not here, love,” I say calmly, and then I wait to see if it is enough of an answer. I pray that it is.
But it is not.
“Where is he?”
I kiss her head and hug her tight as I eye the sky, forcing any shred of doubt or apprehension out of my voice. I want it to sound as true as true can sound. Because I could very well be telling her the absolute truth.
“I sent him on his way.”
17
Our sleep is afforded to us in snatches and spurts as all through the night those fleeing the fires continue to pour into the park. With them comes the latest news. Half of the very heart of the city is gone. Union Square, the Hotel St. Francis, all the little shops I had frequented in that part of downtown—all reduced to ash or to mere skeletons of their former selves. The fires are moving ever closer to Polk Street and the house.
As the morning sun struggles to break through the strange canopy of fog and smoke, Kat and I use makeshift outhouses the army erected overnight, and then we stand in a queue for more than an hour for breakfast. Relief supplies have arrived by ship on the ocean side of the peninsula, and more are expected as word of our unfolding disaster has been sent across working telegraph wires south of San Francisco. The promised army tents arrived during the night, too, and now the troops are attempting to createorderly rows of canvas shelters and assigning them to people via another long and winding queue.
After we eat, I check the bulletin board for any news from Belinda and see nothing, not even my own note. After a bit of searching I see that someone has taken my scrap of paper, turned it over, and written their own desperate message on the back:Missing! Four-year-old twins! Boy and girl. Worried parents are waiting for them at the canteen. Please help!
I leave it as is and tear another bit from Da’s word book. Again, I borrow a pencil and write a message I can only hope Belinda will see.
We stand in a queue for a tent, but because there are only two of us, Kat and I are quartered with a pair of elderly sisters who are none too happy to share a shelter with strangers. I can tell by their clothing that they have money, or at least they did have money. They are wearing silks and ermine and jewels and an air of importance. The older of the two tells the army sergeant in charge of the tent assignments that she and her sister insist on having their own tent, but the man doesn’t even look up at her when he tells her they won’t be getting one. The two of them turn up their noses at Kat and me as we step in and stow our few belongings inside. I don’t care. At least with a place to put the travel case—which I’m sure the two sisters will have no interest in—Kat and I can look for Belinda without my having to carry it.
But our search for Belinda is again fruitless, even after finding the nurse who delivered Belinda’s baby in one of the tents for the injured. She doesn’t know where Belinda ended up. Some of the patients were rerouted as we fled the pavilion. I tell the nurse I will keep checking in with her, and that if she learns where Belinda is to please get word to me.
After spending the better part of the afternoon looking for Belinda, we start to walk back to the tent to rest before standing in the queue for supper. The air is heavily tinged with smoke and ash, and I begin to hear in the distance explosion after explosion after explosion. Kat startles with each one and buries her face in my skirt. I hear someone say that the army is blowing up whole blocks of buildings that survived the earthquake with nary any damage at all so that when the fires reach them—and they will reach them—there will be nothing but low-lying rubble to consume.
I hear chatter that the fires are headed toward the mansions on Nob Hill, and I know that means they are headed toward my neighborhood, too, and the house I was living in with my fraud of a husband inside it.
As we make our way back to the tent, it occurs to me that the men setting the charges will surely check the houses they are dynamiting to make sure the occupants have evacuated. If my house has been targeted to be dynamited, soldiers will step inside it to check. They will find Martin. Will he still be alive? Will he say anything? Or will he suppose that I have too much incriminating evidence against him? If he’s found, will he be brought here to the park to have his injuries treated? In my search for Belinda, will I find Martin instead?
In the tent as we rest I can’t shake the thought of chancing upon him among the rows of wounded.
Kat has said nothing since asking about her father the evening before. She wears a vacant look now that alarms me. It is as if she’s evaporating, disappearing into the ashes and smoke. I don’t want to take Kat to her mother, and yet I do. I sense an urgency to get her to Candace.
When darkness has fully fallen, and we curl up onto the army bedroll we were given, I pull her close to me and sing to her the Gaelic lullaby she loves. One of the old biddies hisses at me to stop making such a racket. But I pay that woman no mind. I sing until Kat is breathing slow and easy in my arms.
•••
Friday morning dawns cloaked in the same throat-burning smoke as the day before. I can tell without even listening to the talk between soldiers and police presiding over the park that the fires have not abated. The widest boulevard in the city, Van Ness, which is lined up and down with stately homes, has been dynamited on its east side. And not just one block or two or even three, but twenty-two blocks—more than a mile of structures have been sacrificed to stop the inferno. My own street is only one block over from Van Ness, one block east, which means the fire will sweep across it before it reaches this new fire break. Perhaps it already has. Martin is either still inside the house or he isn’t.
Kat seems to hover between sleep and wakefulness this morning. She doesn’t stir when I try to coax her into getting up for breakfast, even though her eyes are open. I tell her if she doesn’t come with me that I’ll have to get our breakfast for us, and I’m so certain that she won’t want to be alone in the tent—the two sisters have gone in search of coffee—that she will get to her feet. But she just lies there and says nothing, does nothing. I hate to leave her like this, but she needs to eat, so I admonish her to stay in the tent and not to leave for any reason and assure her that I’ll be right back.
The talk in the queue for breakfast is whether or not blowingup a mile-long path of buildings and homes on Van Ness will stop the fire’s progress. If it does not, the inferno will be headed in our direction. And if that happens, the only thing that will stop it is the ocean.
I am given biscuits and slices of summer sausage wrapped in wax paper to bring back to our tent. I’m not looking forward to another day like yesterday, of mindless traipsing through a sea of bedraggled refugees and injured souls, but what else can we do today except look for Belinda and the baby?
I walk past the bulletin board on my way back to the tent, and again my note is gone—this time nowhere to be found. I don’t know that I’ll ever find Belinda in this mess, and I don’t know how much longer I can wait. I am thinking that as soon as we are given the all clear to leave the park and find our way out of the ruined city, I will take Kat to Arizona as I promised and assume Belinda will find her own way home. I’ll have to find a way to open that strongbox to see if there’s anything inside it I can pawn for cash to buy a train ticket.
As I’m walking back to Kat, pondering my options, I hear a woman call out and at first I don’t turn. I don’t recognize the name being shouted as my own or the voice that calls it. But then it is as if a clockwork bit slides into place and I remember why I’m there and who I have been looking for and why, and I turn toward the sound.
“Sophie!”
It is Belinda. She’s getting out of a carriage with the baby in her arms and wearing a dress I don’t recognize. A nurse is handing her a bag made from a pillowcase but Belinda hasn’t grabbed it; she is instead calling out to me. I pick up my skirt, holdingtight to the summer sausage and biscuits in my other hand, and for the first time in many hours I am running toward something instead of away from it.
Even though I have known her only four days, it is the most natural thing in the world to envelop Belinda and that baby into a tight embrace as though we are sisters. She is crying and I find that I am also shedding tears of happiness and relief that something good can still happen in this upside-down world.
“They took me somewhere else!” she is saying. “And they wouldn’t bring me here to the park where I knew you were! They wouldn’t bring me and there were no carriages, and then the fire was headed toward us. I begged them to take me here instead of the Presidio with the others!”
