“Save her!” someone yelled again.
The papers had predicted that today would find the citizens gazing skyward. Finally, the yellow press had been right about something. But the comet that blazes by every seventy-some years would be overlooked by the spectacle of the moment, by the earthbound fire that was licking at the sky.
“Save her!” the crowd chanted then, not a protest but a plea.
Soon, the crowd formed a wall around her, and from somewhere behind them Bertie Tuttle emerged, her skin glistening with sweat. She held Sudsy on a rope.
“Bertie,” Opal whispered. From the factory came a loud boom, then frenzied screams from the onlookers, who were moving backward, away from the building.
Bertie didn’t flinch. When she spoke, her voice was breathy, like she was speaking to a man she was trying to seduce. “We can go away. Tonight.”
The wind had shifted and pushed the smoke sideways, away from them. Opal crouched forward in pain, then reached for Bertie’s arm to brace herself.
Bertie dug into her handbag until she found what she was looking for: Jagr’s formulary. She held up the gray notebook for Opal to see, then shoved it back inside her bag. “For you.”
Her fingertips were blackened from the matches. She smelled of kerosene. Her eyes held in them a terrifying dullness, like a specimen that’d been pinned to a mounting box. Bertie didn’t have to use words to admit it. Opal knew she was the one who set the factory on fire.
“Why, Bertie?” Opal asked.
“It was all I could do,” Bertie whispered. “He’d have taken it from me. I didn’t know. I didn’t know they were inside.”
Opal’s eyes stung. Everywhere hung smoke like souls that refusedto rise. Opal had heard that during yellow fever outbreaks, so many people died that some cities had to bury their dead beneath the streets. Carriages and horses and automobiles ran above them now, unaware of the piles of bones beneath them.
Bertie put on her gloves. She adjusted her barrettes. She looked exactly as she had atop those factory stairs when Opal first laid eyes on her. A mix of loneliness and desire, a woman trapped in the space between.
Time belongs to the dead. For the living, it’s an illusion. In Opal’s mind, an entire lifetime unfurled. Oren. Madame de Fleur. The Colonel. His warm skin. The scar beneath his eye that would soften as he aged. How when she embodied Hazel he reflected back to her the new person she could be, a new possibility. No choice is final, except death. She’d go with the Colonel to England, then she’d find her way to France. To Madame de Fleur. Eventually, she’d see the woman again.
Another explosion. The heat. The women were pulled back by a group of Earthshine Girls, toward safety. A car pulled up on the street in front of them. The flashes of a camera. The smell of kerosene and rubber and smoke. Tuttle stood before her. Jagr now, too. They’d arrived together, the two men, as though they’d been acquainted all their lives.
At the sight of Jagr, the world went hazy, like Opal was witnessing it from across a vast distance, the vantage point of the Other Side. How small she’d have to fold herself to fit back into that life. How impossible. She doubled over in pain so intense she felt dead already. She searched for the Colonel in the crowd.
She couldn’t see past Bertie, who looked at Opal as though to say,Trust me.
“It was one of the Earthshine Girls,” Bertie said. “I saw her. I tried to stop it, Charles. And, she… She helped them. She told them to do it. It was awful. All of it. And in my condition.”
Opal wiped ash from her eyes, surprised to find Bertie pointing in her direction.
Tuttle stepped forward and embraced his wife.
“Oh, Charles. All that you’ve worked for.” Her voice contained tears even if her eyes did not.
“Let’s get you away from here,” he said. He pulled his wife farther back from the flames, then he turned and watched the factory burn.
The pain intensified. Opal listened to sounds of crackling as though she herself were on fire. Her whole body burned in pain. Jagr grabbed hold of her arm. She managed only a grunt of resistance. “We need to get her to a bed,” he said.
“She’ll face charges,” Tuttle said.
“Even so,” Jagr said. He eased his grip. “She’s in labor. She’s sick.”
A loud boom forced Tuttle to look toward the factory, toward Maria and Amanda and the other girls now standing at the windows, begging for help. The smoke puffed and curled in the light, like the elaborate hand-painted wallpaper pattern Opal had seen in Bertie’s house. There was nothing to be done.
“Those poor girls,” Tuttle said. “My God. They’ll burn alive.”
He stared up toward the window, toward Amanda Mahooney, who waved her cap. The cap looked like a frantic moth, but then the wind shifted, and the smoke grew thick, and the facade of the building was entirely covered in black. They couldn’t see the Earthshine Girls after that, but they could still hear their cries.
Opal hadn’t thought Tuttle to be the kind of man capable of crying, but he did now, quiet sobs. He squeezed his temples; he fell to his knees.
“Those poor girls,” Bertie said to her husband, now kneeling to comfort him. “You’ll rebuild.” She drew her arms around him and pulled his head to her lap. Now she was crying, too. Sudsy sat down beside them.
