“She’s up there!” he screams and points. “First bedroom on the left!”
Someone must hear him, because a pair of firefighters heads into the building. While the heartbeats pass, James waits, forced to watch Nelle’s pounding against the glass, softer each time. Until she stops. Until she collapses.
She can’t die, he thinks, his heart hammering. He needs to get up there. Give him a uniform, a mask, an oxygen tank, whatever they use to go in there so he can save his family. Nelle and Jessie and Lena need him.
He is about to steal a uniform and run back into the conflagration when a huddle of firefighters emerges from the building, carrying three women toward the open ambulances. James sprints. All three women have been chewed up and spat out. Their bodies are covered in ash and soot. Burns mar their arms and hands.
“Excuse me,” he says, hoping the firefighter can hear him over the pandemonium of sirens and screams and the crackle of gnawing fire. “Excuse me, that’s my cousin, that’s my family.”
He climbs into an ambulance and stands in a corner between Jessie’s gurney and Nelle’s spot on the bench. Lena goes to her own ambulance. The paramedics quickly check Nelle and James before rushing to Jessie.
James fumbles for Nelle’s hand, crushing it between his own. “Are you hurt?”
“I was,” she says. He examines her neck, her legs, her hands. No burns.
He turns to Jessie, unconscious, her clothes charred.
“She’s okay.” Nelle massages her throat. “Not sure about her lungs.”
“Lena?” he asks, trying to keep his attention off the paramedics swarming his cousin.
Nelle shakes her head. “I don’t know. She wasn’t moving.”
James can’t find it in himself to comfort her. All his energy is gone. He’s wearing a different body than he was hours ago, seeing all of this through new eyes.
The ambulance doors burst open—he didn’t even know they were moving—and the paramedics rush them into the ER. James insists he doesn’t need any treatment, but he is given no choice in the matter. Thenurse who checks on him assesses minimal lung damage and diagnoses him with a sore throat.
“I am so deeply sorry,” she says before checking Nelle’s vital signs.
James’s heart twists.My home.
When he and Nelle are permitted to visit Jessie, she is already joking about the astronomical hospital bills she will have to pay. They see Lena next. She’s unconscious, but alive. The doctor says she should wake soon.
James wants to feel relieved, but he doesn’t. He has crossed into a parallel dimension. He stares at the tiles of the waiting-room floor. His computer is gone to the flames. Photographs of him and Nelle. And his typewritten manuscript—theonlycopy—ofThe Summer Curse. He only ever transcribed the first chapters.
Thank God Jessie stores her art in the studio, but one silver lining doesn’t make up for all they lost. Hopelessness sucks the air from James’s lungs, grinds his spirit to dust. What is the point of anything when everything is gone?
But Jessie and Lena are still here, and that is a miracle in itself.
Nelle rounds the corner, wearing sweatpants from the gift shop and her maroon sweater from yesterday.
She tucks her hair behind her ears as she takes the vinyl chair beside James. “Any news?”
“Lena hasn’t woken yet. Jessie’s breathing is getting better.”
She sighs. “That’s good. Anything better is good.”
“Yeah.” James can’t find the desire to speak, so he doesn’t. He stares at the wall and the mounted TV. The news is on, an awful choice for an already grim setting, and the reporter is chatting to the camera from the still burning building on Bleecker Street. Smoke pours above the rooftops as the sun rises in a pink sky.
He wants to throw up.
“James,” Nelle starts.
He peels his attention from the TV. “Yeah?”
“I need to end my life, and I want to do it in Lincoln.”
If he was standing, he would double over. The idea is preposterous. “What? Why?”
