In front of her, a man with suffocating body odor says to one of his friends, “This is rather intimate,” but the joke falls flat.
Everyone’s pace slows, until they are at a complete standstill. Sally stands on her tiptoes, trying to see what the cause of the slowdown is.
“It’s so dark,” says Margaret. “Is there anything to see?”
The sconces give off only a dim light, and all Sally can see is the backs of people’s heads.
“I think I see Tom,” she says, but she immediately convinces herself she must be wrong. He and his cousin are at the far end of the corridor, which doesn’t make any sense considering he left the box only moments before her.
Eventually, the air grows hazy with smoke. “Open the windows!” cry the voices of people at the back of the corridor. Ahead of Sally, the man with the bad sense of humor asks his friend for his sword cane. He unscrews the handle and pulls the blade from the cane shaft, then jimmies it under the first of a half-dozen boards that cover the window nearest them. The first board pops off easily, and the man passes it to Sally, who isn’t sure what to do with it. Nails stick out of the board in all directions, andif she lets it clatter to the floor, one of the nails is sure to skewer a woman in the foot.
The crowd begins to move forward again, and the man with the blade has no choice but to abandon his project. “Hand me the knife,” says Sally, who now finds herself in front of the window. The man laughs, but Sally shoots him a look, and he passes the blade to her.
“Take this,” she says, handing the board she’d been holding to Margaret. She passes her purse and jacket over Margaret’s head to Archie.
It takes Sally a moment to figure out how to work the knife under the boards, and even then she can’t get a good purchase. One of the boards eventually wiggles loose, and she slides her fingers beneath it, then yanks at it with all her might.
“Help me,” she says to Margaret, who grabs hold of the board and pulls, too.
The board comes free in the women’s hands, and Sally lets out a small scream, surprised at their own strength.
“Use the board to break the window,” shouts a man behind her, and she looks at the board in her hands with a start. It hadn’t occurred to her that it, too, could be a tool.
She needs a little room to wind up her arm. “Can you move back?” she asks Margaret, but there is nowhere for her to go. “Maybe crouch?”
Margaret does as she is told, and Sally swings the board over her sister-in-law’s head and into the glass, which produces a piercing sound as it shatters. The fresh night air that rushes into the corridor feels so good it makes Sally almost light-headed.
Through the hole she’s helped create, Sally can see a crowd of onlookers on the green. Some point at the theater, some cover their mouths with their hands, but every single face is turned upward, toward the building’s roofline. She won’t allow herself to imagine what it is they see.
The crowd behind them surges forward, and Margaret screams for help. Archie has been pushed on top of her, and Sally lets the knife and the board clatter to the floor in an effort to pull Margaret to her feet. “Stop, everyone, stop!” yells Sally. “Let her get up!”
When Margaret is standing again, Sally squeezes her sister-in-law tight.
“Are we to be killed by our own acquaintances?” says Margaret, who sounds close to tears.
In the bustle, someone had stepped on the heel of one of Sally’s shoes, but there is no way to stop and pop it back into place. Sally has always envied the men their sturdy boots, but never more than now.
“I’m sorry about your knife,” Sally says to the man in front of her, but if he has heard her, he doesn’t acknowledge the apology.
They pass the entrance to one of the other boxes, and through the open doorway they can see the theater proper. The front of the pit, closest to the stage, is already engulfed in flames, which rise as high as the third-floor boxes, but haven’t yet devoured them. Behind Margaret, Archie begins to cough, and the cough turns into a prayer. “Dear God,” he mutters. “Oh, my dear God. My dear God. My dear God.”
“This is very bad,” says Margaret, and—as if on cue—a wave of thick smoke rolls into the corridor, blanketing them in near darkness. Around them, more people begin to cough and choke. Sally’s eyes burn, and she squeezes them shut. How will they possibly make it down two flights of stairs if they can’t see where they are going?
Ahead of them, the crowd charges forward, and a woman’s scream is followed by a man’s much louder and more terrified “Clara!”
The surge is so strong that Sally is lifted off the ground and carried a dozen feet or maybe more. When she is set down again, she is in the third-floor lobby, but she’s lost both her shoes and her sister-in-law.
“Margaret!” she shrieks. “Margaret!”
“Sally!” says Archie, who sounds close enough to reach out and touch. Sally feels for him and when her fingers land upon the flesh of his face and then the brocade of her own jacket, which he’s wrapped around his head, she seizes his arm.
“Where’s Margaret?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says, moving in the direction of the stairs with everyone else. “We lost her.”
Sally tugs at his arm. “Well, let’s go find her.”
Archie shakes Sally off. “I’m sure she’s close by.”
