“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lentini said, “We have secured the locks. I will now attempt to slice Ms. Burch in two,” and he winked at her. A quick second later she heard the shnikt of the blade entering the cabinet, and she gasped. Her toes twitched involuntarily—which meant that they were still there—and she felt a hard pulse of heat against her face. When Lentini wheeled her around, she caught a glimpse of two feet projecting from the other half of the cabinet, churning around like paddles, and then she looked at the ceiling. She must have been the first person to see the flames crawling along the timbers, a dozen blazing lines reaching all the way from the flies to the gallery. It was not until a long petal of burning wood floated down, throwing off yellow sparks, that the first shout arose from the audience.
Afterward, everything happened so quickly. The sixty-year-old oak of the rafters began to blacken and crumble, sending chunks of cinder into the aisles, and the seats with their peeling lacquer went up like tinder. Her head was facing toward the curtain, which was a wavering sheet of flame, but it was not difficult to hear the tumult in the audience. The outcries of people singed by falling embers. Their footfalls as they ran toward the exits. The explosive crack of one of the doors being wrenched off its hinges. She pushed at the lid of the cabinet, but it would not open, and when she called for Micah, he did not answer.
Then she heard him saying, “We need to unlock them. They’re stuck in there,” and Lentini shouted, “There’s no time. We’ll have to roll them outside ourselves.”
She shut her eyes against a bright flaring of the curtain, and when she looked again, Lentini was standing over her, gripping the cabinet in his large white hands. “We’re taking you out the side door,” he said. “Hang on. You’ll be okay.”
Before she could react, she felt herself bumping down a row of stairs, her neck razing against the edge of the cabinet’s window with each jolt. A laceration opened beneath her left ear, and she tried to bring her hand to it, but she couldn’t reach that far. She felt like a patient strapped to a gurney. She remembered walking along a fragment of stone wall. She was staring straight into Lentini’s face, which was grimacing with the effort of steering her through the crowd, and beyond him into the fire and the pall of smoke. The entire scene kept jerking to the left and right as people butted against Lentini or the cabinet in their rush for the door. One of the birds flapped into the loft of the auditorium, its wings taking flame as it tried to push its way through, but she could not tell whether it was the dove or the pigeon. An elbow plunged into her frame of vision, and then a metal crossbar, and then she was outside.
The air was cold, and she could see tree limbs and telephone wires joining and separating in the sky above her. There was a clatter of wheels as she was jostled over the curb onto the asphalt, and still Lentini kept trolleying her away from the building. When she looked to the right, she saw the other half of the cabinet rolling alongside her. Micah was gripping the railing, a black streak of char on his face, and two small feet were sticking out the other end. One of them was missing a shoe. She wondered who the woman inside was.
Once they had passed the last row of cars, Lentini drew to a stop and doubled over, taking in several deep drafts of air. “Okay,” he said when he had finally caught his breath, “let’s put you two together”—he gasped again—“and get you out of there.”
He brushed a fleck of ash from her cheek, blowing it away like an eyelash, and to her surprise she felt a shiver travel across her shoulders and down her back. Her toes curled, pressing against the ledge inside the cabinet. It was a sensation she recognized from her first high school dances, when she was fourteen years old and her date would fan his fingers across her hips, moving out of time with the music to sway up against her. Though her body was aching and bruised, she felt herself smiling.
The sky had cleared and the sun had fallen, and as Lentini wheeled her into position, she saw clusters of sparks climbing into the stars. They faded to a dull orange just before they disappeared, but for a few seconds they seemed to alter the shape of the constellations—wrapping a hunter’s snare around the Pleiades, returning Andromeda to Cassiopeia. It was a map of a different sky, one that wandered and changed before her eyes, a sky where all the old mythologies came back to life and the stories were never about what she thought they were about.
The Telephone
I was sleeping soundly when the telephone rang. It was three or four in the morning, no later, and though my eyes flicked open on strings, it took me a few moments to waken completely into my body. I stared at Janet, who was frowning in her sleep. The digital clock was glowing behind her shoulder, but all I could see of it were two blue spears radiating toward the ceiling. It looked like the moon must look rising out of the ocean.
The phone rang again, and then again. A floating sound. A strange, loose rattling.
This would be hell, I thought.
It was a question I asked myself all the time: What would the world be like if this moment lasted forever—if God took it in His hands and stretched it out over eternity? I experienced a dozen little heavens and hells every day. I waited for the answering machine to catch and roll its announcement. When it didn’t, I picked up the telephone. The dial tone gave its usual blended shrill, and I put the phone back in its cradle. But I could still hear the ringing coming from some other room. Who could be calling so late, I wondered.
I got out of bed and checked the second phone in the kitchen, the cell phone in Janet’s purse, even the front door, in case the doorbell was malfunctioning. Nothing. Every ring seemed to be coming from a different place, as though the entire house had buckled together like a piece of fabric, making the signal warp and bend. Finally, listening carefully, I followed the sound upstairs, tracing it down the hall into Celia’s bedroom. I
opened the door, ready to leap at the first ring, and when it came I knelt on the carpet, opening Celia’s toy chest.
It was her Walt Disney Talk-to-Me Telephone, the kind with likenesses of all the Disney characters on the buttons. It wasn’t a real phone, just a toy, but when you pressed the right sequence of buttons—seven in a row—the bell would jingle and one of the characters would speak to you. Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Uncle Scrooge. We had given it to Celia on her seventh birthday, and it had lain inside her toy chest ever since. I disentangled the cord from a bag of jacks and the top half of a Barbie doll, and then from a flexible rubber horse that had become braided between the loops, and set the phone on Celia’s bed. Her sheets and comforter were flawlessly smooth, like the surface of a puddle. Four years ago she had gone missing—four years, five months, and twenty-five days—and the impression of her body had long since risen from the mattress. It had been only a few weeks since we finally held the memorial service for her.
The phone rang again, and I answered it. “Hello?”
“Hello? Dad? Is that you?”
I recognized the voice immediately. It was Celia’s.
“Dad? Dad? Can you hear me?”
The telephone receiver was made of a soft hollow plastic that felt almost weightless in my hand, far too light to carry the sound of her voice. “I can hear you,” I said. “There’s some interference, though.”
“Thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you for . . . it seems like forever. I thought maybe you weren’t there anymore.”
I bowed my head, tracing my fingers over the long smooth prow of Jiminy Cricket’s face. “Of course I’m here.”
“I know that now.”
“I wouldn’t dream of leaving this place, not without knowing you were safe.”
A sharp fluttering of static bloomed over the line, and I missed the first part of what she said.
“—all the time. You and Mom both. I always wondered who would answer, though.”
“You sound so much older,” I said. I felt a knuckle of tears expanding inside my throat.
“Well, I am, I guess. It’s been—what? Twenty years?”
“It’s been four. Since March 1997.” I was
sitting delicately on the very rim of her bed so that I wouldn’t rumple the covers. I could almost picture her sleeping there. She would look just like she used to—with her hands, balled into fists, stowed inside her pillowcase. “The last time I saw you, you wouldn’t quit singing. It was driving me crazy.”
“I remember.” Amazing how you can hear a person smiling. “ When the sky’s in your eye, and the pizza’s too high, that’s for-sure-ay. It feels more like twenty to me.”
“I’m sorry, Celia. I should have been watching. If I hadn’t sent you outside . . .”
I thought she was going to tell me it wasn’t my fault, or that I couldn’t have done anything to change it, the same thing that everybody else had been telling me for the last four years, but instead she said only, “Thanks,” and then coughed once, quietly.
“You blame me, don’t you? You don’t know how many times I’ve wished I had that morning to do over again. You have to believe me.”
“Dad, I can’t talk much longer. Other people are waiting here.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t go yet. Just tell me where you are.”
“I’m back,” she answered.
There was a strangled series of ticks, and the line went dead. No dial tone, just a deep, impassive silence. I pushed the disconnect button a few times, but nothing happened. Then, as an experiment, I dialed a seven-digit number. The phone produced the gravelly quack of Donald Duck, “Oh boy, oh boy, will you go swimming with me?” I hung up. My ear felt bruised and numb, and I realized that I had been pressing against it with the receiver, bearing down hard.
I had heard somewhere there are two things you cannot do in a dream: you cannot read letters and numbers, and you cannot control the gradation of the light. I looked at the stack of books on Celia’s dresser. Matilda. Amy’s Eyes. The Saggy, Baggy Elephant. When I flipped the light switch by her door, the bulb overhead shone with a dazzling white light, hanging from the ceiling like an apple from a bower. I could smell dust burning away from the glass. When I shut it off, the room went dark again.
It was still night outside, and I stood watching a tiny gray moth that had fastened itself to the window screen separating its wings every few minutes in the breeze. An hour later a bird began to call, a single plunging note that it repeated after ten seconds, and then after another ten, and then, when it received no answering call, fell quiet. An hour later the paper boy bicycled past, slinging the newspaper onto my lawn inside a plastic yellow sleeve.
Then it was morning.
Janet was already showering by the time I returned to the bedroom, currents of steam spilling from the open door. Our house was an old one, with poor ventilation, and she saw no reason to lock herself into the bathroom every morning. “All it does is fog up the mirror,” she said. “I can’t see a thing when I turn off the water. I can barely even find the towel. Besides, it’s only the two of us, Christopher, at least for now. And we’re old hat, baby. You can dangle as much as you want to as far as I’m concerned.”
“No need to explain yourself,” I said. “I love the way you dangle.”
But I couldn’t shake the habit of shutting the door in case Celia came wandering through.
I was making the bed when I saw the light on the answering machine flashing, which was odd, since I couldn’t remember hearing the phone ring again. I touched the play button and listened to the message. “Hey, Janet. It’s Kimson. I’m at the station and it’s late, but I wanted to hear your voice. This is your voice mail, isn’t it? I hope I called the right number. Is this the right number? Anyway, let me know when I’ll be able to see you again.” He paused a few seconds as a chain of footsteps tapped past him. “Okay, they’re gone. I think that’s all I had to say. Call me, Janet. I’ll be waiting. Bye.”
There is a certain tone of voice that new lovers, who are just beginning to discover each other’s bodies, always use to speak to each other: a proud, patient hunger—proud, in fact, because it is patient. Even when they try to disguise it, you can hear it in the way they say each other’s names, as if they have changed suddenly from abstract nouns to concrete ones, from something you merely think about to something you can take in your hands. The sound tings out like a crystal bell.
I erased the message on the answering machine and watched the tape respool.
I was lathering my face at the mirror when Janet climbed out of the shower, stepping into a bath towel which she wrapped twice around her body and bound in a twist over her breasts. She stood beside me brushing her hair out. “Kimson called,” I said.
She did not stop brushing, but the rhythm of her stroke shortened. “About Celia?”
“He didn’t say. He wants you to call him back.” I scraped the first width of shaving cream from my cheek and a band of red-stippled skin appeared. “Something about working late last night. I can call him myself if you want me to.”
“No, that’s okay. I had a question I needed to ask him anyway.”
I could hear the embarrassment in her voice, and when she lowered her head, whipping her hair forward so that she could brush it against the grain, I saw the root of her neck coloring. The truth was that I had been aware of the affair for some time, from the days when it was no more than a gaze and a softened handshake, and she must have realized this. We were long past being able to conceal ourselves from each other.
Kimson was the head of the local police force, which had been searching for Celia ever since the afternoon she went missing, and Janet had spoken to him almost every day since then, visiting the station to see how the investigation was progressing. He tried to be reassuring—I knew that—but what can you do when there’s nothing to go on, when a person just vanishes, lifted like a spirit from her own backyard? I myself could offer very little. Sometimes Janet came home in the evening and found me still wearing my boxer shorts, standing as lifeless as a statue at the window that looked out on the stone wall between the maple trees, the spot where I had last seen Celia playing. “How was your day?” she would ask, and when I didn’t answer she would continue: “You didn’t have one, you say? Well, that’s interesting, Christopher. What’s that? How was mine, you wonder? Mine was . . . hard. Mine was very hard, thanks for asking.” Once, not long ago, she was telling me about a movie she had seen, A.I., which she described as “a living wreck.” Then she looked me up and down and said, “You would probably like it,” and we both laughed, because it was true. Kimson had his strength to give her, and his vigor, and his desire, and I had only the memory of our life before it changed. Strength and desire always outshine memory. I found it hard to summon up much resentment.
When Janet had finished with the brush, she pulled a honeycombed tangle of hair from the bristles and let it fall into the trash. “Do you need to get into the shower? Want me to vamoose?” Sometimes she would use words like this—vamoose, yonder, debacle—just because she thought they were funny. But there was a flatness to her voice this morning, an age-old weariness that I could only hear as contrition.
“Of course I don’t want you to vamoose,” I said. “Take all the time you need.”
She met my eyes in the mirror. “I think I had better vamoose.” She set her brush on the counter, squaring it against the edge of the sink with a deliberate click. Then she pressed her palm quickly to my back. Half a second later she was gone. I shut the door.
It was not until I had showered, dressed, and eaten breakfast that I realized I had forgotten to tell her about Celia and the phone call, and by then she had already driven into town.
In addition to playing clarinet in the Community Orchestra for which Kimson played contrabassoon, Janet also worked part-time as its publicity director—a paid position—booking performance spaces, pinning fliers to church bulletin boards, buying radio ads on the local classical station, and sending concert circulars to season-ticket holders. She set her own hours, depending on when the next performance date was and how much interest each particular program generated, but she almost always worked from late morni
ng to late afternoon three or four times a week. When she had finished for the day, she would go for a walk along the reservoir, or head to the police station to ask about Celia, or take in a midday movie. Sometimes she would drive for hours through the tree preserves to the south of town, beads of transparent sap collecting on her windshield. I knew that I could not expect to see her home before five o’clock.
I heard a school bus applying its brakes on the street, its heavy, blocklike body rocking and scraping to a halt. It was the elementary school bus—the middle and high school buses came half an hour later—and it always stopped at the end of my front walk. I cracked the door open to watch the children climb inside.
One morning (an entire week of mornings, in fact) I had sat on the front porch with a mug of coffee in my hand to observe the whole procedure: the children congregating in knots and twosomes on my lawn, pulling video games and Matchbox cars from their backpacks, prying up wedges of sod with their shoes. Some of them had been Celia’s classmates, and seeing them filled me with a wonderful, open-pored sadness, as though I could understand the whole world if I only looked carefully enough. They seemed both much older and much younger than she was—much older and much younger than she would ever be. She had been seven for so long by then that by the time she was ten or eleven, I thought, she would be ageless. At the end of that week, one of the boys snapped a rubber band at the front of my house, letting fly with it just before he stepped onto the bus. It sailed over the grass and landed at my feet. Since then, I had made it a point to watch the children only from behind the front door. I didn’t want to become someone I wasn’t: that-man-who’s-always-staring-at-us.
When the bus pulled away, I walked out onto the porch and took a few deep breaths. A wind chime threw its shadow onto my face, its struts and vanes rotating slowly in the September air. A dog barked from behind a nearby fence. I collected the newspaper and went back inside.