by Anita Shreve
“For now, anyway.”
“God, I love an east wind.”
—
Grace floats like a paper fragment into her house and up the stairs to where her children sleep. In a slow dance of exhaustion and relief, she slips into her summer nightgown and lies back on her pillow. She ought to stay awake and watch over her house and her children in case the wind switches direction. She ought to go downstairs and wait in the kitchen for Gene. Will he be covered in soot, desperate for a glass of water? But won’t the east wind have reached the men by now, signaling a few hours to go home to get some sleep?
She rolls over to put her cheek to the pillow. She will take a catnap and be refreshed and ready for whatever comes next.
—
Hot breath on Grace’s face. Claire is screaming, and Grace is on her feet. As she lifts her daughter, a wall of fire fills the window. Perhaps a quarter of a mile back, if even that. Where’s Gene? Didn’t he come home? She picks Tom up from his crib and feels a wet diaper. No time to change him.
She scurries down the stairs carrying both children. She deposits them in the carriage in the hallway and pushes it onto the screened porch. Claire begins to cough in the smoky air. “Sweetie,” Grace croons, “have you saved us all?”
She stuffs blankets, diapers, baby food, and water into the carriage behind the children. She loops the kids’ clothes around the upper bits of metal and ties them in knots. She’ll have to leave the mementos.
Because she can’t push the now too-heavy carriage over the lip of the porch, she reverses it in order to drag it down the step. Claire is crying, and so is Tom, but Grace has no time to soothe them.
As she maneuvers the vehicle to the edge of the grass, a bomb goes off, the explosion one Grace can feel right through her feet and legs. The children are silent, as if awed by the sound.
“A fuel tank in a house on Seventh Street,” she hears one man shout to another.
Sparks and embers swirl around Grace. There’s chaos in the streets. She hears cars moving, women screaming. Balls of flame seem to leap from treetop to treetop, giving the fire a frightening momentum. A tree catches fire at the top, and the fire races down the trunk and into a house below. Another bomb. The fire turns tree after tree into tall torches.
Fields resemble hot coals. For as far as she can see, there’s an unbroken line of fire. Cars are traveling, but where can they go?
An ember lands on the hood of the carriage. Grace swipes it off and begins to run. Heat and common sense push her to the seawall. A deer leaps across the street with her, chased by the freight train bearing down on all of them.
She takes the children from the carriage and sets them on a blanket on the sand. On another blanket, she lays out what few provisions she has brought. Abandoning the carriage, she begins to drag both blankets away from the fire and closer to the water. When the sand feels wet underfoot, she stops.
—
Smoke adds to the confusion. She spots, and then doesn’t, Rosie dragging a canoe.
“Rosie!” Grace calls.
“Grace, where are you?”
“Right at the water. There you are.”
Grace helps her friend drag the canoe beside the two blankets. “Where’s Gene and Tim?” Rosie wails.
“I have no idea,” Grace says, shaken.
“Where are all the people going?” Rosie asks.
“To the schoolhouse, I heard.”
“That’s crazy. The schoolhouse will burn, if it hasn’t already.”
Grace kneels on the blanket to change Tom’s diaper. His sleeper is dry enough to stay on. Grace can feel heat on her face.
“Oh, God,” Rosie cries.
“What?”
“The Hinkel house just went. It’s only one street back from us.”
Grace has no words. When she glances up, the fire burning on the ground resembles hot jewels among the rocks and pebbles.
“Rosie, take what you can from the canoe and put it near the water’s edge. Then push the canoe out to sea.”
“But…”
“It’s wood. If an ember falls inside, it will bring the fire right to us. Wet your hair and the kids’ hair.”
Rosie follows Grace’s instructions. She’s glad that Rosie won’t see her own house go up. Already, roof shingles are burning.
“Do my kids, too,” Grace yells to buy more time.
The splendid maple next to Grace’s own house turns orange in an instant, as if someone had switched on a light. The tree collapses. Grace can’t see her screened porch, but she knows the fire will consume that next and lead straight into the house. She left the photographs, the papers, the layette, the antique tools.
Rosie’s house explodes, the fire having found the fuel tank in the basement. Rosie snaps her head up.
“Rosie, don’t,” Grace commands, and there must be something in her voice that makes her friend obey, because Rosie turns to the water and puts her face in her hands.
Grace imagines the fire eating its way through her own home. The kitchen with the wringer washer, the hallway where the carriage is kept, the living room in which Grace made the slipcovers and drapes (an image of the fire climbing the drapes like a squirrel momentarily freezes her), upstairs to the children’s beds, her own marriage bed. All their belongings, gone. Everything she and Gene have worked to have, gone.
“Rosie, listen. Go down to the water’s edge so that only your feet are in the water. Lay down facing the sand—make an air pocket—and I’ll bring you Ian and Eddie. Put a child under each arm and hold them close. Make air pockets for them, too. I’m going to soak your blanket and drape it over you. I’m going to cover your heads. Don’t look up and don’t reach out a hand or let your hair out from under the blanket.”
Rosie is silent.
“Okay?” Grace shouts.
“Okay,” Rosie says.
Grace races into the sea to wet the blanket. Men in jackets and caps carry children toward the water, as if in a great and horrible sacrificial act. The women, with provisions, follow. She lays the blanket over Rosie and her children just as she said she would. Then she sets her own children in the sand and wets another blanket. Tugging the dripping wool, she fetches Tom and lies down facing up, pulling the blanket to her face and anchoring it with her feet. She beckons for Claire to come to her. When she has the children securely beside her, she lets go for a second and flips onto her stomach, making three air pockets. She rolls the children over so that they are all facedown in the sand. Holding her hair back with one hand, she drapes the blanket up and over their heads. She checks around Claire and Tom to make sure nothing is sticking outside the covering.
She hears screams—not of pain, but of horror, and she guesses that the waterfront houses are about to go. People who have not managed to get out of town are trapped like rats running for the sea. She prays an animal will not step on her or, worse, try to burrow inside.
The heat on their heads and backs is just this side of bearable. The blanket won’t stay wet for long.
“Rosie!” Grace shouts.
Grace can hear nothing.
“Rosie!”
“Still here!”
“Squiggle back into the water till it’s up to your thighs, just short of the kids’ feet.”
“Why?”
“Do it, please.”
Grace follows her own instructions and is in water nearly to her waist. She wishes she had thought to make a cave for her stomach. She creates new air pockets for herself and the children.
“Whatever you do, don’t look up. Rosie, did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Did you look up?”
“Yes.”
—
Grace takes shallow breaths, afraid she might inhale sand. She wonders if she and her children will die like this, the fire advancing to the dune grass at the seawall and then igniting Grace’s blanket. Would it be too late by the time she felt the pain, or would she have a few seconds to get Tom and Claire into the
water up to their shoulders? She might have to dunk herself and the kids if the fire gets that close. Does sand burn?
She can do nothing but wait until the fire exhausts itself. The seawater must be in the mid-sixties, and she has begun to shiver under the blanket. She has on only her cotton nightgown. The children are hardly more dressed than she. She can’t tell if the shivering is simply because of the cold, or if it stems from fear. Heat leaves the body quickly when one is lying on the ground, though the top of her feels as if it might sear at any minute. She would rather suffer the cold until the fire is well and truly out. How long will that take?
Around her, she hears timbers crashing, grass crackling. How many people are on the beach now? She doesn’t dare look. She wishes she could calm herself, but it’s impossible with the shivering. She has only one task now, to save her children.
And then Rosie’s children and Rosie.
The shaking becomes so severe, the children seem to catch it. Nature’s way of keeping them warm inside.
—
When she can no longer resist peeking, the moon is red. Burned trees fall to the ground amid showers of sparks. The entire town, for as far as Grace can see, is ablaze. Nothing moves but the fire—hungry, angry, relentless.
This must be what hell is like, she thinks as she lowers the blanket.
—
Grace worries for her mother. She must be safe, she decides. Her two friends would have rescued her. Gladys has a car. Perhaps they evacuated her earlier, and her mother, having no way to communicate, could not alert Grace. Or maybe her mother is at the other end of the beach, over a mile away, hovering near the water, as she is.
—
Claire begins to cry. Afraid that the child might inhale sand, Grace removes her arm from her daughter and as best she can fills the hole.
“Look at me,” she says to Claire. “Just lie your head down facing me.”
Grace brushes the sand from her daughter’s face. “Go to sleep now,” she says. She reaches back to cover her child with her arm.
When Claire is settled, Grace turns to her son. His face is covered with sand. She fills his hole and turns his head to face hers. She can’t understand his strange quiet. His eyes are open, and he is breathing, but he ought to be crying like his older sister. Instead, his expression is solemn, as if he were in shock. She wishes the children would fall asleep. But how can they, when death threatens a mere twenty yards away? They know this is not a game. Not at night. Not in the wet sand.
—
Grace wants to think of Gene, but her thoughts are muddy because she can’t picture where he is or what he is doing. Does he have a shovel in his hands? Is he cowering in a river as she is in the ocean? Or is he sitting in someone’s kitchen having a cup of coffee and a donut in order to keep his energy up?
It would have been impossible, Grace understands now, for him to get a message to her, never mind come home to save her. How is it that they all read the fire so wrong, that no one understood that the town and possibly the people in it would be dust by morning, nothing but hot embers, a whistling wind?
—
The shaking in Grace’s body is so intense that she feels as if her limbs will break apart. Her hands barely work when she reaches beyond her children to make sure nothing is sticking outside the blanket. Not a tendril of hair, not a foot.
She will not allow herself to picture the advance of the fire to the water. They will not burn. They will not drown.
“Rosie!” she yells.
No voice answers her. She doesn’t dare open her blanket. The heat has not abated.
She waits another minute.
“Rosie?”
—
Hour after hour, Grace holds her children. She tries to keep them warm with her body. Her limbs stiffen and ache.
—
A sensation of natural light. A cessation of sound. Only the wash of the water, the odd comment from afar.
She tries to bring Tom and Claire closer to her, but her muscles are so cramped and numb, she can’t move.
—
“Over here!” a man yells.
Two men Grace has never seen before kneel on the sand and peer into Grace’s eyes.
“Are you hurt, ma’am?” one asks.
“Take the children,” she manages. “Please. Warm them up.”
“Will do,” one says, and the two men lift the blanket off Grace.
“Jesus,” the other man says.
She knows the skirt of her nightgown is raised, but she can’t care about that now. One man takes Claire, the other Tom. Awakened from their nightmare, only Claire begins to wail, a reassuring sound.
“Don’t you worry, ma’am. We’ll be right back for you.”
Grace follows her children with her eyes.
The only signs that what she sees was once a town are the perfectly intact brick chimneys, tall druids with awful stories to tell. In one chimney, two fireplaces are visible, one over the other, the brick of the second-story hearth still protruding.
She spots a large vehicle the size of a bread truck parked across the street. The children are handed over to someone inside. Grace can still hear Claire crying.
One of the two men comes back for her.
“The other man’s wife is in there with your children. Can you move?”
The pain in her back and shoulders is searing, nearly unbearable. She shakes her head.
“Have you been here all night?”
“Yes.”
She can see only his boots and then his knees.
“I’m going to try to roll you over,” he says.
She can feel his hands under her shoulder and hip. She does all she can to help him, rolling with a thud, as if she were a frozen block of ice. She sees him lower her nightgown, but she has no sensation in her legs.
“You’re pregnant,” he says, alarm evident in his voice. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
“Why? Hospital?”
“You’re suffering from hypothermia. Think you could give me your hands?”
Grace grabs both his outstretched hands and tries to stand as he pulls. He manages to get her upright, but as soon as he lets go, she falls onto the sand, her frozen legs not working as they should. He urges her upright again and tells her to put her hands on his head for support. He whips off his blue cloth jacket and rubs her legs with the flannel lining. He is rough with her to get the circulation going again.
He stands, puts the jacket on Grace, and tells her to hook her arm into his.
“Let’s give it another go,” he says.
—
She is taken into the truck with many hands helping her. They coax her to lie on her side on blankets. She can hear Claire, from somewhere above her, crooning, “Mamamamama.”
“Hi, sweetie. You’re a good girl. We’re all right now.”
The truck lurches forward.
Grace thinks, I did it. I saved my children.
Cinders
But, no, she didn’t.
—
The bleeding begins in the truck. Exhausted, Grace drifts in and out of consciousness until she is woken by a pain low in her abdomen. She opens the blanket to see blood on her nightgown and the thin blanket.
“No!” she cries.
She has had these pains before. She knows what they are. She holds her legs tight together and pushes the blanket between them.
“Hold on,” the woman says.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Grace cries.
She shuts her eyes and prays. She knows by heart only one prayer. She thinks the words as best she can until she is squeezed from within. At each contraction, Grace grabs for the woman’s hand. She holds her breath.
Baby baby baby stay inside me stay inside.
Between contractions, she nods off. She can’t help herself, even though she knows she must stay awake to keep the child.
The driver races ahead. When the truck stops, the back door is opened by a man in a white coat.
; “How many months?” he asks.
“Five.”
“Contractions?”
“Yes.”
“Intervals?”
“I don’t know.”
Something in Grace’s face must alarm the doctor, because he yells for a cot. While they wait, the doctor takes her pulse.
He frowns.
“What?” Grace asks.
“Racing,” he pronounces.
Two men help her out of the truck and onto a gurney. They wheel her to the double doors of a brick building. The driver of the truck bends over her to say, “Your children will be well taken care of. We’ll be back to see you.”
—
Inside the hospital, Grace is dizzy with swimming overhead lights. She hears deep coughing, yelps of pain, bouts of screaming. Patients lie on cots in the hallway, while others, grimacing, stand against the white tiles. She hopes someone has covered her bloody nightgown. A contraction takes her by surprise with its intensity, and she pushes against the rails of the bed.
“Don’t push,” the nurse behind her says.
But Grace can’t control her body. Once inside a room, she is led off the cot to the bathroom, where her nightgown is removed. She is washed, given a new nightgown, and ordered to empty her bowels. Her body shudders with pain.
She is helped back onto the gurney and a nurse takes her information.
“Grace Holland.”
“Eugene Holland.”
“Hunts Beach.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
“My mother. Marjorie Tate. Her house might not exist either.”
“Two. A girl, two, and a boy, nine months.”
The nurse looks up at her.
“You’ll give birth to this baby today,” a doctor, not the same one as before, announces.
“It’s not time!” Grace insists.
A mask is clamped over her nose and mouth. Twilight sleep. Scopolamine. She has been here before.
—
Grace comes to with grinding pain she remembers from less than a year ago. She wants to sit up, to push.
“You can now,” the doctor says.
She braces her legs and arms, and with a nurse lifting her torso from behind, pushes blindly, going with the pain, pushing, pushing, pushing.
