The Stars Are Fire

by Anita Shreve

For the second time, a mask is clamped over her nose and mouth.

  —

  She dreams the ocean has overtaken her.

  She dreams she is fumbling beneath the skirts of her nightgown, searching for her children.

  She wakes to an image of fresh blood on a blanket.

  Nooooooo, she cries silently.

  —

  A doctor stands at the door. Grace wills him not to enter the room. To enter the room is to deliver information she doesn’t want, information she already knows.

  “I’m sorry,” says the doctor as he stands at her bedside. “The child was born dead.”

  Her eyes fill, even though it’s not yet sadness that overcomes her. She’s stunned.

  “It was a boy,” the doctor says. “He never drew breath.”

  She closes her eyes and nods.

  “The woman caring for your son and daughter stopped by to give you her address and to tell you that both are fine.”

  The doctor doesn’t offer Grace a chance to see the thing that she expelled, which only confirms her understanding of the event.

  “You need to rest away from the mothers, for at least a week. You nearly died that night on the beach.”

  She wants to say, No, I didn’t. Instead, she asks about her husband.

  “I haven’t seen a patient by that name. I’ll check our records.”

  —

  Alone, Grace turns her back to the door, rolls herself into a fetal position, and cries for her dead baby, a son. He would have been such a little thing, and she would have loved him to death. To death. She tries to speak to him, to tell him how sorry she is, but she can’t find a way to envision a being to talk to.

  And what will Gene say when he hears? Will he blame Grace, castigate her? She would prefer that to what she guesses will be his reaction. Silence. Perhaps a word. Maybe two words.

  —

  She imagines that Gene made his way back to Hunts Beach, to the cinders that cover the village acreage. Were any houses saved? Is there no one to tell Gene where his wife is? Will he have somehow found his children?

  An icy thought slices through her. It’s not that he might be dead; no, it’s that he might have walked away from his family. He might have seen the fire as an excellent portal to another life. A life in which he would never have to talk to his wife, in which he would never again have to go home.

  —

  Grace’s shoulders, back, and arms hurt. Her pelvis is heavy and sore. Her legs have needles in them. Having rolled into a fetal position, she thinks she might have to stay that way for days. Curving into herself is bearable. Sitting up is not.

  When did she give birth? This morning? Last night? When was she lying on the beach, her legs in the ocean? Has she lost a day? Maybe, as she burrowed into the sand, the fetus wanted to go back to the sea, to squiggle through her legs and swim away, knowing it could never be born.

  —

  She will not have another baby. She will not make love again. Her womb will never heal from the injury she has done it.

  —

  When Grace thinks about her children, she feels calm: A kind woman said she would take care of them. Grace must send someone to the address that awaits her at the front desk to make sure the children are all right. Perhaps the woman will bring Claire and Tom to the window so that Grace can look down at them and wave.

  How easy it is in this white cubicle, the lights dimmed. Has the fire burned itself out yet?

  She sleeps a deep sleep with no dreams.

  —

  Grace is wakened by a nurse who wants to check the bleeding, take her temperature, listen to her heart. The nurse is abrupt in her commands, a little rough with Grace’s body. Does she blame Grace for her current situation, or is this a mannerism left over from the war? The nurse makes Dr. Franklin, by comparison, seem like a lamb.

  A lamb. A lamb on the cover of a children’s book. Gone.

  The entire contents of Grace’s house, gone. Even the papers and the children’s clothes. Transformed into ashes.

  Will an insurance company honor a policy if the insured has no way to prove he or she was insured? She can’t remember the name of the company or the man who sold the policy to them. Gene will know. But, then again, where’s Gene?

  —

  Another, younger, nurse appears with a tray of food. A ham sandwich and a bowl of rice pudding suggests lunch.

  “How long have I been here?” Grace asks the younger nurse.

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Holland. But I can check. I just came on shift.”

  “That’s fine. What’s your name?”

  “Julie.”

  Julie has short blond hair under a smart cap, a white apron over a light blue dress.

  “You’re a volunteer?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old are you?” Grace asks. She slips a spoonful of the rice pudding into her mouth. She might just manage to get this down. She can’t even look at the sandwich.

  “Seventeen.”

  “You’ve graduated from high school?”

  “I’m about to be a senior.”

  Julie hovers respectfully at a distance, her hands clasped in front of her.

  “This is a good thing that you’re doing,” Grace says.

  “I had to help, didn’t I? It’s chaos out there because of the fires.”

  “Do you have access to hospital records?” Grace asks.

  “I can ask someone who does.”

  “I don’t know where my husband is or my mother or my closest friend. I was rescued off the beach with my two children.”

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Everyone knows.”

  Grace is surprised. “I need information about Eugene Holland, Marjorie Tate, Rosie MacFarland, or her husband, Tim. Don’t you need to write this down?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I’d be grateful for any news. Also, there’s an address at the front desk for me. It’s where my children are. Could you bring me that address?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry about your baby.”

  Grace nods. An awkward silence follows. “You can go now, if you like. I don’t want you to forget those names.”

  “I’m to stay here to make sure you finish your lunch.”

  Grace examines the tray. “If I eat half the sandwich, will that be all right?”

  The girl smiles.

  —

  The sandwich half eaten and taken away, the rough nurse reappears to bind Grace’s breasts, a procedure Grace didn’t think would be necessary since the infant died too soon. But she is reminded of how full her breasts are when the nurse wraps her with a nearly sadistic efficiency.

  “I can’t breathe,” Grace says.

  “You can breathe,” snaps the nurse, as if Grace had been whining.

  —

  In her tight white shroud, Grace is drawn down into a pool of grief. Her body mourns as well as her mind. For the lost baby, for her missing husband, for her unmarriage. How can she possibly bring up Claire and Tom without a father? Would Gene have burned to death with unbearable pain, or would he have succumbed to smoke? Is it possible that he somehow survived?

  —

  For hours, Grace is left to contemplate a man on a cross on the wall opposite, a particularly lurid depiction of suffering. Why would a member of a medical staff put a woman in a room with such a grim reminder of death? The placement of the object is dictatorial, suggesting that the patient ought to pray to ease her sorrow, or to realize worse things have happened to countless others, or to contemplate the story that came after the cross, the one about an afterlife, a door that closed to Grace when reason overtook her childlike fantasies.

  Is she meant to repent? For lasciviousness in the spring? For the challenge to her husband?

  She wonders if she ought to ask to have the gruesome object removed.

  —

  On Grace’s third day of rest, the rough nurse barges into her room with the news that the bed is needed
in the emergency room for a husband and wife with serious burns.

  Two people with burns in a single bed?

  Grace stands at once, but her womb threatens to fall out of her body. She bends to keep it with her, but it’s a sensual illusion.

  “You need to squeeze your honeypot tight from inside,” says the nurse, appearing to demonstrate what might be a tightening of the vagina, but looks more like a woman desperate for a pee.

  Grace can only nod.

  “But quick now, get your clothes on. You’re going home.”

  “I have no home, and I haven’t any clothes.”

  “No clothes, really?” the nurse asks, not at all concerned by the disclosure of no home to live in. Who has a house anymore? “All right. Change your pad. Get yourself cleaned up. You’ve had no fever, no infection. I’ll be right back with clothes.”

  —

  The man with the pickup truck is waiting for her when she emerges into sunlight. The young volunteer has called him on her behalf. He steps around and takes her arm. “My wife and I send our deepest sympathies,” he says in the way of a man who has never learned any other words to express the inexpressible. “I’m a little afraid to put you in the truck again…” He trails off, acknowledging that it was there that the baby died.

  “I’m sorry,” Grace says, “I’m not sure I know your name.”

  “Matthew,” he says. “My wife is Joan.”

  “And I’m Grace.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you live?” she asks.

  “Cape Porpoise.”

  “When the fire got close,” she says, “we thought of escaping to Cape Porpoise.”

  “Good thing you didn’t. The fire did a lot of damage. We were saved only because my son devised a way to suction water from the sea to the house. It worked. The fire passed us over.”

  Grace studies Matthew. He doesn’t look old enough to have a grown son. “Smart young man,” she says.

  Matthew smiles. “He’s eleven.”

  Grace laughs. “Brilliant boy.”

  “Well, you know what they’re like. A genius one minute, a moron the next.”

  “I don’t yet, but I expect I will someday.”

  “My wife says your children are super. She’s been missing the little ones. She said to tell you straightaway that you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

  —

  Matthew and Grace drive through the residue of hell, everything blackened, the trees dark jagged shapes, a gas station exploded, the road itself charred. Shells of automobiles sit at angles to the road, and Grace hopes that the passengers were able to flee ahead of the fire. They pass a lump of metal, an object that might once have been a black Ford, a vehicle to which Grace refuses to assign meaning.

  They turn down a winding road that runs through what was once forest. They pass a burned barn, a chimney to mark the spot where the farmhouse stood. Grace notes places where the fire crowned, leaping from treetop to treetop, singeing the upper branches, but leaving the trunks and the ground untouched. A lone house with wash on the line shocks Grace, not only for its presence amid so much devastation, but for the uselessness of a wet wash that will only trap the cinder dust from the mild breeze. By suppertime, the wash will be gray.

  But to have a house, to have running water, to have sheets…

  —

  Grace has on a nurse’s uniform with a woolen cape to keep her warm, white nurse’s shoes that pinch. She hasn’t a dime to her name.

  She’s aware of coves that lead to the ocean. Matthew turns at one and travels along a dirt road. He stops the car at the only house standing, a shingled cape, the land behind it then dropping off to dark blue tidal water that moves in to fill the cove twice a day.

  Before she is out of the truck, Claire runs to greet her. Since Grace can’t pick her up, she kneels and hugs her daughter with so much force that Claire struggles to get away. But then the girl is back for more, tumbling onto her mother. Grace can hear Matthew chuckling. A screened door slams. When she glances up, she sees Joan, Matthew’s wife, holding Tom. Matthew helps Grace stand, and with Claire clinging to her leg, she takes her son from the woman. She wants to smell her boy, to make sure he hasn’t lost his baby scent. He burbles, a grin across his face. When he starts to kick his feet in happiness, Grace gives him to the woman who has cared for him.

  “I can never thank you enough,” Grace says.

  “They’ve been a joy to have.”

  With her prematurely gray hair and wide nose, her dress tight at the waist and at the bust, Joan is not beautiful; but her smile is so warm that she seems beautiful to Grace and, she imagines, to Matthew, who beams at her.

  “I’m just fixing dinner,” Joan says.

  She doesn’t mention the lost baby. Good, Grace thinks. Here I can pretend to have moved on until I actually do move on. Will I be able to move on?

  Inside the front door is a boy who says, “Hello, I’m Roger. I know you’re Mrs. Holland.”

  “Hello, Roger. I’m sorry you had to share your house with my children.”

  “Oh, they’re okay. Tom isn’t up to much, but I’m teaching Claire math.”

  Grace laughs. “That can’t be very rewarding.”

  “It’s all right. She’s a little slow.”

  Roger has on a red plaid shirt and dungarees. She can see soot marks on his knees. He has left his shoes by the door, where there are three other pairs. Grace sits in a chair and takes hers off.

  “I spend all day cleaning,” Joan says, “but I can’t keep the ash out of the house. We do our best, but it’s going to take a snowfall to settle the black on the ground.”

  Grace glances at the living room, where the finest lace of dark dust permeates.

  “Eventually, I’ll get it all,” Joan says, putting on an apron. “I swing wet towels around all day.”

  In the entrance to the kitchen, Joan has set up a playpen and a crib. Tom raises his hands in the air, a signal for his mother to pick him up. Matthew moves a chair next to the crib so that Grace can touch her son through and over the bars.

  “Mom, look!” says Claire. Grace watches in amazement as her daughter folds and then sets a napkin beside each plate on the kitchen table. Her children look months older than they did four days ago.

  —

  On the walls, pretty wallpaper. Bright oilcloth on the table. Well-ironed yellow-checked curtains at the windows. All around them is black. Black trees, black underbrush, black ruins of houses. The air they breathe is full of black. On the banks of the cove lie random burned branches and boards, the flotsam and jetsam of a hundred destroyed houses.

  They sit to supper, Claire on a wooden booster seat.

  “The Methodist church at Hunts Beach didn’t burn,” Matthew informs Grace. “It’s being used as a shelter now. It’s a center for information. I’m not suggesting you stay there, but I am saying you might want to have a look at their bulletin board. You might be able to find your friends.”

  He doesn’t say husband. He doesn’t say family.

  “I put your name and address up on it a couple of days ago,” he adds.

  “We don’t have a telephone or a post office though,” Joan points out. “It could take a while for a message to get to us.”

  No one has tried to find me, Grace thinks. “I’d like to go there tomorrow,” she says. “Can you take me?”

  “I sure can,” says Matthew.

  “I don’t have any money,” Grace adds. “I can’t pay you.”

  “Good Lord,” scolds Joan. “Don’t you even think of paying. We’re just glad we have a roof over our heads we can share with others.”

  “And food in the cupboards. Hope you don’t mind green beans and peaches. I thought my wife a fool for putting up so many beans. But now I think she’s pretty smart.”

  “And lobster,” Roger pipes up. “My dad can pull more pots than any man.”

  “Now, now,” Matthew mumbles.

  “You’re a lobsterman,” sa
ys Grace.

  “That I am.”

  “But you didn’t go out today.”

  “Matter of fact, I did. When I got home, I got a call from the hospital. They said you were going home, so I waited with my truck.”

  Grace, overwhelmed by kindness, can’t speak.

  —

  Grace and her children have the guest room with two cribs. Grace guesses that either Joan or Matthew has borrowed at least one. Joan has apparently been collecting clothes for Claire and Tom and has for Grace an entire suit of clothing that looks to have been made before the war: a blue tweed skirt and matching jacket, a nylon blouse, a slip and a new package of underwear. How did Joan get her hands on underwear? Grace decides to sleep in the nurse’s uniform. In the morning, she’ll put on the new clothes, overdressed for breakfast.

  —

  “Don’t you look smart!” Joan exclaims when Grace and her children enter the kitchen. “It fits you perfectly.”

  “Thank you,” says Grace.

  “My wedding suit,” Joan explains as she scrambles eggs with a fork.

  Grace glances at the fabric, touches the skirt with her hands. “You can’t give me this,” she says, embarrassed. “It’s a treasure to you.”

  “Truth is, I was busting out of it when I got married. Never had it on since. But now I’ve found a use for it. Can’t be sentimental about clothes when others need them.”

  “I’ll pay you back someday.”

  “Don’t be thinking about that. Get some eggs into you. You’ve got a tough day ahead.”

  If she had had a baby, Grace thinks, she would now be lying in the maternity ward for the better part of two weeks while she healed. The baby would be brought to her three times a day for bottle feedings. When she gave birth to Tom, she was offered the option of going home but leaving Tom in the hospital for thirty days, a dollar a day. “Give you a rest and get the little one fattened up,” the nurse had said.

  But to give birth and go home empty-handed had upset Grace. What was the point?

  —

  “I’m a fairly good seamstress,” Grace announces. “I just need a mill store with remnants. I can work up a dress in no time if you have a machine.”

  “I’ll see if Matt, when he gets home, can go into Biddeford with you on your way to or from the church.”

  “I have to find a way to make money,” Grace says.