Mattie’s room was three doors down, three easy doors, past the laundry room and the vacant nursery and around the corner, where she shared the largest upstairs room with a dozen stuffed animals, two hundred books, and a wooden locomotive large enough to ride.
Jacob crawled forward, the carpet scuffing his bare knees. The floor was warm, and he wondered how far the fire had spread, if it had already sucked the downstairs into its hungry, blue-white heart. The alarm hadn’t gone off. The smoke detector clung to the ceiling as a mute witness to disaster.
“Mattie.” He licked his lips, throat dry as a crack pipe. He called her name again, and the word sounded like the desperate bleat of a dying sheep.
He passed the laundry room, its door ajar, flames barely making entry there. Before bedtime, Renee had put her work clothes in the dryer, a nylon navy pants suit with a blouse that would look good with a briefcase. If the dryer had ignited, then the room would be gutted. So the fire’s origins were elsewhere.
Not that it mattered where the fire started. All that mattered was where it ended.
Jacob forced himself past the nursery, not daring to slow, because slowing would make him think of the empty crib inside, and he had no time.
The best antidote for failure was pain, and the heat shined his skin, pinked the back of his hands, stretched his forehead taut, and invaded his lungs. Still he crawled.
“Mattie!” he yelled, but the name may as well have been shouted against the swirling walls of a typhoon.
He reached the bend in the hall. The current of air was stronger now as the draft poured up the staircase. The flames leaped with new anger at the influx of oxygen. Jacob was dizzy from smoke inhalation and asphyxia, but he wouldn’t let himself drop to the floor. He couldn’t fail again.
All he had to do was reach Mattie’s room, break the window, and collect her in his arms, then jump two floors into the rhododendron hedge below.
He could do it, though the hairs on his arms were electrified wires and his eyeballs felt like boiled grapes.
Mattie’s door was just ahead, closed against the storm of fire. The great yellow-and-red beast chewed the ceiling, licked paint from the walls, clawed at the stair railing. A light fixture fell, shattering three feet to Jacob’s left. He crawled onward, ignoring the shards of glass gouging his hands and knees.
He would not fail.
The door beckoned, its rectangular shape lost in the shimmering haze. Jacob blinked moisture into his eyes and focused on the doorknob. Its brass reflected the conflagration, a kaleidoscope sunburst, acid lemon, nuclear tangerine.
Ten more feet.
He shoved himself forward, commanded his worthless limbs to work, embraced the pain. His lungs were two bricks of ash, his sinuses raw. In the crackling laughter of the surrounding blaze, Jacob heard soft whispers: Sleep, surrender, lie down and lose.
His eyes begged to be closed. The smoke churned and twisted in dark hurricanes. The golden maelstrom swelled with new passion as it reached the framing lumber behind the walls, tasted pine and found it sweet. The house shook in its first death throes. The smoke detector finally reached critical mass and emitted a piercing staccato of beeps.
The doorknob became Jacob’s grail. Failure’s gravity pressed upon him from all directions, as heavy as molten lead. He squirmed forward like some pathetic primitive creature crawling up from steamy slime. Sense of purpose had almost abandoned him, and his muscles screamed in rebellion as he kept moving.
The door.
Open it.
Because behind it lay everything.
Mattie.
Her birthday was February 3rd. Six weeks ago. He’d given her a 35mm camera and a bird book, Renee had given her a bicycle. The cake was chocolate, the nine candles arranged to form an M. The neighborhood kids sat around the table squealing while Mattie smiled amid the splendor of bright ribbons and wrapping paper. Princess for a day.
Princess for every day, in Jacob’s heart.
He couldn’t surrender.
The flames seemed to whisper his father’s voice: A Wells never fails.
He rose, his body wracked with fever, the flames whining and screaming, pieces of construction falling downstairs, large timbers and shelves and furniture. He could only imagine the chaos below them, heat like liquid, and wondered if the floor would collapse before he made it through Mattie’s door. Steam rose from the carpet, its threads curling and shriveling.
“Mommy . . .”
At first Jacob thought Mattie had called out, but the voice was muted, metallic.
The voice came again: “Wish me.”
Jacob had given Mattie a Rock Star Barbie for Christmas that recorded short sound bites. While the quality and tone were the same as pull-string dolls, the newer technology allowed the owner to record bits of song for playback. Mattie and Jacob had a blast playing silly messages back and forth, but she couldn’t know about “Wish me.” The recording erupted into giggles, a perverted mirth that blended into the chaotic and crackling symphony of holocaust.
Broken toys. Nothing but broken toys.
He reached for the doorknob, patted it with his fingers. He knew that if he opened the door, the oxygen would create a backdraft. He wasn’t sure if the draft would blow inward or outward, or how much he’d endanger Mattie with the act.
“Mattie!” he shouted again, his voice lost in fire, becoming the fire, all one now, an angry, all-consuming, sky-eating roar. The detector was an electric hawk, shrieking overhead.
“Daddy?”
No recording. She was there, alive.
He cupped his blistered hands and yelled. “Move away from the door, honey.”
“Daddy?” Sobs surrounded the word, joined by tears that would evaporate before reaching the floor.
“Move back.” A sock lay by the door, somehow missed by Renee’s latest compulsive clean sweep. He rolled it over his fingers and grasped the knob. It was like sticking his hand in a forge, as if he were trying to meld his fingers into some sort of cold weapon.
The fire crowded behind him like a spectator, swelled, held its breath in waiting.
Jacob twisted the knob and pulled back, the gap in the door showed dark, then yellow and red and blue and white leaped through the opening like twisted and howling sheets of wet metal.
The flames lapped at Jacob, raced over his body, singed the hair on his arms and chest and groin. He fell backward against the hot gale while the fire kicked the door wide. The oxygen lifeblood of the fire pulsed forward in both directions and funneled toward the fuel of the hall. Jacob rolled over, heart heavy as a hearthstone as he crawled once more toward Mattie’s room.
She squatted at the foot of her bed in Winnie the Pooh pajamas, stuffed animals huddled around her for protection. Flames crept from the edges of the ceiling. The wallpaper border featuring Sesame Street characters fell away, showing the darkened faces of Big Bird, Elmo, and the Cookie Monster.
“Stay down, honey,” Jacob yelled, his breath a swarm of razors as it slashed his windpipe.
“Daddy,” she said, pleading, as if she were like the smoke detector and had been programmed for one terrible sound.
He forced himself to rise into a crouch and moved through the orange rectangle of the burning doorway. He could see her eyes now, so wide, so scared, eyes like Renee’s, and then fear for Renee gripped him, sluiced through his bloodstream like menthol, and he wondered why he had left his wife alone.
Because you’re not like him. Because you can’t fail.
He couldn’t fail. Not Jacob Daniel Wells, the man who had it all. Not bulletproof Jake, who could buy his luck and whose ladders led only upwards. Not the man with the Midas touch, who had gold at his fingertips and gold for guilt and gold now eating his house and flesh and family, taking back everything it had ever given.
No. It wasn’t taking Mattie. He wouldn’t let it.
He clawed toward her, blew the smoke aside, huffed and puffed like the wolf in Mattie’s bedtime story. Fire hissed at him, ou
traged by his defiance. Its insistent voice tickled the dry paper of his eardrums and filled his head: Surrender.
Only one of us can have everything, and it’s not you.
“No,” he shouted, reaching for Mattie. Because he saw her, all of her, the smoke parting as if the fire’s master wanted to play one final, cruel joke of revelation.
Her pajamas had melted to her skin. Her body quivered, cold and hot, her flesh shrink-wrapped to her bones. Her stuffed alligator had dissolved into a goo of synthetic fibers around her hand. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream. Except with her eyes.
And her eyes screamed plenty.
“Wish me,” they said.
He touched her, afraid to touch her, not knowing where she was least damaged. He was oblivious to the fire now, as if it were a Red Sea that had parted, a miracle that allowed him not escape but a single path for his eternal soul.
Then he lifted her, the window exploded from the heat and the stress of collapsed wood, the detector gave a last long wail of agony, the ceiling folded in, the fire stoked itself, the embers made their bed upon his back, the night pressed its black boot upon them both, and his last thought was that he’d forgotten to give Mattie a goodnight kiss when he’d tucked her in.
And he couldn’t now, because she had no lips.
CHAPTER TWO
This dream was one of darkness, set in a cool, timeless place, like the underwater bottom of a grotto.
Jacob found he didn’t need to breathe this time. Breathing had been a bother all along, an endless exercise in futility, air in and out toward no purpose. Suffocating was so much easier. Breathlessness almost seemed a natural state.
Far above, like a distant moon over a thick sky, was a soft circle of light. Its gravity disturbed his peace, a slight but insistent pull that mirrored the moon’s effect on ocean tides. He tried to fight, but his muscles urged him to surrender, to drift upward. His arms and legs floated effortlessly in the cold waters of the grotto, his lungs took their fill, his eyes stared at the hazy circle of light that grew ever larger.
As he ascended, the layers of dreams separated like a series of skins, peeled away until he was pink and naked and raw. And now the moon was brighter, the water warmer, the sky pressing closer. His lungs ached, the soothing liquid rushing out only to be replaced by jagged stones. The tug of gravity intensified, pulling him faster toward a surface of confusion.
Jacob wanted to scream, but the grotto ate his words. The swelling brightness of the moon corresponded to bright feelings in his fingers, sparks of ice, arctic static.
The moon grew whiter, took over the world, and he recognized the energy that now flowed through his body.
Pain.
He awoke to razors and needles and shards of glass and the dull crush of tons. For a panicked moment, he thought he was being cremated alive, that he’d been brought back to consciousness for one final torment before the deliverance of eternal slumber.
Then the pain lost its thousand sharp edges and became a giant cresting wave of agony, one whose amplitude rose ever higher. The wave turned into a scream that crashed with the echo of his daughter’s name.
Matilda Suzanne Aldridge Wells.
Matilda after Renee’s mother, a woman who had hated her own name. Suzanne because that was Jacob’s first choice, and they’d haggled about hyphenating Mattie’s last name. Aldridge-Wells. But Renee pointed out that she herself had taken the Wells name and the hyphen wouldn’t make sense unless she changed back to her maiden name. Or else Jake would have to take Renee’s name. In either case, the paperwork was too daunting: social security forms, credit cards, insurance policies, Jake’s business records, trappings of a modern American society where every person had a number and too many parents were making up confusing names for their children.
And Matilda became Mattie, though Jacob called her “Matilda” in the soft twilight of her room, in the space between bedtime stories and night-night kisses, or on those rare occasions when Mattie’s misbehavior ranked as a full-name offense. She was Matilda at both extremes of emotion, in deep anger and gentle, aching appreciation. And that was the name that crossed his lips now, as he plunged up through the surface and the moon exploded around him.
“What’s that?” came a foreign voice, probably the voice of that strange moon pushed by a dry wind.
“Matilda.” His own ears couldn’t recognize the sound that passed his lips.
“Don’t speak, Mr. Wells.”
Jacob tried to speak anyway, but felt the tube that lay on his tongue and snaked down his throat. He blinked into the bright lunar face but its haziness remained. Gauze lay across his eyes. He shivered in the white light, afraid of everything, wishing the grotto would suck him back down into its placid waters.
A gentle hand touched his arm and he yelped at the contact. A machine hissed in a rhythm that both mimicked and mocked life. It was breathing for him, sending oxygen into the tube, through his lungs and heart and bloodstream. Jacob tried to lift his head, but it felt impossibly heavy, a chunk of charred granite.
“Relax, Mr. Wells.”
The voice was soothing, distant. Jacob licked his lips around the tube. Through the gauze, he could make out the brown face, the white coat, the spotlight he’d mistaken for the moon.
“Thirsty,” Jacob said, having trouble with the sibilant due to the dryness of his mouth.
“You’ve got an IV,” the distant voice said. The voice was richly accented, West African or something equally exotic. “It may be a day or two before you can drink again.”
Jacob blinked against the gauze, his eyes stinging. After a moment of looking at the vague shapes of machinery and the tubes dangling around him, he closed his eyes. “Where am I?”
“Littlejohn Memorial.”
Hospital.
Kingsboro, North Carolina.
Where he’d once lived and probably still did.
So this wasn’t heaven, or even an antechamber to the land of the dead. Or perhaps it was. Maybe this was his punishment, a purgatory of pain and equipment, a life sentence for his failures.
“How long . . .?” Jacob wasn’t sure what he wanted to ask. How long he’d been dead? How long before he wasn’t dead anymore?
“You’ve been here thirty-six hours. You’re a very lucky man. Upper airway edema, second-degree burns over fifty percent of your body, a dislocated hip.” A hand touched Jacob’s arm again. “I’m Dr. Masutu.”
Jacob shivered, his flesh cold but his skin like that of a baked potato, rough and hot and dry. He flexed his fingers and they felt like water balloons. The doctor must have noticed the movement.
“You’re a little swollen at the moment. It’s typical for burn victims to gain twenty or thirty pounds due to fluid buildup. Your metabolism is in hyperactive mode right now, trying to heal your injuries.”
A memory sparked in Jacob’s head, but it was swept away by a yellow wave of pain. The wave rushed up the beaches of his soul, the foam tickled him, and then the pain receded. The pain reminded him of something, as if it were part of him and he should not be spared. His tongue was thick against the tube and he couldn’t feel his teeth.
“I’ve adjusted your morphine drip,” Dr. Masutu said. “Now that you’re awake, you’ll probably feel a little discomfort. Unfortunately, we have to go easy on the suppressants because your respiratory system is overtaxed.”
Doctors always used the word “discomfort” in place of “pain.”
“And extra antibiotics,” the doctor continued. “The burns will heal, but it’s a dangerous time for your body. Because your system is fighting so hard to grow new skin and replace your fluids, you’re vulnerable to infections. But we’re going to be just fine.”
Jacob felt himself sliding back into the languor of the grotto. Something the doctor had said, one word among that stream of syllables, caused him to open his eyes just before he succumbed to darkness.
Burns.
Burns meant heat.
Heat meant fire.
>
Fire meant that the other dream was not a dream, and the memory of flames eating the walls returned. The past built itself on blackened timbers, stacked like logs, nailed itself together into a wobbly house.
Fire. House.
And a name.
Then words meant nothing, because he was in the grotto again, its water soft against his skin. Cool darkness reclaimed him, and he welcomed it.
A familiar voice accompanied him on his next journey to the surface.
“Honey? Can you hear me?”
Jacob could hear Renee, but couldn’t respond. His tongue was like a sock, his mouth a leather shoe. He forced his eyes open and the spotlight stung them. The gauze had been removed. The corners of the room swam on the edges of his vision.
“Doctor, he opened his eyes.”
He sensed movement, and shadows fell across his face. His hands and feet were numb. His chest was cold, and for a moment he thought he was naked. Jacob rolled his eyes down far enough to see that a loose sheet covered his body. Or maybe it was a shroud.
“Welcome back, Mr. Wells,” came a voice that he dimly recognized. “It’s Dr. Masutu.”
Jacob’s lips parted, and he pushed his tongue out enough to feel the chapped skin around his mouth. His cheeks were coated with a cold gel. He tried to raise his arm and wipe it away, but the doctor caught his hand.
“Easy does it. You still have a drip in that arm.”
Jacob looked into the dark, featureless face of the man above him. Then he saw the person to the right of the doctor. The shape of the hair was familiar, the way it curled out at shoulder length. He tried to focus on her but his head throbbed, shattering his vision into tiny shards of meaningless images. He closed his eyes again.
“Relax, honey. Take it slow,” Renee said.
Take it slow. She’d whispered that the first time they’d made love, when Jacob and Renee were fellow sophomores at North Carolina State. Before Mattie and the other one. Before Joshua came back.
Jacob had taken it slow many times, but never as slow as he did now. Because gravity still pressed upon him, each machine-assisted breath brought embers of agony, and his limbs felt like alien parasites leeched to his torso. He tried to collect the pieces of himself, to reacquaint flesh with bone, to integrate his organs into a functioning cooperative. He gave up. The only connection between his many parts was a network of pain.
Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set) Page 29
