by Margo Catts
Alan looked back at me and narrowed his eyes, pulling on his mask. “How old is she again?” Alan asked.
“Five,” I whispered.
“Does she always do as she’s told?”
“Almost never.”
“Uh-huh.” He tugged the straps and gestured to Ramon, who stepped onto the rubble to reach the flame lantern to the ceiling and then slowly lowered it to the floor. The flame shrank, then went out. Extinguished. Dead.
“Why did the candle go out?” Kevin asked.
“Just stay back,” Alan said, stepping atop the pile and then over it into the dark.
“Why?” Kevin said, looking up at me.
I couldn’t make my mouth open, and only shook my head. I put my arm across Kevin’s chest and pulled us both back against the wall opposite the opening. Dom, also now with his mask on, stepped onto the rubble and watched as the light from Alan’s lamp faded.
Ramon knelt and relit the lantern. “It needs more air,” he said. Then he stood, raised it to the ceiling above us, lowered it to the floor, and swept it from side to side. “See? Good out here. Feel the air moving? Bad air is heavier. Looks like there’s some caught back in that passage and behind the pile.”
He sounded so casual. He might as well have been doing a demonstration in an elementary school classroom on a sunny spring afternoon. But the only thing in my mind was that Sarah didn’t have a lantern to tell her where she could breathe. Sarah, lost in the dark, could’ve gone anywhere. Sarah, who loved dresses that spin and bows on her stuffed animals. Sarah, lost in the dark.
I squeezed my eyes tight, pressing back against the part of me that wanted to scream, to cry, to run, to do anything but wait for a limp little body to appear in the opening.
Perhaps it was only a minute before the passage started to brighten again. Maybe more. Maybe less. Then Alan was there. Empty-handed, exactly as he had gone in.
“Okay,” he said as he pulled off his mask. “Dead end. Let’s assume she didn’t stay wherever Kevin left her. Have an eye out for anything else she might mistake for the slide she took coming in.”
He took a knee in front of Kevin. “Son, do you remember anything about what you were doing before you found the handle? Did you keep your hand on the wall? Do you remember different tunnels or turning one way or another?”
He twisted to look up at me and I could see tears start to pool against the rims of his eyes. With the blanket wrapped around his shoulders he looked like a little boy pretending to be Superman, struggling now under the weight of the importance of his answer. He turned back to Alan.
“I’m sorry—” he said, gulping back the end of the word. “I’m sorry.” He ran the backs of his hands under his eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
“You’re doing great. Finding that handle was great. Now do you remember going across a dip like that?” He turned and pointed, his headlamp illuminating the mouth of another passage, a shallow trench across the opening.
“I—I don’t think so.”
“Okay, that’s good. We’ll go ahead, then.”
“But I don’t know!”
“You’d remember. You would’ve stumbled. I’ll check for tracks, but I think you’re right, and we need to meet the others. We’ll send a team back if we need to.”
“Okay.”
A quick check seemed to satisfy Alan that there were indeed no tracks down the other passage, so with a notation on the map we started forward again. We bent around a corner, then found a rubble-filled shaft that Kevin thought he might remember. One more curve, and then I caught my breath. Another team with headlamps was already there, but there was also light falling from above. Blessed light. A faint, foggy waterfall of light rippling down a delta of rocks and loose dirt, widening and merging with the lights from the headlamps at the bottom.
Alan gave a nod to the others, who nodded and grunted greetings in return as we came to the bottom of the slide. I looked up. The hole looked so small at the top, twenty or twenty-five feet away, the slope so steep. A scatter of rocks around my feet. Had they come cascading down when Sarah slid in? Where, where was she now?
Alan squatted in front of Kevin. “Okay, Kevin. This is where you came in. You went down that way when you headed out, right?” He tipped his head in the direction from which we’d just come.
But Kevin looked anxious and torn. He stood with his back to the slide and glanced to the left and then the right. Left again. Right again.
“I—I think I went that way.” He pointed away from us.
He couldn’t be right. How would we have found him if he’d gone that way?
“Okay,” Alan said.
“What?” I blurted.
“We haven’t found her yet this way, have we? I think he’s right.” He stood and turned to the other men. They consulted for a moment over the maps, and then the other team left the way we’d come, directed to the intersection we’d passed, which according to the map led to another entire web of passages. We went the opposite direction, Kevin and then me again right behind Alan.
We rounded a curve, then hit a split. Radio wire showed where the last group had been, and we turned away from it. Kevin walked with his hand along the left wall, blanket around his shoulders, head down, as if intent on finding his way by feel.
“I think this is right,” he announced suddenly.
“Good. Keep your eyes open.”
More walking. A dip. A widening. A dead-end cutout. More walking.
“Stop!” Kevin shouted. A delta of loose rocks and soil spread onto the tunnel floor, similar to the one at the place where they’d entered, with a dome of darkness above it. He twisted away from me and stumbled toward the incline.
“I told her to go back! I told her to go back!”
Alan lurched after him. “Stop!”
But Kevin had already started to scrabble up. This pile wasn’t as steep as the one that had brought him into the mine, and on this one he made progress.
“Sarah!”
I dove to follow him. “Don’t go in there!”
Alan pressed his gas mask to his face as he reached to grab Kevin with his other hand.
“Sarah!”
Alan got hold of the blanket, which came away in his hand, then snatched again at anything else he could grab. I was just behind him, a finger’s length away from Kevin’s heels as he kicked loose stones back at my face.
“No, Kevin!”
“Both of you! Get back!”
Alan caught hold of Kevin’s pants just as Leo’s arm caught me around the waist. It was before I reached the top of the pile and the opening, but not before my light caught a flash of yellow T-shirt and a pool of unruly blonde hair.
26
The trucking company dispatcher was able to reach Paul, who left his load at an obliging depot for someone else to deliver and drove through the night and day to get back, arriving early the next evening. Kevin and I had been dozing in Sarah’s hospital room, Kevin on the second bed, me pushed back in a recliner. Somehow we both sensed Paul’s presence, coming fully awake to find him standing backlit at the door, jaw darkened, eyes lost in shadow. He didn’t look at us—just stared at the heap of blankets in the other bed, the snarl of blonde hair, the twined plastic tubes. A steady beeping marked Sarah’s pulse.
“How is she?” he whispered, taking a few steps forward.
“She’s going to be fine,” I said. I got to my feet. Yes, she would be fine, but she was in the hospital. On my watch.
Kevin sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, but looked down at his shoes rather than at his father.
“They’re going to take her off the oxygen in the morning, and if everything stays okay through the day, she can go home,” I said.
Paul took another step. “I didn’t really hear anything after—after they said she was in the hospital. What—is it, exactly?”
“The place where the kids went in—it was steep. We think after she got lost that she felt something like it and tried
to go up. But it was just a dead end and there wasn’t enough oxygen. Or, too much carbon monoxide. I don’t know. She passed out.”
“She could’ve died, then.”
“Uh—” The answer stuck in my throat. “Yeah. Eventually.” Soon, was what the medic had said in the mine. Brain damage, he’d also said. But I would leave those words where they belonged, deep underground.
“Has she been awake at all?”
“Some.”
“Is she—” He took another step, then took his eyes away from his daughter to look at me. “Really … okay?”
So he’d already known what to fear. Had that fear been sitting beside him in the truck cab, hour after hour, driving back? “Yeah.” I nodded, then swallowed. “She’s herself. She’s scared to be alone and she wants to go home, but she’s the same. Everything’s going to be fine.”
A gust of breath escaped him, and his shoulders sagged, as if that air alone had kept him inflated and upright, and now he was in danger of collapsing.
“Sit with her. I should go get something to eat.”
“I—I don’t want to wake her up.”
“It’s okay. She’s been sleeping a lot. She’ll want to see you.”
I reached for my purse. The sooner I left the better. His child had almost died under my care. Maybe I could put off the moment when I’d have to accept his blame by slipping away right now. But between me and the bag stood Kevin, eyes on me, mutely pleading. I glanced at Paul, whose eyes were caught in a tunnel that shut out everything but Sarah. I was in no position to judge but that didn’t prevent a painful stab that had nothing to do with my own dread. Kevin had suffered unimaginably, probably more than Sarah, though he lacked the hospital bracelet to prove it.
“You want to get a milk shake?” I asked.
He nodded. Paul said nothing. I left, Kevin trailing, and eased the door shut behind us. A pair of nurses murmured outside the next door. Faint beeping came from behind another. We pushed separately against the blue double doors that marked the edge of the pediatric wing. The silence between us ached.
“Your dad loves you,” I finally said as the doors swung shut behind us. Kevin, eyes on his shoes, shrugged. They were the same shoes I’d seen in the mine, still blackened and scraped. “But I’m sure as soon as he heard Sarah was in the hospital, that’s all he’s been thinking about.”
“It’s okay,” he said as we turned a corner and started down a different hallway toward the cafeteria.
I’d offered a platitude and gotten another in return. I wanted—I needed him to understand me. “No, it’s not okay,” I said, “but he’s tired and worried and he’s been scared about you guys for a long time. He could see you were all right, but Sarah still looks pretty bad with the tubes and all.”
“It’s okay.” Another shrug. His shoes squeaked against the tile. “He oughta be mad.”
“Of course, but that’s my problem, not yours.”
“You can’t stop him being mad at me.”
“What?” I turned on my heel and caught Kevin by the shoulders. “Mad at you?”
The sleep-twisted cowlick on top of his head faced me as he spoke to his shoes. “I broke the rules. It’s my fault. He’s supposed to be mad.”
“What’s your fault? I was in charge. And those boys left you! I will never forgive them!”
“Everybody knows you’re not supposed to go in mines! I’m in a lot of trouble!”
My breath caught in my chest and my throat and against the backs of my eyes. I dropped to my knees and shook his shoulders, surprising myself as much as him. “Kevin! Look at me! Your dad is not mad at you! You were unbelievably brave. You were trying to save your sister, and you did. You’re the one who found her! You went in that mine because you’re eleven years old. Kids everywhere do things like that. But the ones who left—they’re the ones who are in trouble. This was not your fault! Do you hear me? It was not your fault. You saved her!”
He faced me but looked into space somewhere beyond my shoulder. The responsible child. His guilt would not be banished so easily.
“Come on,” I said, not waiting for him to tell me something he didn’t believe but thought I wanted to hear. I stood and turned him back down the hallway. “We’re getting chocolate this time.”
*
Paul gave no hint of any anger toward me, and in fact was anxious for me to stay nearby, but he still hadn’t said anything of consequence to Kevin before Sarah left the hospital the next afternoon. He’d put an arm around his son’s shoulders as they stood over Sarah’s sleeping form that night and squeezed him hard against his side. Whether that was the firmness of unshaken love or inexpressible anger I couldn’t tell. And neither could Kevin, apparently, who continued to lurk around the margins of the room, keeping as much distance as possible between himself and his father, like a dog afraid of being kicked. Fear of punishment more terrible than punishment itself.
I hoped Sarah would settle back down when she got home. Even with her father there, I’d been unable to leave the hospital the night before. She would get panicky if she woke and I didn’t appear quickly enough, so around ten a nurse surreptitiously waved me into the unoccupied room next door. Sarah was equally desperate for Kevin to be there every time she opened her eyes, but he could get along dozing in the chair while his father took the other bed.
I wanted to go home, wherever that was. Away from need and terror and grief and feeling responsible for carrying all of it. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t look Sarah in the eyes and tell her that she was fine, that her dad was here now, that I would see her in the morning, and then watch her face crumple into tears.
So we left the hospital together, and I followed Paul’s truck through town and up their street, Kevin staring woodenly out the windshield beside me. It wasn’t until the truck had turned into the drive that I noticed the balloons and banner hung over the door—sheets of paper taped together and lettered in red marker. Poppy, surely. WELCOME HOME SARAH AND KEVIN, it said. And Kevin. Bless her. I stopped in front of the house and turned off the ignition.
“You see that, Kevin?” I said, pointing. “You two are famous.”
He glanced at the door, and then I saw him look over his shoulder to his dad’s truck, where Paul was just going around the tailgate to get to Sarah’s side.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“People are glad you’re okay. Both of you. Everyone is.”
He didn’t answer. Just opened the door, got out, and slammed it. I reached across to get my purse from the floor and saw the paper bag he’d used for his dirty clothes from the mine. He’d folded and crushed and crumpled it into a dense brown mass and wedged it as far under the seat as it would go.
I left it there and got out of the car, then opened the back door to get out some of the flowers and stuffed animals I’d brought from the hospital. We hadn’t talked about any plans for the night, or even acknowledged Sarah’s need to have me close. I had no idea what Paul might be assuming. My one idea was to get Sarah to introduce her new stuffed animals to the old ones, using them to reconnect her to Buffers, then escape to Tuah’s without any dramatics. I’d already pictured a long bath, the guest room bed, and solitude.
“Lena? You coming?” Sarah stood at the door, holding it open for me.
“I’ll be right there, honey.”
By the time I got into the house, Paul was flipping through mail at the kitchen counter, and Kevin had already disappeared. I saw the closed bathroom door as I followed Sarah into her room.
“Well, here you go,” I said, setting a bouquet of daisies on top of her bookshelf. “Your same room exactly the way you left it. Bet you wished you’d picked up your clothes.”
I might as well have not said anything.
“Buffers!” she cried, leaping onto the bed and landing on her knees. Lethargy, gone. Confusion, gone. Dizziness, apparently gone. Clearly, she was feeling better.
“Where do you want the new ones? I have the puppy and the bear and the pink kitt
en.”
“Right here,” she said, holding out her arms. She pulled the stuffed animals to her chest and buried her nose in the tops of their heads. “They smell like hospital,” she said.
“I guess so. That’ll go away. Why don’t you help them make some new friends?”
I spent the next few minutes fetching and rearranging as she directed. Eventually I heard the toilet flush, the water run, then the bathroom door open and bang against the tub. Steps down the hall to the next bedroom. A door closed. My heart twisted.
I wished Paul wasn’t here. That was it—more than I wanted to be alone, I wanted to be alone with the children. If Paul weren’t here, there wouldn’t be anyone holding the other end of that taut, vibrating cord that ran between Kevin and his father. I wanted to make pizza and let the children put anything on it they could find. Have ice cream and use chocolate syrup to make drawings on it and then laugh at them. I wanted to hear the bath running, and then the shower, comb out Sarah’s hair, pull the curtains and gather close together under the lamp and read The Black Stallion, experiencing Alec’s terrifying shipwreck and discovering how overcoming fear and suffering helped him grow up. Then maybe we could cry, and talk about how scared we each were, and say how glad we were to have one another.
I straightened and blinked the warmth away from my eyes. “Look,” I said. “You’ve got plenty to do here. I’m just going to run over to Poppy’s and thank her for making that nice sign.”
“I wanna come see the puppies!”
“No, you should stay here and get ready for dinner.” I was only saying whatever came to mind. I had no idea what Paul had thought about for dinner. “You can see them tomorrow. It’s been a long day.”
“No! I wanna go with you! I wanna see the puppies!”
“Shh, now. Don’t yell.”
“What’s going on?” Paul’s head and shoulders appeared around the edge of the door.
“I just thought I’d go say thank you to Poppy while Sarah finished getting settled here.”
