CHAPTER ONE
I tuck my hair behind my ears,
bend down over my drawing board and start erasing the wolf’s
eyes one more time. Still trying to get them right after three
days of getting them wrong, trying to make them wise instead
of aloof, fierce instead of savage…because you can’t
expect a person to buy a wolf pendant with an icy cold stare,
one that looks as if it could turn around any second and give
you a good bite.
Across the hall, Myrna’s
radio starts throwing up her favorite talk show. She does it
on purpose ever since a few of us threatened to give her radio
a hysterectomy if she didn’t start using earphones. She
still makes us listen to a good three minutes before she plugs
in though, the worst three. When the host is going on and on
about how wonderful he is, tossing names around, and just generally
making you want to barf.
I stare at the wolf and it hits
me that maybe it’s not the eyes, maybe it’s the mouth
that needs gentling, and I soften one corner with the tip of
my finger, watch him move down a good notch from man-killer.
“Yesss,” I say, and
start erasing a little more. But I could swear all of a sudden
it’s the paper moving under my eraser instead of the other
way around. Then there’s a sound like a 747 taking off
right above my head and everything in the room…bucks.
For lack of anything else, I grab
onto the drawing board and watch my pencil holder tip over and
disappear along with the toothpick Santa perched next to it.
The award I got from the Jewelry Designers of America flips
off the wall, my coffee mug goes sideways and smashes on the
floor, and then all the silver bulbs on the little fake tree
by the window explode one by one.
When it’s over, I can hear
my heart beating…boom boom boom…and aside from that,
just absolute silence. No whoosh from the air conditioner, no
phones ringing, Myrna’s radio gone quiet. And all the lights
out so there’s nothing but a thin shaft of sunshine coming
through the one tiny window, silver dust motes swirling through
it like crazy as though the air itself has just been given a
gigantic shake.
Across the hall someone sobs,
and the silence starts to fill up with voices. I unstick my
fingers from the edge of my drawing board and stand up.
“You okay, Amanda?”
It’s Stan. He’s in my
doorway, holding on to the sides of the doorjamb as if he needs
help standing up. Stan designs the collector plates and his
office is right next to mine, though we’ve never been exactly
chummy. Stan’s plates are considered our low-brow line,
while my jewelry gets the high-end treatment and Stan usually
has a chip on his shoulder about that. But the fact he’s
here, asking if I’m okay makes me want to hug him.
I take a step toward the door.
“What was that?”
His silhouette shrugs against
the dull red glow of the emergency lights behind him. “Felt
like a goddamn earthquake. But whatever the hell it was, the
tenth floor’s not the place to try and figure it out.”
And then he’s gone.
Earthquake? Here? And by the time
I get myself into the hall and push into the stream of people
pouring out of doorways, I can’t tell if the building’s
shaking again or if it’s just me.
I get as far as the elevators
and then there’s a pile-up all the way back from the stairs.
“Stop pushing,” someone
yells, “keep calm, for christ’s sake. No one wants
to get trampled.”
No, no one does. But at the same
time we want out. Someone pushes me sideways. Someone else pushes
me forward. My forehead slams into Ben Bean’s shoulder
blade. “Hey,” he says, and I start to feel pressed,
start to have that feeling I get when the lake water goes icy
cold and I know I’m out over the deep middle, the part
they call bottomless. Except I can swim out of that. In seconds
I can swim back to warm, safe waters.
I close my eyes, wanting more
than anything for it to be yesterday. A long, slow, take-it-for-granted
Sunday at the end of a long, eat-too-much Thanksgiving weekend.
Me lying warm under the sun on the old Indian blanket we keep
in the back of the van, staring up at a perfectly clear blue
sky above the Flats, watching the Cessna make one more lazy
circle, seeing Gary’s silhouette when he jumps, his chute
opening like a giant red and yellow flower.
I’d even welcome that little
hitch I get between my ribs that makes it hard to breathe until
he’s landed and comes walking toward me, grinning, pulling
his chute into a ball.
Gary.
Just when we’re getting ready
to start over again and do it right this time. I don’t
want ten stories of concrete falling in on me now. It isn’t
fair. Not now. “Please,” I say under my breath, “not
now.”
A woman wearing a white blouse
bright with blood wanders out of the corridor that connects
the back of the building, where we are, to the front. She looks
around, her eyes wide and starey, and then her legs buckle and
two men at the edge of the crush grab her.
“Jesus.” That’s
a voice I know, and I turn around as much as I can. Milo and
I look at each other. Milo’s in the research department.
He helps me find the primitive designs everybody’s so crazy
about these days.
Then more people come spilling
out of the corridor, some of them bloody, all of them in a kind
of daze, and everybody in line moves forward a couple of inches,
as though we have the right of way and can’t afford to
let anyone in who’ll stop our progress and damage our own
chances of survival.
I move right along with them,
until a woman trying to force her way in starts crying, which
pops me out of whatever terror trance I’m in, and the next
time the crowd moves forward, I hang back as best I can, grab
her sleeve and pull her in beside me.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She stares at me, her eyes pink
and wet. And then I see the slash of blood just above her temple.
“Are people hurt over there?”
That’s Milo.
This time she nods, and I glance
back at Milo who pushes sideways out of the crowd. And maybe
it’s the fact I’ve come to trust his instincts about
whether this is the season for ancient African tokens instead
of Chinese water lilies, but I follow him without even thinking
about it.
The air gets warmer the further
we go along the corridor, thicker and grittier, so you can feel
it on your tongue and teeth, and the people going past us in
the other direction make me think of the walking dead in a bad
Grade B movie.
“Is there a way out?”
A woman holding her arm, blood dripping off her fingers, stops
me. Her voice is perfectly calm.
“Just go to the end and follow
the people to the stairs,” I tell her.
“Thank you,” she says,
and all I can think is how ridiculous that little automatic
politeness seems.
The reason they’re all heading
for the rear of the building, it turns out, is that the door
to their stairwell won’t work, even though Milo practically
breaks his shoulder trying to get it open. And the reason for
the warm air is because all the windows are blown out.
It’s the people who had offices
over the street who are the worst, stumbling around holding
their heads, their faces. It’s the glass. It’s everywhere.
Crunching under your shoes, in people’s skin, their eyes,
their scalps.
I push half a dozen people toward
the hallway, tell them that’s the only way out. I find
a man and then a woman too dazed to know what to do and take
them all the way myself, where the last people still waiting
to enter the stairwell have only about five feet to go now.
But when I try to leave the dazed couple at the end of the line,
the woman, who outweighs me by a lot, won’t let go, and
I have to peel her fingers off my arm, get someone else to hold
on to her before I can get away.
“Check all the offices,”
Milo yells at me when he sees I’ve come back. He’s
bare from the waist up now, bright blood on his shoulder and
his arm, and for a second I think he’s been hurt, too,
but then I realize the cloth he’s wrapping around some
woman’s head is his shirt, and the blood on his shoulder
is her blood.
I check three of the front offices,
praying they’ll be empty, and they are. But then in the
fourth, stepping over a cracked picture of a red-headed girl
in pigtails, the air gets thin and the floor dips under me.
I yell for Milo.
The man lying across the desk
stares at me, his eyes wide open, and instantly I know two things…that
I have no idea what to do, and that even if I did, there’d
be nothing I could do for him.
“C’mon, Amanda, we’re
finished.” Milo grabs my arm as two firemen push past us.
“Rescue crew’s here. We did what we could.”
The stuck stairwell door is open
now, hanging by one hinge, and we head down. It takes forever.
When we finally get to the sidewalk,
it’s too hard to make sense of what I’m looking at.
That the gaping pile of broken concrete across the street is
the post office. What used to be a giant stone building with
porticos and lions out front. That a twisted mass of burning
metal off to our right is a car. That people lying on the sidewalk
and the street in pools of blood are probably dead.
I sniff the air trying to smell
gas, because that’s the only thing that makes sense right
now remembering the house that blew up on my street when I was
a kid. I remember thinking at first that my brother had pushed
me, and being angrier than I’d ever been in my life because
it was the hardest push I’d ever felt. I remember hitting
the back of my head on the asphalt and not being able to hear
for a second, and then seeing all the other kids down, too.
And when I sat up and looked at the house, the woman who lived
there was standing in her kitchen, just standing there, and
that was all that was left. The kitchen.
“You can’t stay here.”
It’s someone wearing a fluorescent yellow vest. “There’s
debris still coming down. Follow me.”
Like a reflex, I duck, glance
behind me and up. There are no windows on that side of the building
anymore, only empty rectangles with wedges of glass or strips
of swinging metal, and I see that man lying across his desk
and wonder if the shaft of metal sticking out of his forehead
hit him as he sat there or if he stood up into it, if the thing
that killed him was something he kept on his desk or something
he’d never set eyes on before, something that flew through
the window and into his brain due to nothing more than aching
bad luck.
“Sit down here and I’ll
take a look at you,” the guy in the yellow vest says when
we get to the corner, but Milo pulls away. “Where are you
hurt? Please, you need treatment.” But Milo only shakes
his head. “Looks like it’s your shoulder…here,
sit down and let me look at it.”
It’s the blood, it’s
smeared all over him, so of course he looks like he’s bleeding
even though he isn’t. But I know what he’s feeling,
pulling away like that, even though this person only wants to
help. It’s hit us both at the same time. He wants to get
away from here as much as I do. As if neither one of us wants
any of it to settle on us any more than it already has.
We head away, weaving through
the injured and the ambulances, through the lanes of snarled
traffic, through the people who stare at Milo and his bare bloody
chest, and it hits me that Mark was probably in there, the post
office clerk with the neat blonde beard whose line I usually
get in because he’s friendlier than the others, my age,
and because he used to flirt with me until I told him I needed
seventy-six stamps for my wedding invitations.
“No,” he said, “don’t
tell me you’re getting married.”
I nodded. “For the second
time. And to the same guy.”
He smiled at me. “Guess he’s
smarter than I would have given him credit for, then. I mean,
he let you go once but at least he’s realized what a mistake
he made.”
Milo and I stay together for another
half block, and then I cross the street at Archer and Seventh
when he keeps going straight ahead, because I want to get away
from Milo, too. I’m not sure where I’m going. I only
know I have to get someplace where the traffic’s flowing
and the air isn’t gritty with concrete dust. Where there
are no sirens wailing. Because maybe then I can get this taste
out of my mouth and the feel of that big woman’s fingers
off my arm. Maybe then I can stop thinking about Mark. And that
dead man staring up at me from his desk. Though even as I’m
thinking it, I already know for sure that it’s not going
to be anything you could call easy. |
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