Pretty Girl Thirteen (30 page)

My heart squeezed bitterness. How could she do this to me?

And then I had the terrible thought—I’d done it to her first, hadn’t I?

Stupid. Stupid to think I could keep such a powerful part of me locked away once she’d tasted freedom, once she’d seen Sammy, once Brogan had confirmed that the sturdy toddler was her stolen baby.

I added another element to my pacing. One more step and I could crash hard into the wall at either side. The jolting kept me mad, gave me energy. I needed energy. The chair looked awfully tempting.

I could sink into it, and rock, and it would feel like no time passing. Nothing would ever change in this twilight dark room. I could rock, and mourn my life, and wait. I would become the lonely one. And she would become the Angie.

I took a step toward the chair. That wouldn’t be so awful, would it? Just to rest for a moment?

It was so quiet in here, except for the imaginary sound of my footsteps, my unnecessary breathing. The air was still. The flame in the oil lamp was steady and low, unflickering.

It burned there like a metaphor for my Self, my consciousness. Alive but unchanging, unmoving.

I left the path I was wearing across the room and went to the corner, picked up the lamp. It was warm, as I expected it to be. A warm metaphor. Light in the darkness, heat in the cold, a tiny flame of hope. The human brain is so weird, finding symbols and meaning in everything. Here I was, trapped in a metaphor of a walled-off compartment in my brain, holding a metaphor of something that gave me a shred of hope. Why? Why hope?

A spark of inspiration, like the spark of a match, came to me.

I threw the lamp to the wood floor. It crashed into pieces, oil spilling everywhere, catching, lighting all around. I would burn my way out.

Flames rose up the walls, as I knew they would.

The dry pine siding caught like kindling.

Flames danced across the floor, as I expected them to.

Golden-red tongues flicked everywhere, hot and hungry.

I felt their heat, soaked in their campfire light, waiting for the walls to char and crumble.

But the walls held.

The fire crept closer to the center of the room. With a whoosh, the rocker itself went up in flames, consumed to ash in moments. A wall of fire danced, circled me now. The heat intensified.

I moved to step through, but a blast of hot smoke pushed me back. My sleeve caught fire. Just a metaphor, I told myself, but no—the cloth burned and fell away, then my skin was on fire, painful, black, blistering. I screamed and tried to thump it out against my body.

Stop, drop, roll. The safety mantra ran through my head. Useless! The floor was burning.

Flame licked up the legs of my jeans. The smell of burning cloth and hair and flesh was overwhelming. The pain was unbearable. This must be the hell Yuncle warned us about.

“Lonely One,” I screamed. “Unlock me! Save me!”

I ran through the flames to the door. Black pegs I hardly recognized as arms banged against it weakly. “Please! Hear me!”

Oh God. This is it. The air, too thick, too smoky to breathe. I closed my eyes to pray.

The door gave way. It swung open, and there she was. Lonely One, a wide and terrified look in her eyes. A large blanket bundle in her arms. She thrust it at me.

“Take him,” she screamed. “I can’t do it. I don’t know how.”

I reached for the bundle. It was heavy and crying. “Annee, Annee,” it sobbed.

With an electric jolt, my heart hammered again in my chest. I felt it. I heard it. A blast of real heat struck me across the face. My true body solidified around me. I clutched Sam tight with real hands.

Smoke billowed through the doorway.

“Hurry! Leave me!” Lonely One pushed past me toward the inferno in the cabin of our mind, groping through the smoke for her rocking chair.

I dragged her back by one arm, pulled against her protests with all my strength. “You can’t go back in. It’s all gone.”

Ceiling beams crumbled as I spoke. Sparks shot up from the ruined timbers. Lonely One struggled in my grip, willing herself to be destroyed with her refuge, her prison.

But I couldn’t let her. “Come with me. Sam needs you. And I need you. Now.”

With a cry of fear, she fell into me, pushing me through the doorway and into full control, full consciousness. I blindly reached behind me for her hand, but she was gone.

The world spun crazily, and the burning cabin dissolved, and the room was Sammy’s, and the hallway outside was a mass of flame.

Lonely One’s memories tumbled, gushed into my head. She was with Sammy, reading. She was entranced, captivated by his sweetness. The smell of wood smoke all around was so familiar, she didn’t realize what was happening until the vaulted ceiling in the living room came down on the flaming Christmas tree with a shattering crash. That thunderous
crack
finally alerted her. She opened the bedroom door into a fiery hell. The house, the Harrises’ house, was burning, roaring, falling around us.

Sammy twisted in my arms. We had to get out. Six feet from his door was the bathroom, my only hope if we were going to make it out alive. Sirens sounded from outside the house, far down the street. We couldn’t wait for them.

“Be brave, little guy,” I whispered in his ear. Tucking him back inside the blanket, wrapping one arm across my eyes and nose, I took a last gasp of air from the bedroom and sprinted through the flames to the closed bathroom door. The handle scorched my fingers. I slammed us inside and turned on the shower full blast. In seconds we were drenched from head to foot with icy-cold water. Sam howled with shock.

I pulled two bath towels under the stream, soaked them, and wrapped Sam into a wet cocoon. A hand towel wrapped my nose and mouth. His blanket draped my head and upper body like a shroud. Outside the door, something crashed. Good God. The whole roof was coming down.

I hated to leave the wet, tiled sanctuary, but we had to or else be crushed under flaming beams. Sam struggled and squirmed in his casing. I squeezed him tight and muttered soothing nonsense words through the towels, my face pressed against the hard bulge of his head. “We’re going for it,” I said. “Now!”

Searing the other hand, I wrenched open the door. I couldn’t see past the hall, but no matter. I knew the only way out was through the hall and out the front door. If the living room had gone already, so had the kitchen and garage.

The rest was a blur, running, feeling, burning, protecting Sam’s cocoon with my body as best I could, until tile was under my feet, the huge scalding brass handle of the front door in my hand, and then running out into the front and stopping, dropping, rolling the two of us on the front lawn.

A fireman swore loudly, and a heavy smothering blanket dropped on us, along with several bodies.

“They’re out,” I heard. With my last ounce of coherent thought, I dragged the smothering towels off Sammy’s face.

He glared at me, drew a huge breath, and hollered his annoyance. “No, Annee! No baff.”

Thank God.

The burning pain I’d been holding off swamped every nerve ending in my scorched skin. And then I really was out.

M
Y EYES CRACKED OPEN
. I
PEEKED FROM SIDE TO SIDE
. Lots of white, lots of equipment. I was in a hospital again.

I raised a hand to rub the grit out of my eyelashes and nearly bonked myself with the giant Q-tip my arm had become. Both arms. Bandaged to the elbows, hands swaddled in gauze. Seeing them, they suddenly itched like crazy. I banged them together and immediately realized what a stupid idea that was as a wave of pain rippled up the length of my arms.

A nurse appeared out of nowhere and held them gently apart. “Don’t do that, honey. There’s healing going on in there.”

“Where am I?” I asked, blinking away the tears.

“You’re in the burn unit at UCLA Medical Center. It’s Saturday morning. And I’m Marie, your nurse for the next twelve hours.”

Twelve hours? “How—how badly am I hurt?” Stupid question. I felt like a giant bandage.

“Your hands got the worst of it. Third-degree burns. Your legs escaped with second degree. No skin grafts needed.” She gave me one of those encouraging tight-lipped nurse smiles. “You’ll live to play the piano again.”

“Guitar,” I corrected. I shifted uncomfortably.

She adjusted my pillow and smoothed my hair under my head. “Given the rest of you, I’m not sure how you escaped with all your beautiful hair unsinged.”

“I ran out of the fire with a wet blan—oh my God.” It hit me like a two-by-four in the face. “Sammy. My … my child, where is he? Is he okay?” I stopped breathing while I waited for her answer.

Marie’s face twisted in confusion. “Your …? They said you were the babysitter.”

“I was. I am,” I quickly corrected. I wracked my mind, literally. Lonely One? Where are you? Why did I say
my child
?

“The little boy was perfect. Untouched. Somehow you got him out of that inferno before the bedroom wing collapsed, and you took all the damage.” She patted my shoulder. “You’re a very brave girl, from what I understand. A hero. The parents have been to see you while you slept. As have your own, of course.”

Of course. “Can I see them now? Mine, I mean?”

“I believe they’ll all be back up here in a few minutes. They all went off for coffee together. It’s been a long, long night for them.”

I closed my eyes, already exhausted from the short conversation. Marie smoothed the sheet under my chin and stroked my hair one more time. “That’s it,” she said. “Rest and recover.”

But with my eyes closed, I couldn’t sleep, could only wander the halls of my brain. I found them deserted. Where I had created the girls’ cabin, there was only a pile of imagined ash. So where had Lonely One gone when I pulled her out after me?

“I need you. Now,” I had ordered her. Was it possible? Had she merged into me in the blink of an eye? In the unbearable heat of the moment? Perhaps. Yes.

I gave myself permission to remember, and then—I did. I remembered everything: the gentle swell of my belly, already large when I first emerged as a person; the sickness that came and went; the man’s kinder, softer side, making it all the more unexpected when he tore my heart out by stealing the baby, the one we named Sam, after his father, he said; the hours spent rocking and crying alone and forgotten after Girl Scout and Little Wife came back; the bright Angel who came and gave me hope that I’d see my baby again; the nights spent peeking at a sleeping child, who looked and smelled familiar and just might be the one; the detective’s words that gave me the strength to burst from my detention cell and make my way back to Sam.

Yes. That was it. We were—I was—together. Complete.

And together we’d done it. My strength and her mother love joined against the fire.

Burnt, aching, swathed in gauze, I finally felt complete.

Tears tracked down my cheek. A tiny
tap-tap
caught my attention, and I blinked to see the Harrises at the ICU window. Sammy was on Mrs. Harris’s hip. He gave her a wet, open-mouth kiss on the cheek. She waved his little fist in a hi-bye motion at me. Her face heavy with sleeplessness and gratitude, she blew me a kiss and rubbed her cheek on Sammy’s fair hair. Dr. Harris clenched his hands together up beside his right ear, telling me I was a champion in his book. The love was so thick, you could spread it on a bagel.

I sighed with a deep kind of joy and waved my Popsicle arms at them. Dr. Harris saluted me once, then wrapped an arm around his wife and child to head to a hotel for a soft bed.

Mom and Dad came in then for the hug-and-cry session.

They let me go home that evening with all my wound care instructions, home to my own bed. The painkillers did their best, but I still spent much of the night awake. There were other wounds that gauze and antibiotics couldn’t touch.

Before Lonely One had tossed all her memories and emotions into the mental mixing bowl, I’d already fallen hopelessly in love with Sam. Now I knew firsthand the magic bond they had shared for such a short time. Then I had been fighting with her—now I was fighting with myself in the dark hours of the night.

Should I tell Mom and Dad? Bring Sam home? Raise him with my new brother/sister? There was a certain logic in that. But how could I do that to the Harrises? And what was best for Sam? To believe forever that his mother had died or to know that she had been relentlessly molested by a crazy man until he was conceived?

I stumbled on the stairs, distracted by the dilemma spinning my brain around.

In a moment, Mom was in front of me, arms out, as if she could catch me now when it was far too late to make a difference. Her stomach looked huge. Time was speeding along.

“Your dad’s still in the kitchen, watching the morning news. He took the day off work, in case … in case you need anything.”

“Um. Okay.” I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of thing he was thinking of.

“I made you French toast,” she said hesitantly. “Feel up to eating some?”

I wasn’t typically much of a breakfast eater, but after twenty-four hours in the hospital, I was ravenous. “Sure, Mom. I’ll have a slice or eight.” I slipped in next to Dad at the kitchen table—next to, so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact and I wouldn’t block his view of the TV. “Someone will have to feed me, though.”