Silhouette of a Sparrow (16 page)

I turned, the sand under my feet suddenly feeling rough, and sloshed back to shore. I threw my dress over my wet underclothes and picked up my shoes in one hand. I trudged off, barefoot, forcing myself not to look back.

(
Otus asio
)

That night Mother slept beside me in the small bed. She’d been so relieved and grateful to hear of my decision, so proud of me for putting my family first. Mrs. Harrington told her about Isabella, using the most alarming language she could find, claiming that even though we were “no longer family,” she would hate to see me bring my mother disgrace. But Mother was so pleased with me for deciding to marry that once I assured her the friendship was over she didn’t bring it up again. Her approval felt warm and comfortable and affectionate and safe, and it was reassuring to go to sleep with her close-by. I hadn’t slept next to her since I was a child, since those lonely nights when Father was first away at war, and I’d forgotten just how soothing it was to have her near.

But my dreams were anything but soothing. I dreamed of Isabella. She wore the oriole dress even though she
wasn’t working. It was night, and the park glowed like a sparkler with dancing, spinning lights. Isabella pulled me through the whirling mess of rides, laughing that nuthatch laugh of hers, and lured me onto the roller coaster. I’d made a point of staying off that frightful contraption all summer, but now somehow Isabella strapped me in beside her and I couldn’t move. We lurched forward and then her laugh became a shriek. The sound was light and joyful in the beginning, and so close it could have been coming from my own mouth as we climbed the first hill. Then we paused at the top and my heart stopped beating for what felt like an eternity while we waited for the plunge. Finally, we inched over the precipice and the world dropped away beneath me. Isabella’s close, happy shriek became a scream, and when I looked over, she was gone, and a gray-and-white-patterned screech owl perched on the bar where her hands had rested a moment before. The small, stocky owl looked at me with yellow eyes and then lifted up on its great wings and silently flew off. In the distance, I heard it calling in that descending whinny that gave it its name. The roller coaster vanished, and I was looking for her, trying to follow the muffled screeching that was so filled with pain and fear. The lights swirled around me as I stumbled aimlessly into the night.

Mother shook me awake.

“Fire, Garnet. Wake up. Fire!”

I opened my eyes into even deeper darkness than the sleep I’d left behind.

But this darkness was heavy and filled my lungs. Stung my eyes.

I coughed.

“Come on,” Mother said. She grabbed the sleeve of my nightdress and yanked me out of bed, then fell to her knees and pulled me down with her. The air near the floor was clearer.

Muffled screams came through the darkness. Not birdcalls but human screams. Flames rumbled somewhere far off. Glass shattered. Wood splintered in some other world.

Here, near the floor, it was quiet.

“Wait,” I said, coughing. I reached up and grabbed the blue jay handkerchief from the night table. I ripped it in two and dunked both halves in my water glass. “Your mouth,” I said, handing one to Mother.

She felt for it in the dark and took it. With the wet cloth over my mouth and nose I could breathe a little easier. “The door’s here,” I said through the cloth as I crawled like a three-legged dog across the floor. Mother followed; I could feel her close behind me.

I traced the route through the small bedroom by memory, and when we reached the door, I knelt and put my hand up to grope for the knob.

“Ah!” I cried. The metal burned like a skillet.

“Oh, Garnet,” Mother murmured. “It’s too close. I hope the Harringtons got out. Can we go another way?”

I clutched my hand to my chest. It screamed. I tried to think over the throbbing of my skin. “Yes.” I scrambled back toward the bed and past it. Toward the dimly glowing rectangle on the opposite wall.

“The window?” she said when we reached it. “But we’re too far up.”

“No. The veranda. Trust me.” The drapes were
already pulled back and the window was open—even mother slept immodestly in the August heat. I stood up and stuck my head out into the night. The air was clearer there and my lungs sucked it in. I bunched up my nightdress and hauled one leg over the sill, and then the other. My feet hit hot shingles. Hot, but not skillet hot. The roof of the veranda. I turned and helped Mother out.

Here, the sounds weren’t as muffled by smoke. The screams were close. The flames were close. The breaking building cried out with pops and cracks and moans. I led Mother to the edge.

“It’s too far down,” she said. And it was. Farther than I’d thought. Fifteen feet? Twenty? I’d forgotten about the staircase down from the veranda to the ground. We were nearly two stories up, not one. But there wasn’t any other way.

“We have to,” I said.

“They’ll come for us. The firemen.”

“We can’t wait.”

“They’ll come,” she insisted.

“No, I have an idea.” I sat down on the hot shingles and reached with my feet, swinging right and left. Then, yes! They hit wood. The support column. We could
climb
down. I turned to motion for Mother to come.

Then, with a sudden
pop,
the roof we perched on tilted dangerously. I gripped the edge with my knees and my hands, the burned one sending a wave of pain up my arm. Mother dropped to all fours and clung to the shingles like a cat in a tree.

“It’s under us,” she said.

We couldn’t climb down—we’d be climbing
into
the blaze.

“We have to jump,” I told her.

“They’ll come,” she said.

“I’ll go first.”

She looked at me with wide eyes for one, long moment. Then she inched toward me. At my side, she gripped my arm and met my eyes. She nodded once. “Courage, Garnet,” she said.

My father’s voice echoed in my head:
Fly, Gigi, fly!

I looked down, and down, and down. The ground stretched out safe and solid beneath me, but I knew its solidness might kill me. And if I had the courage to jump out of a burning building, I also had the courage to speak the truth. If I was going to die in the next minute, there was something I had to say to my mother first.

“I can’t marry Teddy, Mother,” I said into her panicked eyes. “I need to go to college.”

Then I jumped.

(
Cardinalis cardinalis
)

I jumped—and I
flew.

In my white cotton nightdress I hovered there, suspended above the panic and pain, the chaos and confusion. The whole scene paused for a single moment and my desperate childhood wish for flight was granted. I felt the wind against my skin and turned my eyes to the stars. The brightest ones burned calmly through the smoke and the wavering heat.

In that moment I knew that wanting was not the same as selfishness. Wanting was pure and right and beautiful. And the real me could not change shape to suit the needs of others—not even loved ones, not even family. I knew who I was. The rest could be worked out. I could find a way. If Miss Maple had done it, so could I.

And then, I crashed to the ground. The pain came rushing in with a breathless jolt. My knee burned, and a
stabbing ache pierced my shoulder. Every inch of me was on fire, like the hotel on fire, threatening to collapse.

Mother appeared beside me then. She must have followed me out into the night air. I didn’t see her jump, but there she was. She clutched her ankle, but her relief seemed to overpower the pain. She took me in her arms and we lay there, on the ground, rocking each other amid the panicked crowd.

 

It might have been mere minutes later that I regained rational consciousness, but it felt like hours. Mrs. Harrington’s voice cut through the bustle.

“Well, go in and get them,” she was shouting to a fireman.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but your finery is not our first priority.”

She gaped at him, appalled. “Young man, those dresses and hats and jewels are worth more than your annual salary—more than
twice
your annual salary, I should think—so march in there and retrieve them. Room 209—”

But the young man in question was gone, off helping an old woman that another fireman had just carried from the blaze.

“Do I have to do
everything
myself?” Mrs. Harrington said in a huff, heading toward the burning building.

“No, Mother, don’t!” Hannah cried. “It’s not worth it!”

“Not worth it?” Her voice lowered then, but I could hear her still as she lectured her daughter. “It’s all we have, Hannah. You know that—you told everybody all about it this morning. What do you want, the poorhouse? Do you
want us to have to sell the estate? We’ll never get you a husband without at least the trappings of wealth. The credit’s run out. Lord help us, Hannah, it’s all we have.”

Hannah Harrington turned her furious face to her mother and aimed one pointy finger at the huge woman’s chest.

“It is
not
all we have, Mother. We have each other, don’t we? If you go in there and that building collapses,
then
we’ll have nothing—or at least
I’ll
have nothing. No finery and no husband
and
no mother. If that’s what you want, fine. Go.”

The finger pointed to the blaze.

The singed woman stood staring at her furious child for a long moment, her own anger turning ever so slowly to incredulity. The whole scene around us seemed to pause, to hold its breath.

“What’s gotten into you today?” Mrs. Harrington said sharply, but then her scolding tone shifted, softened. “You’re not my little girl. You’re a young woman. A fierce, beautiful young woman. What on earth am I going to do with you?” Then she gathered Hannah up in her enormous arms and sobbed.

As if someone took a piece of charcoal and decided at that moment to redraw her, Hannah’s hard angles all melted. I watched, and finally I saw the two of them for what they were: a pair of people facing the world together, trying to do right by one another without losing themselves in the process. Just like me. Just like all of us.

“Garnet, you’re shaking.” Mother rocked me in her arms as the firemen and medics rushed around us in a blur of frantic activity. A bright red fire truck blared its two-note
siren like a cardinal gone mad. “We have to get away from here,” she said. She coughed and clutched her ankle. “But where? Where can we go?”

“I know a place,” I said, trying out my knee and finding it functional. “Can you walk?”

 

I knocked, sheepishly, on the door of Isabella’s apartment. After I’d yelled at her and called her names and made her cry, here I was, knocking on her door in the middle of the night, asking for a place to stay.

At least I hadn’t brought the Harringtons. They’d vanished in the bustle and we’d decided to go without them. We needed to find shelter quickly, and we trusted they’d find someplace to go too. And as Mrs. Harrington had so graciously pointed out, we were “no longer family” In any case, I was grateful to be spared their company at this moment as I waited for Isabella to answer her door, hoping that she’d let us in, dreading that she’d shut us out. She had every right to turn me away.

At last, she answered. Isabella, in a slip and smudged eye makeup and the detested night gloves. She stood there, her irritation at being woken up turning to surprise and then concern at the sight of us.

And she opened the door wide for me—for grimy, battered me and for my injured mother.

We stumbled inside. Isabella slept on the sofa and gave us her bed. Mother and I dropped into that narrow bed and slept instantly. Deeply. Side by side.

 

I didn’t wake up fully until Sunday. It was late afternoon when I sat up in Isabella’s bed, groggy and disoriented. Mother still slept, so I tiptoed out of the bedroom and shut the door quietly behind me. The apartment was empty, but I found a note from Isabella on the kitchen counter.
Gone to rehearsal and then a show—manager scheduled one last minute on my day off, bastard. Back late. Help yourself to a bath and anything you can find in the icebox and the pantry. Left fresh clothes out on the sofa—should fit. Isabella