What I Came to Tell You (19 page)

Grover was thinking about going back to get Emma Lee when he heard noises coming from the guest bedroom where Leila slept. He noticed a line of flickering light underneath the door. He pressed his ear to the door but didn’t hear a thing except somebody moving around a lot. He leaned back on a floorboard that creaked and the movement stopped.

“Did you hear that?” Leila’s voice.

“Hear what?” A man’s voice. Grover felt his chest tighten as he realized who the man was.

“Sounded like someone at the door,” Leila said. “Should I go check on the kids?”

“I didn’t hear anything. This old house makes all kinds of noises.”

“I thought I heard someone,” she said.

“You want me to check?”

There was a long silence in which Grover wasn’t sure if someone was coming to the door. He didn’t dare move for fear of stepping on the creaky board again.

“I’m not sure about this,” Leila said.

“Neither am I,” he said.

Grover couldn’t pry himself from the door.

“Isn’t it too soon?” she said. “For you, I mean.”

There was a pause.

“It’s just been so long,” she said.

Another pause.

“Let’s stop talking,” he said.

Grover tiptoed to his room and quietly shut the door. He lay in bed, trying to think. His father had been in the room with Leila, and there were noises that seemed to involve both of them. He’d heard similar noises come from his parents’ bedroom when his mother was alive, noises he’d known to stay away from. His father shouldn’t be making those noises with anyone but their mother. Except of course their mother wasn’t here.

Then he remembered. He’d asked Emma Lee to the Christmas Waltz and she’d said yes. Unbelievable. “Unbelievable,” he said aloud. He yawned, thinking how back in October he’d hardly noticed this girl who had moved into his neighborhood. He yawned again and, thinking of Emma Lee, rode his exhaustion out beyond the worried world, leaving it far far behind.

G
rover woke to Biscuit standing on his chest. The little dog was crying and making noises he’d never heard him make. Grover sat up and Biscuit jumped off the bed and ran toward the hallway.

“Now what?” Grover yawned.

Clay’s eyes opened.

Biscuit stood in the doorway whining.

Clay closed his eyes and in a sleepy voice said, “He’s your dog but I’m thinking he might need to do his business.”

Grover checked his watch. Three o’clock. Groggy and cold, he pulled on his pants, put on his bedroom slippers and walked through the chilly house. The guest room door was open. From the moonlight coming in through the window, he could see that only Leila was sleeping in there.

With Biscuit still crying, Grover opened the front door to let him out. Biscuit didn’t go off the porch, though. The little dog just stood there making those noises.

He started to pick the dog up to carry him out in the yard when he glanced across the street. Bright yellow and red swirls of light framed the Roundtrees’ window. A Van Gogh of flames.

“Emma Lee.” He ran toward the Roundtrees’ house, screaming, “Emma Lee! Emma Lee!” He kept slipping in his bedroom shoes, and finally fell hard on his knees in the street, getting a mouthful of dirt and snow. He ran up on the porch and opened the front door. Smoke poured out. Grover coughed and his eyes stung. “Emma Lee! Are you in there?!” he shouted. All he heard was the fire crackling. As he started in, Merlin streaked out, disappearing off the porch. Covering his mouth with his pajama sleeve, Grover hurried into the house but had to back out because the smoke was so thick. He coughed and wiped his stinging eyes.

He paused at the door, watching the smoke pour out. She might’ve gone back to his house and was fast asleep in Sudie’s room. He started to back down off the porch, when a voice inside him said,
She’s in there
.

He stepped back onto the porch and paused in the doorway. A fireman who’d visited Mrs. Caswell’s class had told them that smoke rises and that the best way to get out of a fire was to stay low and crawl. Maybe it was the best way to go into a fire too. He dropped to all fours and found he could breathe and see a little better. He crawled in the direction of the glow—the doorway of the front room.

“Emma Lee!” he croaked as he coughed and blinked his eyes.

When he reached the doorway to the front room, he saw that the couch and some of the furniture was on fire, and flames were
creeping up the walls. The weavings. Somehow they’d caught. Emma Lee lay sprawled in the middle, her blanket half covering her. The candle had fallen from the windowsill and was on its side on the floor.

“Emma Lee,” he said as he crawled up to her.

She didn’t move. He turned her over. Her face was the color of ashes and her lips blue.

“Oh, no,” he said. He stood up and immediately couldn’t breathe. He felt dizzy. His throat ached with the smoke and he coughed, trying to hold his breath. He took her underneath her arms and dragged her across the floor in the direction of the door. But he slammed into the door frame, hit his back hard and dropped her. He had to bend over and feel around for her in the smoke that was getting thicker. He tried picking her up, but was so dizzy he couldn’t tell which way to go. He collapsed onto the floor beside her and was getting back up when a firm hand gripped his arm and helped him stand. The smoke was too thick for him to make out who it was. But together Grover and whoever it was dragged Emma Lee out of the room, down the hall and out onto the porch. Then, before Grover could turn his head, the person had stepped off the porch and disappeared. Grover dragged Emma Lee out into the snow, pretty far from the house. Clearing a place for her on the front walk with his foot, he laid her down. His head spinning, he fell to his knees coughing. He knelt there for some time, trying to breathe, but whenever he did, his lungs burned like somehow the fire had gotten down inside him.

“Emma Lee!!” In her nightgown, Leila sank down on her knees in front of her daughter. “Oh Lord! Please, Lord!” She leaned over, pulled her daughter’s head back and breathed into Emma Lee’s mouth. Emma Lee’s chest rose.

“Grover?” His father was in his pants and T-shirt. He squatted down beside Grover, brushing hair out of his face. “Are you okay?’

Grover nodded, not looking at his father. He’d felt a tinge of anger at his father’s touch. “I’m okay,” he croaked and coughed. The burning in his lungs had let up a little.

They watched Leila breathe into Emma Lee, wait for her daughter’s chest to go down and then breathe into her again. His father yelled back to Clay and Sudie, who were making their way across the street toward them. “Call 911.”

Sudie started to turn around and run back into the house.

“Already called ’em, Sudie,” Jessie said, coming up to Grover and his father.

“Breathe, sweetheart, breathe!” Leila watched her daughter’s chest fall. “Come on!”

His father helped Grover to his feet. Jessie stood with them, watching Leila frantically work over her daughter. Clay came up beside them, his face pale, and said under his breath, “Oh, Sis.” Grover’s father put his arm around Clay and pulled the boy against him. Sudie came and stood next to Grover, clutching her little silver cylinder like she was calling on a higher power.

Years passed. Leila worked over Emma Lee and worked over her. “Come on!” she’d say. “Come on, Emma Lee!” She yelled
louder. The longer Emma Lee didn’t breathe, the angrier Leila became. Just when it seemed to Grover like Emma Lee was gone in the way his mother was gone, there was a cough. Her eyelids fluttered. She coughed again, gasped for air and opened her eyes. The color came back into her face and her lips.

“Oh, thank you, Lord!” her mother cried out. “Thank You, dear God!” She cradled her daughter’s head in her lap and rocked in the snow, as Emma Lee coughed and coughed. “Oh sweet sweet Jesus, thank You!”

A woman who lived down the street stepped out of a semicircle of neighbors and handed them a blanket. With Emma Lee wrapped in the blanket, Grover’s father carried her off the cold walk and sat her on the curb where another neighbor had laid out more blankets. The whole time Emma Lee coughed and wheezed.

A loud pop, the sound of glass breaking. The front window of the house had shattered and the fire leapt up, the flames reaching up the side of the house.

“Oh, Jessie,” Leila said, looking back, “your house!”

Not even glancing at the house, Jessie wrapped another blanket around Emma Lee.

Two fire trucks followed by an ambulance rumbled up the street, their red lights flashing against the houses and their snow chains ringing on the pavement. The sound of the chains weirdly reminded Grover of sleigh bells.

The EMTs put an oxygen mask on Emma Lee, then carried her to the ambulance and began checking her over with Leila
beside her. One of the firemen walked Grover to beside a fire truck and began checking him over.

“How you feeling?” he asked, looking into Grover’s eyes with a light.

“My throat hurts.”

“The smoke does that,” the fireman said. “It does a whole lot worse if it has time.” He put a blood pressure cuff around Grover’s arm. He nodded toward the ambulance. “The EMTs say you saved that girl’s life. Said if she’d been in there much longer that’d a been all she wrote.”

They heard a crash and turned to see a couple of firemen knock out the rest of the front window. They aimed a fire hose through the window, blasting the front room. A couple of other firemen went in through the front door with another hose. To Grover’s astonishment, the fire was out in minutes. It had seemed so huge when he was in the house, like it would take hours, even days to put out.

Before long, the ambulance pulled away with Emma Lee, Leila riding with her. They wanted to keep Emma Lee at the hospital overnight to keep an eye on her. Leila hugged Clay and said she’d call first thing tomorrow.

“We’ll look after Clay,” Grover’s father had said.

Back at the house, Jessie settled Clay into Grover’s sleeping bag while Grover collapsed onto the couch in the living room, feeling dirty and gritty and reeking of smoke, but too exhausted to do anything about it. In a little while Grover’s father came and led Grover to the bathroom, where he’d lit a candle. Grover was
startled when he saw his flickering reflection in the bathroom mirror. His face was so smudged with soot he didn’t recognize himself.

His father helped him out of his pajamas, then turned on the shower. “The water’s still warm,” he said, testing it with his hand, “even though the power’s been out a while now.” He helped Grover into the shower. But when he saw Grover could barely move, he took a washrag, soaped it up and gently washed his face, his arms, his back and his legs. Grover remembered when he was a little boy and his father had often bathed him at night after supper.

“Somebody helped me,” Grover said, stepping out of the shower.

“Helped you?” His father dried him with a towel.

“Somebody helped me drag Emma Lee out, but I couldn’t see them in all the smoke.”

“You need to get some sleep.” His father led him back to his room, where Clay was already asleep again, and helped him into bed. His father sat on the edge of his bed for a while, watching him. “I’m sorry, honey,” his father said after a while, then he leaned over and kissed his forehead. “I should’ve been there.”

“C
lass, a little later this morning we’ll walk to the Wolfe house,” said Mrs. Caswell. “Let’s review what we’ve learned this week. When was Wolfe born?”

“Oh, oh!” Ashley’s hand shot up. She waved desperately like a survivor in a life raft, trying to get the attention of a high-flying airplane.

“Grover,” Mrs. Caswell said.

“October 3, 1900,” Grover said, knowing the date as well as his own birthday. Ever since Emma Lee had left, Mrs. Caswell had called on him more. He couldn’t get used to the empty desk at his back. Whenever he went off in his head during class, he expected Emma Lee to poke him in the shoulder and whisper in that Mitchell County accent of hers, “Earth to Grover. Earth to Grover.”

Emma Lee had returned from the hospital the day after the fire. She’d been okay except that she was exhausted, had a mean headache and her throat still hurt. She’d slept the whole first day
she got back. The Roundtrees were staying at Jessie’s. Most of the fire damage to his rental house had been to the front room, but the smoke and water damage made it impossible to live there. Jessie had insisted they stay with him until he could get the house repaired.

The same day Emma Lee returned from the hospital, Leila had come over to Grover’s house. Grover’d answered the door, and the first thing Leila did was hug him a long time. She smelled of hospital. When she let him go, she wiped her eyes and said, “Thank you.” Her face was pale and drawn. She had big circles under her eyes. He wondered if she’d slept at all since the fire. “We’ll never forget what you did,” she said.

The way she’d said it unsettled him. What Mrs. Caswell called the past tense had crept in there, as if Leila was already looking back at him from someplace else.

“I had help pulling her out of the house,” Grover said.

Leila nodded. “Your daddy told me about that.” She smiled knowingly.

“You know who it was?” he asked.

“The Lord Jesus was watching out for you and my Emma Lee.” She kissed his cheek. “Come visit Emma Lee tomorrow.”

That evening their father and Leila had gone for a long walk. Grover watched through the front window as they walked away up the street toward Riverside. When they came back half an hour later, they didn’t look happy. They hugged in the middle of the street, reminding him of airport hugs.

Grover hurried back to his room, sat down at his desk and
opened his sketchbook, looking at his latest drawings. He started sketching on a new idea for a weaving and was so caught up in it that he was surprised when his father knocked on the open door to his room.