NOS4A2(44)

VIC STOOD A LONG TIME AGAINST THE WASHING MACHINE, WAITING for her legs to stop shaking.

She did not, at first, really believe that Manx was gone. She felt he was waiting for her to throw herself against the door, hammering against it and pleading to be let out.

She could hear the fire. She heard things popping and cracking in the heat. The wallpaper sizzled with a crispy fizzling sound, like someone pitching handfuls of pine needles into a campfire.

Vic put her ear to the door, to better hear the other room. But at the first touch of skin to metal, she jerked her head back with a cry. The iron door was as hot as a skillet left on high heat.

A dirty brown smoke began to trickle in along the left-hand edge of the door.

Vic yanked the steel mop handle free, chucked it aside. She grabbed the handle, meant to give it a shove, see how far she could push it against the weight on the other side—but then she let go, jumped back. The curved metal handle was as hot as the surface of the door. Vic shook her hand in the air to soothe the burned feeling in her fingertips.

She caught her first mouthful of smoke. It stank of melted plastic. It was so filthy-smelling she choked on it, bent over coughing so hard she thought she might vomit.

She turned in a circle. There was hardly space in the pantry to do more than that.

Shelves. Rice-A-Roni. A bucket. A bottle of ammonia. A bottle of bleach. A stainless-steel cabinet or drawer set into the wall. The washing machine and the dryer. There were no windows. There was no other door.

Something glass exploded in the next room. Vic was aware of a gathering filminess in the air, as if she stood in a sauna.

She glanced up and saw that the white plaster ceiling was blackening, directly above the doorframe.

She opened the dryer and found an old white fitted sheet. She tugged it out. Vic pulled it over her head and shoulders, wrapped some fabric around one hand, and tried the door.

She could only barely grip the metal handle, even with the sheet, and could not press her shoulder to the door for long. But Vic flung herself hard against it, once, and again. It shuddered and banged in the frame and opened maybe a quarter of an inch—enough to let in a gush of vile brown smoke. There was too much smoke on the other side of the door to allow her to see anything of the room, to even see flames.

Vic drew back and pitched herself at the door a third time. She hit so hard she bounced, and her ankles caught in the bedsheet, and she fell sprawling. She shouted in frustration, threw off the sheet. The pantry was dirty with smoke.

She reached up, gripped the washing machine with one hand and the handle of the stainless-steel cabinet with the other. But as she pulled herself to her feet, the door to the cabinet fell open, hinges whining, and she crashed back down, her knees giving out.

She rested before trying again, turned her face so her brow was pressed to the cool metal of the washing machine. When she shut her eyes, she felt her mother pressing one cool hand to her fevered forehead.

Vic reclaimed her feet, unsteady now. She let go of the handle of the metal cabinet, and it clapped shut on a spring. The poisonous air stung her eyes.

She opened the cabinet again. It looked into a laundry chute, a dark, narrow metal shaft.

Vic put her head through the opening and looked up. She saw, dimly, another small door, ten or twelve feet up.

He’s waiting up there, she knew.

But it didn’t matter. Remaining in the pantry wasn’t an option.

She sat on the open steel door, which swung down from the wall on a pair of taut springs. Vic squirmed her upper body through the opening, pulled her legs after her, and slid into





The Laundry Chute


VIC WAS, AT SEVENTEEN, ONLY FORTY POUNDS HEAVIER AND THREE inches taller than she had been at twelve, a skinny girl who was all leg. But it was tight inside the chute just the same. She braced herself, back to the wall, knees in her face, feet pressing to the opposite side of the shaft.

Vic began to work her way up the shaft, pushing herself with the balls of her feet, six inches at a time. Brown smoke wafted around her and stung her eyes.

Her hamstrings began to twitch and burn. She slid her back up another six inches, walking up the shaft in a hunched, bent, grotesque sort of way. The muscles in the small of her back throbbed.

She was halfway to the second floor when her left foot slipped, squirting out beneath her, and her ass dropped. She felt a tearing in her right thigh, and she screamed. For one moment she was able to hold herself in place, folded over with her right knee in her face and her left leg hanging straight down. But the weight on her right leg was too much. The pain was too much. She let her right foot slide free and fell all the way back to the bottom.

It was a painful, ungraceful fall. She clouted into the aluminum floor of the shaft, spiked her right knee into her own face. Her other foot banged through the stainless-steel hatch and shot back into the pantry.

Vic was, for a moment, dangerously close to panic. She began to cry, and when she stood up in the laundry chute, she did not try to climb again but began to jump, and never mind that the top was well out of reach and there was nothing in the smooth aluminum shaft to grab. She screamed. She screamed for help. The shaft was full of smoke, and it blurred her vision, and midscream she began to cough, a harsh, dry, painful cough. She coughed on and on, did not think she would ever stop. She coughed with such force she almost threw up and in the end spit a long stream of saliva that tasted of bile.

It was not the smoke that terrified her, or the pain in the back of her right thigh, where she had definitely yanked a muscle. It was her certain, desperate aloneness. What had her mother screamed at her father? But you’re not raising her, Chris! I am! I’m doing it all by myself! It was awful to find yourself in a hole, all by yourself. She could not remember the last time she had held her mother: her frightened, short-tempered, unhappy mother, who had stood by her and put her cool hand to Vic’s brow in her times of fever. It was awful to think of dying here, having left things as they were.