NOS4A2(45)

Then she was making her way up the shaft again, back to one wall, feet to the other. Her eyes gushed. The smoke was thick in the chute now, a brownish, billowing stream all around her. Something was terribly wrong in the back of her right leg. Every time she pushed upward with her feet, it felt as if the muscle were tearing all over again.

She blinked and coughed and pushed and wormed her way steadily up the laundry chute. The metal against her back was uncomfortably warm. She thought that in a very short time she would be leaving skin on the walls, that the chute would burn to the touch. Except it wasn’t a chute anymore. It was a chimney, with a smoky fire at the bottom, and she was Santa Claus, scrambling up for the reindeer. She had that idiot Christmas song in her head, have a holly jolly f*cking Christmas, going around and around on endless loop. She didn’t want to roast to death with Christmas music in her head.

By the time she was close to the top of the chute, it was hard to see anything through all the smoke. She wept continuously and held her breath. The big muscle in her right thigh shook helplessly.

She saw an inverted U of dim light, somewhere just above her feet: the hatch that opened on the second floor. Her lungs burned. She gasped, couldn’t stop herself, drew a chestful of smoke, began to cough. It hurt to cough. She could feel soft tissues behind her ribs rupturing and tearing. Her right leg gave, without warning. She lunged as she fell, shoving her arms at the closed hatch. As she did, she thought, It won’t open. He pushed something in front of it, and it won’t open.

Her arms banged through the hatch, out into beautifully cool air. She held on, caught the edge of the opening under her armpits. Her legs dropped down into the chute, and her knees clubbed the steel wall.

With the hatch open, the laundry chute drew air, and she felt a hot, stinking breeze lifting around her. Smoke gushed out around her head. She couldn’t stop coughing and blinking, coughing so hard her whole body shook. She tasted blood, felt blood on her lips, wondered if she was coughing up anything important.

For a long moment, she hung where she was, too weak to pull herself out. Then she began to kick, digging her toes against the wall. Her feet clanged and banged. She could not grab much purchase, but she did not need much. Her head and arms were already through the hatch, and getting out of the chute was less a matter of climbing, more a thing of simply leaning forward.

She tipped herself out and onto the shag carpet of a second-floor hallway. The air tasted good. She lay there and gasped like a fish. What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

She had to lean against the wall to get to her feet. She expected the entire house to be filled with smoke and roaring fire, but it was not. It was hazy in the upstairs hallway, but not as bad as it had been in the chute. Vic saw sunshine to her right and limped across the bushy 1970s-era carpet, to the landing at the top of the stairs. She descended the steps in a stumbling, controlled fall, splashing through smoke.

The front door was half open. The chain hung from the doorframe, with the lock plate and a long splinter of wood dangling from it. The air that came in was watery-cool, and she wanted to pitch herself out into it, but she did not.

She could not see into the kitchen. It was all smoke and flickering light. An open doorway looked into a sitting room. The wallpaper on the far side of the sitting room was burning away to show the plaster underneath. The rug smoldered. A vase contained a bouquet of flame. Streams of orange fire crawled up cheap white nylon curtains. She thought the whole back of the house might be in flame, but here in the front, in the foyer, the hallway was only filled with smoke.

Vic looked out the window to one side of the door. The drive leading up to the house was a long, narrow dirt lane, leading away through the trees. She saw no car, but from this angle she could not see into the garage. He might be sitting there waiting to see if Vic would come out. He might be down at the end of the lane watching to see if she would run up it.

Behind her, something creaked painfully and fell with a great crash. Smoke erupted around her. A hot spark touched her arm and stung. And it came to her that there was nothing left to think about. He was waiting there or he wasn’t, but either way there was no place left for her to go except





Out


THE YARD WAS SO OVERGROWN IT WAS LIKE RUNNING THROUGH A tangle of wire. The grass made snares to catch her ankles. There was really no yard to speak of, only an expanse of wild brush and weeds, and forest beyond.

She did not so much as glance at the garage or back at the house, and she did not run for the driveway. She didn’t dare test that long straight road, for fear he might be parked along it, spying for her. Instead she ran for the trees. She did not see that there was an embankment until she was going over it, a three-foot drop to the forest floor.

She hit hard on her toes, felt the back of her right thigh grab with a painful force. She crashed into a drift of dry branches, struggled free of them, and dropped onto her back.

The pines towered above her. They swayed in the wind. The ornaments that hung in them twinkled and blinked and made flashing rainbows, so it was as if she had been lightly concussed.

When she had her breath back, she rolled over, got on her knees, looked across the yard.

The big garage door was open, but the Rolls-Royce was gone.

She was surprised—almost disappointed—at how little smoke there was. She could see a steady gray film rising from the rear of the house. Smoke spilled from the open mouth of the front door. But she could not hear anything burning from here and could not see any flame. She had expected the house to be a bonfire.