The Stars Are Fire(16)

“It’s not just us,” Grace points out. “If what we’ve heard is true, half of coastal Maine is on fire. There are inland fires, too.”

“Okay,” says Rosie, “let’s be sensible.”

Grace smiles.

“You can fit whatever you have in the carriage, right?” Rosie asks.

“Not all.”

“We have to be able to move.”

“I heard that people were stealing shopping carts from Shaw’s,” says Grace.

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Seriously? Stealing?”

“Do you think that matters when the stakes are the lives of your children?”

Grace guesses not.

Rosie snaps her fingers. “We have a canoe!”

“I don’t know,” says Grace. “Pretty dangerous to push a canoe into the ocean at night with your children in it.”

“No. I’ll put the kids and the stuff in it and drag it.”

“To where?”

“To the beach.”

“And then what?”

“The fire’s not going to go all the way to the beach,” insists Rosie.

“I don’t know.”

“It can’t.”

“Sparks might reach us and our things.”

“Simple,” Rosie says. “We’ll wet everything down.”

“And the kids?”

“Oh, Grace, I don’t know. Does the fire look closer?”

The silhouette has changed. Two houses, an open field. Yes, the fire is closer, but for now she will keep that knowledge to herself. “Do you know where the firebreak is?” Grace asks instead.

“Near Route One maybe?”

Grace turns back to the beach, certain that she has felt something new on her skin. Moisture, a cool breeze. She inhales deeply. The scent is unmistakable. She grabs Rosie’s hand. “Can you smell that?” Grace asks.

Rosie tips her face upward. “An east wind?”

Grace nods.

They stand a minute on the grass, hands clasped, taking in long breaths of refreshing wet air. It seems that other townspeople are just now noting it. Motors stop. Arguments halt midsentence.

“We’ve been saved?” Rosie asks.

“For now, anyway.”

“God, I love an east wind.”


Grace floats like a paper fragment into her house and up the stairs to where her children sleep. In a slow dance of exhaustion and relief, she slips into her summer nightgown and lies back on her pillow. She ought to stay awake and watch over her house and her children in case the wind switches direction. She ought to go downstairs and wait in the kitchen for Gene. Will he be covered in soot, desperate for a glass of water? But won’t the east wind have reached the men by now, signaling a few hours to go home to get some sleep?

She rolls over to put her cheek to the pillow. She will take a catnap and be refreshed and ready for whatever comes next.


Hot breath on Grace’s face. Claire is screaming, and Grace is on her feet. As she lifts her daughter, a wall of fire fills the window. Perhaps a quarter of a mile back, if even that. Where’s Gene? Didn’t he come home? She picks Tom up from his crib and feels a wet diaper. No time to change him.

She scurries down the stairs carrying both children. She deposits them in the carriage in the hallway and pushes it onto the screened porch. Claire begins to cough in the smoky air. “Sweetie,” Grace croons, “have you saved us all?”

She stuffs blankets, diapers, baby food, and water into the carriage behind the children. She loops the kids’ clothes around the upper bits of metal and ties them in knots. She’ll have to leave the mementos.

Because she can’t push the now too-heavy carriage over the lip of the porch, she reverses it in order to drag it down the step. Claire is crying, and so is Tom, but Grace has no time to soothe them.

As she maneuvers the vehicle to the edge of the grass, a bomb goes off, the explosion one Grace can feel right through her feet and legs. The children are silent, as if awed by the sound.

“A fuel tank in a house on Seventh Street,” she hears one man shout to another.

Sparks and embers swirl around Grace. There’s chaos in the streets. She hears cars moving, women screaming. Balls of flame seem to leap from treetop to treetop, giving the fire a frightening momentum. A tree catches fire at the top, and the fire races down the trunk and into a house below. Another bomb. The fire turns tree after tree into tall torches.

Fields resemble hot coals. For as far as she can see, there’s an unbroken line of fire. Cars are traveling, but where can they go?

An ember lands on the hood of the carriage. Grace swipes it off and begins to run. Heat and common sense push her to the seawall. A deer leaps across the street with her, chased by the freight train bearing down on all of them.

She takes the children from the carriage and sets them on a blanket on the sand. On another blanket, she lays out what few provisions she has brought. Abandoning the carriage, she begins to drag both blankets away from the fire and closer to the water. When the sand feels wet underfoot, she stops.


Smoke adds to the confusion. She spots, and then doesn’t, Rosie dragging a canoe.

“Rosie!” Grace calls.

“Grace, where are you?”

“Right at the water. There you are.”