The Stars Are Fire(24)
Your good friends,
Rosie and Tim
Grace slides down the wall to a bench, holds the letter to her chest, and is doubly pained by the true destruction of Hunts Beach: Everyone will move away. What is there to go back to? A barren land with no house upon it. She can’t even begin to think about rebuilding. Not without Gene. Even with Gene. Where would they find wood that wasn’t charred? How would they come up with the money? How could they, as a family, live alone on a cinderscape?
After some exploring, Grace finds a side shop that sells remnants. Most pieces are too big or oddly shaped to work for day dresses. But she discovers, beneath a small mountain of fabric, a piece of navy blue cotton, enough to make a dress for her and something for Claire and Tom, too. Joan gave her a dollar bill as she left the house in the morning.
The cost of the navy blue cotton comes to $1.04.
“I have only a dollar,” Grace says.
The cashier hesitates. Is it worth ripping away a fragment of a fragment?
“Just take it,” she says. “What you have is fine.”
“Thank you,” says Grace, holding her wrapped parcel.
“Matthew, I wondered if you would do something for me,” Grace asks when she climbs back into the truck.
“If I can.”
“I’d like to go to Hunts Beach to see if anyone I know is still there.”
“The fire department has been pretty thorough about searching all standing houses, but it never hurts to try.”
“My father was a lobsterman,” Grace offers.
“Was he now.”
“He died when I was fourteen. Went overboard in January.”
No need to explain to Matthew what happened then.
“I’m sorry,” Matthew says.
“It would have been quick,” Grace says, relying on that not-very-comforting old saw. She has too many times pictured the minute her father was in the water before his respiratory system shut down from the shock and the cold.
“Yes, it would have been.”
“It took my mother years to get over it. She lives on what the League of Lobstermen can provide. Some years the money is adequate, sometimes not. I went to secretarial school to help out. But then I met Gene.”
“I’m sure she was happy about that.”
“Yes, she was.”
They drive through blocks of yellow and orange foliage and then through passages of black, as if flitting in and out of a train tunnel. In the green, Grace searches for pumpkins or colorful mums, anything that is a sign of normalcy.
When Matthew turns a corner, she can see from several blocks away that her entire neighborhood is gone. Her mind’s eye can trace every wall of her house, every chair, every kitchen tool, her mother’s favorite tea mug. What is she already forgetting?
“This is unbearable,” she says.
“Can’t wait for the first snow,” Matthew says. “I’m not sure I ever said that before.”
“I need to get out.”
The setting sun gives the water a shade of blue Grace has always loved. She used to think the sea the one blessing of winter: even though the world around her was bleak, the water seldom lost its color. Today, the contrast between the dead black and the rich blue is almost impossible to believe in.
She removes her shoes and puts her feet into the sand. Two or three inches down, her toes connect with wet. She moves toward the water.
She sticks a foot into the sea and then snatches it back. She is not tempted to go in—she knows the water chill of November, but she has come on a mission, even as she knows how strange it is. She thanks the ocean, that vast indifferent entity, for saving her and Claire and Tom.
News
Alone in her room, Grace sits on her bed, propped up by pillows, and reads the several newspapers she discovered in Joan’s kitchen. She learns that fires ravaged Hunts Beach and that 150 of 156 homes in another seaside community burned to the ground. Along with Hunts Beach, five other towns were completely destroyed. She discovers that 3,500 people who were trapped on a pier at Bar Harbor were saved by the Coast Guard. She had no idea the fire had reached so far down east. She reads of a couple who moved all their furniture to the barn, only to have the house saved while the barn burned. Men in planes tried unsuccessfully to make rain with dry ice, fire victims ranged in age from sixteen to eighty, and some farmers would not leave their livestock. Fire damage was estimated at $50 million, home builders planned to build one thousand homes, and Halloween was banned in Maine.
Newspapers are strewn all about her, the collection telling of the immensity of the fire and its terrible toll. From the articles, she doesn’t have a precise map of the fire, but it seems to have hugged the coast of Maine from Bar Harbor to Kittery.
The carnage of the fire amazes her yet again. So many homeless, injured, or dead. She shudders at the report of the sixteen-year-old girl who died in an evacuee motor crash. Grace imagines the panic, the speed, and the horror in the realization that in leaving the danger zone, the girl was put in harm’s way. Grace puzzles over the list of the dead and a Mr. Doe from Sanford or Biddeford. Might the body have been named Mr. Doe by a coroner, pending an investigation, while a reporter took the name literally?
Could the body be that of Gene, who left the four other men and walked into the fire, an act she would consider suicidal were it not for Tim’s letter? She remembers her fear that he might simply walk away from his life.