The Stars Are Fire(58)

The scream is so loud, so guttural, so not like a child’s, and yet a child’s, that Grace yells Claire’s name as she runs downstairs and into the kitchen. First she sees the terrible apparition and then, in the corner, her mother holding Tom with Claire’s face buried in her skirt. Claire has wet her overalls.

In a voice as calm as she can manage, Grace tells her mother to take the children upstairs. When she turns to her husband, it’s all she can do to stand straight and not cover her mouth.

He is hideous.

The left side of his face seems still to be on fire with its skin resembling a gruesome picture in a medical textbook. His ear is gone, his scalp raw, and his left eye appears to have melted. His right eye and his mouth are mostly normal, though the left corner of his lip is indistinct. He wears a silk scarf around his neck, and she realizes that the arm of his tattered coat is empty. She can’t imagine what the skin on his torso looks like.

“Are you in pain?” she asks, her first words to her husband.

“Yes.”

“What can I do for you?”

He tries to shake his good arm out of his coat, and she understands: he wants his coat off. Without looking at his face, she begins to lower the empty sleeve from his shoulder. He yelps—she must have touched him too hard. She lets the coat fall to the ground, then picks it up and drapes it over the back of a chair.

“Sit,” she gestures, staring at the pinned sleeve.

“Can’t sit.”

“Can you lie down?” she asks.

He nods. “I need water.”

She pours a glass of water at the sink and hands it to him. He raises it to his mouth and at least half of it dribbles down the left side of his face and falls onto his shirt, made of an unusually thin material.

“Come with me,” she says.

The irony of Grace leading her husband to another room in his boyhood house is not lost on her. And can’t be on him.

Her hands shaking, she checks her watch. An hour before she is to collect Dr. Lighthart, which will not happen now. She doesn’t know the telephone number at the farm, and she isn’t sure she ever gave him the number of Merle’s house. How long will he wait before he realizes she’s not coming? Would he then dare to drive to her house? She prays that he won’t.

She points to the sofa. In what looks to be a torturous set of moves, Gene manages to lie on his right side. She finds a pillow and puts it under his head. As she backs away from him, the entire construct of her life collapses. She will live in this house with this injured man on the couch until one of them dies. She will never again go to a job. She will never make love again. She will not have friends. Slowly, she sinks into the armchair under the tremendous weight of her future.



Gene



“I have to go to Claire and Tom,” Grace says to Gene. He barely moves his head. He has an inner look she’s familiar with from the clinic—the anticipation of pain.

She finds her family upstairs in her bedroom. Grace walks first to Claire and holds her in a tight embrace. “You were scared, weren’t you?” she asks her daughter, whose clothes have been changed.

Claire, sucking her thumb, nods.

“Do you remember Daddy?”

Claire gives a more exaggerated nod.

“Well, Daddy went to help others on the night of the fire, and he got burned. What you just saw was Daddy with some burns on him.”

Claire drops the thumb and opens her eyes as wide as they will go. She stares into the middle distance, caught halfway between fear and incomprehension.

“He was a hero, your daddy. And sometimes heroes come back with cuts and bumps on them. That’s what happened to him.” She sets Claire on her lap so that she can see her daughter more easily. “Would you like to go out and see him? He’s lying down.”

“Nooooo,” Claire keens as she whips her head from side to side.

Tom, crawling on the bedspread, stops to listen to his sister.

“That’s all right,” says Grace, holding her daughter close and rubbing her back. Grace catches her mother’s eye, in which she reads an agitated mix of fear, despair, and stoicism.

“We need to make some decisions,” Grace says.

“Is he staying?”

“We’ll have to put him in the library. I’m not sure he can make it upstairs.”

“The police said he’d been in a coma. Came to a week ago in a New Hampshire hospital, but couldn’t remember his name until yesterday.”


“How is Claire?” Gene asks from the couch as Grace sits across from him.

“She’s fine,” says Grace. “She just needs a little time is all.”

“My own children didn’t recognize me.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be. It’s reality.” He swivels his good eye, taking in the room. “I was never allowed in here. My bedroom and the kitchen were my playrooms. I was brought in here only to meet company and then disappear.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that. What are you doing here?”

Grace crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Here? In this house? Our own house burned down.”

“So I’m told. But my mother’s house?”

“Your children were homeless. My mother, too. I didn’t have a choice.” She pauses. “Were you in a coma?”