A-Splendid-Ruin(66)

Yes, I could bear this.

The echo of my thought startled me. The weight of the future it contained frightened me more than anything else that had happened at Blessington. I looked up from the page, past the heavy rose bobbling now in the breeze. I had found a way to be here. I had found a way to survive, and that was the first step to acceptance.

But I did not want to accept this. I could not. My fear was too great that I might become complacent, one of the many women treading this endless circular path and finding it pleasant, commenting upon the good stew on the days the commissioners were here, reading and chatting and pretending this was all some society social hour with a hostess who made a truly terrible tea.

Belonging, just as I’d always wanted.

Not here. Please don’t let it be here.

I stared at my hand clutching that pencil, awareness and regret chasing one another. I did not want to give up drawing, yet I knew what would happen if I did not. It would save me, just as it always had. It would make everything all right, but in the end, that would numb any necessity or desire I had to get out of this place. It would give the Sullivans exactly what they wanted. It would destroy me.

I scratched out the lines of the room I had begun to draw. I banished it from my memory. Then I tossed the pencil to the ground. I shoved the sketchbook beneath the bench, and even as my heart ached at releasing it, I wished for rain to soak it, to cover it in mildew and remove its temptation.

I would make my life bearable here, because I had to, but I would never accept it, and I vowed not to draw another thing until I was out of this place. One day, I would be free, and when that day came, I would do what I could to take back what was mine. I would make them pay for what they’d done to me.

In the meantime, I was the seed, biding its time, waiting for the soil to warm and soften, stretching my roots, reaching for the sun.

I did not expect the earth to move itself for me. But when it did, I was ready.





PART THREE:

RETRIBUTION

SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL 18, 1906

EARLY MORNING





I was already awake when the roar thundered from a sky blued with encroaching dawn, a howling from nowhere, from everywhere. I struggled to my elbows as the walls began to shake. The bed rocked as if it were desperately trying to escape the bolts anchoring it to the floor. A train—no, something—had hit the building, or no—what was this?

The floor rose and fell in disorienting, nauseating waves. The room bucked and jerked; I grabbed the sides of the bed to keep from being thrown. The ceiling split with a thunderous crack. I looked up, too stunned to be afraid, and someone’s bare leg thrust through amid a rain of plaster dust. The building lurched, my stomach lurching with it, and the ceiling snapped shut again with a rumbling groan, severing the foot, which fell onto me with a hard thump, spurting a spray of wet into my face. Blood.

I screamed and lunged from the bed just as the floor upended and tossed me down. I dug my fingers into the floor, trying to claw into the wood, to anchor myself. The building twisted and moaned and shook me loose again. Nothing steady, nothing fixed. The disembodied foot danced across the floor as if it were alive. The thick round panes of my little window smashed, one after another, shards jumping and skittering. The ceiling rattled, plaster fell in chunks, raising choking clouds of dust. I was going to die. We were all going to die, and it was going to hurt. Terrified, I dragged myself beneath the bed.

Then the shaking stopped. Barely long enough to catch my breath, to think, It’s over, to hear the screams and the wails coming from beyond the door, before it started again, more violently than before.

A terrible grinding filled my ears, vibrating into my skull, and then there was no more floor, nothing beneath at all, only a pitch into absence and darkness. I grabbed for something, anything, but I was falling and all I could think was No. Please. Not now, after all this. Not yet.

I don’t know how long it was before I opened my eyes to dust and grit and gloom. I wasn’t dead after all, but trapped. The foot, thankfully, had fallen into its own hell. The bottom of my bed was only a breath from my face; the heavy metal frame pinned me in place. I flexed my fingers, dislodging rubble, trying to pull loose, failing. I could not tell where I was in the world, or even if the world still existed. I could not even tell if I was hurt.

Sounds came to me in fractured bursts: muffled groaning, faraway sobbing, brick and stone crashing, someone shouting, “Watch out!” A horse screaming.

“Over here!” someone called from a distance.

I raised my hips. The bed did not budge. Trapped, yes. Buried alive. With growing panic I punched at the frame with my one free hand, and then again. Nothing.

“Help! I’m here! Help!” Desperate effort made me cough, and then I couldn’t stop hacking—eyes watering, throat stinging, so much dust. When the spasms finally subsided, I twisted, or tried to. As if in response, the world trembled once more, the ruins shaking, a quiet roar now, but no less terrifying. I closed my eyes, once again expecting both pain and death. More stones cracked and broke and fell, brick and plaster and wood, a distant explosion, a panicked cry, but the earth was merciful this time, and it was just enough to unsettle the rubble, enough to free my other arm and shift the bedframe. I could ease from beneath it, but I couldn’t get past the beam that had crushed it. No amount of prying or digging, no matter how frenzied, moved me an inch. The quiet was deadly. I could hardly breathe, my lungs full of dust, my nostrils and my mouth caked with it.