Burn Our Bodies Down(29)

eleven





i follow her upstairs to a landing, off which sprout two hallways. Between them, a window seat overlooks the back acres of the farm. Gram leads me down the left-hand hallway, past a number of closed doors, until she reaches one standing slightly ajar. Inside, deep blue walls, white trim, and a white bedspread, delicate scrollwork above the bars of the headboard. It’s been dusted but I can tell it was recently from the streaks left on the nightstand.

“It’s nice,” I say. And then, feeling silly, “Really nice. Thank you. Whose room was this?” It’s not what I want to ask and we both know it, judging from the frown that flashes across Gram’s face.

“Nobody’s.” She crosses to the bed and pulls back the spread. “For the most part. There’s the dresser,” she continues before I have time to ask what she means. She nods to the corner. Next to the chest of drawers, a crooked door is shut. “Bathroom’s through there.”

I wander over while Gram fusses with the linens behind me. Rest my hand on the latch and gently lift it, leaving the door open as I ease inside. A black-tile floor, and a claw-foot tub angled across the left-hand wall, black porcelain with brass taps. The lights are off and there are no windows, but I catch my reflection in the mirror over a pedestal sink to my right. The wall opposite me is taken up by built-in drawers and cupboards, stacks and stacks of them, the kind of storage you need when your family is too big to fit in a run-down Calhoun apartment.

“The water’s all right in there,” Gram calls. “We draw from two different wells. And I put a pair of pajamas in the dresser, and a few other things. They’ll do until we can get you something of your own.”

I come back into the bedroom, open the top dresser drawer and pull out a pile of cream silk. A pair of shorts and a matching button-up, a frill at the neck. Gram bustles past me into the bathroom and sets about pulling clean towels out of one of the drawers, not realizing what she’s done. Because there, ironed onto the neck of the pajama top, is a small woven label, with a name handwritten on it in faded, bleeding ink.

Josephine Nielsen. These were Mom’s.

“Sorry,” I say, my throat tight. “I know it’s early but I’d just like to rest now. And wash my hair.”

Quiet, for a moment. “Of course,” Gram says. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

She sidles by me with a touch to my back, then leaves me, and I listen as her footsteps echo along the hall, the stairs creaking as she heads down them. Outside, through the narrow window, the air is just starting to clear of smoke. I sit down on the bed, feel the springs separate underneath me.

This wasn’t her room, I don’t think. Not the one she grew up in. But these are her clothes, and this is her house, and God, I wish she were here. She should be here. Telling me stories, sharing this with me. Showing me all the spots where she carved her name, showing me all the secrets she and Fairhaven kept from my grandmother together. Instead it’s just me. It’s always just me, even when it was the two of us in our apartment, but I feel the emptiness next to me more than I ever have.

I pull the photo from the Bible out of my pocket, the one of Mom that makes my heart ache, and stick it in the drawer of the nightstand before I go into the bathroom and change out of my shorts and T-shirt. I leave my sneakers in the sink to keep the ash and earth staining them from getting everywhere.

There’s no shower, so I run a bath. The water isn’t rosy, like what’s downstairs. None of the texture, the grit. Once the tub is full, I ease in, my clothes strewn across the black floor, all ash and earth.

Heat licking across my skin, but it’s like breathing again, and I remember the fire. The air clouding with gray, the earth gone dry, and no way out. Not for that girl. I owe her. I couldn’t save her, so I should at least know what it felt like for her to die.

I take a deep breath and duck under the surface of the bath. Eyes squeezed shut, fingers curled into fists, the porcelain smooth against my back. The water stings the open sores across my forehead, sets my hair drifting. Stay under, I tell myself. Even as the air gets tight, as it bursts in my chest.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t get out. She crawled and she crawled and she died, out there, she died, and I didn’t save her, and I don’t know who she is but she’s mine, isn’t she?

I burst up out of the water, gasping. Enough. Whatever should’ve happened, this is where I am. Nothing will change that now.

The water is thick with dirt. I can taste it, can feel it under my nails. I fumble for the shampoo, wash my hair as quickly as I can and hurry out of the tub. When I scrub myself dry, I’m so rough I tear my skin like tissue paper, leave blood behind.

Mom’s pajamas slide on easily, just a little too big. I wonder how old she was when she wore them, if maybe she already knew, then, that I was on the way.

I avoid the mirror as I head back out into the bedroom. I don’t need to see myself looking like Mom, like the girl I saw in the field. I just need to go to sleep.

But it takes me forever. Hours, until the moon is high, the sky blacker than black. I’m on my back, stretched out on top of the covers, sweating even with the window open. I can hear the breeze, though it’s not reaching through to touch my skin. The fire engines are all long gone. Either the fire is out, or they’ve given up.