When the Sky Fell on Splendor(72)

Her eyes had flicked to Dad, who’d given a little smirk and a nod. It’s extraordinary, he’d agreed. I was probably no older than seven, but even then I’d seen through his words: You’re extraordinary.

The tracks were hardly overgrown, devoid of rubble and trash—trains probably passed through here still, though without any reason to stop.

Ahead, fog clustered around the towering, twenty-story blast furnace like the ghost of the ashy carbon dioxide that used to spit out from it. Drizzle bounced off the metal incline ramp that led up to its mouth. One of the skip cars still sat a third of the way up the metal-webbed tunnel, permanently paused, probably still holding its fuel or ore, while the other cars were visible at the bottom.

It was hard not to imagine that rusty little box holding its breath, waiting to see the outcome of the chaos that had left it stranded, suspended six stories over the ground.

It looked sad, the way the toys you didn’t really like did.

At least it wasn’t the kind of thing kids lined up to shoot with BB guns, like the Jenkins House.

Even after five years, the mill still felt like a kind of holy ground, a gravestone over something you felt in your bones you shouldn’t disturb.

What little graffiti had been dashed across the rusty metal and gray brick was limited to prayers and bittersweet platitudes. Across the doors of the building was written in bright violet, RIP NICK. I’LL MISS YOUR BIG BALD HEAD, BROTHER.

My gut twisted like a wrung-out rag. There could’ve been any number of Nicks working at the mill that day, but Nick Colasanti Sr. was the first to come to mind. Was he bald? In the few pictures I’d seen, he was always wearing a mesh-backed hat. When I tried to picture him, I just saw Nick in the hat.

If the accident had happened a few years later, it could’ve been him—Nick Jr. or any of us. Not Remy—he’d been college bound since first grade, even if all he really wanted was to skateboard, and not Sofía, who’d been planning to be a lawyer ever since the pre-accident summer she’d spent binge-watching Law and Order: SVU with her grandma on a visit to Splendor.

But Arthur, Nick, Levi, me. It could’ve just as easily been any of us.

There was a padlock on the door, but it had been clipped. Apparently not everyone avoided this place.

My skin crawled. Wayne Hastings hadn’t.

Any other time, that would’ve scared me off, but any other time, I wouldn’t have come here in the first place.

As I stumbled inside, the ground beneath my feet was soft, with the give of moss or thick carpet, and yet clouds of soot and dust kicked up around me. Another tremor dropped through me, a sounding line that couldn’t find the bottom of my stomach.

I’d been in here exactly once. Mom had asked Arthur and me to drop off Mark’s lunch when he’d forgotten it. The place was blurry in my memory, a messy amalgam of what the place that nearly killed my brother would have looked like, not what it did look like.

What it did look like was somehow worse.

I had expected the black: the ash coating everything, the rubble where the explosion had begun; the metal oxidized and flaking from where the roof had been blown clear, leaving millions of dollars of equipment exposed, just like the skip car.

The white was what surprised me. The gallons or tons of foam or powder that had been sprayed over everything.

If someone had led you, blindfolded, to this room, you might for a moment think you were looking at mounds of snow. Or heaps of chewed-up newspaper, piled for the ultimate papier-maché project. The softness of the ground made sense now.

I was walking on that last moment, when firemen wandered through this place, eyes stinging, hearts pounding, hoping—against all evidence—there were more survivors, people trapped under rubble near the fringes of the room, with no more than minor burns.

I doubled over, gagging. My eyes stung from smoke that wasn’t there, from chemical-laced smells I couldn’t place.

I didn’t know how praying worked, or if it did, but I prayed right then for something that had already happened.

I prayed Mark had had his back turned. I prayed he hadn’t seen the rush of hot metal coming toward him. Maybe he’d even been staring out the window at the field beyond, tracing Fibonacci curves in wildflowers, counting spirals in a dandelion, doing any of the things I pictured my brother doing, when I could conjure up anything but that steadily beeping hospital room.

Purpose. Meaning, connection. That was what he’d found in those things, in drawing them. I hoped that had been what he’d seen in those moments, even if it was a mirage, rippling through the heat waves sent across the room.

It was possible: He’d been almost to the door, heading out for a lunch break, when it happened. They’d found him caught under a metal pipe that had been thrown by the blast, but the burns on his feet and legs and hands weren’t so bad they wouldn’t be usable if he woke up.

How usable, though? Would he ever draw again?

I backed up to the door as a desperate, helpless scream worked its way out of my chest.

Anger, anger, so much anger. And here I was, as alone as I’d felt for five years. Finally safe to let it out.

Spit flew from my mouth, mixed with the piles of everything around me. I doubled over and screamed again, until I felt that jittery energy flowing out of me in every direction. Until a—probably the last surviving—light bulb surged bright and snapped apart, raining glass into the desert of ash. Until the red-painted fire bells on the wall began to scream with me.