Chapter 4: The Fire She Doesn't Remember
The vestry at St. Mark's was small and too warm. I sat by the table where they kept the communion trays, my hands flat on the arms of my chair. The door to the sanctuary was closed but I could hear the low hum of people trying not to talk too loud. My blue dress had ridden up a little on my legs and I smoothed it.
Emily stood with her back to me, facing the stained-glass window. She hadn't looked at me since Margaret had brought us both in here. Her veil was crooked.
I didn't mean to think about the fire right then. But the smell of that vestry - old wood polish and candle wax - took me back. I was nine. Our house on Maple had that same smell in the hallway.
It had been a Saturday in February. Mom had put Emily down for a nap in the back bedroom and I was in the living room doing math homework. The space heater in our room tipped. I remembered the sound first, not the smoke, a soft thump and then the hiss of the rug catching.
By the time I got to the doorway the room was gray. Emily was four and still in that toddler bed with the rail. She wasn't crying. She was just standing there coughing, frozen.
I went in. That was all I did. I went in and picked her up. She was light. I had her against my hip and I turned to go back out, but the curtain had caught and the heat came up fast against my legs and back. I didn't feel it as pain at first, just pressure. We fell in the doorway. Dad found us there when he ran in from the garage.
The doctors told my parents the burns on my lower back and legs were deep and the smoke had done damage, but the spinal injury was from the fall and the beam that came down as Dad pulled us out. I was in the children's hospital for eleven weeks. Emily had a cough for three days and a small pink mark on her forearm that faded by kindergarten. She doesn't remember any of it.
My parents never put those hospital photos in an album. When I was twelve I found a manila envelope in Mom's closet with the Polaroids the nurse had taken for the records. My back, my legs. Mom found me looking and didn't yell. She just sat down on the closet floor and said, "We don't show these, Claire. It makes Emily feel like it's her fault. And you wouldn't want her to carry that, would you?" I said no. She took the envelope and put it on the high shelf. I never asked again.
The vestry door opened and Margaret came in with Daniel close behind her. Daniel's bow tie was undone, hanging loose. He looked at me, then quickly at Emily.
"Claire," Margaret said quietly. She didn't touch me, but she stood near my chair. "I told Daniel what your mother told me."
Daniel swallowed. "Is it true?"
I didn't know what he'd been told, so I waited.
Margaret looked at Emily's back, then back at me. Her voice was even, like she was trying not to make it bigger than it was. "When Daniel and Emily got engaged, I called your mother. Just to welcome her. We talked a long time. She told me about the fire. She told me you carried Emily out when you were nine. She said you were in the hospital all that spring. She said the doctors didn't know if you'd walk again."
Daniel's hands tightened on the back of a wooden chair. He stared at my chair, at my legs under the lace.
"Mom said it was a small house fire," Emily said suddenly, still facing the window. Her voice was thin. "She said you were both trapped. She never said you -"
"She didn't lie," I said. It was the first thing I'd said in that room. My voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to. "She just didn't say the parts that were hard to hear."
Daniel took a step toward me, then stopped. "Your mom told Margaret you saved her. And Emily told you to sit in the back because you're... because of the pictures?"
I nodded once. The air felt tight in my throat but I didn't cry. I had decided a long time ago I wouldn't use that story to make people feel sorry for me. I just wanted it to be true out loud for once.
Emily finally turned around. Her mascara had run a little. When she looked at me, really looked at the chair and the scars she knew were under the dress, her face did something I hadn't seen since we were kids. It crumpled.
"I didn't remember," she whispered. "I swear I didn't remember it like that. Mom always said you fell. She said we both fell."
Margaret didn't interrupt. She let the silence sit there.
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Daniel looked from Emily to me, and I could see him doing the math that Margaret must have done in the aisle. If the girl in the blue lace dress had been pushed to the back for how she looked, what that meant about the girl in the white dress who'd asked her to go there.
He didn't say anything yet. He just stood there between us, breathing hard, and for the first time that morning I felt like he actually saw me.
