Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (23 page)

As the old consciousness burns away, a new consciousness emerges—it has always been there but the blaring noise of living has obscured it. Seeing without eyes, knowing without thoughts. Feeling without sensation. Annette sees her body and feels for it without sight or emotion, rather with a kind of serene knowledge of the ways of the universe. She watches it burn as she watches the house burn, and the deer and the cattle. The fire belongs to the earth and has its place there. And there is, in this place of mortal fear and terror, a tremendous energy released by fire, the energy of things that fire can't burn.

She's conscious of the prairie, and the people struggling to contain the fire. She knows about the lumbering tractor throwing up dirt in its race across the field trying to escape the flames, and how the smoke overwhelms it. The young woman scrambling down from the cab and racing along a narrow corridor of grass with walls of fire on each side—she knows that and how the woman stops and looks skyward, waving her arms frantically until she collapses from the smoke and heat, and drags herself up and falls again with the flames closing in on her.

A small airplane emerges from the cloud of smoke and sets down, and the father, masked and coated in yellow armor, strides through the narrowing corridor to the pit and throws himself upon the burning body of his beloved daughter. He lifts his child in his arms, pressing her close to his bulky armor, and then he strides through the flames like a god.

Just as she knows all things now, she knows her mother is with her.

I'm taking you home, Annie

Mama, how beautiful you are

It's my love you see There's nothing to restrain it now Nothing to tie it down No need to hide it

What is this, Mama? This place?

We're on our way home

I know this place

We've been here before Can you see the light? Can you feel the light?

It feels like your arms around me when I was little When I was safe and loved

It's much greater than that

Mama, stay close to me

Now she is aware of her daughter's bedroom and her daughter asleep, her hair fanned across her pillow. The child's sweet fingers are splayed over the whiskers and yellow glass eye of the stuffed-toy mountain lion her mother has given her for Christmas, and which she named Cosette. She breathes softly, regularly, as yet ignorant of her terrible loss; and the ache that troubled the mother grows deeper.

Now she is conscious of her mother slipping away, moving toward the light. Receding toward an untouchable eternity.

I've lost the light, I don't feel it anymore

The serenity she had felt is shattered, and she recognizes with a lingering memory of earthly knowledge that this anguish is choice.

I won't leave you. Not for all the beauty of heaven. I can't leave you. I can't leave this earth. I love you too much.

She knows then that there was never a choice to be made. It was always this.

The peace that settles over her has none of the beauty she knew earlier, but the anguish is gone. She is aware of her mother's piano, and her sleeping child, the passports and tickets on the dresser in the room next door, her father in the bathroom shaving with his electric razor.

She touches her daughter's face, and her lonely spirit rejoices.

* * *

Ethan had been setting backfires with a few brave hands up north of the main fire, and one of his men had been overcome by smoke and had to be taken to the local hospital. On the way into town he got Tom Mackey's call. They'd flown Katie Anne to the Burn Center at the University of Kansas Hospital.

Speeding down the interstate toward Kansas City he muttered frantic prayers, and his eyes, already inflamed and dried from the smoke and heat and wind, burned with tears. Katie Anne's vanity and selfishness now seemed to him like small blemishes on a character that was ultimately sound and good. He tried to prepare himself for the worst. But nothing could have prepared him for the looks on the faces of Betty Sue and Tom Mackey when they turned toward him as he came rushing down the hospital corridor. Their eyes were flooded with the kind of pain he had spent a lifetime avoiding, and he would have given anything to turn and run. He could have borne the pain alone, but this look in the eyes of parents when their only child is being taken from them, this made the breath catch in his chest, and he took Betty Sue in his arms so that he wouldn't have to look into her eyes. He felt her wither up in his arms, a small, slight force unequal to the burden. Tom stood beside him, looking down at the ground, his nails biting into the soft felt rim of his hat. His soot-darkened face was streaked with tears.

"How is she?"

Neither of them answered for a moment. It was Betty Sue who finally spoke. "She was burned pretty badly. But it's not the burns..." She broke down.

"She inhaled so much smoke."

"Where is she?"

"Through those doors," Tom answered.

"Ethan... be prepared."

"It's okay."

"She looks..."

"It's okay."

In the Burn Center they directed him to a curtained-off bed. He couldn't see much of her through the jungle of monitors and tubes and the lab-coated nurses and doctors tending to her. Her face was bandaged, all but the eyes it seemed, but he didn't want to look too closely.

"Mr. Brown?"

Ethan turned. "Yes."

"I'm Dr. Eagleton. The doctor in charge."

"How is she?"

"The burns are severe, mostly to her face and upper body. She's a healthy young woman, but these hours are critical. She could turn around at any moment. We're doing everything we can to pull her through."

"She's pregnant," Ethan said. "About eight weeks, I think."

"Then we'd better do an ultrasound."

"I'm the only one who knows. We haven't told her parents yet."

"I understand."

Ethan stepped up to her bedside and waited while they wheeled in the ultrasound equipment. He wanted to hold her hand but he didn't dare touch her. All the sights of injuries he'd seen, broken bones and mangled hands and cattle carcasses after the vultures had ripped them apart, but his stomach wasn't ready for what fire had done to this girl. The worst part was bandaged but one side of her face was exposed. He could barely recognize her.

He watched as the doctor moved the ultrasound wand over her jell-smeared abdomen. Her skin was perfect, as smooth and beautiful as he remembered it.

"Mr. Brown, I want you to see this."

The doctor directed Ethan's attention to the monitor.

"Your wife's not pregnant."

Ethan stared at the grainy image of her womb.

"What do you mean?"

"There's no sign of a fetus."

"Are you sure?"

"Could she have miscarried?"

"She didn't say so. She talked about it just a few days ago, about being pregnant."

"You were married recently, weren't you?"

"Last week."

"It's possible she missed a period or two. That's a very stressful time for young women."

Ethan left the room and headed down the corridor, away from the waiting room. Looking for a place to hide himself, away from Betty Sue and Tom. He wandered along hallways and finally found a lounge area in another wing, where he sat in a chair in a corner by himself.

Little things began coming back to him, observations he had shut away in the back of his mind until now. How he'd once come into the kitchen when she was putting away groceries, and he'd noticed a box of tampons on the counter. She'd quickly slipped it back into the plastic bag, and then he'd been distracted and didn't think about it anymore.

She'd talked about her morning sickness and said she didn't have much of an appetite. Those weeks before the wedding he rarely ate at home, nevertheless she always cooked for him and left something in the fridge. The leftovers would disappear, and he thought she'd thrown them out.

They were sleeping together then, and he recalled that there were a few days when she wouldn't let him get close to her. She'd said she wasn't feeling well, but now he wondered if it was because she'd been having her period.

As he remembered all these things, the extent of her ruse became clear to him.

* * *

Eliana crept quietly out of bed and made her way along the dark hallway. She closed the kitchen door behind her and groped along the wall until she found the light. On the kitchen table was her mother's mug where she'd left it that morning, when she'd been drinking her coffee when she was still alive. The little girl went to it and sat down and cradled the thing in her small hands. It was trim and delicate, painted with sheep grazing in a green pasture with a cerulean blue sky and white clouds. The porcelain inside was veined with fine cracks, and the child stared down it like it was a deep, dark well.

She took a sip of the cold, stale coffee; it tasted awful but she forced herself to drink it.

If I drink this it'll bring you back.

That morning she'd listened in the hallway while the sheriff told her grandfather that her mother had been caught in the fire. How they'd seen her car in front of the farmhouse and sent a deputy to find her, but by that time the house was already burning. When Eliana stepped into the room the sheriff turned to her with an embarrassed, pained expression; he told her he was very sorry, and then he put his hat on and left. She knew something terrible had happened to her mother, but she didn't understand.

After the sheriff left, her grandfather got a bottle of bourbon from a cabinet and locked himself in his bedroom. She knocked on the door but he wouldn't answer. She went to the window and watched for her mother to return, and after a while she went back and knocked on his door again. When she began to cry, he opened the door and glared at her; he reeked of liquor and she was afraid of him. He told her to go to bed and leave him alone. When she tried to cling to him he pushed her away and told her that Nell would have to take her because he didn't know what he could do with a little bastard girl who couldn't speak proper American.

After that she went into the backyard and called Bubba and stretched her hands through the chain-link fence to feel the comfort of his soft black fur. She pressed her face to the fence so he could lick away her tears. She kept waiting for her grandfather to holler at her to come inside, and leave the dog alone, but he never did.

When Bubba ran off she piled up dry leaves and made a bed for herself in the dirt behind the bushes, pretending she was a baby foal and her mother had been sold to a wealthy sheikh and taken far away. She hid there and whimpered and neighed and pawed the earth with her knuckles.

The sky was very dark that morning, and the wind blew black ash over her and the town and the prairie. Her mother's ashes mixed with ashes of the trees, the grasses, the animals.

In the afternoon when her mother still hadn't returned, she went inside and knocked on her grandfather's bedroom door; there was no answer and she was afraid that he too had died and left her alone. She went out the front door and took off down the street, searching for Nell's house, but she didn't know how to find it and was afraid she'd get lost. She thought about going to school, but she was afraid her mother wouldn't look for her there, so she went back home and waited in her room. She unpacked the children's Bible her mother had bought her at Christmas, and she sat in bed with her arm around Cosette and read stories and prayed for her mother to come home.

She'd fallen asleep, and now it was dark and she was very hungry. In the kitchen she set the table for three, with place mats and napkins folded carefully on the left as her mother had taught her, and she poured herself the last of the milk and sat down and finished the box of graham crackers. Then she climbed up on the counter on her knees and opened the cabinet. As she grabbed hold of an upper shelf, it tilted toward her, sending heavy tins of peaches in syrup, green beans and chicken noodle soup crashing down on her head and the floor. Eliana screamed and covered her head with her hands, and when the terrible noise had finally stopped she looked up to see her grandfather swaying unsteadily in the doorway.

"What are you doing?" he bellowed, and his voice seemed even more terrible to her than the crashing tins and glass. Cans were rolling across the floor and a jar of homemade apricot jam lay in a puddle of shattered glass.

Quickly she scurried down from the counter and shot under the kitchen table and hid.

"What are you doing?" he shouted.

When she didn't reply he said he'd drag her out and whip her with his belt if she didn't come out right now.

She crawled out and stood, terrified, facing him.

"I'm sorry," she whispered contritely.

"What in God's name were you doing?"

"I was hungry."

"So you come in and make a mess in the kitchen?"

"I didn't do it on purpose, Grandpa."

"Well, clean it up! Clean it all up!" he commanded, waving his gnarly finger at the child, the jam and the soup cans, as though sentencing them all to hell.