Jane Was Here (40 page)

It is one of many questions that will never be answered.

All of Graynier is wracked by the tragedy. Saloons are full of the shocked and sad, made sadder still by the weather. They take no joy in the rain that falls relentlessly, filling the reservoirs and coaxing new growth from lawns and forests.

COLLIN REMEMBERS EVERYTHING.
The deluge of images engulfs him, over and over, asleep and awake, extinguishing his power of speech.

He recalls waking sprawled in a blackberry bush, choking on torrid smoke-filled air. His eyes stung from the thick, suffocating haze, and his eyelids were sticky with blood seeping from cuts on his head. But he was alive and whole: he had been thrown wide of the hunting blind when it exploded.

He pried himself from the bush and rose to his feet. The upper air was so hot, the smoke so intense, he had to drop back down on all fours.

A moan came from the base of an oak, its crown on fire.

“Gita!”

Another moan.

She was alive.

Crawling over, he passed a bloodied shoe, then a broken rind of skull with black hair and clods of brain still clinging to it. Stuck in the branches of a pine was a severed human arm, its skin melted away. Collin had no time to wonder whose life was strewn about so horribly, but the images would return to him later, in the hospital.

He found Gita where the explosion had flung her headfirst into a tree trunk. Dazed and bleeding from a head wound, she gazed up at him in mute fear.

“Can you get up? We gotta run!”

She nodded once, uncertainly. Stretching his T-shirt over his nose as he’d learned in fire-safety class, Collin tugged frantically on Gita’s arm, forcing her to her feet. “Stay low!” he shouted, though she was already bent double, whimpering with pain.

He scanned the clearing for an exit: maybe they could take the stonewall path back to the bottom of the hill.

But leaping flames blocked the way, as strong winds pushed the wildfire downhill. More flames surrounded the shack’s skeleton, swarming up the trees and irradiating the forest in demonic red light. Pine needles, ablaze, snapped as they disappeared; bright cinders rained.

Beside him Gita began to choke on the air.

Where could they go?

A loud crash in the brush: they froze.

Something large was drawing near.

Shaarinen!
Collin pulled Gita down, trying to duck out of sight, hoping their camouflage paint concealed their faces.

An antlered deer burst into the clearing; three more deer followed. Their white tails lifted, they vanished as quickly as they appeared, heading toward—

The pond.

Grabbing Gita’s hand, Collin ran after them, hunched below the dark miasma of smoke as he followed the stonewall leading to Pease Pond. Gita gagged and stumbled. Clutching her hand more tightly, Collin willed her forward.

When they reached the banks of Pease Pond, she collapsed and curled up, holding her stomach. He knelt beside her, shaking her shoulders. She took her hands away, and he saw a metal fragment of pole protruding from her abdomen: the base of the tiki torch.

Without thinking, he grasped the end and pulled it out. Her shriek echoed across the water. More blood than he’d ever seen surged from the hole in her stomach.

At that moment a wallop of heat hit his back, singeing his nape. The wind had changed; the fire was now advancing in his direction, and would be here soon. He heard crackling in the dark sky; the wind had sucked the flames up to the treetops, and the crown fire was racing along the dry canopy, far ahead of the conflagration on the ground.

“Coll…,” he heard Gita whisper hoarsely.

He turned back to her. “We have to go in the water.”

She shook her head. “You go.”

“I can’t!” The terror he’d been holding in exploded. “I can’t without you! You have to come!”

Ignoring her cries, he dragged her into the shallows. The cool water seemed to revive her; as they waded to their necks, she moved her arms in a feeble swimming motion.

Collin peered through the smoke. The water was choppy ahead, oscillating strangely from the center.

At first he couldn’t comprehend what he saw: the water’s surface was stippled with darting silhouettes, like tiny skaters, some with arms outstretched. Through stinging tears, he saw the arms were antlers. The skaters were the heads of deer, alongside other animals, all swimming to the pond’s center to escape the coming flames.

He turned back to see Gita swimming slowly away, into the deeper water.

“Gita!” He took a step, and the pond bottom fell away. His old fear of water flooded him; he flailed for traction, but there was nothing to support his sneakers. Straining his chin above the surface, he paddled as Gita had taught him, breath coming in frightened gasps.

He followed the shape of her head until it disappeared behind a billow of smoke. He paddled faster. At last the haze parted and he could see her again. “Wait!” he shouted, suddenly angry with her. “We have to stay together!”

Then she was swimming towards him.

Except it wasn’t Gita. A dark animal of some kind clawed the water, swerving away when it saw Collin.

Crying, he yelled Gita’s name over and over. She never answered.

He lapsed into silence, then started paddling toward the shallows. But the water at the pond’s edge was too hot; the wildfire had encircled the banks, throwing off gaseous fumes. He swam back toward the center.

Treading water, he stared at the boiling hell he and Gita had summoned with the flick of a lighter. The evil god Shaarinen straddled the lake and unfurled his red cape of flames, laughing in great gusts of smoke at the boy warrior quailing in the pond.

An impenetrable darkness settled over the water as the fire raged. Collin felt things bumping against him: paws scratching at him as they pedaled past, long ropey muskrat tails or snakes raking his arms, blunt noses nudging him.

He couldn’t help thinking of what he’d seen beneath the water, weeks ago when he and his dad had explored the lake.

The drowned woman’s skull, her empty eye sockets, her long hair drifting
…

Suddenly he felt her.

Long wet strings brushed against his arms under the water, tangling in his hands…smooth, spongy flesh and the knob of a nose met his fingers…his sneakers kicked against the soft trunk of a submerged body…arms and legs interlaced with his.

She’s here! She wants to drag me down!

Screaming, he pushed the horror from him, thrashing through the water, swimming to a spot far away from her clutches.

Looking up, he saw the fiery tsunami roaring away from the pond toward the horizon. Another fire seemed to be approaching from the opposite direction. Maybe he and Gita would be safe soon, and could go ashore.

“Giiiii-taaaa!!”

All at once, the knowledge came to him: it wasn’t the lady’s corpse, the phantom body he’d felt under the water. It was Gita.

Drowned.

IN TIME, HE
couldn’t feel his arms and legs. The idea of sinking offered comfort: he only wanted to rest. He imagined lowering himself into the embrace of the silky scarves he used to play with from his mother’s bedroom drawer.

His head sank beneath the water; it flowed into his mouth and nose.

Then a voice spoke sharply inside his ear. A memory of Gita’s voice:

Float!

He broke to the surface, flailing and puking water. He fought not to sink a second time, his head spinning.

Float!

He remembered that first lesson in the pool, Gita’s hand under his back as she supported him in the dead man’s float. He lay spread-eagle on top of the water and concentrated on staying awake. Sleep meant sinking.

After what seemed like hours, rain pelted his upturned face. He closed his eyes against the drops.

Later the air got cooler and the smoke ebbed. He turned over, treading water to watch the fire dim as it gradually lost its life to the rain.

He swam to the shallows. Hauling himself up on a rock still warm from the blaze, he fell asleep until the firemen’s voices woke him.

COLLIN WON’T SAY
his secrets to anyone. Even when he recovers his speech, three months later, he will claim to remember nothing of the entire summer.

He will never go swimming again.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-S
IX

B
rett hasn’t packed yet.
Although he has ten days left on his lease, there is no reason to stay. Now that Jane and Collin are both gone, he doesn’t really know anyone in Graynier. Of course, now all kinds of people recognize him, especially since the fire: the druggist, the supermarket cashier, the mailman.

Like the rest of Graynier, he avoids the Poonchwallas.

There’s no one to talk to, except perhaps Elsa Graynier. He runs into her on one of his habitual walks through town.

“You haven’t been to see me, dear.” She wags a finger at him. “I’ve been wondering, did you ever find out what happened to your Jane Pettigrew?”

“No.” They say their goodbyes; he walks on, relieved she didn’t ask after his son. She didn’t like Collin; after all, he had deliberately broken her glass goblet. That was a piece of cunning: it got the kid what he wanted, to be expelled from the museum so he could visit Gita.

But no one believed Brett when he said the boy was crafty.

He explained to his in-laws how he’d lost sight of Collin at the fair, how the kid had persuaded him—begged him— to climb the ladder and then taken off the minute Brett’s back was turned.

“He set me up.”

Rolling her eyes indignantly, Veronda’s mother asked her husband, “I’m-a ask you, can a little ten-year-old boy ‘
set you up
?’”

“And I say the only one who thinks that is a damn coward.”

Then they tore into him. Brett was banished from his son’s life, maybe forever.

Brett knows he is a terrible father. Worse, he’s fine with turning his back on Collin. From the beginning, the boy was weird, not letting Brett in, which made it hard to care about him. He’s sorry about Collin’s trauma and everything, but—

What had he been doing up there on Rowell Hill?

If Brett could really speak his mind, he would say the boy got what he deserved. Except what kind of father thinks that? A damn coward.

He’s just too young to be a parent; he doesn’t have that unconditional love stuff in him. Maybe one day he will, if he ever has a child by someone he loves, who loves him back, or at least likes him, or is just nice to him.

Back in the house on Sycamore Street, Brett works at the computer, makes French toast for his dinner and washes up, then climbs the stairs to the garret, finishing work around 10. Too early for bed. He should pack, leave in the morning, get back to Brooklyn, sleep in his own bed.

But he doesn’t want to leave this house. He doesn’t understand why, but it feels like his home.

That first day, driving the RV full of camping equipment, his little boy beside him—strangers then, destined always to be strangers now—what made him turn the wheel and enter an obscure town? He could just as easily have kept going.

He would be hard put to describe that feeling: when there is no decision made, you’re just doing exactly what you are supposed to do. Being in this house is like that: being exactly where he is supposed to be. It’s a feeling of clarity, of pure grace, as simple as turning his face to the sun.

Nevertheless, he lays out his T-shirts, slides his pants off the hangers, and starts to pack.

Collin’s room has already been thoroughly cleaned out by Brett’s in-laws. As a kind of rebuke, they left the bed unmade. Half-heartedly he draws the bedspread over the rumpled sheets, then proceeds to Jane’s room, though he knows she left no trace, and he promised himself he wouldn’t think about her.

The volume of romantic poetry he bought her is on the bed. Had it been there before? He thought she took it with her.

It’s lying open to a poem.

“To Jane,”
by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

He snatches the book up, switching on the bedside lamp, and begins to read.

The keen stars were twinkling,

And the fair moon was rising among them,

Dear Jane.

The guitar was tinkling,

But the notes were not sweet till you sung them