Last Dance (17 page)

Lee marveled that Kip could switch gears from the fire to interrogate Gary and find out the precise situation he was in.

“No,” Gary said. “She just all of a sudden wasn’t there.”

Kip shook her head firmly. “I’m sure Beth Rose is just sitting in your car, or else in the girls’ room, or even dancing with somebody else, Gary. Check it out in that order and once you’ve found her come back here to fight the fire.” She relieved him of his buckets and forgot him. “You!” she said, handing the buckets to a waiter.

It was not, however, a waiter.

It was Mr. Martin, the manager.

He had been sitting happily in the resort dining hall, talking with a bunch of people having dinner after a wedding rehearsal. One of the guys was a mountain climber and had some great stories to tell. It was only when the bride-to-be mentioned that Rushing River Inn no longer seemed to have any waiters that Mr. Martin realized something was amiss.

We walked swiftly to the kitchen, annoyance building up quickly, and found the kitchen filled with teenagers filling every available container with water.

His hands went cold.

If Kip had ordered him to carry a bucket, it would have slipped out of his hands.

But two things he saw instantly: first, that the fire was not a threat to the Inn itself, not now anyway; and second, that the brown-haired girl who had cleared things up at the pool was now in control of the fire.

He blinked, and stepped back inside. He called the emergency number himself to be sure that had been done—and it had, they told him. They had just gotten a few crew, and the trucks were leaving now. Then he walked back to the wedding party and asked each man to take up a fire extinguisher.

“Hey,” said the bride indignantly. “Aren’t you an equal opportunity fire fighter?”

But Mr. Martin had no time to worry about that: he just wanted the people who could carry those heavy things the most easily, and he didn’t want any bulky, flimsy dresses catching fire.

For the first time in his hotel-managing life he ignored his guests and ran back to the fire, to have a sixteen-year-old girl hand him a bucket and tell him to stand in line.

G
ARY HAD DIFFICULTY OBEYING
his wrestling coach and got into heavy arguments when his father gave him orders and spent a good many hours resisting his teachers, and he was not always the most obedient employee.

But he never thought twice about following Kip’s instructions.

It was Kip. She knew what she was doing.

Stumbling through the mass of teenagers who were now pouring out of the ballroom and crossing the croquet lawn to join in the firefight, Gary raced down hill to his car. He took a short cut through the formal rose garden and paid the price with badly scratched hands.

Be in the car, be in the car! prayed Gary.

Be mad at me, be as mad as you want, Beth! Just be in the car. Not at the bottom of a cliff.

But she was not sitting there pouting.

Gary turned, gasping for breath and headed uphill again. The slope seemed a lot steeper than when he had escorted the fragile Anne up it a few hours ago. He was more winded than he wanted to admit. The gravel slipped under his shoes, and he momentarily lost his balance, reminding him horribly of Beth Rose’s fall.

Con took the next two buckets. The wind that whipped the fire along whipped through Con’s dark hair and lifted it from his forehead. He was sure Kip was right. Beth Rose was, after all, much too careful to get anyplace near the edge. They hadn’t heard her scream because she had gone back to the dance. They had flung themselves into a panic over nothing.

Half laughing, Con said to Kip, “I’ll feel like such a jerk if all along Beth Rose had just been fixing her hair in the girls’ room with Anne.” He had a charming smile, and he used it, sharing the joke with Kip.

Kip was much too strung out to worry about how her words sounded. She only knew that she had been wanting to tell Con Winters off since the day Anne had decided to leave high school. “You
are
a jerk, Con,” Kip said. “It won’t hurt you to feel like one.”

One by one the fire extinguishers were lugged to the scene, but the fire was so hot that no one could get very close, and the streams of chemicals put out by the extinguishers accomplished little.

The wind picked up instead of dying down.

People kept shifting from one side of the fire to another to keep out of the heat and away from the reaching flames. Kip moved all girls to the kitchen end of the line because their flaring dresses were too likely to catch sparks.

Nobody seemed to care about clothes. Dresses girls had spent a month searching for were wet, smoke-stained, and torn, but the girls just grabbed the next bucket and passed it on. The boys’ shoes were soaked, and their trousers were covered with soot, but they just kept at it.

Kip forgot that she was even at a dance, let alone that her lovely outfit was destroyed.

The waiters had rounded up two more hoses, screwed them together, and run them to another faucet on the far side of the Inn. So now they had more water, but the pressure was low, and the water that was just fine for somebody’s shower after a golf game was not an effective weapon against fire.

“Change tactics,” Kip said. “We can’t put this out after all. We’ll have to contain the fire until the fire department gets here.”

She put them all to wetting down everything in a desperate effort to block the fire from spreading.

The wind rose, and the leaves rustled, and the kids threw water.

If the fire gets away from us, Kip thought, it goes up the mountain. And how will anybody fights the fire up among the rocks and cliffs and tangles of wood?

And the fire spread and pushed her back as it had pushed the waiter back. And, Kip thought, we’re going to lose.

Molly stared at the fire.

She felt her tiny purse, hanging by a leather strand at her side, and through the thin supple leather she felt the pack of cigarettes.

She knew she had not put out the cigarette when she tossed it away.

It had been on purpose.

She disliked the idea of having to be careful.

She disliked being neat on homework assignments, and she disliked paying attention to whether or not a new blouse should be washed only in cold water, and she disliked being told she could not smoke in a particular room.

She liked flicking a cigarette away.

It was the same sort of gesture she used driving away: too much pressure on the accelerator, which made the tires scream.

A flick.

She stared at the fire. Girls unwilling to risk their gowns stood with her, on the terrace, watching the effort.

Most of them kicked off their silly heels, hiked up their skirts, and raced to the kitchens for help.

Oh, they’ll save the day, Molly thought. Kip’s in charge. That means it will work out. And then Kip will be a hero, and everybody will have a story to tell for years to come, and the boys will love it, and the party will last til dawn.

I actually did them all a favor.

But still, she did not have quite enough guts to just watch the fire, and she slithered away from them all, taking refuge, as so many generations had done before her, in the women’s room.

The women’s room, however, was chaos.

Just as Emily and Anne returned to the subject of exactly where was Emily going to live now, a body leaned against the door, pushing it open by that alone, and almost fell into the lounge.

“Bethie!” Anne shrieked, jumping up off the daybed. “
What happened to you
? You look as if you fell off a cliff.”

Beth Rose did not laugh. Her lovely dress was torn. The soft papery texture had been no match for the wilderness. Her red hair was standing up, thick with leaves and twigs. There was blood on her cheek, and she cradled her arm at her side because it hurt so much.

“Oh, no,” Emily gasped, “you
did
fall off a cliff!”

Mike watched Kip.

Her filmy white lace blouse was torn and hung at the shoulders. The low back had a tear in it that could never be repaired. The wild hot pink and yellow skirt had a great green grass stain where Kip had fallen on the wet croquet court. The heel on her left shoe had snapped off, so that when she ran she was lopsided.

Her hair—

Her hair had been singed.

In horror Mike leaped forward and dragged her back from the fire. “Kip!” he said. “You’re going to catch fire yourself! A few feet of brush is not worth getting burned!”

“It’s winning,” Kip said, meaning the fire.

“It’s moving out into the woods,” Mike agreed. He tried to comfort her. “But you’re holding it. The fire department can’t take much longer.”

Kip was so hot from the fire she looked as if she had scarlet fever.

He touched her cheek, but she didn’t notice.

He thought, We came as
just friends.
She didn’t want to be just friends. She wanted me to love her.

Her dress was too wet to catch fire, but she was so close to the flames he had the sensation she would go up like the trees: become a living torch.

Maybe I do love her, he thought. All I can think about is Kip getting hurt. I don’t care about forest fires, and I know if Kip said Beth Rose is all right, then Beth Rose is all right.

Mike said, “Please move back, Kip.” He was terribly worried about her getting burned.

Kip muttered, “I don’t know anything about fires, that’s the thing, Mike. I can’t tell what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. I don’t know what to press on with and what to quit.”

“Quit risking your life,” Mike said.

She paid no attention to him.

Mike did not notice one of the waiters paying a lot of attention. He didn’t see the waiter at all. He just took Kip’s waist and dragged her back anyhow. Being bigger and stronger was an asset now and then. Kip resisted him. “This time,” Mike said in her ear, “I know I’m the one who’s right.”

The heat from the fire hurt.

They all had to move back.

The waiter Mike had not noticed said, “Mike, keep moving. You’re not safe, yet.” He took Kip’s other arm and both boys stepped backward with her.

And below them on the mountain road, strong and reassuring, came the welcome sound of sirens.

“No, I didn’t fall off the cliff,” Beth Rose said, while Emily used paper towels to clean up her skinned elbow. “I just fell down. I
thought
I was falling off the cliff. It was pretty scary. But I hit bottom pretty fast.”

She tried to giggle, but nothing came out.

Anne said, “I just can’t believe this dance. I get shoved in the pool and have to be blow-dried, and you fall down a mountain and have to be dry-cleaned.”

Beth Rose began to cry. “I was such a dope,” she said. “I went along with Gary because I’m so afraid of losing him that I just agree with anything he suggests. Even if I hate what he wants to do, even if there’s no reason for me to do it—I still do it!”

“Well, you lived to tell the tale,” Emily said practically. “Although your dress didn’t. Your dress is finished.”

“What will my parents say?” Beth Rose moaned. She tried to see all of herself in the mirrors over the sinks. “At least the blood is just from my elbow. Who would have thought elbows bled so much? And I have no idea how I got elbow blood on my cheek. It is humanly impossible to touch your cheek with your elbow.”

Emily had no purse with her. She could not get out her comb and brush and fix Beth’s hair. She could only stand there mopping away with her wet paper towel.

I want somebody to comfort
me
! Emily thought.

I don’t want to comfort other people!

I’m the one who needs help here!

Beth Rose went and got dramatic and now everybody will gather round
her
!

I want them to gather round
me
!

Emily was ashamed of her own selfishness. She tried to choke it back. She tried to worry that Gary would be irritated at Beth Rose for walking away without telling him. It took earthquakes to impress Gary Anthony. If Gary even knew by now that Beth Rose wasn’t with him, Emily would be impressed. And if Gary
cared,
Emily would really be impressed.

There isn’t a boy in the world who really cares, Emily thought, down as low as she had been all night.

Now it seemed to her that she had not abandoned Matt in order to sit in here weeping with Anne, but that Matt had abandoned her, and she had been forced to sit in here.

The fire department took charge with such speed that Kip felt like a slow-motion film. Suddenly there were real hoses, and men wearing suitable uniforms that resisted fire, talking to each other on hand radios and bringing out the special jeeps and engines that were used to fight brush fires.

The firemen escorted the kids back to the ballroom where they would be out of the way, and all talk turned to clothes: whose dress was ruined, whose suit was destroyed, whose shoes were ready for the dump.

The kids were laughing and excited and having an absolutely wonderful time.

Kip thought, in some strange way, everybody loves a disaster. They get to sacrifice. They get to do their best. They get to fling themselves into it.

She walked away from the fire with Mike at her side.

She was looking for Lee, though.

He was right there, and he was grinning at her.

Lee had never had to make a decision regarding a girl before in his life. Simply by avoiding girls, he had managed to be sure the problem never arose. Now here was Kip, with whom he had fallen totally, irretrievably in love, and her so-called boyfriend was back again. Next to her. Arm at her waist. Obviously impressed with her.

Kip deserved admiration. Lee agreed with that.

But Lee didn’t want the so-called boyfriend admiring Kip!

Hey, buddy, it’s my turn, Lee thought. Move out.

But of course the so-called boyfriend did not move out: he moved in closer.

Lee thought about this, and he decided that he didn’t like it, and he wasn’t going to stand for it. When Kip turned and smiled at him, he grinned back. She looked terrible. Her hair was clotted to her head. If she had started the evening with any makeup, she certainly had none left now. A huge soot mark on her cheek obviously annoyed her and she had rubbed it with her hand and spread it over most of her face. The lovely lace blouse Lee had admired an hour before was no longer white and no longer in one piece. And the wild, crazy skirt was filthy.