The Secret Letters (12 page)

After a while, we lapsed into a tired silence. I tried closing my eyes, but pictures crowded my brain, smoke and fire, plates of food, weird images from Madame Rosa's cards. I opened my eyes again and saw Milo was gone, but a guy in a Yankees cap was staring at me. He was apparently not aware that no one in Baltimore should wear Yankees gear.

“Are you one of the fire victims?”

I nodded.

“I'm from the
Sun
. Can you describe what happened?”

I told him a short version of the story.

He scribbled in a long spiral notebook. “Where were you when the fire started?”

“Across the street.”

“What were you doing?”

“Well, actually,” I said, not stopping to think better of it, “I was having my fortune told.”

“Seriously?” He perked up. “By whom?”

I told him “whom,” and because I probably still had too much carbon monoxide in my brain, I went into a whole explanation of the Sacred Road cards. “And just before I heard sirens,” I said, “she told me my future looks bright.”

“Is that so,” he said, taking notes like crazy.

“Yeah.” I laughed and shook my head, which almost seemed to rattle. He was staring at me curiously and seemed to expect me to keep talking, so I said, “I guess everything that happens is for a reason. I just wish I knew what the reason was.”

He looked so pleased about this that I decided it would be a good idea to shut up. “I'm not feeling so good,” I said. “I think I need medical attention.”

“You're in the right place.” He thanked me for my statement and disappeared.

When Milo returned from badgering medical personnel about Pam's condition, I asked him if I could borrow his cellphone, turning sideways so no one could see me, since the sign said it wasn't allowed, and dialed Norma. “It's me,” I said.

“Oh God, Julie.” Her voice had a note of hysteria, like she could barely hold it together. “Ricky's alive. I identified him.” This should have been great news, but something about the way she said this sent panic shooting through me. “That was him you pulled out of the building.”

“Is he okay?”

Loud sobbing. I waited a while, saying, “He'll be fine, don't worry, everything will be fine,” over and over until she could answer.

“He has second and third degree burns, fifty percent.” I could hear her blowing her nose. “But they think he has a fair chance. They say younger people tend to heal well.”

I chose to ignore the “they think” part of her sentence. “That's fantastic!” I tried to take a deep breath of relief, but breathing still wasn't going well. “I wasn't sure who I carried out.”

“They said that happens all the time, like they'll pull someone out of a fire or car accident and it takes hours before they realize they know them.” Then she started blathering about silver nitrate and intubating and CAT scans and Foleys.

I had no idea what any of that meant and I didn't really want to know, so I cut her off. “Should I come over there?”

“Well, he's unconscious. They're giving him lots of morphine. That girlfriend is there and won't leave him alone. Some nurses tried to get her to go, since she wasn't a relative, but she started screaming so they let her stay. I've got to run home and deal with the boys. They're at my neighbor's.”

“Where's Bob?”

There was a short silence, then she said, “He moved out.” She sounded relatively calm now, and I didn't want to stir things up so I said, oh, okay, like everything was hunky-dory. She asked about Pam, and I gave her the update, and she said she was going to come over there after she gave the kids their dinner, and her neighbor was going to watch them.

“So you should stay there,” she said. “She needs family.”

“I'll be here.” There was nowhere else for me to go.

Milo and I waited outside the hyperbaric chamber for hours, not saying
anything. After a while, someone wanted my wheelchair back, so I moved to an uncomfortable plastic chair next to him. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing. When I opened my eyes, I saw Norma leaning over me. She wasn't wearing any makeup, and her hair looked like she had combed it with an eggbeater, as my mother would have said. She gave me a quick, painful hug and sat next to me.

“Is it morning?”

“It's six.”

“A.m. or p.m.?”

“A.m. I just came from Bayview. He's holding his own.” She gave my hand a weird little squeeze. “And they identified the person who died.”

“Who was it?” I asked, though I already knew.

“That guy who lived in a tent in the woods. They could tell it was him because all his stuff was in his pockets and it all melted together.”

If I hadn't hired Ray to be my dishwasher, he'd be alive, drawing pictures on napkins and saying crazy shit about the stars. It wasn't until Norma put her arm around me I noticed I was making loud barking sounds like a seal. I sat and sobbed, and nobody took any notice at first, but then I started wheezing pretty bad, and she flagged down a nurse who told me to go back down to the ER and get more oxygen. I didn't want to, but Norma dragged me and before I knew it, I was in a hospital bed with a mask on my face and an IV in my arm. Someone on the other side of the curtain in the center of the room was moaning. I wanted to sleep and shut it all out, but everything hurt too much.

A nurse was holding my wrist. Light streamed through the window blinds.

“Do you need anything?” She stuck a thermometer in my mouth.

When she removed it, I said, “I need to leave.”

She said the doctor would be there soon. I asked for specifics, but she ran off without answering and someone else came in. She asked if I wanted a newspaper and I said okay, so she handed me
The Baltimore Sun
.

The fire was front page news. According to the fire marshal, someone had tossed a lit cigarette into a pile of cardboard boxes that were stored in a rear area next to the creek, just behind the kitchen. The fire had climbed up the back wall, spreading to the second floor and to the building next door. Three people had been trapped in the kitchen, and one of them had died, Raymond Steele, 32, while two others were in critical condition. The article didn't mention that Ray had resided in a tent, but it did say that his father was CEO of a large paper company and that the family lived in the fancy section of Baltimore. Go figure. The funeral was scheduled for Saturday, but it was just for family. There wasn't much background information about Ricky or Pam, but it did say Ricky was in the burn unit at Bayview.

I read a little further about the fire. On page two, there was an article in a little box next to the main story, where they generally ran silly items, with the headline, “Psychic Fails to Predict Fire.” The article said, “When the fire broke out, Julie Barlow, owner of the restaurant Falling Water, was across the street with a psychic reader, one of Main Street's eclectic storefront businesses, having her fortune told by Loretta Bayliss, 42, better known as Madame Rosa. ‘She told me my future looked bright, and then I heard the sirens.'”

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said out loud, and went on reading.

“Barlow, 37, opened the restaurant six months ago and had just turned it into a popular destination on historic Main Street when the fire decimated her business. ‘I guess everything happens for a reason,' Barlow said. ‘I just wish I knew what the reason was.'

“Maybe Barlow should ask Madame Rosa,” the last line of the article said.

I rang for the nurse. “Get me out of here,” I said when she finally appeared.

“You have to wait, hon. The doctor will be here soon.”

I was just about to yank the IV out of my arm when Norma walked in. She noticed the newspaper on the bed and took it away from me.

“Do they think this is funny?” I yelled. “Ray is dead, and this is a cute story?”

She made a tsk sound and patted my arm. “Good news about Pammy. They moved her from the chamber to ICU last night.”

“ICU is good news?”

“It means she's doing better. She's not conscious yet so they're putting her back in the chamber for a while today.”

“Wow.” Suddenly, just for a second, I felt wild with happiness, though it seemed crazy to be happy that someone was in intensive care.

“Do you need anything?”

I lay there thinking for a moment. What did I need? “For this not to have happened?”

“How about coffee?”

“Coffee would be great.”

She came back with a Starbucks latte. I had no idea where she had found it but I sucked it down. Someone came in with a tray of gross hospital food and I tore into it. I couldn't even remember the last time I had eaten, not counting IV fluid. I had always
thought it was sad that people could take great ingredients like eggs and wheat and turn them to rubbery slop, but now I was damn glad to get them.

“Try not to worry, Jools,” Norma said as she was leaving. “Everything will be fine and dandy.”

I nodded, like she'd just said something really smart. I was dozing off again when Milo came in. He picked up my hand carefully, since it had an IV in it. “Are you okay?” He still looked worried and tired, and he hadn't shaved.

“Oh, sure, never better.”

“I was here earlier but you were sleeping.”

Probably drooling, I thought, and come to think of it, I must look truly disgusting. Some nurses or whatever they were had tried to clean me up when they were shoving me into a hospital gown and stealing my clothes, but I was pretty sure it hadn't helped.

“Don't you need to sleep?” I asked. He still looked rough and dirty, with the beginnings of a beard. I had no idea what time it was, or what day. When this is over, I thought randomly, I'm buying a watch. You could strap a watch to your arm and maybe it would stay there.

“I slept a little.” He let go of my hand and pulled up a chair.

“Milo.” I wasn't sure what I wanted to say. I went with, “Thanks for being there for Pam. For all of us.”

He gave me a strange look, and then I was sure: he was in love with my sister. You poor bastard, I thought. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, but I felt like I was falling through space. Before I knew it, someone was shoving another mask on my face and I was out again.

When I woke up, Milo was gone, and there was no light coming in the window. The person who had been moaning was gone and the curtain was open, so I had the
whole room to myself. I lay in the dark for hours, in and out of sleep. Every time I started to drop off, I'd find myself in the middle of a fire, or a flood, or an alien invasion, and I was always trying to find Pam, or Ricky, or my mother. I'd wake up panting like a dog—oh God, I thought, suddenly wide awake: the dogs had been locked in the house for hours, maybe days. I wanted to phone someone and tell them to walk them or at least let them out in the yard, but I didn't have a phone, and anyway, there was no one to call except maybe a nurse, and I didn't want anyone to think I was having a medical emergency. I lay there breathing into the mask, stiff with panic, until the sun started to pour in the window and I fell into a real sleep and into my old dream where I was walking along that mountain path, wearing my moccasins and winding through the trees.

Just before noon, they released me, handing me an asthma inhaler for the road. I made them wheel me upstairs, where I pulled up next to Norma. She gave me a hug and said, “Pammy's back in that chamber.”

“Where's Milo?”

“He went home to shower,” she said, like it was about time. “That's what you need to do now, too.”

“I don't have a home.”

“True.” She squinted at me. “You look like shit on a shingle.”

“Thanks.”

“Come on, I'll take you over to my house. You need to go lay down or something. I was about to head back over to Bayview.”

The thought of being stuck in her big, too-clean house in the cul-de-sac gave me the heebie-jeebies. “I'm fine. I'll come to Bayview with you.”

“No, you need to rest. And you're wheezing.”

“Am not.”

“Well, you can't just sit around in hospitals.”

“You're just sitting around in hospitals.”

“
I
didn't inhale a bunch of smoke and almost get killed rescuing people.” She sounded like she might start crying.

This scared me. Suddenly I remembered my panic in the middle of the night. “The dogs, what about the dogs?”

“Don't worry, I let them out.”

“Were they okay?”

“Of course.” Then a light bulb appeared above her head. She dug into her purse and handed me a key.

I stared at the key. It was as familiar as my own hand.

“Let's go,” she said. “I'll drive you.”

“No.”

“Julie, don't be difficult,” she said, in a voice I'd heard her use on her kids. “You need to rest. If anything happens, I'll call you. I'll even come get you. Okay?”

I didn't say anything.

In a tired voice, she said, “Go home. There's nothing you can do for either of them now.”

She was right, for once, and even on a good day, it was her way or the highway. She steered me into the elevator and through the crowded lobby, where she bullied some guy into watching me while she got her car.

She took an alternate route that made sure we got nowhere near town where my building was, or wasn't. Somehow over the past few days, everyone on our street had gotten the bat-signal and dug out the Christmas decorations. Giant inflatable Santas, penguins, snowmen, and Grinches smiled creepily from every yard. Our house looked naked, without so much as a wreath on the door. Norma parked at the curb and tried to
come around to help me out, but I waved her away. “Seriously, I'm fine,” I said. Before she could protest, I jumped out, lurched up the front path, pulled the key out of my jeans pocket, struggled with the lockbox the realtor had put on, and opened the door. I turned and waved to her until she drove away.

Inside, everything was completely silent. I flipped on the ceiling light, then flipped it off again and turned on a lamp. The living room carpet was streaked like someone had just vacuumed. Everything smelled the same as ever, a combination of air freshener and sweat and the dirt floor of the cellar. It felt weird that my mom didn't come rushing out to greet me, throwing her arms around me and crushing the life out of me while yelling at me for being late, or early, or on time. I must have made some kind of sound because Sally and Max came bounding down the stairs and jumped all over me. I put my arms around them both and relaxed into their dogginess, then sat back on the couch and put my feet on the coffee table, since there was no one to yell at me for doing it, and the dogs flopped at my feet. I closed my eyes. Passing traffic rattled the windows, and I could hear Sally snoring as I drifted off.

The ringing phone made me jump, and at first I had no idea where I was. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the old yellow wall phone.

“Just checking on you.” It was Norma. There was almost no one else it could have been. “Are you okay?”

“Sure.” I was so foggy, I could hardly speak.

“Ricky's still critical, but he's holding his own.”

I tried to say “thank God,” but it came out as sort of a bark.

“I'll call again soon,” she said, hanging up.

Since I was in the kitchen, I decided to scrounge something for lunch, or dinner, whatever it was. The fridge was empty, except for a carton of soymilk and a packet of vegan ham. I found a loaf of million-grain bread in the cupboard, threw fake meat
between a couple of slices, and tore into it. It tasted like slimy cardboard, but I didn't care. I had just stuffed most of the sandwich into my mouth when I heard a knock at the front door. I opened it, still chewing, and saw a square-faced blond guy I sort of recognized, though at first I couldn't remember where I knew him from. Behind him were people with cameras shining bright lights on me. “Channel Two News,” the blond guy said. “Are you Julie Barlow?” I nodded, still chewing. “Miss Barlow, we'd like to ask you a few questions.”

Before I could say no, the reporter turned to face the camera and said he was so-and-so with a news exclusive, an interview with the proprietor of the popular Main Street restaurant that had just burned down. “Tell us about your visit to Madame Rosa.”

I wasn't sure how to respond. “Is that what you want?” I wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

“Would you say she predicted the fire?” the news guy asked.

“Predicted?” Oh sure, when one minute someone says you're going to be lucky and the next minute your restaurant is burning down. “No, I wouldn't say she predicted it.”

“How long have you been consulting Madame Rosa?”

“It was my first time.”

“Do you think the fire was caused by the tarot cards?”

“Caused by the—no, of course not.” I thought about slamming the door on them, but they were wedged in the doorway, and I didn't want them to film me yelling at them, since that was probably just the kind of thing they loved and would show over and over. “That's a crazy question,” I couldn't help adding, though privately I thought maybe it wasn't so crazy, like maybe the cards had somehow moved the universe in the direction of total destruction. I wasn't sure how that might work, but it was in the back of my mind like muzak in a grocery store.

He asked me some questions about Pam and Ricky and how they were, and then he asked me if I had been to Main Street since the fire. I said I hadn't, and he tried to talk me into going down there so they could shoot me in front of the restaurant, but I told him I needed to rest, so finally they packed up their equipment and left to cover other people's tragedies.

I lay on the couch and tried to doze off again, but every time I got close to sleeping, I'd hear all the ghosts in our house yelling, laughing, arguing, listening to heavy metal (Donny), having sex (my mom and Frank). Ricky whining because he wanted candy. Frank coming home after work saying, “Where's my sweet girl?” These sounds were stuck in the walls. People said Main Street was haunted, and there was even a ghost tour, but I had never believed in stuff like that. Now it was starting to seem definite, like the stars really were loose, like Ray said. The fire had burned a hole in reality and I was waffling in and out of it, and time was as mushy and colorful as Jell-O.

Great, I'm going nuts, I thought. I jumped to my feet, threw on a jacket that was probably Pam's, slammed out the front door, and took off on foot down Main Street. I knew my car was still parked somewhere in town, if it hadn't burned up, so it made sense to go get it. I limped down the hill as fast as I could, trying not to wheeze. Just past the curve of the street, I could see the row of shops where my restaurant was. From a distance, they looked fine, but when I got closer I saw a huge hole in the side of my building. By the light of the streetlamp, I could see clothes still hanging in my closet. I thought about trying to rescue them and wash them in my mother's old Kenmore, but when I got closer, I found the stairs to my apartment were gone.

The front window pane of the restaurant lay in pieces on the sidewalk, and no one had boarded it up. Everything smelled of smoke, but if I squinted, the dining room looked almost normal. A layer of broken glass and ash had fallen on everything, but the tables were still set, and it seemed like business as usual until you looked more closely.
Painted buffalos still roamed across back wall, but now they appeared to be melting. The wild colors of Ray's painting of the Sun Dagger had streaked, but I could still see cliffs and sun.