“What happened?” I asked, running down the porch steps. Bear was also with them, somehow, even though they’d left him behind that morning.
“Romi,” Francis whispered in surprise, his voice so hoarse it cracked.
He collapsed into me, halfway between an embrace and a faint. Even as angry as I still was at him, I let my belongings slide to the ground and put my arms around his waist to hold him up, instead of shoving him away from me—everything was so off, it was terrifying, and I couldn’t think straight. The world felt suspended, like we were frozen in time, or had gone outside of it, where old history didn’t exist. Something far worse did.
“Where’s Tam?” I asked, when I realized what was different, who was missing. “Francis, where’s Tam?”
“We have to burn the house” was all he said.
The sheriff, police, and fire department showed up, eventually. Drawn from town by the hot glow and the smoke churning over the trees, blotting out the sky. It was after midnight by then, and the horrible white beams of their headlights blinded us when they came roaring up the long driveway. As they jumped out of their vehicles, engines still on, I caught sight of Eve and Bear clinging to each other, both sobbing, and Daniel, standing at the edge of the grass, staring off into the trees. You were in his arms, although I’m not sure he could feel you there. You had been crying hysterically after the fire in Agloe, but now you were staring up at him silently, perfectly still, more like a doll than a child. Waiting endlessly, for him to come back to life. To tell you that your mother was fine. That she would be back soon. That everything would be all right.
But nothing would ever be all right again.
“All of it,” Francis said softly as we stood beside each other in the dark, watching the embers of what used to be the house, orange lines traced through the pile of black char. “All gone.”
“I don’t want any of it back anyway,” I answered numbly.
The gravel crunched, and I heard the crackle of a radio, felt the piercing halo of a flashlight pass over me.
“This was your house?” the sheriff asked gently, once he reached us.
I turned back to the ashes. I wanted to plunge myself into them.
“Yes,” Francis managed. “We were renting it this summer.”
“And she was inside? Tamara Young?”
I closed my eyes, so they wouldn’t see my heart break.
Francis took a ragged breath. “Yes,” he lied. “She was inside.”
Over the next hour, the officers gathered our statements and the paramedics treated your burns, Nell, but it was already over. They would never find Tam’s bones there in the ash, but it didn’t matter. They already believed she had died in the house. Everything else about that night was real, after all. Our open, agonizing grief, and your desperate cries for her, the burns on your arms. And no matter how hard they searched, they would never find the place where it had truly happened. The way back there was gone forever, without a map.
They had all burned up. All of the thousands Wally had hunted down, and the very first one that Tam always kept. The one we all used to get in and out of the town together each day. The one she’d found together with Wally.
It had died with her. And so had Agloe.
As the fire department was packing up to leave, the remains of the house waterlogged and cold, the sky already brightening with dawn, the sheriff convinced us to follow them back to Rockland in our cars, where they could book us into the motel until we got back on our feet again. Just yesterday, I would have fought tooth and nail against the insult of having Francis and Eve in the same building as me, after what they’d done. Now, I didn’t care at all. I didn’t care about anything.
The paramedics guided Daniel into the ambulance, so your burns could be cleaned at the local hospital. I watched them close the doors, until the only part of either of you I could see was his face through the little square window on the back of the ambulance—the horrible emptiness in his eyes.