It’s nearly 2:00 a.m. when I climb the stairs to my rooms on the third floor. I need only an hour or two, and then I will go back down. But I’m too wound up to sleep. I go to the kitchen and make a small pot of chocolate, add a splash of bourbon, the way Maddy used to drink it, then carry it back up to bed.
I think about having a cigarette, but I’ve left the pack downstairs in my workroom, and I’m too weary to go down after it. The chocolate will have to be enough, and I can already feel my eyelids beginning to droop. Two hours. That’s all I need.
I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep when I awaken with my throat on fire. The room is dark and thick with smoke. I roll from the bed and onto my knees, in search of air as I crawl in the direction of the stairs. I cling to the rail as I go, disoriented by the thickening smoke and eyes rendered useless. The heat is savage, searing my throat and chest. Keep moving, my brain screams. Keep moving! But I freeze when I see the ruddy glow at the back of the house and hear the sickening crackle of flames, feeding, consuming.
My workrooms. My work. On fire.
Frantic, I find my feet, hurtling toward the hideous glow rather than away from it. The heat is like a wall, knocking me backward as I reach the largest of the workrooms. Shelves stacked with spare bolts of fabric are completely engulfed, the curtains, too, and the surface of the worktable where a few hours earlier I had been pinning a pattern. It’s what I always imagined hell to look like.
And then I see them, three nearly finished gowns in various stages of completion, their shadows stretching grotesquely along the back wall so that they appear to be dancing. I watch, horrified, as flames lick up the side of a skirt, then leap to the sleeve of the gown beside it, feeding on lace, buttons, beads.
I hear a wail from somewhere, muffled in the greedy rush of flames. A siren, I think dimly. Someone must have called the fire department. But no, the sound is coming from me, raw and desolate—a mother grieving for her imperiled children.
Without thinking, I stagger forward, wrapping my arms around the waists of two dress forms, weeping and gasping as I drag them to the door, tripping over skirts and trains as I stumble down the final set of stairs, making blindly for the door and the safety of the street.
It isn’t until I spill out onto the steps that I register the searing pain in my left arm. One of the gowns I rescued is crawling with flames, and they’ve caught the sleeve of my cardigan. I drop the dresses and let out a shriek, swatting at the spreading flames as they lick their way along one wrist, then catch the other as well. The pain is like nothing I’ve ever felt, blinding and bone deep. The flames continue to spread in spite of my flailing. There are sirens then, deafeningly real, and suddenly everything goes black as I’m shoved to the ground and smothered in a blanket.
Hours later, I wake in the burn unit, dry mouthed and groggy from the morphine. Both of my hands are bandaged to the elbow. Third-degree burns, the doctor explains, the left hand worse than the right. He speaks slowly, as he might to a child, and I feel like a child, helpless and confused.
The last thing I remember is the blanket swallowing me up. I have no memory of being loaded into the ambulance, where they put tubes in my arms, or the emergency room, where they had to cut the singed cardigan away from my flesh. The doctor has to tell me what happened, and I still can’t remember. A combination of shock and strong opiates, he explains, and not uncommon given my injuries.
I ask him about my shop. He can’t tell me anything. But he does tell me what will happen next. Debridement, skin grafts, exercises, scarring, contracture—and pain. So much pain.
He keeps saying I’m lucky to be alive, lucky to have gotten out when I did, lucky the burns aren’t worse. But all I hear is that I’ll never sew again, that the life I’ve built for myself is gone. The Roussel curse at work again, Maman would say.
My glass is empty. I refill it and go to the study for my box. Suddenly I want my things around me. It’s silly to care now, after so much time without them, but when so much has been uprooted—so many things lost—one must seek comfort in the familiar.
I carry the box back down the hall, holding it in my arms the way one holds a found child, closely, fiercely. And for an instant, as I move past the mirror, I see her looking back at me—the girl who dreamed of princes and believed in happy endings. But a moment later, the girl is gone, replaced by the woman I’ve become. Worn and alone. Dreamless. Scarred.
For a time—a handful of months—I actually thought I might make something of the time I have left, that I might even be happy again. But I see now that it was only a trick of the light, a shimmery mirage that upon closer inspection falls away. Another loss for my collection. Another unhappy ending.