She slowly backs away, ignoring the man’s catcalls. She steps onto the grass, then onto the sidewalk. She reverses direction. She walks with her head bent, her shoulders hunched, praying he won’t follow.
To see a soft naked man inside a heavy metal machine. To have been tricked into having to watch, if only for a second, the man fondling himself. She knows her face is red and that sweat is trickling down the inside of her blouse. Why do men do this? she asks herself. Not the touching—she understands that well enough—but the stealth, the wanting to hurt women, to trick them. Rosie would have laughed and said something vulgar about the size of the man’s penis. If only she had Rosie’s nerve, her ability to think on her feet.
When Grace reaches the beach, she heads for the water. She takes off her shoes and walks in. She did not go home because she didn’t want the man, if he was following her, to know where she lives. If he stops at the beach, she won’t leave the water. If he gets out of the car and starts to move in her direction, she’ll scream and run like hell. But wait, he can’t get out of his car. He’s naked.
She sits on the sand, knees up, only her feet in the shallow waves. She would love to go for a swim. The coolness, the cleansing, her head diving under the water, coming up for air. How good that would feel.
Why not?
Except for the knee length of her cotton skirt, what she has on is not all that different from a maternity bathing suit. What if the baby weighs her down? No, it won’t. With all her extra blubber, she ought to float effortlessly.
The idle thought becomes a desire. The desire takes on a sense of urgency.
She stands and walks into the water up to her knees. She lifts her skirt a bit and runs and stumbles, but then she turns and executes a backstroke the way she was taught so long ago at summer camp. Her skirt floats up beside her, and her legs are free to make any movement they want. She dives, reaching for an underwater breaststroke.
When she comes up for air, she is not at the same place at which she entered. The current has carried her along with it. She squints, and in the distance she sees a black Ford cross an intersection. Lots of people drive black Fords. Her husband for one, the minister for another.
She will never tell anyone—not Gene, not Rosie, not her mother—about the incident with the man in the car.
She floats with her arms out beside her. She lets the waves push her closer to shore. She catches a scent she doesn’t normally associate with the ocean. She stands and sniffs again.
A faint whiff of smoke.
Someone burning leaves? Yes, that must be it. But the air seems slightly hazy to the west. The black Ford rounds a corner and begins to come along the beach road. Grace thinks of ducking below the surface, but then sees that there are two men in the car. On the top of the automobile is a bullhorn.
Fire
By nightfall, a reddish glow appears at the western horizon. With Tom in her arms, Grace gazes at the fearful and exquisite disaster. Even Tom seems riveted, and when she looks into his dark eyes, she can see the unexpected light producing a silhouette: tall pines, maples, an electric tower, a barn. How far away is the fire? How fast is it moving?
She imagines the Indians would have seen the glow as a message of doom from the ancestors and would have taken to canoes along the river. Though Grace and her neighbors live near a beach, few of them have boats of any kind. A motorboat can’t be launched from a beach. Unless the ocean is dead calm, a canoe is useless. Even rowboats are tied up at the town dock a few miles away. Two families that Grace knows of evacuated themselves by car earlier when the black Ford with the bullhorn cruised the streets telling people to take their most important possessions and get out of town. Over the sound of screened doors slapping, voices murmur and then shout.
Reports of fires in Kennebunk preclude driving south. To drive west is to go toward the fire. To go east is to drive into the ocean. And to drive north is not without risk. There are rumors of small fires along the main road to Biddeford. Could she and Gene and the children make it to Cape Porpoise just up the coast? Could a boat be found there?
Many of her neighbors are staying put to protect their houses. Few can imagine a fire advancing to the ocean, deliberately moving toward an absolute lack of fuel. By Gene’s account, they have at least a day before they need to start worrying. This morning at breakfast, he called her an alarmist.
Three words.
She stares again at the glow of red at the horizon. Who lives out there? Have their homes already gone up in flames? There are no newspapers now, and any minute, according to Rosie, they’ll lose power. She urged Grace to assemble candles in every room, which Grace thinks is more likely to produce a house fire than the still distant conflagration.
“I’m frightened,” Rosie says when she enters Grace’s kitchen at seven in the evening.
“Don’t be.”
Rosie hunches forward on the kitchen chair to rock Eddie in Tom’s old cradle while Claire and Ian color on paper on the floor.
“If the house goes, we’ve got nothing,” Rosie wails.
Grace remembers the woman who stood in front of her home on the waterfront, worried about tidal flooding. She said the same thing. Does that woman now feel safer than the rest of her neighbors, living so close to the water’s edge?
“No insurance?” Grace asks.
Rosie shakes her head.
“Oh, Rosie.”
“We meant to get to it, we did, but the money was always needed for something else. I suppose it’s too late now?”
“I think it might be.”
“What’ll we do?”
“The fire is still miles away,” Grace says.
“What will you take with you?”
Grace has set aside a pile of belongings on the floor of the living room. Clothes, baby food, canned milk, a few photographs, two of Gene’s most prized surveying antiques, all the important papers in the drawer of the living room desk, blankets, several bottles of water. How she will manage to get the provisions out of the house with two children in tow is an unsolved problem. Gene took the car in the morning, stating that he was going to help other men create a firebreak to stop the wildfire from nearing Hunts Beach. She wishes he would come home. “Blankets, papers, clothes, water,” Grace answers.
“I can’t focus. Do I take the sentimental or the practical?”
“A little of the first. More of the latter.”
“Will there be any warning at all?”
Does a fire roll down a hill with such speed that it catches people before they can run away? Grace thinks of ancient Pompeii. The population was overwhelmed by moving lava. Is a fire faster than lava?
“I heard Edith on the back porch sobbing this morning,” Rosie reports. “I felt sorry for her and almost went over there. And Tim says that the Bakers had the loudest fight he’s ever heard.”
“Tempers are short. All that waiting for rain. And now the fear.”
“We knew in our bones that something bad was going to happen.”
“Did we?” asks Grace. “To us?”
“The drought. The unnatural heat.”
The early warning they didn’t heed. Should they have been more prepared? For catastrophe? Who lives like that?
Grace brings the supplies out to the back porch to be closer to the car when Gene comes for them. Something that looks like a bat skims the screen and startles Grace. But its flight is too slow and too close to the ground to be a bat. It seems to float to the sunburned grass and stay there, weightless. With caution, she opens the door to get a better look, and as she does, an insect flutters against her cheek. She slaps the bug away and watches the pieces drift to the ground. Not a bat, not a bug. Fragments of burned paper, carried on the wind.
Rosie is back at Grace’s door. Grace steps outside, and the pair move to the halfway point between the two houses so that each can listen for a child crying. “Where’s Gene?” Rosie asks.
“He didn’t come back. Tim?”
“Not back, either.”
“It’s after nine,” Grace says.
“You think they’re still working on the firebreak?”
“I guess.”